republic of Olancho was easily interchangeable with Tudor England, in Charles Majors's When Knighthood Was in Flower (1898), or with the mythical medieval principality of George Barr McCutcheon's Graustark (1901), all sites where playful physical virility represents aggressive national muscle-flexing abroad. In all of these fantasies, the hero can rejuvenate an authentic American self only outside United States borders in the new frontiers abroad.
The revival of the historical romance culminated in the proliferation of best-sellers about the colonial period and the American Revolution, such as Winston Churchill's Richard Carvel (1899), S. Weir Mitchell's Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker (1897), Paul Leicester Ford's Janice Meredith (1899), Mary Johnston's To Have and to Hold (1900). These novels participate in the mass cultural invention of national traditions along with the writing of the pledge of allegiance, the establishment of flag ceremonies in schools, and the rise of genealogical societies such as the Daughters of the American Revolution. These novels rewrite the American Revolution to underplay political conflict with Britain and to unite the two countries in a uniquely Anglo-Saxon heritage of manliness. The novels whitewash the Revolution as an exclusive inheritance against both the influx of immigrants aspiring to national identity and the claims of colonial subjects, such as the Cubans and Filipinos, to revolution and selfgovernment.
Owen Wister's popular novel The Virginian takes its immediate genealogy from the popular historical novel of the 1890s and its romance of empire. Wister sees the cowpuncher as the direct linear descendant of the Anglo-Saxon knight, and by imagining contemporary American imperialism as the return to an original virile past the -259- historical romance reopens the closed frontier and reinvents the West as a space for fictional representation. The West, furthermore, becomes the site for uniting South and North, in the courtship and marriage of the unnamed Virginian to the Vermont schoolteacher (herself with a Revolutionary genealogy). Wister's West expunges traces of Native Americans, while the Virginian takes on characteristics of the noble savage without tinting his essential Anglo-Saxon identity. The West also rejuvenates the overcivilized East, as one of the most erotically charged relationships in the novel is the narrator's attraction to the Virginian's natural virility. Like a regionalist narrator, he escapes from the overheated clubs of New York City and projects his desire onto the 'handsome ungrammatical son of the soil.' Yet the Virginian does grow up, a fact lamented by many readers, including Henry James. He combines not only natural aristocratic civility with democratic violence but also rugged individualism with obedience to his employer, a large landowner. The Virginian protects his property by controlling his unruly workers with a tall tale, leading a vigilante lynching of his friend (a figure for his younger self), and shooting the villain Trampas. The romance of lawless frontier violence is ironically a means of forgetting the history of the West as a political conflict over the land among Indians, homesteaders, and large ranchers, and of reinventing it as a place for the righteous punishment of criminals. The Virginian grows up at the end to become a prosperous landowner and a domesticated husband, but the novel projects for readers the counter-homoerotic plot of reunion, where the West remains as a perpetual melting pot of boys from farms and cities of all regions: 'the romance of American adventure had drawn them all alike to this great playground of young men,' where they never grow up.
Wister's romance renders Native Americans invisible except for their traces in the white bodies they leave wounded. Fifteen years earlier Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884) employed the plot of romance to make visible the forgotten plight of Indians in the American Southwest. Set right after the Mexican War, the novel presents the American nation, as it is in Cable's book, as a foreign occupier in California, where Spanish landowners and native Indians are equally dispossessed by aggressive American settlement. Indians, represented by the hero Alessandro, occupy either a natural primitive -260- innocence outside of history or a culture completely absorbed by the exotic Spanish mission. Alessandro marries Ramona, who is halfIndian and half-Scot, and who was raised by a Spanish family whose imperious mother detested her and whose timid son ineffectually adored her. When she elopes with Alessandro, she returns to the roots she never knew and follows Alessandro's inevitable decline and banishment from the town of his father and every subsequent home, until in a state of insanity he accidentally takes the wrong horse of a white man and is shot as a horse thief. Like Stowe, to whom she was positively compared, Jackson effectively chronicles the abuse of Indians at the hands of the Spanish, the American settlers, and government bureaucracy, but she cannot imagine Native American agency except as insanity. Ramona is redeemed by the motherly love of Aunt Ri, a folksy dialect figure from the passages of local color, a real American, and by her final marriage to her adopted brother, Felippe, who takes her and Alessandro's daughter to Mexico City. As in Cable's novel, the love triangle sets the limits of the imagined community, whose interracial contours — Spanish, Anglo, and Indian — can only be projected over the border, where the woman of mixed race preserves the forgotten history of the nation's westward expansion.
