1Having taken over 618,000 soldiers’ lives and fractured an unprecedented number of families across the United States, the Civil War left hundreds of thousands of women in mourning, forced to reckon with the irreconcilable absences in their households. For many, the physical and emotional labour involved in housekeeping and performing caretaking duties through which most American women defined their identities in the mid-nineteenth century had to come to a sudden halt, as the beneficiaries of that labour—their husbands, sons, and brothers—were abruptly and violently removed from their homes. In creating gaps where once there were physical bodies in need of care, the Civil War left postbellum American womanhood groping for new ways of self-definition and identification.

2The recent enfranchisement of (some) Black men alongside (some) women’s entrance into the workforce as well as the resulting increase in the two groups’ economic power also posed urgent questions about women’s capacity for political involvement. In many cases, necessity encouraged women to extend their labour beyond their homes, offering them alternative avenues for self-definition and laying down the foundation for reducing their dependence on men. In this way, the same historical moment that carved out gaps in families across the entire nation also empowered women to find new ways to fill these gaps. However, despite the urgency of these questions, much of the literature destined for white middle-class female readers that emerged in the decade following the Civil War hardly seemed to address the optimistic political potential born out of this conflict and the unprecedented social changes it engendered. Such was the case of sentimentalism—a literary genre most typically associated with white middle-class female authorship and readership. If sentimental novels addressed women’s newly increased economic power, they did not consider the ways in which this power could lead to political enfranchisement and increased autonomy. It was to trace over what Laura Tanner calls “the contours of [...] grief,” left by men’s embodied presences-turned-absences and to more firmly tether women’s identities to the men’s inaccessible “missing bod[ies]” (87). Instead of taking into account the possibilities for reformulating white middle-class womanhood’s place in society, many postbellum works of sentimental literature promoted women’s return to traditional domesticity, as if women’s passionate embrace of this traditional antebellum role could also re-embody the lost loved ones on whom its energies were focused. This fantasy of men’s reincarnation through women choosing domestic submission is made literal in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ religious novel The Gates Ajar (1868). The novel focuses on Mary Cabot, a twenty-four-year-old woman, whose grief for her brother Royal, a recently killed Civil War soldier, makes her question her faith. The unexpected arrival of Mary’s estranged Aunt Winifred brings much solace not only to Mary but to the community at large, as Winifred’s alternative doctrine of heavenly living provides the people of Homer (a fictitious small New England town) with a reassuring vision of the afterlife, which overwrites the comfortless generalities offered by the contemporary Christian orthodoxy.

3The sustained critical interest that this once popular novel has received in the past four and a half decades owes much to Ann Douglas’ less-than-generous allegation of shallow materialism that she levied against Phelps’ vision of heaven in The Feminization of American Culture (1977). After its controversial initial entrance into the purview of academic scholarship, The Gates Ajar has since enjoyed a reappraisal. Earlier readings of the novel often either traced Phelps’ proto-feminist thinking in her quasi-utopian model of the afterlife (Kessler 85-95), or followed the novel’s unconventional biblical hermeneutics (St. Armand 55-78), including meta-readings that frame the novel as a white middle-class female readership’s guide to the craft of biblical exegesis (Smith 99-133). The role played by gift exchanges and commodity circulation in the process of mourning in the postbellum United States has likewise been well studied (Frank 165–192; Kete 83-102). The work has also been convincingly read in line with Phelps’ known interest in the medical sciences as a covert treatise on the state of postbellum medicine, at once illuminating the challenges it faced and critiquing the limitation of its approaches (Long 781–811; Murison 136-170). In recent decades, the relationships between the novel’s characters and the geographical movements of their bodies have been understood through the lens of political allegory, as The Gates Ajar meditates on the painful events that led up to and comprised the Civil War and renders in metaphorical form the obstacles faced by the postbellum nation during the difficult process of its subsequent reunification (Duquette 61-99; Samuels 207-224). Yet, it is the novel’s rejection of its status as sentimental fiction and its deliberate staging of the failure of sympathetic identification, rendered ineffectual by the unprecedented scale of the national calamity, that has elicited the most sustained interest from scholars. Many of these have paid particularly close attention to the text’s struggle with its own generic and narrative limitations, as it attempts to not simply confront but in fact overcome the virtual irrepresentability of the complexity of mourning (Constantinesco 145-171; Schnog 21-47; Weinstein 56-70).

5This article intends to bring together the various strands of scholarship that have long diverged and developed mostly in isolation from one another. Rather than focusing solely on sentimentalism’s endorsement of consumer ideology (as does Lori Merish throughout Sentimental Materialism) or the novel’s exploration of the capacity of emotions to become embodied (Long 781–811) or of sympathetic identification to assuage grief (Kete 83-102), I consider all of these investments simultaneously. More specifically, this essay unearths the connections between the different ways the body is reified in sentimental literature, and specifically The Gates Ajar, by exposing the causality that links them together. Through its emotional intensity, grief highlights the body’s role as both a nexus of physically manifesting psychic sensations, as Long argues (795-796), and its entrenched existence within a sympathetic network with other bodies, which is both responsible for the distress in the case of loss and its subsequent alleviation through the survivors’ sympathy, as Kete demonstrates (94-102). As many scholars—most recently Lucy Frank—have argued, the novel posits domestic consumer subjectivity as a means of combating this double-edged pain (165-192), a subjectivity, which coincidentally, as Merish showcases, forges a desiring body (13). Keeping in sight some of the most recent interventions in the field that expand on the queer subtext of The Gates Ajar, namely those by Shirley Samuels (214) and Thomas Constantinesco (157-8), I propose that the homosocial and homoerotic union between Mary and Winifred in the second half of the novel is the inevitable result of this attribution of a desiring body to a feeling sentimental subject. Despite the text’s attempt at regulating the excess of desire that it endorses, which takes the form of a forbidden queer union, I argue that the equally excessive (and only haphazardly hidden) materiality of Winifred’s corpse, which is designed to counter this desire, only deepens Mary’s sense of loss. The hopelessness provoked by Winifred’s death surpasses the limits of personal grief: not simply a deceased lover, her dead body becomes a physical signifier of the patriarchy’s eradication of non-heteronormative familial and affective arrangements as well as socio-political and economic freedoms envisioned by Civil War-era women similar to Mary, whose hopes for a freer future are crushed against the largely unchanged postbellum reality that forces them to resume their traditionally domestic gender role. It is only by considering together all these aspects of the bodies’ reification in The Gates Ajar that one is able to fully grasp the novel’s radical potential.

