Constructions of Agency in American Literature on the War of Independence

War as Action, 1775-1860

Martin Holtz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429603662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book argues that the negotiation of agency is central not only to the experience of war but also to its representation in cultural expressions, ranging from a notion of disablement, expressed in victimization, immobilization, traumatization, and death, to enablement, expressed in the perpetration of heroic, courageous, skillful, and powerful actions of assertion and dominance. In order to illustrate this thesis, it provides a comprehensive analysis of literary representations of the American War of Independence from 1775, the beginning of the war, up until roughly 1860, when the Civil War marked a decisive historical turning point. As the first national war, it has an unquestionably exemplary status for the development of American conceptions of war. The in-depth study of exemplary texts from a variety of genres and by authors like Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Sedgwick, William Gilmore Simms, and Herman Melville, demonstrates that the overall character of Revolutionary War literature presents the war as a forum in which collective and individual agency is expressed, defended, and cultivated. It uses the military environment in order to teach the values of discipline and self-subordination to a communal good, which are perceived as basic principles of a Republican virtue to guide the actions of the autonomous individual in a popular democracy.

1 Introduction

Arguably, the waging of war is one of the most contested frameworks for expressions of human agency. Agency is in its rudimentary definition the capacity to act. Actions, understood in philosophical terms, are events brought about by intentional physical processes, consciously guided by an agent, based on his or her beliefs and desires, and causing an anticipated change (Lowe 2013, 4). They are thus emblems of human existence: the manifestations of autonomy, responsibility, will. According to von Clausewitz, war is “an act of force to compel an enemy to do our will” (qtd. in Strachan 2009, 7). For several reasons, this makes war a particularly powerful display of action, because of the sheer quantity of people involved in a concerted military effort, the gravity of the change that is caused by a war in so many ways, and the strength of determination needed to overcome the resistance to the intended outcome. Thus, war can be a very empowering experience, not just for the group or nation that wages it, but also on more individualized levels: from the president or general who orders massive amounts of people to do his bidding down to the simple soldier who uses his skill to kill another human being. However, as can be seen from these examples, war creates a dialectical constitution of agency, because the successful action of one party depends on the curtailment of the capacity to act of the other one. A general’s agency of ordering others depends upon the subordinates’ acquiescence to his will, whereas a soldier’s agency in killing depends upon the annihilation of agency in the opponent. War can therefore provide profoundly diverse manifestations of agency, ranging from a notion of disablement, expressed in victimization, immobilization, traumatization, and death, to enablement, expressed in the perpetration of heroic, courageous, skillful, and powerful actions of assertion and dominance, which in turn explains war’s fascination and its horror.

This study argues that the negotiation of agency is central not only to the experience of war but also to its representation in cultural expressions. In order to contribute to the understanding of the nature of wars, which includes their causes and the ways they are fought, it is essential to consider the way their representations address their potential to provide situations in which human actions are manifested. Of central importance is the question of in how far wars are presented as promoting agency or limiting agency. Are they portrayed as enabling or disabling? In her survey of literature about war, which also serves as an overview of analytical approaches that have been taken to the subject, Kate McLoughlin stresses, in a fairly prescriptive manner, how war writings are (and should be) predominantly concerned with finding words for the horror of the experience and the universal suffering of soldiers and civilians alike, while the limitations of language in trying to render the indescribable constitute a constant meta-literary theme (2009, passim). According to McLoughlin, the majority of war literature studies appear to show a preoccupation with the disabling characteristics of war, particularly its traumatizing effects. Trauma means wound, which can be physical or psychological and which has the effect of shock and paralysis (Colman 2006, 776). A traumatic experience leaves you in a state of suspended agency, unable to act. In only one short paragraph does McLoughlin introduce a crucially contrastive aspect of war and its representation, only to disregard it as ethically questionable: “Finally, the excitement of the fight is a compelling, if distasteful, motive for writing about war” (2009, 21). As distasteful as it may be, the excitement of the fight, which I believe is an effect of the experience of agency and which has been a staple of war literature ever since Homer’s Iliad, deserves a more inclusive analysis, because as ethically well-meaning as an exploration of the traumatic effects of war as depicted in its representations may be, it tells us little about the fascination of war. If wars only caused universal trauma, they would not be fought. To put it provocatively, only a focus that includes the empowering, exciting, seductive, and heroic aspects of war and its representation can potentially help to, if certainly not prevent war, then at least cultivate an awareness of how culture contributes to and reflects a desire to wage war. The approach to war representation I am proposing considers a fuller range of how these representations create meaning by stressing the fluidity and range of agency that they can construct. Each representation of war can be located on a spectrum that is bookended by the twin poles of absent agency and its full articulation.

