Journeys to America
Prof. Harvey
TOTAL SUMMARY OF COURSE: THIS IS A DOCUMENT PERMANENTLY UNDER CONSTRUCTION, WITH A LOT OF REPETITION, BACK-TRACKING, SUDDEN LEAPS, ETC., AS I GLUE TOGETHER LECTURE NOTES AND ONLINE DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
(***SEVERAL TEXTS ARE REFERRED TO THAT ARE NOT INCLUDED IN THIS PARTICULAR SEMESTER'S VERSION OF THE COURSE)
READINGS FROM THE FIRST 1/4th OF THE COURSE:
--readings in the first 1/4th of the course are/are not about the U.S.
--except for Columbus, we've skipped over narratives about Cortez and other Conquistadors
--before 1776, folks writing in North America or about America think of themselves or America as part of the British Empire (which included colonies in the Caribbean)
--thus Shakespeare's The Tempest (about power relations/ takes place in the Caribbean) may be considered "Early American Literature"
--thus Equiano's Life of... (takes place in Caribbean, England, and U.S.) is "EAL"
--yet, even before 1776, cultural themes appear important to later U.S. identity
--1620: Protestant Pilgrims land in New England. They think of themselves as British, but also see themselves as escaping the corruptions of the Old World (Bradford’s story of poor Thomas Granger learning his habit in "old England")=isolationism
--they also want to
set an example of a pure community (Winthrop's “City on a Hill”)
--escape/isolationism + pure = a sense of U.S. being the Redeemer Nation
(later=save the world from Communism, etc, etc,)=imperialism=American
Exceptionalism
--other immigrants in 17th/18th century see "new" country as land of opportunity (cheap land/ less hierarchical class system), because of
--a) pastoral vision
(escape from grimy London
and go farm in Kentucky): the "heartland" of America is farming
--b) self-reliance (we're all just farmers; not dependent on elaborate commodity
exchange): you'll see this in the short Crev. selection (President Bush pretends
to be a down-home Texan, etc. etc.). President Jefferson, especially, feared
that the nation would shift from being one of agricultural/independence to one
of mercantile, dependent exchange
--c) add homo economicus, and ingenious mechanisms/inventions (best exemplified by Franklin)
THE TRANSITION FROM PURITAN TO ENLIGHTENMENT WORLDVIEW
1) Population/mobility:
--ever increasing population of non-Calvinist/Puritan immigrants
--younger generation very mobile
--seeking western farmland (west=western Pennsylvania, etc.)/ capitalistic-oriented
--cities become larger: trade=more economic opportunity but also vice (lots of "young man" manuals written to morally instruct artisans/apprentices detached from nuclear family)
2) 1662--Half-Way Covenant:
--second generation of Puritans less devout--should they be part of church community?
--children of church members (who had testified to their faith) could join without a full statement of their conversion: good conduct emphasized instead
3) Scientific-philosophical shift:
--1687: Issac Newton's Principia Mathematica: motion/gravity understood, gives a sense of control
--Deism philosophy: universe like a vast clock, a mechanism that can be rationally understood
--God no longer intervenes with miracles/providence
--best way of understanding God is by understanding his creation
4) Psychological-philosophical shift:
--John Locke’s 1690 Treatise on Human Understanding
--mind is a blank slate: a tabula rasa, awaiting sensory input
--senses receive input from the world, which combines to form ideas
Consequences:
--no innate depravity/original sin: no essential or stable identity; self is determined by external circumstances
--paranoia: you are vulnerable to circumstance; you can be controlled or influenced by your environment
--but also creates opportunity: you can influence others by manipulating the environment/ self is malleable
--leads to fascination with impressions one creates/ with public effect or public persona
--you’ll notice that both Franklin and Equiano refer to “impressions” frequently. Both also refer to “character,” which seems to have more to do with reputation than inward essence. Equiano sometimes uses the language of conversion/predestination/sovereign God; but he is equally at home in the pragmatic world of Franklin
5) Technological-sociological
--before 18th-century: Great Chain of Being/hierarchal feudal model
--populace does not revolt against King
--but the new realm of the public sphere, created via an explosion of journalistic print, provides a buffer zone, a space to debate political issues
WHY READ FRANKLIN:
1)--the ultimate pragmatist, whose inventiveness (bifocals, lightning rod), anticipates the American culture of gadgetry
2)--can link him to the Protestant ethic of virtuous industriousness: work conceived as a calling/a vocation directed towards service to community (although towards self-advancement also)
3)--mostly, exemplifies so-called "American Dream": from poverty to wealth, from dependence to independence and power, from being unknown to great prestige
4)--or, equally important, a truly modern figure
--no longer Winthrop's hierarchical, ultimately feudal, sense of rank (some rich/ poor)
--but absolute mobility/ fluidity within secular culture (note all the aspiring young artisans in his auto.)
--a media man: once Franklin perceives his life as one that might be imitated, everything comes directed towards external display and not towards introspection
GEOGRAPHICAL EXPANSION:
The maps below were taken from the following site: http://angam.ang.univie.ac.at/western2000/mapsvo2.htm
Notice how rapidly settlement occurred between the Puritan times (1640s-70s) up to the time in which Equiano and Crev. are writing (the American Revolution). And yet notice also how much vast "open" space remains to the west in the maps. 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, 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, "a Lewis and Clark of your own mind" (got it?).
