April Patrick
LITR 5535 2003 midterm

Eaten, Lost, Transformed: 

DISSOLVING BOUNDARIES IN AMERICAN ROMANTICISM

            The most compelling theme of American Romanticism, to me, is crossing borders.  People and, therefore, characters experience a peculiar urge:  a yearning to be totally swallowed up by another person or life force, all divisions dissolved completely.  An extension of this impulse is the desire to transform oneself or explore.  The characters may lose themselves in the shimmering pools of a lover’s eyes, or in a dark forest in a new land, or even experience a union with an animal or the earth for one exalting moment.  Whether physical, social or psychological, crossing boundaries marks much of Romantic literature, often leading to loss and nostalgia or transcendance--other major themes of Romanticism.  To achieve a sharper focus, though, I will limit my scope to how early American texts develop the theme border-crossing , and how this impulse blossoms fully in the The Last of the Mohicans.  

            The stage is set for the American Romantics with Genesis: Adam and Eve transgress against their only restriction (i.e. boundary) and are banished from Paradise, where desires were met without the painful realization of a gap between desire and fulfillment.  Then Columbus, with the Genesis tale as his template, describes the New World as Edenic:  "very fertile to a limitless degree" with "many rivers, good and large," "lofty mountains, beyond comparison," and green trees so tall that "they seem to touch the sky" (N 12).  Columbus names the islands like Adam named the beasts in Eden.  But when Columbus is "encompassed about by a million savages, full of cruelty,”--when the Native American people get too close, Columbus feels “so separated from the holy Sacraments of Holy Church," he fears his "soul will be forgotten" (N 14).  For Columbus, the savages’ attempt to transgress physical boundaries leads to fear, and to the loss of his illusion of Paradise.

            In Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Edwards imagines God’s wrath disintegrating all physical divisions between man and God:  “Haste and escape for your lives, look not behind you, escape to the mountain, lest you be consumed” (N211) by a wrathful God.  God eats the sinner, obliterating delineations of physical borders completely, joining two bodies into one.  

            Boundaries between Edwards and God disappear again in his Personal Narrative when Edwards experiences transcendence of earthly existence and the sublime sensation of being devoured by Him:  “a calm, sweet abstraction of the soul from all the concerns of this world… sweetly conversing with Christ, and rapt and swallowed up in God” (N 178.)  Whatever one consumes becomes a part of them, and physical separation ceases.  Thus, Edwards imagines being totally joined in body and spirit with God when God swallows him.

            In Rowson’s “Charlotte Temple,” Charlotte fails to “resist the impulse of inclination when it runs counter to the precepts of religion and virtue” (6).  “Fainting into the arms of her betrayer,” the dishonorable Montraville, Charlotte transgresses against social mores and crosses physical / sexual boundaries (10).   Charlotte gives birth to an illegitimate child and then dies, paying a steep price for her transgressions.

            In The Cherokee Memorials, the Cherokee nation argues, in a tone of distinct dignity and respect, that the United States has no right to transgress the borders of their ancient, inherited land, much less try to usurp it:

                          “The land on which we stand we have received as an inheritance from our fathers, who possessed it from time immemorial, as a gift from our common Father in Heaven.  We have already said that when the white man came to the shores of America, our ancestors were found in peaceable possession of this very land.  They bequeathed it to us children and we have kept it , as containing the remains of our beloved men….what better right can the people have to a country than the right of inheritance and immemorial peaceable possession?”  (N 579)

            The Cherokees write that it is unjust for the United States to proclaim its own independence from Britain, but then “encroach upon our territory,” in an attempt to dominate a nation that never ceded its independence.  Yet, the respectful addresses, humble pleas, grievances and begging of the Cherokee do nothing to stem the tide of United States transgressions across Cherokee borders.  The more the white men transgress the borders of their ancient lands, the more the “strength of the red man became weakness,” and the “Northern tribes, who were once so numerous and powerful, are now nearly extinct” (N 579).  The Indians, who “are poor in life and have not the arm and power of the rich,” (N 578) have little recourse to stop them from transgressing borders.   Writing at approximately the same time as Irving, the Cherokees seem to speak to Ichabod Crane’s longing to take the ancestor’s land, and use it for profit and expand further.  The white men continue to transgress at will, breaking treaties and stealing land in their lusty quest of their “inalienable rights”--which they seemed to believe only they possessed--grabbing happiness wherever and however they could, with no regard for others.

