American Writers and the Picturesque Tour

The Search for National Identity, 1790-1860

Beth L. Lueck

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135813598
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: Literary Criticism

Explores a beloved genre
Even before the age of the Romantics, travel literature was a favorite genre of English and American writers and readers. After the War of 1812, Americans' passion for scenic beauty inspired them to take the picturesque tour of America as well as going to Europe for the requisite Grand Tour. The written American version of the popular British tour in various guidebooks helped shape the literature of the new nation as nearly every major writer of the first half of the 19th century contributed to it from Poe, who provided several comic pieces, and Irving to Thoreau, for whom the tour symbolized moral and spiritual growth, and Margaret Fuller. Offers new perspectives
American writers adapted the picturesque to express their nationalistic sentiments; picturesque discourse offered a flexible series of conventions that enable writers to celebrate the places, people, and legends that set America apart. This volume demonstrates the vital role of this genre in the formation of national literary taste and national culture and offers fresh and exciting perspectives on the topic. Includes index. Also includes maps.

Chapter 1

Introduction

In 1855, writing about travelers of various nations, a critic for Putnam’s Monthly compared British, French, and American travelers and made the following observations about his fellow countrymen: “The American,” he wrote, “has a pleasure in foreign travel, which the man of no other nation enjoys. With a nature not less romantic than others; with desires and aspirations for the reverend and historically beautiful, forever unsatisfied at home, fed for years upon the splendid literature of all time, and the pompous history of the nations that have occupied and moulded the earth, and yet separated from those nations and that history, not only by space and the total want of visible monuments, but by the essential spirit of society around him; bom with poetic perception amid the stateliest natural forms--forests, mountains, rivers, and plains-that seem to foreshow a more imperial race, and results more majestic than are yet historical, but with none of that human association in the landscape, which gives it its subtlest beauty and profoundest influence, the American mind is solicited by Europe with unimagined fascination.” The American traveler, he concludes, “goes out [to Europe] to take possession of his dreams, and hopes, and boundless aspirations.”¹

He was wrong. For at least a half-century before this essay appeared Americans had been traveling in their native land, their routes expanding ever westward. During this same period dozens of travel books had appeared by recognized writers, by minor writers, and by people without the least pretense to this title. Contrary to this critic’s observation, the great majority of these travelers found plenty to satisfy them on the American continent, both landscapes and history. Even though Washington Irving complained early in the century about the dearth of historical associations in the American landscape, he was finding and exploiting dozens of historical and geographic sites in early sketches such as “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and, later on, in tales such as “The Devil and Tom Walker” and “Kidd the Pirate. “² Americans, including Irving and most other major writers, did travel to Europe in great numbers, often paying lip service to the complaint that the American landscape lacked the associations and history necessary for a vital, indigenous literature. Nevertheless, many of these same writers found enough to write about and produced hundreds upon hundreds of travel books, sketches, tales, and novels.

These works of travel literature constitute the material of this study. Although critical interest has been stirred in recent years by the extraordinary volume of travel literature written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and an occasional work has appeared that links the interest in particular landscapes with people traveling to view such scenery, no one has examined the broader issues that arose when Americans in increasing numbers traveled in pursuit of scenic beauty in the first half of the nineteenth century.³

American travelers’ passion for picturesque beauty was fostered by various accounts of landscapes worth viewing, by artists’ renderings of scenery that appeared in periodicals in the form of woodcuts and engravings, as well as in paintings, and by the nationalistic fervor following the War of 1812. With peace newly returned to the country, with prosperity, and with leisure time at hand, people increasingly sought out well known landscapes and traveled in search of landscape beauty. Picturesque travel led to the development of the American picturesque tour, a written version of the popular British tour. But what was most significant about this phenomenon, in which almost every major author of the first half of the nineteenth century participated, was the role it played in shaping the literature of the new nation. Critics have assumed that, by and large, American writers borrowed British literary conventions and used them relatively uncritically to present native materials to their American and European audiences. In sharp contrast to this view, it is clear that American authors did not feel at all confined by some literary forms. Instead, they adapted these conventions for a national literature, keeping elements that seemed essential and abandoning those that appeared irrelevant. In the case of the picturesque tour, American writers seized upon an essentially British form that originated in the late eighteenth century and modified it for their own use.

