U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Life in the Woods: The Influence of Hunting on Frontier Leadership in Revolutionary Kentucky

Blair M. Smith

© Blair M. Smith. All Rights Reserved. 

In investigating the influence that a hunter would have on the region commonly referred to as ‘the frontier’, one need only look at the nineteenth century interpretations of Daniel Boone and the Kentucky frontier, and the influence they were to have on constructions of heroism and leadership in America during this period. From James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales and the Presidency of Andrew Jackson, to the historical understandings of Frederick Jackson Turner, the frontier would provide national symbols and heroes who carried the westward advance across the continent. It is the endurance of these symbols that can provide an explanation as to why Turner’s understanding of the frontier is still discussed today when approaching the topic.[1] From Cooper’s Natty Bumppo to Jebediah Springfield and the cultural juggernaut of The Simpsons, one does not need to have an extensive knowledge of the arguments surrounding frontier history to recognise the image of a buckskin-clad hunter blazing a trail through the wilderness for civilisation to follow.[2] In the foundations of such images, Daniel Boone has been the most prominent of these frontier hunters, due in no small part to John Filson’s 1784 publication The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke to which is added the Adventures of Daniel Boon. Yet Boone’s role merely represents how the figure of the hunter was used to create a viable national hero, and does not provide an answer as to why the frontier hunter would emerge as a viable option for such transcendence.[3] This paper will consider the definition of ‘leadership’ during this period and the notion of where authority emanates from in the social hierarchy of backcountry Virginia and Kentucky during the revolutionary period. In this region there appears to be a conflict between the established or traditional authority of the gentry classes, and the charismatic authority of prominent frontiersmen, such as Daniel Boone.[4] Due to this apparent conflict one of the major questions that arises – and needs further investigation – is from where did these prominent frontiersmen gain the experience of leadership to challenge the established hierarchy? The answer surely lies in the development of commercial hunting in this region in the middle part of the eighteenth century. This article will therefore focus on the findings that relate to the organisation of hunting parties to Kentucky in the late 1760s and early 1770s which provide an image of the frontier leader that is very different to the Boone image of the nineteenth century, an image that is arguably central to the establishment of an ad hoc political structure in revolutionary Kentucky. For this discussion to begin, though, a brief understanding of the role hunting played in backcountry society during the period prior to Kentucky settlement is required.

As settlement pushed into the backcountry regions of Virginia and Pennsylvania during the eighteenth century, hunting rose in importance to these new communities. Not only did this area develop as a viable commercial activity but, as Stephen Aron has argued, it provided an avenue for young men to gain respite from farm work and emasculating dependence.[5] Before this activity could become a commercial endeavour, however, learning to hunt was one of the greatest adjustments these early settlers to the backcountry regions made. It is unsurprising that for early settlers to Western Pennsylvania and Virginia hunting would have contributed little to a family’s subsistence, and many of those choosing to settle in these regions came from backgrounds with no hunting heritage. In Britain, for example, hunting was a sport confined to the elites, and strict poaching laws discouraged the labouring classes from legally participating on a subsistence level.[6] Having been previously excluded from a hunting culture, immigrants developed their skills gradually and, by the time settlement pushed into the mountain valleys of Virginia and North Carolina, hunting had become an ever more crucial part of backcountry life. However, the question remains as to how these skills were developed if the vast majority of backcountry immigrants did not possess any sort of hunting experience. Of the early settlers to these regions, only Scandinavian Pennsylvanians had any expertise in this field, and the core skills needed—appropriate dress, tracking, patience, stealth—were gained through observing local Indian populations and their techniques.[7]  The endurance of this Indian influence has been observed in the dress codes of adolescent hunters, and it was in this arena where a young Daniel Boone learned his skills.[8] By the middle part of the eighteenth century, frontier settlers had taken the original Indian skills and made them their own, with crucial elements differentiating them from their indigenous neighbours. One distinctive difference concerns the relationship each group had with the animals they hunted. Where Indians viewed the hunt as a spiritual quest, which credited the animal for surrendering itself, backcountry hunters saw it as an act of mastery with the animal falling to the most skilful hunter. However, the most profound difference in the hunting practices concerned gender roles. It was not uncommon for women to accompany Indian men on a hunting expedition, and while they never directly participated in the hunting, they fulfilled roles in keeping with traditional Indian labour division. While the men hunted, the women who accompanied them would tend to the camp, prepare meals, smoke meat and dress the skins. In some respects, the absence of women among settler hunting parties is understandable when one considers the labour divisions within European society in this period that had men at the head of all subsistence systems. However, it also highlights the socio-economic divisions in colonial Virginia where hired hands and slaves, rather than women, were used to tend the domestic needs of a hunting party. The absence of women is important as it raises some issues when trying to determine how many people participated in a hunting party; slaves, like women, were often omitted from the records and there is no way of ascertaining who was there to hunt or provide domestic assistance. These service divisions in hunting parties were also significant in other ways.[9] As backcountry hunters altered elements of Indian methodology and made it their own, the greatest development to occur concerning future westward development was the influence hunting would have on the well-ordered hierarchies idealised by colonial gentry. In adding wild meat to their subsistence repertoire, early settlers went beyond simply adapting to their environment; they also altered the organisation of the social hierarchy.

Gentry commentators blamed hunting for the deficiencies of the backcountry and regarded the activity as the ‘lowest mode of subsistence’. However, while British poaching laws contained repressive ‘bloody codes’ to awe potential transgressors, colonial game laws, especially Virginian, exempted frontier counties from many restrictions, preferring fines and a regulated hunting season to harsher penalties.[10] While lawmakers were more understanding of the needs of backcountry life than British courts would have been, they still held to the hierarchical values that underwrote Virginian society’s political order. During the eighteenth century, a small band of elites controlled the key institutions in most Virginia counties and, in light of concerns over status and authority, distinguished themselves over their ability to command the deference of the common people.[11] Despite this expectation of deference from the gentry, as hunting developed as a viable economic avenue for backcountry settlers, the aforementioned importance placed on skill gave rise to alternative options outwith the traditional social hierarchy of backcountry Pennsylvania and Virginia. Albert H. Tillson, Jr. has examined the impact that hunting played on the social hierarchy of backcountry Virginia and has clearly stressed the ways in which this activity contributed to altering the relationship between the gentry and their subordinates. However, it would not be until these hunters crossed the Appalachians in search of economic gain that the impact of the organisation of hunting parties on the social hierarchy of this region could be seen.

Lyman Copeland Draper, who corresponded with a number of hunters’ descendants in the nineteenth century, helped create an image for the commercial hunters who breached the Appalachian barrier in search of economic gain in the hunting grounds of Kentucky and Tennessee, and it is with this Appalachian barrier that we can truly think of these figures as ‘Long Hunters’. By coining the term, Draper supplies a misleading image due to the heroic connotations present. Ted Franklin Belue echoes this sentiment with the description of them as ‘the first true American frontiersmen to push beyond the Blue Ridge’. In reality, though, they can be easily described as trespassers who broke treaties by entering Indian lands to hunt, and the heroic connotations of the title do not explain where the name came from either, or even if it is appropriate.[12] A good definition of ‘Long Hunter’ can be taken to mean either the distance that a hunting party travelled in order to reach a specific hunting ground, or the time spent on an individual hunting trip. Draper’s correspondence the Long Hunters’ descendants presents a number of different lengths involved and although there was no fixed time limit, a rough estimate suggests that seven months to a year was standard for this occupation. A number of factors had to be considered when defining the length of a hunting trip: the intended destination, the distance to intended markets and the simple fact of how long the ammunition lasted.[13] As with the length of a hunting trip, there is also some uncertainty over the time of year these hunts would have started, and there are conflicting accounts when it comes to determining the best time to commence a trip. Both Stephen Aron and Ted Franklin Belue suggest that hunting was something that could be pursued year-round but the general consensus seems to be that extended hunting trips could only be undertaken once the harvest had been completed.[14] However, as with the factors determining the length of a hunting trip, start dates would often be determined by the kind of animal one was hunting.

For hunters, each game animal had a season that promised the greatest rewards. Joseph Doddridge noted the different hunt seasons which included ‘The fall and early part of the winter…for hunting deer, and the whole of the winter…for bears and fur skinned animals’. While it is more likely deer were hunted in the summer and early fall, as the thicker winter skins tended to crack along vein lines, it is clear that this was a year-round process, one that was designed to preserve ammunition.[15] By laying traps for smaller animals such as beaver, mink and otter, hunters could preserve ammunition in the periods between hunting for deer and the larger elk, buffalo and bear. With these extended trips and variety of game targets, hunters were required to have a great deal of skill in order for the journey to be a success. Not only would they require enough knowledge to repair guns and traps and to shoe horses, but a group would also have to understand the nature of their animal targets. Renowned frontier hunter Michael Stoner was regarded as fairly ‘indifferent’ when shooting at a standing target but excelled at bringing down deer and other game as he ‘seemed to understand the motions of living animals’.[16] These skills distinguished some hunters from others, and it was the veneration of such skills that played an important part in the qualities of those sought to lead hunting parties across the Appalachians. In addition to hunting skills, a leader would have needed the ability to successfully navigate a party to their intended region and such experience would have been necessary for any potential leadership candidate. However, Long Hunters had greater requirements than simply reaching their destination, and it is with this selection of leaders that hunting parties deviated from the well-ordered hierarchies idealised by Virginian gentry.[17]

The ability to coordinate the hunting and organise a large number of men would have been an essential skill, in addition to selecting an appropriate site for the central camp, referred to as a station camp, where all the hunters could return to and store the gathered skins. While those employed as camp-keepers would stay at the station camp, the leader of the hunt would organise the main body into smaller groups for more economical hunting in the vast wilderness, and pass on knowledge of the best places to lay traps. Large groups were more likely to scare the skittish deer and significantly lessen the potential rewards, although the decision to break hunting parties into smaller groups was as much for safety as economic reasons. Hunting in small groups was less likely to attract the attention of Indian groups, who could be less than friendly to intruders on their hunting grounds.[18] After an extended period hunting, the small bands would rendezvous at the station camp where a small hut would have been constructed to store the gathered skins. After a few days’ resting and repairing traps and guns, the groups would break off and return to the wilderness, having first coordinated their next rendezvous. The leader, or leaders, of a hunting party would have considered all these factors during a hunt, and it is for these reasons that backcountry hunters placed such a premium on skill and experience. Placing the leadership in the hands of these men, rather than traditional authority figures, would hopefully increase the chances of financial success. However, it is not only in the selection of these leadership candidates, but the ways in which their charges expected them to lead, that serve as an example of what would follow in Kentucky during the 1770s.

The best example of the leadership structure of a hunting party is the group Draper entitled the ‘Long Hunters’. James Dysart arrived in Philadelphia from Ireland aged 17 in 1762, having agreed with his grandfather to return to Ireland the following year. Over the next several years, however, he gradually made his way to the western settlements of Pennsylvania and, once there, grew fond of hunting as an occupation.[19] Towards the end of 1769, Dysart joined a party that were in the process of equipping themselves for a hunting expedition to Kentucky. As one of around forty men to sign on Dysart became one of Draper’s ‘Long Hunters’.[20]

Due to the significant number of surviving accounts of this expedition, and of those involved, Draper’s ‘Long Hunters’ offer the most thorough example of the organisational structure of a trans-Appalachian hunting party. In addition, the group offers the best example of the identification process of potential leaders and the authority they could command. Furthermore, research into these Long Hunters in the Draper Manuscripts reveals the number of different candidates who vied for authority. The legacy of nineteenth century writers such as Humphrey Marshall and Mann Butler has helped perpetuate a traditional notion of hierarchy in the region by crediting the sole leadership of the party to James Knox. The role of Knox as leader appears to have been retroactively applied due to the success Knox enjoyed in Kentucky as a landowner, but one cannot discount the impact that Knox himself had on the elevation of his status.[21] However, while Knox was a member of the party and likely captained one of the smaller groups, evidence suggests that he was not the one who led the group into Kentucky. That honour fell to Henry Skaggs and Joseph Drake, ‘being two of the oldest of this party and first rate woodsmen’ and the pair were elected leaders through a consensus decision of the group.[22] The election of Skaggs and Drake highlights the standing that hunting skills could afford men in backcountry communities, and while hunters were never regarded as the type of men likely to make good sons-in-law, successful hunters held a great deal of respect among their peers. Not even the rumours surrounding the illegitimate paternity of one of his children could diminish Skaggs’ standing as a man with a ‘high sense of honour’. Not only does the choice in leadership highlight the importance placed on skill and experience, but it also alludes to the extent of the authority the leaders could exercise in the decision-making process.[23]

Appointed through general consensus, Skaggs and Drake were expected to lead by example. However, appointing leaders did not mean the hunting party had relinquished all rights, and they expected to be consulted on the major decisions. In this light it is possible to view the instructions given by leaders in a hunting party as suggestions rather than orders which no-one appears to have been under any obligation to follow.[24] In terms of leading by example, Skaggs appears to have justified his selection as one of the leaders. It was during this trip that Skaggs is reputed to have killed 1500 deer and it is through this feat that Skaggs not only justified selection based on skill, but also revealed the fragility of his elected position. After a spell hunting, Charles Ewing began a dispute with Skaggs, the origins of which are not clear. In one version of events recounted by Draper, Ewing became jealous of  Skaggs’ success—something not uncommon in the competitive nature of this employment—and as a result of the dispute 24 members of the party returned to Virginia with Ewing.[25] It is possible to overstate Ewing’s influence over the number of men returning to Virginia as there is no way of knowing the motives of each man who chose to leave the hunt. Reasons could include dissatisfaction with Skaggs and Drake’s leadership, or simply that they had exhausted their supplies or had had enough of the wilderness. However, the event displays the agency available in the hierarchy of a hunting party, and with just over half of the party returning east the remaining hunters suffered the added misfortune of having their station camp ransacked by Indians. Faced with a dilemma, the consensual nature of the leadership became evident once more. The remaining hunters were unanimous in their decision to continue in the region until their supplies were exhausted, and their decision was justified as the remaining hunters eventually acquired their loads of skins and returned home ‘in good health’.[26] While this party’s trip could be deemed a success, and Skaggs was able to purchase two slaves from his share of the skins sold, Ted Franklin Belue has argued that few men ever got rich through hunting alone and the aforementioned experience of Skaggs, Drake and Boone with Indians points to an uncertain reward for such high costs of equipping a hunting party.[27] Therefore, to return to the factors determining the destination of a hunt, one can underestimate the impact of members of the gentry. It would not be unusual for hunters to supplement their income by conducting land surveys for eastern speculators, a tactic favoured by people such as George Washington who financed hunting trips for this purpose.[28] Skaggs and Drake were not alone in terms of hunting experience during this period and, regardless of who was funding the trip, practical leadership resided in the most skilled woodsmen. The experience of these men and others of their mould would transcend the hunting world in the years following their return to Virginia, and increasingly affect the formation of the militia hierarchy. As settlement pushed into Kentucky in the 1770s, the recognition of authority would increasingly mirror the impact that hunting was to have on Virginia’s militia.

While the social elites of the backcountry settlements of Virginia and Pennsylvania differed from their Tidewater counterparts in many ways, the most distinctive of which was the prevalence of Presbyterianism in the former, backcountry social aspirations favoured the eastern model.[29] In analysing the relationships between the social classes, the militia offers the most insightful example of leaders and subordinates in the backcountry. Here, the Virginia militia was organised in the following manner: a lieutenant supervised the militia in each county. As a member of the gentry with ties to the Tidewater elites, the county lieutenant would be assisted by several field officers taken from the most prominent social leaders of their area. These field officers would then appoint the company captains and lesser officers, and make the majority of the decisions concerning the defence of their counties.[30] As a microcosm of the social hierarchy of the backcountry, the militia offers the best example of the nature of leadership and the changes that were taking place. It was through the militia that the disruption of hunting practices on the role of leaders could be seen in the early 1770s and in this period, the conflict between traditional understandings of a leader’s role and charismatic leadership comes to the fore. While the militia hierarchy was previously organised with the most prominent county citizens—the gentry—at the top, in practice other figures were breaking into this elite group.[31] For example, during Dunmore’s War in 1774, a number of non-gentry were present in the officer ranks in positions as ensigns or lieutenants and, in some cases, captains. While the upper command positions still eluded frontiersmen, the fact they were appointed to command positions at all is significant, as was the manner of their appointment.[32] In October 1774, Captain Daniel Smith forwarded a petition to William Preston, the county lieutenant for Fincastle County. The petition was from the settlers of the Lower Clinch River asking that Preston commission Daniel Boone as a captain and place him in command of the forts in that area. With the petition granted, Boone was elevated to a rank usually held by members of the gentry, and the settlers of the region had a commander they had selected, one with a reputation for leadership gained through skill as a woodsman and hunter. Yet this was not the only way in which a frontier hunter could be granted a commission.[33]

Joseph Drake, one of the leaders of the Long Hunters, also broke into this militia hierarchy during the same period as Boone. However, unlike Boone, Drake was not granted a commission based on a petition from the local population. Rather, Drake, responding to a perceived lack of faith in the official militia commanders on the Upper Holston, rallied his own independent company for the Point Pleasant campaign. While Drake may have been responding to local unrest to enhance his own status, there is also the sense that his raising of a company may have been an attempt to get his own commission.[34] Ultimately, Drake raised so many men from other companies that Arthur Campbell, who was to lead the Point Pleasant expedition, allowed the militia forces from the region to march under a commander of their choice, in order to get them to the rendezvous point.[35] The role of the frontier inhabitants in both the case of Drake and Boone cannot be ignored. Backcountry men in the militia now held the view that they determined whom they chose to serve under, and Boone and Drake benefited as local men with experience of leadership gained through hunting. Despite Dunmore’s War providing an opportunity for frontier hunters to gain commissions in the militia, there still existed clear distinctions between gentry and non-gentry. The letters from Dunmore’s War cited here refer to both Boone and Drake as ‘Mr’ rather than by rank, which indicates a clear distinction in the hierarchy. However, the relative success of these figures in breaking into the commissioned ranks displays the changes that had taken place and the precedence that had been set over the popular selection of leaders on the frontier. In terms of Kentucky settlement, the other significant commission during this period was James Harrod, another member of the non-gentry to gain leadership experience at this time.[36] During this revolutionary period on the Kentucky frontier, defence concerns were paramount and competition between gentry and non-gentry over leadership positions was to further intensify.

In 1775, Boone was elected to lead a party of road markers into Kentucky in a manner that was familiar to the elections of Skaggs and Drake with the Long Hunters five years previously. Not only was Boone the majority choice of the party but he was chosen above a more traditional candidate, both in terms of the militia and the social hierarchy. The thirty members of the party put themselves under the ‘management and control of Colonel Boon’ but of the thirty men, William Twitty also had a reputation as an able woodsman, while Richard Callaway would have been an equally appropriate choice.[37]  As a member of the gentry with ties to the East, Callaway was socially superior to Boone. Added to this, Callaway’s status of colonel outranked Boone’s captain in the militia. Therefore, if the ranks were decided on social standing or militia commission, Boone would not have led the party. What may have counted in Boone’s favour among the party was that he had travelled in the region before and had prior knowledge of what could be expected on the journey, as well as knowing how to reach the destination. However, over the course of the eighteenth century through the experience of hunting and, latterly, the militia, frontier men had become accustomed to having their voices heard, and by 1775 this had reached the stage that the gentry could no longer be guaranteed automatic deference from a party of backcountry settlers. As settlement pushed into Kentucky, defence concerns were of primary importance and the early social hierarchy reflected these concerns. Boone’s party of thirty had been subjected to an Indian attack in 1775, and by 1778 British-backed Indian raids on the settlements had reduced their number to three—Harrodsburg, Logan’s Station and Boonesborough.[38] The organisation of the social hierarchy in a period where settlement was hanging by a thread, unsurprisingly, replicates the backcountry militia. Also unsurprising was that leadership based on experience and skill would continue to play a role regardless of social background. In terms of the traditional versus charismatic argument, the most well known struggle for leadership would once more take place between Boone and Callaway during the siege of Boonesborough. In September 1778, Callaway, having deposed Boone upon his return from capture by the Shawnee earlier in the year, saw himself as the sole commander of the fort. Boone, responding to Callaway’s assertion, attempted to regain his status through an unsuccessful raid into Shawnee settlements. During the siege itself, Boone, Callaway and William Smith all presented themselves to the Shawnee as leaders of the fort, indicating that rank was by no means permanent and that leadership contests could continue even when the threat of attack was high.[39] The contests between Boone and Callaway were certainly not unique between woodsmen and members of the gentry, and by the late 1770s a new class of leadership candidates, so-called ‘Big Men’, rose to the fore when counties were threatened with attack, many of which had experience as hunters or in the militia during the early part of the decade. The likes of Simon Kenton and James Harrod had benefited from the experience of leading men in hunting expeditions, which gave them some advantage over more traditional candidates.[40]

This article has provided some isolated examples of the changes that had taken place in ideas of leadership on the frontier as settlement pushed towards Kentucky, and the influence of hunting on militia leadership needs further exploration in order to gain a greater understanding of the impact on social leadership as a whole. In the context of militia and defence, commercial hunting had provided backcountry men with leadership experience. With the consensual nature of the hunting leadership process, and the petitions to county lieutenants in the militia appointments, backcountry men had become accustomed to making a contribution towards major decisions. By the siege of Boonesborough in 1778, when the decision to defend the settlement was decided by the inhabitants, this interpretation of frontier leadership had evolved to the extent that in matters of defence, it could be argued, leaders were not needed until a course of action had been decided. From the growth of commercial hunting along the frontier of Virginia and into Kentucky throughout the eighteenth century, concepts of command and expectations of leaders had been altered. The charismatic notion of leadership had begun to assert itself and in order to maintain a degree of authority over a hunting party or militia force, the leader needed to justify his position and provide evidence for the faith placed in his abilities. For backcountry settlers, this could be defined as leaders acting boldly and decisively, such as Boone’s proposed raid on Shawnee settlements to regain authority from Callaway. Joseph Drake also used his experience with the Long Hunters to break into the commissioned ranks of the militia and James Harrod was another beneficiary in Kentucky. It is not clear how far this new class of frontier leaders were able to advance their status outside of a military context, or how many managed to rise beyond the rank of field officer. What is clear is that of the three remaining settlements in Kentucky in 1778, all were named after backcountry leaders, and in Boone and Harrod, men who had benefited from the change in frontier leadership. Much work remains to be done in determining other factors, besides hunting and militia experience, in appointing candidates for leadership, including whether these isolated incidents can be seen on a wider scale in Kentucky, and how far it affected the settlement process of the region. In light of the later misfortunes suffered by many frontiersmen such as Boone, the final question remains as to when – and why – the Virginia-based model of traditional landed gentry once more reasserted control over the charismatic and dynamic leadership of the bold Kentucky frontiersmen.

University of Dundee 

Notes

[1] For a greater understanding of Turner’s ideas see Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, in Frederick Jackson Turner (ed.), The Frontier in American History, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920), pp. 1-38.

[2] The role of the frontier in the cultural memory of America can be found in: Arthur K. Moore, The Frontier Mind: A Cultural Analysis of the Kentucky Frontiersman, (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957); and Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000).

[3] John Filson, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke to which is added the Adventures of Daniel Boon, (Wilmington: James Adams, 1784).

[4] For a more detailed understanding of the notion of ‘traditional’ and ‘charismatic’ authority see: Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation, (London: William Hodge and Company Ltd., 1947), translated from the German by A.R. Henderson and Talcott Parsons.

[5] Stephen Aron, How the West was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 26.

[6] Aron, How the West Was Lost, p. 14.

[7] Aron, How the West Was Lost, p. 23. Terry G. Jordan and Matti Kaups, The American Backwoods Frontier: An Ethnic and Ecological Interpretation, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 211-32.

[8] Joseph Doddridge documented the appearance of the frontier hunter and in particular drew attention to their ‘Indian like dress’. From Doddridge’s description this Indian style seems especially appropriate for the lower half of a hunters ‘uniform’, with the breech clout, leggings and moccasins being adopted. The hazards that this dress, and the hunter’s life, could play on their future health is also discussed by Doddridge, with rheumatism appearing as a frequent complaint. See: Joseph Doddridge, Notes on the Settlement and Indian Wars of the Western Parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1763-1783, (Wellsburg, VA: 1824), pp. 91-93. A good description of Daniel Boone’s early years learning to hunt in Pennsylvania can be found in: John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992), pp. 9-39.

[9] Aron, How the West Was Lost, pp. 23-25. For more on the spiritual nature of Indian hunting techniques, and the Anglo-European differences see: James Axtell, The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 53-54. Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 55-56. An example of the use of slaves and hired camp tenders in hunting can be found in the case of Daniel Boone’s extended hunt into Kentucky between 1769 and 1771. Of the six to go on the trip only Boone, John Findley and John Stewart were hunting. The other three, and little is known of their social status, were James Mooney, Joseph Holden and William Cooley who were to act as camp keepers. Faragher, Daniel Boone, p. 76.

[10] Aron, How the West Was Lost, pp. 14-16.

[11] This small band of elites controlled the key institutions revolving around the county courts during the eighteenth century. These positions would include that of the county surveyor responsible for surveying the land for purchase. It is no surprise that land would help determine the membership to this elite group. In the pre-revolutionary era the gentry comprised roughly ten percent of the free population in Virginia. This ten percent owned half of all property in the colony, which in this context can be taken to mean land and slaves. Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, & the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. xviii. For more on the gentry’s expected deference from the common or ‘simple folk’ see: Albert H. Tillson, Jr., Gentry and Common Folk: Political Culture on a Virginia Frontier 1740-1789, (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1991), p. 18.

[12] Ted Franklin Belue, The Long Hunt: Death of the Buffalo East of the Mississippi, (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1996), p. 85.

[13] In many of Draper’s correspondence he seems to have compiled notes based on the information in each letter in order to get confirmation from all parties. The examples on the length of the trans-Appalachian hunting trips can be found in the Daniel Boone Papers of the Draper Manuscript Collection (Madison, Wis.: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Microfilm Edition, 1980), DM5C41-46.

[14] Aron, How the West Was Lost, p. 23. Belue, The Long Hunt, pp. 85-96. Ted Franklin Belue, The Hunters of Kentucky: A Narrative History of America’s First Far West, 1750-1792, (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2003), pp. 90-91.

