The Making of American Myths

Myths of an emerging nation

One of the first writers to take advantage of the greater opportunities for publication that were opening up, in the process becoming one of the first American writers to achieve international fame, was Washington Irving (1783–1859). Irving was born into a prosperous merchant family in New York City, the youngest of eleven children. He studied law and contributed to two newspapers edited by one of his brothers, the Morning Chronicle and The Corrector. For the Chronicle he wrote ‘The Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent.’, a series of youthful satires on New York society. Published in 1802–3, they won him instant recognition. To restore his failing health, he then made the first of many trips to Europe; later, in fact, he was to live for protracted periods in England, to travel in France and Germany extensively, and to have spells of government service in Spain. But in 1806 he returned to New York City. There, a year later, he began to publish Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff Esq., and Others (1807–8), a series of satirical miscellanies concerned with New York society that ran to twenty numbers. The leading essays were written by Irving, his brothers and James Kirke Paulding (1778–1860), all members of a group known as the ‘Nine Worthies’ or ‘Lads of Kilkenny’ of ‘Cockloft Hall’. Federalist in politics, conservative in social principles and comic in tone, they included one piece by Irving, ‘Of the Chronicles of the Renowned and Antient City of Gotham’, that supplied New York City with its enduring nickname of Gotham. Characteristically, Irving had borrowed here from a European source: he transferred both the name and a reputation for folly from the original Gotham village in Nottinghamshire, England.

Irving was now famous as an author, wit and man of society, and to consolidate his reputation he published A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809) under the pen name of Diedrich Knickerbocker. Often regarded as the first important work of comic literature written by an American, it initiated the term ‘Knickerbocker School’ for authors like Irving himself, Paulding, Fitz-Greene Hallek (1790–1867) and Joseph Rodman Drake (1795–1820), who wrote about ‘little old New York’ in the years before the Civil War. Ostensibly concerned with the Dutch occupation, the book in fact burlesques contemporary historical narratives, satirizes pedantry and literary classics, and offers a comic critique of Jeffersonian democracy. Jefferson himself is satirized as Governor Kieft under whom greedy Yankees attempt ‘to get possession of the city of Manhattoes’. And there is an ironic apologia for white dispossession and destruction of Native Americans. The original inhabitants of America, Knickerbocker assures the reader, were ‘mere cannibals, detestable monsters, and many of them giants’; ‘animals’ rather than humans, they ‘deserved to be exterminated’. ‘The host of zealous and enlightened fathers’, in any event, brought many blessings with them for ‘these infidel savages’, such as ‘gin, rum, brandy, and the smallpox’. They also brought them ‘the light of religion’ and then ‘hurried them out of the world, to

enjoy its reward!’ Irving’s style here, and in his earlier essays, is derived from the gently satirical fluencies of English writers like Oliver Goldsmith and Joseph Addison. Five years after the publication of his History he went to England to work in the family business there. He remained in Europe for seventeen years. He became friends with Sir Walter Scott, visited Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and in 1820 published The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., a collection of essays and sketches that was enormously successful in both England and the United States.

The Sketch Book contains two small masterpieces that initiated the great tradition of the American short story, ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. Four other sketches are also set in America, but most of the other pieces are descriptive and thoughtful essays on England, where Irving was still living. Both ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and ‘Sleepy Hollow’ have origins in German folklore. Irving admits as much in a ‘Note’ to the first tale where the reader is told that ‘the foregoing Tale, one would suspect, had been suggested to Mr Knickerbocker by a little German superstition’. Both also owe a debt, in terms of stylistic influence, to Sir Walter Scott. Nevertheless, both exploit their specifically American settings and create American myths: they explore the social and cultural transformations occurring in America at the time in terms that are at once gently whimsical and perfectly serious. In ‘Rip Van Winkle’, the lazy, hen-pecked hero of the story ventures into the Catskill Mountains of New York State to discover there some little men in Dutch costume bowling at ninepins. Taking many draughts of some strange beverage they have brewed, he falls into a deep sleep. When he returns to his village, after waking up, he eventually realizes that twenty years have passed, the Revolution has been and gone, and that, ‘instead of being a subject of his Majesty George the Third, he was now a free citizen of the United States’. The news naturally takes a long time to sink in; and, at first, when he is surrounded in his homeplace by people whom he does not recognize and who do not recognize him, he begins to doubt his own identity. ‘I’m not myself – I’m somebody else,’ he complains; ‘I’m changed, and I can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!’ His dilemma is a gently comic response to traumatic change; and it offers a genial reflection in miniature of the sudden, disconcerting process of alteration – and possible reactions to it – experienced by the nation as a whole. A similar transposition of American history into American legend occurs in ‘Sleepy Hollow’. This story of how the superstitious hero, Ichabod Crane, was bested by the headless horseman of Brom Bones, an extrovert Dutchman and Crane’s rival in love, allows Irving to parody several forms of narrative, among them tall tales, ghost stories and the epic. But it also permits him, once again, to reflect on change and to present a vanishing America, which is the setting for this story, as an endangered pastoral ideal. ‘It is in such little retired Dutch valleys,’ we are told, as the one where American types like Crane and Bones live,

that population, manners, and customs remain fixed, while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweep by them unobserved. They are like those little nooks

of still water which border a rapid stream; where we may see the straw and bubble riding quietly at anchor, or slowly revolving in their mimic harbour, undisturbed by the passing current.

The tendency towards a more lyrical, romantic strain suggested by Irving’s evocation of the sleepy hollow where Ichabod Crane lived became a characteristic of the later work. His next collection, Bracebridge Hall; or, The Humorists (1822), was well received, but it mostly consists of sentimental portraits of the England of landed gentry. Tales of a Traveller (1824) met with a poor reception; and, discouraged, Irving turned increasingly towards historical subjects. His History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) and A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829) were both based on careful historical research; so was Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus (1831). What was described as a ‘Spanish

Sketch Book’, The Alhambra, recounting Spanish legends, appeared in 1832. Irving then returned from Europe to America, where he was enthusiastically welcomed, and began travelling in the far West in search of picturesque literary backgrounds. The results of these Western travels were A Tour of the Prairie, one of three volumes in The Crayon Miscellany (1835), and Astoria (1836), an account of the fur-trading empire of John Jacob Astor. Both books evoke the romance of the West but none of its rigours; and the later book idealizes the business tycoon Astor, at whose suggestion it was written. Other books followed: among them, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville U.S.A. (1837), Oliver Goldsmith (1840), a biography of one of Irving’s literary masters, A Book of the Hudson (1849) and a monumental Life of Washington (1855–9) in five volumes. Irving’s literary career was erratic, and he never recovered the wit and fluency of his early style; he also tended, especially in his later work, to bathe the European past in an aura of romance. Nevertheless, in his best work, he was a creator of significant American myths: narratives that gave dramatic substance and shape to the radical changes of the time, and the nervousness and nostalgia those changes often engendered. Perhaps he was so effective in fashioning those myths in particular because the nervousness about the new America, and nostalgia for the old – and, beyond that, for Europe – were something that he himself felt intensely. He was writing himself, and the feelings he typified, into legend.

The making of Western myth

Legend of a very different kind was the work of James Fenimore Cooper (1789– 1851). If any single person was the creator of the myth of the American West, and all its spellbinding contradictions, then Cooper was. But he was far more than that. He was the founding father of the American historical novel, exploring the contradictions of American society in a time of profound change. He also helped to develop and popularize such widely diverse literary forms as the sea novel, the novel of manners, political satire and allegory, and the dynastic novel in which over several generations American social practices and principles are subjected to

rigorous dramatic analysis. And Cooper did not begin writing and publishing until his thirties. Before that, he had served at sea then left to marry and settle as a country gentleman in New York State. His first novel, Precaution (1820), was in fact written after his wife challenged his claim that he could write a better book than the English novel he was reading to her. A conventional novel of manners set in genteel English society, this was followed by a far better work, The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821). Set in Revolutionary New York State, on the ‘neutral ground’ of Westchester County, its hero is Harvey Birch, who is supposed to be a Loyalist spy but is secretly in the service of General Washington. Birch is faithful to the Revolutionary cause but a convoluted plot reveals his emotional ties to some of the Loyalists. What the reader is presented with here, in short, is a character prototype that Cooper had learned from Sir Walter Scott and was to use in later fiction, most notably in his portrait of Natty Bumppo, the hero of the Leatherstocking novels. The hero is himself a ‘neutral ground’ to the extent that he, his actions and allegiances, provide an opportunity for opposing social forces to be brought into a human relationship with one another. The moral landscape he negotiates is a place of crisis and collision; and that crisis and collision are expressed in personal as well as social terms, as a function of character as well as event. The Spy was an immediate success. One reviewer hailed Cooper as ‘the first who has deserved the appellation of a distinguished American novel writer’. And it was followed, just two years later, by The Pilot (1823), the first in a series of sea stories intended to prove that a former sailor could write a better novel in that genre than the landsman Scott had done in his book, published a year earlier, The Pirate. Some of the success of this novel was due to the character of Long Tom Coffin, a daring old sea dog. Even more came, though, because it contrasted Tory ineffectuality with the composure and courage of the hero. The mysterious Pilot of the title is, in the words of the story, ‘a Quixote in the behalf of liberal principles’, whose status as a natural aristocrat is reflected in his boast: ‘I was born without the nobility of twenty generations to corrupt and deaden my soul.’

