LITR 5535: American Romanticism
Sample Student Research Project, fall 2003

Rosalyn Mack

Labor in Utopia: America’s Growing Anxiety over Progress

While writing my midterm for this class I briefly touched upon the idea of work in America as a subject not really dealt with during the American Romanticism period.  Labor was mentioned in passing, glossed over by most of the authors we’ve studied, such as Columbus, John Smith and Henry David Thoreau, but not truly addressed by them.  Where did the idea of the American work ethic come from?  Why does American literature, particularly American Romantic literature, perpetuate the ideal of America as an Edenic land?  How does that ideal tie in to the American view of labor and employment? 

The first question I sought to answer was how does literature, specifically Romantic literature, deal with labor in America.  I had already concluded from our classroom texts that writers such as Columbus and John Smith idolized the American continent and landscape into a sort of Eden, a paradise waiting for man but what about future writers?  Why continue the Edenic metaphor? 

Marx, Hunt, Hemingway, Cather and the Ideological Implications of America’s Pastoral Revolution

Gregory Jones’s article “Marx, Hunt, Hemingway, Cather and the Ideological Implications of America’s Pastoral Revolution” offers one a look at the Edenic metaphor.  Jones argues that pastoralism offered an alternative to industrialization and an ideological foothold for the growing revolt against England.  During the growth of America as a country, Europeans and the American colonists viewed America as “an unsullied land” with the potential to be an ideal society (2).  The new country became a place where mankind was believed to be able to exist in harmony with nature.  But Jones presents evidence of that ideology warping into a means to restructure American societal interactions.

Jones points to the work of Leo Marx and his argument that pastoralism was an ideological tool used before and during the American Revolution to shape the revolt and establish an “alternative means of effecting societal stratification and gaining political control” (2).  According to Jones, Marx believed that the pastoral ideology required an agrarian economy that placed power in the hands of a landed gentry and left small landowners, tenants, laborers and slaves politically voiceless. 

Marx argued that such Jeffersonian writings as the “Declaration of Independence” were invalid to anyone not of Jefferson’s social and economic status.  Jefferson, a wealthy landowner, was not arguing “[...]life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness[...]” (Norton 337) for all American colonists, Marx maintained that Jefferson was expounding these ideals only for those who were like him, i.e. wealthy and landed gentry.

However, Jones offers equally compelling research to combat Marx’s somewhat cynical view by citing Lawrence Buell’s idea of pastoralism as a retreat from society and an opportunity to commune with nature and escape the increasingly stressful urban life.  Writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman held this view of pastoralism.  They held that nature was a place they could go to think and refresh themselves uninterrupted.  These writers wrote about the pastoral glory of going back into nature, likening it to returning to the Biblical Eden.

I chose this work because it reviews two different perspectives on pastoral writing.  I hadn’t fully appreciated the political ramifications of painting America as a pastoral utopia.  Jones’s article highlights the way in which the Jeffersonian writers used the pastoral ideal to reinforce their view of America and its inhabitants.  This led me to go looking for more information on Jeffersonian thought and America.

Paradise and the Noble Savage in Jeffersonian Thought

Unlike Jones, Bernard Sheehan approaches Jeffersonian thought from a purely literary perspective, noting that “[t]he New World had already been ensconced as the peculiar repository of paradisaic expectation and its physical properties, both material and human, were described in a rhetoric fitting to its ample proportions and its splendid future” (330).  Sheehan’s work deals primarily with how Jeffersonian writers handled the native inhabitants of America, but I found that it suited my purposes because it also dealt with how those writers viewed the land itself.  Sheehan maintained that the two were inseparably connected.

Sheehan notes “the conception of the New World as a pristine, salubrious paradise” but points out that there were two other mythic visions of America: the “howling wilderness” and the “pastoral garden”  (330).

