Raintree County Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Dean Rehberger

Critical Essay by Dean Rehberger

SOURCE: “Blurred Boundaries and the Desire for Nationalism in Ross Lockridge's Raintree County,” in Myth, Memory, and the American Earth: The Durability of Raintree County, edited by David D. Anderson, The Midwestern Press, 1998, pp. 68-76.

In the following essay, Rehberger examines nationalism and the possibility of true national union in Raintree County.

What is any nation, after all—and what is a human being—but a struggle between conflicting, paradoxical, opposing elements—and they themselves and their most violent contexts, important part of that One Identity, and of its development?

(Walt Whitman, Memoranda During the War)

In Raintree County, Ross Lockridge's main character, John Wickliff Shawnessy, quotes the conclusion of Abraham Lincoln's “First Inaugural Address.” Lincoln's conclusion is a desperate plea to put off civil war by recalling a deeply embedded nationalism to save the union of states, a nationalism that the narrator of Raintree County calls “a mystical covenant” between the...
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