SOURCE: Long, Lisa A. “‘The Corporeity of Heaven’: Rehabilitating the Civil War Body in The Gates Ajar.” American Literature 69, no. 4 (December 1997): 781-811.

In the following essay, Long contends that Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's 1868 novel The Gates Ajar offers an early symbolic analysis of “the inadequacy of traditional belief systems” in the post-Civil War era.

In July 1866 a remarkable short story appeared in the Atlantic Monthly.¹ The anonymous author, young Army surgeon S. Weir Mitchell, would later attain fame—and infamy—as the inventor and implementor of the “Rest Cure” for turn-of-the-century neurasthenics. During the Civil War, however, Mitchell's attentions were turned toward nerve injuries.² In his story, “The Case of George Dedlow,” we imaginatively enter the mind of one of Mitchell's patients—an army surgeon who has lost over eighty percent of his body mass through the amputation of all of his limbs. The understandably despondent George is brought...