Tales Told by Empty Sleeves, or, The Economics and Aesthetics of Post-Civil War Mendicant Texts

This paper considers the intersection of performance and consumption through post-Civil War “mendicant” texts, the works composed and circulated by disabled veterans for their financial support. In the exchange called into... [ view full abstract ]

This paper considers the intersection of performance and consumption through post-Civil War “mendicant” texts, the works composed and circulated by disabled veterans for their financial support. In the exchange called into being by the mendicant text, the former soldier’s story is a consumer object that allows the purchaser to perform patriotic service and an act of patronage, at the same time that it places the disabled veteran’s body in the contradictory positions of hero and object of charity. I suggest that such narratives complicate common scholarly understandings of the relationship between disability and nineteenth-century American literature, in which disability largely serves as a character device or metaphor. In post-war mendicant texts, disability is an inaugurating condition of authorship; a visible impetus toward consumption; and a factor that mediates relationships between the writer-performer and reader-consumer in ways that have broader implications for the disabled veteran’s relationship to the national body politic.