MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This essay documents the roles of symbolic femininity in literature and political cartoons produced during the war. Based on substantial archival research, my essay inserts Columbia, also known as Lady Liberty, and other female personifications of the Union and the Confederacy into the critical discussion and historical understanding of the ways in which American writers and artists understood the stakes and consequences of the conflict. Patriotic poems calling for renewed determination and dedication to the cause of defeating the Confederacy habitually invoke Columbia, the embattled and all-encompassing female personification of the Union. Both vulnerable and belligerent, Columbia and her Southern counterparts encourage action. These poetic personifications prepare for battle, and perform socially acceptable forms of female participation in war. Symbolic women call their nations to a war that only men may fight. Consequently, sexuality and nationalism are closely intertwined—to defend the nation-state is to shelter female bodies from rapacious enemies and to retain the purity and structural integrity of national borders and codes of law. Though female allegories often serve to remove or distance actual women from participation in the public and political realms, the bodies of Columbia and her sisters, threatened and torn by the war, disrupt this distancing by moving the symbolic feminine body into the physical realm of the war and more closely aligning the symbolic feminine with the physical bodies of American women. Both Columbia and American women are vulnerable to war’s violence. This essay examines the ubiquity of female personifications in the literature and visual culture of the Civil War in order to illustrate the significance of symbolic femininity to both sides of the conflict and to document the various ways in which these personifications were strategically deployed.