In his historical novel about California, The Octopus (1901), Frank Norris deromanticizes the West of Jackson and Wister. In place of freewheeling cowpunchers, we find sophisticated wheat ranchers (most of them college men) out to exploit, not merge with, the land. In place of Jackson's victimized exotic Spanish past, we find the Spanish mission as a site of violence from within, where a young girl is raped by a mysterious 'Other.' The novel opens with a familiar Eastern outsider, Presley, who has come West to recuperate his health and who desires to write a romantic 'Epic of the West.' The first chapter exposes this desire as fantasy, through his disgust at the presence of German immigrants (not 'The People' he expected), and more violently through the slaughter of sheep by the railroad, foreshadowing the climactic slaughter of the ranchers. In his depiction of the violent confrontation between the ranchers and the corporate railroad, Norris makes visible the capitalist economic structure that undergirds the mythical space of the West. Yet like the urban nar-261- rators of Wister, Jewett, and Garland, Presley (and the novel) do not simply travel from naive romance to more trenchant realism. Instead, they continually try to recuperate in the West a desire for prehistorical origins or a utopian vision of national unity.
What better symbol of national unity and what better subject for a national novel than the railroad, a complex economic and industrial phenomenon that physically transformed part of a continent into a nation by linking commerce and communication among widely dispersed local communities? The novel exposes the contradictions of this nation building as the railroad destroys the settlements and livelihoods of the same communities it brings into being. Against the overarching force of the railroad, which controls the means of representation in the press, as well as the government through the militia, the novel explores alternative definitions and symbols of the national public sphere. At an assembly of the farmers' league after the massacre, Presley proposes the model of a nation unified by conflict, by the struggle of people against trusts. But the novel diffuses this threat of class conflict, in part by making the original confrontation one within the family (the Derricks) and within the capitalist class, and in part by having Presley — the intellectual — engage in a desperate act of anarchism by ineffectually throwing a bomb, without political or narrative consequence. Countering the threat of class conflict is a nostalgic view of the folk as an Anglo-Saxon clan, represented by the marriage of Annixter and Hilma — ultimately doomed — and embodied in a barbecue, where we see 'pure Americans at the starting point of civilization, coarse, vital, real sane.' Another symbol of unity that appears to transcend social conflict is the natural cycle of the wheat, which recurs as a powerful symbol of the earth's female-identified fecundity. Yet the wheat is never 'natural' to start with, as the mechanical planting and reaping appear throughout in images of military conquest or sexual violation echoing the rape by 'The Other.' Furthermore, the capitalist, Shelgrim, merges nature and the machine as an ahistorical apotheosis of 'force.' If, as he claims, the railroads make themselves as the wheat grows itself, neither is subject to contest by human agency.
The conclusion of The Octopus abandons the depiction of class contrast between an elite dinner party and a starving immigrant mother for a ship about to carry wheat to India with Presley on -262- board. Not yet cured of his overcivilized consumption by his sojourn out West, he plans to light out for a more distant territory. His spiritual passage to India complements the manifest destiny voiced by the owner of the ship, who has given up domestic industry and the class conflicts it spawns to fulfill America's global mission of feeding the world while opening it up to commerce. His overt imperialism rounding the globe finds echo in Presley's Nirvana, the 'full round of a circle whose segment only he beheld.' On board the same ship and buried under tons of wheat is Behrman, the agent of the railroad. The wheat, which takes its natural revenge on Behrman, represents a revitalization of the American economy, as a spiritual and natural course of empire. Despite his ironic critique of America feeding the world while immigrants starve on the streets of San Francisco, Norris can turn imperial expansion from a history of violent conquest to one of global and spiritual nourishment.
The ending of The Octopus suggests an important but overlooked historical context for American literary naturalism: America's shift from continental expansion to an overseas empire at the