            In Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane gets an eyeful of Old Bartus Van Tassel’s thriving, country estate and becomes more enthusiastically smitten with his daughter, Katrina.  “His heart yearned after the damsel who was to inherit these domains, and his imagination expanded with the idea how they might be readily turned into cash, an the money invested in immense tracts of wild land and single palaces in the wilderness” (N 2099).  Ichabod envisions turning the paradisiacal “paternal mansion” into financial wealth, transgressing family history and tradition.  The older generation contrasts the new:  Old Baltus “seldom…sent either his eyes or his thoughts beyond the boundaries of his own farm,”  while Ichabod imagines deserting paradise with “the blooming Katrina, with a whole family of children” and their household essentials, escaping the beautiful fatherland and venturing “who knows where” (N 2099).  Ichabod’s peculiar itching to leave exemplifies the Romantic “desire for anything besides the hear and now.”  Rather than enjoy the sprawling fertile abundance, he wants to cross literal state borders, going wherever hilly path or wooded lane takes him.

            Apess, in An Indian Looking Glass for the White Man, protests how skin color forms a physical boundary between the “white leaders” of New England and the Iroquois people.  They “hold the skin to be such a barrier” to giving a man of color respect, power and equal rights (N 478).  Apess rails against Massachusetts leading regarding intermarriage as a crime, yet pretending to regard the Indian as an equal.  He criticizes the settlers for their hypocritical practice of plucking up Indian girls for brides, while telling Indian men they are not entitled to marry white women.  “As the whites have taken the liberty to choose my brethren, the Indians, hundreds and thousands of them, as partners in life, I believe the Indians have as much right to choose their partners among the whites if they wish” (N 481).  The whites freely cross the skin color barrier when it suits them, yet disallow the Iroquois the same freedom of mobility.  Such an unfair arrangement counts as a transgression of fairness.

            In The Pioneers, Cooper presents the problem of man transgressing against nature.  Natty Bumpo chastises Judge Marmaduke for clear-cutting the forest.  Sharp-shooting and conscientious, Leatherstocking scolds Billy Kirby for, “Killing twenty to eat one”--shooting Passenger Pigeons in a “wastey,” “wicked manner.”  This careless practice caused the extinction of the once-plentiful birds.  Thus, transgressions lead to loss, nostalgia and longing in this part of the Pioneers. 

            The forest of Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, is a boundary that must be crossed, a “broad barrier of wilderness,” impenetrably dense, “matted… with briars” (N 125).  Characterized by their great talent for traversing the boundary of the forest with relative ease, Hawkeye and Chingachgook exhibit that common trait of romantic heroes:  mobility and agility in many different places.  Connecting with and blending into the wilderness, they blur the line between nature and man, seemingly one with the wilderness, or at least intimately close to it.  Whereas, the Europeans need scouts to traverse such territory, “Since… none but the hunter or the savage is ever known, even now, to penetrate its wild recesses” (N 119).  Hawkeye proves his skill of mobility when he abandons “the blind path that the Hurons had followed,…entering the thicket,” moving into territory so tangled and thick with twisting branches and vines (mirroring the Gothic forest of Irving), even the horses are no help:  “the steeds had been serviceable only in crossing the shallow stream” (N 212).  Chingachgook, Hawkeye and Uncas display greater mobility than Heywood when Hawkeye recalls the spot of their journey as the one in which he first fought the Maquas, recollecting that during that fight they erected a structure to protect themselves from being scalped in the night.  Hawkeye imagines the structure must still be standing and “moves boldly into a dense thicket…like a man who expected to uncover some object he had formerly known” (N 125), as though the face of earth will come into focus like a familiar friend’s.  “After penetrating through the brush, matted with briars,” he finds the “decaying blockhouse…rude and neglected building...quietly crumbling in the solitude, neglected and nearly forgotton” (N 125).  While Heyward and his companions stand back, disinclined to go near, much less enter, the dilapidated (Gothic) structure, “Hawkeye and the Indians entered the low walls, not only without fear, but with interest” (126).  Hawkeye seems to lovingly caress the inside and out of the building that seems hardly separate from the dank earth itself, as if searching the face and smelling the scent of a lover after a long separation.  He is then filled with “melancholy,” an instance when connecting with something (a near-earthen building), or crossing borders, leads to a sense of loss and nostalgia. 