6In the first section, I thus demonstrate that the novel’s promise to reincarnate the Civil War dead hinges on American women’s ability to learn to harness grief’s affective energies and to reroute these into continually generating newer and newer consumer desires. In rendering longing economically productive, Gates empowers women to meaningfully contribute to rebooting the post-war economy in the same gesture as it cements domesticity as the primary terrain for women’s identity formation, as they anticipate to forever resume their caretaking duties in the afterlife. In her autobiography, Phelps wrote that she wanted to console “the patient, limited, domestic women, who thought little but loved much, and loving, had lost all” (1895 98); Gates makes it clear that for her consolation meant protecting this “limited, domestic” version of womanhood rather than endangering it by imagining what its unlimited counterpart might look like. Yet, although the traditionalist turn of the novel’s formal doctrine frustrates the contemporary hope for female suffrage and increased autonomy, the relationship between the two female protagonists registers and even, in a limited way, reifies these progressive impulses, as I argue in the second section of this essay. The attempted truncation of Mary’s complex selfhood in an effort to refashion her into a domestic consumer proves to be a failure, as Mary recognises the potential for an emotionally and erotically fulfilling homosociality in the sessions of biblical exegesis that she shares with her aunt Winifred, which dulls the lustre of the afterlife’s promise of enforced heteronormativity and gendered division of labour. Finally, the last section follows the novel’s material remnants left behind by death’s foreclosure of this hopeful alternative futurity that threatens the status quo, as well as other ghostly presences that haunt the text, namely the never-acknowledged but ever-lurking memory of the recently abolished slavery. Obeying patriarchy’s repressive logic, terminal illness ravages this unsanctioned family unit, leaving Mary, Winifred’s survivor, grasping for linguistic tools to express the loss of interdicted possibilities that this oppressive regime’s language does not permit to articulate. And yet, despite the very failure of language, death leaves behind irrepressible revenants of this radical union, revenants that are rendered intelligible through the use of strategically placed silences across the chapters that make up The Gates Ajar.

“The Vacant Place”: From Domestic Consumerism to Heavenly Reincarnation

7At the beginning of the novel, the grieving Mary ceaselessly muses on her memories of Roy. Tanner elaborates on the specific violence that the process of remembering can cause an embodied subject; she writes: “Visualizable but untouchable and untouching, the lost body of a loved one taunts the survivor with its absen[ce],” as memory’s “images body forth present absence rather than past presence” (89). Mary is incessantly haunted by such images. For instance, she declares that she “hate[s] the maple” that grows in her garden because it is “full of pictures of Roy.” She lists these in caring detail:

Roy, chopping off the twigs for kindling-wood in his mud oven, and sending his hatchet right through the parlor window. Roy cutting leaves for me, and then pulling all my wreaths down over my nose every time I put them on! Roy making me jump half-way across the room with a sudden thump on my window, and, looking out, I would see him with his hat off and hair blown from his forehead, framed in by the scented blossoms, or the quivering green, or the flame of blood-red leaves. But there is no end to them if I begin. (20)

10The first step involves insisting that the subject’s embodied loss is temporary, transforming the memory of intercorporeal existence into an impending reality, thereby relocating it from the past tense to the future. Indeed, the belief that heavenly subjects will be embodied, that their bodies “will be as real as these” (Phelps, 2019 69), lies at the heart of Winifred’s religious ideology precisely to secure this promise of future intercorporeality. To Mary’s assumption of earthly bodies’ differing materiality (“But these you can see, you can touch”), Winifred responds: “What would be the use of having a body that you can’t see and touch? A body is a body, not a spirit. Why should you not, having seen Roy’s old smile and heard his own voice, clasp his hand again, and feel his kiss on your happy lips?” (69). Winifred’s corporeal heaven literally reincorporates Mary’s memories of Roy, inciting a reversal from the merely visual (“see[ing] Roy’s old smile”) back to the tactile (“feel[ing] his kiss on your happy lips”).

11The second step involves reinventing the subject’s relationship with consumer goods by having her imagine the promised heavenly reunion with the re-embodied loved one in as great a detail as possible—including picturing (and thus selecting) the precise decorations of her heavenly home. The Gates Ajar is not the only sentimental novel to encourage such materialistic thinking; in fact, Merish identifies a link between “the affiliated emergence of an ethic of feminine consumption and the literary genre of domestic fiction, in which domestic material culture is often depicted in great detail” (2). In the same way that heavenly bodies are “as real as these,” so are heavenly dwellings. Winifred muses: “In the Father’s house are many mansions. Sometimes I fancy that those words have a literal meaning which the simple men who heard them may have understood better than we, and that Christ is truly ‘preparing’ my home for me. He must be there, too, you see,—I mean John” (81). The promise of heavenly reunion contains a related promise of identity preservation: Winifred’s heaven supplies women with “just so many independent domestic spaces structuring the families and friends chosen by the mutual exercise of taste among these individuals,” Kete states (100). Moreover, Winifred’s expectation that her dead husband “must be there, too” allows her to anticipate that she will eventually and permanently resume her caretaking role within the traditional institution of the heterosexual marriage and the related framework of gendered division of labour. This anticipation is comforting, as it saves her the pain of having to restructure her subjectivity by extending her familiar past identity, which was defined entirely within a domestic setting, into the future.

12The promise of re-embodiment of the missing men, such as Roy and John, in the afterlife preserves domesticity as the primary site for women’s subjectivity formation. However, the immediate unavailability of bodies in need of care on earth means that the very nature of women’s domestic responsibilities has to change form in order to allow for the creation of new modes of relating to the ontologically central, yet necessarily deferred, experience of caretaking labour. This is achieved by decentring domestic physical labour and material practices of care and focusing instead on the process of selection of consumer goods for the future home. While “the feminine consumer as a new civic identity for women and a site of sentimental identification” emerged as early as the eighteenth century, as Merish demonstrates in Sentimental Materialism (6), the need to jumpstart the economy created by the Civil War urgently resurrected that identity with the help of sentimental literature.

