“What a Place to Live”: Home and Wilderness in Domestic American Travel Literature, 1835–1883
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“WHAT A PLACE TO LIVE”: HOME AND WILDERNESS IN DOMESTIC AMERICAN TRAVEL LITERATURE, 1835–1883 DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By James A. Weaver, M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 2006 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Steven Fink, Adviser Professor Susan S. Williams _____________________________ Professor Jared Gardner Adviser English Graduate Program ABSTRACT Focusing on the period 1835–1883, this dissertation examines how authors of nineteenth-century domestic American travel literature conceived of the relationships between ideas of the wilderness and of home. While American travel literature as a broad field has garnered a large amount of critical attention in past decade, much of that focus has been on Americans traveling abroad. As a result, texts documenting travel within the domestic United States have not received the critical attention they deserve. This dissertation seeks to address this gap in current criticism by analyzing texts by Washington Irving, Caroline Kirkland, Henry David Thoreau, George William Curtis, Bayard Taylor, Mark Twain, and Helen Hunt Jackson. In arguing that these works of domestic American travel literature redefine the wilderness as a potential home that carries both personal and national significances for these authors, I reveal the continuities not only between nineteenth-century conceptions of nature and home but also among the literary movements of the century. This dissertation adds to existing travel literature scholarship and ecocritical discussions of nineteenth-century American literature (a) by addressing a set of texts that has been undervalued for its contributions to American thinking about the relationship between humans and nature in particular and to American literary history in general; (b) ii by analyzing the interconnections that exist not only among these less-studied texts but also between them and their better-known fictional counterparts; and most importantly, (c) by offering a new understanding of nineteenth-century representations of the fundamental connection between the American wilderness and the home and the various roles that relationship played in American literature and culture. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to thank Cynthia Greenleaf, who has been a wonderful source of strength and inspiration during this project, and who is the best imaginable partner in both the home and the wilderness. I thank my mother, Emily Weaver, for her unwavering support, generosity, and love; my father, John Weaver, for his unabashed excitement about my work; and my siblings, Deirdre, Julia, and Fred, for keeping their younger brother laughing and learning. I am deeply indebted to Steven Fink, my adviser, for providing years of intellectual support, encouragement, and guidance, without which this dissertation would not have been possible. I am also grateful to Susan S. Williams and Jared Gardner for their thoughtful feedback on this project and their guidance throughout my graduate career. I also thank James Phelan for his advice and support over the years. Matt Giordano, Jen Desiderio, Matt Delconte, Liz Delconte, Mark Bayer, and Theresa Kulbaga each provided intellectual stimulation and collegial friendship at various stages of my work. And finally, my cats Blackwell and Alice deserve my gratitude for their companionship during the past several years—their visits to my lap made the long hours in front of the computer much more enjoyable than they otherwise would have been. iv VITA April 18, 1976............................................Born: Baton Rouge, Louisiana 1998............................................................B.A., English, Allegheny College 2000............................................................M.A., English, The Ohio State University 1999–2005..................................................Graduate Teaching and Administrative Assistant, The Ohio State University PUBLICATIONS 1. “Rehabilitative Storytelling: The Narrator-Narratee Relationship in J. California Cooper’s Family.” MELUS 30.1 (Spring 2005): 109–134. 2. Review of Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism: The Tide of a Great Popular Movement, by Jeffrey Alan Melton. Prose Studies 25.3 (December 2002): 107– 111. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract...............................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................iv Vita......................................................................................................................................v Chapters: Introduction: “Not a Place to Visit”: Nineteenth-Century Domestic American Travel Literature...................................1 1. “Home on the Outskirts of Civilization”: Nation, Nature, and Community in Washington Irving and Caroline Kirkland........................................................24 2. “A Very Centre of Civilization”: Henry David Thoreau and the Naturalized Home.................................................84 3. “What Switzerland is to Europe”: Nationalism, Tourism, and the Technological Sublime in George William Curtis and Bayard Taylor......................................................129 4. Unsettled Nature, Unsettling Home: Dislocation and Transplantation in Mark Twain and Helen Hunt Jackson..............................................................173 Coda: Enjoying Grander Company: Beyond Nineteenth-Century Domestic American Travel Literature...................236 Bibliography....................................................................................................................242 vi INTRODUCTION “NOT A PLACE TO VISIT”: NINETEENTH-CENTURY DOMESTIC AMERICAN TRAVEL LITERATURE In his essay collection The Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder writes, “There has been no wilderness without some kind of human presence for several thousand years. Nature is not a place to visit, it is home—and within that home territory there are more familiar and less familiar places” (7). Similarly, at the outset of “Walking, or The Wild,” Henry David Thoreau asserts a fundamental link between humans and nature. “I wish to speak a word for Nature,” he proclaims, “for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society” (592). Separated though they are by some 140 years of American history, Snyder and Thoreau raise the same important question: How should we live in relation to our natural environment? Their answers to that question—that nature is home, and we are part and parcel of it—erase any clear boundaries between the territories of nature and culture and wilderness and home, suggesting instead that these opposed terms are less oppositional than they have traditionally been understood to be. This dissertation examines the points at which authors of nineteenth-century domestic American travel literature experience those “less familiar places” in nature as the “more familiar” place of home. 1 The problem of the relationship between humans and nature addressed by Snyder and Thoreau comprises an important theme throughout the American literary tradition, one that becomes of particular interest during the nineteenth century. As the United States expanded geographically and as industrialization and economic expansion enabled increased leisure travel, domestic American travelers began to see the wilderness itself as a possible destination. Several factors played a part in this development. The infrastructure of transportation within the United States improved in the early nineteenth century, marked by such events as the National Road reaching Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1818, and Columbus, Ohio, in 1833; the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825; and the opening of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1830. By midcentury, a network of railroads connected the major cities of the nation, linking New York to Chicago, Philadelphia to Charleston, thus enabling not only more efficient commercial transportation but also increased leisure travel. As the nation’s transportation network was growing, so too were its geographical boundaries expanding. With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the nation added the land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains to its territory. In 1819, the United States acquired Florida from Spain, and in the 1840s and 1850s, the nation set its northern boundary with Canada through the Oregon Treaty, annexed the Republic of Texas, and established its claim to the desert southwest and California through the Mexican War and Gadsden Purchase. Coinciding with this expansion of U.S. national boundaries was a relocation and removal of the American Indian inhabitants of these territories. In 1795, the Treaty of Greenville ceded some seventeen million acres of Ohio from Shawnee Indian possession to the United States. Throughout the 1800s, then, the United States carried out an aggressive 2 expansionist policy that dislocated American Indian tribes from their traditional lands. That policy is perhaps most clearly embodied by the early 1830s Trail of Tears, during which Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek Indians were forcefully removed from the southeastern United States and placed on reservations in the territories that