The howling wilderness was viewed as a challenge that might not be conquerable and therefore wasn’t the image Jeffersonian writers wanted to encourage.  Paradise, by definition, was a state of near-perfection, which did not require man’s intervention.  The pastoral garden represented the idea that man could reshape nature through human achievement.  It was much more attainable and thereby could become a testament to man’s accomplishment.

This type of rhetorical redefinition can be found in the writings of both Christopher Columbus and John Smith.  Though both men wrote before the Jeffersonian era, their writings contain the mythic representations of the New World as Eden recovered.  They also seemed to purposely avoid casting the New World as an unconquerable, and therefore uninhabitable, wilderness.  As I pointed out in my midterm, Columbus and Smith did this by downplaying the sizable amount of work needed to carve civilization out of the wilderness. 

The Sheehan article also points out that writers such as James Fennimore Cooper and Washington Irving were active participants in the continuation of this mythology.  Their depiction of America fits into the pastoral garden category because their works are set in forest areas that are so tantalizingly close to inhabited areas that the forests are an extension of the civilized areas.  Cooper and Irving’s forests are not wild, unconquerable wilderness.  They have been tamed, pastoralized into a place that man can feel fairly secure in once he knows what to expect.  Unlike Cooper, Irving strays a little towards the wilderness mythology in an effort to heighten the gothic nature of his Catskill Mountains, but not enough to make them seem dangerous or uninhabitable.  Both men reinforce the pastoral ideology within their work.  As a matter of fact Irving’s Ichabod Crane yearns to move from the tamed Pennsylvania landscape to the wild freedom of Kentucky in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

So I began to see how by emphasizing the pastoral nature of the land, the Jeffersonian writers created a stronger desire for it.  The more Europeans desired this pastoral setting, the more settlers that could be enticed to come over.  Among the affronts Jefferson included in the Declaration of Independence was that King George III had “...endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing laws for naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands” (Norton 339).  For Jefferson, the pastoral setting is a force that drives the acquisition of more people, “bodies” if you will, to work the land.  Unfortunately, this helped to speed up the eventual urbanization of the land.

As urbanization grew, so did the literary scope of pastoralism but it began to take on a different aspect.  It was still crafting a grandiose view of America but, rather than being a tool to entice colonists and European settlers, it became a refuge from the growing industrialization of the time.  A growing middle-class culture also began to be heard from at this time.  Middle-class writers, such as Hawthorne, began to express anxiety over the move from an agrarian society to an industrial one.  Specifically, they began to worry about the effect that middle-class labor, i.e. office work, was having on their mental and physical health.

Healthful Employment: Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Middle-Class Fitness

“Healthful Employment: Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Middle-Class Fitness” explores the connection between the mid-nineteenth century society’s transition from manual labor to a less physically active form of labor.  Michael Newbury presents evidence that “a much broader cultural anxiety about the expansion of nonmanual work and material nonproductivity” were expressed in the writings by authors such as Hawthorne and Thoreau (682).  These writers were still prone to the Jeffersonian pastoral ideology that farmers and artisans, those who worked within nature, were healthier and somehow more productive members of society.  So they began to find other ways to feel less disconnected, Newbury explains that “certain aspects of emergent middle-class culture began to redefine and appropriate manual labor in ways consistent with the middle-class separation from the necessity or performance of it” (682).  Even as the rising middle-class devalued the significance of manual labor, they romanticized the physical aspects of manual labor.

So even as they distanced themselves from “the work, the locations of work, and the social habits of manual workers,” the mid-nineteenth century middle-class expressed guilt and concern for that loss.  They began searching for ways to alleviate the perceived crisis.  The emergence of a variety of health programs meant to get the middle-class exercising testifies to this growing concern.  Many of these exercises were based on the presumed labors of farmers.  Gardening, walking and skipping rope were all considered the type of work found on farms and believed to provide health rewards.  The co-opting of the terms, virtues and activities of the yeoman farmer became central to the reshaping of the middle-class identity.  Writers were pivotal to this reconstruction.

