AML4213:
Early American Literature—Journeys to America
Spring 2012
Dr. Bruce Harvey
Slide Show #1:
Domestication of Wild Indianness
This depiction
of The Death of Jane McCrea was painted in 1804 by John Vanderlyn
(detail):
The
Rescue is a
large marble sculpture group assembled in front of the east façade of the United States Capitol building and exhibited there from
1853 until 1958 when it was removed and never restored. The sculptural ensemble
was created by sculptor Horatio Greenough (1805–52).
Prof. Harvey notes: little Indian = no threat, easily subdued by robed
colonial-Euro person; Indian looks up like baby, as if seeking tutoring (vague
Christ & Madonna, also); Indian physicality absorbed into colonial-Euro
intellection (figures are fused).
Slide Show #2: The American Sublime in Art
Charles W. Peale (1741-1827), The Artist in his Museum—1822.
Prof. Harvey notes: Peale applied Enlightenment principles to nature by
creating the first rationally-classified American natural history museum.
Peale was a painter, naturalist, and all-round scientist. He was a friend
of President Jefferson, and saw his naturalist museum as bringing "rational
amusement" (a line in the tickets for the museum) to the American
citizenry. Here, Peale depicts himself inviting the viewer-spectator to
enter into the edifying museum. The bones beneath the curtain to the right are
mastodon bones. Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on their famous
expedition, in part, in the hopes of finding living wooly mammoths... which he
believed might be still existing somewhere in "Indian" territory
across the Rocky Mountains. The birds, etc., in the grid-like boxes are
taxidermist specimens. Note Peale's somber expression; we're not supposed to
gape at nature with mindless enthusiasm, or bond with it!
Frederic
Edwin Church (1826 –1900), Cotopaxi (1862).
Prof. Harvey notes: no human “subject” position; instead we are drawn into vast
sublime scene which is everywhere/all-subsuming.
Slide Show #3: American Romantics Imagine Nature
Henry David Thoreau,
from Walden (1850):
Flint's Pond! Such is
the poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the unclean and stupid farmer,
whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare,
to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting
surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen
face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his
fingers grown into crooked and bony talons from the lodge habit of grasping
harpy-like;- so it is not named for me. I go not there to see him nor to hear
of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never
protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that He had
made it. Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl
or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or
some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own;
not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded
neighbor or legislature gave him- him who thought only of its money value;
whose presence perchance cursed all the shores; who exhausted the land around
it, and would fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that
it was not English hay or cranberry meadow- there was nothing to redeem it,
forsooth, in his eyes- and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom.
It did not turn his mill, and it was no privilege to him to behold it. I
respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would
carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get
anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm
nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose
trees no fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose
fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. Give me the
poverty that enjoys true wealth. Farmers are respectable and interesting to me
in proportion as they are poor- poor farmers. A model farm! where the house
stands like a fungus in a muckheap, chambers for men horses, oxen, and swine,
cleansed and uncleansed, all contiguous to one another! Stocked with men! A
great grease- spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk! …. White Pond and
Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light. If they
were permanently congealed, and small enough to be clutched, they would,
perchance, be carried off by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads
of emperors; but being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors
forever, we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too
pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than
our lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are they! We never
learned meanness of them. How much fairer than the pool before the farmers door,
in which his ducks swim! Hither the clean wild ducks come. Nature has no human
inhabitant who appreciates her.