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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
The idea that America constituted anew world that fulfilled both the divine and the natural design has been the subject of numerous studies, including the classics Virgin Land by Henry Nash Smith and The American Adam by R. W. B. Lewis. I start from these but go back instead of forward: back, or down, in that my concern with the astonishing imaginative feat that translated a new country's rise into the discovery of a new world lies in the underlying form of this vision rather than in its particular features. With the interior of the landscape already well mapped, I would like to walk its perimeter.
1. Wills, Garry, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978), p. xxii and Prologue.Google Scholar
2. This is my own translation from Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Morceaux choisis, introduction and notes by Nollet, R., Paris, 1911.Google Scholar All further references to Buffon's writings are to this text. Page numbers are given in parentheses or brackets.
3. Van Doren, Mark, ed., Travels of William Bartram, from the original edition (New York: Dover, 1955Google Scholar; original ed. published in Philadelphia, 1791). All further references to Bartram's writings are to this text. Page numbers are given in parentheses or brackets.
4. Jefferson, Thomas, Notes on the State of Virginia, introduction by Abernethy, Thomas Perkins (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964).Google Scholar All further references to this work are to this text. Page numbers are given in parentheses or brackets.
5. Smith, Henry Nash, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Vintage, 1961), p. v.Google Scholar
6. de Montaigne, Michel, “Of Cannibals,” The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Frame, Donald M. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 153.Google Scholar
7. My argument with this view does not extend to interpretations of the novel, which through the nineteenth century seems to me sui generis in American thinking precisely for its fundamental ambivalence toward the national self-image. I have begun to suggest how and why the novel is thus anomalous in “The Novel and the Middle Class in America,” Salmagundi, Winter 1977Google Scholar, and I am now working on a fuller treatment.
8. Parkman, Francis, The Oregon Trail, foreword by A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (New York: Signet, n.d.; originally published 1849).Google Scholar
9. Some who wrote about encountering the American wilderness were at odds with it. Crèvecoeur (Letters from an American Farmer) is a telling contemporary example. His view of wild nature was more consonant with Buffon's, and this went along with an essentially European view of America itself, culminating in his remaining loyal to the Crown during the Revolution. See my “J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur: A Monarcho-Anarchist in Revolutionary America,” American Quarterly, 31, No. 2 (Summer 1979).Google Scholar Another much later example may be Rölvaag, O. E.'s Giants in the EarthGoogle Scholar, written in Norwegian and fundamentally European in its outlook.
10. Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, ed. Paul, Sherman (Boston: Riverside Editions, 1960; originally published 1854), p. 109.Google Scholar
11. Thus, Lewis, R. W. B., in The American Adam (Chicago: Unversity of Chicago Press, 1968)Google Scholar, identifies “dialogue” and “dialectical,” praising Perry Miller for “seizing upon the dialectical and dramatic qualities” of his subject, in a footnote to the need to recognize the dialogue nature of American thought; later (p. 8), he writes that the best form in which American experience has been reported has been dialectical, although recently “the dialogue [has] tended to die away.” In conclusion, he regrets the nondialectical quality of contemporary discourse and, therefore, its lack of irony: The implication throughout is that a dialectic is any set of opposites.
12. I found two texts especially useful in explaining the nature of totemic myth: Leach, Edmund, ed., The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism, ASA Monographs (London: Tavistock, 1973)Google Scholar, and Levi-Strauss, Claude, Totemism, trans. Needham, Rodney (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).Google Scholar I am indebted to Judith Friedlander for suggesting them.
13. Levi-Strauss, , Totemism, p. 19.Google Scholar
14. This account by R. Landes is reported in ibid., p. 21.
15. So Henry Nash Smith, in Virgin Land, describes the continued belief in an open West as a basis for legislative and political action long after the West was no longer open. Marx, Leo, in The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967)Google Scholar, criticizes a national inability to recognize that the pastoral ideal of the founding years no longer applies in technologically advanced America.
16. A number of historians – notably, Woodward, C. Vann in Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964)Google Scholar–have attributed much of the strength of the appeal of populism in the South to its ability to invoke the legitimacy of its descent from Jefferson's founding vision of a yeoman America.
17. Goetzmann, William H., Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: Norton Library, 1966).Google Scholar
18. Miller, Perry, Errand into the Wilderness (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), pp. vi–x.Google Scholar
19. I regret very much that the recent analysis of the writings of American naturalists in Franklin, Wayne's extremely suggestive Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)Google Scholar appeared too late for discussion in this essay. Professor Franklin deals with much of the same material and many of the same issues. At a later date, I plan to take up his argument in more detail, but it will have to suffice here to say simply that we seem to be drawing very different conclusions. He finds in a “preternatural” link between “language and event in America” a source of power to transform, an agency of the will; I would suggest on the contrary that this link (for me, an identification) implies passivity and the impossibility of change.
