ABSTRACT
The beguiling vision of "elemental" or "mythic" simplicity in a racially pure enclave quickly turns dark. Separation creates a sense of community by rejecting the "other", but soon wrecks the community it wishes to constitute. The segregated commonwealth discovers itself internally split, not pure. "The Peasants" refers not to the minority, but to the majority of Frenchman's Bend. Will Varner, the folk hero of the hamlet, "merry", "mild-mannered", and even "lusty", seems to be tolerated, even beloved in the community. Many critics have seen the novel's barters and exchanges only as studies in personal avarice or "greed". Nietzsche shows inequality to have been there all along, and reveals the mechanism of rhetorical effacement whereby a process of exchange turns the "odd" into the "even". Because the self-deceptions of Frenchman's Bend are intrinsic, only external forces may challenge them. A cloaking ideology refers present inequality backward to a founding legend in which all hold equal shares.