Integrating concepts from philosophy and sociology, the agency approach constitutes an innovation in literary theory and can find numerous applications to various levels of discourse. At the center of the approach is the question for the capability and degree of action. Action is understood as the intentional and guided achievement of change, the production of an effect upon the world. The creation of meaning is a form of agency that texts of any kind have. Texts act in the world. They produce effects on their readers by creating worlds, suggesting narrative order (or disorder), presenting arguments, and conveying values. A text can, for example, be very effective in its attempt to construct a world in which a narrative takes place that clearly suggests the validity of certain values and prompts respective attitudes or even actions in a reader. The effects that a text can achieve in the real world are ultimately dependent on the way it constructs agency on a diegetic level. The way in which the agency of characters in a text is realized is the main analytical focus of this study. Character agency is dependent on a variety of factors, which will be unfurled in a detailed methodological approach in Chapter 2, and this can make for a very nuanced conception. Even a cursory catalogue hints at the complexity of the subject: characters can be objects or subjects of narration; they can be portrayed as free or unfree in their decision-making process, as enmeshed in or unaffected by ideological contexts in which decisions are made, as rational planners or impulsive actors, they can be selfless or selfish in their actions, courageous or cowardly, responsible or irresponsible; they can be reduced to functioning automatons or elevated to dutiful and noble agents; they can meet insurmountable obstacles or welcome challenges; they can skillfully traverse a hostile terrain or ineptly fall prey to its traps; they can be fortuitous or unlucky, successful or ineffective. All these, by no means exhaustive, factors are, on the one hand, dependent on the contextual scenario that the text creates and, on the other hand, influence the image of that scenario as either expressive of or harmful to human agency.

For reasons of space and manageability, the ideal of evaluating a comprehensive historical overview of American war representations regarding their constructions of agency needs to be curtailed. An initial curtailment is the narrow definition of what for the purposes of this study I consider to be war literature. A broad definition may include every text that is written under the influence of war, regardless of how explicitly war is featured in its content. A text like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, for instance, reflects a mood of cultural turmoil and collapse in the wake of World War I, while Melville’s Moby-Dick portrays the civilizational ills of imperial capitalism as expressed in the Mexican– American War. Both texts can be seen as reflecting (a) war metaphorically, but they do not engage directly and unequivocally with the experience on the battlefield. The same can be said about texts whose exclusion from the corpus may be deemed more controversial: texts about the experience of civilians who are not directly involved in combat situations, even though they may be affected directly by the vicissitudes of the war on the home front. There are a number of women’s diaries about the Revolutionary War (and on numerous other wars for that matter), for instance, by such authors as Margaret Morris, Sally Wister, Grace Galloway, and Mary Almy, which have received scholarly attention (cf. Comfort 2001), and while their experiences may provide an enriching picture of how the agency of different sections of the population is affected by war as a whole, my interest lies in texts that have the experience on the battlefield in an explicitly military environment at their center. It is the action on the battlefield that I consider to be the essence of war and that, as will be seen, not only provides a wealth of different approaches to its representation, but also functions as the environment in which the most extreme and challenging conditions of agency are encapsulated in the violent conceit of dying and killing. This is why, for the sake of this study, I only selected literature which focuses on militarily conducted combat.

