AML 4213: Journeys to America
Spring 2012

This will be a monster lecture, with many themes going back and forth, from the beginning of the course to the films “Shane” and “Last of the Mohicans.”  Please read several times.  “Early American Literature” is usually deemed to end after what is called the “Early National Era” (1776-1820).  The next era is called the “Antebellum Era,” which designates the period before the Civil War (1861-5).  The period between 1820-1865 (end of the Civil War) is also called the “American Renaissance” or “American Romanticism” (sharing many of the themes with British Romanticism, although roughly three decades later). The last fourth of the course jumps very rapidly from 1800 or so, to give you a sense of the broad cultural themes that emerge after the era of “Early American Literature.”

U.S. Identity and Geographical Expansion (here and below there will be some repetition with earlier lectures):

--The Puritans escaped the corruption of the Old World & felt they could establish a regenerated community, a "city on the Hill” as Winthrop puts it.

--Outside that hill—the wilderness—remained threatening: Bradford and Rowlandson see it as land of vicious Indians.

--By the American Revolution, all Eastern Indian territory appropriated: a sense of security ensues.

--The vast majority of population still lives on farms, although Boston/Philadelphia are thriving urban centers.

--American exceptionalism/special destiny becomes secularized: American environment itself becomes responsible for a nation uniquely free of corruptions/constraints/hierarchy of Old World.  The “City on the Hill” ideology of being an exemplary community fuses with the boundless possibility of expanding westward, unburdened by history. Indian history and peoples, of course, were a tactical/military impediment; but Indian-ness also served a key purpose as “white” men drew upon the raw virtue and vigor of the “red” Indian…. Thus the novel The Last of the Mohicans in which the white hero romps in the woods with his native-non-white pal… and thus why we have a pop-culture tradition of white/non-white guys fleeing marriage/civilization for the innocent freedom of the woods: Huck Finn/Jim, Lone Ranger/Tonto, Rockford files, Mel Gibson/Danny Glover, Crockett/Tubbs (woods replaced by “urban jungle!).  Yes, when you’re watching retro-TV, Miami Vice, you’re tapping into key American themes!

--Note the tremendous/rapid settlement that occurs between the Puritan times (1640s-70s) up to the time in which Equiano and Crevecouer are writing (the American Revolution).  Yet also reflect upon how much vast "open" space remains to the west.  It is hard for us to imagine what a sense of nation, national identity, and national "mission" would have been like if we do not envision these tracts of land westward of the white settlements.  Think about Prospero (who wants resources) and resistant Caliban (who sees his island as a garden).  Americans alternate between Prospero-like domination of the land (i.e. technology, the future-as-real-estate development, etc.) and a longing for the pure space of non-development, the pastoral refuge (a romantic concept, to be sure, since the territories were occupied by native Americans), the Garden lost.  We urbanites have a tough time finding open, "wilderness" space: you then need to be, as Henry David Thoreau put it, "a Lewis and Clark of your own mind."

Pastoralism, Male Regressive Selfhood, and the Escape from History:

--The curious feature about the antithesis I've set up above--settlement/technology/ industry/ future vs. wilderness/pastoral refuge/sublimity/regression--is that it gets racialized: the "other" on the other side, in the woods, is typically non-white, or vaguely sexualized. 

--The connections I'm beginning to make are apparent in Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," in which Rip cannot tolerate, as it were, the castrating scold "shrew" wife, and flees for the mountains-woods (which are more sublimely sexualized.)

--Not in the Puritan period, but by the end of the 18th-century, the "captivity narrative" had become secularized/eroticized: “red” men raping white women with heaving bosums. See the famous painting "The Death of Jane McCrea" (from 1808); google-image search for this.  The "captivity narrative"--insofar as it manifests a sexual/gender dynamic--is part of what might be called the "feminization" of "America."  Initially, "America" is the native woman (the engraving of Vespucci discovering America); bit by bit "America" geographically/symbolically becomes a pastoral garden/Edenic (you'll see this briefly in Crevecouer and Irving's "Rip Van Winkle"), a figure vulnerable to too much technology/industrialization or to outside hostile forces. Brown's Wieland’s main plot involves (sort of) around the seduction of a woman by an outsider European. The 20th century rendition is, of course, the Statue of Liberty/America, a genderized geo-political body threatened by evil terrorists (this is not to downplay the threat of terrorism, but to illustrate that there are long continuities in how "Americans" think about "America"). Part of our moral-political-symbolic language perhaps subliminally invokes rape anxieties. Former President Bush=Prospero/father; Miranda=America; Caliban=terrorists.

