English 251: American Lit. (1600-1865)

Second Lecture:
AMERICAN RENAISSANCE: THE EMPIRE OF THE SOVEREIGN SELF

"As respects authorship, there is not much to be said. Compared to the books that are printed and read, those of native origin are few indeed. The principal reason of this poverty of original writers, is owing to the circumstance that man are not yet driven to their wits for bread. The United States are the first nation that possessed institutions, and, of course, distinctive opinions of its own, that was ever dependent on a foreign people for its literature. Speaking the same language as the English, and long in the habit of importing their books from the mother country, the revolution effected no immediate change in the nature of their studies, or mental amusements."

This was James Fenimore Cooper's assessment of the state of American literature, in 1828. You can see from it that he attributes the "poverty" of original writing in the Republic to several causes. In the first place--and probably he says this with tongue in cheek--Americans are too well off. Unfettered by a European-style aristocracy, they flourish and so aren't "driven to their wits" to earn their daily "bread." In addition, Cooper suggests here (and makes plain elsewhere in Notions of the Americans), that English writings have for so long been cheaply and readily available that the "market" for American writings has not yet developed. Cooper therefore imagines the socio-political revolution as having, even four decades later, no clear cultural counterpart. Culturally, he says, there has been "no immediate change" from the habits of mind of the "mother country."

In many ways, this may be taken as the point of Washington Irving's 1817 tale, "Rip Van Winkle," in which the protagonist falls asleep in about 1770 and awakens twenty years later to find the world politically different (the picture of King George III has been replaced by one of George Washington), and his wife (perhaps a symbol of Cooper's "mother country") dead, while otherwise things are quite the same. Rip does, however, have a story to tell, and a ready audience; and one way of reading the tale is to see it as an allegory of the literary marketplace--ready, at last, for new, American writers.

By 1800 many Americans were already anxious about the prospects for a national literature. The Revolutionary period had brought an outpouring of patriotic verse, of which Phillis Wheatley's poem to Washington is a fair example. This surge in "versifying," though, was largely a disappointment, other than for the most ardent nationalist. Drama was still just awakening from centuries of Puritanic prohibition. As for fictions, the publication of novels like Susanna Rowson's Charlotte: A Tale of Truth (1791) or Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798) foreshadowed strong potentials for growth, but again (excepting themes and characters) seemed largely derived from English 18th century novels. Some critics in the early decades of the Republic argued, in fact, that Americans should expect no distinct literature of their own because they lacked a language of their own. Noah Webster was, however, at work on his American dictionary, and its publication in 1822 suggested that a national language was by then definable. The early decades of the 19th century, however, were largely concerned with ideas about "correct" taste, rules of composition, and linguistic acceptability--most of it based on British models. American victory in the War of 1812 provided the first impetus for strong change. The North American Review, first of the great literary magazines of the 19th century, stressed in its first issue (of 1815) the necessity for original American standards. In an 1816 essay for the Review, Harvard professor E.T. Channing stressed that a truly American writing would emerge when it fully recognized how the American "Genius," with its "indignant freedom," put writing in everlasting conflict with "rules for versification, laws of taste, books of practical criticism, and approved standards of language." Channing argued that Nature, not tradition, would be the real nurturer of a new literature. It was a thesis echoed by William Tudor, editor of the Review, who argued that American literature would be born out of its wilderness settings.

To anyone who has read, for example, Crevecoeur's thesis about the American's special relationship with wilderness, and thought for a moment about Crevecoeur's assertion that "men are like plants," the idea that distinctly American landscapes would breed a uniquely American literature hardly surprises. But well into the 19th century, these ideas remained scattered, indistinct, and certainly had not yet been made into a unified aesthetic theory. Still, the claims of Channing and Tudor, seen in light of Crevecoeur's image of "this new man," contain the seeds of the so-called "American Renaissance." It was not until Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1836 book, Nature, that such arguments jelled in the form of aesthetic precepts.

From the 1815-16 North American Review Essays, through Walt Whitman's 1871 essay, "Democratic Vistas," the widely shared sense was that writers of real, American genius, were lacking. Whitman went still further, though, in suggesting that the work of American empire-building needed to go hand-in-hand with the work or building an American literature. Here is Whitman:

"I say that a nation may hold and circulate rivers and oceans of very readable print, journals, magazines, novels, library-books, poetry, etc--such as the States today possess and circulate--And yet, all the while, the said nation, strictly speaking may possess no literature at all. Repeating our inquiry, then, what do we mean by real literature, especially the American literature of the future? I feel, presently, with dejection and amazement, that among our geniuses and talented writers or speakers, few or none have yet really spoken to this people, created a single image-making work for them, or absorb'd the central spirit and the idiosyncracies which are theirs. America demands a poetry that is bold, modem, and all-surrounding and imperial, as she is herself. For the literatures of a country are of importance principally because they furnish the materials and suggestions of personality for the women and men of that country, and enforce them in a thousand effective ways."

These admonitions were written, remember, in 1871, well beyond our period of study for this course. Yet they clearly illustrate the cultural work expected of literature during the period we are now undertaking to study. From 1800 to 1860 the call was for literature to participate in the work of nation building by providing models of action for "this new man, this American." The call was for literature to model for readers this Sovereign Self, the self-created democratic American, and to do it, moreover, by locating that Sovereign Self in American Nature.

