1 % ^ THE TRANSCENDENTAL ADMIRAL: RE-VISIONS OF COLUMBUS IN EMERSON, THOREAU, AND WHITMAN by SCOTT G. PHILLIPS, B.A. A THESIS IN ENGLISH Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial FulfiUment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS Approved August, 1997 y^ ) ^9 T TABLE OF CONTENTS ^^f' CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. ORIGINS OF THE COLUMBUS MYTH 3 m. EMERSON 14 IV. THOREAU 23 V. WHITMAN 32 VI. CONCLUSION 50 WORKS CITED 52 11 y^ CHAPTERI INTRODUCTION In the Introduction to Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays, Ed Folsom relates the story of how noted Whitman scholar Charles Feinberg was denied his request for a Centennial exhibition by the Library of Congress. "1992," Feinberg was told, "would be Columbus's year." Of course, as Folsom points out, 1992 was anything but a banner year for the once-celebrated mariner. While the long-rising wave of debunkings and deconstructions crested and crashed on the Quincentennial and the legacy it was intended to commemorate, Whitman's Centennial was a rousing national and intemational success. Yet, while Whitman scholarship and readings flourished during 1992, little notice was given to the coincidence of these anniversaries or to the poet's repeated identifications with, and literary appropriation of, our most protean and problematic American icon. While this silence may be attributable to an attempt at critical kindness towards the toasted bard (in contemporary criticism, Columbus is more Hkely to be represented as a symbol of imperialism, racism, phallocentricism, and ecocide than as a heroic visionary or intrepid world-finder), it is also indicative of a tendency in twentieth-century literary scholarship to underplay or avoid altogether the problem of this now-vilified American hero's persistent presence in American transcendental literature. This essay wiU explore the writings of three of America's most prolific and influential literary transcendentalists-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman-in an attempt to clarify the role the Columbus myth played in the development of each author's version of the "transcendental" vision. ^ The coincidence of the anniversaries of Whitman's death and Columbus's landfall could, of course, be dismissed as exactly that, unrelated incidents which, while conveniently situated for a scholar in search of a subject, are finally unremarkable and unimportant. Nothing, however, could be farther from the truth. Whitman's death marks the end of a distinct and important period in American thought and culture. As the last of America's literary transcendentalists, Whitman's demise arguably meant the end of the "American Renaissance," an era which, though rooted in European Romanticism, in time produced an unprecedented and uniquely-American literature which contributed immeasurably to the American sense of identity. Whitman's death also corresponds with a pivotal moment in the history of the Columbus myth. As many thousands of admirers filed past the poet's body in his home in Camden, New Jersey, the nation's most celebrated artisans, architects, and engineers were gathering in Chicago to construct what modem historians cite as one of the most important and far-reaching events of postbellum American history. The World's Columbian Exposition-the largest, most widely attended, and most international world's fair of the nineteenth century-ushered in the dawn of the modem era, serving not only as a showcase for revolutionary innovations in consumer-driven manufacturing, travel, and entertainment technologies, but as a fomm, albeit muted, for social and historical reappraisals of American history, myth, and destiny. (Frederick Jackson Turner, for example, used the Exposition to announce his now-famous hypothesis concerning the closure of the American frontier.) Only nominally about Columbus or the anniversary of his "discovery," the Exposition celebrated American ingenuity, progress, and coUective consumption while bidding the nineteenth century, and its problematic symbology of spiritual individuahsm mixed with Manifest X Destiny, a fond but firm farewell. By the century's end, Columbus had largely outlived his usefulness as an effective national symbol. Transcendentalism, too, had lost its always precarious public appeal as a philosophical and aesthetic mode of thought. But to understand how this happened, and why the nineteenth-century m^rth of Columbus is important to our understanding of American transcendental literature, we must first look to the origins of this m^rth. ^ CHAPTERII ORIGINS OF THE COLUMBUS MYTH In his essay "Columbia, Columbus, Columbianism," historian Thomas J. Schlereth traces the public American history of the Columbus myth over three chronological periods. In the first, or "Columbia," period, the figure of Columbus is represented in the popular consciousness not as a historical or even mythical voyager-hero, but as an allegorical, and consistently female, classical deity. It appears that in the Colonial era Columbus and his legendary exploits were largely ignored: "The year 1692 passed without a single word or deed of