In the same year as The Pilot appeared, the first of the five Leatherstocking Tales, The Pioneers (1823), was published. Set in 1793 in Otsego County in the recently settled region of New York State, it introduces the reader to the ageing figure of Natty Bumppo, known here as Leatherstocking. The reader also meets Chingachgook, the friend and comrade of Natty from the Mohican tribe; and, in the course of the story, Chingachgook dies despite Natty’s efforts to save him. The other four Leatherstocking Tales came over the next eighteen years. The Last of the Mohicans (1826) presents Bumppo, here called Hawkeye, in his maturity and is set in 1757 during the Seven Years’ War between the French and the British. In The Prairie (1827), Bumppo, known simply as the trapper, has joined the westward movement; he is now in his eighties and, at the end of the novel, he dies. The Pathfinder (1840) is set soon after The Last of the Mohicans, in the same conflict between the French and Indians and the British colonials. Here, Bumppo is tempted to think of marriage. But, when he learns that the woman in question loves another, he nobly accepts that he cannot have her. Like the many Western heroes for which he was

later to serve as prototype, he recognizes that, as he puts it, it is not according to his ‘gifts’ to love and to marry. The last novel to be written, The Deerslayer (1841), is, in fact, the first novel in chronological order of events. It takes the reader back to upstate New York in the 1740s. A young man here, Natty Bumppo begins the action known as Deerslayer. In the course of the story, though, he kills an Indian in a fight that approaches the status of ritual; and, before he dies, the man he has killed gives him a new name, Hawkeye. So the series ends with the initiation of its hero into manhood. It does not quite begin with his death; nevertheless, there is clearly a regressive tendency at work here. The Leatherstocking Tales, as a whole, move back in time, back further into the American past and the youth and innocence of the hero. As they do so, they move ever further away from civilization, in terms of setting and subject, and ever further away from social realism, in terms of approach. The Pioneers is set in a settled community where Natty Bumppo, who is a relatively marginal character, can be arrested and jailed for shooting a deer out of season. The Deerslayer, by contrast, is set in a place that is several times referred to as a ‘wilderness’, amidst ‘the sleeping thunders of the woods’, in a period that, Cooper observes, ‘seems remote and obscure’ already, ‘so distant as seemingly to reach the mists of time’; and it has a hero who is described as a ‘legend’, ‘the beau ideal’ that ‘constitutes poetry’. At work here, in short, is an Edenic impulse common in American writing that drives the imagination out of the literal and into romance and myth – and out of a world where the individual is defined in relation to society and into one where he or she is more likely to be situated outside it. As the conception of him alters over the course of the five Leatherstocking Tales, Natty Bumppo gravitates more and more towards the condition of an American Adam: in his comradeship with another man, his virginity, as much as in his reliance on action and instinct rather than thought and reasoning

– and in his indebtedness, too, not to education or convention but to natural wisdom and natural morality.

Natty Bumppo is more than just an American Adam, however, as his recollection of earlier figures set on ‘neutral ground’ suggests as well as his anticipation of later Western heroes. And the Leatherstocking Tales are far more than types of the American pastoral, resituating Eden somewhere in the mythic past of the country. They are densely textured historical narratives using contrasts and conflicts both within and between characters to explore the national destiny. The Prairie illustrates this. The characteristically convoluted plot involves a series of daring adventures, raids and rescues, during the course of which Bumppo saves his companions from both a prairie fire and a buffalo stampede. Woven through that plot is a close examination of human nature and its implications for human society. The original inhabitants of America, for example, are taken as instances of natural man but, the reader soon discovers, the instances are ambiguous. On the one hand, there are the Pawnees, who are ‘strikingly noble’, their ‘fine stature and admirable proportions’ being an outward and visible sign of their possession of such ‘Roman’ virtues as dignity, decorum and courage. On the other, there are the Sioux, a race who resemble ‘demons rather than men’ and whose frightening appearance is matched

only by their treachery and savagery. Nature, in turn, is represented variously, as benevolent, the source of Natty’s natural wisdom (‘ ’Tis an eddication!’ he is wont to declare, while gazing at his surroundings), and the scene of a desperate internecine battle (‘Do you see yon birds watching for the offals of the beast they have killed,’ Natty asks a companion. ‘Therein is a moral which teaches the manner of prairie life’). That reinforces the account of Indians as both Rousseauistic noble savages and imps of the Devil. The issue of whether human beings are good, originally innocent, or evil, steeped in original sin, is sounded here. So is the issue of whether America is an Eden or a wilderness. And both those issues, Cooper realized and intimates, feed into the question of what kind of society was needed, particularly in the New World. This was a question fundamental to the infant republic, and The Prairie offers a fascinatingly ambivalent answer.

The ambivalence goes further. The portrait of Natty Bumppo suggests, in many ways, that that government is best which governs least. He does not need any civil laws to guide or restrain him since he is, the reader is told, ‘a man endowed with the choicest and perhaps rarest gift of nature, that of distinguishing good from evil’. He knows what is right. Remarkably, this includes knowing about the need for conservation: he is an instinctive ecologist, who laments the inclination he sees all around him ‘to strip th’ arth of its trees’ and rob ‘the brutes of their natural food’. But Natty is perhaps a rarity: as his complaints about ‘man’s wish, and pride, and waste’, the destruction of the wilderness he witnesses all around him, intimate. His own comments on civil law are, in fact, conflicting. He is deeply critical sometimes of what he calls ‘the wicked troublesome meddling’ of society. ‘Why, do you know,’ he declares, ‘that there are regions where the law is so busy as to say, “In this fashion shall you live, in that fashion you shall die . . . !” ’ At other times, though, he offers a contrary view. ‘The law – ’tis bad to have it,’ he observes early on in The Prairie, ‘but I sometimes think it is worse to be entirely without it.’ ‘Yes – yes,’ he adds here, ‘the law is needed when such as have not the gifts of strength and wisdom are to be taken care of.’ Of all the questions that emerged in the United States in the nineteenth century, the question of what finally was the national heritage, democratic community or individual freedom and advancement, was the most pressing and the most difficult. And on that question even Natty Bumppo stands on neutral ground, despite his status as an icon of freedom. So, even more, does The Prairie, since Natty’s chief antagonist in the novel, Ishmael Bush, is, as his forename suggests, an outcast from society – and in the worst sense. ‘Ishmael Bush,’ we are told, ‘had passed the whole of a life of more than fifty years on the skirts of society.’ There, he has learned to be a predator, following ‘the instincts of the beast’, and pursuing his own individual advantage without regard to law of any kind, natural or civil. He neatly sums up his own position when he declares of another character, ‘he is an enemy . . . hear him! Hear him! He talks of the law’. Violating property rights, ignoring the claims of everyone but himself, he offers a decidedly sardonic reading of human nature and the implications of individualism – and, by extension, a positive case not only for civil laws but for social control and strong government.

At his best, as in The Prairie, Cooper explores the basic tensions at work in American culture and history in a way that allows free play to the opposing forces. At the same time, he creates mythic figures, of whom Natty Bumppo is easily the most notable, who offer a focus for debates about the character of American democracy – and also possess the simplicity and stature required of any great epic hero. The first time we see Bumppo in The Prairie is typical. He appears to a group of travellers, and the reader, standing in the distance on the great plains with the sun going down behind him. ‘The figure was colossal, the attitude musing and melancholy,’ the narrator observes, and ‘embedded as it was in its setting of garish light, it was impossible to distinguish its just proportions or true character.’ Larger than life, romantic and mysterious, Natty Bumppo here anticipates a whole series of Western and American heroes: Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick, for instance, the central characters in the Western films of John Ford, or Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. And a similarly heroic closure is given to the story of our hero. At the end of The Prairie, Natty dies with his gaze ‘fastened on the clouds which hung around the western horizon, reflecting the bright colours and giving form to the glorious tints of an American sunset’. ‘The spectators’, we are told, of whom the reader is now one, are filled ‘with solemn awe’ as they watch the old man, supported by friends, struggle to his feet for the last time. ‘For a moment he looked about him as if to invite all in his presence to listen’; then, finally, ‘with a fine military elevation of the head and with a voice that might be heard in every part of the numerous assembly, he pronounced the word, “Here!” ’ With that grand, ultimate entry into nature, Cooper may be suggesting the passing of the democratic possibilities Natty Bumppo represents. The Prairie certainly has an autumnal mood: it is set firmly in the past, and there are constant references to the way immigration and cultivation, the destruction of the wilderness and the scattering of the Indians have changed the West – and, quite possibly, America – between then and the time of writing. Perhaps; and, if so, the novel is as much a new Western as a traditional one, mapping out the destructive tendencies of the westward movement as well as its place in a heroic tale of national expansion. One further layer of complexity is then added to a narrative that is, in any event, a debate and a mythic drama, a great historical novel and an American epic in prose.