Right from the beginning, with Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799), the American tour took off in a direction scarcely suggested by the British original. From Brown’s picturesque tourist, asleep and stumbling through a dark landscape, to James Kirke Paulding’s later satires on tourism, to Poe’s parodies of the genre, American writers transformed the picturesque tour, recognizing its extraordinary adaptability in tone and its particular usefulness as a means of expressing their nationalistic sentiments. In addition, picturesque discourse offered a flexible series of conventions that enabled American writers to celebrate verbally the unique landscapes and associated legends and peoples that set their nation apart from the rest of the world. Its many variations in tone, from straightforward description to irony and satire, also allowed writers to adapt the picturesque for various kinds of writing, including nonfictional forms such as tours and essays and fictional forms such as sketches, tales, and novels. How these writers took the conventions of the picturesque tour and adapted them to help shape the nation’s identity through literature is the focus of this book.

Most of the leading writers of the period between 1790 and 1860 showed familiarity with picturesque travel and used at least some of its conventions in their writing. Some writers borrowed the picturesque tour and its literary conventions wholesale from English models and adapted them to the realities of the American landscape. Brown’s picturesque tourist in Edgar Huntly, for example, explored the wilderness landscapes of Norwalk, and Paulding’s tourists traveled throughout the South and New York. Later Washington Irving and Francis Parkman adapted the modes of picturesque discourse to the prairies and mountains of western America. Other writers dealt with the divergences between English conventions and American realities by introducing new tonal qualities into the picturesque tour. Thus Hawthorne created an ironic tourist who satirized the pretensions of other travelers, while Poe employed comic and parodic strategies in his travel writings. Thoreau also responded creatively to the problem of adapting the British model to American landscapes, employing picturesque discourse in a wide range of tones and forms, ranging from irony to awe, and from description to meditation.

In this study I propose to define the picturesque tour both as a form of travel and literature, and to examine the national and cultural background that led to the popularity of picturesque travel. Then I will explore the ways the major writers between 1790 and 1860 adapted the existing conventions of picturesque travel to American locales and shaped the tour for their own needs in both fictional and nonfictional narratives. Focusing on the writings of seven major authors whose work reflects a knowledge of and interest in picturesque travel—Brown, Irving, Paulding, Hawthorne, Parkman, Poe, and Thoreau—I will examine the varying modes of picturesque discourse that resulted in their work.

The conventions of the picturesque tour date back to the 1780s and ’90s in England, or even earlier, if one considers the continental grand tour a forerunner of picturesque travel. During this period William Gilpin, an English clergyman, traveler, and writer, emerged as the chief advocate and practitioner of the picturesque tour. His published tours of Great Britain introduced the upper ranks of British society to the pleasures of touring. These tours also established the format for the picturesque tour for the next half-century, both in England and America, and set the standard for travel books that featured the picturesque tour.

Gilpin’s influential essay “On Picturesque Travel” (1792) defined the conventions of this form of travel, even as his essay “On Picturesque Beauty” (1792) initiated a prolonged debate about this form of landscape beauty. According to Gilpin, the picturesque tour was a tour in search of picturesque beauty, which he defined as the kind of landscape beauty that would be suitable in a picture. Travelers searched for landscapes featuring contrasts in light and shadow; rough textures, or “ruggedness” (as opposed to smoothness, which was associated with the beautiful); compositional unity within the varied elements of a scene, sometimes achieved through the unifying light of the sun or moon on a landscape; and historical, legendary, literary, or other associations.⁴ Contemporary critics such as Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight debated Gilpin’s definition of picturesque beauty. More recently, modern critics such as Martin Price argue for both a more complex and less stable definition of this aesthetic category. But because the term “picturesque beauty” was most widely understood in America as embracing the qualities listed here, and because Gilpin’s works were most frequently cited and read by American writers, I will use the term in this sense throughout this study.⁵ Several examples will illustrate the first three elements in picturesque description as American writers used them in the art of the verbal sketch; the issue of associations and landscape will be taken up later.

