MISS RAVENEL'S CONVERSION FROM SECESSION TO LOYALTY

A landmark in the rise of realism in American literature, Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867) remains one of the best novels ever written about the American Civil War. The author, John W. De Forest (1826–1906), had been a captain in the Twelfth Connecticut Regimental Volunteers, had joined in the battles of Georgia Landing and Bisland and in the siege of Port Hudson in Louisiana in 1862–1863, and saw action in Philip Henry Sheridan's Shenandoah Valley campaign in Virginia in 1864. When De Forest returned to his Connecticut home at the end of the war, as he later reminisced,

I found myself in possession of new material, for I had studied men under fire and in all sorts of places, and knew a good deal more about life than when I went in. When I was discharged, my mind turned easily to writing again, and I wrote "Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty," a book out of my own experience. . . . In that book for the first time in my life I came to know the value of personal knowledge of one's subject and the art of drawing upon life for one's characters. (Oviatt, p. 856)

SENTIMENTAL ROMANCE

Issued by Harper & Brothers on 25 May 1867, Miss Ravenel's Conversion carefully develops two distinct story lines. On the one hand, De Forest tells a love story governed by the conventions of nineteenth-century sentimental romance. Lillie Ravenel belongs to a popular tradition of heroines who make disastrous marriages, such as Mary Harvey in Sarah Josepha Hale's My Cousin Mary; or, The Inebriate (1839), Amelia Sedley in William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848), and Ellen Montgomery in Susan B. Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850). While she was "very fair, with lively blue eyes and exceedingly handsome hair" (p. 12), the narrator allows that "there were different opinions" on the question of whether she was "lovely" (p. 13). She marries the good-natured but rakish Colonel Carter, who later has an affair with the coquettish shrew Madame Larue, speculates with government money, and dies in battle before his scheme is exposed and his reputation besmirched. In truth, Carter and the dark siren Larue, who prattles on about the sainte passion (p. 377) and divin sens (p. 379), are more complex characters than either Lillie Ravenel or Captain Edward Colburne, a noble and heroic captain in the Union Army who also loves Lillie. When she learns of Carter's infidelity, for example, Lillie swoons according to the conventions of nineteenth-century melodrama. Nor is her "conversion to loyalty" rendered in psychologically realistic terms. It seems little more than a conceit for the gradual triumph of the Northern armies in the Civil War. In a tableau near the end of the novel, Colburne finally confesses his love for Lillie, and they embrace in a conventional set piece "with her head on his shoulder, sobbing, trembling, but full of joy" (pp. 514–515). The Union captain, tempered by the fire of war, has matured into a virile and self-reliant citizen. The Southern belle Lillie, chastened by sacrifice and humiliation, has blossomed morally and intellectually. Figuratively, their union reconciles the regions they represent—a plot device invented by De Forest and subsequently used by such writers as Albion Tourgée in A Fool's Errand (1879) and Owen Wister in The Virginian (1902). As for the reason he "always had boy and girl in love in my books," De Forest once explained to an interviewer that "it was the only kind of plot a writer could get the public interested in" (Oviatt, p. 856). Some 75 to 80 percent of all books and magazines during this period were bought by women.

DEPICTIONS OF WAR

The battle scenes in the novel are written in an entirely different timbre than the love scenes. De Forest proved his reportorial skill at depicting men at war, from the tedium before combat to the grisly butchery of the field hospital. While under rebel fire in chapter 20, Colburne cites army regulations to justify his decision not to assist soldiers wounded in the field until the enemy has withdrawn or the battle decided. De Forest often reworked passages from his own Civil War diary into the narrative. In the midst of the Union attack on Port Hudson on 14 June 1863, for example, Captain De Forest felt trapped in "a ridiculous situation," according to his diary, with the Confederate fort shrouded in dense fog and rifle balls "spatting furiously" around him. He lost "several men in this blind, useless skirmish" before he knew in which direction he should advance (Volunteer's Adventures, p. 136). In the battle described in chapter 20, similarly, Captain Colburne seems lost in a maze: he does not know "the whereabouts of the Major" (p. 284) or "how many of his soldiers had been hit" (p. 287), whether there are other Federal forces in the vicinity, or whether to advance or retreat. De Forest also noted in his diary that a body retrieved many hours after the battle "was a horrible spectacle, swollen and perfectly black with putrefaction, so rapid was that shocking change under the heat of the Louisiana May" (Volunteer's Adventures, p. 132). He worked this detail into chapter 21 of his novel, when an officer dies and "before night he was black with putrefaction, so rapid was that shocking change under the heat of a Louisiana May" (p. 294). Although De Forest based his depiction of the battles of Georgia Landing and the siege of Port Hudson in the first part of the novel on his own experiences, he recreated the battles of Fort Winthrop (or Fort Butler in the novel) and Cane River in the later chapters from oral accounts and newspaper reports months after the events. Just as some war movies since the late twentieth century have revised the conventional Hollywood war movie with its sanitized combat, Miss Ravenel's Conversion transformed the genre of war novels epitomized by James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Sir Walter Scott's Rob Roy (1817) with their chivalric heroes, false bravado, and easy moral distinctions.

