Book Review: Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

Title: Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

Author: Allan Gurganus

Date: 1989

Publisher: Ballantine

ISBN: 0-8041-0643-6

Length: 875 pages

Quote: “But they tells me: we gone inherit Mother Earth, us meek. Well, semi-meek.”

There’s nothing even semi-meek about this super-sized satire. It’s a historical novel set in an alternate history. The last real Confederate Widow lived into the 1980s and this story, only in the vaguest way even a travesty of hers, can seem like a tasteless jab at a woman whose only distinction was longevity, while she was dying.

However: Lucy, Mrs. William Marsden, has all the stories people wanted to imagine a Confederate Widow who’d survived into the 1980s would tell. Thirty or forty years younger than her husband, of course. Probably a second wife, though Will Marsden’s true love seems to have been an older soldier who was killed. Will Marsden lives with post-traumatic stress until he’s old enough to develop Alzheimer’s Disease, which can produce violent insanity. He’s never much of a treat to live with, although Lucy was impressed by his size and strength before she knew better. Eventually he has to be euthanized and who’s to do it...

Well, actually there are several possibilities. He’s lived with two women, one his legal wife and one his inherited slave housekeeper. After marriage he dismisses the housekeeper, but it’s a small town, the woman’s domestic odd jobs never call her very far away, and the three grow old together. Old and weird.

Castalia, the housekeeper, is an African “princess.” “King” is the title she gives her father although what she meant by it is more like “elder,” in a “tribe” of forty people, all enslaved after the international slave trade in our world was banned. Her tribal religion is the ultimate example of the Power of Positive Thinking: it leads her people into slavery without resistance, brainwashing them to see their enslavement as an expression of inferior people’s need for their guidance. If there were such religions in Africa it would explain a lot of things, including why such religions have died out. Castalia’s passivist self-worship guides her through a horrific life with her self-esteem intact. She repays non-fatal slights in kind, promptly, and carries on being helpful, even generous, while despising everybody.

Lucy is that rarely documented creature, a Southern girl who never aspired to be beautiful, brilliant, popular, charming, or much of a “lady” in the sense of a moral example to humankind. The sexual pleasure to which she admits is lesbian, but she never goes all the way with a woman. She does her duty, gives birth to nine children, admits no special affection for any of them but does melt down when one of them is blinded in a hunting accident.

I got as far as the meltdown scene thinking that this book was a collection of short stories about The Way Things Might Have Been But Weren’t, and then I recognized that it’s not meant to be either historical or a novel. It’s a bitter, satirical re-visioning of the Southern States’ historical lore. When Lucy’s emotions blow up, they take the form of blaming the object involved in an accident. She doesn’t weep over poor blind Ned, nor does she have much to say about helping him, apart from a throwaway line about most of the Marsden money being used to send the children to college. About her children, generally, people of the readers’ grandparents’ generation, she has remarkably little to say. But she wants to burn up Will’s whole gun collection, except for the guns he and Ned were carrying and the one she wants to point at Will’s head when she says, “Manners.”

Yes, “hysterical” is the word that comes to mind, for Lucy and for the book...but it’s relevant hysteria. The things that didn’t happen, wouldn’t have happened, in the real nineteenth century are statements about things that were happening in the twentieth century. Lucy compares Civil War veterans to Vietnam veterans, a group that were receiving very wary and tentative kinds of respect in the 1980s. Her gun grab and Castalia’s slave story, or Positive Thinking story, express the author’s opinions on contemporary political and religious discourse, and also on women: Lucy and Castalia are strong all right, even magnificent, but they’re not intelligent. 

Not that men are more intelligent; the men in this novel all seem to be coping with insanity in their various ways. Will wasn’t even half grown during the war (it would have taken some intensive lying to get him legally recognized as a Confederate veteran in our world) and wasn’t sent into combat; his claim to fame is having walked all the way home from Appomattox (home is in eastern North Carolina) but he rejected lifts he was offered. In the psychological news of our 1980s, researchers tried to determine whether punishment works as a deterrent to crime at all; in the family legends of this fictional world’s 1850s, a runaway slave is beaten and left in the cellar, then dug up from a tunnel she dug, working northward from the cellar.

A case might easily be made that all historical fiction consists of projecting our own present-time thoughts onto the past, that Jean Plaidy’s meticulous reconstructions of historical documents in novel form were shaped by her immediate concerns almost as much as Gurganus’s having Edwardians talk about “a gene” (instead of “something in the blood”) or slaves brought from Africa in 1860. The counterargument would be that, if most historical fiction represents a patchwork of current and recreated thoughts, and if a seam always shows somewhere, still, in most historical fiction the seams aren’t as predominant a feature as they are here.

In any case, if read as a deliberate use of images from historical fiction to represent present concerns, the way anthropomorphic teddy bears represent present concerns in children’s stories, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All makes sense, in a mordant and cynical way, and is worth reading once. As history it is, of course, worse than useless. Now you’ve been warned and, whether or not you find it entertaining, this work of fiction can do you no harm.

If 875 pages of snarky satire with extensive adult content, longwinded build-ups, and intensive disrespect for Our Past appeals to you, you probably already have this book. If not, you want it now. Allan Gurganus is still alive so it's a Fair Trade Book: if you buy a copy here, we'll send 10% of the purchase price to him or a charity of his choice.