--Recollect Caliban and Prospero.  We may look at them as representing antithetical ideologies: the lyrical pastoral response to the island and the urge to control, shape, and transform it.  Shakespeare creates Prospero before the U.S. exists as a cultural identity, but already we can see the tendency towards engineering. Such has utopistic possibilities and certainly leads to the good civic engineering of a Ben Franklin.  But, carried too far, it can also become inhuman.

--Caliban, for all his crude id-like behavior, responds lyrically to the island world.  Let us call him the pastoralist.  These two cultural ideologies--the compulsion to engineer, the desire to lose oneself in nature (or in the sublime)--are in constant tension in U.S./"American" culture. 

--Rip wants to avoid anything that has an agenda—whether his wife's agenda (voiced loudly) to work, stories that might be about "something," or history itself (the revolutionary moment).   Irving seems to be playing infantile retreat/womb-like security of the mountain hills off of "maturing" into history/change.  But both are found wanting.  Rip is, indeed, immature, etc.; and history turns out to be bickering.  It is almost as if Irving cannot conceive of history as something that people make; you're either in stasis (the town before the revolution), evade history (Rip in the hills), or history just "happens" (you "wake up" and George Washington has replaced King George).  Consider the postscript as well: static Garden of Eden (sort of) that seems sublime, but then change happens (gourds broken) and catastrophe follows. Rip deserts/evades his family, just as the new "America" seeks to reject the Old World.  These moments of separation, of evading genealogical responsibility (dismembered mountain: strange faded patriarchal ghost men), lead to crises of identity: the town is disunified after Revolution, and Rip can’t recognize himself (his alienation when he sees his son passage near the end  of the story). Those who are not "making" history often retreat into regressive memories of the glories of the past—the ghost men are the perfect symbol of the ghostly power/faded grandeur of the past. 

--The Last of the Mohicans film (although it distorts the novel on which it is based) plays the world of the immature/regressive male psyche (that wants to be in the secret, mysterious womb-like woods) against the more mechanized, marriage-oriented world of the British suitor of the black-haired daughter.  In American culture there is a long tradition of transcoding desires for freedom and power into racial terms.  Non-whites are typically represented as more "id" like, more Caliban like.  (I'm speaking of stereotypes, not realities.)  Hippies are versions of Indians, repulsed by the world of plastic and the grey cubes of the bourgeoisie.

--Pastoralism, in short, either as a sublime sentiment or a regressive impulse, is an enduring theme in "American" culture:

--Europeans thought of America as new, "virginal", not-yet-corrupted-by-history space.

--Vespucci (remember the engraving) awakens "America" into history (Indian rights to the land are ignored, just as Prospero ignores Caliban's claims).

--The sense of potentiality (the longing to start over, to recreate Eden in secular terms, etc) is deeply, as it were, libidinal:

--Here, in “America, a utopian fantasy of perfect (democratical) society might be realized.

--Here, free from the shackles of history or class, your individual desires can be realized.

--Perhaps you will be able to create a holy community (Bradford, Winthrop).

--Perhaps you will be free from paternal authority (Ashbridge).

--Perhaps you find in the woods the thrill of pure masculinism (Cooper), absent of fussy, nagging women (Rip Van Winkle).

--Perhaps you will find in the woods the racial other (Indians).

--Your identity, regardless, will be fluid, unconstrained because you are linked to a vast geographic space, not to a tidy plot of ground in, say, England (Crevecouer).

--Such potentiality ultimately undercuts the Puritan belief in innate depravity.

--Such potentiality requires a post-Lockean understanding of the personality as being in flux.

