Home, Home on the Range; or Can a haunted house ever be a home?

Beginning with the very title itself, the idea of “home” in Lippard’s ‘Bel of Prairie Eden proves complicated by the context of American Imperialism and the US/Mexico War.  If “Eden” were to be considered a home, it is inevitable, following the metaphor, that those within Eden would be expelled from their home as a result of wrongdoing.  If, as Shelley Streeby suggests in the beginning of “George Lippard’s 1948”, the sensationalist writer saw Westward expansion and the settlement of low-income workers on homesteads as a utopian solution to urban inequality, he might have been more hesitant about that notion by the time he wrote ‘Bel of Prairie Eden.  According to Streeby, this ambivalence comes from Lippard employing a “panoply of gothic effects” in his US/Mexico War novels that both “contributes to the demonization of Mexicans and may thereby feed the war frenzy of readers” yet “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).  If Mexicans are demonized (along with the “thick lipped” Irish Ewen) and the Texas colonizer perhaps has just as many problems, who do these ghosts running around the prairie actually haunt?  It is unclear who the memory of Cortes haunts more:  the descendants of the Spanish conquistadors, having spent Lippard’s “300 Years” in post-Montezuma Mexico, or the US settlers, embodying the memory of Cortes in their yearning for prosperity at whatever cost, justified by their own sort of providential Olmedo? 

Why does Cortes the Spaniard haunt the text written by Lippard the Philadelphian?  In “The Other Country: Mexico, the United States, and the Gothic History of Conquest,” Jesse Aleman utilizes Freud’s notion of the uncanny as “unheimlich,” or “the unhomely,” to help account for the haunting of Américan history in US writing about Mexico, saying “the fluidity of national borders collapses the otherwise clear distinctions between native and foreigner, domestic and international, and America and América” (409).  Furthermore, Aleman helps answer the question I pose in the title of this blog by analyzing the further linguistic implications of unheimlich: “Heimlich also means “native,” however, so that the notion of home can be extended to the idea of nation” (409).  As with Prescott and Bird, Lippard’s text is haunted by the buried history of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, unearthed in the actions of the fledgling US entering the game of imperialism, as Streeby and Aleman remind us, long before 1898.  Perhaps instead of a home in the West, an undisturbed Prairie Eden, the US moved into an old house that had already had many tenants who had kicked out the previous owner for time immemorial. Surely, millions of Americans today consider the land in contention between the US and Mexico in the mid-19^th Century as “home,” but when one is tasked in constructing a narrative that celebrates the establishment of that home, one likely finds themselves, well, haunted by a past they did not enact but are left to reckon with nonetheless.  As Aleman writes, “one Cortes is the same as the other in the hemisphere’s haunting history of conquest” (423).