[15] Doddridge, Settlement and Indian Wars, p. 98. Belue, The Long Hunt, pp. 86-87.

[16] Belue, The Long Hunt, p. 86. John Dabney Shane interview with Samuel Treble, DM12CC43.

[17] Aron, How the West Was Lost, p. 24.

[18] The dangers of Indian attack while hunting have been well documented, and will be elaborated on later in this article. One of the best examples of the desire to avoid Indian contact can be seen through Daniel Boone, who had his hoard of skins confiscated, along with his rifle, twice, by Cherokee and Shawnee hunters during his two year hunt in Kentucky between 1769 and 1771. Aron, How the West Was Lost, p. 18. Belue, The Hunters of Kentucky, p. 92. Faragher, Daniel Boone, pp. 79-87.

[19] Letter from John B. Dysart to Lyman Copeland Draper, DM5C61.

[20] While the title of Long Hunter has now been applied to any commercial trans-Appalachian hunter, Draper applied the term to the members of a specific hunt that took place between 1769 and 1771. Draper researched the men involved in this hunting party with the intention of including their experiences as part of his biography of Daniel Boone. A sketch of the men and their experiences are included in chapter eight of Draper’s unpublished manuscript: Lyman Copeland Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone, DM3B54-84. Though Draper never completed his manuscript a transcribed version of the completed chapters, which covers Boone’s life up to 1778 is available; see: Lyman Copeland Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone, Ted Franklin Belue (ed.), (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1999), pp. 254-280.

[21] The endurance of Knox’s status as the hunt’s leader endured into the twentieth century, but much of this seems to have come from Humphrey Marshall who was furnished with his account of the hunting trip by Knox himself. In a letter to Draper, Robert Wickliffe was also insistent of Knox’s leadership, though from the letter it is once more apparent that the information has come from Knox himself. See: Brent Altsheler, ‘The Long hunters and James Knox their Leader’, in The Filson Club Historical Quarterly, vol.5, no.4. (October, 1931), pp. 169-185. Humphrey Marshall, The History of Kentucky, (Frankfort: George S. Robinson Printers, 1824), p. 9. Mann Butler, A History of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, (Louisville: Wilcox, Dickerman and Co., 1834), pp. 19-20. Letter from Robert Wickliffe to Lyman Copeland Draper, January 28^th, 1849, DM5C54. Letter from Lyman Copeland Draper to Robert Wickliffe, October 25^th, 1850, DM5C55.

[22] Dysart to Draper, DM5C61. Draper’s sketch of the Long Hunters, that ends his eighth chapter, suggests that the average age of the hunting party would be in the mid-20s. That Skaggs and Drake were older than many in the party does not seem to be a factor in the leadership decision. One member of the group was an elderly man named Russell, who, despite having poor eyesight, still killed a number of deer. Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone, DM3B59-69, 73-84.

[23] Aron, How the West Was Lost, p. 27.

[24] The decision-making process and consensual nature of a hunting party can be seen in a letter to Draper by Thomas Mitchell, where he asserts that there was no leader in the hunting party. Letter from Thomas Mitchell to Lyman Copeland Draper, November 1850, DM5C67.

[25] Letter from John Barbee to Lyman Copeland Draper, April 15^th, 1849, DM5C77. Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone, DM3B54-84.

[26] Dysart to Draper, DM5C61.

[27] Letter from Lewis Barnet to Lyman Copeland Draper, July 15^th, 1857, DM5C96. Belue, The Long Hunt, p. 86.

[28] Faragher, Daniel Boone, p. 74.

[29] Tillson, Jr., Gentry and Common Folk, p. 19.

[30] Tillson, Jr., Gentry and Common Folk, p. 47.

[31] Albert Tillson echoes the sentiments of Max Weber when arguing over the causes of indiscipline in the militia regiments coming from competing notions of the role of a leader. Tillson, Jr., Gentry and Common Folk, pp. 47-53. Weber, Theory of Social and Economic Organisation, pp. 330-331.

[32] While the Draper Manuscript collection contains a vast array of militia rolls from the period in the Preston Papers, many of these have been transcribed and published. See: Reuben Gold Thwaites and Louise Phelps Kellogg (eds.), Documentary History of Dunmore’s War 1774, (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society, 1905), pp. 396-425.

[33] Letter from Daniel Smith to William Preston, October 13^th, 1774, DM3QQ119. Aron How the West Was Lost, p. 27.

[34] The ways in which a militia commission was used to enhance status had been a tactic of the gentry in Virginia throughout the eighteenth century. By seeking a commission, Drake was treading a well-worn path for social advancement. Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 37, 92-98.

[35] Letter from Arthur Campbell to William Preston, August 12^th, 1774, DM3QQ75. Letter from Arthur Campbell to William Preston, August 28^th, 1774, DM3QQ85. Tillson, Jr., Gentry and Common Folk, p. 58.

[36] Letter from Arthur Campbell to William Preston, August 3^rd, 1774, DM3QQ70.

[37] This quote comes from Felix Walker’s account of the marking of the Wilderness Road. Boone referred to as a colonel in the account due to Walker writing many years after the event. In 1775 Boone still held the militia rank of captain. Felix Walker, ‘Felix Walker’s Narrative of His Trip with Boone from Long Island to Boonesborough in March, 1775 (Written About 1824. Published in Debow’s Review of February 1854)’, in Dale Payne (ed.), Narratives of Pioneer Life and Border Warfare: Personal Recollections, Memoirs and Reminiscences of Indian Campaigns, Captivities and Pioneer Life on the Eastern Frontier, (North Kansas City: Dale Payne, 2004), p. 2.

[38] Neal O. Hammon and Richard Taylor, Virginia’s Western War 1775-1786, (Mechanicsburg PA: Stackpole Books, 2002), pp. 49-50.

[39] John Dabney Shane interview with John Gass, DM11CC13. For a more detailed understanding of the siege of Boonesborough and the events of 1778 see: Faragher, Daniel Boone, pp. 141-202.

[40] Elizabeth A. Perkins, Border Life: Experience and Memory in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 132-141.

U.S Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

‘Hail to the King, baby’: Bruce Campbell and the Representation of US Masculine Heroism

Michael Goodrum

© Michael Goodrum. All Rights Reserved.

When I’m in despair, I adjust my hair and make evil pay… When danger calls, you must have the balls of an ox or a bear or any large mammal!

‘It’s Time’, from Evil Dead: The Musical (2007), lyrics by George Reinblatt.

Taken from the non-canon Evil Dead: The Musical, this quote offers an excellent introductory framework to the Evil Dead trilogy and its parodic relationship with conventions of heroism and masculinity as perpetuated through Hollywood film. Effectively a parody of a parody, Evil Dead: The Musical highlights the equation of heroism with potent masculinity towards the end of the Evil Dead franchise, a long-standing Hollywood convention that, in my interpretation, the Evil Dead trilogy seeks to undermine.  Nowhere is the construction of heroic masculinity more clearly ridiculed than in the quote above, with the hero adjusting his hair and reflecting on his suggested sexual potency while battling the forces of evil. Although fictitious, such a construction of overstated masculinity has the potential to offer insights into a repertoire of more widely accepted constructions. Offering a rigid definition of masculinity, Antony Easthope writes of ‘the young male body [being] used to present not just the self as it is but as he would like to be, not just the ego but the ego ideal’, something that seems easily applicable to action stars of the 1980s such as Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean Claude Van Damme, among others.[1] Taking heterosexual masculinity to its logical conclusion, these ideal figures invite acceptance rather than criticism, directing the audience to view them as natural. Likewise, blockbuster film as a whole invites an uncritical attitude towards the forms of heroism being represented.

Offering the possibility of a more nuanced and flexible understanding of both masculinity and heroism, Max Jones contends that heroes can be regarded as either ‘blunt instruments for transmitting a simple ideological message’ or, more subtly, ‘screens onto which a range of meanings [can] be projected’; whether consciously or not, Bruce Campbell’s star persona works towards promoting the second approach as a viewing strategy, with his films undercutting conventional notions of both masculinity and heroism in order to expose them as constructions.[2] This paper will explore Campbell’s films as a reflexive metacommentary on the masculine and heroic norms offered by Hollywood through an analysis of the Evil Dead trilogy (1981-1992), Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) and My Name Is Bruce (2007), exploring the way Campbell’s characters initially reject and then parody notions of Hollywood heroism.

Spanning 11 years, the Evil Dead trilogy showcases a distinct representational shift with regard to its central character, Ashley Williams. Debuting in 1981, The Evil Dead appeared just as Hollywood was beginning to promote what Yvonne Tasker defines as a ‘muscular cinema’, an idealisation of the built white male body.[3] More or less coinciding with the beginnings of muscular cinema, The Evil Dead had a very different approach to the male body than that witnessed in, for example, either of the two Rocky films released by 1981 (1976 and 1979) or Conan The Barbarian, seen in figure 1, released in 1982. As a set of representational practices, muscular cinema idealised and glorified the male hero who became able to achieve increasingly outlandish feats as the 1980s progressed. Rather than judging the morality of this development, Tasker views the increasing visibility of the powerful male body as mediating the rise of masculinity as a ‘visible category within the criticism of the day’, suggestive of anxiety around masculine roles in the 1980s.[4] For the New Right of the 1980s the Equal Rights Amendment passed by Congress in 1972 was directly responsible for ‘America’s rapid decline as a world power’ due to it being an apparent attempt to transfer control of the US to women.[5] Given this context, the all-conquering male heroes of muscular cinema could be seen to take on a different function, operating as a fantasy response to the threat of a shift in gender power and a mounting a call for a return to more traditional masculine ideals. However, some significant differences separate The Evil Dead from muscular cinema; rather than offering ‘a counterpoint to the experience of oppression and powerlessness’ identified by Walkerdine in action cinema, The Evil Dead exploits precisely these fears to unsettle rather than reassure its audience.[6]

With Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn (1987) effectively a remake of the first film, it is possible to provide a brief synopsis of both plots. Ash (Campbell) and his friends visit a log cabin in the woods where they are systematically possessed by the spirits of the evil dead and killed. Only Ash survives the night but an ambiguous resolution leaves his fate uncertain. Despite their narrative similarity, there are unique points in each that warrant closer analysis. In the first film, Ash emerges as a potential survivor rather than a hero, problematic for his masculine status in that the survivor’s role is generally adopted by women in horror films such as Halloween (1978), Alien (1979) or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Characterising Ash as the hysterically inarticulate survivor reinforces his status as a non-hero as he owes his survival to avoiding that which threatens him rather than defeating it. Whereas muscular cinema demands the representation of a hero transcending his limits in physical confrontation to bring about victory and reinforce faith in the masculine ego, The Evil Dead refuses to engage with such narratives of redemption. Instead, the very concept of masculine heroism is called into question by the terror-stricken Ash; even the androgynous nature of Ashley’s name problematises his occupation of a heroic masculine role. In fact, Ash’s occupation of the survivor role could be interpreted as an acknowledgment of the transfer of gender power feared by the New Right, his feminine status mediating the decline of US masculinity apparently brought about through the Equal Rights Amendment.

It is, however, still possible to draw a parallel between Ash and the inarticulate hero figures of muscular cinema. Privileging the body over the voice, muscular cinema offers the body as active spectacle, reinforcing the status of the muscular hero as an agent privileging actions over words. Ash’s inarticulate hysterics highlight a clear division between the inarticulate built male body as active, and therefore masculine, while the slender body and hysterical voice of Ash mark him as passive and therefore feminine. Such a division emphasises the problem of control; heroes may choose to act rather than speak when confronted with their enemies but Ash is seemingly robbed of his agency by the evil dead, becoming a purely reactive figure. As Ash’s hysterics suggest, he is unable to take control of himself or the situation. Powerless to act and failing to offer visual spectacle, Ash has no choice but to scream. It is difficult to imagine a more stark contrast to the taciturn yet massively powerful Rambo, first appearing in 1982, and it is this combination of powerlessness, or impotence, and hysterics that most clearly separates Ash from conventional muscular heroes.

Evil Dead 2 begins to transform the character of Ash. Once again visiting a cabin in the woods, though this time only with his girlfriend, Linda, evil spirits are accidentally summoned and Linda is possessed. Demonstrating his new-found heroic potential, Ash dismembers the corpse of the possessed Linda, though he is unable to prevent her from biting his hand. As a result of this bite, Ash succumbs to possession on three different occasions, indicating that Ash’s transformation into a hero is not straightforward. Blurring the boundary of the body, possession calls into question the integrity of the hero’s masculinity. According to Easthope, ideal representations of the male body emphasise ‘hard, clear outline[s]’ that prevent ‘leakages across the edges between the inner and outer worlds’, an ideal to which Ash is unable to conform.[7] Such rigid boundaries are generally maintained in Hollywood action films, but rather than offering a clear division between hero and enemy, Ash’s possession introduces an element of fluidity to the character. Now capable of demonstrating physical prowess, Ash is still unable to control his body, as evidenced in the longest possession sequence where Ash is fighting his own right hand after it turns against him.

Often cited as representative of male power, as in ‘right hand man’, this loss of bodily control problematises notions of male heroism. Eventually forced to remove his hand with a chainsaw, Ash simultaneously acknowledges both his active status but also the questionable nature of the position he occupies. The act of removing his hand, potentially reflecting a loss of power, actually facilitates Ash accessing another trope implicit in muscular cinema: the body as weapon. Having sawn off his hand at the wrist, Ash replaces it with a chainsaw, demonstrating his intent to fully occupy the heroic role and overcome the threat he faces. Similarly, the increasingly articulate manner adopted by Ash throughout Evil Dead 2 and moving into Evil Dead 3 demonstrates a move towards a more conventional heroic stance. Engaging with more widespread representations of masculine heroism, Ash’s badinage, indicative of masculine confidence, has become a central part of the fan culture connected to these films. Previously only capable of screaming in terror, Ash now trades quips with the spirits of the evil dead. For instance, when confronted with a demon shouting ‘I’ll swallow your soul!’ Ash responds by pointing a shotgun in its face and saying ‘swallow this’.[8] Combining humour and sexual imagery, lines such as this emphasise the artificiality of the film, provoking a laugh from the audience when the hero should be at his point of maximum effort. As a result, Ash is both elevated as a hero and also undermined by the film, with comic elements deployed to work against his acceptance as an unproblematic hero. Ash’s final triumph in Evil Dead 2 is also questionable as in banishing the Deadites, Ash manages to also banish himself. Returning to the theme of a lack of control, the banishment of Ash may also suggest that he is part of the problem rather than the solution, hardly a heroic conclusion.

Ash is similarly both elevated and undermined in Evil Dead 3: Army of Darkness.[9] Finding himself in mediaeval England, Ash now has to defeat an entire army of the undead in order to return to his own time. In the first of a series of transformations, Ash’s body is now rather more built, his physicality emphasised through his ripped shirt. The badinage that came to represent Ash’s heroic identity in the previous film has also escalated, with quips now a constant feature. Banter has been analysed by Easthope, who concludes that while appearing genial due to its emphasis on humour, banter actually supports the ‘aggression of the masculine ego’ through its use of targeted, aggressive jokes.[10] Used between friends to disguise their love for one another, Ash’s use of banter here could be a mask for both his fear of defeat and also his concern for those around him, most notably Sheila, his love interest. In addition to these issues regarding the meaning of banter, a more obvious point is that the increased role of humour means that Ash’s most complete physical embodiment of the hero is also the one subject to the greatest ridicule, with action sequences played largely for comic effect. A narrative strategy such as this undermines models of heroism and masculinity as perpetuated through Hollywood cinema by using their own devices against them, exposing heroism and masculinity as constructs. Publicity images for the film emphasised the constructed nature of heroism and masculinity, depicting a stylised Ash posing heroically while surrounded by evil; the woman gripping his leg implies the sexual reward for successfully negotiating these threats. Effectively, this poster establishes the heroic construct that the film will undermine through depicting Ash as cowardly, arrogant and, on occasion, incompetent.

Despite the loving rendition of Ash in the poster, an impregnable masculinity is far from assured in Army of Darkness. Returning to themes of penetration and loss of bodily control raised in both previous films, one particular scene depicts Ash being forced to swallow a smaller version of himself, effectively impregnating him. A monstrous birth then follows, where a full-size evil version of Ash grows out of the original Ash’s body and begins to taunt him. Not yet able to prevent ‘leakages across the edges between the inner and outer worlds’, Ash is now able to avenge transgressions of his bodily boundaries.[11] Taunting him for his commitment to good, the evil Ash is silenced when the original Ash shoots him in the face, quipping ‘good, bad, I’m the guy with the gun’ or ‘I ain’t that good’, depending on whether it is the theatrical release or director’s cut of the film.[12]

With neither of these a conventionally heroic statement, this scene indicates the willingness to applaud acts of violence by those invested with heroic status while simultaneously playing the scene for laughs. As a result, this scene not only questions Ash’s masculinity through the violation of his bodily integrity but also his right to occupy a heroic role. Through the application of comedy and the raising of relevant concerns regarding his suitability as a hero, Ash’s triumph over his evil other self is rather less triumphant than it may have initially appeared. Anxieties over Ash’s heroic qualities are reinforced through his subsequent actions. Sent on a quest to retrieve the Necronomicon, a magical book with the power to banish the Deadites once and for all, Ash reveals the true depths of his incompetence. Failing to correctly recite the passages necessary for safe retrieval of the Necronomicon, Ash ultimately summons a greater army of the undead before managing to escape with the book. Despite having clearly failed in his quest, Ash demands the reward he was promised for its successful completion: passage back to his own time. Those who had looked up to him as their hero, the chosen one sent to deliver them from the Deadites, are disgusted and openly accuse him of cowardice. Such a scene builds on the previous problematisation of Ash’s heroism, though a chance of redemption is offered when he elects to stay and fight following the kidnap of Sheila. Ultimately proving successful in defeating the Deadite army, Ash even manages to unite the warring factions of mediaeval England, demonstrating his ability to transcend the limits placed upon normal men.

Far from finally establishing Ash as a model of heroism, his return to the late twentieth century instantly undermines his heroic credentials. Jones effectively argues that heroes cannot be considered as heroes unless they are acknowledged as such and exist in a relationship of emotional involvement with a wider public who invest them with heroic status.[13] Having returned as effectively the saviour of the world, Ash returns to his rather unheroic job in the housewares department at S-Mart, a large department store. Relating his story to his colleagues, Ash is met with a mixture of boredom and scepticism, adding an additional layer to the questioning of Ash’s heroism implicit in his rather mundane occupation. Just when it appears that the film will end on a critical note, however, Ash’s story is legitimised through the appearance of a Deadite that he swiftly dispatches, though once again in comic fashion.

In applying comedy to established heroic ideas they are revealed as ridiculous and incapable of existence in reality–for instance, a serious action star would certainly not consider a trolley a suitable mode of transport for his final confrontation with evil. Perhaps the film is summed up best by its final lines, spoken by Ash: ‘Sure, I could have stayed in the past. I could have even been king. But in my own way, I am king’. Grabbing a girl who had described his story as ‘kind of cute’, Ash says ‘hail to the king, baby’, before kissing her.[14] These final lines offer a framework within which to interpret the film, declaring Ash to be a different kind of hero, one that both explores and explodes Hollywood notions of heroism and masculinity. Rather than seeking wholesale changes to Hollywood conceptions of heroism, however, the character of Ash is perhaps working towards an extension of Hollywood’s repertoire rather than its complete subversion–perhaps some acknowledgment that heroism is more complex than simply shooting something and rescuing an attractive woman.

These narrative strategies that simultaneously elevate and question Campbell as a hero are also explored in Bubba Ho-Tep.  Campbell plays Sebastian Haff, an Elvis impersonator residing in a rest home in the Deep South. However, Haff claims to be the real Elvis Presley, having traded identities with an impersonator named Haff in order to escape the pressures of fame. Haff/Elvis is unfortunately unable to prove this as he lost the contract clarifying the matter in a barbecue accident. Bubba Ho-Tep therefore simultaneously accesses and problematises notions of heroism. Despite the tragic decline and virtual self-parody of his later life, Elvis is still regarded as a hero throughout the world with a highly profitable industry devoted to his work. Bubba Ho-Tep, however, attempts to write off Elvis’s decline by attributing it to someone else, therefore removing a potential barrier to viewing Elvis as heroic. Another obstacle instantly takes its place, though, as the audience is confronted with the sight of an elderly and infirm Elvis. No longer the spectacular body of the 1950s and ‘60s, Haff/Elvis is a pensioner with a dodgy hip and a ‘growth on [his] pecker’, hardly an ideal to which the audience could aspire.[15] While accessing Elvis’s brand identity instantly creates a heroic framework in the mind of the audience, highlighted through a trailer for an Elvis movie marathon on television that explicitly acknowledges the various aspects of Elvis’s apparent heroism, Bubba Ho-Tep is not afraid to call elements of this framework into question. Rather than a screen for the projection of meanings and desires, Haff/Elvis initially seems to reject a heroic identity, turning off the trailer in disgust with that which he had pretended to be. As the film begins, then, the audience is presented with the problematic shell of a former hero that provides more questions than answers.

If the identity of Haff/Elvis is confused, so is the identity of his fellow rest home resident Jack, an elderly African American claiming to be JFK. When Haff/Elvis protests that JFK was white, Jack retorts that the CIA ‘dyed me this colour’ so as to render his story incredible.[16] While it is possible that neither Elvis nor Jack are who they claim to be, the film’s narrative strategy is to provide evidence for Haff’s claims in the form of lengthy flashbacks that corroborate his story.[17] Jack’s story is not supported to the same extent, and as such it seems likely that his story is precisely that—a story. As such, the film could be interpreted as depicting another way for audiences to involve themselves in heroic narratives. Rather than being JFK, Jack is accessing his heroic identity and drawing on its narrative power, allowing him to transcend limits he would otherwise not be able to overcome. Whereas Elvis rejected his heroic identity, Jack has potentially escaped his mundane existence by wholeheartedly embracing the heroic identity of another. With each character now at least indirectly connected to a heroic identity, albeit shakily, the film introduces the quest that offers these characters a redemptive trope, a chance to test or reclaim their right to heroic status: a mummy begins feeding on the souls of the residents of their rest home.

Prior to this revelation, both Elvis and Jack had been immersed in the rhythm of the rest home, discontentedly living out their final years reflecting on past glories and the failure to fulfil what they deemed to be their true potential. Seizing the opportunity to ‘ask not what your rest home can do for you, but what you can do for your rest home’, Elvis and Jack are rejuvenated through their struggle with the mummy.[18] This is most prominently displayed through Elvis’s masculinity. A constant point of reference throughout the film, attention is particularly directed towards Elvis’s inability to get an erection.  Once the attack on the mummy is planned, Elvis rediscovers some of his potency, represented in figure 8 through a change in costume. While this is a more explicit acknowledgment of Elvis’s heroic identity, it is only made possible through an equally explicit reference to masculine potency. Part of the treatment for Elvis’s penile growth is an ointment that has to be administered by a young female nurse; following discussions with Jack on potential strategies for defeating the mummy, the application of ointment results in Elvis having an erection, despite the fact that he ‘hadn’t had a hard-on in years’, something that suggests a reclamation of masculine potency through the heroic acts that lay ahead.[19] Elvis then propositions the nurse and, while she declines, his rediscovery of sexuality reinforces the fact that the attack on the mummy offers not only a chance to reclaim a heroic identity but also a potent masculine one. Despite the problems with the ageing bodies on display, Bubba Ho-Tep establishes a parallel with muscular cinema through equating heroism with masculine potency. In this instance, however, ‘its workings show’ and through the ensuing comic effect undermine more serious attempts to naturalise links between sexual potency and heroism.[20]

In terms of a relationship to Hollywood norms, Bubba Ho-Tep is problematic. Audiences cannot be convinced that the lead characters are who they claim to be and they may also be unsettled by the prominent role given to Elvis’s sexual dysfunction. Although the mummy is defeated, both Jack and Elvis die as a result of wounds obtained in the battle; in keeping with his rediscovered heroism, Elvis manages to administer the final blow as he lies dying, both saving those remaining in the rest home and avenging the death of Jack. Given the problematic relationship established between these characters and conventions of heroism, perhaps death is the only option that makes narrative sense; while Elvis’s story is believable, Jack’s is ridiculous. More importantly, it would be impossible for Elvis and Jack to return to the banal life of the rest home given their rejuvenation and rejection of their stagnant environment, yet there are few other options open to the elderly, infirm and potentially insane. Although JFK and Elvis may continue to operate as tremendously powerful ideological apparatus outside this film, within it these characters question the perpetuation of heroic myths and their function in society, while contributing to a critique of the connections between sexual potency and masculine heroism so prominently advocated by muscular cinema and action films as a whole.

Continuing in this vein, My Name Is Bruce also questions the power of heroic frameworks. Effectively a riff on other comedies such as The Three Amigos (1986) and Galaxy Quest (1999) where actors are confused with their characters, My Name Is Bruce sees Campbell playing a version of himself kidnapped by a fan, Jeff, in order to fight Guan-Di, the Chinese god of war and protector of bean curd. Mistakenly assuming the kidnap is an elaborate birthday present, Campbell falls into playing an amalgamation of several of his characters, simultaneously feeding his own ego and effectively living up to Jeff’s desires. Until, that is, Guan-Di turns out to be real, at which point Campbell flees, exposing the cowardly actor behind the bold façade of the character. Despite evidence of Campbell’s cowardice, Jeff continues to access the heroic framework Campbell has established through a range of largely parodic action films. Kitting himself out in Bruce Campbell memorabilia, Jeff heads out to face Guan-Di alone. It is only then, shamed by the actions of a teenage boy, that Campbell returns to play the heroic role expected of him.

