Rosalyn Mack
LITR 5535 2003 midterm

 The Geography of Early American Romanticism

Geography played a major part in shaping American Romanticism.  European colonists, coming from cities and/or small hamlets, found themselves surrounded by wilderness – forests that stretched on for miles, rivers and mountains, wild animals – all seem to have worked towards creating a body of work that deals with freedom within the American geography.  The concepts of the landscape and freedom seem permanently linked to each other.

For Europeans such as Christopher Columbus, the vast differences between the New World landscape and Europe were enthralling.  His first writings about America emphasized the abundance of flora and fauna to be found and the ease with which it could be acquired.  Here was a place that had “…very many sierras and very lofty mountains, beyond comparison…most beautiful, of a thousand shapes, and all are accessible and filled with trees of a thousand kinds and tall, and they seem to touch the sky.  And I am told that they never lose their foliage, as I can understand, for I saw them as green and as lovely as they are in Spain in May…” (Norton 27). 

This first descriptive narrative of America as a sort of rediscovered Eden not only set the stage for the European migration, but became the basis of much of the European-American writings that took place for the next several hundred years.   The image of the American landscape was planted in European minds and would not be shaken, only redefined.

Taking Columbus’s Edenic America one step further, John Smith used the American wilderness in Virginia as a means of recasting himself as a brave and noble hero.  Literally carving a space out of the forests, Jamestown was meant to be an oasis of civility amid the wilds of nature.  But deprivation forced the men to leave the compound and directly interact with untamed nature.  And, like the Garden of Eden, the Virginia wilderness provided them with “rivers…covered with swans, geese, ducks, and cranes…good bread, Virginia peas, pumpkins and putchamins, fish, fowl, and divers sort of wild beasts” (Norton 47).  This natural abundance of food allowed the men to think about the wilderness around them rather than merely fighting to survive. 

Within these writings, Smith creates the landscape as both a giver and taker of life.  They resonate with the idea that Man is meant to conquer and tame the land and all nature’s bounty is there to satisfy his needs.  In A Description of New England, Smith emphasizes that in America “what exercise should more delight them, than ranging daily those unknown parts, using fowling and fishing, for hunting and hawking?” (Norton 56).  This America-as-Eden dynamic, created by Columbus and reinforced by Smith, reasserts the viewed of the New World as a potential source of wealth and industry, a ripe apple waiting to be plucked by land-hungry Europeans. 

Strangely both Columbus and Smith fail to write of the physical exertion necessary to survive in this new environment.  Columbus speaks of the difficulties he encountered dealing with the natives, and later the Spanish colonists, but either he knows nothing of the dangers and struggle of colonization or he chooses to ignore them in his writings.  Smith hints at the near Herculean tasks necessary to create civilization out of wilderness but avoids detailed descriptions.  But he does describe the struggle to map and learn the land around him.  The difficulty of constructing a township out of untamed land is overshadowed by the magnitude of the wilderness around them.  It’s the land that holds Columbus and Smith enthralled.

Smith portrays himself as a man who cannot live within the confines of civilization.  He is constantly heading off into the surrounding forest and battling nature for survival.  Smith found, or created, many opportunities to experience high adventure in the forests surrounding the Jamestown settlement.  In his attempt to define the scope of the wilderness around him, he explored the forests, battling not only the general landscape but the Indians as well.  Neither rivers nor trees nor wild Indians could stop him.  He becomes the superman, shaped and refined through his adventures in nature. 

However, not every colonists viewed the American wilderness as an obstacle to be conquered and tamed.  Mary Rowlandson, and many others like her, cherished the safety of the fortified villages.  The worst imaginable event was an Indian attack.  Besides the burning and killing, it seems like the worst result of such an attack was capture.  The captives were taken into the forests where they had no skills but were expected to adapt themselves for survival, i.e. live as the Indians lived.  These captivity narratives emphasized the barbarity, horror and shock of such transplantation. The Europeans seem ill-prepared or incapable of acting in accord with nature; they must either conquer it or become its victim.

It’s important to note that Indians were considered as much a part of the geography as the trees or rivers.  Much of early American writings depict Indians as wild savages, so close to nature that they can blend into the landscape and become invisible to the civilized eye.  Both Columbus and Smith create the “wild savage” willing to befriend the hapless European but not without a price or some kind of treachery.  There is often the sentiment that the Indian resistance to European colonization is puzzling and unexpected, such as when a tree limb suddenly falls on you.  It can be said that within the context of these writings, nature fights back in the form of the Indians but even that changes with time.

By the late eighteenth century, the literary uses of the American landscape had subtly changed from a test of a man’s physical strength to a test of his emotional and spiritual fortitude.  Nature became gothic.  The sweeping forests and breathtaking vistas of Columbus and Smith became the dark, gloomy and disturbing world of Washington Irving and, to a certain extent, James Fenimore Cooper.

