In the Middle: Fiction, Borders, and Class

I

Although the idea of the border has figured decisively in the shaping of U.S. literature since its inception and has illuminated new contexts for studying the literature of the Americas, the value for exploring, setting, and crossing boundaries has been steadily erased from U.S. literary history. Primarily this erasure has been conducted in critical endeavors to nationalize literary culture, efforts that were Eurocentric at first, later New England based, and ultimately modernist, a consolidation that needed to obliterate or undo the differentiating force of the merely local. So ravaged has the idea of the border been that in postmodern literary history no connection between past conceptions and present definitions seems to obtain. Lost, however, is the power of the border to generate a complex historicizing of trans-national American literatures. And in U.S. literary history, this means that an understanding of the formative category of class is squandered. I aim to repair this state of critical affairs by reconstituting the history of U.S. border literature through a discussion of how and why border literature came to be the province of the middle class, the class that anxiously projected its fear of U.S. corruption and immorality onto border realms; to do so, I will also suggest how the prevailing regionalist impulse in middle-class U.S. fiction turned elsewhere in the hemisphere.

My argument begins with the surprising story of how Kentucky almost joined the Spanish empire instead of becoming a state in 1790, a historical intrigue between the Crown's representatives in New Orleans and the frontiersmen who distrusted the loosely confederated powers in Washington, D.C. Even more than the neighboring territories of Franklin and Cumberland (in what is now largely Tennessee), which were also negotiating with Spain, Kentucky wanted urgently to protect its commercial interests and to give homesteaders access to the Mississippi River that the Spanish had foreclosed a few years before. The separatist movement in Kentucky was particularly lively, in part because there were more educated men of affairs there, politicians versed in the new ideology of local determination over sovereign loyalty. The King was willing to relax the usual rules that restricted immigrant status to Spanish-born, Catholic people, but this slight measure of tolerance—instead of the firm assurances of commercial freedom and Indian protection that the Kentuckians wanted most—proved insufficient warrant, especially after the new federal government granted statehood (despite the best efforts of one schemer, whose machinations might have succeeded but for a casualty of the mails between New Orleans and Spain). Otherwise, the legendary old Kentucky home might have been situated on la frontera. ¹

I begin by explaining the need to reconstruct the relation between border and region in U.S. literary history. As I will show, the literature of the border has mostly been a middle-class literature, a genre that perhaps needs some revisiting. This fiction is not the literature we typically mean when we refer to the canon; indeed, it is the literature that the canon has been defined against—the writing that is perceived to be not good enough to withstand Arnoldian tests of time, modernist litmus tests of formal complexity or philosophical alienation, or appeals to postmodern ambivalence. Nor would it ever fall within the ken of multicultural revisionism, since it is mainstream literature. This literature was sometimes popular enough, but it is not the mere fact of its popularity that constitutes its primary claim to historical memory; forgotten as it has been, it was never marginalized as a result of race or gender or political prejudice. This writing has been consigned to critical oblivion because its politics, really its worldview, are so relentlessly bourgeois—and in academe, fifty years ago as now, middle class status was perhaps just as much as an anathema as it is today. Because these writers—once so well known, now so obscure—have been...