Maintaining a critical relationship with Campbell’s star persona, his fans, and heroic frameworks, My Name Is Bruce also flags itself as a film breaking with the suspension of disbelief integral to most films. Actors from previous Campbell films appear and claim that they should have been chosen as heroes instead of Campbell and, when Jeff initially tells Campbell about Guan-Di, Campbell assumes that he is being pitched a film and describes it as awful while giving a knowing look to the camera. Also critiquing the power of Campbell’s heroic framework, so clearly bought into by Jeff, is the fact that several of the other characters in the film inform Campbell how dreadful many of his films have been.  Prior to his kidnap, Campbell is filming a sequel to the fictional Cave Alien where he plays a brash, sarcastic hero in a similar vein to Ash in Evil Dead 3. Demonstrating an element of self-parodic viewing pleasure that can be obtained from this film, such a narrative strategy highlights Campbell’s awareness of his star persona and his desire to call it into question.  Parodying many of the films in Campbell’s career, Cave Alien adds an additional layer of criticism to My Name Is Bruce. Such criticism is not only directed at Campbell, however; he also rounds on his fans at one stage, complaining about how they always criticise his films. Such criticism indicates that a dynamic relationship exists between Campbell fans and the heroic framework Campbell himself inhabits in his films. Jeff’s experience in this film is partly learning to separate reality from fiction, his confusion clearly demonstrated by his search for methods of defeating Guan-Di in horror scripts kept in his car. This confusion is never fully clarified, however, as having defeated Guan-Di Bruce tells Jeff that ‘next time you unleash an ancient demon, call that Buffy chick’, referring to the character played by Sarah Michelle Gellar in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (1997-2004).[21]

All of the criticism directed at Campbell, however, promotes an active viewing strategy. Breaking again from Hollywood convention, My Name Is Bruce positively encourages the audience to become involved with the film and to pick up on its intertextual references. Audiences are therefore assumed to be media-aware and well practised in criticising films themselves, most likely Campbell films. It is therefore logical that My Name Is Bruce should both parody and yet also conform to what is expected of both a Bruce Campbell film and a Hollywood action film, offering a ‘B’ movie alternative to Hollywood that refuses to take overblown heroes seriously. There is no more obvious exposure of heroism as a construction than when, in the film’s final battle, Campbell uses a cardboard cut-out of himself in an attempt to defeat Guan-Di. Created to market Campbell’s novel, Make Love! the Bruce Campbell Way, the cut-out depicts Campbell wearing 1950s playboy attire. As such, this scene exposes both heroism and a particular construction of masculinity as constructions, as performances that can be inhabited but cannot truly exist. Campbell also reprised this role for two Old Spice adverts, both of which engaged with particular constructions of masculinity. In the first, Campbell talks cryptically about something seemingly essential to masculinity that, in a caption, is revealed as experience; of what precisely is left open, though a sexual element is certainly implied. In the second, Campbell is shown playing a lounge version of Hungry Like The Wolf by Duran Duran on a grand piano in a large house while scantily-clad young women of all races look on appreciatively. As the advert progresses, the implication is that Campbell is a Hugh Hefner figure, something that, like the cut-out for Make Love, continues to access discourses centred on consciously constructed masculinities.

Alongside their critique of Hollywood conventions, Bruce Campbell films seem to offer largely postmodern viewing pleasure. Targeting a knowing audience, the films discussed here operate on a number of levels. Despite working as straightforward narrative cinema, the proliferation of intertextuality and the parody of well-established heroic tropes allow these films to operate as a critique of Hollywood heroism and masculinity. For example, in My Name Is Bruce, when Campbell, or in fact Jeff, attempts to use a cinematic pick-up line, the results range from disgust to confusion. Following his kidnap, Campbell informs the gathered townsfolk of his anger until he spots Jeff’s attractive mother at which point he says ‘consider yourself officially exempt from my wrath, sweetcakes, and if you’re lucky a little later I’ll let you play with my boomstick’, a line that certainly provokes a reaction, though surely not the one that Campbell intended.[22] Instead of welcoming the cinematic version of masculine heroism played to the point of excess by Campbell, it is found to be uncomfortable and undesirable in what the film presents as reality. As a result, the hero is established as a problematic figure unworthy of unquestioned emotional involvement. Campbell’s films are therefore promoting the idea that heroes are to be questioned rather than blindly followed and that the overt masculinity witnessed on screen simply cannot exist in reality.

Projecting an ideology of masculine heroism that imposes ‘without appearing to do so’, Hollywood films generally stand in stark contrast to those made by Bruce Campbell.[23] The emergence of muscular cinema in the 1980s can be interpreted as ‘indicative of a new conservatism in both national and sexual politics’, a political stance that fails to resonate with the Campbell films discussed, suggesting that their project is rather different.[24] Rather than offering ideals to which the audience should aspire, Campbell’s films critique more mainstream offerings, questioning models of masculinity and heroism and encouraging greater audience involvement through active viewing strategies. As such, through both performance and construction, the films discussed work to undercut the perpetuation of unrealistic versions of heroism and masculinity that Hollywood attempts to pass off as natural. Returning to Walkerdine’s suggestion that muscular cinema be seen as a route of escape for audiences occupying positions of inequality, Tasker argues that ‘many action narratives carefully orchestrate social problems… that will be overcome in fantasy form’, something that contributes to the imposition of ideological values.[25] Rather than campaigning for actual social change, muscular cinema poses problems and then recovers any potential dissent at the level of fantasy through depicting the triumph of a powerful male, potentially reinforcing politically conservative discourse.

Bruce Campbell films do not operate in the same way as conventional Hollywood action films. While The Evil Dead seems to completely reject the idea of the hero, doing little to reinforce masculinity against the perceived threat of second wave feminism emerging in the 1970s, later films work towards exposing the constructed nature of Hollywood masculinity. As such, the Campbell films discussed are not commenting on social problems but rather taking an ironic look at the commentary mounted in action films. Owing to their general status as ‘B’ movies, Campbell films can never hope to match the distribution of the Hollywood ‘A’ list but, given their project, it seems that such widespread circulation is not their intention. As previously discussed, these films appeal to a relatively culturally literate niche audience already appreciative of their parodic aims who actively seek out films starring Bruce Campbell. As a result, their impact on Hollywood conventions can be minimal at best. Despite this, their project continues to be worthwhile, and highlighting that screen heroes are not necessarily unproblematic has become something expected of Campbell films. While such critique is often implicit, Campbell is perhaps at his most forthcoming on the matter as Elvis in Bubba Ho-Tep: ‘In the movies, I always played the heroic types. But when the stage lights went out, it was time for drugs, and stupidity, and the coveting of women’.[26] Perhaps the greatest achievement of Campbell’s films is their suggestion that some of the negative characteristics identified by Elvis exist in the character of the Hollywood hero and are ripe for parody. Certainly, Hollywood blockbusters will continue to be king at the box office, but in his own way, Bruce Campbell is king. Hail to the king, baby.

University of Essex

Notes

[1] Antony Easthope, What A Man’s Gotta Do: The Masculine Myth in Popular Culture (London, 1992), p. 53.

[2] Max Jones, The Last Great Quest: Captain Scott’s Antarctic Sacrifice (Oxford, 2003), p. 10.

[3] Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, genre and the action cinema (London, 2000), p. 1.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Christian Voice, as cited in Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York, 1991), p.232.

[6] Valerie Walkerdine, from Burgin, V., Donald, J. and Caplan, C. (eds.), Formations of Fantasy (London, 1986), p. 172 as cited in Tasker, p. 71.

[7] Easthope, p. 52.

[8] Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987), directed by Sam Raimi.

[9] This mockery is heightened through the fact that Army of Darkness is known as Captain Supermarket in Japan. Such branding is hardly heroic.

[10] Easthope, p. 92.

[11] Ibid., p. 52.

[12] Evil Dead 3: Army of Darkness (1992) directed by Sam Raimi.

[13] This was a prominent feature of the paper presented by Jones at the ‘My Hero’ conference at King’s College London, 2009. It is also present in The Last Great Quest, particularly chapters 5-7.

[14] Evil Dead 3: Army of Darkness (1992), directed by Sam Raimi.

[15] Bubba Ho-Tep (2002), directed by Don Coscarelli.

[16] Ibid.

[17] In press interviews to support the film’s release, Campbell stated that Haff actually was Elvis while Jack was senile.

[18] Bubba Ho-Tep (2002), directed by Don Coscarelli.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London, 1992), p. 54.

[21] My Name Is Bruce (2007), directed by Bruce Campbell.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’ in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London, 1971), pp. 171-2 as cited in Silverman, p. 17.

[24] Tasker, p. 1.

[25] Ibid., p. 72.

[26] Bubba Ho-Tep (2002), directed by Don Coscarelli.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

‘Anti-scriptural, anti-domestic, and revolutionary’: Female Preachers and Gender in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1864-1888

George Scratcherd

© George Scratcherd. All Rights Reserved.

After the Civil War in which so much, for so many, was pinned to the Divine, the religious landscape of America was shattered. Amidst this turmoil the black churches underwent significant reshaping, propelled by emancipation. African-Americans left biracial churches in great numbers and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, already the largest black Methodist denomination, was one of the greatest beneficiaries of this exodus. By 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois would write that the A.M.E. Church was ‘the greatest Negro organization in the world’.[1] These transformations provided fertile ground for a reassessment of the roles women were to play in the A.M.E. Church, and between 1864 and 1888 female preaching, women’s participation in church hierarchy and gender roles within the A.M.E. Church were all negotiated and debated. Traditions of women’s preaching, social and geographical necessity and nascent arguments of gender equality drove women’s attempts to take up more active and positive roles in church organisation and preaching. These were pitted against entrenched associations of masculinity with the pulpit, and of femininity with the domestic sphere. Yet even as church hierarchies adapted to these impulses, so the case for female participation grew stronger and challenged those hierarchies still further. Once the A.M.E. Church began some limited expansions of women’s place in the church hierarchy, women’s participation in the church reinforced its usefulness and added momentum to the case for female preaching and ordination.

The possibilities for women in the A.M.E. Church in this period were shaped by several key decisions by the church’s General Conference. The first in 1868 created the position of stewardesses, lay assistants in each church ostensibly equivalent to male stewards and the first position open to women in the church’s hierarchy. The second in 1884 sanctioned the licensing of women as lay preachers—a practice which had existed informally on a small scale since the church’s very beginnings. However, ordination remained closed to women, a decision reaffirmed by the General Conference of 1888. Debates took place at national and regional A.M.E. Conferences and in the pages of the church’s journals and newspapers as to the appropriate limits of women in the church. Voices supporting the ordination of women were few, but did exist. Many more sought to curtail women. Yet some came to realise the value of women as stewardesses and supported their further advancement in the church hierarchy. Henry McNeal Turner, a black political leader and later an A.M.E. bishop, reported in 1873 that ‘I have found the stewardesses worth more than all the male officers put together’.[2] Women themselves were the principal architects of the advances sanctioned by the General Conference through their persistent pressure to be licensed to preach and through their effectiveness as unofficial preachers and stewardesses.

Women took up roles as stewardesses in the wake of a dramatic influx of church members in the south as emancipation saw great numbers leave the Southern Methodist Episcopal Church to join the black Methodist churches. While some did so as early as 1863, this movement gained greater momentum after the end of the war and the completion of emancipation. Prior to the war, the A.M.E. Church had very little presence in the south and the 1864 General Conference authorised the establishment of a presence there by the formation of the South Carolina Conference of the A.M.E. Church.[3] Missionaries such as James Lynch, Henry McNeal Turner and Daniel A. Payne led the work of establishing A.M.E. congregations, especially in Georgia and South Carolina. By March 1867, the South Carolina Conference reported ‘not less than 48,000 or 50,000 members in the whole’.[4] This enormous influx of members in the South persisted, and required a significant organisational effort. Not only did this offer significant opportunities to women but required their service, which they provided in great numbers, principally as stewardesses.

Broadly speaking, the historiography of female preaching in general and in black churches in particular has focussed on the period after the symbolic end of Reconstruction in 1877 and especially after the establishment of Jim Crow. This period saw significant developments in women’s roles in various denominations. In 1880 Anna Howard Shaw was ordained as the first female Methodist minister in the United States.[5] In 1889 Louisa Woosley became the first Presbyterian woman to be ordained and Ella Niswonger was ordained in the United Brethren Church.[6] Among the black churches the African Methodist Episcopal Church of Zion was the first to ordain a woman, Julia A. Foote, in 1894. Mary J. Small followed soon after in 1895, and in 1898 she became the first female elder of the A.M.E. Zion Church. The A.M.E. Church was much slower to introduce full ordination of women, which was only allowed in 1948. However, they too significantly advanced women’s roles in this period creating the position of deaconess as a lay equivalent of the ordained male deacons in 1900.[7] In the black Baptist church Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has demonstrated the roles women forged for themselves through women’s conventions, especially the national Women’s Convention formed in 1900, and through feminist theology.[8] Such developments have overshadowed the history of women’s religious activity in Reconstruction period, despite it being a seminal juncture in the development of the black churches.

In the case of the A.M.E. Church this period was doubly important since, as Jualynne Dodson put it, ‘A.M.E. preaching women were the cutting edge of women’s activities’.[9] Dodson’s work in particular has illustrated the influence and power which women forged for themselves. However, the existing literature on women in the A.M.E. Church does not fully address the connections between women’s progress within the hierarchy of the church and the dramatic changes wrought by emancipation, especially in the South. Works on the black churches and the A.M.E. during Reconstruction, such as those by Clarence E. Walker and William E. Montgomery, have underemphasised women. Julius H. Bailey has also studied the complexities of masculinity, femininity and womanhood in the A.M.E Church through an examination of domesticity. A stronger understanding of the association between this domestic ideology and women’s formal roles in the church is also required in order to understand how these roles were reconciled with traditional conceptions of womanhood.

The role of women was debated at church conferences at both the national and state level and in the pages of the church’s newspaper, The Christian Recorder, and from 1881 in The A.M.E. Church Review. Perceptions of womanhood and domesticity in the A.M.E. Church are also manifest in the columns of The Christian Recorder and in Daniel Payne’s Treatise on Domestic Education of 1885. The roles women played in the A.M.E. Church and their relation to broader developments in the church were also discussed in several works by leading A.M.E. clergymen, including Payne and C.S. Smith’s histories of the church, Alexander Wayman’s Cyclopædia of African Methodism, Henry McNeal Turner’s The Genius and Theory of Methodist Polity and W.J. Gaines’s African Methodism in the South. Finally, a more particular insight into female preachers may be garnered via the contemporary biographies of the two most prominent of the time, Amanda Berry Smith and Harriet A. Baker, as well as Smith’s own autobiography and Baker’s surviving sermons.

Women in the A.M.E. Church were ‘the cutting edge’ of women’s religious life during the Reconstruction period and it is essential to understand their role. It shaped—and was shaped—by the nature of womanhood and domesticity. It was a product of the great changes in the church wrought by emancipation but it was also an essential factor in shaping those changes. Women in the A.M.E. Church paved the way for the great progress women would make in the A.M.E. Church and other black churches for decades to come.

In 1844 Nathan Ward and forty signatories unsuccessfully petitioned the General Conference of the A.M.E. Church ‘to admit females to receive a license to preach in the connexion’.[10] Four years later the Daughters of Zion submitted a similar petition ‘to grant their license in all respects as men are licensed, and so to graduate up to the highest office in the church’. They were at one point granted permission to preach, but ultimately, after spirited debate, did not receive licenses from the Conference.[11] In 1850 the Philadelphia Conference discussed ‘Whether it should be tolerated for women to form a Connection, and appoint their preachers to stations in the several districts?’ after a group of women had done so.[12] According to Payne these women ‘held together for a brief period, and then fell to pieces like a rope of sand’.[13] At the next General Conference in 1852 the question of licensing women to preach was raised again by Bishop William Paul Quinn and Rev. Thomas Lawrence, but was defeated by a large majority.[14] The issue was not raised at the General Conference again until 1864, when Henry Davis thrice raised the question only for it to be postponed and ignored.[15] It was not until 1868 that the question finally achieved a position for women in the church’s hierarchy with the creation of boards of stewardesses.[16]

These repeated petitions formed part of a larger tradition of female ambition, vocation, participation and preaching in the A.M.E. Church as old as the church itself. Many women had informally preached without licenses throughout the antebellum period. They served as both exhorters (who led local prayer meetings) and evangelists (who proselytized outside their own community). The most renowned antebellum A.M.E. female preacher was Jarena Lee. In 1809, prior to the organisation of the A.M.E. Church, Richard Allen, founder of the A.M.E. Church and then a deacon in the Methodist Episcopal Church, permitted Lee to preach without a license. She was not granted a formal license after the organisation of the church in 1817, but Allen verbally authorised her to act as an exhorter and she continued to preach in Philadelphia, New York and New Jersey. Other women were also active preachers in the antebellum church. Joseph Thompson’s Bethel Gleanings describes one Philadelphia preacher, Sophie Murray as ‘the first evangelist of Bethel’, and another, Elizabeth Cole, as ‘holding many glorious prayer meetings’.[17] Doritha Hill led female prayer meetings in Baltimore and Mary Prout ‘was a leader of a female prayer meeting’ in Maryland in the early years of the church. Wealthy Dorsey acted in a similar capacity in Philadelphia.[18] Harriet Felson Taylor was described as the ‘First Female Exhorter and Local Preacher’ of Washington’s Union Bethel Church and Rachel Evans of New Jersey was ‘a preacheress of no ordinary ability. She could rouse a congregation at any time’.[19] Pricilla Baltimore of St. Louis ‘was not only the assigned itinerant minister but single-handedly laid foundations for African Methodism in this area of the Mississippi River Valley’.[20] The tradition of unlicensed female preaching also extended to other Methodists outside the A.M.E. Church, with Sojourner Truth and Zilpha Elaw being the most significant.

Jarena Lee’s autobiographical Journal offers some insight into the motivations of female preachers and the female preaching tradition of the A.M.E. Church. She described her profound spiritual conversion experience ‘as if I were in an ocean of light and bliss’, and her subsequent vocation to preach:

[T]he same voice seemed to say—“Preach the Gospel; I will put words in your mouth, and will turn your enemies to become your friends”… the Lord had revealed it to me, that [I] must preach the gospel.[21]

This account of divine inspiration to preach presaged the similar account of Amanda Berry Smith, the most renowned postbellum female A.M.E. preacher. She likewise described a Divinely-inspired conversion and vocation:

I seemed to go into a kind of trance or vision, and I saw on the foot of my bed a most beautiful angel… Then, it seemed, I went to a great Camp Meeting and there seemed to be thousands of people, and I was to preach… O, how I preached, and the people were slain right and left… I thought God had spared me for a purpose, so I meant to be converted.[22]

Harriet A. Baker likewise described her conversion experience in her 1892 biography. While she stood at a prayer meeting while others kneeled to pray, ‘The power of God struck me down… [He] taught me by his spirit to read his holy Word, and not only to read it, but to understand it also’.[23] These particular accounts of Divine inspiration may be principally a product of the tropes of nineteenth-century religious autobiography. However, it is clear that female preachers justified themselves by a genuine and profound conviction that preaching was their spiritual calling. Their call to preach was a vindication of the seriousness of female spirituality and a manifestation of Divine will. Some prominent A.M.E. women adopted strong proto-feminist positions, particularly those involved in education, like Hallie Quinn Brown who would become dean of the Women’s Department of Wilberforce University.[24] However, it seems that those preachers who recorded their calls to preaching claimed spiritual rather than feminist inspiration.

The tradition of unlicensed female preaching continued after the Civil War. The most prominent preachers were Amanda Berry Smith and Harriet A. Baker. Smith evangelised extensively at camp meetings in the north-eastern states, especially in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania between 1871 and 1878. J.M. Thorburn noted in his introduction to her autobiography, ‘I have never known anyone who could draw and hold so large an audience as Mrs. Smith’.[25] Baker similarly won great renown through evangelising at camp meetings and revivals between 1874 and 1889. She had won the sanction of the A.M.E. Church as a preacher after leading a revival at the white Evangelical church of Brownstown Pennsylvania, where she converted seventy-two people.[26] She went on to become a pastor when the Philadelphia Conference appointed her ‘to take charge of the St. Paul’s Church on Tenth Street, in the city of Lebanon, Pa’ in 1889.[27] Other women also continued the preaching tradition prior to the 1884 General Conference. Margaret Wilson preached in New Jersey from 1870 as did Emily Calkins Stevens from 1882, and Lena Doolin-Mason of Hannibal, Missouri, ‘preached in nearly every state in the Union’.[28]

The continuing preaching activities of women challenged the masculine hierarchy of the church. Unlicensed female preaching, alongside the growth of the church in the south, provoked debates regarding women’s place in the church and its sanctioned hierarchy, and regarding the nature of Godly womanhood. In the first instance, female preaching and persistent petitioning for a place in the church hierarchy prompted the creation of the boards of stewardesses. A board of stewardesses for a church consisted of three to nine women ‘who assist the stewards, class-leaders, and pastor in managing the spiritual, and sometimes the temporal affairs of the church… They are especially charged with looking after the females of the church’.[29] Stewardesses were lay assistants, ostensibly similar to the existing position of steward. Prior to their creation in 1868, many had doubted the prudence of allowing women any official position in the church. In 1852, an editorial in The Christian Recorder asked

Must the Church, that needs the most manly strength, the most gigantic minds to execute her labors, confide them to those whom nature has fitted for the easier toils of life? Shall the labors of a Paul, a Silas, a Peter, a Luther, a Calvin, a Wesley, be trusted to the weaker sex?[30]

Rev. Elisha Weaver echoed these sentiments in a speech in 1858. He criticized women ‘pressing into the empire which belongs exclusively to man’ in defiance of ‘the gentle and attractive grace of their sex’. He argued that man’s superior faculties ‘entitle him to absolute rule’.[31] The introduction of stewardesses provoked resistance in some churches especially from stewards and other existing male officers. Henry McNeal Tuner reported that one steward

‘objected to the whole thing and desired to let such a law as that remain a dead letter on the statute book. But I told him, that if he could not stand the stewardesses, he must go out of the board and let me put in such officer as could… The next day some of my leaders and local preachers, having heard of what had transpired… were disposed to be troublesome. I gave them to understand that… if they could not work in harness, because I had made a few stewardesses, they had better vacate their positions at once’.[32]

Similarly The Christian Recorder reported in October 1873 that

In some of our Churches in this vicinity, the Stewardesses, appointed in regular order, have been, and are, subjected to much unchristian treatment at the hands of those, of whom better things were expected—we mean some of the officers whose tenure of office is in no way superior to that of the Stewardesses.[33]

Clearly the introduction of stewardesses was provocative and controversial. Male lay officers were threatened by the potential influence stewardesses could wield, and their status was undermined by the apparent inclusion of women alongside the stewards in the church hierarchy.

However, in reality the influence of the stewardesses was severely curtailed and they were certainly not the equals of the stewards. The hesitancy with which women were introduced into the offices of the church was reflected in the limitations placed on them. The boards of stewardesses were introduced at the minimum possible cost to the influence of existing lay officers, and their creation may have been designed to curtail and contain the pressure for the licensing of female preaching within the structure of the church. In the absence of the requisite minimum of three suitable women men could serve as stand-in stewardesses. Furthermore all appointments of stewardesses had to be ‘confirmed by the Board of Stewards only in a regular stewards’ meeting’.[34] They were neither members of the Official Board of the church nor did they attend the Quarterly Conference.[35] They had ‘no legislative or judicial discretion, but are merely assistants’.[36]

Despite these limitations, the stewardesses proved their worth and won many plaudits. Henry McNeal Turner wrote that among those who had initially resisted the introduction of stewardesses ‘I heard some of the same individuals say, that it was the best thing the General Conferences did’, while he himself ‘found the stewardesses worth more than all the male officers put together’.[37] In 1888 Reverend Theodore Gould of the Philadelphia Conference wrote to The Christian Recorder with ‘An Important Query—Why should not the stewardesses be members… of the Quarterly Conferences?’ They had proved their worth, ‘and no class of officers in the Church should be appreciated more highly than the stewardess… the female members are as capable and as willing to work for the cause of Christ and humanity as are the male’. Gould identified the reason as prejudice, ‘Simply because they are women’, and for him the question was one of justice; ‘The time has now come when the sisters of our great Church must be protected in their rights’.[38] Women’s service as stewardess earned them recognition as valuable contributors to the church and swayed the debate over women’s roles.