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. The connections I'm beginning to make now will become clearer when we read Irving's "Rip Van Winkle."
Not in the Puritan period, but by the end of the
18th-century, the "captivity narrative" had become secularized/eroticized. See
the famous painting "The Death of Jane McCrea" (from 1808).
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. When we read Brown's "Wieland" you will see that the main plot involves
(sort of) 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. President
Bush=Prospero/father; Miranda=America; Caliban=terrorists.
THEMATIC OVERVIEW OF THE COURSE
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.
HISTORICAL/THEMATIC OVERVIEW:
--Puritans escape 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 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)
--Europeans thought of America as new, "virginal", not-yet-corrupted-by-history space
--Vespucci (remember the engraving) awakens "America" into history (Indian right to the land is ignored, just as Prospero ignores Caliban's claims)
--the potentiality of America leads to two, in tension impulses
--the first is what I call the ecstasy/sublime/pastoral impulse
--here 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
--but such potentiality can also lead to the opposite impulse of social engineering
--and the fascination with technological solutions
--the perfect exemplar of which is Ben Franklin, who draws up an almost ruthlessly mechanical means to achieve perfection
--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”)
--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.
--at the end of My Antonia there is a lot of womb/fertility/earth goddess image, which Jim reflects upon with much nostalgia because he is disenchanted with the history of his own life
--his nostalgia may be regressive or it may indicate a longing for some anti-patriarchal, anti-bourgeois arrangement
--two abrupt leaps forward:
--the space race, in the metaphorics of culture, perfectly satisfied the sublime impulse and the engineering impulse
--malls and advertisement culture: malls (etc.) are a form of the mysterious woods/pastoral sublime/desire, constructed by manipulators/engineers who are like Franklin
--I have been speaking of cultural symbols when I say sublime vs. engineering. Such oppositions are constructs only. U.S. culture is, in fact, much more messy
--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."
ALL-PURPOSE DATE SHEET OF KEY EVENTS AND INTELLECTUAL/CULTURAL HISTORY BEFORE 20TH CENTURY:
1492 Columbus "discovers" Americas.
1502 First Africans taken to work in Americas.
1517 Martin Luther's 95 Theses--Protestant reformation begins.
1521 Conquest of Mexico by Cortez.
1543 Copernicus refutes 'Geocentric' view of universe (earth no longer center of Creation).
1603 Queen Elizabeth dies; James I rules until 1625; Charles I until 1649.
1607 Founding of Jamestown in Virginia.
1611 Shakespeare's The Tempest.
1620 William Bradford and "Pilgrim Fathers" land at Plymouth.
1637 Descartes' Meditations published (in which appears the most famous line in philosophy, "I think, therefore I am").
1640 John Winthrop delivers sermon aboard the Arabella.
1642 English Civil War begins (country divided between pro-Catholic loyalists to Charles I and Protestant landed nobleman and propertied classes, who feel the king has disregarded their traditional rights and privileges; more democratical, radical groups‑‑the Levellers‑‑are also against the king).
1642 Galileo (born in 1564) dies.
1643 Louis XIV ("the Great" or the "Sun King") of France begins 72 year reign.
1649 Charles I, son of James I, son of Queen Mary ("Bloody Mary"), sister to Queen Elizabeth, is beheaded; Cromwell, a radical Puritan, leads the parliamentary Commonwealth to 1660.
1651 Hobbes' Leviathan (a famous political treatise defending absolute monarchy) published.
1660 Restoration of monarchy in England; Charles II rules.
1662 Puritan "Half-Way Covenant".
1665 Black Death hits London.
1682 William Penn founds Quaker colony in Pennsylvania.
1682 Mary Rowlandson's A Narrative published (she dies probably in 1678).
1685 Charles II, on the throne since 1660, dies; James II (a Catholic) becomes king.
1687 Newton's Principia Mathematica. The Einstein of his age, Newton's theories of matter/motion seem to explain the workings of the universe‑‑an optimistic sense of being able to control nature ensues. God no longer perceived as routinely intervening in the cosmos; instead, the Deity has created a perfectly rational, harmonious universe (like a super-complex watch), and he is best known by understanding his creation, the natural world.
1688 English "Glorious Revolution." William III (Protestant) usurps the throne, by invitation
of Parliament (from now on, government in Britain is parliamentary, with kings & queens increasingly becoming only symbolic figureheads).
1690 Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding published. Main theory is that our minds are "blank slates" when we are born. There are no inborn ideas (traditional Christian notion of innate depravity, the inheritance of Adam and Eve's sin, loses validity for intellectuals of the period); we gain knowledge only through experience and our environment. Consequently, education becomes very important‑‑perhaps humankind can be perfected in the progress of time. Combined with optimism from Newton's scientific ideas, the so-called "Age of Enlightenment" emerges in full swing. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and company all read and took Locke to heart.