13Thus, neither Winifred, nor Mary have to wait for death in order to resume their domestic duties. The process of shopping for consumer goods begins on earth, as Winifred makes clear by revealing her private nightly thoughts to Mary. She says:

You don’t know how I amuse myself at night thinking this all over before I go to sleep; wondering what one thing will be like, and another thing; planning what I should like; thinking that John has seen it all, and wondering if he is laughing at me because I know so little about it! I tell you, Mary, there’s a ‘deal o’ comfort in ’t’ as Phœbe says about her cup of tea. (84)

14Here, Winifred is explicitly converted into a paradigmatic female shopper who is exercising her domestic consumer taste. Frank puts it best: “This admission implies an anticipated process of selecting and acquiring objects, presumably to furnish her heavenly home, which is redolent of the pleasures of the shopper” (177). By relocating the meeting of loved ones from the past into the future, the theology of the material heaven combats grief by introducing women to the pleasures of shopping, of “planning” future purchases of various “thing[s],” the thrill of which is accentuated rather than diminished by anticipation. Yet, the chief “comfort” of shopping comes from the fact that, despite simulating an orientation towards the future, it simultaneously shuts off the consumer subject from both the painful past and the uncertain future by positioning the pleasures of commodity choice-making as an end in itself. Similar to Phoebe’s “cup of tea,” shopping folds the pleasurable anticipation of a domestic sociality into a solipsistic experience of escapism. And, as escapist practices, both teatime and shopping are built into women’s routine as a means to help them bear the burden of domestic and caretaking labour, even as this deceptively innocent comparison between the two helps obscure the role that household consumption plays in limiting the site of women’s self-expression to the domestic realm. As Merish argues: “Viewed in its historical context, domestic consumption [...] facilitated middle-class women’s civic agency, even while it enforced domestic conceptions of womanhood” (18).

15Significantly, because the fact of commodity acquisition is deferred to the afterlife, the pedagogy of Winifred’s heaven does not stress the virtues of property ownership but the pleasure of constant cultivation of new consumer desires. The anticipatory joy of future possession becomes almost greater than the pleasure of ownership, which is in itself promised to be redoubled thanks to the extended waiting period. Within the ideological framework of the material heaven, with its promise of familial reunion in the afterlife, consumption thus turns present absence, the central source of pain, into the greatest pleasure of mortal existence. This affective reversal retrospectively transforms the images of grief that appear at the beginning of the novel to taunt Mary about Roy’s absence into hopeful precursors of the world to come.

16Such radical affective restructuring only becomes possible because Winifred’s commodity heaven fundamentally transforms the affective relationship between the visual and the tactile. Reversing death’s transformation of the body into image, Winifred’s commodity heaven promises to reincorporate the memory’s image of the lost loved one, restoring their former depth. The survivor’s focus is therefore shifted from present absence to future presence, from “present sensory inaccessibility” to future resumed intercorporeality (Tanner 95). In promising re-embodiment and a deferred return to intercorporeal contact, memories’ images no longer stir up feelings of loss at contemplating the missing one’s absence; instead, the visual redirects the grieving subject’s attention to the future, exciting pleasure at the anticipated ecstasy of the first touch in the afterlife. Winifred’s self-consolatory deathbed speculations about one’s first experiences in heaven clearly encourage such a response; she muses: “It may be that the faces of familiar human friends will be the first to greet us; it may be that the touch of the human hand dearer than any but His own shall lead us, as we are able, behind the veil, till we are a little used to the glory and the wonder, and lead us so to Him” (137). Winifred’s fantasy depicts the exact moment of fulfilment, i.e. the moment where one’s memories are replaced by the actual sight of the dearly missed “faces of familiar human friends” and rapidly supplanted by the previously inaccessible and long anticipated “touch of the human hand” extended by the lost loved one. Yet, as the anticipatory pleasure becomes the end in itself, it becomes necessary to encourage the production of new (consumer) desires within oneself, which is precisely what fuels Winifred’s mental shopping with which she “amuse[s] herself at night.” The Gates Ajar thus disengages the visual—both memories and fantasies of heavenly reunion—from the dynamics of grief and instead conscripts these to encourage commodity fetishism and shopping. In other words, by relocating intercorporeality from the past into the future, the version of the afterlife presented in the novel makes images of grief obey what is essentially the logic of advertisement.

17Indeed, in Winifred’s hands, the Bible itself is transformed into something of a shopper’s catalogue. For instance, commenting on the conventional images of disembodied heavenly existence, Winifred claims: “Never, never, if Jesus Christ had been Teacher and Preacher to them [the girls of Homer], would He have pictured their blessed endless years with Him in such bleak colors. They are not the hues of His Bible” (86). The Bible is imagined here to be a tool that gets mortals to “picture” their impending experience of the afterlife in brightly coloured “hues”—to project images of a more fulfilling existence, enriched not only through the presence of loved ones but also the much-coveted consumer goods, such as a piano, as is the case for one of Winifred’s young pupils, Clo. Winifred’s implicit framing of the Bible as an advertisement brochure of heaven comes back again a little later, when she explains to Mary:

I treat Faith just as the Bible treats us, by dealing in pictures of truth that she can understand. I can make Clo and Abinadab Quirk comprehend that their pianos and machinery may not be made of literal rosewood and steel, but will be some synonyme of the thing, which will answer just such wants of their changed natures as rosewood and steel must answer now. (108)

18Framing the Bible as an explicitly image-based medium that “deal[s] in pictures of truth,” Winifred entices the younger members of the community into believing in this “forbidden fairy-land” (85)—which, despite this epithet, is, on the contrary, one of the sanctioned solutions of sentimental literature to regulate young people’s potentially forbidden desires by directing their libidinal energies towards consumer goods. Indeed, Winifred’s Biblical hermeneutics seem to sanction commodity fetishism at its purest by obfuscating the means of production as well as the exact materials of which the coveted objects will be made, highlighting merely that they shall “answer” the consumers’ “wants,” which likewise likens the Bible to a shopper’s catalogue. Entirely removed from the fraught context of labour relations, Winifred’s Bible reframes commodity consumption as a pure form of self-expression.

19The novel’s propagation of the pedagogy of consumer desire for its own sake, a message encoded in much sentimental literature of the period, “helped write into existence a modern consumer psychology” (Merish 139). The latter instils a deep sense of dissatisfaction within one’s self, leading the subject to re-imagine their identity as always already incomplete, as always already lacking, as always already in need of supplementing. Such is the case of Clo, whose full moral capacity cannot be realised unless she comes into possession of a piano, as her dialogue with Winifred suggests:

“See here!’ she said in a whisper, “I can’t be good! I would be good if I could only just have a piano!”