The debate over the licensing of women as preachers in 1884 was also divisive. George C. Sampson presented a resolution to the General Conference in May 1884 acknowledging the existing unofficial licensing of female preachers:

Whereas, Female evangelists are becoming very numerous and, as they are not amenable to anyone, Resolved, that those sisters that have, and who shall receive licenses from the hand of any of our ministers in the future, shall be subject to the same requirements as local preachers, and they shall be amenable to the Quarterly Conference of the church of which they are members, subject to all the requirements of a local preacher.[39]

This resolution was adopted and for the first time it officially sanctioned the licensing of women. Simultaneously it sought to regulate all existing and future licensees bringing them within the jurisdiction of the Quarterly Conferences. However, as with the introduction of stewardesses sixteen years earlier, the new role opened to women was viewed with suspicion. Another resolution at the same Conference introduced by W.D. Cook sought to limit the new role for women, much as the role of stewardess had been constrained:

Whereas, we have in our Church some female ministers who have been holding pastoral charges much to the detriment of the Church; therefore be it Resolved, That they are hereby prohibited from assignment to a special charge, and simply labor as evangelists.[40]

Some women had already been appointed pastors, most notably Sarah Ann Hughes at Fayetteville Station and then Charlotte Mission in North Carolina, and Margaret Wilson at Haleyville Mission in New Jersey.[41] This resolution sought to put an end to the practice. Dr. James H.A. Johnson spoke in favour of the resolution arguing that were the resolution not to pass, ‘it would sap the foundation of the Church and corrupt its very purity’.[42] He argued that women had no right to preach from the pulpit and that the appropriate sphere for women had been circumscribed by God. Finally he invoked St. Paul’s directive to ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches’.[43] Rev. Dr. Thomas H. Jackson concurred that scripture proscribed women’s public work in the church, and another supporter of the resolution, Rev. G.W. Bryant, said, ‘I vote in favor of their staying home and taking care of the babies’.[44] The resolution was adopted by a vote of 65 to 11. Interestingly, the report of the Conference notes that ‘There were quite a number of female preachers in attendance while this question was being discussed’, including Sarah Ann Hughes and Margaret Wilson, but it does not describe their reactions to these arguments.[45] However, one of those in attendance, Lucy Cooper, wrote to The Christian Recorder and in a lengthy letter rebutted Rev. Dr. Jackson with ‘biblical proof that women have high and holy callings as well as men’, citing the Acts 2: ‘I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy’.[46] She also emphasised that ‘in the African Methodist Episcopal Church women are its principal support’.[47] Henry McNeal Turner, often a visible advocate of women in the church, also supported the licensing of female preachers. He wrote that ‘Women ought to be utilized in any way suitable to their condition and circumstances’.[48] He also disagreed with the view that Scripture precluded women from preaching but he did not agree with Lucy Cooper that women were entitled by Scripture to assume higher ministerial offices.[50]

Nevertheless in 1885, he sparked new debates over whether the licensing of women to preach should be followed by the ordination of women as deacons. On 29 November, 1885 he ordained Sarah Ann Hughes as a deacon.[51] The question of the ordination of women was discussed in several articles in The Christian Recorder and The A.M.E. Church Review between then and the 1888 General Conference. The debate paralleled similar debates in other denominations. The Southern Methodist Episcopal Church created the office of deaconess, not ordained, and similar in function to the stewardesses of the A.M.E. Church. In 1889, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church ordained Louisa Woolsey and in 1891 she published Shall Woman Preach, a treatise on the question of the ordination of women. The question was addressed in The Christian Recorder in February 1886 by Mrs. Alice S. Felts who wrote in strong support of Bishop Turner. She argued that ‘two-thirds of the present church membership are women’ and that principles of religious equality mandated that offices of the church be filled by women on an equal footing with men.[52] An article in The Christian Recorder in June also examined the question of the ordination of women on the basis of Dr. Adam Clarke’s Commentary on the Bible. It quoted him thus: ‘There is, however much more than is implied in the Christian ministry, of which men only, and men called of God are capable’. On this authority, the article argued, ‘Christian women are put below the level of the Christian ministry’.[53] Similar disputes were to be found in The A.M.E. Church Review and most of its articles were hostile to Turner.[54] However, Bishop John M. Brown supported the ordination of women and called for women to be ordained as deaconesses and as presbyters.[55] Ultimately the matter was decided at the General Conference of 1888 which resolved:

Whereas, Bishop H.M. Turner has seen fit to ordain a woman to the order of a deacon; and Whereas said act is contrary to the usage of our Church, and without a precedent in any other body of Christians in the known world, and as it cannot be proved by the Scriptures that a woman has ever been ordained to the order of the ministry;

Therefore be it enacted, That the bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church be and are hereby forbidden to ordain a woman to the order of deacon or elder in our Church.[56]

The church had firmly established a ban on female ordination. Nevertheless, women continued to preach under the licenses permitted at the 1884 General Convention. Lena Doolin-Mason’s continued preaching activity supposedly led to the conversion of 1617 people in Minneapolis.[57] Harriet A. Baker became the pastor of St. Paul’s Church in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Mary C. Palmer, Melinda M. Cotton, Emma V. Johnson and Mary L. Harris, all continued to preach under the auspices of the Philadelphia Conference as did Margaret Wilson in the New Jersey Conference.[58]

The debates over the licensing of women to preach and the ordination of women as deaconesses were far more fierce and divisive than those over the creation of boards of stewardesses. They focussed more on Scripture and the offices held by women in the early church. In part this was due to the influence female preachers, deaconesses and ministers would wield over the church as a whole. Despite some initial concerns, stewardesses actually wielded little influence over individual churches, never mind Quarterly Conferences or the church as a whole. Once the boards became established concern over stewardesses disappeared as they filled traditional female roles as carers and domestics within the church hierarchy, and did not disturb the social order of the church. Female preachers, by contrast, assaulted the traditionally-conceived male monopoly on preaching, questioned the masculinity of the pulpit and wielded significant influence throughout the church.

Only a small minority of the women who held offices in the church and participated in its public work did so as preachers. By far the vast majority of female participation in the A.M.E. Church during the Reconstruction period was as stewardesses, particularly in the South. By 1887 the church had 14,190 stewardesses.[59] However, Jualynne Dodson has argued that ‘The church’s establishment of boards of stewardesses did nothing to alter the containment of women’.[60] Certainly Dodson is correct that boards of stewardesses were subordinated to male authority, especially that of the stewards and, as mere assistants, were stripped of all genuine power and authority. It is wrong to assume, however, that this meant that the introduction of stewardesses placated, compromised or diverted the efforts of female preachers to be licensed and ordained by the A.M.E. Church. Unlicensed female preachers continued preaching as they had done prior to the introduction of stewardesses. Nor were those who became stewardesses also preachers in any great proportion. How could they have been, given how numerous they were? In fact the boards of stewardesses allowed a much greater breadth of female participation in the A.M.E. Church than the rarefied world of the unlicensed or even the licensed female preacher. Women whose aspirations could never have stretched to preaching could nonetheless actively participate and take on responsibilities within their church and community. Henry McNeal Turner described the character of a stewardess: ‘They should be highly pious women of irreproachable reputations, and of sufficient age and standing in the community to guarantee respectability’.[61] Stewardesses had high standards to live up to, but the institution of the stewardess allowed women to take on that challenge en masse and it seems from the generally favourable reports of the stewardess system that they met it. Rev. Theodore Gould believed that ‘no class of officers in the church should be appreciated more highly than the stewardess’.[62] They illustrated the capability of women within the church hierarchy and strengthened the case for the licensing and ordination of female preachers. The stewardess system also widened the pool of talent from which female preachers could emerge. In the long term the boards of stewardesses also provided the basis from which women could be made deaconesses once deaconesses were introduced in 1900.

Boards of stewardesses did not hinder the cause of women or of female preaching in the A.M.E. Church. They may not have been the preaching licenses that women hoped for in 1868, but nevertheless they were a significant advance for women in the A.M.E. Church. They were also of great importance to the A.M.E. Church in the postbellum South as it won great numbers of adherents and faced the organisational challenges of emancipation. However, ultimately a constraining domestic ideology won out over women’s efforts to demonstrate their value as workers for the Church. By 1888 the leaders of the church remained persuaded by Daniel Alexander Payne’s assessment of female preaching in 1848, that it was ‘antiscriptural, anti-domestic, and revolutionary’.[63]

University of Oxford

Notes

[1] W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago, 1903), p. 197.

[2] H.M. Turner, ‘How the Stewardesses System Operates in the A.M.E. Church’, The Christian Recorder (15 May, 1873), p. 1.

[3] ‘Report of the General Conference’, The Christian Recorder (21 May, 1864), p. 2; W.J. Gaines, African Methodism in the South; or, Twenty-Five Years of Freedom (Atlanta, GA, 1890), p. 6.

[4] Gaines, African Methodism in the South, p. 13. At this point the South Carolina Conference embraced North and South Carolina, Florida, Georgia and Alabama.

[5] A.D. Gordon, ‘Shaw, Anna Howard’, American National Biography Online [http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00615.html] (Accessed 01 March, 2010).

[6] The Cumberland Presbyterian, (22 July, 1952), p. 4; (26 August, 1952), p. 15 [http://www.cumberland.org/hfcpc/minister/woosleyL.htm] (Accessed 01 March, 2010); ‘Ella Niswonger, 1865-1944’ [http://www.gcah.org/site/apps/nlnet/content3.aspx?c=ghKJI0PHIoE&b=3637665&ct=4506051] (Accessed 01 March, 2010).

[7] C.E. Lincoln and L.H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham, NC, 1990), pp. 285-6.

[8] E.B. Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1993), pp. 12, 120-1; E.B. Higginbotham, ‘The Feminist Theology of the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1900’, in A. Swerdlow and H. Lessinger (eds.), Class, Race and Sex: The Dynamics of Control (Boston, 1983) pp. 31-59.

[9] J. Dodson, ‘Nineteenth-Century A.M.E. Preaching Women’, in H.F. Thomas and R. Skinner Keller (eds.), Women in New Worlds: Historical Perspectives on the Wesleyan Tradition (Nashville, TN, 1981), p. 277.

[10] C.S. Smith, A History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Philadelphia, 1922), p. 415.

[11] D.A. Payne, History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Nashville, TN, 1891), p. 301.

[12] Ibid., p. 237.

[13] Ibid., p. 237.

[14] J.A. Handy, Scraps of African Methodist Episcopal History (Philadelphia, 1902), pp. 189-90.

[15] Smith, A History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church , pp. 477, 487.

[16] Ibid., p. 81.

[17] J. Thompson, Bethel Gleanings (Philadelphia, 1881), pp. 34-7.

[18] J. Dodson, Engendering Church: Women, Power, and the A.M.E. Church (Lanham, MD, 2002), p. 75.

[19] Dodson, ‘Nineteenth-Century A.M.E. Preaching Women’, p. 279; A.W. Wayman, Cyclopædia of African Methodism (Baltimore, 1882), p. 57.

[20] Dodson, Engendering Church, p. 31.

[21] J. Lee, Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee (Philadelphia, 1849), pp. 10-11.

[22] A.B. Smith, An Autobiography: The Story of the Lord’s Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith the Colored Evangelist (Chicago, 1893), pp. 42-3.

[23] J.H. Acornley (ed.), The Colored Lady Evangelist: Being the Life, Labors and Experiences, of Mrs. Harriet Baker (Brooklyn, 1892), pp. 31-3.

[24] Dodson, Engendering Church, pp. 72-3.

[25] Smith, An Autobiography, p. vi.

[26] Acornley (ed.), The Colored Lady Evangelist, p. 41.

[27] Ibid. p. 46.

[28] Dodson, ‘Nineteenth-Century A.M.E. Preaching Women’, pp. 284-5.

[29] H.M. Turner, The Genius and Theory of Methodist Polity, or the Machinery of Methodism. Practically Illustrated through a Series of Questions and Answers (Philadelphia, 1885), p. 165-6.

[30] Payne, History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, p. 301.

[31] E. Weaver, ‘Woman—Her True Sphere’, Repository of Religion and Literature and of Science and Art 1, No. 2 (1858), pp. 58-61.

[32] Turner, ‘How the Stewardesses System Operates in the A.M.E. Church’, p. 1.

[33] ‘Our Swivel’, The Christian Recorder (23 October, 1873), p. 4.

[34] Turner, The Genius and Theory of Methodist Polity, p. 166.

[35] Ibid., p. 167.

[36] Ibid., p. 166.

[37] Turner, ‘How the Stewardesses System Operates in the A.M.E. Church’, p. 1.

[38] T. Gould, ‘An Important Query—Why should not the stewardesses be members and also of the Quarterly Conferences?’, The Christian Recorder (5 April, 1888), p. 2.

[39] Journal of the 18^th Session and 17^th Quadrennial Session of The General Conference of The African Methodist Episcopal Church in The World (Philadelphia, 1884), p. 253.

[40] Ibid., p. 256.

[41] S.W. Angell, ‘The Controversy over Women’s Ministry in the African Methodist Episcopal Church During the 1880s: The Case of Sarah Ann Hughes’, in J. Weisenfeld and R. Newman (eds.), This Far by Faith: Readings in African-American Women’s Religious Biography (New York, 1996), pp. 96-9.

[42] ‘The General Conference—Report of the two last days’, The Christian Recorder (5 June, 1884), p. 2.

[43] 1 Cor. xiv.34.

[44] ‘The General Conference—Report of the two last days’, p. 2.

[45] Ibid., p. 2.

[46] L. Cooper, ‘Woman’s Sphere in the Church’, The Christian Recorder (19 June, 1884), p. 1; Acts ii.17.

[47] Cooper, ‘Woman’s Sphere in the Church’, p. 1.

[48] Turner, The Genius and Theory of Methodist Polity, p. 169.

[49] Ibid., p. 99.

[50] Ibid., pp. 100-1.

[51] A.S. Felts, ‘Women in the Church’, The Christian Recorder (18 February, 1886), p. 1; Angell, ‘The Controversy over Women’s Ministry in the African Methodist Episcopal Church During the 1880s: The Case of Sarah Ann Hughes’, pp. 102-3.

[52] Felts, ‘Women in the Church’, p. 1.

[53] ‘Ordination of Women’, Christian Recorder (3 June, 1886).

[54] Dodson, ‘Nineteenth-Century A.M.E. Preaching Women’, p. 286, n. 31.

[55] J.M. Brown, ‘The ordination of women: What is the authority for it?’, The A.M.E. Church Review, 2 (April, 1886), pp. 359-61.

[56] Smith, A History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, p. 159.

[57] Dodson, ‘Nineteenth-Century A.M.E. Preaching Women’, p. 287.

[58] Ibid., p. 287; Angell, ‘The Controversy over Women’s Ministry in the African Methodist Episcopal Church During the 1880s: The Case of Sarah Ann Hughes’, pp. 95-6.

[59] Gaines, African Methodism in the South, pp. 193-4.

[60] Dodson, ‘Nineteenth-Century A.M.E. Preaching Women’, p. 282.

[61] Turner, The Genius and Theory of Methodist Polity, p. 166.

[62] Gould, ‘An Important Query – Why should not the stewardesses be members and also of the Quarterly Conferences?’, p. 2.

[63] C.E. Walker, A Rock in a Weary Land: The African Methodist Episcopal Church During the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, 1982), p. 26.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

The Knickerbocker Atlantic: Ritual and Federalism in Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

Michael Collins

© Michael Collins. All Rights Reserved.

The relationship of Washington Irving to the genre of the literary sketch has long been established. Seen as a major proponent of the genre in its early manifestation, Irving’s work in The Sketch Book is regarded by many as inaugurating a tradition in American letters of detached, brief and ironic first-person narration with a focus on surface impressions and the visual field. In addition to his achievements in the sketch form, in stories that appeared alongside sketches in The Sketch Book (such as ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ and ‘Rip Van Winkle’), Irving pioneered the short story as a distinct genre in nineteenth-century literature. However, owing in part to the disjointed structure of The Sketch Book, critics have tended to treat Irving’s work in each genre as distinct. In this essay I demonstrate how by identifying problems inherent within the form of the literary sketch early in the work Irving precipitated the development of the short story in America. I show how in The Sketch Book, for important political and historical reasons, Irving questions the value of the literary sketch and its techniques of representing the social world. In so doing, Irving creates a new form in the short story, which exhibited a greater capacity for the expression of inter-subjectivity and historical consciousness, and challenged the resistance to the social world present within romanticism’s elevation of individual experience.

Despite the centrality of certain aspects of Irving’s work to American literary history, his reputation has been unstable in relation to issues of an American national literature. In America’s Sketchbook, Kristie Hamilton summarises a common critical approach to the literary sketch work of Washington Irving when she writes, ‘Irving creates the sketch writer as doubly detached—above a scene… and purportedly independent of society’s prejudices as Romantic poets sought to be’.[1] Following this remark Hamilton also states ‘the claim of detachment allied elite educated, Euro-American males with an older, masculine European literary and philosophical tradition that had already been appropriated for the bourgeoisie by, among others, Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson’.[2] In depicting social life through the form of the sketch, Hamilton implies that Irving, Addison and Johnson sought to self-identify as separate from the actions they described; creating themselves as critical, disinterested and ironically detached.

Hamilton’s view of Irving, whom she compares unfavourably to the generation of writers that followed him in political terms, incorporates two common assumptions about the American writer and the literary sketch. Firstly, Hamilton points to Irving’s ‘detached’ manner of narration, marking both an association with a broadly-defined romanticism and with a politically-conservative bourgeois sensibility. Secondly, Hamilton assumes Irving’s experiments in narrative form have an unproblematic relation to British literature, whilst failing to account for the social, temporal and political space that divided Johnson and Addison as much from each other as from the American author.

Hamilton’s perspective emerges from a long tradition in scholarship of Irving’s work that began with Herman Melville’s rejection of him during his early years of association with the ‘Young America’ movement. As Paul Giles remarks in Transatlantic Insurrections, ‘Melville… quickly wrote off Irving’s literary persona Geoffrey Crayon, as an almost plagiaristic extrapolation from the work of Oliver Goldsmith’.[3] In addition to his claims of plagiarism, the Democrat Melville rejected Irving because of his upper-middle-class New York heritage, which was long associated with the earlier, elite, Federalist politics of figures such as Alexander Hamilton. For the young Melville, Irving’s supposed Anglophilia in The Sketch Book did not serve the interests of Young America’s celebration of the Jeffersonian national imaginary with its associated beliefs in natural rights, the ideal of the yeoman farmer and the sublime in nature. Instead, Irving’s literary inheritance came from American Federalism, which, as a political and social system, rejected Jeffersonian anti-urban nationalism in favour of a more positive picture of America’s British mercantile heritage. Alexander Hamilton’s cosmopolitan purview empowered international capitalism at the expense of nationalism, preferring a corporate identity to Jefferson’s sentimental formulation of the nation as a family bound by natural rights and paternalistic bonds of affection.

Following Melville, and for numerous historical and political reasons, many American Studies scholars have rejected Irving’s contribution to American letters as the product of an elite, conservative imagination seeking to distance itself from what was deemed unpleasant, uncomfortable or unappealing in his national culture through reliance on the aesthetic conventions of the English literary sketch. As Dana Brand notes in The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, the tradition begun by figures such as Addison and Steele of ‘a spectatorial persona who enjoys a diversity without grossness, randomness without danger, amusing bustle of mild interest rather than terrifying chaos of profound fascination’ sought to make safe the increasing disorder of modern life for the emerging middle classes.[4] For the liberal, British sketch writer the world became a theatre in which their position corresponded to the view from the central tower of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. Addison and Steele’s spectator could see all and yet remain respectively unseen.

In this essay I contend that to see Irving as an unproblematic adopter of English literary forms is to fail to historicise his work correctly within the framework of Federalist and anti-Federalist competition over American identity in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In particular, such perspectives have ignored the manner by which earlier Federalist writers and critics used ritual, performance and competing aesthetic theories concerning the political role of literature to challenge the authority of the Jeffersonians. This has unproblematically tied Irving’s literary productions to traditions in English literature, rather than seeing how his work operates within a complex history of transatlantic and national dispute and exchange.

As Douglas Tallack notes, romanticism has often been privileged in histories of the short story through an elevation of the anti-communal, individualistic and visionary qualities of experience. ‘With no significant tradition prior to the early nineteenth century,’ Tallack writes, ‘it is the short story… which more naturally assimilated the Romantic preference for intense lyric effects’.[5] This tendency has resulted in a literary history that emphasises the historical development and continuity of the romantic mode in America, with its emphasis on individual subjectivity, the lyric and epiphany, at the expense of other competing epistemologies and truth-claims.

To see Irving as a product of a complex culture of transatlantic exchange, rather than as an epigone of British romantic poetry or the eighteenth-century English essay, is to highlight how his work often questions the quixotic, romantic search for essence by elevating the theatrical and playful elements of experience. Through the short story, with its emphasis on gesture, ritual, performance and intersubjective experience, and by turning his gaze on Britain, Irving critiques ideas of romantic distance and the ideal neutral space of the imagination rapidly gaining footing in Jefferson’s America. As Paul Giles states:

Irving avoids… any simple sycophancy to English tradition, but more disturbing for American cultural nationalists would have been the author’s implicit denial that any representation of the ‘natural’ could exist outside… [a] framework of intertextual reflection, comparison, and immersion which the prismatic style of The Sketch Book delineates.[6]

Like many in the Early Republic, Irving doubted the validity of an American national character based upon essentialist principles of the sublime and natural rights of man. These principles were often associated with the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Party, who saw America’s future in an ideology of agrarian individualism and romantic natural rights. Instead, Irving preferred the Federalist purview of the largely urban middle classes, which favoured the possibilities of a cosmopolitan culture and treated the world as an evolving series of performances, spectacles and experiences. The tradition of letters in which Irving was schooled was one quite different from Addison and Steele’s vision of aesthetic distance and detachment as the path to an objective truth. Whilst many English writers thought of literature as providing an ideal, purportedly apolitical space for objective reflection, the prose and reportage of America’s Federalist elites possessed a more immersive relationship with events, rejecting an artificial, discreet frame in favour of a more open, adaptable and ludic interplay of performance and print. As David Waldstreicher remarks in his study of the politics of national celebration in early-republican America, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes, American Federalists sought to distinguish themselves from their anti-Federalist and Democratic-Republican opponents by sanctioning:

a repeated move from performance to print and back [that] epitomized a profound, complex set of cultural forms in which traditional festivals were inverted into dirges and reinverted to become celebrations, only to be improved upon in song, in dance, in the streets, in church, and, once again in print.[7]

Whilst anti-Federalists remained sceptical about celebrating a national culture that still included an influential upper-middle-class elite as part of its political landscape, Federalists, in their attempts to ratify the constitution after the War of Independence, favoured a politics of national celebration that saw print as a participant in the same performance of collective feeling as the rituals they described. ‘Reports of celebrations,’ Waldstreicher asserts, ‘helped create the sense that constitutional ratification… was actually a national movement, an inevitable expression of the national popular will’.[8] By colonising print culture and developing aesthetic theories that broke down the distinctions between the printed word and the public world of national celebrations, Federalists developed the logic of unity required for the establishment of a coherent national culture. The public and private realms of performance and writing became mutually interdependent for Federalists in a way that was not true for anti-Federalists, whose interests lay in the private individual’s resistance to the will of national government.

For Federalists, rituals, performances and festivals were simultaneously a way of displaying their elite power and presence within late-eighteenth-century American politics, and demonstrating the assent of the masses to that presence. Unlike anti-Federalists (most of whom would later turn to Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party), whose literature adopted a dissenting attitude and favoured romantic assertions of essential laws, sublime truths and the power of nature, Irving’s Federalist leanings led him to envision the world as a series of performances and playful constructions of identity. Furthermore, the pro-urban, commercially speculative sensibility of the Federalist mind engendered an understanding that people were incapable of self-reliant individualism, bound through ritual to a common culture, and that they should yield power to their social betters in questions of politics. For this to work the Federalists had to be seen in the public sphere, not remain unverifiable and critical. As a metaphor for the social world, theatre had greater meaning to Irving and the New York mercantile middle classes than it did to their Jeffersonian opponents. Unlike Addison, Steele, Johnson and Hunt in Britain, whose spectatorial position sought to fashion them as invisible in order to provide a means of critique, Irving’s sketches in The Sketch Book rely upon an American Federalist logic of visibility: to be seen is as important as seeing.

In the following section I read the early chapters of The Sketch Book alongside this tradition of Federalist performance to demonstrate how the progress of Geoffrey Crayon’s narrative functions as a satire of romantic detachment through which Irving questions an essentialised vision of experience. Across The Sketch Book Irving demonstrates a gradual resistance to the detachment of the sketch form that had become associated with expressions of romantic subjectivity, finally settling on the short story with its emphasis on the body, gesture and ritual to articulate his vision of the importance of performance to social identity. In the first essay of The Sketch Book, ‘The Author’s Account of Himself’, Irving opens with an epigraph from John Lyly’s Eupheus that is worth quoting in full.

I am of this mind with Homer, that as the snaile that crept out of her shel was turned eftsoones into a Toad, and thereby was forced to make a stoole to sit on; so the traveller that stragleth from his owne country is in a short time transformed into so monstrous a shape that he is faine to alter his mansion with his manners and to live where he can, not where he would.[9]

Thus, before Crayon has introduced himself in his own words, Irving presents a comic vision of the traveller that alludes at once to the transformative potential of travel and the danger such a process poses to an easy nationalism based upon settled manners and conventions. Lyly’s epigraph suggests that the traveller becomes something unrecognisable or ‘monstrous’ because of his experiences, a figure peculiarly at odds with the polite, ‘rambling’ sentimentalist that we subsequently see Crayon imagine himself to be. Context, the epigraph suggests, is the originary element of character, not inner drives or personal psychology.

A tension therefore exists between the narrative-framing device and Geoffrey Crayon’s own first–person narration. Crayon opens his interventions into The Sketch Book with the statement ‘I was always fond of visiting new scenes and observing strange characters and manners’ before providing a potted history of his life in America that generates an image of constancy.[10] Juxtaposed to the metamorphic Renaissance vision of John Lyly, Crayon sees his life as marked by a consistency typified by phrases such as ‘I was always’ and ‘this rambling propensity strengthened with my years’.[11] In addition, the focus on observation, as opposed to contact or relationship with history suggested by the epigraph, casts Crayon as a detached spectator. Irving begins The Sketch Book playfully by exposing the discontinuities that exist between the narrator’s sense of himself and the transformative capacities engendered by a life of motion and experience.

Crayon alludes to the tradition of spectatorship in which he seeks to establish himself in the final paragraph of the piece when he states, ‘I cannot say that I have studied… with the eye of a philosopher, but rather the sauntering gaze with which humble lovers of the picturesque stroll from the window of one print shop to another’.[12] Crayon’s gaze is fleeting, ‘caught sometimes by the delineations of beauty, sometimes by the distortions of caricature and sometimes by the loveliness of landscape’.[13] The incapacity of Crayon to maintain coherence in the face of experience casts doubt on the authority of his proceeding narrative. The tradition of spectatorship inaugurated by Addison and Steele, and in which Crayon seeks to place himself, is questioned through his inability to impose order upon events. As Martin Roth notes of Irving’s earlier persona Dietrich Knickerbocker:

Knickerbocker is the first narrative voice in American literature that rings true… unable to order the story in his mind, unable to exert any control over the story he wishes to tell, unable to decide whether the story is fact, myth, actual or marvellous.[14]

In an earlier passage from ‘The Author’s Account of Himself’ Crayon alludes to his discontent with his current American scene:

I visited various parts of my own country, and had I been merely a lover of fine scenery, I should have felt little desire to seek elsewhere its gratification for on no country have the charms of nature been more prodigiously lavished… no, never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery.[15]

For Crayon, the meaning of America has become inextricably tied to romantic conceptions of the sublimity of the New World. Crayon feels little parity with the grandeur of American scenery, but his response to it is expressed in the register of Romanticism. Even as Crayon purports to reject the Romantic worldview, he is subject to its influences, describing the landscape in terms that were already becoming outdated by 1819 through association with Jefferson’s common declarations of America’s future promise. ‘Her mighty lakes,’ Crayon states, ‘like oceans of liquid silver; her mountains with their bright aerial tints; her valleys teeming with wild fertility; her tremendous cataracts thundering in their solitudes’.[16] The enthusiastic viewer of early-nineteenth-century romanticism has come to resemble a bored, lone spectator longing for some new object to gratify him: ‘had I been merely a lover of fine scenery, I should have felt little desire to seek elsewhere its gratification’.[17] As Albert Von Frank remarks in The Sacred Game (1985), Crayon is a confused character in whose narrative it is ‘often difficult to distinguish between the literary nationalist, with his grudge against history, and the provincial Anglophile who wants nothing more than to have history reassert itself’.[18] Irving plays out these tensions through the sketch form, which possesses at once a historical association with English literature and a formal propensity towards the disembodied consciousness that marked an anti-Federalist culture of romanticism.

