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“Can I now but avenge my murdered parents and my fair young cousin, then peace and happiness may once more dawn for me and Rafael Rejon at last cease to wage the dread warfare of Vengeance on the Invader, which has made the Lion of Mexico terror and scourge to the race which murdered his kindred, but now gives him his bride.” —rejon, a character in The Mexican RancheRo; oR, The Maid of The chappaRal K n i g h t s i n b a t t l e I consolidate and structure my discussion of chivalric tales by focusing primarily on two paradigmatic novelettes, one used to exemplify what this mode proffers as the axial conflict, the other to scrutinize how the form comes to a resolution. Along the way I reference other novelettes with similar chivalric qualities. They all share two distinguishing features: (1) the frequency with which central Mexican villains are drawn as heroic and chivalrous and (2) a propensity for the historicity of the war and debates about the invasion’s justice to periodically emerge amid their otherwise fantastic plots. Both traits set them off from their frontier and western variants. These properties, however, also speak to the way chivalric texts dissipate national difference both at the point of theme—that is, in the way they envision their subject—and at the point of closure, in the way they resolve the plot. In the end, heroic Mexicans reveal themselves as morally equivalent to their U.S. enemies and at times even part Anglo American,18 and happy marriages unite as well as reconcile Mexicans with Anglo American invaders.These same novelettes often express moral doubts about the justice of the war, an important motif I return to later in the chapter. They do not, however, argue against the war overtly, or express significant sympathy for the war’s victims, or harbor a tolerance toward racialized Mexicans. Rather, they feature a class division in Mexican society, casting aristocratic Mexicans in a positive light and the “lower classes” with a predictable array of racist dogma. Here I am reading these characterological systems in accordance with Streeby’s analysis, but her emphasis is on how war novelettes in general reveal a spectrum of race, class, and gender anxieties more or less as projects aimed at justifying or supporting or promoting the war. As my point of entry suggests, I often note characterological features, much as Streeby does, but I aim them toward different ends. For example, Streeby outlines how “international race romance” furthered a fantasy of ina c t o n e : t a l e s o f c h i v a l r y Novelettes and Dime Novels 2  corporation and domination of the Mexican enemy in the form of a feminized prize.19 In my analysis, however, cross-national marriages trouble not the ideals of pure whiteness but the premises of U.S. national exceptionalism . Furthermore, she groups the happy endings of cross-national marriages with what I see as the distinctly different closures deployed by other novelette and dime novel forms, which do not end in marriages but in reconsolidated domestic and national spheres. In fact, cross-national marriages, even when metonymic for a captured, feminized Mexican nation, constitute only one kind of ending. In any case, the Anglo Americans in chivalric variants tolerate, even welcome, Mexican enemies as long as they are white and wealthy, race and class markers in this way implying, as Streeby has shown, supranational linkages between the United States and the rest of the Americas.20 Within this imaginative sphere, national identity is less imperative than shades of skin color and economic status. Because they begin by assuming a world with more or less interchangeable national loyalties, chivalric texts stress analogues between the United States and Mexico, comparisons that foreground a worldly, contingent definition of the United States that the nation’s midcentury rhetoric of liberating mission would categorically dismiss or relegate. Of all the novelettes in this study that can be read as chivalric, probably the most perfect dual-national symmetry lies in a work by Charles E. Averill, a writer of numerous adventure tales, who in 1847 published The Mexican Ranchero; or, The Maid of the Chapparal: A Romance of the Mexican War. In this relatively early war novelette, Averill pairs an Anglo American military hero, Captain Herbert Harold, with a carefully matched Mexican rival, General Rafael Rejon.21 Their initial conflict and eventual familial bonding...

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