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Active Enchantments: Form, Nature, and Politics in American Literature

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Active Enchantments: Form, Nature, and Politics in American Literature Active Enchantments: Form, Nature, and Politics in American Literature Vesna Kuiken Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 © 2014 Vesna Kuiken All rights reserved ABSTRACT “Active Enchantments”: Form, Nature, and Politics in American Literature Vesna Kuiken Situated at the crossroads of literary studies, ecocriticism and political theory, Active Enchantments explores a strain of thought within American literature that understands life in all of its forms to be generated not by self-determined identities, but by interconnectedness and self-abandonment. I argue that this interest led American writers across the nineteenth century to develop theories of subjectivity and of politics that not only emphasize the entanglement of the self with its environment, but also view this relationship as structured by self-overcoming. Thus, when Emerson calls such interconnectedness “active enchantment,” he means to signal life’s inherent ability to constantly surpass itself, to never fully be identical with itself. My dissertation brings to the fore the political and ecological stakes of this paradox: if our selves and communities are molded by self-abandonment, then the standard scholarly account of how nineteenth-century American literature conceptualized politics must be revised. Far from understanding community as an organic production, founded on a teleological and harmonizing principle, the writers I study reconceive it around a sense of a commonality irreducible to fixed identity. The politics emerging out of such redefinition disposes with the primacy of individual or human agency, and becomes ecological in that it renders inoperative the difference between the social and the natural, the human and the non-human, ourselves and what comprises us. It is the ecological dimension of what seems like a properly political question that brings together writers as diverse as Emerson and Sarah Orne Jewett, Margaret Fuller and Henry and William James. I argue, for example, that in Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, racial minorities emerge from geological strata as a kind of natural archive that complicates the nation’s understanding of its communal origin. When she sets her romances on Native American shell-mounds in Maine, or makes the health of a New England community depend on colonial pharmacopoeia and herbalist healing practices of the West Indies, Jewett excavates from history its silent associations and attunes us not only to the violent foundation of every communal identity, but to this identity’s entanglement in a number of unacknowledged relations. Her work thus ultimately challenges the procedures of democratic inclusiveness that, however non-violent, are nevertheless always organized around a particular notion of identity. The question of the self’s constitutive interconnectedness with the world is as central to Margaret Fuller’s work. Active Enchantments documents how Fuller’s harrowing migraines enabled her to generate a peculiar conception of the “earthly mind,” according to which the mind is material and decomposable, rather than spiritual, incorruptible or ideal. This notion eventually led her to devise a theory of the self that absolves persons from self-possession and challenges the distinctiveness of personal identity. My concluding chapter argues that Henry James’s transnational aesthetics was progressively politicized in the 1880s, and that what scholarship celebrates as the peak of his novelistic method develops, in fact, out of a network of surprising and heretofore unexplored influences – William James’s concurrent theories of corporeal emotion, Mikhail Bakunin’s anarchism, and Henry James’s friendship with Ivan Turgenev, which inflamed James’s interest in British politics, the Russo-Turkish War, and the Balkan revolutions. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Active Enchantments 1 Chapter 1 “Life is an Ecstasy”: Nature and Politics in Emerson 18 Chapter 2 “Earthly Mind”: Thinking through Pain in Margaret Fuller 61 Chapter 3 “Perfect Self-Forgetfulness”: The Interrupted Community in Sarah Orne Jewett 104 Chapter 4 “I ain’t anything”: Henry James’s Art of Conversion 148 Bibliography 214 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without two enormous intellectual debts: to Ross Posnock, whose graduate seminar on the James Family opened up for me the whole new world of the American Henry James, which led back to Emerson; and to Branka Arsić, whose book On Leaving changed everything. I am grateful for the years of guidance, patience, commitment and inspiration they gave me. Theo Davis was kind enough to read the drafts of all my chapters, and I thank her for the insightful suggestions and important questions she raised. Kir Kuiken makes everything else possible – enchantingly, lovingly. ii INTRODUCTION Active Enchantments Emerson’s early book Nature, a text often read as the mind’s idealist triumph over nature’s dead matter, contains two remarkable descriptions of an enchanted mind. There is, first, the famous eye-ball passage in Chapter I: “I am glad to the point of fear. … Standing on the bare ground,– my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”1 The second is a similar image in Chapter III: I see the spectacle of morning from the hill top over against my house, from day-break to sun-rise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long slander bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations: the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. (Nature 15, emphasis added) While these are descriptions of a person transfixed by the beauty of the world or struck dumb by an unexpected sensation of “gladness,” they are also disconcerting illustrations of paralysis, exemplified by the image of a body and a mind momentarily immobilized, arrested by the overwhelming world that continues to pulse. Emerson sometimes calls this state one of “active enchantment,” at other times he uses the words “ecstasy,” “growth,” “divine expansion” or “enlargement.” Although these states resemble mystical ecstasy, with which they share the basic attribute of “being outside oneself” (ek-stasis), the two accounts differ from religious rapture in 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Poems, edited by Joel Porte, Harold Bloom and Paul Kane (Library of America, 1983), 10. Unless otherwise indicated, all further references to Emerson’s essays are to this edition, given in the text parenthetically, either with full title, or abbreviated with the first letter of the essay’s title, and followed by the page number. 1 one crucial aspect: Emersonian enchantment lacks transcendence. Neither divine intervention, nor supernatural force, nor a set of contemplative practices overpower Emerson’s enchanted person. Nor is Emersonian enchantment reducible to the psychological state of elation or euphoria: it is not a property or an expression of individual interiority. The gladness the speaker feels in the “eyeball passage” is not the “joyous consciousness of the rich plentitude of existence.”2 It is, rather, a potentially terrifying experience of falling through the cracks, losing ground – an affect accompanying the more fundamental process of “enlargement” and depersonalization (“I am nothing; I see all”). Emerson’s enlargement, to press matters a little further, is not only a version of the mind’s imaginative conquering and shaping of the outside world (although Nature offers those idealist definitions as well). The mind’s expansion is, rather, projected out into the world’s fullness – the uncircumscribed flow of matter, percepts, forces – which is revealed as the “all” only on the condition that “I” is also experienced as “nothing.” In this state of active enchantment, the mind’s capacity to unify the self into a coherent whole – to give meaning to what it sees – is suspended, and the speaker, released from the subjective position of the “I,” is discharged into an elemental, material state (“I dilate and conspire with the morning wind”; “I am part or particle of God”). With no self to take possession of a given experience, the latter ceases to be an experience at all, becoming instead a pure, unattributable affect. For a brief moment, the speaker becomes impersonal – and hence, “transparent.” The two passages above are illustrative of two phenomena: 1) the way our individual selves operate; and 2) the way the world operates. On this account, the world – another name for life or nature – is not some distant exterior, separate from us, but an infinite onrush of 2 Robert D. Richardson, “Emerson and Nature,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Joel Porte and Saundra Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 104. 2 matter, forces, intensities, “particles,” and “currents” in constant transformation, of which we too “partake” (“I seem to partake its rapid transformations”). At the same time, our selves are not stable, self-enclosed, autonomous individualities either, but temporally (and temporarily) coherent coagulations of matter, sensations, affects, perceptions and their constantly transforming relations, which the labor of the mind processes,
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