“Well, Clo,” I said, “if you will be a good girl, and go to heaven, I think you will have a piano there, and play just as much as you care to.” (85)

20This apprehension of one’s own incompleteness is precisely the mechanism that drives the subject’s need to generate ever-renewing consumer desires, as each new acquisition fails to eradicate the consumer subject’s constitutional sense of dissatisfaction, which in turn explains how the pleasure of anticipation comes to outweigh the necessarily disappointing fulfilment. The heaven of The Gates Ajar simultaneously feeds and offers a respite from this exhausting dynamic: both similarly to and unlike earthly commodities, Phelps’ consumer paradise promises to finally actualise this forever-deferred fantasy of wholeness, permanently rooting out this sense of dissatisfaction. Herein lies the novel’s test of faith: the reader is not asked to believe (this being framed as a certainty) that heaven will be, as Phelps suggests, as “thoroughly concrete and domestic,” to use Ann Douglas’ phrase (224); the reader is instead asked to believe that, unlike earthly commodities’ empty promise, heavenly commodities will really purge dissatisfaction out of the subject’s constitution. Winifred shows herself to have full faith in this interpretation of the heavenly promise, hence her comment: “No, I am quite willing to trust all these things to God. [...] I know that I shall find them infinitely more satisfying than I have supposed” (137-138; original italics).

21Mary’s own conversion is registered when she reframes her view of “the coming life” in comparison to mortal existence in the following manner: “that is the reality, this the dream; that the substance, this the shadow” (113). This future-oriented constitutional dissatisfaction, which does not attenuate but indeed fuels the pleasure of anticipation, relegates the present tense to the status of a mere shadow of an afterlife, which is replete with actually fulfilling “substance.” By perpetually relocating “reality”—i.e. the experience of a full-fledged subjectivity, of identity wholeness—into the future tense, consumer psychology becomes the perfect vehicle for reconfiguring the external empty space left by the dead person’s body into an internal chasm that the person seemingly has the power to fill through economically productive recourse to commodity consumption. The novel’s promise of consolation therefore rests on Mary’s (and the reader’s) ability to embrace this feeling of dissatisfaction that pertains to consumer subjectivity in order to be able to view the world around them as devoid of “substance,” while at the same time imagining heavenly people and objects as endowed with greater and superior materiality.

“This New Promise of Home”: Queer Potentialities in The Gates Ajar

22Yet, despite presenting commodity fetishism as a cure to pain, the affective currents that underpin the relationship between the two female protagonists expose the impossibility of commodifying all forms of desire and of transforming a feeling subject into a domestic consumer. Both the “reality” of mortal life and the materiality of death haunt Winifred’s heavenly vision, repeatedly threatening to shatter her seemingly fail-proof theology. For a novel that is primarily concerned with dealing with death, The Gates Ajar is extremely efficient at hiding its corpses—even in spite of the gruesomeness of all the ways of dying that it mentions, from Roy’s battlefront fatality, to John’s tuberculosis, to Mrs. Bland’s burning alive and finally to Winifred’s breast cancer. While the materiality of these corpses themselves is not depicted in Mary’s diary, she does document her own reaction to the sight of death: “The bare, blank sense of physical repulsion from death, which was all the idea I had of anything when they first brought him home, has not gone yet” (6). Mary’s ability to overcome the “repulsion” inspired by death’s materiality with renewed desire (the extreme opposite of repulsion)—for consumer goods as for Roy himself—hinges on her ability to wholeheartedly assume her aforementioned mantra: “that is the reality, this the dream; that the substance, this the shadow.” Winifred employs a plethora of strategies to make earth’s tangible materiality—including the undeniable materiality of death—seem less substantial than that of the promised heavenly existence: namely, she supplements her image-based pedagogy with tactile means.

Winifred appeals to human touch to shadow forth the restoration of intercorporeality that she suggests awaits the bereaved women in heaven, matching the methodology of her pedagogy with its central message. The first instance takes place in Mary’s bedroom:

I did not speak, for I could not, and, the first I knew, a gentle arm crept about me, and she had gathered me into her lap and laid my head on her shoulder, as she might have gathered Faith. [...] I don’t know what it was, whether the voice, or touch, or words, but it came so suddenly,—and nobody had held me for so long,—that everything seemed to break up and unlock in a minute, and I threw up my hands and cried. (29-30)

23Following Shirley Samuels, Thomas Constantinesco comments on “the novel’s substitutive logic,” which, he argues, “Roy initiated by replacing for his sister both their dead parents and Mary’s ‘never-to-arrive husband,’” and in which Aunt Winifred likewise participates when she “rapidly fills ‘the vacant place’” that he has left behind (160). This is precisely the logic that is at work in this scene: here, Mary’s relational identity as a daughter is restored to her, which is achieved entirely through Aunt Winifred’s motherly touch and through her bending Mary’s body to fill her own daughter’s place in her lap. This bodily contact thus permits Mary to get a momentary taste of the promise of Winifred’s material heaven: the restoration of all lost intercorporeal bonds between the bodies of close relatives and, as a result, the eternal preservation of one’s unchanged identity, which, for women, is defined entirely through the domestic context of the family circle.

24Yet, there might be more to Winifred’s “motherly” gesture than first meets the eye. Here, Constantinesco suggests: “Although articulated in the form of its denial or euphemized as childlike affection and reciprocal motherly love, queer desire between women remains legible through a longing for bodily touch and embrace” (161). A different episode in the novel makes this undoubtedly present affective dimension even more explicit, namely the handhold that the two women share during Dr. Bland’s sermon: “Aunt Winifred slipped her hand into mine under her cloak. Ah, Dr. Bland, if you had known how that little soft touch was preaching against you!” (42). It is evident that Winifred’s haptic methodology achieves its goals. Long argues that “In Winifred's corporeal theology, conversion is achieved through physical contact. Her “little soft touch”—not her words—preaches most convincingly against Reverend Bland’s inchoate sermon and converts Mary to her way of thinking” (792). Similar to the earlier instance of bodily contact that takes place in Mary’s bedroom, Winifred’s touch effectively portends the heavenly reality that she assures awaits her niece and herself beyond death. Touch thus becomes a more effective conversion tool, because, as Long suggests, “Winifred is able not only to identify ideological and emotional vacuums but also to embody them, articulate them, fill them with the sensation for which Mary yearns” (791).