A year before the publication of The Prairie, Cooper took his family to Europe. He travelled there, worked as a diplomat, but still found time to write. Books written during this period include The Red Rover (1827), a novel of early frontier life The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829), and another sea tale called The Water Witch (1830). He also completed a historical trilogy, The Bravo (1831), The Heidenmauer (1832) and The Headsman (1833). A year before the final volume of the trilogy was published, he returned to the United States. By now, he was becoming repelled by what he considered to be the absence of public and private virtues in his country, and by the abuses of democracy. In A Letter to His Countrymen (1834), The Monikins (1835) and The American Democrat (1838), he investigated these problems from the standpoint of an aristocratic democrat. In the novels Homeward Bound (1838) and Home as Found (1838), in turn, he offered fictional

explorations of his beliefs. For his attacks on populism, and the politics of Jacksonian democracy, Cooper was vilified in the press. He responded by successfully suing for libel. And his writing continued unabated. In the last ten years of his life, in fact, he produced no fewer than twenty-one books: among them, more novels set all or in part at sea (like Afloat and Ashore [1844] and Miles Wallingford [1844] ), several scholarly and factual works (including a History of the Navy [1843] ), a number of historical romances (such as The Oak Openings [1848] ), a utopian social allegory (The Crater [1848] ), and a novel concerned with the perversion of social justice that is often considered an anticipation of the modern mystery novel (The Ways of the Hour [1850] ). Perhaps the most notable publication of his last few years, though, was the trilogy known as the Littlepage manuscripts, Satanstoe (1845), The Chainbearer (1845) and The Redskins (1846). These three novels trace the growing tension between the propertied and the propertyless classes in New York State from the colonial period to the 1840s. In the process, they reveal Cooper’s continuing interest in adopting and developing different fictional forms, while dramatically interrogating the conflicts at work in American society. Cooper was a great innovator. At his best, as in the Leatherstocking Tales, he was also a great creator of American myths. And through all his fictional innovations, he returned compulsively to issues that were to haunt many later American writers: the different routes a democratic republic might take, the conflict between law and freedom, the clearing and the wilderness, communal ethics and the creed of self-reliance.

Over the three decades when the Leatherstocking series was written, many other attempts were made to translate experience in the West into literature. Notable among these were two novels, Logan: A Family History (1822) and Nick of the Woods; or, The Jibbenainesay (1837), and an autobiographical narrative first serialized in the Knickerbocker Magazine in 1847 and then published in 1849, The Oregon Trail.

Logan: A Family History was one of the several novels and many publications of John Neal (1793–1876). Born into a Quaker family in Maine, Neal was an endlessly energetic writer. His early works included Keep Cool (1817), a novel that was also a tract against duelling, two narrative poems titled ‘Battle of Niagara’ (1818) and ‘Goldau, or, the Maniac Harper’ (1818), and Otho (1819), a romantic tragedy in blank verse. Among his other, later publications were a Revolutionary romance (Seventy-Six [1823] ), a romantic epistolary novel (Randolph [1823] ), a romantic novel set in colonial New England (Brother Jonathan [1825] ), a fictional study of the Salem witchcraft trials (Rachel Dyer [1828] ), and a picaresque tale about a New Englander abroad (Authorship [1830] ). Living in England for a while, Neal also wrote a number of articles for Blackwood’s Magazine, a journal notoriously hostile to American writers. Among the most remarkable of these was a series of five papers on American authors. Marred by errors of fact, and Neal’s own prejudices, these papers nevertheless represented the first serious attempt at a history of American literature; and they were eventually published in 1937 under the author’s own chosen title, American Writers. Logan: A History is an essentially romantic account of a noble savage, the Indian chief who gives the book its title. The reverse side of the coin is suggested by Nick of the Woods, the work of Robert Montgomery Bird

(1806–54), an equally prolific author whose output included historical drama (The Gladiator [1831] ), a tragedy dramatizing the assassination of the Spanish conquistador Pizarro (Oralloosa, Son of the Incas [1832] ), a tragedy set in eighteenthcentury Colombia (The Broker of Bogota [1834] ), two novels concerned with the conquest of Mexico (Calavar; or, The Knight of the Conquest [1834]; The Infidel; or, The Knight of the Conquest [1835] ), a romance of the Revolution (The Hawks of Hawk-Hollow [1835] ) and a series of travel sketches (Peter Pilgrim; or, A Rambler’s Recollections [1838] ). Nick of the Woods, an immensely popular tale in its day and also Bird’s best work, has a complicated plot involving Indian raids and massacres, a romantic heroine taken into captivity but eventually rescued, and an eponymous central character who is bent on revenge against the Indians for the slaughter of his family. Throughout all the plot convolutions, however, what remains starkly simple is the portrait of the Indians. As Bird depicts them, they are violent, superstitious and treacherous. They may be savages but they are very far from being noble.

The Oregon Trail is another matter. For a start, it was written by someone, Francis Parkman (1823–93), who went on from writing it to become one of the most distinguished historians of the period. Parkman was one of a generation of American historians who combined devotion to research with a romantic sweep of imagination, and a scholarly interest in the history of America or democratic institutions or both with dramatic flair and a novelistic eye for detail. Apart from Parkman himself, the most notable of these romantic historians were John Lothrop Motley (1814–77), George Bancroft (1800–91) and William Hinckling Prescott (1796–1859). Motley, after writing a novel about the colony of Thomas Morton (Merry Mount [1839] ), devoted much of his life to historical study of the Netherlands, drawn to this subject by the analogy he perceived with the United States, and the opportunity it offered him to dramatize the triumph of Protestantism and liberty where previously there had been despotism. ‘The laws governing all bodies political,’ Motley sonorously declared in his book Historic Progress and American Democracy (1869), proceeded as ‘inexorably as Kepler’s law controls the motion of the planets. The law is Progress: the result Democracy.’ That was an article of faith not only for Motley but for Bancroft, whose belief in the progressive character of history – and in the duty of the historian to demonstrate the evolution of liberty in historical events – was thoroughly exercised in his major work, a monumental, ten-volume History of the United States (1834–76). Prescott concentrated his attention further south, on what was the then neglected field of the conquest of Mexico and Peru. He too, however, mixed historical scholarship with romantic literary forms. In his finest work, the History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), Prescott presents his story in terms of a narrative structure borrowed from the historical novel and, in particular, the fiction of Sir Walter Scott. Within a panoramic portrait of two cultures in collision, the Aztec and the Spanish, Prescott focuses on the conflict between two heroic figures, Montezuma and Cortez. The result is an intervention in both history and literature, a matter of scholarly record and a tragic epic. Parkman also negotiated the borderline between the historical and the literary,

in seven works exploring the struggle for domination in the New World published over the period between 1865 and 1892. Surveying, in particular, the conflict between the English and the French for control of colonial America, the series pivoted on a contrast between progress and reaction – represented, respectively, by England and France – seen from the standpoint of an author who once described himself as a conservative republican.