1690 Two Treatises on Civil Government published, to legitimate the overthrow of James II.
1692 Puritan Witchcraft trials in Salem, Mass. (rationality eventually wins out over mass hysteria; U.S. becomes more and more secular).
1702 William III dies. Queen Anne reigns to 1714.
1706 Benjamin Franklin born (dies in 1790).
1713 Elizabeth Ashbridge born (dies in 1755).
1721 J.S. Bach completes the Brandenburg Concertos.
1735 Swedish naturalist Linnaeus publishes The System of Nature‑‑descriptive system designed to classify all the plants on the earth, known and unknown, according to the characteristics of their reproductive parts.
1743 Thomas Jefferson born (dies in 1826).
1762 J.J. Rousseau publishes Emile, in which he sketches a method of education that would preserve the natural goodness of children by allowing relatively free expression of their inclinations.
1764 Mozart (aged eight) writes his first symphony.
1769 Watt patents the steam-engine; Industrial Age takes off.
1773 Captain Cook ("discoverer" of Hawaii) brings Omai, a native of the Polynesian island of Huahine, back to England, where he is entertained by the aristocracy and causes a sensation. Signals fascination with "noble savage"‑‑a main theme of "Romanticism." By the end of the 18th-century, a very complicated and competitive international network of commerce and colonialism has emerged.
1773 Phillis Wheatley publishes "On Being Brought from Africa to America".
1775 American Revolution begins.
1776 Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations: establishes "laissez faire" principle: capitalism is like a self-regulating clock, so no need to regulate working conditions.
1782 Crevecoeur publishes "What is an American" in Letters from an American Farmer (1782).
1787 U.S. Constitution signed.
1789 Parisians storm the Bastille: English government clamps down on dissent. Fear of "mob rule" makes it difficult for workers to articulate grievances. Wordsworth, Blake, and other Romantic poets greatly enthusiastic about the democratical energy unleashed by the revolution.
1793 Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette of France executed.
1789 Olaudah Equiano's The Life.... is published.
1791 Toussaint L'Ouverture leads slave rebellion against French in Haiti.
1794 Thomas Paine publishes scandalous Age of Reason (debunks Old Testament as superstitious myth).
1800 Thomas Jefferson becomes third President of U.S.
1803 Louisiana Purchase ("Manifest Destiny" ideology, right of nation to appropriate western lands, kicks in).
1804 Immanuel Kant, German "Idealist" philosopher, dies. Basic philosophical premise is that we cannot absolutely know "reality" because it is always shaped, a priori, by the mind's faculties. Will influence Romantic celebration of the shaping power of imagination.
1804 Beethoven composes his Third Symphony, "Eroica".
1807 Robert Fulton's steamboat.
1814 First steam locomotive.
1821 Napoleon (defeated in 1815) dies: the British Romantic Period more or less ends. "Captains of Industry" become the heroes of the Victorian Age.
1826 James F. Cooper publishes Last of the Mohicans (Indians either "savage" or "noble").
1828 Andrew Jackson becomes U.S. President. "Orphan, frontiersman, horseracing man, Indian fighter, war hero, and land speculator, Andrew Jackson embodied the new American spirit and became the idol of the ambitious, jingoistic younger men who now called themselves Democrats. At its best, Jacksonian democracy meant an opening of the political process to more people (although blacks, women, and Indians still remained political nonentities). The flip side was that it represented a new level of militant, land-frenzied, slavery-condoning, Indian-killing greed" (qtd. from Kenneth Davis).
1830 Opening of Liverpool-Manchester railroad: allows for rapid transport of coal, etc. between industrial areas of England.
1832 First Reform Bill in England: extends vote to middle-class owners of property (but working classes must wait until 1867, when the Second Reform Bill passes).
1833 All slaves emancipated in the British Empire.
1837 Queen Victoria begins reign--Victorian stuffiness/prudery, etc.
1838 First transatlantic steamship crossing.
1839 Opium War begins (ends 1842): England forces free trade upon China.
1843 Karl Marx meets Engels; during the 1840's widespread unemployment, depression, and famine leads to rioting throughout Europe; massive immigration from Ireland to U.S.
1844 Frederick Douglass publishes Narrative of the Life of FD.
1848 Marx and Engels publish The Communist Manifesto.
1851 The Great Exhibition in London‑‑a celebration of the wonders of technological progress (world perceived‑‑by the middle-class, that is‑‑as dynamically changing, for the better).
1852 Otis invents the first elevator with a safety break.
1853 Charles Dickens publishes Hard Times‑‑a novel about exploited English factory workers.
1856 Bessemer announces new process for making high-quality, low-cost steel. When combined with the Otis elevator, this makes possible the modern skyscraper.
1859 Darwin publishes Origin of Species.
1861 U.S. Civil War begins.
1865 Lister introduces antiseptic practices in hospitals.
1876 Bell patents the telephone.
1879 Edison invents the incandescent bulb.
1880's Britain and European nations colonize Africa.
1901 Queen Victoria dies.
1917 Lenin leads the Bolshevik Revolution (which will lead to Communist Russia, Cold War, etc.).