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2 The Region of the Repressed and the Return of the Region Hamlin Garland and Harold Frederic 38 As I argued in my first chapter, pastoral regionalism, like Sarah Orne Jewett ’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, constructs regional folk as figures of a receding past. By narrating the distance between reader and regional figure as temporal, regional writing can posit the spatially distant region as “ahistorical” and outside the time of industrial development. The regional folk themselves become the standard of, rather than participants in, regionalism’s adjudication of a fantasized unity of national identity because they are described as outside the problem of the reified subject and its relationship to capital. Such narratives of the region are nostalgic and cover up the questions of ethnicity and nativism that arise when the halfhidden histories of regions intrude into the present as likenesses of contemporary crises in immigration, capital, and the normative subject’s felt lack of solidity. Such likenesses acknowledge that regional writing’s dialectic between native and stranger (figured through the marketplace) are activated by contested contemporary definitions of strangers and foreigners. The Country of the Pointed Firs generates the likeness between stranger and native as a strategy to create a new national value for the local. To do so, it creates the region as leisure space and its folk as collectibles. The private meaning of regional fiction becomes an indication of its use value, and that use value, although it is fictitiously generated, becomes the standard of its market value. But not all genteel nineteenth-century regional fiction undergirds its market value with its problematic conversion into use value. In this chapter, I look at what happens when regional fiction’s appropriation of the region decouples the relation between the region’s marketability and its usefulness as an object of nostalgia. What kinds of value does regional fiction generate about geographic spaces that are not picturesque? What market value can be assigned to characters who are neither quaint nor charming? The discursive economies of regional writing that I outlined in Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs generate a value for the local that has nothing to do with the labor of the regional inhabitants. In fact, it is crucial that the inhabitants have nothing to do except be themselves. In Jewett’s text, all occupations were local, and labor was performed in the community and for the community.1 In this chapter, I examine two novels set in regions that are neither tourist destinations nor untouched, self-sufficient geographic areas. In Hamlin Garland’s collection Main-Travelled Roads and Harold Frederic’s novel The Damnation of Theron Ware, the profession of the regional writer or the occupation of the regional observer is implicated in the text’s internal representation of the labor performed by the regional figures in a nationalizing market. Even though each form of labor in these novels aligns the region to a national economy of production and consumption, national and regional economies are in tension, since the formation of both the region and the regional folk is still incomplete. That is, the region is not yet the site of nostalgia ; rather, its consolidation as a region reveals the difficult process of creating nostalgia. These two works, then, demonstrate how a representational literary economy and a national market economy combine first to produce a marketable idea of the local for the nation and then to enable national financial markets to exploit the local. In this argument, regionalism exists in a doubly speculative economy, first by foregrounding the narrator ’s observation of regional culture and second by demonstrating specific regions’ vulnerability to economic interests. Literary representation and economic exploitation exist simultaneously in the regional writer’s project, but in the fictions I examine, the economic value ascribed to the region cannot be renewed by or derived from the fictions constructed around it. My argument is not that these texts show us how the “real” region can be uncovered through a critique of representation itself. Instead, it asks how regionalism—a genre of writing about an elsewhere that is also a “here”—foregrounds the contest over the meaning of the real through multiple determinants of the “value” of the region. Regional fiction about or from culturally barren regions enters the market for regional fiction on defensive terms, and so the relationship between native and stranger that I have already established is more sharply drawn than it is in New England. In the...

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