25Indeed, in deploying intercorporeal tactility for religious purposes, Winifred is able to undo the sensory stupor, in which the isolation of Mary’s grief has placed her and which acts as the primary source of her religious doubt. Mary describes this debilitating affective state as follows: “Going hungry, hopeless, blinded, I came back empty, uncomforted, groping. I wanted something actual, something pleasant, about this place into which Roy has gone” (43). Winifred’s responding handhold answers Mary’s “groping”; elsewhere, Winifred’s arms envelop Mary’s “uncomforted” body; she cures Mary’s blindness by making her picture heaven’s “actual” and “pleasant” reality; and, most of all, she fills Mary’s “empty” self with heaven’s promised “substance,” anticipated by Winifred’s own touch, and sates her hunger.

26Taken together, these passages reveal that religious ecstasy is in fact powered by sexual tension. The latter passage renders religious conversion in sexually charged terms, giving force to the erotic dimension of Winifred’s handhold, which is reinforced by its surreptitious—or, in other words, closeted—nature, as it happens not out in the open but “under her [Winifred’s] cloak.” Likewise, Mary’s exclamatory interjection—“Ah[!]”—half-conceals, half-reveals the sexual ecstasy that Winifred’s touch inspires. It is therefore clear that Winifred’s well-timed non-verbal engagement with Mary’s body deliberately harnesses the erotic energy that is sparked between the two women to guide Mary towards her consolatory theology of the material heaven. As Constantinesco notes, “Her [Winifred’s] soothing gestures are more eloquent and effective than words, in a somewhat classic rendition of queer experience as [...] absence of speech” (162).

27Yet, in doing so—in harnessing the sexual tension as an earthly means to a spiritual end—Winifred plays a dangerous game. As Constantinesco remarks, Winifred’s “unexpected arrival [...] facilitates the redirection of Mary’s interdicted desire for her lost brother” (161). In other words, instead of successfully rerouting her libidinal energy into domestic consumption, on which the success of the material heaven’s consolation depends, Winifred makes Mary trade her illicit incestuous longing for no less illicit queer desire. Herein lies the danger of embedding the nineteenth-century American woman’s family-centric identity into a liberal consumer subjectivity: this reconfiguration resulted in the emergence of an increasingly sexualised and, more alarmingly, desiring female body. Although, as Merish notes, this transformation was accompanied by the simultaneous promotion of “norms of taste, ‘proper’ affect, and political and economic discipline” (13), this regulatory process was not always as straightforwardly efficient at controlling the desires it produced—at converting the desiring subject into a consumer—as Merish suggests here, leading to the creation of the deviant subject Mary becomes in the central portion of the novel.

28Soon after Winifred’s arrival, queer desire ceases to be an earthly means to a religious end for Mary, becoming an end in itself, a basis on which to build a new earthly (rather than heavenly) home and reconstitute her identity accordingly. Mary explains the details of her new domestic arrangement at some length:

So then we took this new promise of home that has come to make my life, if not joyful, something less than desolate, and analyzed it in its practical bearings. What a pity that all pretty dreams have to be analyzed! I had some notion about throwing our little incomes into a joint family fund, but she put a veto to that; I suppose because mine is the larger. She prefers to take board for herself and Faith; but, if I know myself, she shall never be suffered to have the feeling of a boarder, and I will make her so much at home in my house that she shall not remember that it is not her own. (62)

29Left without living male relatives, the remaining women of Mary and Winifred’s family take charge of their own finances, managing their household funds to create a new familial arrangement that eliminates the need for male figures. Their discussion of “practical bearings” figures in the text in both economic and political terms, highlighting the two women’s autonomy: thus, “put[ting] a veto to” a “joint family fund.” The last sentence exposes Winifred’s complex relationship to Mary: no mere “boarder,” she is implicitly placed into a spousal position, as both Mary’s husband and Mary’s wife. This is because Mary herself takes up both the traditional feminine role of the homemaker and the traditional masculine role of the provider. She pledges to make Winifred “at home in [her] house,” simultaneously taking on the responsibility for domestic labour and emphasising that not only is the house hers to dispense with as she wishes, but she is likewise the owner of “the larger [income],” which figures as a strictly masculine trait, since women did not at this time possess the right to own property.

30Winifred’s religious doctrine succeeds in instilling a normative desire for domesticity in Mary; yet, the very means that she uses to direct this desire at heaven end up, unbeknownst to her, carving out a competing vision of what domestic paradise can look like. Instead of reinforcing women’s reliance on men, this all-female vision of queer domesticity, made possible by its specific historical post-war context, challenges the status quo by dispensing with men altogether; one “pretty dream” challenges another. Moreover, although Mary complains of having to “analyze” this “pretty dream” in its practical bearings, which, supposedly, spoils it, it is these very tedious logistics that actually turn this “pretty dream” into a reality, challenging the very need for an optimistic vision of heaven and weakening Mary’s mantra: “that is the reality, this the dream; that the substance, this the shadow.” The “reality” of queer sociality thus outcompetes the “dream” of the material heaven. Tragically, this hopeful alternative futurity is forestalled no sooner than it is conceived.

“Silence Between Us”: Foreclosed Futurities and Material Ghosts

31In The Gates Ajar, resistance is squashed by violent means. In fact, God’s will itself functions to promote the interests of patriarchy and capitalism; it inflicts disease and death to restore the status quo. And yet, the very materiality of disease, which precipitates death, possesses a revelatory quality: it lays bare the oppressive forces that operate on marginalised bodies. Thus, after a few happy weeks with Mary, Winifred becomes terminally ill with breast cancer, an event that is both ideologically and narratively necessary to return Mary to a heteronormative existence promoted by the novel’s biblical doctrine. The cancerous growth that distorts Winifred’s body tells a different, much darker tale about the promise of heaven, uncovering its oppressive regulatory function, and Winifred chooses to share this truth with Mary: “She walked feebly towards the window, where a faint, gray light struggled in, and opened the bosom of her dress.... There was silence between us for a long while after that; she went back to the sofa, and I took her hand and bowed my face over it, and so we sat” (134). The same gesture—the “open[ing] [of] the bosom of her dress”—that should have served as the climactic moment of fulfilment of the women’s homoerotic desire becomes a proclamation of death. This is no mere coincidence: the altered materiality of Winifred’s diseased breasts, i.e. her secondary sex organs, images the social death of queer subjects and their lack of futurity in a heteronormative system. In other words, the oppressive patriarchal regime makes it so that to be consumed by queer desire becomes synonymous with being consumed by terminal illness.