Irving took the Catskill Mountains and crafted them into an other-worldly mélange of twisted trees, screeching owls and ghostlike vegetation.  In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Irving creates a truly gothic world out of the trees and other bits of nature.  A landscape where “[the] swamp and stream and awful woodland…at that witching hour…the moan of the whippoorwill from the hill-side; the boding cry of the tree-toad, that harbinger of storm; the dreary hooting of the screech-owl, or the sudden rustling in the thicket of birds frightened from their roost” (Heath Anthology 2097) capture the fear of the unknown that nature evokes in mankind. 

His use of geography as the settings for his stories emphasizes the importance of the landscape in American Romanticism.  The gnarled trees and winding paths serve as nature’s lure for the unsuspecting human.  Within the confines of nature, man must be more aware and more careful because too much freedom can be dangerous, especially when it involves wandering through the wilderness. 

The Last of the Mohicans embraces the idea of man within nature, incorporating Columbus’s wilderness paradise and Irving’s gothic wonderment with Smith’s European superman.  The novel could not exist outside the American frontier.  Unlike Irving’s use of gothic elements of the landscape to stir the imagination and create the proper mood for his stories, Cooper’s landscape is almost another character within the story. 

Geography is so important that the novel begins by establishing the location of the events to follow.  Cooper acknowledges the harshness of the American landscape as “peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered, before the adverse hosts could meet.” (Mohicans 11).  But the idea of nature as an opportunity for Europeans to assert their dominance and superiority persists.  The inhabitants of Cooperian wilderness are “the hardy colonists and the trained European,” more than capable of “struggling against the rapids of the streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the mountains, in quest of an opportunity to exhibit their courage in a more martial conflict” (Mohicans 11).  Conquering the physical demands of the wilderness is nothing for these men.  And yet they cannot be compared to the man raised within the forests and taught to understand its languages and features.

Hawk-eye is the ultimate European wilderness superman.  A white man, raised by Indians, he is a hunter and scout of extraordinary skill.  He can move easily through the forests and surrounding landscape.  As a white man, Hawk-eye feels an entitlement to North America yet he refuses the safety and confinement of civilization.  Hawk-eye asserts that he “expect[s] to leave my own bones unburied, to bleach in the woods, or to be torn asunder by the wolves” (Mohicans 33).  The forest frees Hawk-eye to live an unfettered life, carving his existence out of the wilderness and yet leaving no mark upon it; a total contrast to the other whites around him. 

The concept of the Indian as part of nature is reasserted in The Last of the Mohicans.  Hawk-eye asserts, “these Indians know the nature of the woods, as it might be by instinct!”  (Mohicans 34) when warned by Chingachgook that the Maquas will hear his gun if he fires his rifle.  Yet Hawk-eye has been trained by Indians and should have known that firing his gun would alert enemies to their presence. 

There are several instances where Hawk-eye yields to the “superior” knowledge of Uncas and Chingachgook despite the assertion that he has lived among them for many years.  Cooper seems to be asserting that the very fact that they were born Indians makes them infinitely closer to nature than Hawk-eye could ever achieve.  But, if this is viewed as true, nature fights back in the form of the Indians who have joined with the French.  Thus “good nature” (the Mohicans) and “bad nature” (the Iroquois) clash.  In the end neither group can win because nature will be subdued by the Europeans and, as part of the natural landscape, the Indians will disappear with it. 

There is an almost supernatural quality to Cooper’s landscape.  Ravaged by war, it is still beautiful, even untouched in some place.  This ability of nature to protect itself and provide sanctuary is extraordinary in light of the fact that much of the action takes place in the forests surrounding a fort that is besieged by the French. 

Everything Hawk-eye knows about surviving in the forests has been learned by living with the Indians most of his life.  Cooper gives his reader the paradox of a naturalized white man who possesses both the European view of nature as an entity to be subdued and the Indian view of nature as an element to be respected.  Hawk-eye exists within nature but also seems to understand the European drive to best it.  In the end, he acknowledges that the Indian way of life is doomed; nature will be conquered and civilized.  The terrain is not enough to stop the encroaching industrialization of America.

The idea of America still conjures up images of the frontier where there’s freedom to shape your own destiny.    Within today’s American society complaints often arise that there are no more frontiers, no more opportunities to pit man against nature, no place for the common man to test his mettle and live free.  Space is spoken of as “the final frontier” but that is for a chosen few.  This lack of unexplored geography is lamented and longed for by modern Americans.    But for the writers that shaped American Romanticism the connection between the landscape and freedom was essential to creating the story of America.