Ironically, Crayon’s desire to see the world as ‘from the window of one print shop to another’ replaces the stultifying experience of the sublime landscape with an equally staid and detached series of tableaux that are really nothing more than a degraded form of romantic disinterest.[19] Bored by expressions of the sublime in nature, but yet unable to abandon his reliance upon the sketch form’s inbuilt romantic sensibility, Crayon unknowingly presents himself as conflicted. In this way, Irving satirises the kinds of grand nationalist rhetoric often associated with Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party as well as the more insidious manner by which the American mind is colonised and delimited by such rhetoric. The narrative of The Sketch Book concerns Irving’s attempt, through Crayon, to resist appropriation by a romantic sensibility increasingly becoming inseparable from Jefferson’s cultural nationalism and Anglophobia.

Irving’s challenge to romanticism is continued in the second essay of The Sketch Book, ‘The Voyage’, in which Crayon is consistently foiled in his attempts to envision the Atlantic in terms that correspond with the romantic ideal of an imaginative neutral space. Crayon remarks, ‘the vast space of waters, that separates the hemispheres is like a blank page in existence… From the moment you lose sight of the land you have left, all is vacancy until you step on the opposite shore…’.[20] However, in the paragraph immediately following this assertion, Crayon undercuts himself by describing this sense of ‘vacancy’ as at once liberating and troubling, providing the mind with a space for ‘meditation’ and ‘reverie’ as well as an object of profound fear and trepidation. Crayon remarks, ‘a wide sea voyage severs us at once… it makes us conscious of being cast loose from the secure anchorage of settled life and set adrift upon a doubtful world’.[21] For Irving, the sublime and the terrifying share a common space in the imagination. Crayon wishes to find comfort in the ‘vacancy’ produced by the ocean, but instead finds a terrifying sense of disconnection and solitude. In this way Irving emphasises the equation of romanticism and the genteel ‘sauntering gaze’ of the sketch genre he first made in ‘The Author’s Account of Himself’. By suggesting that the blankness of the ocean and the ‘picturesque’ qualities of the sketcher’s tableaux share a common space in the imagination, Irving collapses the distinction that Crayon makes between the ‘sublime and beautiful of natural scenery’ and ‘the picturesque stroll from the window of one print shop to another’. Crayon’s desire for the aesthetic distance suggested by his decision to adopt the sketch form is mapped onto the strange fear he has for the ‘vacancy’ of the ocean. Aesthetic distance becomes a source of profound terror, rather than a way of providing comfort and safety for middle-class readers, as it had in the cases of Addison, Steele and Johnson.

When later reflecting on the terror and awe associated with the ocean Crayon retracts his remarks about the ‘vacancy’ of the sea. Instead, he suggests, ‘a sea voyage is full of subjects for meditation: but then they are wonders of the deep and of the air, and rather tend to abstract the mind from worldly themes’.[22] Never failing to miss an opportunity to satirise his hapless narrator’s commitment to romantic reverie, Irving immediately places Crayon in a position whereby he is forced to confront the ‘worldly themes’ from which he often ‘tend[s] to abstract the mind’. Crayon writes:

We one day spied some shapeless object drifting at a distance… It proved to be the mast of a ship that must have been completely wrecked; for there were the remains of handkerchiefs, by which some of the crew had fastened themselves to a spar to prevent their being washed off by the waves… But where, thought I, is the crew!—Their struggle has long been over—their bones lie whitening among the caverns of the deep. Silence—oblivion, like the waves, have closed over them… [23]

In the context of the recent War of 1812 the image of a shipwreck and drowning sailors seems poignant. The sublime is tied in his mind to nation and seems to annihilate the individual, removing all prospects of identification and creating a ‘vacancy’. Not only has the sea, contemporaneously bound by Burke’s theories of the sublime to the exercise of state power, presumably killed all of the men aboard, but it has also annihilated all records of the ship’s name. The erosion of the ship’s name is Irving’s poignant warning against unverifiability that is, in turn, a critique of the sketch form’s claims to aesthetic detachment. For Irving, bellicose nationalism, claims to a position of aesthetic detachment, and romanticism share a common space in the early nineteenth-century Atlantic imaginary.

In the chapter entitled ‘Roscoe’, Crayon encounters an English writer whose charity, generosity and talent serve as a model for him. The narrator remarks that Roscoe was ‘born in a place apparently ungenial to the growth of literary talent’.[24] This statement mirrors Crayon’s earlier assessment in ‘The Author’s Account of Himself’ of the limited opportunities available to an American writer who is not ‘merely a lover of fine scenery’. Roscoe is a partial reflection of the narrator, but his relationship to the world around him suggests a level of engagement that Crayon denies through his commitment to an aesthetic based on a ‘sauntering gaze’. Roscoe, unlike Crayon, ‘has turned the whole force of his talents and influence to advance and embellish his native town’.[25] Crayon depicts Roscoe as an uncanny other to himself. This mirroring serves Irving in his project of imagining a radical bond between Britain and America that relies upon a logic of commonality and reflection rather than separateness. As Giles states, ‘in the early nineteenth century, American and British culture comprised disturbing mirror images for each other in light of their newfound separatism’.[26]  From this perspective Roscoe is a synecdoche for the wider aesthetic concerns of The Sketch Book. What distinguishes Roscoe from other English writers is his refusal to use his writing as a tool to distance himself from the world; a lesson that is consciously directed against Crayon himself. In the sketch, Irving suggests that the exercise of international travel should produce a consciousness in which the claims of the sketch writer to critical distance and authority are consistently challenged or undermined. For Irving, the sketcher should be forced to reflect upon his own condition, engaging in a reflexive double-vision that forces the subject to recognise his identity as constructed through social engagements rather than in the exclusive mental space of romantic detachment. In this way it is possible to see the division between Irving’s own aesthetic vision and that of his narrator. Crayon always reasserts his neutrality and detachment from the scenes he views, whilst Irving, in borrowing from the performance culture of American Federalism, conceived of the function of literature as establishing a ritual in which the viewer and the viewed subject were connected by a common culture and bound by duty to expressions of civic virtue. ‘Roscoe’ operates by demonstrating the construction of identity within a social space of interaction.

It is following these sketches and their challenges to the authority of aesthetic detachment and the ideality of a neutral space free from history that Irving presents the reader with ‘Rip Van Winkle’, regarded by many as one of the first genuine ‘short stories’ in the English language. It is in the creation of a new genre in the short story that Irving is able to more adequately explore the tensions inherent in romanticism’s claims to representation. ‘Rip Van Winkle’, besides being more-or-less the first, is perhaps the most famous American short story of the nineteenth century. It is the story of a man in the late-eighteenth-century who, to escape his bullying wife, goes off into the woods to shoot squirrels near the Hudson River. There he encounters the ghosts of some old Dutch burghers, drinks a flagon of beer, and falls asleep for twenty years. Upon waking he discovers that the revolution has taken place and he is the citizen of a new government, the United States of America.

Whilst Geoffrey Crayon’s interventions in The Sketch Book show his desire to remove himself from history through the sketch’s claims to an ideal disembodied space of objective vision, ‘Rip Van Winkle’ begins by establishing its relation to history and myth through the presentation of the story’s increasingly baffling series of prior narrators. Irving frames the narrative as ‘A Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker’, which the Dutch-American has collected, in turn, from the wives of ‘old burghers… rich in that legendary lore so invaluable to true history’.[27] Furthermore, Knickerbocker begins his manuscript with an epigraph from the seventeenth-century English dramatist William Cartwright that reads: ‘By Woden, God of Saxons/ From whence comes Wensday, that is Wodensday/ Truth is a thing that ever will I keep/ Unto thylke day in which I creep into/ My sepulchre’.[28] Even before beginning the story proper, by referring in the epigraph to the origin of Wednesday in the name of the Viking god Woden, Irving presents the reader with an example of the connection between modern language and older myth. By appealing to Woden, the poem’s narrator implies that the ‘Truth’ is found in the relation of modern consciousness to history and myth. Irving alerts the reader to the centrality of history to contemporary identities and ‘truth’, a function of social conditioning over time, rather than the essentialism of romantic thought.

Modern theories of the short story that have emphasised the relation of the genre to myth have tended to do so in a somewhat abstracted, dehistoricised manner. Whilst claims to the mythic origins of the short story are typical, few have attempted to map Irving’s early work in the form onto the specific historical circumstances of creation. Mary Rohrberger argues that the short story genre has its ‘beginning in myths and legends wherein the reader is asked to put the extensional world out of mind and deal in and with a kind of underworld… a mystical world of paradox and ambiguity’.[29] In referring to the ‘Romantic tradition’ Rohrberger is not speaking of the romanticism of the early nineteenth century so much as the medieval romance of questing knights errant and symbolic action. Furthermore, since early works of anthropology, such as Jessie L. Weston’s groundbreaking From Ritual to Romance (1920) and J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), mythic narrative has frequently been treated as having its origins in Christian and pre-Christian ritual processes. As Catherine Bell states in the introduction to Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (1997), ‘The study of ritual began with a prolonged and influential debate on the origins of religion’, before remarking that ‘for Frazer and his followers, the theme of the ritually dying and reviving god became the basis of all myth and folklore’ in Western literature.[30]

Whilst this may be true of all short story narrative there are historical reasons for Irving’s decision to adopt this form at this time. Irving’s Federalism is discernible in ‘Rip Van Winkle’s’ move away from a concern with the individual subjective response into a realm of folklore in which human action is understood in relation to collective codes of meaning operating in the public sphere. The pattern of the story resembles the mythic basis that Frazer, Weston and Otto Rank saw as the origin of all folklore, a ‘ritually dying and reviving god’ that takes on the role of society’s redeemer.[31] Rip’s sleep and his subsequent awakening into a new world corresponds with this early anthropology, but the world that Irving wishes Rip to redeem is the world of the New American nation that he saw as rapidly galvanising, not around community, but an ahistorical vision of the power of the individual.

By transferring narrative focus in The Sketch Book from the individual to the collective, from Crayon’s spectatorship to Knickerbocker’s mythic storytelling, Irving fashioned the short story as a genre that operates within an inter-subjective matrix closer to ritual than to the sketch’s aesthetic detachment. It is in this manner that Irving resists appropriation by the Jeffersonian symbolic order, which sought to fuse nationalism and individualism together in its vision of American identity. It is in the short story, with its folkloric and ritualistic origins, that Irving’s cosmopolitan consciousness finds its strongest voice in dissent against the Democratic-Republican Party’s romantic, ahistorical and culturally amnesiac imagination.

This can be seen in the plot of the story, in which Rip’s famous sleep in the woods above his village causes him to pass, however briefly, out of history, a process that is presented as a trauma. Like the conflation of nullity and sublimity that attend Crayon’s vision of the sea in ‘The Voyage’, the ‘awe and apprehension’ that Rip feels as he gazes on the mysteriously silent ghosts of the Kaatskill mountain results in his withdrawal from conventional temporality: ‘his senses were overpowered, his eyes swam in his head… and he fell into a deep sleep’.[32] It is important to note that Rip’s temporary removal from history is sanctioned by his temporary removal from community. Rip’s flight into the woods is presented as a retreat into the individual consciousness, rendered by Irving through Rip’s entry into a fugue state; a psychologically complex condition characterised by total amnesia and detachment. The blankness associated with Crayon’s mind in the earlier sketch ‘The Voyage’ is transferred onto Rip at this point. In so doing, Irving comments on the limits placed upon memory by the individual gaze and necessary brevity of the sketch form. As he ‘rambles’ alone in the woods Rip becomes ‘unconscious’ of his surroundings. It is in this state that he encounters ghosts with whom he cannot interact in any meaningful way in ‘a hollow like a small amphitheatre’.

On entering the amphitheatre new objects of wonder presented themselves. On a level spot in the centre was a company of odd-looking personages playing at ninepins… Their visages too were peculiar… The whole group reminded Rip of figures in an old Flemish painting… they maintained the gravest faces, the most mysterious silence, and were, withal, the most melancholy party of pleasure he had ever witnessed.[33]

In a moment of lonely reverie Rip is transformed from a figure embodying the spirit of community into a passive observer closer to the kind that Irving had satirised earlier in The Sketch Book through Geoffrey Crayon’s narration. Indeed Crayon’s own idiosyncratic lexis is even used to describe Rip’s response to the ghosts. Irving has Knickerbocker describe them as ‘figures in an old Flemish painting’ directly referencing Crayon’s earlier description of life as a ‘picturesque stroll from the window of one print shop to another’. Furthermore, the ‘amphitheatre’ in which the event takes place is the theatre of the sketcher’s imagination, a place for viewing images with which he does not interact. Rip becomes a passive viewer who receives new objects of wonder but remains largely invisible and unacknowledged by the subjects he views. Rip’s sleep is the terrifying corollary of the sketcher’s romantic vision, a utopian annihilation of history and community through the disembodiment of the viewing subject.

In the story, Rip Van Winkle’s decision to escape into the woods of the Kaatskill Mountains is the result of a depression caused by his ‘termagant wife’s’ forceful insistence that his labour be for the family alone. ‘Poor Rip’, Irving writes, ‘was at last reduced almost to despair… his only alternative to escape from the labour of the farm and the clamour of his wife’.[34] Whilst Rip ‘would never refuse to assist a neighbour even in the roughest toil’, he is unwilling to do ‘family duty, and keep[…] his farm in order’.[35] Irving fashions Rip as the functional opposite of Jefferson’s ideal yeoman farmer in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), a man who feels that his duty is to a wider community and not to the individual or the family.

In short, Rip lacks the self-interest required for citizenship in Jefferson’s future American republic. Through Rip’s wife Irving shows how a focus on an ideal domestic sphere and Jefferson’s model of individual labour have an uncanny parity: an austere self-interest that is contrary to the festive, collective culture of the Federalist imagination. It is against the twinned forces of romantic reverie and domestic self-interest that Irving depicts theatricalised exchange as a radical force of cosmopolitan anti-nationalism. Irving’s political vision is embodied in the new relationship that Rip has with his son upon his return to the village, which, through the image of their identical physicality, transforms a familial and patriarchical power relationship into the more egalitarian relation of fraternity.

Rip looked and beheld a precise counterpart of himself, as he went up the mountain: apparently as lazy and certainly as ragged. The poor fellow was now completely confounded. He doubted his own identity, and whether he was himself or another man.[36]

Whilst his first impression is one of confusion and terror at seeing his doppelgänger, upon learning his name is also Rip Van Winkle, he comes to serve as an ameliorating force within the narrative, an identical other that provides a connection between Rip Sr. and the new American nation that Irving had previously depicted as a violent threat. An initial revulsion is replaced with a sense of the radical potential within the bodies of the two Rips to rearticulate continuity between the Old World (Rip Sr.) and the New (Rip Jr.) in the wake of the revolutionary breach. In effect the young Rip becomes what Joseph Roach—following Victor Turner’s categorisation of the ritual process as a desire to redress a breach in the social world of a community through theatre—designates as a ‘surrogate’. In Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996) Roach depicts Atlantic theatrical culture as ‘a genealogy of linked surrogations’, that is, performances that seek to overcome the radical breach of death through a process of embodying the characteristics of dead forebears.[37] In this way, the folkloric origins of the story of ‘Rip Van Winkle’ in the Western mythology of a dead and reviving king is manifested as a present concern, overcoming the nationalism of Irving’s own early-Republican moment. The neutral space of objectivity that Geoffrey Crayon seeks in the disembodied aesthetic of the sketch genre is critiqued through Irving’s presentation of the radical potential for transatlantic fraternity that lies within a ritualised treatment of the body. Whilst the sketch form produced a strange cultural amnesia as each event was treated as discrete from every other, the embodied, theatricalised content of ritual served Irving in his Federalist attempt to establish a literature of social memory.

The centrality of ritual and performance to the meaning of ‘Rip Van Winkle’ is also manifested in the setting Irving selects for Rip’s return from the mountains after twenty years. Rip’s ritualised ‘rebirth’ conveniently coincides with a time of great festivity, the day of an election, which ties the mythic and ritual sense engendered by Rips rebirth with the transformative power of the democratic process. In this way democracy and revolution are conceived as a tradition, having more to do with continuity than breach. Consequently, Irving restores the concept of revolution to its pre-War of Independence meaning, by imagining Rip as a force that provides a restoration of community through ritual rebirth and election, rather than the dissolution of it through individual self-interest. As Hannah Arendt points out in On Revolution:

the word revolution meant originally restoration, hence something which to us is its very opposite… The revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which appear to show all evidence of a new spirit, the spirit of the modern age, were intended to be restorations.[38]

In this way ‘Rip Van Winkle’ seeks to overcome the divisive effects of modern self-interest and inter-subjective conflict by reinstalling a historical consciousness that relies upon a process of ritualised and mythic embodiment. In doing this, Irving helped to establish the short story as a genre within early-nineteenth-century literature that would challenge the dominance of a romanticism that was becoming increasingly tied to insidious forms of cultural nationalism. For Irving, literature served a role similar to ritual or theatre in attributing value to history and community rather than the solitary ‘ramblings’ of a privileged individual.

University of Nottingham

Notes

[1] Kristie Hamilton, America’s Sketchbook: The Cultural Life of a Nineteenth-Century Genre (Athens, GA: Ohio University Press, 1998) p. 21.

[2] Ibid., p. 24.

[3] Paul Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730-1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001) p. 142.

[4] Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), p. 33.

[5] Douglas Tallack, The Nineteenth-Century American Short Story: Language, Form and Ideology (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 13.

[6] Giles, op. cit., p.143.

[7] David Waldstreicher, In The Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 27.

[8] Ibid., p. 55.

[9] Washington Irving, History, Tales and Sketches (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 743.

[10] Ibid., p. 743.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid., p. 745.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Martin Roth, Comedy and America: The Lost World of Washington Irving (London: Kennikat Press, 1976), p. 169.

[15] Irving, op. cit., p. 744.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid., p. 743.

[18] Albert J. von Frank, The Sacred Game: Provincialism and the Frontier Consciousness in American Literature, 1630–1860 (London: CUP, 1985), p. 61.

[19] Irving, op. cit., p. 745.

[20] Ibid., p. 746.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid., p. 747.

[23] Ibid., p. 748.

[24] Ibid., p. 753.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Giles, op. cit., p. 163.

[27] Irving, op. cit., p. 767.

[28] Ibid., p. 769.

[29] Mary Rohrberger, ‘The Origins, Development, Substance and Design of the Short Story’ in The Art of Brevity (eds.) Winther, Lothe, Skei. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), p. 6.

[30] Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: OUP, 1997), pp. 3-5.

[31] Ibid., p. 5.

[32] Irving, op. cit., p. 776.

[33] Ibid., pp. 775-6.

[34] Ibid., p. 773.

[35] Ibid., p. 771.

[36] Ibid., p. 781.

[37] Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 133.

[38] Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 43.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Continuities and Changes: A Report on the British Association for American Studies Postgraduate Conference, Northumbria University 2009

Helen Mitchell

© Helen Mitchell. All Rights Reserved

Northumbria University was proud to host the BAAS Postgraduate Conference on Saturday 14^th November 2009 where 25 papers were submitted for presentation within the theme of ‘Continuities and Changes’.  The university welcomed an audience of over 50 people with delegates from across the UK as well as those from as far afield as Germany and Nigeria, providing an incredible richness to the variety of subjects under discussion.

The papers were thought-provoking and diverse, and included topics such as ‘Female Preachers and Gender in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1864-1888’, ‘The Influence of Hunting on Frontier Leadership in Revolutionary Kentucky’, ‘Bruce Campbell and the Representation of US Masculine Heroism’ and ‘Ritual and Federalism in The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon Gent (1820) by Washington Irving’.  These papers are presented in this issue of US Studies Online, and were among other excellent contributions in the fields of history, literature, culture and politics in the individual sessions.

All the papers stimulated interesting debate which was carried forward into the various breaks throughout the day as delegates took advantage of the opportunity to engage with fellow postgraduates in a more informal environment.  By late afternoon the wine and conversation was flowing and the delegates were engaged in lively exchange as the nerves of conference speaking eased.  As conference organiser, this was particularly gratifying and I hope those who stayed in the city overnight enjoyed their time here.

Our plenary speaker, Professor Sara Evans from the University of Minnesota, undertook a long and tiring journey to be with us for the day and delighted us all by singing during her keynote, ‘Women and the American Presidency: From Victoria Woodhull to Hillary Clinton’: the experience of hearing the audience singing along with her will stay with me for a very long time!  I’m sure all who witnessed this would agree that it was a truly excellent conference plenary and was pitched perfectly for the audience.

Sincere congratulations to those whose work has been published in this journal, and to all those who attended I wish you much luck and fortune in your forthcoming careers.

I would like to thank BAAS for the opportunity of organising the conference which was an incredibly rewarding experience, and I would highly recommend fellow postgraduates to seriously consider hosting this most worthwhile and satisfying venture.  I would also like to express my gratitude to the US Embassy and Northumbria University for the very generous financial support without which we would not have been able to provide this valuable experience for young researchers.  There are numerous others who contributed to the day’s proceeding and thanks go to them all, not least the delegates themselves, but especially to my own PhD supervisor, Dr. Sylvia Ellis, for her unerring support.

Northumbria University

BAAS Pamphlet No. 28 (First Published 1994)

ISBN: 1 85331 149 9

1. Chronology
2. The Genre of Horror: General Theoretical Approaches
3. Alienations: Outsiders in the 1950s
4. The Emergence of Contemporary Horror
   i. Family Horrorsii. Apocalyptic Horroriii. Body/Horror
5. Horror in the 1980s
   i. The Slasher Movie and the Serial Killerii. The Science Fiction/Horror Film in the 1980siii. Contemporary Horror Fiction by Women
6. Conclusion
7. Bibliography
8. Notes

British Association for American Studies All rights reserved. No part of this pamphlet may he reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. The publication of a pamphlet by the British Association for American Studies does not necessarily imply the Association’s official approbation of the opinions expressed therein.

1. Chronology

1951
The Thing (dir. Christian Nyby).
The Day the Earth Stood Still (dir. Robert Wise).

1953
It Came from Outer Space (dir. Jack Arnold).

1954
The Creature from the Black Lagoon (dir. Jack Arnold).
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, Jack Finney (London: Sphere, 1978) This version is slightly rewritten to update the text.
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson (London: Corgi, 1956).
Them! (dir. Gordon Douglas).

1956
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (dir. Don Siegel).
The Shrinking Man (republished as The Incredible Shrinking Man), Richard Matheson (London: Sphere, 1956)

1957
The Incredible Shrinking Man (dir. Jack Arnold).

1959
The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson (London: Robinson, 1959).
Psycho, Robert Bloch (New York: Tor, 1959

1960
Psycho (dir. Alfred Hitchcock).
The House of Usher (dir. Roger Corman).

1961
The Premature Burial (dir. Roger Corman).
The Pit and the Pendulum (dir. Roger Corman).

1963
The Haunted Palace (dir. Roger Corman).
The Birds (dir. Alfred Hitchcock).

1964
The Masque of the Red Death (dir Roger Corman).
The Tomb of Ligeia (dir. Roger Corman).

1967
Rosemary’s Baby, Ira Levin (London: Pan, 1967)

1968
Night of the Living Dead (dir. George Romero).
Rosemary’s Baby (dir. Roman Polanski).

1969
The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton (New York: Dell, 1969).

1971
The Omega Man (dir. Boris Sagal).

1973
The Exorcist (dir. William Friedkin).

1974
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (dir. Tobe Hooper).

1975
Shivers or They Came From Within (dir. David Cronenberg).
Jaws (dir. Steven Spielberg).
A Boy and His Dog (dir. L. Q. Jones).

1976
The Omen (dir. Richard Dormer).
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice (London: Futura, 1977)

1977
The Shining, Stephen King (London: New English Library, 1977).
Rabid (dir. David Cronenberg).
The Hills Have Eyes (dir. Wes Craven).
Damnation Alley (dir. Jack Smight).

1978
The Stand, Stephen King (London: New English Library, 1978). Recently republished in an unabridged version.
Halloween (dir. John Carpenter).
Dawn of the Dead (dir. George Romero).
The Eyes of Laura Mars (dir. Irvin Kershner).

1979
Alien (dir. Ridley Scott).
The Brood (dir. David Cronenberg).

1980
The Vampire Tapestry, Suzy McKee Charnas (New York: Tor, 1980).
Friday the 13th (dir. Sean S. Cunningham).

1981
An American Werewolf in London (dir. John Landis).
The Howling (dir. Joe Dante).

1982
Videodrome (dir. David Cronenberg).
The Thing (dir. John Carpenter).

1983
Familiar Spirit, Lisa Tuttle (New York: Tor, 1983)

1984
The Terminator (dir. James Cameron).

1985
The Vampire Lestat, Anne Rice (London, Futura, 1985).
Day of the Dead (dir. George Romero).

1986
Aliens (dir. James Cameron).
The Fly (dir. David Cronenberg).
Nest of Nightmares, Lisa Tuttle (London: Sphere, 1986).
The Stepfather (dir. Joseph Ruben).

1988
Queen of the Damned, Anne Rice (London: Futura, 1988).
Women of Darkness, Kathryn Ptacek (New York: Tor, 1988)

1989
The Silence of Lambs, Thomas Harris (London: William Heinemann, 1989).
Sunglasses After Dark, Nancy A. Collins (London: Futura, 1989).
The Abyss (dir. James Cameron).

1990
Skin of the Soul, Lisa Tuttle, ed. (London: Women’s Press, 1990).
Tempter, Nancy A. Collins (London: Futura, 1990)

1991
Terminator 2: Judgement Day (dir. James Cameron).

1992
In the Blood, Nancy A. Collins (London: New English Library, 1992)

2. The Genre of Horror: General Theoretical Approaches

From the early days of the Gothic novel, there have been moral panics in response to the horror genre. In 1797, Matthew Gregory Lewis’s novel, The Monk, provoked outrage, and sections of the text had to be removed in response to a threat of legal action. In the 1950s, there were campaigns in Britain and America which sought to ban American horror comics,[1] and in the 1980s, there were campaigns against so-called ‘video nasties’.[2] There was no clear definition of the term ‘video nasty’, but it was generally agreed that it referred to examples of horror and pornography. These two genres are often associated with one another, and they are frequently referred to in medical terms. They are referred to as ‘sick’ and ‘perverted’ forms which corrupt and contaminate the minds of their audience and the social body as a whole. These descriptions, and the attitudes on which they are based, are not limited to a small group of moral or cultural guardians. They have acquired the status of ‘obviousness’ and ‘commonsense’, and are shared by people with widely different political sympathies.