Newbury suggestions that “the work of authorship also needed to be re-united with the virtues of physical activity” (683) indicating a deliberate attempt by writers to recast the middle-class place in society.  Hawthorne, Thoreau, even Emerson, are attempting to reclaim “modes of idealized and residual manual work” (683) for writing.  As writing became a profession, or a money making venture, anxiety grew about “this realization of self through managerial or professional work and performance” (684).  This growing commercialization of writing clashed with the traditional “ideological virtues associated with manual labor and material production” (684).  The introduction of commerce into the once “gentlemanly” endeavor of writing changed authors from hobbyists into professionals and made them vulnerable to the growing redefinition of what it meant to work. 

Sheehan’s article begins to move away from the discussion of authorship and labor and continues to discuss the connection between antebellum Americans and physical exercise, but I chose to continue pursuing the labor, literature and commerce idea Sheehan had introduced in his article.

By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America

“By the Sweat of the Brow” is a collection of critical essays written by Nicholas K. Bromell.  The first essay I’ve chosen to use, Manual Labor and the Problem of Literary Representation, examines the connection between literature and the nineteenth century redefinition of labor.  During “the 1830s and 1840s a number of New England writers felt obliged to understand and adjust their work in relation to the work performed by those who worked with their hands” (17), often by altering the lexicon of work.

The mid-century writers believed that their mental labor was just as important to the general labor division as manual labor.  Bromell points to George Ripley and Ralph Waldo Emerson as “neither the first nor the last New England writers to approach the nature of work in general and of writing in particular by way of [the] distinction between ‘thinker’ and ‘worker,’ and ‘head’ and ‘hands’ (16).    Bromell suggests that writers of the time struggled to reconcile their New England work ethic, which linked physical labor with the Calvinistic ideal of duty to God and community, with the new economic realities of writing.  Writing as a career was not viewed as productive endeavor. 

To be productive, a laborer “worked upon...a raw material and made it into ‘some particular subject or vendible commodity, which lasts for some time after the labor is lost.’  The unproductive laborer was one who made nothing vendible and durable” (21).  The question became whether writing was the transformation of raw material into a vendible commodity.  Did the growing commercialization of literature satisfy the “vendible commodity” requirement thereby making the writer a productive laborer? 

Words such as “productive” and “unproductive” were too abstract for the growing discussion about the place of authorship within the established ideology therefore they “were quickly supplanted by the more powerful distinction between manual and mental labor” (22).  Bromell tells us that the discourse on what it means to work was radically changed by the shift in thinking.

This fundamental change in the placement of mental labor did not come easily to the time period.  The change “required the writer to think of himself or herself not just as a producer who is located in the marketplace, but as a worker who occupies the realm of necessity in which so many readers lay” (15).  Mid-nineteenth century writers still struggled to define themselves within the pastoral ideology of the Jeffersonian era but they also began responding to the notion that their endeavors did not constitute true labor by arguing “that the distinction between manual and mental labor rested on a ‘deeper’ and more sacred distinction between body and mind” (23).  This allowed them to shape a new ideology, one that dealt more with “philosophical, or religious, rhetoric about the relation of mind to body, spirit to matter” (23) rather than focusing on political or economic rhetoric. 

I was now beginning to have a better understanding of the ideological conundrum facing writers of the mid-nineteenth century.  For them to continue within the established pastoral ideology was to consent to a thoroughly politicized model of America, a model that was based upon the continuation of a pseudo-aristocratic society.  There was no room for the middle class within the Jeffersonian society.  They were neither manual laborers nor landed gentry.  So as the middle class increased, the need for a new representation of America also grew.  Industrialization began to reveal some of the problems within the pastoral ideal and the antebellum writers shared those problems with their readers, many of whom were considered laborers within the evolving industrial economy.

