Toward A More Perfect Union

Abstract

At the end of a semester of teaching, I felt fortunate to come across David Wyatt’s Secret Histories because Wyatt so clearly delights in American fiction. Gently encouraging readers to listen and to participate in the intimate relationships revealed by American writers, Wyatt is most like Leslie Fiedler, who famously calls out to readers in the assumed voice of Mark Twain’s Jim to “come back to the raft agin, Huck honey” (the title of Fielder’s 1948 article). Jennifer Rae Greeson also urges readers familiar with American literature and literary tropes to anticipate intimate encounters. In Our South, Greeson uncovers an intranational consciousness at work in the United States. She shows how eighteenthand nineteenth-century U.S. writers represent the South as “an enemy within,” as she titles one of her chapters. Both Wyatt and Greeson place family romance at the center of American history. While these two writers cover different periods in American history and, for the most part, approach fictional material with different methodologies, each reflects in some way a spatial turn in American Studies. Each argument hinges on the question of how national spaces have been imagined by American writers. Greeson refers explicitly to connections among geography, literature, and social forms. Wyatt employs spatial vocabulary more sparingly and most often within his discussions of gender and race in American fiction. Early in his wide-ranging argument, Wyatt makes the tantalizing assertion that “the history of the novel could be said, in fact, to constitute the secret history of the origin and course of love” (p. 20). He perceives twentieth-century American writers as continuing the struggle toward union that began with the nation’s founding documents. Although connected by a fundamentally American preoccupation with how and to what extent disparate peoples can share one