The Harm of "Swedening": Anxieties of Nativism in Katherine Anne Porter's "Noon Wine"

"Yes, sir, Homer T. Hatch is my name," the bounty hunter of Katherine Anne Porter's 1937 "Noon Wine" declares, "and America is my nation" (86). While this introduction is clearly part of Hatch's stock patter—he also asks to buy a horse, then reveals that it's "an old joke" of his designed to put people at ease (85)—his emphatic foregrounding of his nationality reveals a key anxiety of the novella's characters: who, exactly, can be considered an American? Though Mr. Thompson and his family at first see their Swedish-descended hired man purely and explicitly as a "forriner" (65), just as they view other American minorities (63), Olaf Helton's helpfulness and work ethic gradually persuade them to see him as a "man" first and a "Swede" second. The villainous Hatch, in contrast, exploits nativist anxieties to attack the "Americanness" not only of Helton but also of the third-or fourth-generation Irish American Mr. Thompson. By demonstrating both the hypocrisies of nativist reasoning as well as the violence that it inexorably creates, "Noon Wine" forms a powerful critique of this conflation of national and racial identities.

Though "Noon Wine" has received a number of psychoanalytical and feminist readings, its themes of nationalism and nativism remain largely unaddressed. Janis P. Stout, for example, contrasts Hatch's garrulousness with Helton's taciturnity and observes how Mr. Thompson finds himself caught between these two extremes (212), while Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. focuses his reading on Hatch's and Thompson's failures of storytelling (144-145). Although these readings usefully contrast the verbal styles of main characters, neither reading addresses the pervasive racial subtext of their conversations. Even M. Wynn Thomas, who builds his insightful analysis of the novella around the repeated use of the word "stranger," sees the discussion of foreignness as a theological metaphor for alienation and estrangement, "the fateful privacy of meaning" in God's world (159), rather than as a commentary on the politics of race and immigration. Darlene Harbour Unrue reads the moment similarly, seeing the labels of "stranger" and "foreigner" as symbolizing the isolation inherent in "basic human nature," rather than in a specific political context (Understanding 81).

This critical lacuna is all the more surprising considering the amount of attention that critics have bestowed on anti-nationalist themes in Porter's only novel, Ship of Fools.¹ Set on an ocean liner en route to Germany in 1931, Ship of Fools chronicles the varying prejudices of a massive cast of characters, ranging from the economic, racial, and sexual snobbery of Thiele, the ship's captain, to the explicit call of Herr Siegfried Rieber, a magazine publisher, for Jewish extermination: "I would put them all in a big oven and turn on the gas" (207). Though German anti-Semitism understandably receives the most narrative focus in this setting, Porter makes it clear that the American passengers harbor many prejudices of their own, particularly the young Texan, William Denny. First introduced as "exhausted" by his efforts to maintain "the proper white man's attitude" while "among strange languages and strange lands" (24), Denny makes clear his distaste for "niggers, crazy Swedes, Jews, greasers, bone-headed micks, polacks, wops, Guineas, and damn Yankees" (333-334). Even the German-run ship is not segregated enough for Denny, who longs to return to his hometown, "where a man knew who was who and what was what" (333). Throughout Denny's scenes, the novel thus demonstrates not only his racism, but the anxieties that underpin his white identity: Denny's own "whiteness" can only be preserved by keeping others—including "crazy Swedes," who occupy an unenviable place in Denny's hierarchy of prejudice between "niggers" and "Jews"—in subordinate roles. For Denny, the racial mixing involved in foreign travel leaves these delineations deeply threatened, though the ironic name of his fictional hometown—"Brownville" (333)—hints that even there, white identity may not be as absolute as he would wish.

The turn-of-the-century South Texas of Porter's "Noon Wine" is the setting for William Denny...