Henry David Thoreau, one of the most well-known writers of the American Romantic period, often tried within his personal essays to work out the conflicts being experienced by writers and laborers.  I chose a second Bromell essay, Naturalized Labor and Natural History in Thoreau’s a Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, as a means of learning more about Thoreau’s ideas on work.  According to Bromell, “Thoreau experiences work as an activity in which the concerns of politics, ethics, and aesthetics converge” (80), which is a fascinating convergence of the pastoral ideal and the industrial ideal; by industrial ideal I mean the commercialization of manual and mental, i.e. literary, work.  Thoreau was searching for a way to bring the laborers more in tune with the growing middle class.  He felt that they were all laborers within the changing economy.

Thoreau set himself a goal of “producing a literary culture more meaningful to, and representative of, the working class” (82) by producing literature that was not created for commercial or self-aggrandizing purposes.  He wanted literature to “become respectable to the working-man, not ‘something cunning and pretty merely,’ the writer must see himself as a worker, as one who ‘works anxiously and sadly, to get bread of life, and dispense it’” (82).  This seems to indicate that Thoreau found the growing industrialization of literature to be false and unproductive, limiting the writer’s ability to be a worker himself.  “Literature must not merely replicate the division of labor by producing ‘poetry,’ ‘prophecy,’ and ‘advice’ that descend from the writer (as society’s ‘head and heart’) to the worker (society’s ‘hands’).  Literature must somehow locate itself in the hands” (83).  Thoreau obviously felt that literature produced for market purposes did not qualify as true work and thus could not establish a connection to the working class.

Bromell also points out the conflict Thoreau endured trying to reconcile his efforts as an author with the linguistic barriers he believed existed within the words “labor” and “work.”  For Thoreau, labor was a wasteful endeavor, producing “nothing that supplements what is already given to man by nature” (84).  To Thoreau, labor’s only achievement was the creation of items for consumption, which could only lead to the creation of more consumables.  Work, on the other had, carried a stronger connotation.  Work was what farmers did, the physical exertions they endured.  Work stemmed from the earth and implied the natural production of items necessary for sustaining human life.  Thoreau wanted writing to be seen as “work,” connected to physical exertion and thus carrying a more naturalistic association, which brings us back to the pastoral ideology of the Jeffersonian era. 

Thoreau immersed himself in the pastoral ideal of nature as a pristine environment that provides everything man needs, but he struggled to redefine the labor/work component of the ideal trying to include authorship as a viable option for productivity.  I’m not certain he succeeded but his efforts did a lot to reshape the societal view of authorship for future writers. 

During the research of my journal topic, I came across an extremely interesting article that I couldn’t fit into any of the other points I wanted to make in this journal.  I didn’t want to omit it because the information was very helpful to my understanding of American Romanticism.  I decided to discuss it briefly here because I believe the information is valuable on several levels.

Romanticism and the American Renaissance

When I sat down to begin brainstorming for this project I only had a vague idea about where I wanted to go and how I wanted to pursue it.  As I was going through the initial research stages I realized that, even after extensive class discussion, I still was entirely certain when the American Romantic period began or ended.  So I decided I needed to look for information on American Romanticism before I focused on one specific aspect of it.  My efforts brought me to R. P. Adams’s article Romanticism and the American Renaissance, which explores the historical factors and relevance of the American Romantic period.  Adams asserts that one cannot begin a study of American Romanticism without understanding the nature of romantic works or how works become classified as romantic.  Adams considers romantic thought to be:

[R]elativistic and pluralistic; it rejects absolute values, formal classifications, and exclusive judgments ; it welcomes novelty, originality, and variety.  It is [interested in] relationships, particularly in the organic relationship which it posits between man and nature, or the universe, and (less often) between the individual and society (420).

This provided me just the kind of perspective I needed to feel my way through the morass of information I found when I began my research. 