This situation has produced severe problems. Not only has it often been used to justify legislation which extends far beyond the realms of these genres themselves, but the supposed obviousness of these genres’ undesirability has meant that there has been little real investigation of their forms or effects.[3] In the case of horror, criticism either relies on assumptions about its undesirability, or else it tends to ignore claims about the representation of sex and violence altogether.[4]

This latter problem is related to a more general problem in the study of contemporary popular culture. Critics have either tended to define popular culture positively or negatively. On the one hand, it has been defined as a positive force which satisfies existing interests and desires, or even acts to positively enrich people’s lives by informing and educating them. On the other hand, it has been seen as a form of domination. Mass culture theory and much contemporary post-structural criticism—despite their differences—share a tendency to see popular culture as an ideological form which reproduces relations of power and subordination.[5]

In the case of horror, most post-structural critics have claimed that the genre is founded upon a patriarchal fear of female sexuality. Within horror, it is argued, female sexuality is defined as monstrous, and the narrative works to repress or contain the threat to patriarchy which it poses. However, while critics such as Stephen Neale and Barbara Creed both arrive at this same conclusion, it is worth noting that they do so on the basis of different, and even contradictory, evidence. According to Neale, the monster is usually male, but he argues that as women are usually the primary object of its actions:

it could well be maintained that it is women’s sexuality, that which renders them desirable—but also threatening—to men, which constitutes the real problem that the horror film exists to explore, and which constitutes also and ultimately that which is really monstrous.[6]

According to this argument, the monster acts to punish those women who are sexually active, and the only women who survive are those who agree to accept the authority of the patriarchal male hero.

Other critics (e.g. Barbara Creed) claim that the monster is usually female, and that it is often a maternal figure who threatens to devour males.[7] According to this argument, horror narratives operate in relation to a patriarchal fear of the mother which originates in the Oedipus complex when patriarchal culture requires the male child to separate himself from the mother (and repress his desire for her) in order to identify with the positions of mastery and dominance associated with masculinity.

As a result, despite their differences, both these critics assert that horror is an inherently patriarchal genre which is ‘primarily produced and consumed by men’.[8] This kind of analysis of popular culture has been criticized by such figures in cultural studies as Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and David Money. Though this work originated in Britain, its theoretical claims are not restricted to the British context, and have become very influential with the American academy.[9] These critics claim that mass culture theory and post-structural psychoanalysis ignore—or even deny—the active historical struggles which compose popular culture in favour of the abstract analysis of ‘epochs’, or even transhistorical conceptions of ‘culture’. They agree that popular culture is not simply a positive force which satisfies existing interests and desires, but they also stress that it is not simply a form of domination either. Instead they claim that it is neither an expression of dominant or subordinate groups within society, but rather a site of struggle between these groups.

Drawing on the work of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci,[10] and the Russian linguist, V. N. Volosinov,[11] they argue that different social groups are in a continual process of dialogue and struggle. Each group is concerned to justify their own interests and aspirations in order to win the right to social leadership. (Gramsci’s term ‘hegemony’ means leadership.) But this leadership can only be won by a specific social group if it is able to address the interests and aspirations of other groups and present itself as the group best able to satisfy them. If they ignore the interests and aspirations of other groups, they will soon lose legitimacy.

Culture is therefore seen as a realm within which different groups not only challenge other groups, but also attempt to incorporate them. They seek to answer certain interests and aspirations, but only within terms that do not challenge their own. However, the interests and aspirations of certain social groups necessarily contradict one another. As Marx argued, for example, the interest of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie are inevitably opposed to one another. The bourgeoisie can only exist on the basis of the exploitation of the proletariat. For this reason, social hegemony can never be finally secured and won. No hegemonic formation can ever resolve all social conflicts. It will have to be reorganized continually to address new challenges. It will never be a fixed structure, but must change and develop historically.

These processes of dialogue and struggle are also identified in the linguistic forms of texts—or utterances as Volosinov refers to them. It is argued that while members of a society may share a common linguistic system, their differing social and economic positions mean that they will interpret linguistic signs in different ways: that which defines ‘freedom’ for one social group may be seen as ‘oppression’ by another. As Volosinov puts it, ‘differently oriented accents intersect in every ideological sign. Sign becomes an arena of class struggle.’ It is this struggle which gives signs their ‘vitality and dynamism and the capacity for further development.’[12] For this reason, while the meanings of individual texts or utterances are always defined in relation to other utterances, it is also the case that each text or utterance redefines language and ideology, rather than simply reproducing existing structures. Each text or utterance is a historical development.

If the ‘multi-accentuality of the sign’ means that no utterance is ever simply a reproduction of an existing ideological system, it also means that different social groups will interpret texts in different ways. For Money and others, one problem with Post-structural criticism has been that it has tended to rely on conceptions about ‘The Audience’, rather than socially specific audiences, and has thereby failed to acknowledge that texts do not necessarily have the same effect on all readers or viewers. Certainly texts do have ‘preferred readings’, but for a number of reasons actual audiences may produce very different readings from that which the text itself seeks to initiate. In his work on audiences, Money identifies three aspects which affect audiences’ interpretations. He points out that the audience may not share the ideological positions of the text, and may therefore qualify or even reject that position. However, he also stresses that interpretation does not simply involve the acceptance or rejection of the texts’ ideological position. It also involves the relevance/irrelevance and competence/incompetence of different types of materials for different audiences. In his discussion of these latter aspects of interpretation, Money draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, and his study of the ways in which cultural competences and dispositions are differentially distributed within societies.[13] The issue of the relevance/irrelevance of certain types of material concerns the reasons different audiences select material and identify those materials as ‘their sort of thing’ or not. The issue of the competence/incompetence of certain types of materials, on the other hand, concerns the competence or cultural knowledge necessary to make sense of specific types of material. Just as the understanding of modernist poetry or abstract art requires specific competences on the part of the audience, so does the understanding of popular forms such as Soap Opera, Kung Fu movies, or horror.

This kind of work is particularly important to the study of horror for two main reasons. First, it suggests that the horror genre cannot be simply seen as a patriarchal form, but that it can be used differently by different groups. It is not always—or even usually—female sexuality which is defined as monstrous. Different groups will represent the monstrous in different ways and representations will develop historically. Second, it also suggests that horror texts do not have a specific effect on their audience, but can generate different responses from different audiences. The moral panics which have surrounded horror over the years are based on the assumption that certain representations have certain effects. For example, some have claimed that horror creates anti-social or aggressive behaviour, while others have suggested that it reproduces the negative attitudes to women in patriarchal society.

The following study will not try to identify a fixed structure which underpins the horror genre and defines it. Instead it will examine the ways in which the genre has developed historically since World War II. If it overstresses the radical or progressive aspects of the genre, it does so as a corrective to other work which overemphasizes its reactionary or conservative elements. It also concentrates on popular and non-canonical texts. Too much work on horror, particular in work on literature, discusses the genre in terms of a small group of relatively legitimate texts, such as the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe or the films of Alfred Hitchcock, at the expense of more popular texts.

3. Alienations: Outsiders in the 1950s

The modern American horror genre which emerged in the period after World War II grew out of along tradition of American horror, but it also represented a development away from elements of that tradition. Unlike the canon of British literature which has marginalized or excluded horror fiction, the American literary tradition has been dominated by writers working in the horror tradition from the outset. Charles Brockden Brown, America’s first professional writer, was primarily an author of horror fiction, and the American Renaissance was dominated by writers of horror and horrific fantasy.[14] Edgar Allan Poe is the most obvious example, but such writers as Hawthorne and Melville also wrote fiction which draws upon the horror genre. Nor was horror a marginal interest for them. Most of their major works used elements of the horror genre. All of Hawthorne’s major novels and many of his short stories draw upon the horror genre, as does Melville’s classic novel, Moby Dick (1851). Since the American Renaissance, there has been a long and enduring tradition of horror within canonical American literature which includes examples such as Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1899). All of this fiction was produced within the context of a far more general and popular interest in horror, and the first half of the 20th century witnessed a profusion of popular literature and film. Magazines such as Weird Tales published the horror writing of Lovecraft and others, while filmmakers such as James Whale and Tod Browning at Universal and Val Lewton at RKO produced a series of popular horror films, most of which are now regarded as classics of American cinema.

The horror fiction of the post war period was certainly dependent on this previous work, but it began to free itself from a dependence on the Gothic elements of the earlier period, and tended to place its horrors firmly within the context of the modern world. This change is particularly evident in the 1950s science fiction/horror film where the threat comes not from the past or the actions of a lone individual, but is associated with the process of social development and modernization. The threat emerges from within modern American society, or else is an alien threat which comes from those realms (such as outer space) which American society is beginning to explore and colonize. The threat also tends to be presented as a collective force rather than an individual monster, and it presents the possibility of global destruction, not just the destruction of an individual or small group.

These texts have frequently been attacked for being deeply authoritarian. It is argued that the monster is presented as inherently evil, a force which must be repressed and destroyed by the forces of order. It is also claimed that they associate the monster with Russian communism, and so justify American society and its institutions.[15] These texts are identified as Cold War narratives which legitimate American militarism and xenophobia. An alternative interpretation is possible though. These narratives can be shown to be as much concerned with developments within American society as with the threat of a Russian invasion, and to be specifically anti-authoritarian.

The science fiction/horror narratives of the 1950s emerged from a social and cultural context which had been transformed during the war and its immediate aftermath. During the war, there was a consolidation of the corporate or ‘Fordist’ modes of social organization which had begun to develop with the New Deal era of the 1930s. This use of the term ‘Fordism’ is not restricted to the types of labour processes often associated with Henry Ford, but it refers instead to a particular organization of social, political, and economic life. The depression had lead many to argue that capitalist economic relations had to be managed to prevent social, economic and cultural crises.

The Fordist system developed a bureaucratic rationality in which experts drawn from the state, corporations and organized labour collaborated to regulate social life. This system increased state powers as the state rejected laissez faire capitalism in favour of greater intervention in the management of the economy. New fiscal and monetary policies were employed, and the state took greater responsibility for social welfare. Corporations, on the other hand, began to apply the techniques of scientific management to a growing range of activities. They not only regulated the labour process, but also personal relations, training, product design, pricing strategies, and the planned obsolescence of equipment and product. They were also more concerned to regulate the process of consumption through the use of a series of techniques such as advertising. [16]

Fordism was therefore a centrally ordered system in which an elite of experts used technical-scientific rationality in an attempt to regulate a whole series of social, economic and cultural activities. It has both been praised as a rational and non-ideological system which was not motivated by special interests,[17] and attacked as a destructive form of domination and control which has been variously referred to as ‘the Power Elite’, ‘the Technocratic Society’, and ‘Mass Society’.[18] It is this latter type of criticism which can be identified in many 1950s science fiction/horror texts. If many aliens were identified as Russians, it was through a more general association with scientific-technical rationality which also meant that they were frequently associated with the highest levels of the American establishment as well.

In The Thing From Another World (1951), for example, the alien being is, in a sense, the catalyst for a more general struggle between its American characters. While the leading scientist, Carrington, wants to preserve it for study, the military group recognizes it as a threat. In fact, the thing is identified with the scientist for whom it represents the ideal of scientific­technical rationality. Carrington’s admiration for the thing is confirmed when he discovers that the alien reproduces asexually, and produces offspring who lack individual qualities. As Lukacs claims, the application of scientific-technical rationality to the labour process (and by extension to society as a whole) redefines the individual qualities of human beings as ‘mere sources of error when contrasted with these abstract special laws functioning according to rational principles.’[19] Scientific-technical rationality is only concerned with the quality of the workers’ output, and attempts to convert individual workers into mere interchangable components within a system which is regulated by experts. For Carrington, individuality, sexual desire and emotion are defined as a threat to rational processes. They must be contained or ideally eliminated. As the alien species lacks these features, he claims that it is ‘superior in every way’ to human beings.

The fact that the alien species is made up of duplicates also means that it is not interactive, but is directed by a single unitary purpose. By contrast the military group are represented as an interactive community. It is not made up of experts, but of low-ranking and practical people who are constantly at odds with the orders of their superiors, and with the military hierarchy itself. Carrington, on the other hand, is identified with the highest levels of the scientific establishment, the government, and even the military. For example, he is even identified as a primary figure in the nuclear bomb tests at Bikini Atol. These divisions and distinctions are also dealt with through the film’s verbal styles. While Carrington takes positions of authority from which he delivers speeches to others, the military group use a style of talking which is common to films associated with its producer, Howard Hawks: overlapping dialogue. This is an interactive mode of speech in which ideas and authority do not originate in the expert, but from the group as a whole. Every member of the group has an equal right to speak, and they each add to, and complete, one another’s ideas. Authority does not reside in a single individual, but in the group as a whole. Arguably, therefore, the establishment—particularly the scientific establishment but also the military establishment are presented negatively. They are associated with the thing in a number of ways, specially around the issue of scientific-technical rationality. The military unit or group, on the other hand, the ‘men on the ground’, are presented positively exactly because they are identified as a community of practical workers rather than rational experts.

These issues are also related to issues of gender. It is often argued that, within contemporary culture, the irrational and the interactive are associated with femininity, while rationality and authority are associated with masculinity. For this reason, it is worth noting that the female, Nikki, is unproblematically accepted into the military group as an equal, and that it is her use of domestic knowledge that lays the foundation for the plan which will eventually destroy the alien. The use of domestic knowledge in conjunction with scientific knowledge of electricity eventually triumphs, and in this and other ways, the film acts to break down the hierarchical distinctions between the masculine and the feminine, and the rational and the irrational, distinctions which are necessary for the authority of technicalscientific rationality. For this reason, while the alien’s monstrousness is related to its reproductive system, it is identified with masculinity not femininity. It is associated with the masculine both physically and through its hyper-rational lack of emotion. Thus, it is not female sexuality which is the problem, but a ‘male’ system of reproduction which has eliminated the need for recourse to the female. It is also the case that while the alien may be associated with the Russians, it is additionally linked with the highest levels of the American establishment, and the threat which that establishment poses to the interactive group, or democratic community.

There is a great deal of argument over the interpretation of the novel and the film of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1954 and 1956, respectively). They have been seen as both anti-communist, and anti-McCarthyite. Such apparently contradictory readings are possible because their concern with the spread of conformity within American society was shared by both the left and the right during the period. The right claimed that the social relations associated with Fordism threatened American individualism, and were indistinguishable from communism. The left, on the other hand, argued that McCarthyism and Fordism both sought to repress or exclude dissent.

While Jack Finney, the author of the novel, has denied that he intended either interpretation, his book (even more than the film) concerns the impact of the media, technology and new forms of social organization upon American communities. The novel concerns a local doctor, Miles, who discovers that the people of his home town, Santa Mira, are being replaced by alien duplicates. These duplicates are the same as the original humans in every way with the exception that they lack emotion. As in The Thing, it is the alien’s rationality and lack of emotion which is monstrous, and this is also linked to its asexual method of reproduction. In the course of the narrative, the leading characters learn that it is their desires and emotions which distinguish them as human, and that need to be preserved.

These differences between the human and the alien are not immediately apparent though. In fact, the novel stresses the difficulty of distinguishing between the two. The problem is that the humans themselves have been conditioned into standardized and rationalized forms of behaviour by American society itself. It is emphasized that the pods are only speeding up a process which would happen anyway, a process which is identified with the media, technology, and existing structures of authority. Within the book, people’s behaviour is shown to be conditioned by cliches from books and films. Technological systems of communication, such as the telephone networks, are associated with the pods. The drive towards efficiency within American society is presented as breaking down the relationships between people and imposing an order which is ‘utterly brainless’ and ‘inhumanly perfect’.[20] The bureaucratic military authorities have become unimaginative and define people such as Miles as things to be controlled and not citizens to whom they are accountable. Miles’s claims do not have authority within the social hierarchy, and he is defined as irrational by all the authorities.

Ironically, rational methods are completely incapable of dealing with, or even identifying, the menace. The pods’ duplication of people is so perfect that it can only be detected by those who have had a close personal relationship with the victim, and even then, there is nothing tangible which can be identified. There is simply something missing in their interpersonal relations, something that can only be identified at the level of ‘feelings’ and ‘intuition’. It is therefore significant that it is usually those with least authority who identify the menace such as children and women, while the authorities dismiss these fears as a product of mass hysteria. People’s feelings are defined as untrustworthy by the authorities who offer rational explanations which are not only shown to be wrong, but dangerously misguided. In fact, the rationality of the authorities associates them with the pods, and it is frequently the figures of authority who are the first to be duplicated.

In this way, the pods are not simply associated with communism, but with the structures of American society itself, and as in The Thing, it is not female sexuality which is the problem but the repression of those features usually associated with the feminine. The novel also identifies gender roles as a product of conditioned behaviour. Not only is it Becky who comes up with the plan which enables her and Miles to escape the pods, but it also relies, at least in part, on her realization that the forms of behaviour associated with men and women are not fixed and determined, but socially constructed through cultural images such as films and literature. In fact, rather than presenting humanity and personality as being founded upon a fixed presence, the novel identifies them with absence, desire, and interaction. These features are also related to the novel’s narrative which does not work towards closure and completion. Instead it emphasizes the unreliability of Miles’s narration, and suggests that it is not only impossible to rationalize and resolve everything, but also undesirable.

However, aliens were not always presented unsympathetically during the 1950s. In many cases, they were seen to be misunderstood by American society which was in turn envisaged as harsh and unsympathetic. In this way the alien was used to criticize definitions of normality prevalent within America in the 1950s. The best known examples of this type of film were those directed by Jack Arnold in the early 1950s. In It Came From Outer Space (1953), for example, an alien craft crashlands on earth and the towns people start being replaced by replicas who seem to lack emotion?[21] The aliens are not presented as evil however. It is revealed that no-one has been harmed, and that the aliens have only disguised themselves so that they can repair their damaged craft. They are afraid that, if humans see them as they really are, they will be misunderstood, feared, and persecuted. In fact, the aliens are presented as entirely justified in these fears. These issues are related to a more general criticism of small town America in the film through an association with the leading male character. He is not originally from the town, and is himself the focus of the town people’s suspicion and jealously.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954),[22] on the other hand, concerns a group of scientists who go on an expedition into the Amazon in the search for fossils and encounter the Gill-Man, a living example of animal life’s prehistoric attempts to make the transition from the water to the land. The Gill-Man reacts violently to the humans’ intrusion into his habitat which is linked with issues of colonization. Not only are the scientists exploring areas which humans have never visited before, they also believe that the knowledge which they hope to acquire will help humans to colonize other worlds.

Their intrusion is also associated with issues of masculinity. The lagoon in which the creature lives is womb-like in its shape, and the water in general is identified with the source of life. By contrast, the male scientists enter it with spear guns and cameras in a way that is associated with phallic aggression, masculine control, and goal-oriented behaviour. Their relationship with the water is very different to that of the creature and the lone female on the expedition, Kay. These latter two exist in harmony with the water, and derive pleasure from it. In fact, while the creature is drawn to the women, and conflicts with the males over her, its attraction to her is not associated with dominance or aggression, but a fascination and affection which is stimulated when it sees Kay swimming in the lagoon. In this sequence, the two are associated with one another as the creature swims along and mirrors her movements. The creature’s attraction to her is therefore different to that of the males. It is based upon a recognition of its similarity to her and is clearly distinguished from the acquisitive Mark who also competes for Kay with her boyfriend, David. Kay also shares a bond with the creature. Despite her tendency to scream each time it appears, she is also fascinated with it, and seeks to protect and defend it from the male ‘heroes’ throughout the narrative.

Like most 1950s horror films, The Creature from the Black Lagoon was made primarily for a teenage audience which largely identified with the tragic, alienated creature who existed outside the, middle-class definitions of normality held by their elders. In fact, the film gives the creature a tragic dignity, and portrays its world as a fabulous romantic realm. If the film’s ending appears to present the triumph of masculinity, the emphasis does not fall on the establishment of the heterosexual couple, but on the tragic destruction of the creature, a point which is reinforced by Kay’s manifest sorrow. In fact, the final image is not of the human couple, but the dead body of the creature disappearing into the depths of the lagoon.

Jack Arnold also directed the film version of Richard Matheson’s classic science fiction/horror novel, The Shrinking Man (1956) (filmed and republished as The Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957). Like much of Matheson’s fiction, this novel concerns a man who is displaced from his usual relationship to the world. Through a freak combination of factors, Scott Carey finds himself gradually shrinking, and as he does so, the ‘normal’ world becomes strange and terrifying. He begins to feel intimidated by his wife, and eventually finds himself trapped in the cellar of his house, battling against an everyday house spider which now appears to him as a giant monster. These reversals enable the novel to investigate aspects of ‘normal’ middle-class American masculinity, and to illustrate that monstrousness is not a quality which is inherent within a particular being, but something which is ascribed to it by another being.

This position can also be clearly seen in Matheson’s classic vampire novel, I Am Legend (1954), in which the leading character, Richard Neville, is the last human left alive after a plague of vampires has taken over the world. Neville trys to hold onto his definitions of normality, and spends his time in a futile attempt to destroy the vampires. At the end of the novel though, it becomes clear that to the vampires’ culture, Neville is as much a monster as they were to his own culture, and the novel thereby illustrates that definitions of the monstrous are always socially constructed, while it also investigates the limitations and problems associated with Neville’s concepts of normality. These are presented as both profoundly unimaginative and brutally repressive, particularly in relation to issues of gender. Neville not only fears active female sexuality, but continually directs his sadistic experiments against female vampires, while pathetically holding on to an idealized memory of his aptly named wife, Virginia.

If these narratives work to relativize American definitions of ‘normality’, the works of the late 1950s and the early 1960s go further in their criticism of American society. They present American institutions as destructive in both personal and global terms.

4. The Emergence of Contemporary Horror

I Family Horrors

The release of Psycho in 1960 is seen by many as a significant break in the development of the horror genre. Such critics as Robin Wood argue that Psycho starts a critical trend which identifies the monster with the fundamental institutions of American society, rather than with foreign forces.[23] For Wood, the horror has previously taken place outside America, or else was the result of an invasion by external forces. At this stage, American institutions were seen as the solution to the horrors, not the problem. Psycho is said to change this situation. According to Wood, the film identifies the American nuclear family as the source of the threat. It is not ‘abnormal’ or foreign elements which are the problem, but American definitions of ‘normality’.

In Psycho, the monster appears to be a ‘normal’ American teenager, Norman Bates, whose personality is split. On the surface, he appears to be a shy young male, but when sexually excited, another personality takes over which murders the object of his desire. Norman sees this other personality as an entirely separate being, which he calls ‘mother’, and she is the product of a disturbed mental state which derives from his family background. For Wood, Psycho is therefore a critique of the institution which he sees as fundamental to American society, the patriarchal family.

There are problems with Wood’s position though. First, as Barbara Creed and others have argued, Norman is not the product of a patriarchal family, but a family which lacks a father and which is dominated by the mother.[24] For these critics, the film does not present ‘normal’ family life as the problem, but the lack of a patriarchal presence which would sever the bond between mother and child, and allow Norman to develop ‘normally’. Rather than a critique of the patriarchal family, they see Psycho as an endorsement of patriarchal ideology. This argument overstates the case somewhat. All the families within the film are presented as destructive and corrupt, even the patriarchal families. At the beginning of the film, Marion Crane, Norman’s first victim within the film, steals money from a business man who is buying a house for his daughter. This business man is also presented as a domineering and destructive influence. He is buying the house in an attempt to maintain his control over his daughter after her forthcoming wedding. His sexual advances to Marion also highlight the hypocrisy of his family values. None the less, the arguments of Creed and others do require, at the very least, a qualification of Wood’s position.

It is also important that the nature of the supposed break is not overemphasized. As we have already seen, American institutions have always been precarious within horror. They are frequently identified with the horrors in various ways. If there were not some fault or problems with them in the first place, there would be no convincing threat.

The focus on Psycho as a distinctive case also needs to be questioned. Psycho was not unique at this time in its depiction of the family. Similar concerns can also be identified in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House which was published in 1959, the year before Psycho’s release in 1960, and also in Roger Corman’s adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe, the first of which was also released in 1960.

The Haunting of Hill House concerns a young woman, Eleanor, who has spent her life looking after her sick mother. She not only feels that she has been dominated by her mother and never had a life of her own, but like Norman, this situation has lead to a series of psychological problems. When her mother dies, Eleanor feels liberated, but she also suffers from feelings of guilt. (She believes that she may have been responsible for her mother’s death.) More significantly, her sense of identity is insecure. Longing for freedom, she heads off to join a research team who are investigating a possible haunting at Hill House. But when she reaches Hill House and finds that she is the first to arrive, her fantasies of freedom soon give way to feelings of loneliness, isolation, and vulnerability. When Theodora, another member of the team, arrives, Eleanor immediately attaches herself to Theodora, only to finally feel trapped and smothered by this relationship. Eleanor finds it impossible to find a stable sense of identity, and she swings between fears of being engulfed or abandoned by others. This situation intensifies to the point of madness as Eleanor is drawn to the house, and eventually commits suicide so that she will not have to leave it.

Despite the fact that this novel, like Psycho, concerns the psychological damage done to a child by a domineering mother, it has often been praised as an account of the problems women have in establishing a stable sense of identity. Judie Newman, for example, uses Nancy Chodorow’s work on the relationship between mothers and daughters.[25] She argues that unlike the male child which separates itself from the mother and identifies with the father, the female child rarely achieves the same sense of separateness from the mother, but continues to identify with her. As a result, the female child does not experience itself as a separate entity to the same degree as the male. This situation leads to a less secure sense of identity which can be seen in a variety of ways within the novel. Not only does Eleanor continually imitate others in her search for an identity—a strategy which is fraught with contradictions and doomed to failure—she also finds that she has internalized the attitudes of her mother and others, and is continually unsure whether the thoughts she has are her own or derived from others. This problem is also related to her relationship with the house. While she is there, a series of events seem to revolve around her. Eleanor believes that the house is addressing her, but it is also possible that these events are a projection of her own unconscious desires—there is the suggestion that she may have telekinetic powers. Finally, at the end of the novel, when she commits suicide, Eleanor’s last feelings are of panic. She is unsure whether her suicide is her own choice or whether some other force is compelling and controlling her.