Published before his histories, The Oregon Trail is an account of a journey Parkman took along the trail of the title in 1846. His purpose in taking the trip was twofold: to improve his frail health and study Indian life. Skilled in woodcraft and a decent shot, he survived the hardship of the trek, but only just: the strain of travelling eventually led to a complete breakdown in his health, rather than the recovery for which he had hoped. Incapable of writing, he was forced to dictate his story to a cousin and travelling companion. The result has been described as the first account of a literary white man who actually lived by choice for a while among Native Americans. What emerges from this account is, like the other work of Parkman and the romantic historians, an intriguing mix of fact and fiction, matters of record and the stuff of the imagination. It is also, and equally intriguingly, double-edged. As the narrator of The Oregon Trail, a Harvard graduate and a member of a prominent Boston family, encounters the landscape and peoples of the West, his tone tends to hover sometimes between condescension and disgust, the style verges on the mandarin. ‘The Ogillallah, the Brulé, and the other western bands of the Dahcotah or Sioux, are thorough savages, unchanged by any contact with civilisation,’ Parkman tells the reader. ‘Not one of them can speak a European tongue, or has ever visited an American settlement.’ The white people, the emigrants he meets, also strike the young traveller, very often, as savage, unkempt and unruly. ‘I have often perplexed myself to divine the various motives that give impulse to this migration,’ Parkman confesses, ‘but whatever they may be . . . certain it is that multitudes bitterly repent the journey, and, after they have reached the land of promise, are happy enough to escape from it.’ Certainly, it seems to the young narrator that the territories the migrants encounter – drawn, it may be, by their ‘desire of shaking off restraints of law and society’ – are sometimes landscapes of desolation. ‘If a curse had been pronounced upon the land, it could not have worn an aspect more forlorn’, Parkman declares of one area he visits on the prairie, where ‘all alike glared with an insupportable whiteness under the burning sun’. The only relief he found on this bleak terrain, he recalls, was a solitary ‘pinetree clinging at the edge of a ravine’, its ‘resinous odors’ recalling ‘the pine-clad mountains of New England’ and a greener, more gracious world.

Yet, for all that, Parkman remembers that he found much to admire, or even cherish, in the West. The two scouts who accompanied him are portrayed in frankly romantic terms. One has the rough charm of the prairie, and an indefatigable ‘cheerfulness and gayety’, the other a ‘natural refinement and delicacy of mind’; the both of them, in their different ways, are true knights of the wild. And the romance of the hunt, and wilderness occupations in general, is fondly recalled: ‘I defy the annals of chivalry’, Parkman declares at one point, ‘to furnish the record

of a life more wild and perilous than that of a Rocky Mountain trapper.’ Native American life, too, is celebrated for its colour and occasionally chivalric touches. ‘If there be anything that deserves to be called romantic in the Indian character,’ Parkman explains, ‘it is to be sought in . . . friendships . . . common among many of the prairie tribe.’ Parkman himself, he discloses, enjoyed just such an intimacy, becoming ‘excellent friends’ with an Indian he calls ‘the Panther’: ‘a noble-looking fellow’, with a ‘stately and graceful figure’ and ‘the very model of a wild prairierider’. ‘For the most part, a civilised white man can discover very few points of sympathy between his own nature and that of an Indian,’ Parkman cautions. But, in this instance, ‘there were at least some points of sympathy between him and me’ and ‘we rode forward together, through rocky passages, deep dells, and little barren plains’. This is the homoerotic romance across the line between white and Indian that Cooper imagined, replayed here in however muted a key. Parkman is framing his recollections within a literary tradition that includes the author of the Leatherstocking Tales and, before him, Sir Walter Scott. And he is not shy about confessing to his model. Observing an Indian village, for instance, with its ‘armed warriors’, ‘naked children’, and ‘gayly apparelled girls’, Parkman suggests that ‘it would have formed a noble subject for a painter, and only the pen of Scott could have done it justice in description’. As such remarks intimate, Parkman is drawn to the romance of the West, what he sees as its primitive beauty, its bold colours and simple chivalry, even while he is also repelled by its rawness, its lack of refinement. So he ends up decidedly at odds with himself, when he eventually returns from the trail. ‘Many and powerful as were the attractions of the settlements,’ Parkman concludes, ‘we looked back regretfully to the wilderness behind us.’ That was a broken, uncertain note to be sounded in many later stories about going West, negotiating what the traveller sees as the borderline between civilization and savagery. Parkman was playing his part, in The Oregon Trail, in inaugurating the frontier as a site of vicarious risk, imaginative adventure: with the West perceived as it was precisely because it was seen through the eyes of the East – as a place destructively, but also seductively, other.

A year after the publication of The Last of the Mohicans, in 1827, a very different story about the relationship between white people and Native Americans appeared, and one different in turn from the accounts of Neal, Bird and Parkman: Hope Leslie by Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867). Sedgwick had already produced two best-sellers, A New England Tale: Sketches of New-England Character and Manners (1822) and Redwood (1824). She was to go on to publish many other books, including Clarence; or, A Tale of Our Own Times (1830), set in and around New York City, The Linwoods; or ‘Sixty Years Since’ in America (1835), which portrays the life of New York City during the Revolution, and Married or Single? (1857), a contrast between different types of women aimed at showing the valuable activities in which unmarried women might engage. The main figures in these novels tend to be women, and often women of independence and courage. There is, for instance, a character called Aunt Debby in Redwood who is described as ‘a natural protector of the weak and oppressed’. Aunt Debby, the reader is told, decided to remain

single after the Revolution because she was ‘so imbued with the independent spirit of the times, that she would not then consent to the surrender of any of her rights’. Similarly, the heroines of both Redwood and A New England Tale are female orphans who have to make their way in the world. Jane Elton, in A New England Tale, suffers a difficult adolescence of restrictions imposed by poverty and Calvinist orthodoxy, before finally achieving the emotional maturity required for the responsibilities of marriage and a family. Ellen Bruce, in Redwood, also meets her destiny in marriage. But, in this novel, marriage is part of a larger narrative vision which sees the influence of women as a whole producing an age of virtue, family harmony and love.

Hope Leslie, too, focuses on the destiny of women, but in even more interesting ways than Sedgwick’s other novels. There is a white heroine, whose name gives the book its title. There is also a Pequod woman, Magawisca, who saves a white man, Everell Fletcher, from execution at the hands of her father, the chief, in the manner of Pocahontas. Her act involves considerable physical, as well as emotional, courage, since she offers her body to the weapon aimed at Everell’s neck and, as a result, loses her arm. ‘All paid involuntary homage to the heroic girl, as if she were a superior being,’ the reader is told. Hope Leslie herself shows similar heroism when, on not one but two occasions, she frees Indian women from what she considers unjust imprisonment. And Magawisca resumes her status as an evidently ‘superior being’ towards the end of the narrative, when she is captured by the whites. At her trial for ‘brewing conspiracy . . . among the Indian tribes’, she is defended by the historical figure of John Eliot, whom Sedgwick identifies as the ‘first Protestant missionary to the Indians’. Magawisca, however, insists that she needs no defence, since the tribunal has no authority over her. ‘I am your prisoner, and ye may slay me,’ she declares, ‘but I deny your right to judge me. My people have never passed under the yoke; not one of my race has ever acknowledged your authority.’ Clearly, their heroism makes Magawisca and Hope Leslie doubles. Their primary allegiance is to conscience: what Magawisca calls ‘the Great Spirit’ that ‘hath written his laws on the hearts of his original children’. Obeying those laws, they defy those set in power in their respective societies, who are determinately male: Magawisca defies her father, of course, and both she and her white double Hope defy the authority of the Puritan fathers.

What is equally notable about this rewriting of Western tropes is the intimacy that evidently exists in Hope Leslie between white and Indian characters. Unlike Cooper, Sedgwick is perfectly willing to contemplate marriage between the two races. Faith Leslie, the sister of Hope, is carried into captivity while still a child; she marries Oneco, the brother of Magawisca; and she then refuses the chance offered her to return to the Puritan community. Sedgwick is also willing to countenance signs of kinship between women of the two races. In one narrative sequence, Hope Leslie resists ‘the prejudices of the age’ – and, for that matter, the conventions of female behaviour – by liberating an Indian woman called Nelena from prison. Nelena has been condemned as a witch, after she cured a snakebite with the help of herbal medicine; and she repays the debt by arranging for Magawisca to meet

Hope with news of Faith. The two women, Hope and Magawisca, meet secretly in a cemetery where both their mothers are buried, and plot a way for Hope to meet her sister even though this would violate colonial law. The scene where they meet underscores their shared dignity and courage. Even when Hope momentarily balks at the news that her sister is married to an Indian, the sense of mutual respect is quickly restored by Magawisca’s response. ‘Yes, an Indian, in whose veins runs the blood of the strongest, the fleetest of the children of the forest,’ Magawisca proudly insists, ‘who never turned their backs on friends or enemies, and whose souls have returned to the Great Spirit as they came from him. Think ye that your blood will be corrupted by mingling with this stream?’ The entire scene subtly interweaves intimations of debt and intimacy. The graves of the mothers of the two women lie side by side, the women recall how Magawisca rescued Everell Fletcher and Hope saved Nelena as they talk about the marriage between the brother of one and the sister of the other. It is a celebration of a sisterhood of the spirit and the blood. And its mythic status is confirmed at its conclusion by Hope. ‘Mysteriously, mysteriously have our destinies been interwoven’, Hope observes to ‘the noble figure’ of Magawisca as she departs into ‘the surrounding darkness’. ‘Our mothers brought from a far distance to rest together here – their children connected in indissoluble bonds!’

