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(2014
midterm assignment) Sample Student Midterm answers 2014 #1: Long Essay |
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Jonathon Anderson
Early America as a Cosmic Space
“Oh my America, my new found lande…”
–
John Donne, “Elegie: To his Mistris Going to Bed”
When early settlers reached the American
mainland and began to explore, we can imagine something of the sense of awe
induced simply by the sheer scale of the continent. Coming from England or
Spain, these unsuspecting people were entering a space approximately
thirty-eight times the size of the British Isles or eighteen times the size of
Spain. The more Europeans explored the new land, through forests, plains, or
deserts, the more it would seem functionally limitless: the sagas of countless
generations had played out in physical spaces almost stacked on top of each
other between the English Channel and Mediterranean Sea. This expansive quality
finds expression in the origin stories of the Native Americans, where Good Mind
and Bad Mind might engage in epic struggles across the land and enormous caves
may hold “all the animals” or an entire race of human beings.
The Europeans, too, experienced the larger-than-life scope of
the New World, as when Cabeza de Vaca describes weathering a “great storm” that
carried men off ten leagues and disfigured them so badly that they were
unrecognizable. After the day of “two contrasting storms…the people…were so
terrified by what had happened that they were afraid to set to sea again in
winter and begged the Governor to remain there for that season.”
The elemental presence of nature in America quickly transforms its
network of meanings for Europeans into what it had been for the Native Americans
all along; it becomes a cosmic space.
The first impressions of this place excite
Columbus’s mind into confusion. What turns out to be an island “is so extensive
that [he thinks] it might be the mainland.” His language is already transforming
the land mass when he offers descriptions like “ports along the sea-coast
excelling any in Christendom” or [the mountains] “are most beautiful, of a
thousand varied forms,…full of trees of endless varieties.”
It seems perfectly in keeping with Native
American (the Apache, Zuni, and Iroquois we read) concept of a world of cosmic
hope when the Pilgrims set out, as Bradford says, with “a great hope and inward
zeal,” crossing a “vast and furious ocean” to arrive in the “vast…countries of
America, which are fruitful.” They are crossing not only a physically “vast and
furious” distance, but, as they discover when they realize the magnitude of
their distance from the world they knew (“they had now no friends to welcome
them nor inns to
entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or much less towns to
repair to, to seek for succor.”), they have crossed just as vast and furious
spiritual distance. They have successfully “revert[ed]
to” a sort of “ancient purity, and recover[ed] their primitive order, liberty,
and beauty,” but the true immensity
of what they have done hits them when they set foot on this dreamed-of Unknown.
Once Europeans start to
adjust to the cosmic scale of America, their hopes and fears undergo a similar
change. If we cannot bring ourselves to admire anything else in John Smith’s
A General History of Virginia, we
might be able to appreciate the characteristically American concept of the
larger-than-life hero. Smith constantly appeals to an aesthetic of myth-making,
transmuting his experiences into the realm of legend. This seems to me merely a
response to an experience of America on what I have been calling a cosmic plane;
Smith has created a character based on John Smith (himself) who is a metaphor
(as things tend to be when considering things from a mythic standpoint)
referencing certain ideals while still containing grains of historical fact.
One only has to read a
little of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative to see something similar going
on in which she uses a Biblical framework to connect her story with a larger
narrative worked out on the cosmic stage. (Nor has this tradition of America as
stage for the working out of cosmic dramas abated in the intervening centuries.)
In fact, thinking of America metaphorically opens a path towards the possibility
of assimilating the disparate stories that filter through time into something
uniquely American.
