traditionally confining spaces into centers of power, as in 'The Revolt of 'Mother'' and 'A Church Mouse.' In Pembroke, a young man and woman defy their parents and their oppressive community by denying and deferring their desire for one another; while their final reunion seems to attest to the redemptive power of love, it is unleashed, ironically, by their capitulation to communal disapproval.
Eliding the inescapable social tensions that structure the growth from childhood to adulthood in Freeman's communities, Jewett's narrator recovers in Dunnet's Landing the common 'instincts of a far forgotten childhood,' thus linking the New England family picnic to the rites of ancient Greeks. This sense of the region as a space where a collective childhood can be recovered pervades literature of the West as well. Forerunners of Garland, such as Edward Eggleston in The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871), Edgar Watson Howe in The Story of a Country Town (1884), and Joseph Kirkland in Zury (1887), are known for contrasting the idealized vision of the West, as a site that develops rugged individual virtues, with the more squalid reality of violence, economic oppression, and narrow provincialism. Most of them, including Garland in his Boy Life on the Prairie (1899), seek another more romantic retreat from this West in their depiction of the life of boys. In contrast to the exploitation of child labor that Garland calls attention to in 'The Lion's Paw,' novels and autobiographies were popular that represented the West as an arena of perpetual boyhood, where gangs of boys do little but play cowboys and Indians. Nostalgia for pre-Civil War innocence comes together with a scientific view of childhood as an earlier stage of evolutionary development; as G. Stanley Hall put it, 'the child revels in savagery.'
In this formulation, the boyhood of white settlers comes to displace the history of Indian settlement, a story that underlies Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). There Tom's famous stunt where he turns the work of whitewashing into boy's play might symbolize this dynamic of rendering the whitewashing of a community founded -255- on racial conflict as child's play. For Twain's complex vision of children makes them both innocent of social ideology and repositories of it. Like the island communities outside urban centers, childhood is colonized by adult desire for a pristine past prior to social indoctrination, which is exposed as impossible. Tom's childish desire for heroism takes concrete social form in a court of law where he exposes Injun Joe as the real murderer of the doctor (much like Pudd'nhead's final revelation of racial identity). Escaping the courts, Joe meets a natural punishment, suffocated by the same cave where Tom finds money and flirts with his male sexuality. The earth that swallows the Indian turns the white boy into a man, while allowing him to remain perpetually a youth by rendering his entry into the economic system as the discovery of buried treasure.
Thus regionalism in its many forms both fosters and thwarts the desire for a retreat from modern urban society to a timeless rural origin, the 'common inheritance' of the clan. The regions painted with 'local color' are traversed by the forgotten history of racial conflict with prior regional inhabitants, and are ultimately produced and engulfed by the centralized capitalist economy that generates the desire for retreat.
Both the desire for and the impossibility of escaping the changes wrought by modern industrial capitalism propel the narrative of Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). The richness and the contradictions of the novel open the text to a multivalent allegory of almost every aspect of late nineteenth-century American society. The novel can be read as an allegory of reconstruction and colonialism, as it conflates the genres of regionalism and the historical novel (which Twain contributes to without irony in Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc [1896]). Connecticut Yankee plays out its double meaning in the drama of national reunion: in relation to internal regions, it refers to Hank Morgan's Northern background and makes him a kind of carpetbagger, eradicating the last vestiges of slavery and modernizing King Arthur's 'southernized' England. But Connecticut Yankee also represented a collective national identity to those outside America's borders and subject to its power. An island at once outside of time and at the origins of history, King Arthur's England appears as the ultimate primitive col-256- ony, or region, with inhabitants who are compared to children, Indians, barbarians, bound by superstition, violence, and laziness. Knocked over the head as a foreman in an industrial dispute at home, Morgan, by becoming 'Boss' of Camelot, gains the power he lacked at home. Like other colonists, he imagines the island as a backward blank slate on which he can create a utopian image of nineteenthcentury capitalism, freed of its threatening conflicts. Like other imagined timeless islands, this one, however, clings tenaciously to its own history and culture in order to resist or assimilate his projections of development. The tension informing Morgan's project of reform, between modernization as social change and modernization as social control, leads to the violent confrontation of cultures, both the source of humor in this diabolically funny book and the source of the final massacre. Whether resonant of the Civil War, Indian wars, or class conflict, or prescient of mass twentieth-century destruction (all seen by critics), the final massacre of the knights, paradoxically both Hank's victory and his defeat, represents the foundational violence that must be 'forgotten' in order to imagine a nation, sixth-century England's natural evolution into America. Hank's destruction of Camelot tellingly spawns his nostalgia for the 'lost land' he has destroyed. Connecticut Yankee sounds Twain's death knell for expanding United States frontiers abroad, which end up reproducing or magnifying the social conflicts at home they sought to alleviate.