A word of caution is perhaps necessary here. Sedgwick did not question the prevailing contemporary belief in the Manifest Destiny of the white race. For that matter, she did not seek to challenge the conventional notion that marriage was a woman’s proper aim and reward. As for the latter, even Married or Single?, written with the stated aim of driving away ‘the smile at the name of “old maid” ’, ends with the heroine being married off in traditional fashion. And, as for the former, even Magawisca admits, at her trial, that, as she puts it, ‘the white man cometh – the Indian vanisheth’. Within these constraints, however, Sedgwick did find a place for female integrity and for intimacy between the races. The Linwoods offers a neat illustration of this, when the heroine is assisted in rescuing her brother from jail by a free black woman – who tells the jailer, as she ties him up, ‘remember, that you were strung up there by a “d-n nigger” – a nigger woman!’ In effect, she negotiates a position between those women of the time who assigned a special sphere to the exercise of female virtue and those who said a woman could and should be anything she wanted to be, provided she had the talent and dedication. Her female characters, after all, may be directed towards marriage as their appropriate final destiny: but that does not stop them from transgressing the conventional boundaries for women in the name of their own sense of justice. Sedgwick also negotiates, along the way, a different set of meanings for Western myth: one need only compare Hope Leslie with the Leatherstocking Tales to measure the difference. It is partly a matter of reversal: male transgression and bonding are replaced by, yet reflected in, their female equivalents. It is partly a matter of rewriting, radical revision: here, the connections between the races are what matter rather than the conflicts – and, whatever else may be present, there is an intensely felt sense of community and continuity. Cooper was a powerful creator of frontier myths but

he was not, by any means, the only one: the legends figured in Hope Leslie also had a significant impact on how later Americans imagined the movement of their nation west.

The making of Southern myth

However much they differ, though, writers like Cooper and Sedgwick do have common interests and ideas, derived from the basic currency of Western myth: a belief in mobility, a concern with the future, a conviction that, whatever problems it may have, America is still a land of possibility. The counter-myth to this is the myth of the South: preoccupied with place and confinement rather than space and movement, obsessed with the guilt and burden of the past, riddled with doubt, unease and the sense that, at their best, human beings are radically limited and, at their worst, tortured, grotesque or evil. And if Cooper was the founding father of the Western myth in literature, even though he never actually saw the prairie, then, even more queerly, Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) was the founding father of Southern myth, although he was actually born in Boston and hardly ever used Southern settings in his fiction or his poetry. What makes Poe a founder of Southern myth, typically of him, is not so much a matter of the literal as of the imaginative. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) is set in an anonymous landscape, or rather dreamscape, but it has all the elements that were later to characterize Southern Gothic: a great house and family falling into decay and ruin, a feverish, introspective hero half in love with death, a pale, ethereal heroine who seems and then is more dead than alive, rumours of incest and guilt – and, above all, the sense that the past haunts the present and that there is evil in the world and it is strong. Typically of Poe, who turned his own life into drama, this Southern dimension is also a matter of self-consciousness: the causes he espoused, the opinions he expressed, the stories he told about himself. ‘I am a Virginian,’ he wrote in 1842, ‘at least I call myself one, for I have resided all my life, until within the last few days, in Richmond.’

Even when Poe had become, to all intents and purposes, an exile from the South, he clung to its conservatism and many of its prejudices. ‘I have no faith in human perfectibility,’ he wrote to James Russell Lowell in 1844, ‘I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect on humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6,000 years ago.’ Resisting the American, and Western, shibboleth of progress, Poe also never missed an opportunity to poke fun at democracy. ‘The sense of high birth is a moral force,’ he wrote in ‘Marginalia’ (1844), ‘whose value the democrats, albeit compact of mathematics, are never in condition to calculate . . . “Pour savoir ce qu’est Dieu,” says the Baron de Bielfeld, “il faut être Dieu même.” ’ On its uglier side, this adoption of the pose and beliefs of a Southern aristocrat occasionally led Poe into racist stereotyping. An African American character called Toby, for example, in his long story ‘The Journal of Julius Rodman’ (1840), is said to have ‘all the peculiar features of his race: the swollen lips, large white protruding eyes, flat nose, long

ears, double head, pot-belly, and bow legs’. On its more positive side, though, it encouraged Poe to promote the cause of Southern literature. ‘It is high time that the literary South took its own interests into its own charge,’ he insisted in 1836 while editing the Southern Literary Messenger, and then followed this up a few months later by announcing boldly: ‘we are embarking in the cause of Southern literature and (with perfect amity to all sections) wish to claim especially as a friend and co-operator every Southern Journal.’ And it also encouraged him to attack what he saw as the hegemony of New England and pour comic vitriol on Boston in particular, which he labelled ‘Frogpondium’. ‘We like Boston,’ Poe wrote in 1843 in an essay for the Broadway Journal, and then continued with elephantine irony:

We were born there – and perhaps it is just as well to mention that we are heartily ashamed of the fact. The Bostonians are very well in their way. Their hotels are bad. Their pumpkin pies are delicious. Their poetry is no good . . . But with all these qualities the Bostonians have no soul . . . The Bostonians are well-bred – as very dull persons generally are.

Nevertheless, as Poe admits here, he was born in Boston. Despite all his aristocratic sneers at the bourgeois dullness and correctness of the town, and his complaints about Southerners ‘being ridden to death by New-England’, he did not leave there, to be raised by a Richmond merchant John Allan, until he was two. It was from John Allan that, by choice, Poe took his middle name. And it was with the Allans that Poe lived in England from 1815 to 1820. Poe then entered the University of Virginia in 1826, but relations between him and Allan were by now severely strained. Allan wanted Poe to prepare for a legal career. Poe, however, left university for Boston, where he began a literary career with his first volume of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827). Published anonymously and at his own expense, it went unnoticed. But it clearly announced his poetic intentions: aims and ambitions that were later to be articulated in such seminal essays as ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846) and ‘The Poetic Principle’ (1850) and further put into practice in the later volumes, Poems by E. A. Poe (1831) and The Raven and Other Poems (1845). The poet, Poe wrote in his essays, should be concerned, first and last, with the ‘circumscribed Eden’ of his own dreams. ‘It is the desire of the moth for the star,’ Poe says of the poetic impulse in ‘The Poetic Principle’. ‘Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave,’ he goes on, ‘we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone.’ According to this prescription, the poet’s task is to weave a tapestry of talismanic signs and sounds in order to draw, or rather subdue, the reader into sharing the world beyond phenomenal experience. Poems make nothing happen in any practical, immediate sense, Poe suggests. On the contrary, the ideal poem becomes one in which the words efface themselves, disappear as they are read, leaving only a feeling of significant absence, of no-thing.

Clearly, Poe drew elements of this visionary, even cabalistic, notion of poetry from the English Romantic poets, particularly Samuel Taylor Coleridge. What is remarkable, however, is just how far he pushed this notion – so that, in his critical hands, the poet becomes a prophet who has seen the Promised Land and is now trying to lead others there. Or, it could be added, Poe sees the poet as a priest or shaman, using his arts to entice us into a rejection of the here and now – even a kind of magician who is attempting in effect to enchant us, or simply trick us, into forgetting the laws of the ordinary world. Seen from an international perspective, it is easy to understand why Poe became such an influential figure for Charles Baudelaire and the French Symbolist poets, who learned in part from their American cousin to regard the poet as a person with arcane, almost divine knowledge and the poem as a magic document resisting the heresy of paraphrase. And seen from a purely American standpoint, it is handy to remember Franklin’s insistence that ‘nothing is good or beautiful but in the measure that it is useful’. Quite the contrary, Poe insists. Playing the elegant dandy once again, the Southern aristocrat resisting the demands of a crass, bourgeois culture, he takes the scarlet letter of shame and turns it into a badge of pride: it is the special merit of poetry, he claims, that it is useless.