THE ISSUE OF SLAVERY

Though De Forest payed lip service in the novel to the rights of free blacks, in truth he was not very advanced on the race question. The Civil War, according to De Forest both in his own voice and in the novel, was waged to preserve the Union, only incidentally to free the slaves in the South. The physician Dr. Ravenel, Lillie's father, concedes as early as chapter 4 that the war was a Manichaean struggle between the angels of commercial progress and enlightened civilization on the one hand and the legions of ignorance and arrogance on the other. The "slaveholding Sodom," he asserts,

will perish for the lack of five just men, or a single just idea. It must be razed and got out of the way, just like any other obstacle to the progress of humanity. It must make room for something more consonant with the railroad, electric-telegraph, printing-press, inductive philosophy, and practical Christianity. (Pp. 58–59)

A moderate Republican opposed to slavery but no abolitionist, De Forest tries to imagine the amelioration of the "peculiar institution" in chapter 18, when Dr. Ravenel "commences the reorganization of Southern labor" (p. 247), that is, free black labor, a social experiment undertaken at several abandoned Louisiana plantations between 1862 and 1865. The manumitted slaves "did more work that summer" under Ravenel's direction than the deposed planters "had ever got from double their number by the agency of a white overseer, drivers, whips, and paddles" (p. 265). The doctor even assigns Lillie the task of teaching "all these poor people to read" (p. 257) arguing that they should never again suffer the indignities of illiteracy: "Negro children are just as intelligent as white children until they find out that they are black. Now we will never tell them that that they are black; we will never hint to them that they are born our inferiors" (p. 257).

For all the reform and antislavery talk in the novel, however, De Forest's black characters never transcend racial stereotypes. In chapter 12, Colburne visits a Creole family named Meurice in whose New Orleans home he meets "New Englanders, New Yorkers, and even stray Marylanders and Kentuckians" (p. 185). Colburne defends "the mixed race," specifically "their intelligence, education, good breeding, respectability of character, and exceptional patriotism in a community of rebels" (p. 186) presumably inherited from their white ancestors. Similarly, in chapter 19 Colburne in a letter to Dr. Ravenel writes condescend-ingly about his "boy Henry," his young black servant, who "dances and gambles all night and then wants to sleep all day" (p. 273). Colburne must spend "hours every day in shouting for Henry" (p. 273). He disparages freedmen as "lazy bumpkins" and is unconvinced that emancipation will succeed, as he explains to the doctor: "I am as much an abolitionist as ever, but not so much of a 'nigger-worshipper.' I don't know but that I shall yet become an advocate of slavery" (p. 273). For the record, De Forest expressed similar sentiments in letters home from Louisiana. He referred derisively to his servant, a "little yellow vagrant named Harry," whom he had dismissed "for never being on hand when wanted" (Volunteer's Adventures, p. 77).

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Miss Ravenel's Conversion was not a commercial success, at least initially. Sales of the first edition were miserable, with 1,608 of the press run of 5,000 copies still unsold in 1884. Despite the love story, the realism of its war chapters apparently repelled nineteenth-century readers inured to undistilled sentimentality and domestic romance. While it failed to sell in large numbers, the novel was nonetheless a modest critical success. To be sure, most reviewers for Southern publications reviled it. According to the critic for the Charleston Courier, perhaps William Gilmore Simms, the novel epitomized "all the brutal malignity Northern writers have conceived . . . to the slander of the South." Similarly, De Bow's Review, edited in Nashville, scorned most of De Forest's characters as "caricatures" and averred that "the fights and skirmishes he brings into the plot will be laughed at by old campaigners on either side." After a British edition of the novel appeared in May 1868, the London Athenœum recommended that De Forest "expend no more of his time and industry on an art for which he has no special qualification" (6 June 1868, p. 795).