The historical focus of this study is the representation of the War of Independence in American literature from 1775, the beginning of the war, up until roughly 1860, when the Civil War marked a decisive historical turning point. This focus can be justified not just by reasons of manageability. For one, the War of Independence is the first war that was fought by the nation, that indeed gave birth to the nation. The prior colonial wars, most notably King Philip’s War, which did produce a certain amount of literature, were not fought as a nation. As the first national war, the character of its representation in early America has an unquestionably exemplary status for the development of American conceptions of war. As will be seen, the historical and textual scope of the analysis is wide enough to showcase a multiplicity of representative strategies of war, stressing its diachronic and synchronic complexity by highlighting the plurality of voices/texts at any given moment in time and the adaptation of textual representations to changing historical contexts. Additionally, literature of the War of Independence is, apart from studies of individual canonic authors like Thomas Paine, James Fenimore Cooper, or William Gilmore Simms, and surveys of propaganda literature during the war, a neglected field of study, with no substantial study that comprises literature both written during and after the war available.¹ This study aims to provide exactly that: a survey of Revolutionary War literature in the early years of the Republic. What is crucial for the overall thesis of this study, that agency rendition is central to the representation of war in American culture, is that the War of Independence was fought precisely for the attainment of agency. As Jeremy Block puts it, the war created a “nation of agents” in that it marked the historical transition from conceiving of populations as obedient (or unruly) subjects to monarchs to cultivating citizenship as expressed in political participation and hence individual action (2002, 234). As the nation is founded on the ideals of promoting individual agency along the lines of Republican citizenship and as these ideals continue to be as contested and as relevant as they were when the nation was founded, it is all the more valuable to explore in how far the event that made this agency possible was reflected in terms of its agentive character.

Based on these observations on the nature of the proposed approach and the circumscribed area of primary literature, further theses can be elaborated. Besides demonstrating the centrality of agency negotiations in war representations, this study suggests that while agency is treated in multifarious ways, the overall character of Revolutionary War literature presents the war as a forum in which collective and individual agency is expressed, defended, and cultivated. Not only is war portrayed as enabling, it is the environment in which the right kind of agency is acquired. The literature of and about the Revolutionary War uses the military environment in order to teach the values of discipline and self-subordination to a communal good, which are perceived as basic principles or as “Republican virtue” (Block 2002, 252–253), to guide the actions of the autonomous individual in a popular democracy. As a result, the literature of the War fulfills an important cultural function of not only salvaging the Revolution from contemporary anxieties of a radical destabilization of social structures by giving way to “excessive” rebelliousness along the lines of the French Revolution, but it also serves as a didactic tool of character building to curb the more radical implications of the Revolution and so works as an expression of a predominantly conservative interpretation of the Revolution by suggesting the necessity of (self-)regulatory measures to circumscribe individual agency. In other words, the literature suggests that the war teaches agenthood in the acquisition of self-control and selfless behavior.

In order to arrive at this insight, the initial part of the study (Chapter 2) is concerned with the clarification of the term “agency”. The concept is often used in literary studies, but rarely accompanied by a thorough theoretical foundation, which is why I will turn to the fields of philosophy and sociology where such theorizations have a long history, in order to approach a working definition. Based on the findings in these two sections, I will develop applications of the concept to the areas of war and literature in the subsequent sections. These four sections will make up the theoretical frame for the study and conclude with questions that will guide the analytical part.

The analysis of literature on the War of Independence (Chapter 3) will be subdivided into two broad categories: literature written during the war and literature written after it. This division respects the different overall purposes of the texts. Literature written during the war has the overall function of inspiring support for the war effort, making people act. Central to the analysis will be the question how this propagandistic appeal to action is manifested in the texts. By the detailed analysis of representative pamphlets, poems, satirical writings, plays, and autobiographical narratives, it will be shown that the propaganda literature of the war negotiates agency between a stylized victimhood in order to generate outrage and the suggestion that the enemy’s encroachment on the freedom of action prompts immediate resistance in order to defend agency at all. Central to the appeal to action is the texts’ presentation of selfless behavior on the battlefield, which includes the acceptance of death as glorified expression of agency, a self-chosen act of will, thereby prefiguring principles of Republican virtue that conceives of agency as a subordination of self to public benefit. This presentation of dying as heroic action is significant in so far as it counterbalances the Revolution’s extolment of the value of each individual and their freedom from oppressive social constraints.

Literature about the Revolution written after the war emerges with the publication and success of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy (1821). This section will focus on a variety of novels inspired by Cooper’s groundbreaking book, encompassing works by Cooper himself, John Neal, James A. Jones, Eliza Cushing, John Pendleton Kennedy, Catharine Sedgwick, Robert Montgomery Bird, William Gilmore Simms, and Herman Melville, as well as autobiographical writings by Alexander Graydon and Joseph Plumb Martin. In their evocation of the Revolutionary War, the texts reflect conservative contemporary anxieties about a perceived “excess of democracy” (Wood 2009, 19) and, while presenting different takes on the agentive potential of the war, on the whole try to cultivate selflessness as the principle of action by glorifying the service in the military as expression of a virtuous agency that is needed in a popular democracy. In this way, the study will illustrate the cultural work that representations of war contribute to fundamental concerns of the nation’s identity and to how this identity is indivisibly tied up with notions of agency.