Yankees abroad conquering lands remote both in time and in space were not unusual in fiction of the 1880s and 1890s; in fact, these heroes were the staple of the popular historical romance, from Ben- Hur (1880) to The Virginian (1902). Dismissed by literary historians as escapist, these narratives of escape echo the political argument for overseas expansion in this period. Leaving his overcivilized surroundings for adventure in a primitive arena, the hero (an overt or thinly disguised American) fights theatrical swashbuckling battles to liberate a backward realm from its threatening barbaric enemies, subdues and wins the love of an aristocratic heroine, rejuvenates his own masculinity, and finally returns home to the corporate commercial world he escaped. This formula is strikingly pliable to vastly different settings, from imperial Rome, to Latin American republics, to European history, to mythological medieval kingdoms, to colonial America, and finally to the West. In the national project -257- of reinventing origins, these works colonize the past as allegories that turn national reunification into empire building.
Vying with Uncle Tom's Cabin as the all-time best-seller of the nineteenth century was Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur, which reached the height of its popularity on stage and in print in the 1890s (a text in need of the kind of critical attention recently paid to Stowe's novel in its cultural context). The novel appealed to the fascination with origins, and it reinvented a most important originary moment, the birth of Christian civilization out of the ruins of the Roman Empire. Yet rather than focus on the saintly life of Christ, the novel spends most of its time on a hero who is confused about whether he is fighting a material battle for a new earthly kingdom of the Jews or a spiritual one for an unknown messiah. Fortunately, he does not have to decide until the end of the novel after he wins the climactic chariot race (as well known in the 1890s from its repeated staging in lavish outdoor spectacles as it is today from the film versions). What does this have to do with American culture in the period? The New Kingdom of Christ — anti-imperial in its origins — might allegorize and spiritualize the imagined New American Empire, which was propounded by ideologues such as A. T. Mahan and the Reverend Josiah Strong at least a decade before the Spanish-American War. They imagined American global power as anti-imperial in nature and not territorially based, but depending instead on international commerce and the spread of United States cultural institutions. Popular at a time of heightened militarism and the movement of 'muscular Christianity,' Ben-Hur highlights virile body-building in the service of a spiritual global empire. The book also would have appealed to interest in the origins of slavery, as well as to curiosity about the exotic distant ancestors of more recent Italian and Jewish immigrants, ancestors who were superseded by the Christian civilization to which Ben-Hur finally converts as an apostle. Lew Wallace, a veteran of the Mexican W ar, a Union general in the Civil War, and governor of the territory of New Mexico, lived a career that followed the Westward Course of Empire. His first popular historical novel, The Fair God (1873), treated the Spanish conquest of Mexico (á la Prescott), a lens through which he would view the Christian conquest of Rome. No wonder President James Garfield appointed him minister to Turkey as an expert on 'the East.' -258-
In the courts of Constantinople, Lew Wallace lived the life a younger writer, Richard Harding Davis, was famous for writing about in his novels of high society and colonial adventures. While Ben-Hur conquered Rome, Davis's hero of Soldiers of Fortune (1897), a dashing American mercenary and civil engineer, triumphed over the decaying British and Spanish Empires to save a fictional Latin American republic from dictatorship and revolution, and to marry an athletic 'New Woman' whose father owns the mines there. In the abundance of best-selling romances around the time of the Spanish-American War, Davis's backward but alluring
