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Article Excerpt
Along with a few Shakespearean gems, the commentary on fences from Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" may be the best-known poetic icon in contemporary American culture. As Frost and his neighbor mend their common wall in a New England spring ritual, the neighbor twice trumpets: "good fences make good neighbors." The first declaration sets out a guiding principle of the neighbor's conservative worldview. Despite some gentle and subtle probing by Frost, the neighbor "likes having thought of it so well, he says again 'Good fences make good neighbors.'"
Frost's rejoinder is less well known. It captures the opposing position, profoundly important in understanding the significance of walls and fences in world and American cultural and historical debates, disputes, and physical conflicts. In response to his neighbor, Frost reflects,
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.
A poster designed for classroom teachers as a didactic aid for the Smithsonian Institution's Between Fences exhibition reflects Frost's message. It poses the same question in its headline title, asking if the several pictures on the poster signify that the subjects are "Fenced In or Fenced Out?"
This essay explores the dichotomous and contentious interpretations offences; walls; and physical, philosophical, and psychological barriers of all types, from playpens and prisons to boundary-line real and virtual fences. The essay evolves from a description of the Between Fences exhibition as an organizational rubric, but it goes beyond the exhibition to explore other examples, nuances, and extrapolations of the thematic principles.
The Between Fences Smithsonian traveling exhibition describes fences and explores how fencing has helped to mold and reflect Americans' views of public and private spaces. As the exhibition shows, they are built of living hedges and other flora, stone, concrete, wood, or metal; they are also exemplified by a variety of ditches and moats; and, in another guise, by dogs and other creatures, including crickets. Most recently descriptions of the international boundary line's "virtual" fencing have festooned the front pages of U.S. and Mexican print media and agitate rabble-rousing talk-show hosts and TV's talking (shouting!) heads. Though far too seldom, virtual fencing even evokes more credible, measured debate in the corridors of power and the halls of academe.
Fences skirt our properties--and our minds. They form a central feature of the American experience and the nation's historical landscape--and urban cityscape. Beyond these shores, fences and walls play a featured role in world history. The American chronology began with palisades in the East and presidios in the West. They gave way to the forts of the American West following the Civil War. The wooden worm fence decorated the fields of early America. Young Abe Lincoln split rails for zigzagging worm fences. Barbed-wire fences took command of the rural landscape beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Ubiquitous chain-link fences dominated in the twentieth century. They defined school grounds, protected industrial sites, and discouraged domesticated and wild animals from invading our yards and our interstate highways. The gated community appeared in the last quarter of the twentieth century. It provoked a new round of social commentary from those both within and without the isolated communities supposedly protected from outside contamination.
Several other facts and events also capture broader and rather different North American perspectives on boundaries and barriers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon defined their line before 1800. It later formed the boundary between the U.S. slave states and free states, and even now it serves as the dividing line between the American North and the South. The 1814 Treaty of Ghent helped define the U.S.-Canadian boundary line and officially ended the war of 1812. Most of the battles during the war took place in the U.S.-Canadian borderlands. Thirty years later, in 1842, the United States and Canada agreed on the definitive east-to-west boundary line of more than 5,500 miles. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War and established most of the U.S. southern boundary. Five years later the subsequent Gadsden Purchase of 1853 slightly revised the configuration of the international line.
A few examples of barriers covering the globe's geography and a lengthy span of world history complete the scenario. The illustrative evidence includes the Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall in northern England, the Maginot Line, the Berlin Wall, the forbidding array of defenses between North and South Korea, and Israel's formidable Separation Barrier.
Fences and walls symbolize always and everywhere a continuum or a contradictory hodgepodge of fears, frustrations, ambitions, and aesthetics. Fences decorate or blight the land; they spark love-hate intellectual and emotional responses; they touch the ambivalence of our minds; they symbolize the indecision that often haunts the human personality and spirit. They protect, but they also separate. Fences define and secure "ours," but they isolate "us."
Fences are, indeed, many-splendored things. They serve several admirable purposes. They protect us, define our property, and decorate our landscape. In an apparent paradox, fences may also liberate. At the most visceral level, fences, walls, moats, and other barriers prohibit real or imagined enemies and bothersome nuisances, "the other," from crossing into our zone of security or our sanctuary of privacy. The "other" may be unfamiliar people, hostile marauders, or the neighbor's brats. They may also be hungry hogs, meandering cattle, or the neighbor's mutt. Our fences keep "them" in their place--and away from "our" place. Beyond protecting life and limb and maximizing privacy, fences and walls help define our property. They nurture a fulfilling sense of ownership. They mark the expanse of our land and, in the process, contribute to predictable and comforting certainty. The surveyor's calculations tell us where to water our cattle, plant our corn--or build our spite fence.
The liberating quality of fences derives from their security function. Fences liberate by securing our space to pursue other productive activities. Thanks to the imposing Separation Barrier, Israelis may tend to their fields relatively free from the threat of the intrusion of their enemies. A double lock on the hotel door comforts the traveler, nurturing a peaceful night's sleep. In a clever and witty discussion, author Judith Viorst defended playpens as fences. The playpen restrained her infant child from constantly following and being with her, even in her most private moments. In Viorst's words, it afforded her the opportunity to be "free to pee,...
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