Yet granting a seemingly absolute privilege to this new, sovereign self was not without its problems. In the writings of Paine, Jefferson, Rawson and others of the Revolutionary period, we have seen how the tendency was to seek the via media, the middle way between reason and emotion. Crevecoeur's farmer, James, was "the farmer of feelings," but coolly reasonable; and his move west to live among the Pennsylvania Indians made sense chiefly because the conflict between American revolutionists and British colonialists had unleashed seething, murderous passions. What was wanted, throughout the Revolutionary period was balance, a sense that the new American self occupied the "middle" in more ways than those of class-status, or income. In this common, middle-American, it was thought, were corrected the excesses that divided the European aristocracy from its poor.

Yet what if that hard-won balance were to break down? What if the unparalleled growth and prosperity of the American states were to breed citizens too undisciplined, too childish in their innocence and unfamiliarity with struggle, so that their passionate side began to dominate? This became a constant concern of the age.

With the Treaty of 1815, ending the British-American War, there came a time of remarkable prosperity that lasted until 1837, when the first of several financial crises sobered up the States. Even before 1815, with Jefferson's completion of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which practically doubled the size of the nation; with the opening of the far west through the expedition of Lewis and Clark, in 1805-1807, the States seemed poised on the brink of incredible expansion. In addition to these geographical attainments, the achievements of American industry suggested still greater things. Whitney's development of the cotton gin; the applications of steam power in manufacturing and, especially, in steamship and railway travel, were popular subjects for self-congratulation. Indeed, the opening of the Erie Canal, in 1825, and then the completion five years later of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, were occasions for national celebration.

Still, at the same moment a residual strain of the dour Puritan conscience began to reassert itself. In 1836, Boston's leading preacher Andrew Bigelow delivered an "Election Day Sermon" before the assembled Massachusetts Legislature, and warned his audience that:

"...it is with nations as with individuals, that prosperity is the parent of vice.... In the long festival of peace which has smiled upon us, the very sunshine of our fortunes has hatched out a pernicious brood of evils. The political atmosphere is becoming charged with noxious miasmata, which threaten grievous distempers to society.... We see luxury, the fatal bane of all republics, spreading its infection and eating as a gangrene into the vitals of the state."

The nation was, in sum, diseased, indeed plagued by the vices attendant on its own success. Just six years later, in 1842, Edgar Allan Poe would describe a pestilence invading the comfortable sanctuary of a Prince Prospero, and utterly wiping out his merry crew. This story, "The Masque of Red Death," may be read as an allegory of the uneasiness on the minds of many Americans during this time.

In Unquiet Eagle: The Idea of American Freedom, historian Fred Somkin argues that American prosperity in the early decades of the 19th century raised up a host of problems. The hallowed ideals of family brotherhood, of freedom of contract, of local agrarian civilization, all seemed under the gun. These centering and nation-building ideals, so critical to the Revolutionary period, seemed to be endangered by the centrifugal pull of factions, as pro- and anti-slavery forces, the Whig and Democratic parties, industrial and agrarian interests, all seemed to be at odds. During this period, moreover, the Founding Fathers were dying. The Society of Cincinnatus--to which former officers in the Revolution belonged--was by 1825 down to just a few remaining souls. The 1828 election of Andrew Jackson, the first President who was not either a Founder or a direct descendent of one, and who was moreover a "westerner," signified the coming of a new age of democratic leadership.

During this period, the dominant questions of the day were: What is America? Who is an American? Attempts at answering such questions were, of necessity, attempts at self-definition. And the answers, generated from a twin sense of American prosperity and American anxiety, often paused over the alarming historical fact that the prosperity of all previous empires had been exactly what foretold their awful collapse.

Optimists of the period persisted in seeing America as a "golden column" standing forever amidst the rubble of other, bygone empires; but the pessimists would have agreed with Lyman Beecher, the father of anti-slavery writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, when he said: "The greater our prosperity, the shorter our duration, and the more tremendous our downfall."

To invent "this new man, this American" in a form that would not fall was the task that American writers now addressed. The great writings of the age, from 1800 to 1860--by writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Wait Whitman--were largely preoccupied with this cultural work. For succeeding generations of writers and scholars, this period has become known as the American Renaissance.

At the start of this concluding period in our course, you should certainly read the editors' introduction, over pages 917 through 931 of our anthology. It neatly surveys the principal literary movements of the age. Here, we have wanted to point out four key themes to keep in mind:

the call for a distinctly American literature, in effect by declaring a kind of cultural independence from English models of writing and selfhood;
the important role ascribed to literature in the work of nation-building, from Cooper through Whitman;
the sense that the primary task of literature in that work is the development of new models for American self-identification;
and yet, at the same time, the profound uneasiness over American prosperity, a sense (in short) that American prosperity had come too easily, and that American culture would therefore have to be extremely vigilant about the potentials for degeneracy and laziness.

Seen with these concerns in mind, texts such as Emerson's "Self-Reliance," Douglass' Narrative of his life as a slave, Thoreau's Walden, Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" and Whitman's "Song of Myself" may be more sharply defined, seen as they are against the ambitions as well as the anxieties of the age that produced and received them.