Wednesday, September 11, 1996
Noon
Caribou Coffee
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
The settlers of colonial America arrived here by going West. Over the
next three centuries, despite some glances over their shoulders, many Americans
continued to look and to go West. Even after Frederick Jackson Turner announced
in 1893 that America no longer had a frontier, the Americans of this century
have recalled and recreated the West in movies, television shows, dime novels,
and paintings. Why West, and what has this region meant to American writers
and their audiences?
Mark launched the discussion by suggesting that the West has provided a
convenient metaphor for the mission of America itself. Whether it was the
Pacific Coast, the Great Plains, the land just over the Appalachians, New
England, or Virginia, the West has been a place of promise, indeed a unspoiled
place where humans inspired by the Enlightenment or later the age of Romantic
individualism could start anew. Sprawling and largely uncultivated--even
uncivilized, many Europeans thought--the land to the West naturally inspired
Thomas Harriott's and John Smith's analogies to Eden. Even after this comparison
faded from the American imagination, colonial writers such as Benjamin Franklin
and Jean de Crevecoeur continued to celebrate the opportunities inherent
in a land that was new and unformed. As late as the mid-nineteenth century,
some Americans held onto this vision of the West as a place where humans
finally could achieve a perfect society. Although he expressed some impatience,
perhaps even disappointment, in :"Facing West from California's Shores,"
Walt Whitman clung to the idea of an American utopia and, in Democratic
Vistas, imagined the West as the setting for such a utopia. Even later,
Huck Finn sets out for the territories at the end of his adventures on the
Mississippi.
With this promise, however, came anxiety. Crevecoeur warned in Letters
from an American Farmer of the danger of going too far into the frontier,
where America's protective government exerted less of its beneficial influence.
Furthermore, Brian pointed out that Crevecoeur, noting that man cannot live
alone, also saw the need for community--a need that naturally was in danger
in the frontier, where space and sensibility favored individualism. Similar
concerns surface in the works of Whitman and Melville, both of whom prize
individuality while recognizing the necessity and value of community.
A second form of anxiety came in American fears about the wild nature of
the frontier. William Bradford's comment about "wild men," captivity
narratives such as Mary Rowlandson's, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's treatment
of devilish doings in the woods all reflect this anxiety. Brian saw additional
evidence of this uneasiness in Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly,
in which a man alone in the wilderness confronts the dangers of atavism.
Our discussion also left us with some questions. Where, for example, does
Crane's "Blue Hotel" fit into American literary treatments of
the West? Is it merely, because of its desolate nature, a convenient place
for him to play out his naturalistic notions? Or does the setting comment
on American hope and its belief in the promise of the Western frontier?
What do Frank Norris's The Pit and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie,
naturalistic novels set in Chicago, say about the promise of the West? Finally,
how the dime novels of the late nineteenth century idealize and romanticize
the West, and how did audiences respond to these characterizations?
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