Just how Poe turned these poetic ideas into practice is briefly suggested in one of his poems, ‘Dreamland’, where the narrator tells us that he has reached a strange new land ‘out of SPACE – out of TIME’. That is the land that all Poe’s art occupies or longs for: a fundamentally elusive reality, the reverse of all that our senses can receive or our reason can encompass – something that lies beyond life that we can discover only in sleep, madness or trance, in death especially, and, if we are lucky, in a poem or story. Certain poetic scenes and subjects are favourites with Poe precisely because they reinforce his ultimately visionary aims. Unsurprisingly, life after death is a favourite topic, in poems like ‘Annabel Lee’ and ‘The Sleeper’. So, too, is the theme of a strange, shadowy region beyond the borders of normal consciousness: places such as those described in ‘The City in the Sea’ or ‘Eldorado’ which are, in effect, elaborate figures for death. As Poe himself explains in ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, an account of how he wrote ‘The Raven’, ‘the death . . . of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world’ because it enhances the seductive nature of death, transforming annihilation into erotic fulfilment. ‘O! nothing earthly’, begins ‘Al Aaraaf ’, one of Poe’s earliest poems, and that captures his poetic thrust: whatever the apparent subject, the movement is always away from the ordinary, phenomenal world in and down to some other, subterranean level of consciousness and experience. The sights and sounds of a realizable reality may be there in a poem like ‘To Helen’, but their presence is only fleeting, ephemeral. Poe’s scenes are always shadowy and insubstantial, the colours dim, the lighting dusky. In the final instance, the things of the real world are there only to be discarded – as signposts to another country that is, strictly speaking, imperceptible, unrealizable by the waking consciousness.

‘Helen, thy beauty is to me, /’ ‘To Helen’ begins, ‘Like those Nicéan barks of yore, / That gently o’er a perfumed sea, / The weary, way-worn wanderer bore / To

his own native shore.’ This is poetry as incantation. Poe uses hypnotic rhythm and recurring, verbal melody and words like ‘Nicéan’ that suggest more than they state, all to create a sense of mystery, or what a later poet, and disciple of Poe, Arthur Rimbaud, was to call ‘a prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses’. The narrator is transported, by the end of this poem, to ‘the regions which / Are HolyLand!’ So, ideally, is the reader. Looking at a poem like this, it is easy to see why Ralph Waldo Emerson attacked Poe as ‘the jingle-man’. It is also easy to see why Poe made people like Emerson nervous since he turned the national belief in individualism, the imperial self, in a strange new direction. The motion here is utterly, remorselessly centripetal: away not just from the world of use, getting and spending, but from the entire world outside the self. In dreams, trance, death, Poe intimates, the self fashions its own reality, inviolable and intangible; it draws inward to a world that, to quote ‘Al Aaraaf ’ again, has ‘nothing of the dross’ outside it, on the material plane. And, if the poet is capable of it, the poem makes a supreme version of that world: self-contained, fixed, perfect, it is a pure or closed field, as autonomous and impalpable as the reality it imitates. It is as if Poe, with typical perversity, had decided to rewrite the dangers that many of his contemporaries saw in the American ethic of selfhood, and the way it opened up the perilous possibility, in particular, of isolation. For, in his work, solipsism becomes the aim: the poet seeks neither to embrace nor to dominate the world but absolute solitude, the sanctuary of the disengaged soul.

Disengagement was not, however, something that Poe could pursue as a practical measure. He had to earn his living, to support himself and then later his wife: in 1836 he married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia. He worked as an editor for various journals, including Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine; he was associated with other journals, such as the New-York Mirror and Godey’s Lady’s Book; in 1845, he even became proprietor of the Broadway Journal; and he was an apparently indefatigable essayist and reviewer. What the magazines wanted, in particular, was stories; and in 1835 Poe attracted attention with one of his first short stories, ‘MS Found in a Bottle’, which won first prize in a contest judged by John Pendleton Kennedy (1795–1870) – himself a writer and author of one of the first idyllic fictional accounts of life on the old plantation, Swallow Barn; or, A Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1832). This short story was followed by more and more tales appealing to the contemporary taste for violent humour and macabre incident. ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, and ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ were all published in Graham’s Magazine in 1841–2; while 1843 saw the freelance publication of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, ‘The Black Cat’, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, and another prize-winning story, ‘The Gold Bug’. His first collection of stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, was published in 1840; it included ‘Ligeia’, ‘Berenice’, and ‘The Assignation’. In 1845 Tales appeared, a book that reprinted previous work selected by Evert Duyckinck (1816–78) – an influential man of letters of the time who, with his brother George (1823–63), was to produce a Cyclopaedia of American Literature (1855), the most comprehensive scholarly work of its kind of the period. This later collection contained ‘The Pit

and the Pendulum’ and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ among other notable pieces. In the earlier, in turn, Poe made his attentions as a short story writer clear in a brief Preface. It was true, Poe admitted, that many of his stories were Gothic because they had terror as their ‘thesis’. But that terror, he went on, was not of the conventional kind, since it had little to do with the usual Gothic paraphernalia; it was, instead, a terror ‘of the soul’.

Whatever else he might have been, Poe was an unusually perceptive (if often also malicious) critic. And he was especially perceptive about his own work. Poe did not invent the Gothic tale, any more than he invented the detective story, science fiction or absurd humour. To each of these genres or approaches, however, he did – as he realized and, in some instances, boasted – make his own vital contribution. In a detective story like ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, for example, Poe created the detective story as a tale of ratiocination, a mystery that is gradually unravelled and solved. He also created the character of the brilliant amateur who solves a crime that seems beyond the talents of the professionals. In his Gothic stories, he first destabilizes the reader by using unreliable narrators: madmen and liars, initially rational men who have their rationalism thoroughly subverted, men who should by all commonsensical standards be dead. And he then locates the terror within, as something that springs from and bears down upon the inner life. In Poe’s stories, the source of mystery and anxiety is something that remains inexplicable. It is the urge to self-betrayal that haunts the narrator of ‘The TellTale Heart’, or the cruel and indomitable will of the narrator of ‘Ligeia’, which finally transforms reality into fantasy, his living wife into a dead one. It is the impulse towards self-destruction, and the capacity for sinking into nightmare worlds of his own creation, that the protagonist and narrator of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) reveals at so many moments of his life. For that matter, it is the strange ending of Pym’s story. As he hurtles towards a chasm in the seas from which arises ‘a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men . . . the hue of the skin . . . of the perfect whiteness of the snow’, he appears to be hurtling towards death. Imaginatively, emotionally, it seems he is dying; and yet, according to other textual detail – and the simple, logical fact that he is narrating the story – he would appear to be alive. Poe tears the Gothic tale out of the rationalist framework it previously inhabited, with accompanying gestures towards common sense, science or explanation. And he makes it a medium for exploring the irrational, even flirting with the anti-rational. As such, he makes it as central and vital to the Romantic tradition as, say, the lyric poem or the dream play.

‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ shows how Poe makes a fictional art out of inwardness and instability. The narrator, an initially commonsensical man, is confused by his feelings when he first arrives at the home of his childhood friend, Roderick Usher. ‘What was it’, he asks himself, ‘that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?’ But he is inclined to dismiss such feelings as ‘superstition’; and, even when he is reunited with Usher, his response is ‘half of awe’, suggesting a suspicion that his host might know things hidden to him, and

‘half of pity’, suggesting the superiority of the rational man. Gradually, the narrator comes to speak only of ‘awe’. He even admits that he feels ‘the wild influences’ of Usher’s ‘fantastic yet impressive superstitions’ ‘creeping upon’ him. The scene is set for the final moment, when Roderick’s sister Madeline arises from her grave to be reunited with him in death, and the House of Usher sinks into a ‘deep and dank tarn’. At this precise moment, Usher turns to the narrator and speaks to him, for the last time, addressing him as ‘Madman’. The reversal is now complete: either because the narrator has succumbed to the ‘superstition’ of his host, or because his continued rationality argues for his essential insanity, his failure to comprehend a truth that lies beyond reason. Nothing is certain as the tale closes, except that what we have witnessed is an urgent, insistent movement inward: from daylight reality towards darker, ever more subterranean levels, in the house and in the mind of the hero. And as the narrator moves ever further inward, into ‘Usher’ the house, we the readers move ever further inward into ‘Usher’ the fiction. The structures of the two journeys correspond. So, for that matter, do the arts of the hero and author: Roderick Usher uses his to transform his guests’ minds and expectations, so also does Poe with his imaginative guests. And at the moment of revelation at the end

– when the full measure of the solipsistic vision is revealed – both ‘Usher’ the house and ‘Usher’ the tale disintegrate, disappear, leaving narrator and reader alone with their thoughts and surmises. In short, the house of Usher is a house of mirrors. Every feature of the story is at once destabilizing and self-reflexive, referring us back to the actual process of creative production, by its author, and reproduction, by its readers. Like so many other tales by Poe, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ stands at the beginning of a long line of Southern narratives that incline towards narcissism and nostalgia, the movement inward and the movement back. It stands at the beginning, also, of an even longer line of fiction, American and European, that disconcerts the reader by jettisoning the mundane in favour of the magical, bare fact in favour of mysterious fantasy – and turning the literal world into a kind of shadow play.