32In The Gates Ajar, such destructive workings of power are repeatedly made invisible, for the very materiality of dying bodies, which register the deathly effects of oppression, is continuously sidelined and excluded—which, contrary to the desired effect, highlights its stubborn and undeniable presence. Thus, in a place where Mary sees cancerous growth, the reader sees a mere ellipsis designed to suppress a graphic description of diseased corporeality. Citing Toni Morrison’s argument that “invisible things are not necessarily not-there,” Avery Gordon suggests that “that which appears absent can indeed be a seething presence” (17). As the success of the novel’s persuasion hinges on heaven’s “substance” being more real than that of the earthly plane, the final chapters of The Gates Ajar attempt to perform a reversal by etherealising the excessive corporeality of disease and death and concretising the image of the coming life, a mission that ostensibly fails. Counter-intuitively, then, the ghosts of the text’s finale are therefore not the dead men, who are imagined to have ascended to heaven, yet whose presence is still felt among the living, such as Roy and John, but Winifred, the terminally ill and later dead queer woman.

33Indeed, this moment of suppressed recognition of Winifred’s impending dissolution is staged anew multiple times at the end of the novel. Tanner’s lesson on the embodied dimension of grief and the related value of objects is useful in reconstructing the presence of death in the final pages of The Gates Ajar. As she writes, “meaning is not only constructed through but is located in material form” (185). By simultaneously paying attention to both certain objects’ metaphorical signification and their “palpable, sensual presence,” one renders legible the same obfuscated revelation as the one staged earlier by Winifred’s own diseased body: the material fact of death. For instance, Faith makes a flower chain for her mother, who is too ill to accept the gift. Later, Mary will write in her diary: “When I had locked the front door, and was creeping up here to my room, my foot crushed something, and a faint, wounded perfume came up. It was the little pink and purple chain” (134). The epithet “wounded” renders the metaphorical transformation of Winifred’s diseased body into a crushed, soon-to-decay flower crystal clear. The image is designed as a means of concealing the gruesome materiality of death, even as it timidly alludes to it. Yet, the material presence of the object does not shy away from the whole story: Winifred is too ill to accept Faith’s token of affection, a refusal which forebodes death’s fast-approaching severance of the affective exchange between mother and daughter. Taken together, the embodied and metaphorical dimensions of the flower chain simultaneously conceal and reveal the insuppressible presence of death.

34Death’s overpowering presence becomes impossible to ignore towards the end of Phelps’ novel, although this does not stop Mary from attempting to divert the reader’s attention from it. One such scene unfolds in Winifred’s sick-chamber, as Mary watches Faith and her mother interact for the last time: “I sit and watch them, and watch the sick-lamp flicker in the night, and watch the blue morning crawl over the hills; and the old words are stealing down my thought: That is the substance, this the shadow; that the reality, this the dream” (139). Although Mary claims to “watch them,” in reality she looks away, describing the “sick-lamp” and “the blue morning [...] over the hills” that she observes. Here, Mary’s gaze instructs the reader to avert their mind’s eye from the deathbed scene, slotting the novel’s famed mantra in its place in a hopeless attempt to fix the reader’s attention on heaven’s imagined “substance” as opposed to the “substance” of the dying body in the room, which the reader cannot help but picture.

35Mary’s choice not to witness the final goodbye between mother and daughter echoes an earlier instance of Mary’s self-effacement when confronted with a scene of filial grief. When Winifred’s disease renders her bedridden and unable to keep putting Faith to bed, they share a dolorous moment of acknowledgement of impending loss, from which Mary retreats: “It was the last dear care of motherhood yielded; the last link snapped. It seemed to be the very bitterness of parting. I turned away, that they might bear it together, they two alone” (135). Mary’s repeated withdrawal from such archetypal scenes of parting points to a painful emotional reality: despite the multitude of episodes where Mary is formally cast in the role of Winifred’s surrogate daughter, she refrains from embracing this role in her aunt’s final months. Refusing to formalise her relationship with Winifred as either filial or sororal, Mary is suspended in an emotional limbo, as she fails to intelligibly articulate the true nature of the queerly affective bond she shares with Winifred, for which Victorian social structures leave no space. In light of the distance implied by the two women’s materteral relationship, Mary finds that there is neither a privileged spot reserved for her by Winifred’s deathbed, nor a series of archetypal scenes in which the two women can adequately mourn the loss of their unrealised and forbidden—unrealised, because forbidden—shared future. Additionally, Winifred is unlikely to leave a “vacant place” behind her in the structure of Mary’s family in the same way that Roy has, since Mary herself will replace her in the role of Faith’s surrogate mother, as the novel’s amnesiac logic of substitution ruthlessly abides by heteronormative standards. The endless ellipses, diversions and silences, through which one glimpses the haunting presence of Winifred’s rapidly self-destroying body, become the only expression of Mary’s unspeakable grief.

36Although this is a scene of Mary’s displacement, it is simultaneously the closest she gets to admitting the true nature of her and Winifred’s relationship. The phrase “they two alone” in reference to Winifred and Faith alludes to two other defunct pairings: that between Winifred and her husband John (“So there in the sunset and the moonrise, we two alone together, he [John] baptized her [Faith], and we gave our little girl to God” (38; my italics)) and between Roy and Mary herself: “Then we have lived together so long, we two alone, since father died, that he [Roy] had grown to me, heart of my heart, and life of my life” (5; my italics). The twin phrases “we two alone” and “they two alone” thus come to encompass the two types of familial ties— that between man and woman and between parent and child—that can exist within a heteronormative family unit, where even incest is sanctioned, as long as it remains within the bounds of heterosexuality. Although Mary is forced to exclude herself from the parent-child bond shared by Winifred and Faith and forbidden to openly name the affective reality of her relationship with Winifred, a ghostly “we” nevertheless haunts the bitterly exclusive phrase “they two alone.” Between the deaths of John and Roy and the novel’s compulsive drive to create substitutions, the narrative structure makes the romantic pairing between the two women inevitable, even if made unnamable due to its queer nature. The network of echoes and allusions thus creates a ghostly palimpsest, where fine traces and half-erased script often speak louder than the actual words on the page, once again confounding what constitutes the “reality” of The Gates Ajar and what constitutes its “dream,” as the novel’s “dream” of everlasting, death-defying heteronormative family is overshadowed by the “reality” of the high cost at which it comes, i.e. the violent suppression of queer life.

