with such different genres all enact a willed amnesia about founding conflicts, while they reinvent multiple and contested pasts to claim as the shared origin of national identity.
Another axis for late nineteenth-century novels lay in reimagining the shifting spatial contours of the nation, for the Civil War not only restored a familiar map but also opened new territory for expansion. History was inseparable from geography as well in Frederick Jackson Turner's famous address 'The Significance of the Frontier in American History' at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, an icon of nationalization. In a period in which the United States was in the process of securing the continental borders that now define it, through a series of 'forgotten' Indian wars, his speech voiced nostalgia for a past as well as anxiety about the bounded space of the future, and his argument was deployed on behalf of further United States expansion abroad. Turner defined the center of American 'civilization' through its edges, its confrontations with the 'primitive,' at a time when new 'Indians' were sought, at home and abroad, as 'others' against which to imagine American nationhood. Many novels of the period explore past and present borders and -242- frontiers to imagine a community through exclusion as much as inclusion.
What De Forest called 'conversion,' implying only one tenable resolution to the conflict, writers of the post- Reconstruction period called reconciliation or reunion, implying the transcendence of conflict. (Even in De Forest's novel, Southerner and Northerner fight on the same side.) This erasure of conflict from the legacy of the Civil War was performed by fraternal meetings of Union and Confederate veterans to commemorate former battle sites, and by publications such as The Century's series, 'Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,' recounting the same battles from both sides to foster mutual respect. In addition to the war itself, the past of slavery needed reinterpretation as a shared legacy of North and South, rather than a history of violent contention spilling over into race relations in the present. To this end, in the 1880s and 1890s, the region De Forest called barbaric (which means foreign tongue) prolifically spoke for itself to the North in its major publications. Curiosity about Southern 'local color' was inseparable from understanding its past, which often recast 'the peculiar institution' of slavery in a romantic light. Yet this nostalgia that invented a palatable past for North and South was often doubleedged and could turn against the present, exploring racism as a major legacy of the Civil War.
George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes (1880) directly addresses the issues of national and racial identity in the past and indirectly in the present in its epic story of an extended Creole family, whose white hero, Honoré, has a free mulatto half-brother of the same name. Set at the time of the Louisiana Purchase (1803), at the frontier of shifting national boundaries, the novel represents 'America' as a foreign power speaking a foreign tongue. The native-born son of German immigrants, Frowenfeld, plays an interesting central role as outsider to the local community but representative of the nation. The Grandissimes undergo a conversion of sorts, by splitting into old and new. The die-hard slaveholding, dueling citoyen dies off (along with his part-Indian blood), and the white Honoré defies his aristocratic past by going into business with his mulatto half-brother, adopting English and allegiance to the nation, and marrying the vic-243- tim of a former family feud. The novel rejects the explicit statement of an old era that 'we the people' always means white, but makes that concept implicit in the new era. While business unites white and black, the love triangles of the novel demarcate the limits of imagining an interracial community: the mulatto Honoré is hopelessly in love with the beautiful and powerful ex-slave Palmyre, who loves his white brother; she was once married to an enslaved African king, Bras-Coupé, who she had hoped would lead an insurrection but who died imagining his return to Africa rather than be broken by slavery. The novel ends with the double marriages of two generations of white Creoles (the younger to Frowenfeld), and the exile of Honoré and Palmyre to Bordeaux, France (an echo of the exile of free African Americans in Stowe's novel). This end to the story of slavery mirrors the post- Reconstruction imagined community, where Cable, among others, argued for political equity for freed African Americans and social separateness. Palmyre remains outside the boundaries, however, unassimilated and threatening as the repository of 'forgotten' memory and desire, tying the 1880s to 1803, in a palimpsest of earlier histories of massacres, Indian origins, and slave ships.
Reviewers tried to limit Cable to 'local color' writing in order to separate geography from history and its resonance in the present, and they linked him unfairly with Thomas Nelson Page's invention of the 'plantation tradition,' which overtly romanticized slavery in In Ole Virginia (1887), a collection of dialect stories narrated by a faithful ex-slave who reminisces nostalgically about 'dem good ole times.' With Page, critics also joined Joel Chandler Harris's famous collections of Uncle Remus stories, which have a more double- edged effect. They participate in the nostalgic recuperation by framing slave stories in the voice of an elderly black 'uncle' entertaining a white boy, but the stories themselves often speak in the subversive voice of a popular oral tradition that provided a cultural source of resistance to slavery and racism in the past and the present.
Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899) most fully exploits the multivocal potential of the dialect tale to turn the plantation tradition against itself. He frames stories told by ex-slave Uncle Julius with two conventions: the white Northern narrator and his wife who have bought an old plantation for both economic development and a bucolic retreat, and a marriage at the end between a -244- Northern and Southern young couple, whose reconciliation Julius's story facilitates. His stories, however, subtly subvert the plantation tradition to reinscribe its willfully 'forgotten' history of slavery's brutal violence and slave resistance. As conjuring becomes a rich metaphor for storytelling as historical memory, Julius links the deromanticized past with the present reenslavement of blacks. The first tale, 'The Goophered Grapevine' (which launched Chesnutt's career in the Atlantic Monthly), undoes the Northern romance of the Southern garden by exposing natural cycles under the institution of slavery as inseparable from economic exploitation and dehumanization. In the second story, 'Po' Sandy,' the history of severed slave bodies is inscribed in the haunted houses of the present, in the very wood that the Northern family wishes to use for a new kitchen. Chesnutt recharts the projection of an exotic and romantic Southern landscape as a palimpsest of destruction linking the past to the present. The final story reconciles the white lovers through the narration of slavery's destruction of a black couple, which exposes the broader national allegory of reconciliation through marriage that is founded on the expulsion of blacks from the national family in the Jim Crow laws of the New South.
Like Cable and Chesnutt, Mark Twain reinvents the prewar South in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) to interrogate the present. By shifting Huck Finn's narrative journey from Northbound to Southbound, from freedom to further enslavement, from Jim's agency as an escaped slave to Tom's antics to set a free man free, Twain is doubling past and present, North and South, to question the meaning of freedom for African Americans and the nation at large in the aftermath of Reconstruction. Twain's devastating satire of all levels of Southern society 'debunks' the romantic fictions the South tells about itself (though even his famous attack on the Sir Walter Scott disease as a cause of war here and in Life on the Mississippi [1883] tends to externalize an internal conflict as one between real Americans and pseudo-Europeans, thus contributing to the drama of reunion).
Huckleberry Finn is best remembered by readers for imagining an interracial community between Huck and Jim on the raft in the middle of the Mississippi — a subject of multiple interpretations and criticisms. The powerful appeal of this vision far outstrips its fragile and -245- fleeting appearance in the text, for the raft is continually threatened, run over, and invaded by the world of the shore it aims to escape. The problematic ending of the novel has a nightmarish logic in culminating the journey toward reenslavement. Jim, the legally free man, is enslaved in Tom's romantic novels and the town's racist fears, and Huck, after choosing to 'go to hell' against his community and help Jim escape, is reborn as Tom Sawyer. The ending could be seen as a macabre parody of Reconstruction with Jim happily accepting forty dollars from Tom for his 'trouble' (instead of forty acres and a mule?), and Huck lighting out for the territory ahead of the rest, to the 'forgotten' history of white settlement and Native American displacement.
The dependence of racism and slavery on the power of social fictions at the end of Huckleberry Finn sets the starting point for the nightmarish playacting of Pudd'nhead Wilson, which interestingly echoes Cable's novel. Cable's doubling of the Honorés as the visible genealogy of slavery turns into Twain's switch of the white and black babies who are visibly indistinguishable. The imperial figure of Palmyre turns into the devilish mother-trickster, Roxana, who threatens the social hierarchy with her switching of babies, but who obeys her own son as her master and endorses the 'fact and fiction of law' that declares one baby black and the other white according to an invisible 'drop of blood.' While in Cable the immigrant represents 'America,' he is split in Twain into the real American, Wilson, and the more alien Italian twins, reflecting the nativist fear of immigrants in this period. A ridiculed outsider at first, Wilson becomes an insider at the end, when he uses fingerprints — which
