Asylum in American Narratives of Natural Disaster
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Shelter from the Storm: Asylum in American Narratives of Natural Disaster by Alexandra K. Rahr A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Alexandra K. Rahr 2014 Shelter from the Storm: Asylum in American Narratives of Natural Disaster Alexandra K. Rahr Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto 2014 Abstract America's origin story depicts the nation as sanctuary incarnate. From the Puritans seeking religious refuge to generations of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, to slaves fleeing north across the Ohio River, in the national imaginary America functions as asylum extant -- as the end of the story. This dissertation interrogates this iconic narrative at a critical historical moment. Reading narratives of natural disaster -- accounts of historical drought, flood, and hurricane -- it produces a nuanced theory of refuge which counters the myth of nationalized sanctuary. In an era of normative catastrophe, narratives of 'natural' disaster problematize the discourse of the nation-state as the exemplary guarantor of refuge. This theory of asylum constitutes a vital prehistory for increasingly urgent critical engagement with vulnerable citizenship and the emerging canon of eco-catastrophe narratives. Chapter One examines the Dust Bowl as represented in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Woody Guthrie's folk song 'This Land is Your Land' (1940) and documents of the National Park Service (1936). These disaster narratives demonstrate ii that asylum is defined both by an inviolable border, and by imaginative expansion beyond that defensible perimeter to borderless, abstracted, and infinite refuge. Chapter Two examines the texts of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Flood Relief Chairman Herbert Hoover's memoir (1952), President Calvin Coolidge's 1927 State of the Union Address as well as 'Saving the Day' (1928) -- a sermon by Rev. Sutton E. Griggs -- constitute a trenchant critique of the nationalized provision of refuge. Delving further into the 1927 flood, Chapter Three considers Richard Wright's short stories 'The Man Who Saw the Flood' (1937) and 'Down by the Riverside' (1938) as well as William Faulkner's novella Old Man (1939). These texts demonstrate how racialized asylum subverts the conventions of the disaster narrative's promise of catastrophic renewal. Concluding with a contemporary disaster, Chapter Four examines Dave Eggers' Zeitoun (2009), James Lee Burke's short story 'Jesus Out to Sea' (2006) and Spike Lee's documentary film When the Levees Broke (2006). In these Hurricane Katrina narratives, refuge's doubled nature is revealed, and asylum is re-configured as perilous as well as sheltering. iii Acknowledgments Throughout this project I have benefitted from many skilful readers and advisors. Both as readers and as listeners, Susannah Ketchum-Glass, Miriam Novick, Caroline O'Connell and Leslie Barnes generously offered astute insight. Fiona Coll's intellectual companionship throughout this project was both formative and indispensible. Sue Ferrier introduced me to Zeitoun, James Lee Burke and the music of Tremé. And at a critical juncture, Rose Ann MacGillivray asked all the right hard questions. I have also been uncommonly lucky in my academic advisors. Michael Cobb’s expansive vision for what this project could be was both inspirational and instructive. Naomi Morgenstern’s careful reading and considered attention to foundational questions grounded this project in intellectual rigour. Both Naomi and showed me new ways of thinking. Andrea Most was in every way an exemplary supervisor: patient, encouraging, academically exacting and a model of engaged scholarship. She taught me how to ask consequential questions, and how to turn an instinct into an idea. It has been a pleasure learning from her. I am also very grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which generously supported this project. My friends and family have been essential to this project. Ian McDonald in particular read every single word at least twice and heard them many more, and cooked so very many dinners after so very many long days. Throughout this project, as in all the time before and since, I am deeply indebted to my family. My mother, Maria Desjardins, was a source of unwavering support, and my father, Nick Rahr, was an enthusiastic, engaged reader. For them, and for my siblings, I am grateful beyond words. Finally, to my husband, Andrew Adams. He solved every problem, formatted every footnote, and opens every door. This project is dedicated to him. iv Table of Contents Seeking Refuge in 'Nature's nation'.....................................................................................1 Chapter 1: ‘I been a-wonderin’ why we can’t do that all over’: Expansionist Asylum in the American Dust Bowl....................................................................................................32 Chapter 2: 'Mississippi River Blues': Engineering Refuge in the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927...............................................................................................................................76 Chapter 3: 'No more water, but fire next time': Drowning Noah's Ark in the Great Mississippi Flood.............................................................................................................122 Chapter 4: 'They're Trying to Wash Us Away': Hurricane Katrina's Hazardous Sanctuary .........................................................................................................................157 Concluding Notes: New Arks in an Age of Disaster.....………………..........................199 Works Consulted..............................................................................................................203 v Introduction Seeking Refuge in "Nature's nation" In the summer of 1635, a hurricane rushed up the Atlantic coast all the way to New England. William Bradford, the governor of the Pilgrim colony at Plymouth, recorded the storm and its severity in his journal: Such a mighty storm of wind and rain as none living in these parts, either English or Indian, ever saw...It blew down sundry houses and uncovered others...It blew down many hundred thousands of trees, turning up the stronger by the roots and breaking the higher pine trees off in the middle...The signs and marks of it will remain this hundred years in these parts where it was sorest. Here Bradford catalogues the damage wrought by the storm, recounting roofs torn from houses and trees torn up by their roots.1 Having surveyed the disaster, the governor declared it unprecedented. "None living in these parts" had ever before seen such a storm. And the hurricane was unparalleled not merely according to the recently-arrived colonists, but also in the experience of the Native Americans, the original residents of the not-so New World. Bradford invokes the Aboriginals as a legitimating primeval memory here. They substantiate the settlers' sense that this natural disaster was indeed catastrophic, was in fact unparalleled. The brief fifteen-year history of Plymouth colony is bolstered by the long history of the Natives, who are denoted here as the carriers of territorial memory. Bradford concludes his hurricane narrative with an assertion that the unprecedented storm was no passing phenomenon. For although the hurricane has dissipated, its scars endure: "The signs and marks of it will remain this hundred years in these parts where it was sorest." Even after the winds subside and the skies brighten, 1 Nicholas Coch, a professor of geology at New York's Queens College, recently demonstrated the severity of the 1635 hurricane. He collected contemporary descriptions of the storm, noting that “the documentation was better than any hurricane until the mid-1800s. That's a story in itself." Coch then worked with the National Hurricane Center to create a computer model of the tempest, and concluded that the 1635 hurricane was the worst in the region's history until the deadly 1938 storm known as the Long Island Express. "It was an extraordinary event, a major hurricane," Coch asserts, "and nearly knocked out British culture in America." 1 2 natural disaster leaves behind a trace. The disaster endures. Its "signs and marks" convert colonial America's landscape to a hazard-scape, and then to a palimpsest which retains traces of the storm. Bradford was not the only colonist to remark on the devastating storm of 1635. His fellow governor, John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, also recorded his impressions of the tempest. His colony only six years into settlement at the time of the hurricane, Winthrop shares Bradford's awe at the storm's ferocity. The tempest "blew with such violence, with abundance of rain, that it blew down many hundreds of trees, " Winthrop observes, "overthrew some houses, and drove the ships from their anchors" (155). Unlike Bradford, however, Winthrop depicts not just physical damage to homes and trees, but also recounts stories of settlers caught in the maelstrom: In this tempest, the James of Bristol, having one hundred passengers, honest people of Yorkshire...was driven within a cable's length of the rocks...In the same tempest a bark of Mr. Allerton's was cast away upon Cape Ann, and twenty-one persons drowned...None were saved but one Mr. Thatcher and his wife who were cast on shore and preserved by a powder horn and a bag with a flint, and a goat