The Perfect Fence: Untangling the Meanings of Barbed Wire by Lyn Ellen Bennett and Scott Abbott

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Perfect Fence: Untangling the Meanings of Barbed Wire by Lyn Ellen Bennett and Scott Abbott Alex Hunt The Perfect Fence: Untangling the Meanings of Barbed Wire. By Lyn Ellen Bennett and Scott Abbott. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2017. Pp. 269. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.) Lyn Ellen Bennett and Scott Abbott present readers with an interdisciplinary approach to the cultural significance of barbed wire fencing, amassing an impressive range of historical sources and literary references for analysis. They argue that the explosive popularity of barbed-wire fencing and the various debates around this revolutionary product mark a key division between pastoral and industrial ideas of America, finding a great deal of ambivalence in the many paradoxical values that inhere in the "perfect fence." If the book strains in many directions, and at times seems to want a more pointed unifying argument, it certainly makes the case that barbed wire as a cultural phenomenon is complex and difficult to neatly fence in. Bennett and Abbott organize their book in two main parts. The first section, primarily historical in nature, is titled "Constructing the Meaning of Barbed Wire in Late Nineteenth-Century America." The main focus is not on the history of the fence but on the history of its cultural affects. The three chapters in this section consider the marketing, controversy, and public response during the period that saw the invention and explosive sales of barbed wire. Then they move through media response, primarily newspaper stories and letters, legislative response, and advertising. The second section, "The Barbed Wire Motif in Literature," takes us well into late twentieth-century examples. Four chapters in this section cover genre westerns, the "New West," religious iconography, and Native American representations of barbed wire. Stylistically, the authors employ numerous section headings that perhaps mirror the rancher's need to bring logical order to pastures, but in effect introduce redundancies and detract from the reader's ability to become immersed in the prose. Similarly, the authors' introduction of so many examples at times felt like a catalog without sufficient unifying [End Page 361] analysis other than the point that barbed wire is indeed rich and varied in meaning. The historical survey of attitudes toward barbed wire examined in the first section of the book provides numerous, rich artifacts that are at times humorous, disturbing, or surprising, but the second literary portion of the book gets deeper into the metaphorical associations that are so telling of our cultural attitudes. The authors make a convincing case that reading for barbed wire is a revealing strategy, finding fascinating parallels, for instance, between Ed Abbey and James Galvin and John Steinbeck and Flannery O'Connor. It is through these literary analyses that the authors' contention that barbed wire embodies deep and often paradoxical cultural values—freedom and constraint, order and pain, property, and racism—is most powerful. Inevitably, such a survey leaves gaps and has blind spots. For instance, while the authors several times mention military use of barbed wire in the Boer War, World War I, and elsewhere, there is no discussion about how the association of wire and war affected attitudes toward barbed wire on the home front. And in a related matter, while there is brief discussion of barbed wire on the U.S.–Mexico border in the work of Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa, there seemed a missed opportunity to think about how the perfect fence has had a role in shaping our most contentious Southwest borderland. On the whole, Bennett and Abbott provide us with an admirable work of interdisciplinary scholarship that offers readers a great deal to think about and many good leads to follow. Historians and literary scholars of the borderlands, agriculture, the American West, and related topics will value this book. Alex Hunt West Texas A&M University Copyright © 2019 The Texas State Historical Association