More commonly, however, the novel was praised by reviewers, particularly for the realism of its battle scenes. The American Literary Gazette hailed it as "a most brilliant and charming book" with "some scenes of fighting and hospital life" that "no one could have written who had not taken part in that deadly struggle" (1 June 1867, pp. 71–72, 77). Peterson's regarded it as "one of the best American novels that has appeared in years" (September 1867, p. 234). The New York Round Table lauded "De Forest's battle-pieces, and, indeed, all his sketches of military affairs" for their "faithful and effective" details (20 June 1867, pp. 40–41). According to the New York Citizen, it was "the best war which has yet been written" with its "truthfully written episodes of battle" (1 June 1867, p. 5). Henry James even commended it in the Nation for its "excellent description of campaigning in the terrible swamps and forests of Louisiana and in the trenches at Port Hudson" (20 June 1867, pp. 491–492). William Dean Howells, the dean of American letters and the foremost American theorist of realism, championed the novel throughout his career. Howells declared in the Atlantic Monthly for August 1874 that "so far [De Forest] is really the only American novelist" (p. 229), high praise indeed from the friend and patron of Henry James and Mark Twain. Howells believed Miss Ravenel's Conversion represented something of a turning point in American fiction. It exhibited "an advanced realism before realism was known by that name" and was "one of the best American novels" ever written (My Literary Passions, p. 223). In 1887 Howells suggested that Miss Ravenel did not pale in comparison even to Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869): "it is an admirable novel and spacious enough for the vast drama glimpsed in it" (Harper's Monthly, September 1887, p. 639). As late as 1900 Howells insisted the novel "paints war as it is, with Tolstoyan fidelity" (North American Review, December 1900, p. 947). Although The Red Badge of Courage (1895) replaced Miss Ravenel's Conversion in the canon of American literature as ostensibly the best novel about the American Civil War, De Forest's canvas was larger than Stephen Crane's and his realism more stark and mordant. De Forest, not Crane, inaugurated the American tradition of realistic war writing that includes novels by Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, James Jones, and Tim O'Brien.

See alsoCivil War

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

De Forest, John W. Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1867.

De Forest, John W. A Volunteer's Adventures: A UnionCaptain's Record of the Civil War. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1946.

Secondary Works

American Literary Gazette and Publishers' Circular (1 June 1867): 71–72, 77.

Antoni, Robert William. "Miss Ravenel's Conversion: A Neglected American Novel," Southern Quarterly 24, no. 3 (1986): 58–63.

Cecil, L. Moffitt. "Miss Ravenel's Conversion and Pilgrim's Progress." College English 23 (February 1962): 352–357.

Fick, Thomas H. "Genre Wars and the Rhetoric of Manhood in Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty." Nineteenth Century Literature 46 (March 1992): 473–494.

Gargano, James W., ed. Critical Essays on John William De Forest. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981.

Howells, William Dean. "Editor's Study." Harper's Monthly 75 (September 1887): 639.

Howells, William Dean. My Literary Passions. New York: Harper, 1895.

Howells, William Dean. "The New Historical Romances." North American Review 171 (December 1900): 947.

Howells, William Dean. "Recent Literature." Atlantic Monthly 34 (August 1874): 229.

James, Henry. "Miss Ravenel's Conversion." Nation (20 June 1867): 491–492.

Light, James F. John William De Forest. New York: Twayne, 1965.

Oviatt, Edwin. "J. W. De Forest in New Haven." New York Times Saturday Review, 17 December 1898, p. 856.

Simpson, Claude M. "John W. De Forest's Miss Ravenel'sConversion." In The American Novel from James Fenimore Cooper to William Faulkner, edited by Wallace Stegner, pp. 35–46. New York: Basic Books, 1965.

Solomon, Eric. "The Novelist as Soldier: Cooke and De Forest." American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 19, no. 3 (1987): 80–88.

Gary Scharnhorst