Battle of the Contraries: Glory of War or Gory War in De Forest’s
Miss Ravenel’s Conversion From Secession to Loyalty According to Jay Martin, John William De Forest presents many “contraries” in the spirit of writing a novel realistic in its portrayal of Americans and American life (Martin 30, 33). Using a central historic theme of the Civil War, the two opposing contraries are romanticism and realism, or “antiromantic[ism]” (Martin 31). De Forest reveals both the Civil War’s antiromantic horrors and romantic strengthening by hardships the soldiers face in Miss Ravenel’s Conversion From Secession to Loyalty. De Forest casts aside traditional romantic tendencies of Civil War literature to focus on the glory of the battle and how brave the soldiers were, unlike another fellow veteran turned writer Samuel Byers (Pettegrew 57). There are more details of the horrific and gruesome aftermath of the war, more scenes of the infirmary and wounded, rather than the battlefield. His sense of duty to tell the truth instead of idealized tales of bravery is almost as strong as his characters’ “profound sense of duty” (323). The reader sees not the men limping heroically, gun and bayonet in hand, bearing wounds as badges of courage, but rather “pools of blood” and piles of severed body parts shorn by blood-drenched surgeons (260). He mentions a “smell of death poisoning the air” and the constant groaning, pain and misery of the wounded (218). This sounds more like a scene from purgatory than real life. We share the young soldiers “disillusionment” knowing courage and righteousness do not protect people from wounds or death (Adams 223). I believe De Forest intentionally breaks the “romanticized vision” of war so that other people would not be drawn to battle so naïve, misled and uninformed (Adams 224). However, this attempt at sharing the truth is lost in De Forest’s