January 1, 1865---Pulp Fiction

JANUARY 1, 1865:        

Wartime pulp fiction was a relatively late development of the Civil War.  

Authors, both Northern and Southern, churned out penny novels that ran the gamut from swashbuckling retellings of the (fictional, quasi-fictional, and non-fictional) adventures of (fictional, quasi-fictional and non-fictional) war heroes, to romance novels, to pornographic stories that were either titillating or merely crass (cheap photobooks of nude and semi-nude women were also available, often through sutlers in the army camps).  Most of the pulp fiction available on the home front, however, was directed toward women (there was also a thriving children’s literature about heroic youngsters defending their respective causes). Due to their very cheap production values, few of these publications have survived the years.

 

Southern Field and Fireside, a monthly Georgia publication, specialized in serialized romantic tales about damsels in distress of being ravished by leering Yankees. Rescued at the last moment by noble, handsome Southern men who defended their honor, the women were inevitably taken away on horseback to a better life, and just as inevitably, irresistibly seduced under a full moon at the end of the story. They lived happily ever after, and very few women made it into combat in Confederate pulp fiction.

Not so their Federal sisters. Unionist women were portrayed as more assertive and proactive by far. Northern authors presented their readership with tales of cross-dressing women who undertook men’s tasks always with greater success than their male counterparts (in fact, some 400 women served both sides of the Civil War in drag, unrecognized by their fellow male compatriots). Charles Wesley Alexander (writing as Wesley Bradshaw), the dean of the wartime pulp novelists, wrote stories such as Pauline of The Potomac: Or, General McClellan’s Spy, loosely (very loosely) based on the reported adventures of the real Major Pauline Cushman. Another Bradshaw novel, Maud of The Mississippi: General Grant’s Daring Spy, was about a Unionist woman living among the enemy while supporting the North’s cause at grave danger to herself. General Sherman’s Indian Scout was a similar tale of feminine elan and derring-do.

Bradshaw also wrote The Picket Slayer about a “demonic” Englishwoman (described from the outset as “a child of sin”) who told Jefferson Davis, “My mission hither, President Davis, is to render your cause assistance, not because it is holy, as you hypocritically say, but because it is the most diabolical that could be conceived.” 

The women in Bradshaw’s and other writers’ stories were frequently possessed of magical powers or were of foreign, exotic birth or mixed race.  The Picket Slayer, who could become invisible and pass through walls to kill men, may have influenced Sheridan LeFanu’s female vampire story, Carmilla (1871), which in turn influenced Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic Dracula.