Note

1 See Chapter 3 for an overview of available studies on Revolutionary War literature.

2 Agency

The succinct way in which the term “agency” is dropped every so often can lead to the assumption that there is not much complexity to the concept. In its rudimentary definition, agency is the capacity to act, pure and simple. Yet an exploration of what this capacity entails is rewarding, for it broaches fundamental features and problems of human existence. The philosophy of action will serve as the anchor for a clarification of relevant terminology and a formulation of basic problems and questions that illustrate the multifaceted nature of actions. A central task of this first section will be a discussion of intentional action as an expression of agency. Subsequently, agency will be explored from a sociological perspective. In this section the question of how agency relates to discursive social structures that inhibit or generate actions is central. The following section will apply these findings to military structures and reflect the question of how agency relates to war. The final section will discuss agency in the context of literature by exploring the use of the concept in narratology. The goal is to come up not only with a working definition of agency but also with terminological tools that allow for an application to and evaluation of texts in terms of their creation of meaning.

2.1 Agency in Philosophy

The capacity to act defines human existence. Aristotle was among the first to characterize the specific nature of human action, distinguishing between voluntary actions and those which are forced upon someone or of whose circumstances the agent is “ignorant” (Coope 2013, 439–441).¹ Voluntary actions are thus characterized by choice and awareness of the agent. Aristotle’s concept of voluntariness laid the foundation for classifying actions according to intentionality, which modern action theory recognizes as crucial to defining agency.

For Korsgaard, intentional actions can be described as generating a “practical identity” (2009, 18): “whenever you take control of your own movements – you are constituting yourself as the author of that action, and so you are deciding who to be” (2009, xi). Hence, “your identity is in a quite literal way constituted by your choices and actions” (2009, 19). For intentional actions to be possible, certain prerequisites need to be fulfilled. Lau distinguishes between “inner freedom” and “outer freedom”, by which he means a freedom of the will and a freedom of action. Inner freedom is the ability of an agent to independently form intentions. According to Lau, such a freedom is achieved when a situation in which an action takes place is undetermined, i.e. an original decision between options of equal value can be made (2013, 98); when the agent has a high degree of rationality, i.e. good cognitive and self-regulatory capacities, a good memory and anticipatory qualities, and a good knowledge of personal needs and environmental conditions and regularities (2013, 97); and when the agent has a high degree of self-reflection, i.e. awareness of the decision-making process and an ability to rationalize one’s decision (2013, 99). Outer freedom is the ability, once an intention has been formed, to act it out successfully by overcoming any obstacles that may impede its realization (Lau 2013, 106). If such freedoms are prerequisites for agency, then a discussion of intentional action should start with a discussion of the validity of such freedoms, which leads to a fundamental philosophical question: is there a free will? This discussion will form the basis for the subsequent attempt to delineate the qualities of intentional actions after which the problems and complications of intentionality will be illustrated. The goal is to show that agency in its philosophical usage is a highly modifiable and interpretive concept, which depends on a variety of objective and subjective, universal and situational factors, and this quality invites a structured application to cultural analysis.

2.1.1 Determinism vs. Libertarianism, Compatibilism vs. Incompatibilism

Aristotle’s concept of voluntariness suggests that the individual is free to decide whether to perform an action or not. This freedom of the will, to have done otherwise, appears to be a constitutive premise for agency, and accordingly most people would regard this freedom as an integral human quality. Most people would also assume that such a freedom is incompatible with the idea that our actions are determined by causes beyond our control. Pink suggests that such an understanding makes us intuitive incompatibilist libertarians (2013b, 474).

‘Incompatibilism’ is the doctrine that freedom is incompatible with the causal predetermination of the way we act by factors outside our control. ‘Libertarianism’ about freedom of action combines incompatibilism with the further belief that we do actually possess c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Agency
• 3 Agency in American Literature on the War of Independence, 1775–1860
• 4 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index