37The ending of The Gates Ajar struggles to contain its unruly phantoms. The final page deploys one final diversion strategy, perhaps the most disastrously unsuccessful in the entire novel. When ’Bin Quirk brings “a single white carnation” to Winifred’s funeral, Mary responds: “I motioned to him to lay it himself between her fingers.” ’Bin follows up the gesture with a comment: “She liked ’em,’ he faltered; ‘maybe, if what she used to say is all so, she’ll like ’em now” (143; original italics). This line is supposed to recall Winifred’s earlier vision of heaven’s flowers: “Not all amaranth and asphodel, but of variety and color and beauty unimagined; glorified lilies of the valley, heavenly tea-rose buds, and spiritual harebells among them. [...] I should like, if I had my choice, to have day-lilies and carnations fresh under my windows all the time” (81; original italics). Yet, ’Bin’s single carnation hardly manages to index Winifred’s heavenly home: instead, it merely points to the dead fingers that clasp it. In an ironic twist, the “variety and color and beauty” of vividly described heavenly flowers stays “unimagined,” as the dead “fingers,” despite their lack of epithets, assert death’s material presence in Mary’s living room and on the page. Despite countless attempts to render deathly corporeality unseen, its “substance” continually haunts Phelps’ novel, undermining heaven’s “reality.” “But haunting, unlike trauma, is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done,” Gordon notes (xvi). Thus, the suppressed—yet insuppressible—diseased and deathly materiality of a queer woman’s corpse provides a counter-narrative to the main story, retraining the reader’s gaze to focus on the “seething presence” of those bodies whose systemic exclusions structure the socio-political reality of the postbellum United States (Gordon 17).

38The Gates Ajar traces the path towards a productive futurity that is beneficial to the status quo; yet, this futurity is haunted by alternative affective, social and economic arrangements, which are violently interdicted from coming to fruition. Having been taught to foster proper consumer desire through commodities, Mary is domesticated into a maternal role: “I feel sure that she [Winifred] is showing me, who will have no motherhood by which to show myself, how to help her little girl [Faith]” (143). Commodities thus help Mary assimilate into paradigmatic womanhood, which combines the roles of the mother and the domestic consumer and is endorsed by the nation’s contemporary political and economic interests, which consist in boosting the economy and population size. This politically and economically productive assimilation is made possible by Winifred’s concept of embodied heaven, which leaves Mary sure that “our absent dead are very present with us” (Phelps, 2019 52). Because Winifred’s heaven permits, as Kete argues, to leave “no gap in the circle of the newly recomposed and extended family” (101), it locks women into the traditional family hierarchy, with the respective gendered division of labour, even in the (temporary) absence of men. In other words, in “restor[ing] Roy to Mary and Mary to herself” (Kete 95), Winifred’s heaven returns Mary to a limited life of domestic servitude, which is reified and obtains futurity through her newly acquired care-taking responsibility over Faith. The ghost of traditional domestic femininity, with its compulsory shadows of economic dependence and political exclusion, is thus revitalised and destined to be propagated into the future, thanks to the work performed in and outside the text by Winifred’s consolatory heavenly vision.

39And yet, a different ghost, stripped of its future, yet still irrepressibly there, haunts the final sentence of the novel: “If the Master will that we should be about His Father’s business, what is that to us?” It is no coincidence that the most patriarchal appellations of Jesus and God are selected to convey the dominance of their will in this paraphrased allusion to Luke 2:49. The word “business,” which at the end of the war found itself on the cusp of being promisingly dislodged from its traditional gendered associations due to women’s involvement in the labour force, is here firmly re-rooted in the realm of the masculine. The “we” here is Mary and Faith but also implicitly the extended community of women, who are tasked to “be about” not their own affairs but God the “Father’s” and, by implication, those of their male relatives, as suggested by this explicitly familial title. Instead of ending with a comforting assertion, The Gates Ajar ends with a question: “what is that to us?” Far from a simple resignation, this question could be interpreted as measuring the immeasurable damage produced through the process of forcing women into conformity: here stand a motherless child and a bereaved lover, with the question on their lips: “what is that to us?” Whether bitter irony or resilience, that question conjures up Winifred’s shadowy figure and with her, those alternative domestic, social and political arrangements, which could have empowered women, and increased their financial and political autonomy but which never came to pass. If haunting, as Gordon suggests, “is an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely” (xvi), then the last sentence of Gates is teeming with ghosts.

40While the outlines of Winifred’s absent figure are etched into the concluding chapter of Gates, she is not the only ghost to cast a glaring shadow on the final sentence. For a literary work that incessantly gestures towards the Civil War—i.e. the war that served as its raison d’être—it performs a surprising amount of skirting around the root of this deadly conflict, the flint that sparked and fuelled the fratricidal war: the terrible institution of slavery. While Gates makes it its mission to commemorate and honour the victims of the United States’ bloodiest conflict, the text’s memory appears patchy, subject to retrospective erasure that banishes the cause of the Civil War out of the field of visibility and with it its greatest victims: the formerly enslaved African American population. Commenting on the different visions of the conflict that emerged in the nation’s collective memory in its wake, David Blight highlights the powerful influence of what he calls the “white supremacist vision,” which “by the turn of the century delivered the country a segregated memory of its Civil War on Southern terms” (2). In writing a novel on white grief and victimhood brought about by the Civil War, one explicitly devoid of acknowledgement of Black death and sacrifice, Phelps contributes to this collective white supremacist misremembering. However, the palimpsestic memory of the Civil War, which the novel engages, leaves behind the traces of its erasures, things it deliberately forgets. Thus, the novel is haunted not only by the non-attainment of the freedoms that had long been promised women, but also by the so-called peculiar institution, the massive shadow of which is made retrospectively visible throughout the text by its highly suggestive final sentence.

