Journeys to America

Prof. Bruce Harvey

ALMOST A SUMMARY OF THE COURSE

Below, I've repeated some "GO" materials from earlier in the semester, written out a lecture or two, and summarized some key points about Black Elk Speaks, My Antonia, and Jasmine.  Please read this carefully, as it begins to tie together cultural/thematic strands about "America."

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.  I would argue that 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. 

This tension has, to some extent, become invisible today because we no longer have a home for the sublime, for non-development, for "raw" nature.  It is hard for us to imagine what a sense of nation, national identity, and national "mission" would have been like in the 18th and 19th-centuries if we do not envision vast 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, 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 wrote, "a Lewis and Clark of your own mind." 

Now, the curious thing about the antithesis I've set up--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. 

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, Rip can’t recognize himself (his alienation when he sees his son passage). 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.  (To switch gears slightly: in Black Elk Speaks, Black Elk's nostalgia for green power is not unlike Rip in the hills, and Rip's wife would then be kindred to the grey box world).

The Last of the Mohicans 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 Heyward and Colonel Duncan.  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: the divide in Black Elk Speaks between the grey box world and the green, expansive world.

Now absorb some history to compliment the film montage lecture I gave in class:

--Puritans escape corruption of the Old World & felt they could establish a regenerated community, a “city on the Hill” as Cotton puts it

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

--by American Revolution, all Eastern Indian territory appropriated: sense of security

--vast majority of population still on farms, although Boston/Philadelphia 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

--Americans are somehow more natural (remember my sarcastic point about cereal ads)

 --Louisiana Purchase of 1803 from France: vast area b/w Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains acquired: virtually a blank on the maps

 --Lewis and Clark published in 1814: History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark to the Sources of the Missouri, Thence Across the Rocky Mountains and Down the River Columbia to the Pacific Ocean

--expedition stimulated fur trade (for beaver pelt) up the Missouri

--conducted by reckless breed of uncouth mountain men

--they pioneered routes for other explorers and emigrants to Western territories

--imperialistic war against Mexico in 1845: Southwest territories acquired

--1845-46 exploration/settlement/military presence on Pacific coast--Oregon and California

--throughout this period a feeling that the US had a “Manifest Destiny”, a natural right, to conquer/inhabit/claim entire North Continent of America, from East to West—to create an “empire of freedom,” as one common slogan of the day put it

 --ideology of Manifest Destiny however, still somewhat abstract, until 1848 when the Gold Rush began

 --before Western territories perceived as remote from the normal patterns of American society

 --with Gold Rush, hugh influx of Easterners to California almost overnight, West becomes major locale for adventure and settlement

 --Indians pushed onto reservations; era of U.S. cavalry and Indian wars

 --railroads push west; open up territory for farms, grazing lands

 --era of robber barons, etc.

When you read My Antonia and Jasmine, please try to see how both authors offer a perhaps feminized/feminist version of the (in essence) boy's story I have been telling thus far.  Consider, for instance, how Antonia matures into a venerable earth-goddess figure and yet is still married (she is perhaps who Rip's wife would like to be!).  And when you turn to Jasmine, note the very complex mix of satire and sentiment that hovers over the author's approach to the American "heartland."