A preoccupation with the relationship between madness, identity and the family can also be identified in Roger Corman’s adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s work. The first of these, The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), contains many of the elements of later films. Despite these films’ use of Poe, it is worth remembering that any reinterpretation must be understood in terms of the specific period within which they are produced. One not only has to recognize that the turn to Poe’s fiction in the late 1950s has as much to do with the concerns of the period as it does with those of the original texts, but also that any reinterpretation will alter these originals, if only by concentrating on some features rather than others. In fact, Corman’s films depart from Poe’s originals significantly. For example, in contrast to the plot of the original Poe story, Corman’s film concerns a young man who comes to the house of Usher to collect his fiancee, Madeline Usher, and take her back to Boston with him. This detail not only changes the function of this character within the story, but also introduces issues of generational conflict which are entirely absent from Poe’s original tale. In the house of Usher, the young man encounters Roderick Usher who is obsessed with the evil of the Usher family line, and fears that he and Madeline are tainted with that evil. He feels oppressed by the past and the film is filled with images of confinement and claustrophobia. The action barely moves outside the self-contained world of the house which contains not only bedrooms and dining rooms, but chapels and crypts.

The film makes much of the house’s enclosed spaces and underground corridors within which Roderick eventually buries Madeline alive. He wants to prevent her from having children and continuing the family line. The preoccupation with premature burial is a continuing theme through the later Poe films, and like these later films, it is linked to a fear of catatonia. Catatonia is a condition in which the person has all the outward appearances of death, but is still alive. Later films, such as The Premature Burial (1961), emphasize the fear of being rendered helpless; unable to move or communicate, but still conscious of the surrounding world and able to feel pain.

The film not only stresses these external threats to identity. The most terrifying threat is presented as internal. Roderick’s main fear is that he and Madeline will go mad; that forces within their own make-up will erupt and render them helpless. The preoccupation with catatonia has some of these connotations, but his fear of madness is more explicit. He fears that even his own consciousness is unstable, and that it may be erased by more powerful forces within his own psychological make-up over which his conscious self has no control. The same preoccupation recurs in later adaptations of Poe by Corman. In The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), the leading character is eventually possessed by the personality of his father, a cruel member of the Spanish inquisition, and in The Haunted Palace (1963) (really a version of H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘Charles Dexter Ward’), the leading character is possessed by the personality of one of his ancestors.

This concern with the family and with the instability of identity links all three films and was to become one of the central problems within contemporary horror. It cannot simply be explained as the innovation of Psycho, or its director Alfred Hitchcock. It was part of a more general cultural process. In the early 1950s, in texts such as The Thing and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, the consciousness and desire of individuals were presented as that which was threatening to rational control, as that which it must repress or deny. The rational system had to discipline their desires and discourage people from thinking for themselves. But as American society developed during the 1950s, American industry attempted to control consumption according to rational principles through the use of advertising and other techniques. Rather than repressing or denying desires, it attempted to stimulate specific desires.

As this process developed, it became increasingly commonplace for people to claim that consciousness and desire were now integrated within the system of rational control, rather than threats to it. This situation led to a profound sense of instability as people became uncertain which thoughts and desires were their own, and which were the products of the system of control. The boundaries between the inside and the outside, the self and the system of control became blurred and obscure, and their faith in their ability to resist was questioned.

In fact, while theorists of mass society and culture had claimed that the development of rational control would increasingly lead to a population which was complacent and uncritical,[26] it might be more accurately argued that it led to an increasingly paranoid population who felt that they had less and less control over their own lives, and were more and more suspicious of the authorities that sought to control them. Unfortunately, these conditions also gave them less and less confidence in their ability to change this situation.

During the 1960s, this situation was largely responsible for the shift from secure to paranoid horror which has been identified by Andrew Tudor.[27] According to Tudor, prior to the 1960s, secure horror had maintained a series of relatively unproblematic distinctions between self and other; there was some sense of faith in authority and in the possibility of effective action; and hence, a general tendency to resolve narrative conflicts. In the 1960s though, these features started to disappear, and paranoid horror emerged from a blurring of distinctions between the self and other; a loss of faith in authorities and the possibilities of effective action; and hence, gave rise to horror narratives in which conflicts and problems are rarely resolved, but seem to move inexorably towards complete social or personal breakdown or apocalypse.

For Tudor, family horror must be understood in this context; not as a concern with the family in itself, but as part of a more general crisis of confidence in American institutions. In fact, an examination of family horror after 1960 calls into question Wood’s assumption that the family is the fundamental institution of American society.[28] Most of these family horror texts clearly present the family as only one element in a more general series of institutions and processes which penetrate and shape one another.

Ira Levin’s novel, Rosemary’s Baby (1967), for example, is as much concerned with the media and other forms of authority as it is with the family. The novel centres on a young woman, Rosemary, who moves into a new apartment with her husband. There she becomes the focus of a Satanic conspiracy which uses her as a vessel for the birth of the Anti­Christ. Though it is often seen as an example of family horror, this novel clearly presents the family as part of a much broader series of processes. Rosemary’s desire for a family, and her image of family life, is constructed through a series of different institutions, from the Catholic church of her past, to the vast array of consumer images which permeate her world. The novel is filled with references to the media and media events, and these are shown to not only define the terms of fashionable conversation, but also the modes of appropriate behaviour. Rosemary arranges her apartment according to the advice of popular magazines, and her sexual and moral behaviour are learned through a variety of sources, such as Time magazine and The Kinsey Report.

Nor is it the case that the Satanists challenge her behaviour or beliefs. On the contrary, they rely upon them, and they are themselves as at least as brutal, callous and unthinking as the beings which they are out to destroy. Furthermore, when they finally do arrive at the house where the main characters have been defending themselves against the zombies, they indiscriminately shoot the last survivor of the group.

It is within this context that the family horror aspects of the film work. Just as the social order around them is in crisis, redundant, and riddled with conflicts, so are the relationships between those within the house. Rather than coming together as a coherent group with a shared sense of community, they fight amongst themselves. The situation does not bring out the best in them, but only the worst. In fact, few of them are actually killed as a result of the zombies outside. They are either killed by one another, or as a result of their own incompetence. Even those characters who are killed by a zombie have a familial relationship with the zombie in question. One woman is killed by her own daughter, and another by her brother. For Wood, for example, this highlights the eruption of conflicts and resentments within the family, which is more generally presented as a brutal and oppressive institution.

II Apocalyptic Horror

The film’s use of the zombie as a monster is also significant in this regard. Prior to Night of the Living Dead, the zombie was a very minor horror monster, but since 1968, it has become one of the major figures in contemporary horror. Its importance is due to its lack of consciousness or conscious motivation, and this is linked to issues of rational control, particularly consumerism. This link is merely hinted at in the original film, but the sequel makes it far more explicit. This follow-up, Dawn of the Dead (1978), is set in a shopping mall to which the zombies are drawn by a mindless compulsion which has its roots in the consumer behaviour of their earlier existence as living human beings. This mindlessly compulsive behaviour and lack of conscious motivation is that which links the zombie with other contemporary monsters, but it also links it with the people within the house in Night of the Living Dead. These human beings are largely presented as stereotypical or stock characters who lack self-consciousness or imagination. Even in the midst of the siege, they rely on television to give them information about their situation and the appropriate responses to that situation.

Michael Crichton’s novel, The Andromeda Strain (1969), is another example of apocalyptic horror, and it too concerns a satellite which returns to earth and brings with it a plague that threatens human existence. The main story concerns the attempt by a group of scientists—the Wildfire team—to prevent it from destroying the world. Unlike Night of the Living Dead though, the problem is not the internal crisis of the system, but that it is too ordered. The satellite does not bring back a plague by mere accident, but has been sent into space with the explicit aim of discovering plagues for use by the military. If the family is one of the central institutions within contemporary horror, the military is the other. It has come to represent the most destructive aspects of the state for two reasons.

First, it deals with forces of incredible destructive potential such as nuclear and biological weapons, and minor errors can have dramatic effects. In fact, The Andromeda Strain goes further. It suggests that rational systems of control have an inherent tendency to crisis. They are inflexible and rigid, and are unable to account for every eventuality. Personal idiosyncrasies, and minor malfunctions create unpredictable havoc within the novel, which also emphasizes that any system will inevitably create its own blindspots. Every system of procedures will inevitably exclude certain options. The novel is a virtual catalogue of blindspots which result in missed opportunities, and one blindspot in particular nearly results in the destruction of the entire world. The research station has been built on the assumption that any plague can be destroyed by intense heat, and it has been fitted with a nuclear device which is programmed to detonate if the plague escapes. No-one has predicted that the plague may actually thrive on energy, and that such an explosion might create the perfect conditions for its almost limitless reproduction.

Second, the military is seen as threatening in contemporary horror by reason of its specific relationship to the population. For reasons of national security, the population has been increasingly denied knowledge of military actions and procedures since World War II. This situation is made clear in the opening of the novel where the military use a rather crude method to detect the satellite for fear of arousing public suspicion about their activities. The novel is filled with such cases. Not only was the actual mission of the satellite kept secret, but the laboratories where the Wildfire team work are disguised as an agricultural research station. Rather than acting in the interests of the population, the novel presents the military as a rational system of control which imposes itself upon them, and which is quite willing to accept the deaths of millions of Americans as part of its rational calculations. The population exist merely to be ordered and controlled.

Like most apocalyptic horror texts, Night of the Living Dead and The Andromeda Strain do not resolve all the problems at the end of the narrative. At the end of the first, it remains unclear whether the posse will actually succeed in destroying the zombies, but even if it does, all the main characters are dead and the posse hardly represent the promise of a positive or appealing future. In the second, the plague does not destroy humanity, but it continues to have unpredictable effects on human activities. As the final line of the novel states, future developments are ‘out of our hands’.[29]

These open endings are partly the result of the loss of confidence in effective action and in authorities which Tudor identified in contemporary horror. If authorities are often the source of the problem, they cannot also be the solution. In contemporary horror, attempts to resolve the situation often fail, or only make matters worse. But there is another aspect which frequently makes narrative resolutions unsatisfying. In a social world which is increasingly seen as a nightmare of regulation and control, it can be pleasurable to witness that world destroy itself.

The Omen (1976), for example, is an apocalyptic horror film which was part of the 1970s preoccupation with demonic forces. It concerns a family who come to realize that their adopted son is, in fact, the Antichrist. Again the issue of apocalypse is linked to the American state: the family in which the Antichrist is raised is that of the American ambassador to London. The film revolves around the father’s acquisition of the knowledge necessary to kill his demonic son, Damian. At the end of the film though, he fails in his task. He is shot as he tries to kill his son, and we are left with a final image which suggests that Damian has been adopted by the American President himself.

While this is the nominal plot, and the father is the nominal hero, it is probably more accurate to read the film’s plot as being concerned with the inexorable rise to power of the young Damian. The father’s death is only the last in a series of grisly deaths which are inflicted on anyone who attempts to organize against Damian. The film also presents these deaths with such relish that Robin Wood has suggested that the film’s real pleasure is that of watching Damian systematically destroying contemporary society. As Wood puts it: ‘The Omen would make no sense in a society that was not prepared to enjoy and surreptitiously endorse the working out of its own destruction.’[30]

It is this desire to be rid of the existing social world which can also be identified in a sub-genre of apocalyptic horror—the post-apocalypse film. In films such as The Omega Man (1971), A Boy and His Dog (1975), Damnation Alley (1977), and the Mad Max trilogy, there is a clear pleasure in the post-apocalypse world where there may be horrors, but where one is freed from the more mundane forms of control and constraint which distinguish contemporary society. It also allows for the possibility of starting society over again, but getting things right this time. In fact, this is often the explicit narrative problem of post-apocalyptic narratives, and it is one which preoccupies Stephen King’s epic post­apocalyptic novel, The Stand (1978).

As in many of these narratives, a plague which has been developed by the military is accidentally released, and proceeds to kill 99.9% of the population. The majority of the novel then concerns the conflict between the survivors as they come together in two distinct groups and struggle to define the nature of a future society. As Stephen King writes in an attempt to explain the pleasure which he experienced in the writing of the novel: ‘Much of the compulsion I felt while writing The Stand obviously came from envisioning an entire entrenched societal process destroyed at a stroke. I felt a bit like Alexander, lifting his sword over the Gordian knot and growling, “Fuck untying it. I’ve got a better way.”[31]Despite this pleasure, he also notes: ‘My own lesson in writing The Stand was that cutting the Gordian Knot simply destroys the riddle instead of solving it, and the book’s last line is an admission that the riddle still remains.’[32] The riddle is: how can human beings develop ways of living together which are satisfying and fulfilling to all? Destroying existing society may get rid of specific forces which control and oppress people, but it does not, of itself, offer a solution to that riddle.

III Body/Horror

The preoccupation with plagues within apocalyptic horror is also related to another aspect of contemporary horror which is often referred to as ‘body/horror’. The texts which are grouped together under this heading are primarily concerned with processes of bodily transformation. The body is either engulfed by some larger process, or else moves towards fragmentation and collapse. These processes can have apocalyptic implications. In certain films, the whole of society is overtaken by their effects. But the focus of concern is mainly upon their impact on an individual and their sense of identity. In this way, these films also concern the instability of identity, though they concentrate mainly upon the sense of bodily identity, rather than consciousness. Their most significant moments are those in which an individual watches their own body change. The sense of identity is also challenged by the loss of any clear sense of an inside or an outside to the body. The threat is not clearly external, but erupts from within the body itself. Despite this, it is usually the result of certain forms of rational control associated with medicine, science, and even the media.

The figure most clearly associated with this aspect of horror is the Canadian film director, David Cronenberg, who has not only worked within Hollywood, but had considerable influence upon the development of American horror. In his first major film, Shivers (a.k.a. They Came From Within, 1975), he reworks Romero’s Night of the Living Dead so that the plague is a scientifically generated organism which penetrates the body and turns its victims into pleasure-driven zombies who pass on the organism through sexual contact. Despite its similarities to Romero’s film, Shivers is far more interested in the processes of biological transformation, and it uses new special effects techniques to depict them.

His next film, Rabid (1977), is very similar, but on a much larger scale. It concerns a young women who undergoes a radical new type of surgery as doctors try to save her life. Unfortunately, this surgery gives rise to a strange bodily mutation. The woman develops a phallic spike in one of her armpits, and finds that she can only feed through the use of this spike, which stabs those she embraces, and sucks their blood. As it does so, it also passes on a new strain of rabies which quickly converts its victim into a cannibalistic zombie who passes the plague on to its victims. Soon the plague of rabies is spreading out of control. Despite the larger scope of this film, it is actually more intimate than Shivers. The film is mainly interested in the working of the disease, and its effect upon the young woman as she finds herself unable to control her bodily processes.

Cronenberg’s films have often come under attack for supposedly displaying a profoundly conservative fear of the body and female sexuality in particular; and they are often interpreted as a conservative reaction to the sexual revolution.[33] Barbara Creed, for example, has argued that the sub-genre as a whole `reveals a fascination with the maternal body—its inner and outer appearance, its functions, its awesome powers.’[34] Cronenberg’s visual style in particular is claimed to be deeply voyeuristic, and to view the body with a horrified, distanced, and controlling gaze. This kind of criticism tends to miss the sense of pleasure with which Cronenberg treats his subjects. He has often stated his sympathy and admiration for the bodily processes with which he deals. Furthermore, while these processes are related to issues of sexuality, they are clearly connected to issues of rational control. The development of bourgeois society came to define the body as an inalienable form of private property which guaranteed individuals a sense of self; but as society was increasingly organized according to rational principles, the body came to be an object of rational control. It is regulated by a whole series of institutions, and as Christopher Lasch has argued in relation to the development of medical institutions, these institutions do not simply act to improve peoples’ lives, but ‘increase patients’ dependence on machines and medical experts who operate these “life-support systems.”‘[35]

These institutions not only alienate and objectify the body, they make it increasingly difficult to distinguish the body from systems of control. Forms such as spare-part surgery, reproductive technology, and genesplicing make it increasingly clear that the body is no longer a private sphere, but is increasingly penetrated by a whole series of processes. If these films are concerned with sexuality, it is within this context. Sexual contact also blurs distinctions between the inside and the outside of the body, and between the self and others. Not only is this the case, but as Shivers and Videodrome (1982) make clear, sexuality is no longer a threat to the system of control, but integrated into it and stimulated by it.

Videodrome is one of Cronenberg’s most analysed films. It concerns the head of a pornographic cable channel who spends his time in an attempt to track down a specific piece of sado-masochistic pornography of which he can only discover brief snippets. This televisual image turns out to be part of a plot, and has been used to programme him. It affects his consciousness through his body. In one particularly famous sequence, his body develops an opening into which he is encouraged to insert video cassette. His body has become an object programmed and controlled by the pornographic media, and the sexual imagery has been used to make his body more receptive to its subliminal stimulations.

The influence of Cronenberg’s body/horror films, and the special effects techniques which they pioneered, have been huge. In the late 1970s and 1980s, a series of werewolf films were made which used special effects to show the transformation sequences in extraordinary detail. But despite their relative success, their influence was limited. The dual personality theme of the werewolf narrative did not really develop the body/ horror subgenre, and the films tended to rely on references back to classic werewolf films such as The Wolf Man (1941) and others.

Alien (1979), on the other hand, used body/horror special effects and concerns in a way that was both highly popular and deeply influential. The film concerns a group of workers on a space cargo vessel who are ordered to investigate what appears to be a distress signal from an alien planet. They find a giant space ship, the insides of which are organic in appearance, and contain a huge chamber filled with alien eggs. One crew member, Kane, is attacked or ‘contaminated’ by something from within one of the eggs, which wraps itself around his face, and cannot be removed. Eventually, it comes off, but later, Kane starts to cough and convulse. His chest heaves, and an alien being suddenly bursts from inside him before escaping into the ship. From then on, the film presents a fairly straightforward situation in which the crew are killed off one by one. Finally, Ripley. the last survivor, manages to destroy the creature which has now transformed itself into something much bigger and nastier than the thing that emerged from Kane’s chest.

There is considerable discussion of this film from a variety of perspectives,[36] but it is the alien species which really distinguishes the film, and was its main influence. It is presented as a kind of biological machine which dominates other species and uses them as a vessel for its own reproduction. In this way, the threat is made both external and internal. The most famous and best remembered sequence is the one in which Kane `gives birth’ to the alien, and it is this aspect which recurs again and again in later science fiction/horror films. As Barbara Creed has claimed, many 1980s science fiction/horror films concern the conversion of the bodv into a kind of womb from which a new, alien life-form is born.[37]

The film also sets up a series of associations between the corporate/ military authorities and the alien. It becomes clear that the authorities have known about the alien species from the start, and that they are exploiting the crew, using them to test the destructive capabilities of the alien which they hope to use as a form of biological weapon. The representatives of these authorities are the ship’s computer and tile science officer. Ashe, who turns out to be an android. Not only do they share the aliens cold-blooded attitude towards the crew. but also its ambiguous nature. They all complicate distinctions between organic life and machines in various ways, and act to dominate and control the crew. But if many have praised Alien as a radical horror film. it is also related to developments in the 1980s which are often seen as highly conservative, particularly the stalker or slasher film and the re-emergence of the science fiction/horror film. It is these developments which will be the subject of the next chapter.

5. Horror in the 1980s

I The Slasher Movie and the Serial Killer

If the developments of the 1960s and 1970s achieved a measure of critical recognition, and were identified in some quarters as potentially radical, the developments of the late 1970s and 1980s have provoked widespread hostility from critics and reviewers. The ‘video nasties’ caused a moral panic in both Britain and America, though no clear definition of the term was ever produced. Instead these moral panics largely relied on arguments about the Slasher movie, a subgenre which emerged in America in the late 1970s and early 1980s and provoked considerable hostility. For many critics such as Wood, the dasher movie represented a reactionary turn in contemporary horror.[38] Rather than presenting the monster as a product of American social life, it is claimed that they present the monster as ‘the essence of pure evil’, an inexplicable destructive force which assaults American social life, but does not imply any criticism of its institutions.[39]

It is the attitude towards women that is believed to be present in these films which is considered their most worrying feature however. Slasher movies concern a serial killer who tracks down a group of teenagers, killing them off one by one in various grisly ways, and it is usually argued that its attacks are primarily directed against women. Even when the number of men killed is equal to the number of women, it is pointed out that it is the killing of women on which these films concentrate.[40] The men are either dispatched quickly, or else their deaths are not seen at all. It is also claimed that the killer’s primary target is the women, and that the men are simply killed as a means to this end.

The ways in which the killings are presented are claimed to make this situation even more worrying. One of these films’ most distinctive stylistic features is the use of the subjective camera shot from the killer’s point of view, and this is reputed to create an identification between the audience and the killer, by placing the audience in the position of the killer rather than its victim.[41] It is also claimed that the women who are killed have usually been engaged in sexual activity just before their deaths, and that their slaughter is presented as a justified punishment for their overt sexuality. Female sexuality is claimed to be threatening to patriarchal culture, so that these films act to contain it by presenting the sexually active women who are killed as merely ‘getting what they deserve’. Robin Wood, for example, has argued that these films are a conservative reaction against the women’s movement in which ‘the women who are terrorized and slaughtered are those who resist definition within the virgin/wife/ mother framework.’[42] It is also claimed, in support of this argument, that the women who do survive these films are usually presented as virgins. They are sexually innocent and do not display a threatening female sexuality.

There are a number of problems with these arguments though. First, the objection that the killers are presented as almost inhuman personifications of evil tends to miss the point. Their lack of conscious motivation and their apparently relentless and compulsive types of behaviour not only links them with other monsters in contemporary horror such as the shark in Jaws (1975) and the creature in Alien, but it is that which makes them both terrifying and fascinating. Critics such as Wood and Newman compare these serial killers with those in films such as Psycho and novels such as The Silence of Lambs (1988) where the killer’s family background is explicitly presented,[43] but even in these cases, the killers are interesting specifically because these explanations are insufficient and do not help people in dealing with them. These figures captivate their audiences because they are driven by relentless and compulsive types of behaviour over which they have no conscious control. The tendencies to refer to these figures as ‘killing machines’ is therefore highly appropriate. They lack subjectivity and seem to act like programmed automatons. The fears associated with these serial killers are similar to those discussed in relation to other forms of contemporary horror. They are fears that human identity is being erased by forms of rationalized behaviour.

Second, not only do these killers lack consciousness, they also lack all forms of personality. This lack is emphasized by their use of masks. The killer rarely has a human face. For this reason, it is difficult to see how the audience is supposed to identify with them, despite the use of the subjective camera shot. It is difficult to identify with something which is specifically defined by its lack of an identity. This problem is highlighted by Carol J. Clover who points out that the subjective camera shot is used in a variety of different films, such as Jaws and The Birds (1963), where the point of view is that of animals such as the shark or the birds. As a result, she questions claims about the effect of these techniques and argues ‘either that the viewer’s identificatory powers are unbelievably elastic or the point-of-view shots can sometimes be pro forma.’[44] In fact, in many dasher movies, the subjective camera shot does not necessarily imply the presence of any being at all, but only its potential presence. There are a whole series of sequences in which it is used to suggest a character’s fear that they are being watched, or their vulnerability.

These problems have led some critics to claim that the use of the subjective camera shot is not used to create an identification with the character of the killer, but with the position of the killer.[45] It is used to make us identify with the killer’s gaze and the aggression with which it is associated. One problem with this argument is that even if this were the intention, it may not actually work in this way. In 1946, George Montgomery used the subjective camera shot in his film, The Lady in the Lake, in an attempt to approximate the first person narrations used by Raymond Chandler in his original novel. The film is very interesting, but it fails in its use of the subjective camera shot. It not only denies the audience any sense of interiority to the character from whose point of view the action is presented, but as a result, it may also have alienated the audience from that character’s position. Denied any real access to the character, the gaze itself may become an image from which the audience feel distanced and detached.

A similar problem is also emphasized in John Carpenter’s script for The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), a script which he wrote around the same time as his deeply influential dasher movie, Halloween (1978). In this film, a woman finds that she has telepathic powers which link her with a serial killer. When he kills, she is denied her own sight, but is forced to watch the killings through the killer’s eyes, an experience which is presented as terrible and disabling. She is forced to see that which she does not want to see, and is rendered powerless and helpless both by its imposition upon her and by her inability to prevent the carnage which she witnesses. In this way, she can be seen to occupy a very similar position to that of the audience in a dasher film. The technique may work at times specifically to elicit the feeling of helplessness before the image of the gaze which Laura Mars experiences in Carpenter’s narration, rather than an identification with that gaze.

There are also problems with the claims about the attitudes towards women in such films. It may be true that women are the primary targets of the killer, but this need not necessarily imply that the films suggest that the killings are a justified punishment for female sexuality. As Tudor argues in relation to Halloween, the most discussed of the dasher movies, ‘all three women are appealingly characterized—there is no sense that their activities are inappropriate or immoral. They are frivolous, perhaps, but hardly figures who can be seen as inviting their terrible fates.’[46] In fact, their sexual activity is not presented as threatening to men at all. It is presented as normal teenage behaviour, and something which the males expect of them. By contrast, it is the surviving female, Laurie, who is presented as threatening to men. Her friends are constantly joking that she has ‘scared another one away’. The males are intimidated by her intelligence, seriousness, and independence, and it is these qualities that distinguish her in the film, not her virginity. She is clearly interested in men sexually, but is not prepared to accept the role of sexual plaything which the other girls put up with. They are clearly irritated by the males’ treatment of them, but accept it as ‘normal’. Nor does she disapprove of extra-marital sex, and even denies she is a virgin.

In fact, it is masculinity, not femininity, which is the problem within these films. As Tudor argues, ‘however restricted our understanding of the psychotic’s motivation … we are left with the feeling that threatening psychosis is sexual in some way and that male aggression and misogyny are significant elements within it.’[47] The problem of masculinity is also registered in other ways. First, there is a distinct absence of positive or effective male figures within these films. It is the female characters themselves who fight the killer. If male characters do appear, they are usually entirely ineffective. The psychologist in Halloween, for example, spends most of the time in the wrong places, and when he finally does track the killer down he is no more effective than Laurie. While Laurie has spent a considerable amount of time in hand to hand combat with the killer, the psychologist is too scared to approach him. Instead he nervously shoots at him, but proves no more effective in killing him.