41The patriarchal appellations—“the Master,” “His Father”—used to describe Jesus and God that appear in the last sentence of The Gates Ajar allude to the history of slavery, with the latter recalling the common pro-slavery conception of enslaved people as inferior members of the enslaver’s family, where the slaveholder is cast in the paternal role, which prevailed in the imagination of the antebellum South. Moreover, since God performs the role of a desire regulator in the narrative by redirecting Mary’s affective energy from Roy, to Winifred, to domestic commodities, his role in the narrative is effectively that of the free market, which gives further force to these ghosts of slavery in the novel. After all, as Lori Merish rightly suggests:

[T]he emergence and growth of capitalism, as well as its ideological justification in the United States, cannot be understood apart from the growing institution of chattel slavery; the American market system constituted, from the start, a racialized structure, one thoroughly implicated in the institutions and material practices of race. (19)

42It is therefore impossible to discuss sentimental consumerism and capitalism in an American novel such as Gates without awakening the ghost of slavery, because of their intertwining histories.

43Additionally, when Mary expresses concern that the heavenly Roy “would not be the old dear Roy,” Aunt Winifred reassures her: “But he is not any the less Roy for that,—not any the less your own real Roy, who will love you and wait for you and be very glad to see you, as he used to love and wait and be glad when you came home from a journey on a cold winter night” (32). The chosen phrasing—“your own real Roy”—extends the logic of sentimental ownership from the domestic commodities of their heavenly home to Roy himself, in an uncomfortable motion that sanctions human possession. Moreover, Roy’s only words in the novel, recorded in a letter he sends to Mary before his death, allude to Corinthians 6:20 and establish a possessive relationship between God and Christian subjects. He writes: “Perhaps I ought not to call myself a Christian [...] and I shall make no profession to be such, till I am sure of it, but my life has not seemed to me for a long time to be my own. ‘Bought with a price’ just expresses it” (10). From the very outset, Roy limns the boundary between humanity and property, uncomfortably conjuring up the ghost of slavery that trapped whole generations of people in the same legal limbo that Roy’s liminal positioning in the text evokes.

44In Gates, such proprietary relationships are defined against what they are not, while at the same time summoning their suppressed dark foils. Roy’s death, conceived as a kind of crossing-over of physical space (since “Mary must not only imaginatively reconstitute Roy’s body but also situate it in her geographic imagination” Long 788), a journey which is necessarily accompanied by his transformation from a person into Mary’s commodity, recalls a very different kind of deathly voyage—the Middle Passage. While Roy, a white Northerner, is not explicitly allegorised as a ghost of the Middle Passage, he is undeniably a ghost of the war that decided the future of slavery. The Middle Passage is a ghost of Roy’s ghost, to use Gordon’s helpful conception of haunting. She writes: “even those who haunt our dominant institutions and their systems of value are haunted too by things they sometimes have names for and sometimes do not” (5).

45These ghosts of ghosts index one truth—that, in Gates, the freedom to own tramples all other possible definitions of freedom. Curiously, the novel’s other, more orthodox vision of Christian heaven, which makes Mary “shiver” with dread and which Winifred is summoned by the text to correct, resembles some of the more radical antebellum conceptions of a de-hierarchised democratic collectivity (such as those of Walt Whitman, for instance). Dr. Bland preaches: “We shall moreover love each other with a universal and unselfish love.” Mary writes:

That we shall recognize our friends in heaven, he was inclined to think, after mature deliberation, was probable. But there would be no special selfish affections there. In this world we have enmities and favoritisms. In the world of bliss our hearts would glow with holy love alike to all other holy hearts. (42)

46Moreover, this “cold” version of heaven reifies the promise of the New World: its inhabitants are free to leave their past selves in the past and reinvent themselves within their new context. Yet, this idealistic, democratic vision of heaven (this “unreality”) is rejected in favour of an individualistic proprietary heaven that reproduces the actual socio-material conditions of the contemporary United States as opposed to reifying idyllic ones. Perhaps, Aunt Winifred means the following comment literally: “One thing I have thought much about; it is that, whatever may be our first experience after leaving the body, it is not likely to be a revolutionary one” (137; original italics).

47Thus, a geographically contingent version of freedom, in which Roy’s crossing-over into the afterlife where Mary would be “nothing any more to Roy” (12) would give him liberty to break free from his former earthly identity and community, is rejected in favour of Mary’s absolute freedom to continue to possess Roy indefinitely, regardless of the distance separating them. This recalls the logic of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, where the enslavers’ freedom to claim ownership over the enslaved regardless of their location within the country trampled the freedom of the latter to escape bondage by crossing a different border, the Mason-Dixon line separating the “free” and the “slave” states. Although at the time of the novel’s writing, this legal act had become defunct, legislation like this helped cement freedom, the quintessential principle of the United States, as the freedom of ownership. In that sense, The Gates Ajar belongs to its historical moment, since, as Gordon remarks, “reconstruction ratified a prevailing but limited notion of freedom as the freedom to own property, to sell one’s labor, and to not be owned as property” (173).

48Responding to both emotional and economic needs created by its traumatic cultural moment, Gates comforts its white middle-class female readers, many of whom had been bereaved by the conflict, by extending to them the power to turn the novel’s fantasy of reincarnating the ghosts of the Civil War into a reality, on the condition that they internalise proper consumer habits and help contribute to rebuilding the country’s economy. Instead of carrying out the promise of doing away with ghosts altogether, however, the sentimental fiction’s contemporary project of forging a new consumerist paradigm of womanhood ends up giving rise to even more spectral presences and haunting sites. This newly minted subject—the domestic consumer—whose responsibilities had been narrowly enlarged from traditional caretaking duties to shopping for her family home is haunted by much hoped-for but unrealised alternatives of female empowerment, namely female suffrage, greater economic independence and a generally higher flexibility in the range of social roles available to women, which would finally release them from the inexorable pressures of the heteronormative family. Although the formal narrative of The Gates Ajar frames free-market capitalism as a means to end violence, usher in peace and bring about reunification of estranged factions, the novel nonetheless cannot help but trace the origin of these spectra of unfulfilled possibilities, along with the most enduring haunting presence in the history of the United States—slavery—back to the oppression engendered by this very system. In this way, the text is constantly suspicious of its own messaging, questioning the idea that consumerism can become the uniform solution to the many tensions that troubled the wounded nation at this difficult historical moment. By following the trail of the novel’s phantom presences that linger at the brink of textual signification, in the gaps opened up by the novel’s many ellipses, omissions and silences, it becomes possible to locate this unexpectedly radical latent pedagogy in the cracks of what initially appears to be the reactionary doctrine of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Gates Ajar.