East Tennessee State University Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University Electronic Theses and Dissertations Student Works 5-2015 Encounters with the American Prairie: Realism, Idealism, and the Search for the Authentic Plains in the Nineteenth Century Jacob L. Vines East Tennessee State University Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.etsu.edu/etd Part of the American Art and Architecture Commons, American Literature Commons, Cultural History Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Theory and Criticism Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Vines, Jacob L., "Encounters with the American Prairie: Realism, Idealism, and the Search for the Authentic Plains in the Nineteenth Century" (2015). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 2511. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/2511 This Thesis - Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Works at Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Encounters with the American Prairie: Realism, Idealism, and the Search for the Authentic Plains in the Nineteenth Century A thesis presented to the faculty of the Department of Literature and Language East Tennessee State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in English by Jacob L. Vines May 2015 Dr. Mark Holland, Chair Dr. Tess Lloyd Dr. Michael Cody Keywords: James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Margaret Fuller, Hudson River School, Great Plains ABSTRACT Encounters with the American Prairie: Realism, Idealism, and the Search for the Authentic Plains in the Nineteenth Century by Jacob L. Vines The Great Plains are prevalent among the literature of the nineteenth century, but receive hardly a single representation among the landscapes of the Hudson River School. This is certainly surprising; the public was teeming with interest in the Midwest and yet the principal landscape painters who aimed to represent and idealize a burgeoning America offered hardly a glance past the Mississippi River. This geographical silence is the result of a tension between idealistic and empirical representations of the land, one echoed in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie, Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies, and Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Margaret Fuller’s more physical and intimate Transcendentalism unifies this tension in a manner that heralds the rise of the Luminists and the plains-scapes of Worthington Whittredge. 2 Copyright 2015 by Jacob L. Vines All Rights Reserved 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A project of this size and scope is not dreamed in an evening. Looking back upon my graduate career, I can sense the hints of this project brewing as early as my first semester. Somewhere within will be found the insights of each instructor I have been fortunate enough to meet. First and foremost, I am indebted to Dr. Mark Holland for his contagious and passionate approach to literature of the nineteenth century as well as his direction and continuous encouragement. Dr. Michael Cody’s careful considerations of the portrayals of nature in the era are appropriated here. Dr. Tess Lloyd has forever impacted my understanding of the relationship between place and person, the central concern of this project. I would also like to thank Dr. Scott Honeycutt for his open-door policy and his willingness to discuss my thesis in so many unplanned meetings. Finally, I owe more than gratitude to my wife, whose empathetic and patient heart is a constant source of encouragement to those around her. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT.....................................................................................................................................2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................................4 Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................................7 The Great Plains.................................................................................................................16 Concerning Theory............................................................................................................21 2. THE EARLY ROMANTIC DILEMMA: COLE’S COMPOSITIONS AND COOPER’S DESERT PRAIRIE..................................................................................................................24 Composition and Empiricism in Cole’s Views and Visions..............................................32 The Impossible Pastoral: The Cautionary Allegory of The Course of Empire..................36 The Romantic Desert and the Unrefined Hero: Paralyzing Ambivalence in Cooper’s The Prairie................................................................................................................................49 Conclusion.........................................................................................................................64 3. A ROMANCE IN REVISION: THE SUBVERSIVE PRAIRIES OF WASHINGTON IRVING AND THE SPECIMEN PAINTINGS OF ASHER DURAND................................68 The Romantic Text and the Subversive Subtext in A Tour on the Prairies......................72 Asher Durand and Thomas Cole: Kindred Spirits?...........................................................89 Conclusion.........................................................................................................................96 4. FAITHFUL OBSERVERS OF THE PRAIRIES: FULLER’S SUMMER ON THE LAKES AND THE LUMINIST PLAINS-SCAPES OF WORTHINGTON WHITTREDGE.............98 Ways of Seeing and Ways of Being in Summer on the Lakes.........................................101 5 Fuller’s Faithful Observations of the Prairies..................................................................110 Fuller’s Luminist Corollary: Worthington Whittredge....................................................115 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................120 WORKS CITED..........................................................................................................................123 VITA............................................................................................................................................130 6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Barbara Novak begins her American Painting in the Nineteenth Century with a discussion of the early American portraitist John Singleton Copley in which is outlined a significant tension in his works. Novak argues that Copley’s paintings are conflicted between an empirical, object- seeking eye and an idealist artistic formula inherited from the European style. The thing- oriented, spontaneous composition in Copley’s portraits of Nathaniel Hurd and Paul Revere reveal an affinity for the empirical, but elements of compositional formula demonstrated in pieces like Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Izard interrupt the spirited physicality in even his most empirical studies. This disharmony is perhaps best exemplified in the lower third of Paul Revere, where the attention to reflection gives a moving luminosity to the silver tea kettle and a solidity to the grained table, but this luminosity is muted by the dull, flat, weightless shape of a bulbous pillow beneath Revere’s forearm. The tension between the empirical and the ideal is not merely Copley’s, but is manifest almost universally in the masterpieces of painters (and, I will also include, writers) throughout America’s nineteenth century, carrying within it numerous implications regarding personal, spiritual and national identities. Novak explains, Holding out a Utopian dream of access to the noble superiority of the Grand Style, [the style] lured abroad many other Americans—West, Trumbull, Vanderlyn, Morse, Allston, Cole—in search of a heroic ideal they could not find or did not see at home, creating schisms in their works that caused them to paint like children of divorced parents—as indeed they were—with visiting rights on one side of the ocean or the other. (American Painting 4) 7 Despite this desire to work within the mode of those grand compositions, these artists were, at the same time, fascinated by what was physical and individual, particular rather than formulaic. Novak argues that “the need to grasp reality, to ascertain the physical thereness of things seems to be a necessary component of the American experience” (American Painting 7). The metaphysical, religious, and idealist ideologies of late eighteenth-century England were still resonating throughout the early republic, and yet those ideals seemed utterly incapable of facing the unprecedented magnitude and rawness of the wilderness—the physical thereness— discovered in the New World. The American experience of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth century partially revolved around these competing visions of the wilderness; the artistic endeavors of the era—among them the works of Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, Martin Johnson Heade, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne—acted as imaginative spaces in which this tension was explored incessantly. Art (including literature) in America became a mediating center between man, nature and God in which man’s relationship to both nature and the divine were displayed,