recorded commemoration" (Sale 331). "Americans first discovered the discover," Schlereth notes, "during their quest for independence and nationhood; successive generations molded Columbus into a multipurpose American hero, a national symbol to be used variously in the quest for a coUective identity" (937). One manifestation of this quest can be seen in the rise of the word "Columbia" as a synonym for the New World. WhUe the first usage (1697) of the feminine adjectival form of "Columbus" is credited to Massachusetts Chief Justice Samuel SewaU (Schlereth 939)-and the term also makes an appearance in a few pre-RevoIutionary, and even loyalist, verses (Bushman 42-43)-the appeUation only came into popular currency in the mid-to-Iate 1700s in a shared attempt to infuse the budding repubUc with a sense of its own history and romantic self-sufficiency. Yet, as the early repubUc attempted to separate itself from European culture, it nonetheless felt the need to work within the framework of European cultural models. The goddess "Columbia," for example, was represented in eighteenth and early-nineteenth century art, engravings, and poUtical cartoons in one of two conventional forms. The first "X depicts a fair-skinned and stately woman of European ancestry who, dressed in the robes of ancient Greece, bears aloft the flame of liberty. A modern remnant of this image can be seen in the production logo for the motion picture studio Columbia Pictures. The second form-an image which, though consistently present in American art, would become more popular with European than American audiences-depicts a half-naked "Indian Princess" placed typicaUy in a pose of submission and/or terror. Though both images were clearly derivative counterparts to the goddess Britannia, each was intended to provide America with a recognizably "civiUzed" emblem and a symbol of its much-desired non-British European ancestry. While the origins of the name "Columbia" as an altemative to "America" are unclear and hotly debated, it is generaUy agreed that the word "first entered the Americain ethos in literary discourse" (emphasis added) (Kauffinan 158). The freed slave PhiUis Wheatley, for example, penned a number of poems in the neoclassical mode which gained considerable attention. Though this notice was due largely to her race and ex-slave status (Bushman 42)-WheatIey is credited with being America's first African-American female poet-her verse was generaUy considered competent and appropriately decorous. (In one notable and reveaUng deferral from this judgment, however, Thomas Jefferson declared her verse beneath the dignity of criticism) (Hart 712). But it was Wheatley's 1775 tribute to "his exceUency Gen. Washington" which has often been cited as America's fij-st patriotic usage of the name "Columbia": One century scarce perform'd its destin'd round, When GalUc powers Columbia's fury found; And so may you, whoever dares disgrace the land of freedom's heaven-defended race! Fixed are the eyes of nations on the scales, For in their hopes Columbia's arm prevaUs. X Anon Britannia droops the pensive head, WhUe round increase the rising hiUs of dead. Ah! cmel blindness to Columbia's state! Lament thy thirst of boundless power too late. (29-38) Albert J. Hoyt, however, cites another woman poet as the first American to use "Columbia" in a revolutionary context. Mrs. Mercy Warren, wife of Gen. James Warren and sister of James Otis Jr., colonial patriots in the Revolutionary War, pubUshed in the Boston Gazette of Febmary 13, 1775 a poem identifying "Columbia" as a land "where Liberty, a happy goddess reigned / where no proud despot mles with lawless sway / Nor orphan's spoUs become the Minion's prey" (Kauffinan 158). Though Hoyt and others have uncovered a number of simUar minor instances of this patriotic use of "Columbia" arising in conjunction with the American Revolution, it would faU to a pair of epic poetic treatments of the explorer, and his first "comprehensive" American biographer, to set into motion the century-long process of America's "discovery" of Columbus and his transformation into a popular and useful national symbol. It was in the early revolutionary period that PhiUp Freneau began his career-Iong personification of America in the form of a mythic and mascuUne "Columbia," and in so doing transmuted the "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" "from a personage of ItaUan birth and Spanish employ into the first American" (Schlereth 939). "American Liberty, A Poem" (1775), was Freneau's expression of the patriotic fervor of a whole generation of young American poets known as the "rising glory school" (Bushman 48). Praising "Columbia, America sometimes so caUed from Columbus the first discoverer" (143n), the poet exclaims: Where darling peace with smiling aspect stood, Lo! the grim soldier stalks in quest of blood: What madness, heaven, has made Britannia frown? Who plans our schemes to puU Columbia down? (23-26) But Freneau had earUer shown an interest in the Uterary possibiUties of the discoverer's story, and in his teen years had already produced a number of poems in which Columbus played a featured role.