            Crossing racial lines by ‘male bonding,’ Hawkeye and Chingachgook connect deeply, transcending separatist ideas about keeping races apart and ‘pure,’ as well as homophobic fears of  men expressing love for or intense closeness with one another.  Their bonding in the wilderness acts as a means of transgressing social mores, belying the prejudice that people of difference races or skin colors do not have enough in common to establish strong relationships.  Furthemore, Hawkeye “has renounced his past and become a Mohican,” completely overstepping the boundaries between white man and Native American to become the other. 

            With her racially mixed background, Cora represents a personification of inherent blending,  and mixing--transgressing various boundaries.  She crosses social boundaries by having a mother who was a slave of African-American origins and a father, a man of the West Indies:  "‘the Mother of Cora….was…a lady whose misfortune it was…to be descended, remotely, from that unfortunate class who are so basely enslaved to administer to the wants of a luxurious people.’" (N 187-188).  The assimilation of different races within Cora seems to transform her into a transcendent character far greater than sum of her parts, infused with a spirituality more powerful than black or white alone.              Assertive, intelligent and strong, Cora breaks the barriers of gender stereotypes, possessing “a mind too elevated and improved to need the guardianship even of a father” (N 189).   Courageously, she hollers at and makes demands of Magua, “the fierce Huron,” as though she found him no more intimidating than a schoolboy, chasing after him fearlessly when he picks up and stalks off with the helpless Alice.

            As with Hawkeye, Chingachgook and Uncas, her physical beauty blurs the boundaries between nature and man:  “The tresses of this lady were shining and black, like the plumage of the raven,.” yet without having animalistic “coarseness,” (N 19).  Compared to a bird, Cora seems close to the spirits of earth.  Boundaries between Cora and the wilderness are more dissolved than for Alice, certainly.

            By venturing into the heart of Indian territory in their quest to rescue Alice and Cora, the party crosses another major border, observing “aspects of [the Indians’] religion, politics, system of justice, family and social relations, rules of hospitality, and treatment of the enemy” (Le Blanc’s essay from 2000 class).  The whites cross borders of unfamiliarity by discovering heretofore little-known complexities of the Indian way of life. 

            Boundaries between man and nature disappear especially thoroughly for Uncas, who dresses in the skin of a bear to escape the Huron’s camp:  "Uncus cast his skin, and stepped forth in his own beautiful proportions" (N 275).  He steps out the bearskin like a molting snake or a phoenix rising from ashes, transformed or reborn.  “Something in the mixed nature of Uncas makes….[him] seem to move effortlessly beyond the limitations of physicality, thereby assuming sublime magnitude” (Le Blanc’s essay from 2000 class).  Boundaries hardly seem to exist for Uncas between nature and man;  his transcendence of these borders elevates him to a position of the sublime. 

            Later, Uncas and Magua have a confrontation, standing motionless for nearly a minute, gazing unflinchingly and fiercely at each other, neither backing down in the slightest, as though the powers of light and dark are having a showdown.  Cooper describes Uncas transforming again: “the form of Uncus dilated, and his nostrils opened like those of a tiger at bay; but so rigid and unyielding was his posture, that he might easily have been converted by the imagination, into an exquisite and faultless… warlike deity of his tribe” (N 248).  Uncas crosses over the boundary between nature and man yet again in Cooper’s simile of a tiger.  But heightening and lauding him much further, Cooper infuses him with immense spiritual power:  he becomes a God, or at least a statue of one.  Uncas not only crosses the border between the animal and human world, but also crosses the border between human beings and God, passing into the realm of a deity.  

            Tracing this theme into post-modernism, one finds that James Wright, in 1963, another period in America seen by many as a renaissance of these romantic ideas of interconnectedness, writes of “breaking out of his body, into blossom” in his poem “A Blessing,” while communing with a horse in pasture.  He experiences a bursting out of physical limitations, and one imagines him, as a flower, being consumed by the horse--an act that would eliminate boundaries completely. 

            From all the border crossing and boundary transgressing in American Romantic literature, I conclude that the underlying issue is a debate over polytheism versus monotheism, wholeness of life forces or individuation:  eastern versus western concepts.  Eastern cultures and Native Americans generally believed in the wholeness, or interconnectedness, of all living things.  Western civilization represented the push for reason and technology, as well as greater individualism.  Society and its impulses were seen as a corrupting force by the Romantics who advocated an idealism of communing with nature to regain purity.  Romanticism indulged in Orientalism and exoticism, appreciating eastern ideas and goods, seeing spirits in nature, and encouraging an idea that everything in life is interlinked; that borders and boundaries, separations and differences, beginning and endings can drop away, that discontinuity is an illusion.