The Perfect Fence: Untangling the Meanings of Barbed Wire

Abstract

In his foreword to The Perfect Fence, Sterling Evans notes that “the past couple of years (2016–2017) have been characterized by a great deal of discussion about fences and walls in US political culture” (p. xi). While Lyn Ellen Bennett and Scott Abbott do not directly treat that recent (and continuing) “discussion” in their book, in grappling productively with a series of questions—“What does barbed wire mean? How did it acquire those meanings? And what do those meanings mean to us?” (p. 203)—they provide a wealth of historical context for understanding what is at stake in it. The book is organized into two main parts. The first considers the invention of barbed wire, as well as the patent battles that followed, and it traces the evolution of fencing and the metaphorization of barbed wire in the late nineteenth century, particularly in the American West. They focus principally on public debates regarding the benign and injurious potentialities of the wire, legislative responses to such matters, and advertising strategies that shaped the meaning of the wire to promote extensive sales. The second part offers astute analyses of the meaning of barbed wire in the western (in Owen Wister's The Virginian [1902] and other works), its ambiguous status in the New West (as elaborated in Annie Proulx's Close Range [1999], for example), the thorny fence as a religious metaphor in selected works of literature (a figure intricately structured in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath [1939] and Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood [1952]), and the significance of the wire for Native Americans (as articulated in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony [1977], for example). The conclusion is a collage of engaging images, anecdotes, and literary snippets that give final thematic punctuation to what has gone before.