Poe had, perhaps, his own reasons for wanting to turn the world into shadow play, and for associating women with death. His own mother had died when he was only two, which was why he went to live with the Allans; and, in 1847, his young wife Virginia died after a long, debilitating and painful illness. Even during his more successful periods – when, for instance, ‘The Raven’ was published in 1844 and became an overnight success – he was haunted by feelings of insecurity and inadequacy, reasonless fears that nothing seemed to diminish. In his last few years, he remained prolific: in 1848, he published, among other things, a long philosophical work, Eureka, and in 1849 he wrote one of his best-known poems, ‘Annabel Lee’. But he was finding it increasingly difficult to place his work. Suffering from periodic attacks of what he called ‘brain fever’, or temporary mental instability, Poe turned for comfort to a series of relationships with women much older than himself, and to the simpler, chemical release offered by alcohol and opium. Nothing, however, seemed to relieve him; he attempted suicide. Then, in 1849, he disappeared in Baltimore on a journey; he was discovered five days later,

in a delirious condition and wearing someone else’s clothes. He never recovered enough to explain what he had been doing; he simply died four days after this. It was like one of his own stories; and, bizarre and disconcerting though it was, it seems an appropriate end for a writer who thrived on mystery, viewed life as a masquerade and death as a voyage into another, truer world. As we look at the story of Poe’s forty years, we can see certain experiences and obsessions emerging to haunt his writing and aesthetic: death and beauty, alienation and subterfuge, loss and despair. What is perhaps more marked, however, is not this or that particular theme but a guiding impulse: the living and the writing show us someone who by sheer effort of will transforms everything he inhabits, who dissolves the sights and sounds of the world just as he touches them. Poe turned personality into performance, poetry and story into a series of ghostly gestures; in the process, he marked out boundaries for American Romanticism and its succeeding movements that few writers have been able, or even perhaps dared, to cross.

Legends of the Old Southwest

Straddling the borders between the myth of the West and the myth of the South are those heroes and writers who are associated with the humour and legends of the Old Southwest. As for heroes, the notable figures here are Davy Crockett (1786–1836) and Mike Fink (1770?–1823?). Crockett spent a shiftless youth until his political career began when he was thirty. Serving in Congress from 1827 to 1831, and from 1833 to 1835, he was quickly adopted by Whig politicians, opposing the populist hero Andrew Jackson, who saw in Crockett a useful tool for associating their party with backwoods democracy. Davy, who boasted that he relied on ‘natural-born sense instead of law learning’, was soon turned by skilful politicians into a frontier hero, whose picturesque eccentricities, country humour, tall tales, shrewd native wit and rowdy pioneer spirit were all magnified and celebrated. With the help of a ghost writer, Crockett wrote A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee (1834): a book clearly designed to help him gain or retain political popularity. But soon after that, tales of the legendary frontiersman had begun to spread, by word of mouth, songs and poems, almanacs (known as Crockett Almanacs), and by such publications as The Lion of the West

(1831) by James Kirke Paulding, Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee (1833) by Mathew St Claire Clarke (1798–1842?) and An Account of Colonel Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East (1835). In some of these publications, Crockett may have had a hand; in many, he did not. And when he died at the Alamo in 1836, even more life was given to the legend. Davy Crockett became, more and more, a larger than life figure whose exploits, a mixture of the comic and the legendary, turned him into an embodiment of the rough spirit and even rougher individualism of the frontier. In one story, ‘Sunrise in His Pocket’, which appeared first in one of the posthumous almanacs, Davy tells a tall tale of how he got the sun moving again after it had ‘got jammed between two cakes o’ ice’. His solution to the problem was to take ‘a fresh twenty-pound bear’ he had

been carrying on his back, ‘and beat the animal agin the ice till the hot ile began to walk out on him at all sides’. Pouring ‘about a ton on’t over the sun’s face’, he got the sun loose; then, Crockett says, concluding his brag, ‘I lit my pipe by the blaze o’ his top-knot, shouldered my bear, an’ walked home, introducin’ people to the fresh daylight with a piece of sunrise in my pocket’. Simultaneously beautiful and tongue-in-cheek, swaggering and comic, the story captures nicely the rough pride of the hero of these stories and his refusal to take himself too seriously.

As an actual historical figure, less is known of Mike Fink than of Crockett. He was a keelboatman on the Ohio and Mississippi. Before that, he had worked as Crockett had, as an Indian scout; and, when he left the river, he moved west to become a trapper. It was on the river, however, that his violence, humour and energy made him a legend. He evidently helped to foster that legend by telling tales about himself, but it was others who wrote the tales down, among them the newspapermen Thomas Bangs Thorpe (1810–56) and Joseph M. Field (1815–78). The stories about Fink appeared in books, the earliest of which was The Last of the Boatmen by Morgan Neville published in 1829. They also appeared in magazines and newspapers, like the Spirit of the Times, which specialized in tales of the frontier and sporting sketches, and in almanacs – among them, the Crockett Almanacs, which did not confine themselves to the exploits of Davy. Perhaps the most famous piece of prose associated with Fink is ‘Mike Fink’s Brag’, which achieved circulation around 1835–6. ‘I’m a Salt River roarer! I’m a ring-tailed squealer!’ Fink announces, in this extended celebration of himself:

I’m a reg’lar screamer from the ol’ Massassip! WHOOP! I’m the very infant that refused his milk before its eyes were open, and called out for a bottle of old Rye! I love the women an’ I’m chockful o’ fight! I’m half wild horse and half cock-eyed alligator and the rest o’ me is crooked snags an’ red-hot snappin’ turtle . . . I ain’t had a fight for two days an’ I’m spilein’ for exercise. Cock-a-doddle-do!

It captures perfectly the exuberance, the brute humour and animal vitality of the old frontier, and its absolute belief in itself.

Crockett and Fink inhabit an interesting borderland between ‘popular’ and ‘high’ culture, the political and the legendary, oral folk tradition and published literature. The first writer to make the legends and humour of the Old Southwest part of the literary tradition was Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790–1870). A Georgia lawyer and academic, Longstreet published Georgia Scenes: Characters, Incidents &c, in the First Half-Century of the Republic in 1835. In a series of sketches varying from the descriptive to the dramatic, Longstreet presented his readers with illustrations of life in the remoter parts of the state. The sketches were linked by the appearance in nearly all of them of a narrator bearing a suspicious resemblance to the author himself – a kindly, generous but occasionally pompous and patronizing man who tended to treat his subjects as if they were specimens of some strange form of life, with a mixture of curiosity and amusement. A healthy distance was maintained

from characters who were presented not so much as individuals as in terms of their common behavioural patterns; and the combined effect of the detachment, the condescension and the generalizing tendency was to create an impression somewhere between folktale and caricature, legend and cartoon. One of the sketches, for example, ‘The Fight’, describes a country scrap in detail and then ends with a lengthy description of the two fighters’ wounds. ‘I looked and saw that Bob had entirely lost his left ear,’ the narrator recalls, ‘and a large piece from his left cheek.’ ‘Bill presented a hideous spectacle,’ he goes on. ‘About a third of his nose, at the lower extremity, was bit off, and his face so swelled that it was difficult to discover in it anything of the human visage.’ The fighters did not meet after that for two months, we learn. They then made up, with Bill admitting, ‘Bobby you’ve licked me a fair fight; but you wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been in the wrong’. The tale acknowledges the notions of rough justice embodied here, but it does not mitigate the brutality. And the narrator concludes by reassuring the, presumably genteel, reader that more refined habits and customs have now arrived. ‘Thanks to the Christian religion, to schools, colleges, and benevolent associations,’ he explains, ‘such scenes of barbarism and cruelty as that which I have been describing are now of rare occurrence, though they may still be occasionally met with in some of the new counties.’

In the Preface to Georgia Scenes, Longstreet claimed proudly that he was filling in a ‘chasm in history that has always been overlooked’; and ‘The Fight’ illustrates how he reconciled this claim with the demands of comedy. The tone of the description is humorous but the writer clearly hopes that, by means of his humour, he will show something significant about backwoods character: its simplicity, its rough energy, its notions of justice and its capacity for violence. The simplicity and the exaggeration that create the comic note are there, in effect, because they enable Longstreet to show what is different about people like Bob and Bill, and emphasize that at the expense of any qualities they may share, in a Wordsworthian sense, with the rest of humanity. Longstreet’s probable motives for writing in this way were ones he shared with many other Southwestern humorists: among them, Joseph Glover Baldwin (1815–64), author of The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi

(1853), Johnson Jones Hooper (1815–62), who wrote Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers (1845), and Thomas Bangs Thorpe, whose stories about what he called ‘a hardy and indomitable race’ of frontier people were collected in The Big Bear of Arkansas; and Other Sketches Illustrative of Character and Incidents in the South-West (1845). As a professional gentleman and a Whig, Longstreet was inclined to nervousness about the crude habits of frontier life: a life characterized by what Baldwin, in Flush Times, called ‘vulgarity

– ignorance – unmitigated rowdyism . . . bullying insolence’ and ‘swindling raised to the dignity of the fine arts’. Violent, rowdy and anarchic, that life frightened anyone used to a more stable culture with habits of deference and respect. So, in an eminently understandable way, Longstreet and other Southwestern humorists attempted to distance their frontier surroundings, to place them in a framework that would make them manageable and known. They tried, in effect, to enclose

and encode them. One way of doing this was via the humour: by its means, violence was transformed into play, social anarchy into curious spectacle, and fear and anxiety into mild amusement. Another way of doing it was via legend: they also tried to identify the rough, rude world they saw around them with a familiar rural type – the plain farmer, with his straightforward approach to things, his raw integrity and earthy language, and above all his muscular self-reliance. By this means, violence could be interpreted as an excess of high spirits and honest energy; apparent moral anarchy was metamorphosed into a reassertion of conventional principles; and the disruption of established social patterns could be regarded as a crucial step on the road to the recovery of a deeply traditional democratic ideal.

