Uncanniness and Stifled Remorse in George Lippard’s ’Bel of Prairie Eden

In his article “The Other Country: Mexico, the United States, and the Gothic History of Conquest”, Jesse Aleman quotes Lewis Cass articulating ambivalence to the stipulations of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo:

It would be a deplorable amalgamation [uniting the US and Mexico]. No such evil will happen to us in our day. We do not want the people of Mexico, either as citizens or subjects. All we want is a portion of territory, which they nominally hold, generally uninhabited, or, where inhabited at all, sparsely so, and with a population which would soon recede, or identify itself with ours. (Aleman 414)

As Shelley Streeby voices in American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War, such hopes were a ridiculous fantasy: “evidence proliferated in war representations, which inevitably revealed that Mexico was not a vacant wilderness, that many different peoples already lived there, and that violence would be required to displace them” (58). The relationship between John and Isora in George Lippard’s ’Bel of Prairie Eden illustrates the problems with the belief that the United States could take Mexican territory without adopting any of its people or its heritage. John intends to merely seduce and have sex with Isora in order to enact his revenge on Don Antonio Marin, but he unexpectedly falls in love with her. If Isora is symbolic of the Mexican nation, Lippard’s novel’s conclusion shows that Mexico cannot be objectified; in the process of the US fighting for Mexican land, the different peoples intermingle and the United States is forced to recognize the humanity of the Mexicans, even if by annihilating them.

Aleman discusses how Mexico “appropriately stands in as the US’s uncanny imperial other because the continental proximity of the two countries and their shared revolutionary histories make them estranged national neighbors” (409). He quotes Freud, explaining that the uncanny “is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (409). Aleman argues that Mexico is uncanny because the natives fought for independence just as Americans did against Britain. At the same time, Americans are also forced to identify with the Spanish conquistadors who made Mexico part of their empire. In identifying with both of these groups, Americans are put in a similar position to John; the enemy becomes more human and relatable just as Isora moves from sexualized object to beloved wife. In attempting to deal with the United States’ uncanny resemblance to Spanish conquistadors, popular writers like Lippard

fantasized about heterosexual union between a feminized Mexico and a masculinized United States, they appealed to narratives of gender and sexuality to turn force into consent and conquest into international romance. In this way, they tried to establish distinctions between a rapacious Spanish conquest and an idealized, peaceful, and nonaggressive U.S. relationship to Mexico. (Streeby 65)

Thus, by having John fall in love with Isora and ultimately marry her, Lippard distinguishes John from Don Antonio Marin, the Mexican of Spanish descent who raped John’s sister Isabel and left her without ever offering marriage.

There seems to be hope for peaceful relations between the US and Mexico through the symbolic marriage of John and Isora. John remembers Isabel’s dying words which point to the possibility of forgiveness between the two nations: “Let us forgive, and make such recompense for our wrong as is in the power of man to make. Be kind, very kind to Isora” (194). However, this forgiveness is one-sided and the recompense for their wrongs is not complete because Isabel also says, “let [Isora] never know her brother’s fate” (194). John cannot erase his brutal acts of revenge, he can only hide them. Isora is not given the opportunity to forgive because the history of violence against her brother (and fellow Mexican) is withheld from her. The novel ends with John’s intense guilt. Despite his kindness to Isora, he cries out, “There is no living breast into whose recesses, I may pour the agony of my soul—may pour my horrible secret and my remorse. For Isora—oh God! she is dying” (194). If John’s remorse is read symbolically, it would seem that no amount of kindness toward Mexico after the violent war can erase the guilt that Americans are stuck with. By repressing the truth about the violence against Mexicans and framing the conquest as consensual and paternal, Americans make forgiveness impossible—the Mexicans cannot forgive what the Americans will not admit to.

In addition, Isora’s death shows that a peaceful union is short-lived, if even possible at all. Streeby explains that Lippard’s novel “suggests that romance cannot heal the wounds of war…Force is never plausibly transformed into consent; the violence that structures most of the narrative does not disappear but instead fully implicates the Texas colonizer in the bleak conclusion” (76). She goes on to say, “It is even possible to read this as an antiwar novel if one emphasizes the ending and interprets the escalating revenge plots as an allegory about the futility of the violence between the United States and Mexico” (76). However, I read the ending more cynically as a sign that it is too late for Americans to fix their wrongs against Mexico and that they can’t even admit those wrongs to the Mexicans. John’s hidden remorse is the same remorse that Americans suppress today through the dominant narrative of United States history.