Adams even addresses Thoreau’s ideology on work which, in turn, led me to research Thoreau, where I found the variety of works referenced here.  Included in Adams’s paper are Thoreau’s views on man and labor found in Walden, “[a] laboring man ‘has no time to be anything but a machine,’ and ‘men have become the tools of their tools’” (425).  But while the connection between this quote and my research topic was very close, ultimately Romanticism and the American Renaissance didn’t work with my chosen topic because it was more geared towards the idea of symbolic death and rebirth within the writings of American Romanticism. 

Conclusion

            My original intention had been to explore the idea of labor in America from the literary, philosophical, sociological and cultural perspectives.  However, the essays I read redefined my ideas and got me thinking about the how the pastoral ideology had shaped the American notions of work.  The pre-colonial and Jeffersonian era writers were responsible for these utopian ideals, but the Romantic era writers began reformulating their approach to the pastoral ideal after industrialization began. 

The mid-century writers used a kind of literary force to gain inclusion of their chosen livelihood into the ideology’s lexicon.  Of course, the fact that one could now make a living strictly through writing was such a fundamental alteration of the ideology that it almost negated it.  Ironically, the thought of America as an Edenic utopia was so thoroughly ingrained into the psyche of the Romantic writers that they used pastoral imagery to assert their claims that writing was the mental equivalent to farming. 

The research for this journal gave me a lot to think about.  I began reviewing my own ideas of America and work.  The pastoral ideology of America is alive and well in the twenty-first century.  It’s easy to see touches of pastoralism in concepts such as recycling and ecological conservation or the “keeping America beautiful” ads. 

The very idea of “America the beautiful” harkens back to the Jeffersonian pastoral ideology and its attendant labor beliefs.  Recycling and eco-conservationism are both derivative ways of channeling labor back into America.  Both require a person to think of wasted resources as marring the American landscape and detracting from its attractiveness.  In other words, if America becomes ugly we will no longer be able to tempt new immigrants to live here and thus lose their productivity, ceasing to be competitively productive ourselves. 

America still exports these ideologies to foreign lands.  “America: land of the free, home of the brave” or “In America you can be anything you want if you’re willing to work hard for it” – these are ideas so deeply ingrained into our psyche that we take them for granted.  Americans become uncomfortable when anyone points out that this isn’t always true.

It’s all very complicated because the Jeffersonian ideology seems so outdated to us when it’s put into words.  But we as a people still believe in the utopian concept and the Romantic concepts of work.  And there is still a nagging fear that people work too much and play too little; that we as a society are suffering poor health due to the pace of our society and the lack of physical exertions in our work.  Americans are repeatedly concerned that the rapid growth of our society is detracting from our mental and physical well-being.  We are reliving the concerns of the mid-nineteenth century.

I now have a better idea of where to start if I were going to do a more extensive research paper or thesis.  And I’ve gained a greater insight into my own thoughts about work and America.

Works Cited

Adams, R. P.  “Romanticism and the American Renaissance.”  American Literature 23.4 (1952): 419-432.

Baym, Nina, ed.  The Norton Anthology of American Literature.  New York: Norton, 2003.

Bromell, Nicholas K.  By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

Gilmore, Michael T.  American Romanticism and the Marketplace.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Gleason, William.  “Re-creating Walden: Thoreau’s Economy of Work and Play.”  American Literature 65.4 (1993): 673-701.

Jones, Gregory H.  “Marx, Hunt, Hemingway, Cather and the Ideological Implications of America’s Pastoral Revolution.” Deluge. http://english.la.psu.edu/group_1/jones.htm.

Newbury, Michael.  “Healthful Employment: Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Middle-Class Fitness.”  American Quarterly 47.4 (1995): 681-714.

Sheehan, Bernard W.  “Paradise and the Noble Savage in Jeffersonian Thought.” The William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Ser. 26.3 (1969): 327-359.

Shulman, Robert.  Social Criticism & Nineteenth-Century American Fictions.  Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1987.