These two strategies were, of course, not wholly reconcilable. And if ‘The Fight’ illustrates the strategy of comedy, then another tale in Georgia Scenes, ‘The “Charming Creature” as a Wife’, illustrates the other approach. In the latter tale, the reader is told how the son of ‘a plain, practical, sensible farmer’ was ruined by marriage to the only child of a wealthy cotton merchant: a creature infected by what the narrator calls ‘town dignity’ – which involves an inordinate sense of her own worth, a preference for the glittering social world where she was brought up, and a failure to appreciate the ‘order, neatness, and cleanness’ of her husband’s home and community. There is no doubt where the narrator’s sympathies lie here. On every possible occasion, he criticizes or makes fun of the pretensions of the ‘charming creature’, her idleness and ‘irregular hours’, and her longing to return to the fashionable world of town. Eventually, she gets her way; the couple leave the simple, rural world she detests, and in their new urban surroundings the husband sinks melodramatically into debt, drunkenness, illness and an early grave. The story then ends with the narrator pointing the moral of his tale: which, unsurprisingly, has to do not only with the pretensions but with the dangers of all those known as ‘charming creatures’. It is a rather different moral from the one drawn at the end of ‘The Fight’. In that story, all that the nineteenth century associated with the word ‘culture’ – taste of a certain genteel kind, ‘schools, colleges, and benevolent associations’ – is held up for approval; it provides a convenient vantage point from which to look down on the ‘barbarism and cruelty’ of the frontier. In ‘The “Charming Creature” ’, however, that very same culture is mocked – words like ‘refinement’ and ‘fashionable’ become terms of abuse – and the idea of the ‘natural’ becomes the touchstone. Both stories, and the morals that are drawn from them, spring from the same impulse, though: which is to contain the anarchy of the backwoods. In ‘The Fight’, it is acknowledged as anarchy but then placed in a narrative frame, to be viewed only sometimes and from a distance. In ‘The “Charming Creature” ’, notions of anarchy and the backwoods setting are both changed utterly by the idiom Longstreet adopts, caught safely within the timeless framework of pastoralism. As amusing barbarian or as good, plain farmer, the frontiersman ceases to be a source of anxiety, a rough beast slouching towards the Southwest to be born; he becomes a remembrance of things past rather than the shape of things to come.

As time passed, though, the narrative enclosure in which Longstreet, Baldwin and other Southwestern humorists chose to pen their frontier subjects tended to dissolve. And with dramatic results: the work that certainly represents the culmination of Southwestern humour, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, shows that. Even before that, the abolition of the conventional narrative frame was a notable feature of the comic stories and tall tales of George Washington Harris (1814–69). Harris began writing about his backwoods hero, Sut Lovingood, as early as 1843, in pieces published in the Spirit of the Times. But it was not until after the Civil War, in 1867, that a full-length volume appeared, Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun by a Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool. Warped and Wove For Public Wear. Sut tells his own tales. And all those tales are guided by his belief that, as he puts it, ‘Man was made a-pupus just to eat, drink, an’ fur stayin’ awake in the yearly part of the nites’. A native of rural Tennessee, Sut is a primitive or natural man: a man who stands on the periphery of conventional society and yet still offers significant comments on it. His life, circumscribed by the animal functions, is a continual drag on our own pretensions, about the nature of our personalities and the efficacy or security of the society we have organized for ourselves. At one point in his narrative, Sut admits that he has ‘nara a soul, nuffin but a whisky proof gizzard’; and Harris’s habitual strategy, of making us, the readers, share Sut’s life and experience the connection between what he is and how he lives, leads us to suspect that in similar conditions we might be forced to say exactly the same.

Harris’s intentions and techniques are, in effect, very different from those of Longstreet and the other humorists. They emphasize the difference between the world of the characters and the genteel world of the author and the presumed reader. Harris, by contrast, presents the reader with a kind of test case that paradoxically derives its impact, the sense of relevance to our lives, from the distance it establishes between the literate reader and the illiterate protagonist. Suppose, Harris intimates, we had been brought up in surroundings similar to those of Sut Lovingood: would we be that different from him? Would we not, perhaps, speak the same language, live on the same level; and, if we would, does this not undermine our pretensions – the belief in our dignity as God-given rather than acquired as a matter of special privilege? Sut Lovingood is detached from us, certainly – the use of an almost impenetrable dialect sees to that – but he is detached from us only in the way that a freakish mirror image of ourselves is. We watch him and, in doing so, witness a curious aping and a criticism of our own behaviour.

The criticism is all the more effective because of Harris’s capacity for reminding us, in the middle of Sut’s various scrapes, that his protagonist does have traces of what we like to call virtue, waiting for the right conditions to bring them to life. He shows pride and independence of judgement, for instance, qualities that lead him to consider himself ‘the very best society’ and to punish those he feels have insulted him in any way. More telling still is the ability Harris gives him for sensing who his enemies are, regardless of whether they have slighted him or not. They are, he

realizes, the preachers and the pedagogues, the politic and educated leaders of society who are there not simply to supply a butt for Sut’s fooling, although they certainly do that, but to remind us of the kind of people – people like ourselves, the readers, perhaps – who are indirectly responsible for his condition. For their privileges, the suggestion is, have been bought at his expense; they, and maybe we, are the beneficiaries of a system from which he is excluded and by which he is deprived. The mirror is being held up to the readers as a group, in other words, as well as to the reader as an individual. We see in Sut Lovingood a reflection of possibilities existing in ourselves – and we are forced to acknowledge our complicity in the creation of circumstances that, in Sut’s case, have translated possibility into fact. Just in case we should continue to miss the point, denying Sut a germ of sensitivity even after all this, there are moments in the narrative when more energetic hints of his potential are allowed to appear. Instead of a reference to some dormant virtue, the reader is confronted with a passage of lyric beauty – not denying the comic framework but actually growing out of it – that serves as a reminder of all those aspects of Sut Lovingood’s character that mostly remain unexercised. In one striking episode, for instance, Sut waxes lyrical about a mealtime. In a long passage, he describes in loving detail a supper that, he recalls, was like ‘a rale suckit-rider’s supper, whar the ’oman ’ove the hous’ wer a rich b’lever’. An evocative catalogue of all the food laid out on the table is followed by a description of the woman who has cooked it all, for Sut and her husband, that combines eroticism and domesticity. ‘Es we sot down, the las’ glimmers ove the sun crep thru the histed winder,’ Sut recollects,

an’ flutter’d on the white tabil-cloth and play’d a silver shine on her smoof black har, es she sot at the head ove the tabil, a-pourin out the coffee, wif her sleeves push’d tight back on her white roun’ arm, her full throbbin neck wer bar to the swell ove her shoulders, an’ the steam ove the coffee made a movin vail afore her face, es she slowly brush’d hit away wif her lef han’, a-smilin an’ flashin her talkin eyes lovingly at her hansum husbun.

The occasion being described here is mundane enough, certainly, but what matters is all that Harris allows his protagonist to make out of it. Sut, the reader is forced to recognize, has a sensitivity – a capacity for recognizing the sensuous beauty and the value of a particular experience – which will emerge at the least opportunity, although too often it is left to waste unrecognized. The waste is articulated elsewhere in the narrative, in the scenes of comic violence and degeneracy that illustrate the actual conditions of his existence. Here there is something different: an instinctive insight, and wisdom, that align Sut with the ideal of the natural man. Sut voices a vision, for and of himself, and, at such moments, he is more than just a comic legend. He is one of the first in a long line of American vernacular heroes, who compel the reader to attend because, the sense is, no matter how poor, stupid or peripheral they may appear to be, they and what they have to say deserve attention.