--And yet such potentiality (the freedom from Old World class hierarchy) can also lead to a sense of anomie and disconnectedness: think of the isolated characters in Brown's Wieland; think of Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" as perhaps about the dislocations/disconnectedness/isolation that follows from democracy.  Remember the excerpt from Alexis De Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1832) to ponder:

"Amongst aristocratic nations, as families remain for centuries in the same condition, often on the same spot, all generations become as it were contemporaneous. A man almost always knows his forefathers, and respects them: he thinks he already sees his remote descendants, and he loves them. He willingly imposes duties on himself towards the former and the latter; and he will frequently sacrifice his personal gratifications to those who went before and to those who will come after him. Aristocratic institutions have, moreover, the effect of closely binding every man to several of his fellow-citizens. As the classes of an aristocratic people are strongly marked and permanent, each of them is regarded by its own members as a sort of lesser country, more tangible and more cherished than the country at large. As in aristocratic communities all the citizens occupy fixed positions, one above the other, the result is that each of them always sees a man above himself whose patronage is necessary to him, and below himself another man whose co-operation he may claim. Men living in aristocratic ages are therefore almost always closely attached to something placed out of their own sphere, and they are often disposed to forget themselves. It is true that in those ages the notion of human fellowship is faint, and that men seldom think of sacrificing themselves for mankind; but they often sacrifice themselves for other men. In democratic ages, on the contrary, when the duties of each individual to the race are much more clear, devoted service to any one man becomes more rare; the bond of human affection is extended, but it is relaxed.Amongst democratic nations new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition; the woof of time is every instant broken, and the track of generations effaced. Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after no one has any idea: the interest of man is confined to those in close propinquity to himself. As each class approximates to other classes, and intermingles with them, its members become indifferent and as strangers to one another. Aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king: democracy breaks that chain, and severs every link of it. As social conditions become more equal, the number of persons increases who, although they are neither rich enough nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over their fellow-creatures, have nevertheless acquired or retained sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants. They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart."

--Such potentiality can also lead to bad, overly rational social engineering and to the bad fascination with technological solutions.

--Happy optimistic Ben Franklin, from a certain perspective, seems a bit too ruthlessly mechanical in his effort to achieve perfection (even if he does relate his efforts tongue-in-cheek!).

--Franklin does not speak of trees (nor did Prospero); he speaks of rational solutions.

--He does not want the green world, he wants a tidy cube world (Black Elk Speaks will later comment on a “grey world”).

--In short, “America” as a land of potentiality speaks at once to a libidinal/sublime quest and to obsessive engineering! (An autobiographical note: I grew up in West Virginia, spending my days tramping the woods, from six-till-sixteen.  Yet my father was a chemical engineer, in charge of making plastic!).

The Western and the Sublime: "Shane"

The film "Shane" seems to be negotiating corporate capitalism vs family (or family values).  But both corporate capitalism (big cattle ranch) and little house on the prairie (as it were) are compromised by being stolidly equated with territory, whereas Shane comes from nowhere and has nothing. The Western's ultimate fantasy is not property secured (fenced-in territory or suburbs in California!) ... but rather that long wide sublime horizon of blankness.  This is a continual theme in American literature and culture--the character who inhabits a geographical space that is not property (Thoreau in his cabin), or who is mobile and disengaged (Huck Finn going down the river); such is part of a larger thematic of pastoralism/escapism that haunts Western culture from the Renaissance and on.

A Final, More Personal Lecture Point:

Dear Journeys to America students,

The semester is coming to a close, and I want to wish you all the very best as you finish up in this and your other courses.

In Humanities courses (Philosophy, Literature, Art History, History, and so on), it's always a little tricky to "add up" exactly what one learned--a few facts here, or there, perhaps; a sense of exposure to other times and places, a bit of wisdom from reading the assigned texts, or maybe a recollected interpretation or two from professorial lectures....

All good things to learn.  But let me add a last perspective, as we turn off the lights of the semester.  What you should most learn--it is the only learning that "sticks"--is enhanced curiosity.  It is not from me or the books that you learn, but from yourself, developing a rich interiority and reflectiveness in response to what you study.

SO ... to quote my all time favorite line from Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden: "Be a Lewis and Clark of your own mind"!  The Sublimity is always within each of us.

Sentimental and metaphysical, but there you go!

All best, and for those of you who are graduating this term!  Congrats!

Prof. Harvey