Washington Irving, one of the most enthusiastic picturesque travelers in America and abroad, offers an excellent example of the verbal sketch in a scene from A Tour on the Prairies (1835), as he and his fellow tourists pause to view a river valley in what is now Oklahoma. Irving’s highly trained picturesque eye appreciates the scene before him, and he creates the following sketch of the view:

A beautiful meadow about half a mile wide, enameled with yellow autumnal flowers, stretched for two or three miles along the foot of the hills, bordered on the opposite side by the river, whose banks were fringed with cotton wood trees, the bright foliage of which refreshed and delighted the eye, after being wearied by the contemplation of monotonous wastes of brown forest.

The meadow was finely diversified by groves and clumps of trees, so happily disposed that they seemed as if set out by the hand of art. As we cast our eyes over this fresh and delightful valley we beheld a troop of wild horses quietly grazing on a green lawn about a mile distant to our right, while to our left at nearly the same distance, were several buffaloes … The whole had the appearance of a broad beautiful tract of pasture land, on the highly ornamented estate of some gentleman farmer, with his cattle grazing about the lawns and meadows.⁶

The entire scene provides a refreshing contrast to the “monotonous wastes” of forest through which the company has just ridden. Within this scene the smooth meadowland contrasts effectively with the rougher textures of the trees, just as the meadow is “diversified” by “clumps” of cottonwoods. (These terms originate with Gilpin, who had defined the usage of such terms for picturesque discourse in Remarks on Forest Scenery [1791].⁷)

Irving provides the requisite variety for a picturesque composition with the river, meadow, trees, flowers, and animals, and although the unifying touch of the sun is absent here, his focus on the valley, with its surrounding hills, helps to frame the scene for the reader. Directional references also help the reader picture the scene. Water, whose changeable quality Gilpin admired in the picturesque landscape, is present in the river.⁸ The grazing buffalo and wild horses give rough texture to the composition, an element Gilpin often included by means of sheep or other rough-coated animals, and add a pastoral element that softens the wildness of the western landscape.⁹ At the end of the verbal sketch Irving’s comparison of the river valley to a gentleman farmer’s estate domesticates the landscape even further and suggests its future potential as farmland for the pioneers who would one day settle here. This reference also introduces the element of class to the sketch, an element that plays an indirect role in landscape appreciation for many picturesque tourists. For the upper-middle class or upper-class traveler in America or abroad, the act of categorizing landscapes as picturesque often involved class distinctions since farmers--real ones, not “gentleman farmers”—who actually tilled the soil, shepherds, and similar figures often appeared in picturesque sketches, verbal or otherwise. Such figures were often sentimentalized by the very nature of the tourist’s viewing them as “picturesque”; indeed, a later American traveler, Francis Parkman, distinguished between such persons (Indians, for example) seen at close range and at a distance. In the foreground, they and their dwellings are merely ugly or dirty, but with the softening effect of distance they become picturesque. Prosperous figures, whether businessmen or middle-class tourists, lack the roughness and quaintness of humbler persons and rarely appear in the picturesque sketch until the late 1820s, when they enter the scene as objects of the author’s irony or satire. Paulding frequently satirizes the tourists at popular Virginia and New York watering places, and Hawthorne occasionally features such characters in his American travel sketches.

While Irving celebrated western scenery in the example from A Tour on the Prairies, Hawthorne’s travel sketches from the 1830s illustrate the usefulness of picturesque discourse for depicting the scenery of eastern America and reflect, like Irving’s description, Gilpin’s compositional principles at work in the verbal sketch. “A Night Scene” provides an excellent example of how contrast and unity can function in picturesque composition. Although most picturesque scenery is viewed in the daytime or during the early morning or evening hours, in this sketch Hawthorne finds visual excitement in the strong contrasts created by a bonfire on a riverbank, which he views from a steamboat at night:

As the evening was warm, though c...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly: The Picturesque Traveler as Sleepwalker
• 3. “Banqueting on the Picturesque”: James Kirke Paulding in the 1820s and ’30s
• 4. The Search for Manliness: Irving and Parkman in the West
• 5. Hawthorne’s Ironic Traveler
• 6. Poe’s “Picturesque-Hunters”
• 7. Excursions in New England: Thoreau as Picturesque Tourist
• 8. Conclusion
• Index