This absence of these male characters is part of the more general crisis of confidence in authority in American society, a crisis which can also be detected in other aspects. These films frequently present ‘normal’ everyday life as inherently fragile and unstable. It masks uncontrollably destructive forces which constantly threaten to erupt from within, without apparent explanation. For this reason, these films rarely reach a definitive resolution. Not only is the killer often virtually indestructible, but even when it is killed, the ending is rarely a happy one. It usually depicts the female survivor suffering a virtual breakdown as the result of her experience. She may have survived, but she is only left with a sense of the insecurity and fragility of existence.

It is this loss of faith in authority which displaces traditional male authority figures from the role of the hero, and leads to the emergence of the female hero. This situation does not mean that these films are necessarily feminist texts, but time and again, they are presented as the only figures with the resources to combat and defeat him. In fact as Carol Clover claims while these films may involve some form of identification with the killer at the start, this situation is reversed by the end of the film so that the female hero becomes the main point of identification. More significantly, this reversal also coincides with her appropriation of the gaze. It is often claimed that the ‘active, investigating gaze’ is defined as male within popular cinema, but this claim is inappropriate to the dasher film where, as Clover argues:

The gaze becomes, at least for a while, female. More to the point, the female exercise of scopic control results not in her annihilation, in the manner of classic cinema, but in her triumph; indeed her triumph depends on her assumption of the gaze.[48]

In fact, it is her appropriation of the gaze which distinguishes her. As we have seen, the distinguishing feature of female heroes in films such as Halloween is not their sexual innocence but their seriousness, intelligence and independence.

In the process, she not only appropriates the traditionally male gaze, but also traditionally male forms of action and heroism. For this reason, as Carol Clover claims, they challenge traditional associations between sex and gender. They do not present women’s roles as being determined by their biology, and they enable them to perform activities usually restricted to males. But though these women perform traditionally male activities, this does not mean that these films privilege masculinity as is often claimed. These women are valued, but not because they act like men. Women do not have to become like men to become successful and positive. As Carol Clover points out, it is not masculinity which is privileged, but ‘masculinity in conjunction with a female body—indeed, as the term victim-hero contemplates, masculinity in conjunction with femininity.’[49] Male authority remains the problem, and it is the female who refuses her role as victim and rejects the positions of powerlessness associated with femininity who is the hero. Masculine attributes such as aggression, violence, and self-assertion are only positive when they have been reappropriated by those who are usually victims of them.

II The Science Fiction/Horror Film in the 1980s

Many of these developments can also be identified in the science fiction/ horror films of the 1980s which became one of the most popular and influential aspects of the genre. In this context, the work of the writer/ director James Cameron and his ex-wife, producer Gale Anne Hurd, are exemplary. Their films, particularly The Terminator (1984) and Aliens (1986), are almost summations of contemporary horror. They contain strong female leads; an interest in the family; concerns about scientific­technical rationality and the military; killing machines which lack conscious motivation; and forms of body/horror. In The Terminator, a cyborg killer is sent to present day Los Angeles from the future in order to kill a young woman, Sarah Conner. This cyborg killer, the terminator of the title, is related to the serial killer of the dasher movie both by its actions, and by the film’s use of the subjective camera shot from the terminator’s point of view. In The Terminator though, it is made quite explicit that the fear evoked by the serial killer is a fear of mindless, compulsive, rationalized behaviour. The terminator is half human, and half machine. If most serial killers use masks to hide their human faces, the terminator uses human flesh to hide its mechanized, robotic body.

Not only is the terminator quite literally a killing machine, it is also an extension of scientific-technical rationality and American militarization. The terminator is a product of the American missile systems. In the future, the American defense network computers come to see all human life as a threat and attempt to exterminate humanity. If earlier forms of rationalization had defined the individual qualities of the worker as a source of error that had to be eliminated, the machines of the future come to define humanity itself as a source of error that has to be eliminated; a source of error that can now be replaced by machines. None the less, the film suggests that this redefinition is only a logical extension of current forms of rationalization. The roots of the nightmarish future lie in the mechanized modem cities of contemporary America.

Within the film these modern cities are dominated by machines. They regulate people’s work and leisure activities, and the terminator is able to use communications systems such as telephones, telephone books, and answering machines to identify Sarah. The implications of this situation are suggested by the identification number which Kyle, the guerrilla fighter from the future, has imprinted into his flesh, a mark which Constance Penley aptly identifies as ‘the ubiquitous bar code stamped on today’s consumer items.’[50] Not only are people identified through these machines, they are also identified with them. Sarah’s flatmate, Ginger, is never separated from her walkman; and the only feature which seems to distinguish Sarah’s unseen boyfriend is the Porsche which he owns.

Within this world, it is difficult to distinguish the human from the machine, the organic from the inorganic. If the terminator is a machine which wears human flesh to disguise itself, human beings are frequently encased within mechanical constructions. It is also a world in which people act in ways that are almost robotic. They are caught up in compulsive, repetitive forms of behaviour. In such a world, the terminator does not seem too out of place. It can calculate and predict the appropriate forms of behaviour and pass for human. In Terminator 2 (1991), these implications are made even more explicit. The humans are often more insensitive and unthinking than the reprogrammed cyborg sent back to protect John Conner, Sarah’s son. This cyborg learns the human emotions and values with which most of the humans within the film have lost contact. As a consequence, Sarah recognizes that ‘in an insane world’ such as the present, the terminator will make a better, more caring father for her son, John, than any man she has known.

Despite the difficulty of distinguishing the human from the machine, the film does not suggest that distinctions between the two are impossible, or even undesirable, or that humanity and its machines have become replicas of one another. If this were the case, humans would not pose a threat to the machines, and there would be no reason to fear the machines or the possibility of human extinction. The process of rationalization suppresses the individual qualities of the worker in favour of abstract measurements of quantity. It seeks to standardize workers and make them interchangable with one another. By contrast, The Terminator associates humanity with those very features suppressed by rationalization, particularly sexual desire and interaction. For example, it is Kyle’s desire for Sarah that distinguishes him from the terminator. Rather than defining humanity according to a fixed presence, it is associated with absence; desire is based upon the fact that one’s self is incomplete by itself and needs to interact with others.

These issues are addressed through the film’s preoccupation with reproduction. The terminator is a product of an asexual process of mechanical reproduction in which human flesh is mass produced as standardized product. It is a product of a monological, rational order, and can never attain an interactive relationship with others of its kind. They are all replicas of one another, and merely follow the programming of the computer systems which produced them. It is only through reprogramming and interaction with humans that the cyborg in Terminator 2 is able to be ‘humanized’. By contrast, Sarah, the terminator’s target in the original film, is dangerous to the machines specifically because of her reproductive capabilities. The film stresses that human reproduction, unlike mechanical reproduction, is based on interaction. The child is a product of two human beings and can learn to differentiate itself from its parents through a process of interaction.

In The Terminator, the process of rationalized, mechanical reproduction is associated with excessive masculinity through the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger. In Aliens, it is associated with a mechanized femininity. The alien mother is a giant reproductive machine. But even in Aliens, there is an association with masculinity and the military. The alien species is identified as the ‘ideal’ soldier, a pure killing machine which is not distracted from its functioning by individual features or desires. This alien species, like the military/corporate state of the humans, is a colonial power. It penetrates other species and transforms them into a vessel for its own reproduction, just as the humans place ‘atmosphere processing plants’ on alien planets in order to create the conditions necessary for colonization. By converting the human body into a mere vessel for their own reproduction, the aliens are also related to patriarchy which has traditionally defined women as a mere vessel for the reproduction of the male seed. It is for this reason that it is a woman who is not only the aliens’ main adversary, but the figure with the resources required to resist them. She rejects rationalization and mechanical reproduction which define human beings, and particularly women, as objects or vessels to be used and controlled. She also highlights the active female component in human reproduction which male forms of authority deny or repress. She stands for interaction in opposition to rationalized order. Within these films, it is women, not men, who represent that which is truly human.

This presentation of women does not operate to confirm women in the tradition role of mothers. While Constance Penley claims that these films confine women to the role of mothers,[51] Barbara Creed claims that in Aliens, Ripley is not really a woman at all.[52] She argues that Ripley undergoes the male passage through the Oedipus complex in the film. By destroying the alien mothers’ genitals with a phallic gun, Ripley is construed as separating herself from the maternal, and identifying with masculine positions within culture. Both Penley and Creed’s claims sound credible, but both ignore aspects of female heroes such as Sarah and Ripley. While these female characters are associated with the maternal, they also perform activities which are usually associated with masculinity. When Ripley aims that phallic gun at the mother’s genitals, she is also engaged in the maternal protection of a surrogate daughter. These female heroes are distinguished by their hybridity. They erase distinctions between masculine and feminine activities in similar ways to the female heroes in the Slasher film, and transform the meaning of maternity and violent action through the course of the films.

In The Terminator, Sarah is not an image of self-sacrificing motherhood, but the source of her son’s strength and authority. Everything he is comes from her, and she is the myth that holds the resistance of the future together. Despite the film’s mythic elements—John Conner has the same initials as Jesus Christ, and his conception is an impossible, almost immaculate one—Sarah is not presented as a virgin mother like the Madonna. It is Kyle, John’s father, who is the virgin. If Sarah does become a myth for the future, the film does not present the audience with the myth of Sarah, but Sarah herself. The film allows the audience to watch a process of mythologization which is not imposed upon Sarah by men, but is engineered by Sarah as she narrates her story to John.

Most of these features remain central to Terminator 2, though it both extends and limits features of the original film. While Sarah starts off as a victim in the original film, but slowly comes to recognize her own potential, she is both stronger and more peripheral in the sequel. Defined as insane by society, she is presented as the only sane person in an insane world as she straggles to halt humanity’s drive towards self-destruction. The newly acquired star status of Schwarzenegger tends to undermine her centrality however, as does the mission of the new terminator. This time, it is the young John, not Sarah who is the terminator’s target. For example, while it is clear that Sarah is capable of defeating the new terminator at the end of the film, it is Schwarzenegger who ultimately saves the day. For once, the contemporary female hero does not save herself in the last instance, but is saved by a ‘male’ hero.

None the less, male authority figures are still problems within the film, as is shown by way in which the new terminator continually disguises itself as a Los Angeles Police officer, to say nothing of the way in which psychiatrists, SWAT teams, scientists, and company managements are presented. Not only does the film carefully distance Schwarzenegger from positions of authority and place his character in the ‘feminized’ position of John’s self-sacrificing and nurturing protector (in contrast to Sarah’s masculinized authoritative female), it also needs to destroy him at the end. Not only is he a potential threat to the future of humanity—he is destroyed so that no trace of the future will remain—but also to Sarah and John’s independence. The film cannot completely separate him from associations with male authority, but it resists the suggestion that John and Sarah will come to rely on him.

A similar problem emerges in relation to Sarah. She has acquired combat skills and become a tough, female warrior, but the film has to resist the suggestion that women have to become like men to achieve success. She must be separated from associations with male authority and domination, and this is achieved in two main ways. First, she is continually haunted by dreams of the nuclear annihilation which she knows is coming. Her actions are placed in opposition to the destructive forms of violence and domination which will cause human self-destruction. Her use of violent action is a resistance against the dominance of scientific-technical rationality and American militarization. Second, she learns to distinguish herself from forms of male authority through the course of the narrative. She discovers the name of the scientist who will develop the technology responsible for the machines of the future, and she decides to change the future by killing him. In the attempt, she becomes the mirror image of the terminator in the first film, and as a result, she finds that she is finally unable to kill the scientist. Instead she collapses into an almost cataleptic state. It is only as she is coaxed out of this state by John that she is finally able to interact with her son. Obsessed by the future, she has lost contact with her feelings for her son, and her ability to interact with him. She has become authoritarian as she tries to train him for his future role, and she has defined their personal feelings as secondary to his future mission. This behaviour has caused John pain earlier in the film, particularly after he has tried to save her from the mental institution in which the authorities have imprisoned her. By rejecting the role of the terminator, she dissociates herself from masculine positions, and rediscovers the importance of human feeling and interaction.

If Sarah, John, and the terminator do form a kind of family group during the film, it is one which is clearly distinguished from the ‘normal’, patriarchal family of middle class America. There is no clear authority figure—certainly no patriarch—and they are placed in clear distinction to the ‘normal’, middle class, suburban family who act as John’s foster parents at the beginning of the film. If Sarah, John, and the terminator compose an ideal family group, it is one which is made up of a mother whom society has defined as insane, a son who is a juvenile delinquent, and a father who is a robot.

III Contemporary Horror Fiction by Women

These developments may not be inherently radical, but they are related to the development of feminist horror fiction. Gale Anne Hurd often talks of her work in terms of feminism, and has worked to encourage women within Hollywood. In literature too, women writers such as Lisa Tuttle have begun to write self-consciously feminist horror fiction. Horror has always been an important area of women’s writing from Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley, though the Brontes and Charlotte Gilman Perkins, to contemporary writers such as Angela Carter and Joyce Carole Oates (whose work not only may be read as horror, but who also publishes horror under the pseudonym of Rosamond Smith.) Recently, however, there has been a proliferation of popular women horror writers, some of whom write as feminists and some of whom do not. Unfortunately this is one of the least appreciated aspects of both contemporary horror, and women’s writing. Little work has been done on this area, despite the fact that it is a vital area of popular women’s writing. Ironically, certain aspects of feminism have been partly responsible for this lack of recognition. Feminist approaches to horror have tended to dismiss the genre too quickly as an inherently patriarchal genre which is primarily produced and consumed by men. As a result, they have tended to ignore its interest and appeal to women writers and female audiences.

For many reasons, women’s horror fiction has been much more productive in America than in Britain. Most of it is not even available in this country except on import from the States. One problem is produced by the shape of the British market. Women’s horror does not conform to the rather limited definition of horror in Britain, and is often excluded from the image of women’s writing perpetuated by feminist publishing houses and critics. Women’s Press have begun to publish some women’s horror writers. Lisa Tuttle has produced a collection of horror written by women, Skin of the Soul (1990), and they have also released Melanie Tern’s Blood Moon (1992) and Suzy McKee Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry (1980). But even these books are hard to find. They are often unavailable in either the horror or women’s fiction sections of bookshops. In fact, assumptions about the horror genre often lead publishers and bookshops to reclassify women’s horror as either Gothic romance, dark fantasy, or thriller fiction. As Lisa Tuttle has argued: ‘It has almost become a circular self-fulfilling argument: horror is written by men, so if it’s written by women, it isn’t horror.’[53] But if, as a result, men seem to dominate the field of horror novels, the situation in the magazines is quite different. As the horror writer Kathryn Ptacek has claimed in relation to horror fiction, ‘when it comes to the short story, women write and publish as regularly as men.’[54]

The forms of women’s horror are as various as those of male horror writing, but there are certain specific tendencies which can be discerned within them. One of these is a particular fascination with the figure of the vampire, a horror monster that has largely vanished from male writing. But even within this area, there is immense variety. The most popular of these writers is Anne Rice, whose vampire novels, ‘the Vampire Chronicles’—Interview with the Vampire (1976), The Vampire Lestat (1985), and Queen of the Damned (1988)—are some of the few examples of women’s horror to have gained mainstream popular success outside of cult readerships. Their main characters are usually male vampires, but they are presented as sympathetic and attractive figures whose narratives run parallel to the course of human history. These novels have become particularly popular within the gay community,[55] though their relation to women’s fiction is more ambiguous. They do share many features with the historical romance, such as a profound fascination with the details of their romanticized and exotic historical situations, and with different forms of desire. These forms of desire are not primarily sexual, though they may have a sexual aspect, but are often a desire to overcome a feeling of isolation and vulnerability through a close emotional bond with another, and in this way, they have much in common with the dynamics of the romance.

Suzy McKee Charnas’s novel, The Vampire Tapestry,[56] is also about a male vampire, though he is very different from Rice’s vampires. First, he is a lone vampire and is not related to a larger vampire community. Second, the novel is set in the present and gives few details of his existence in previous periods of history. Finally, the novel’s attitude to him is much more ambiguous. He is not a particularly romantic figure. He views humans as cattle, and preys upon them in unpleasant ways. In Rice’s novels, there is a romantic and appealingly sexual aspect to the vampires’ acts, but in Charnas’s novel, the vampire’s attacks are brutal violations, and are likened to sexual assaults such as rape. The vampire does become a progressively sympathetic figure, but only as he himself is victimized by a group of Satanists who encage and abuse him. During this period, he begins to develop his first positive relationships with humans. He is befriended by young boy who helps him, and this friendship is the start of a process which begins to transform him. As he begins to interact with humans, his perception of himself and his actions gradually changes. The two significant characters in this process are a female psychiatrist with whom he has his first sexual encounter with a human, and a male Satanist who wants to sacrifice the vampire in the belief that this act will give him immense power. These two figures become the positive and negative figures within the book. It is by comparing himself to them that the vampire examines himself. One teaches him the value of interaction, while the other represents the evils of power and victimization.

Nancy Collins’s vampire novels differ in various ways, though they are linked by narrative details and figures, particularly the figure of ‘Sir Morgan’. Her first and third novels, Sunglasses After Dark (1989) and In the Blood (1992), are centred on a female vampire, Sonja Blue, who is a complex and relatively sympathetic figure. Her second novel, Tempter (1990), on the other hand, concerns a male vampire—the tempter of the title—who is thoroughly depraved and demonic. In this second novel in particular, the use of the vampire raises issues of gender and race. The vampire was once human, and is the product of a depraved and exploitative family background. Cursed by the slaves whose labour built the family’s empire, the empire and the family collapse, and the vampire—their last representative—is destroyed by two females who represent those he has exploited. One is the reincarnation of the wife whom he abused, and the other of his daughter. As a slave owner, he had raped and abused a slave who was his wife’s maid and companion before selling her to a whorehouse to break the bond between her and his wife. His daughter was a product of that rape.

The larger part of the novel does not take place in the Slave South, however, but in contemporary New Orleans where the vampire tries to reassert his dominance. The women who are the reincarnations of his wife and daughter know nothing of their history—one is a young yuppie, and the other is a member of the city’s poor black populatio—and the story is at least as much about the way in which they discover their power as it is about the vampire. In fact, it is the dilemmas of the young yuppie, Charlie, which are the major focus of the novel, and her character makes it particularly clear that in this novel the threat is not merely external but internal too. Not only is the main feature of the vampire that he is a tempter or trickster who compels people to perform his will by playing upon their own anxieties and desires, but Charlie is a woman who is constantly attracted to men who abuse her. This problem is related to her previous incarnation, Eugenie, whose romantic attachment to her abusive husband resulted in her own death. Both incarnations have internalized male power to such an extent that they have actually learned to desire their own degradation. Charlie’s situation also highlights the fact that the problems of male power are not restricted to males of the Slave South, but also a feature of contemporary America. As a result, Charlie’s story is not just a confrontation with the vampire, but with her own self-destructive sexuality. In the end, she not only destroys the vampire, but also breaks out of the cycle of abusive relationships which have dominated her past. The victory is not total though. The threat of ‘temptation’ continues, and must be constantly confronted.

These issues link Tempter with a large body of women’s horror writing which concerns the problems faced by women within the family in general, and within their relationships with men in particular. Traditionally women have been taught to subjugate their own identities to their husbands and families, and this situation leads many women to experience the family as a place of confinement. Changes in the job market, and the development of feminism since the 1960s, have changed this situation to some extent. Women are now encouraged to realize their own potential, and develop social roles outside the domestic sphere of the family home. These developments do not mean that traditional social roles have vanished though, and frequently women find that a conflict develops between the demands of their traditional social roles, and their newly acquired expectations. Their newfound independence can often conflict with the demands and expectations of families and lovers. Consequently, while the family can still be seen as a realm of restriction and confinement, independence can also be feared as a form of insecurity and isolation.

It is this kind of dilemma which concerns Lisa Tuttle in her novel, Familiar Spirit (1983). It concerns a young woman, Sarah, who feels trapped in her relationship with her lover, Brian. In this case though, it is not Brian himself who is the problem. Brian is anything but a domineering male. Instead, the problem is inside Sarah’s own personality itself. She finds she cannot help subjugating herself to Brian, and she fears her feelings of emotional and sexual dependency upon him. When she leaves Brian things do not improve though. She feels vulnerable and isolated, and these feelings are made worse when Brian starts seeing someone else almost immediately after Sarah has left him. Suddenly, she feels abandoned and betrayed. Like Charlie in Collins’s Tempter, Sarah has internalized the paradigms of male power. She cannot help subordinating herself to a man within a relationship, and she feels worthless when she is outside a relationship. These issues of internalized male authority are also dealt with through the novel’s horror elements. When Sarah leaves Brian, she rents a house which is possessed by a male spirit, Jade. Much of the book is about Jade’s fight to subjugate her, and to take possession of her. Not only does this situation highlight the instability of identity through a concentration on consciousness, but also through her relationship to her own body. As Jade possesses her, she becomes a mere spectator in relation to it. She watches her body act without any control over its actions. It becomes alien to her.

This concern with the alienation of women from their own bodies is common to a number of Lisa Tuttle’s stories, and those of other women horror writers. In ‘Bug House’ (published in Lisa Tuttle, Nest of Nightmares, 1986), for example, the implications are made overt through an association with issues of rape and childbearing. Women’s bodies are frequently defined as either the property of others, or as objects which exist for the gratification of males or children. This attitude towards women’s bodies is common in many aspects of contemporary culture, but it is deeply enshrined in the ideology of the family. In the family, the wife is usually defined as the figure who exists to look after the husband and children, and biologically to reproduce the male line. In ‘Bug House’, a young women is raped by a man who impregnates her with his seed. This act has two effects. First, it converts her into a host for the insects which will issue from his seed, feed upon her body as they grow, and eventually kill her as they hatch. Second, it renders her body incapable of independent movement. She cannot even feel it. Her body ceases to be her own in any meaningful sense, but becomes something strange and alien which confines her, and which she can only experience as a spectator.

These issues are dealt with in other ways by other women writers. In Kit Reed’s ‘Baby’ (published in Kathryn Ptacek, ed., Women of Darkness, 1988), a child is presented as a vampire-like creature which needs to be constantly fed, and these needs not only come to dominate the female character in the story, but also threatens to destroy her. In Melanie Tern’s ‘Lightening Rod’ (published in Skin of the Soul, 1990), a woman’s body is literally scarred by the tensions in her family. She is a wife and mother who tries to protect her family from pain by absorbing the pain into herself. This role becomes so central to her sense of identity that she cannot bear the idea of her daughter taking over this role from her.

In fact, within these narratives, it is women’s investment in their positions of subjugation and subordination which is their most disturbing feature. Frequently, the leading female finally resigns herself to the forces that threaten to oppress her, and surrenders to those forces. The ultimate horror, within this fiction, is that male power may be so pervasive that these female characters not only desire their subordination, but have lost their power to resist it as a consequence.

6. Conclusion

Horror is usually discussed as a conservative, dangerous and rather abhorrent genre of popular fiction. In response, this brief study has examined its various radical aspects and potentials. The claim most often directed against horror is that it is somehow ‘sick’; that its preoccupation with violence and sexuality are excessive and politically reprehensible. As has been pointed out, one of the ironies of this situation are the startling similarities between left-wing and right-wing critics of the genre. It is continually claimed that horror causes antisocial or aggressive behaviour usually directed against women. The genre is supposed to revolve around ‘violence against women’ and is said to both satisfy and encourage ‘unhealthy’, sadistic attitudes within the audience. If women are seen as the primary victims in horror, it is also claimed that the monstrous is also directly associated with female sexuality and reproductive capabilities. The genre is supposed to encourage negative images of women in two ways: by presenting their degradation as both exciting and pleasurable; and by presenting women as ‘abnormal’, frightening and monstrous. Women are supposedly presented as both the victims (who are not only responsible for their fate, but also enjoy it), and as the monster; that which must be contained or repressed.

This study has challenged such responses in two main ways. First, it has contested the claim that any genre has such a fixed and unitary political position. It is certainly true that certain books and films may exhibit the feature criticized above, but genres develop historically according to a process of debate and struggle. They are used and appropriated by different groups with different political interests. As a result, their concerns will not only change and develop, but different films from any particular period will take different position with regard to any specific issues or problems. Second, it is perhaps even more important to stress that those attacking the genre usually rely on highly simplistic and even inaccurate theories about the ‘effects’ of texts upon their audiences. Such positions present these ‘effects’ in direct and almost mechanical terms, and pay almost no attention to the conditions within which the consumption of texts take place. As many studies have shown, the process of consumption is far more complex than the ‘effects’ tradition has acknowledged.

Rather than presenting the genre as a unitary object with a fixed structure or system of structuration, the present study has therefore concentrated on the different ways in which it has developed in America since 1951. It has discussed the ways in which it has dealt with the process of rationalization, or the development of rational control; its critique of American institutions, particularly the family and the military; and its questioning of concepts of ‘normality’. In the process, it has also shown how changing modes of social organization have created a crisis of identity in relation to both our sense of ourselves as conscious beings, and the integrity of our bodies. While these issues are frequently related to issues of gender and sexuality, the study has examined the ways in which horror texts have often questioned forms of male power, and so given greater and greater centrality to female characters, particularly in the role of the hero. It is for this reason that horror has not only been such an important and enduring area of women’s writing in general, but for radical women writers in particular.

It would be wrong to simply reverse the position of critics of the genre by claiming that horror is not a conservative genre, but a radical one. None the less, its concern with issues of power and victimization has meant that it has always had a strong tendency towards radicalism. But radicalism itself, like the genre, is not a fixed position: what is radical in one period many appear conservative in the next. It is constantly developing and changing, as will the horror genre, at least in the foreseeable future.

7. Bibliography

There are a variety of general books on horror many of which contain material on American horror in the post-war period. One useful resource is The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural(Viking Penguin, 1986), which is edited by Jack Sullivan. It contains sections on a variety, of books, films, authors and directors, as well as essays on various aspects of the genre. Also useful is David Punter’s The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day(Longmans, 1980), which mainly concentrates on canonical literature and dissociates itself from the term ‘horror’ through the use of the more literary and legitimate term ‘gothic’ . It has a good chapter on the horror film, and contains other useful material. James Twitchell’s Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror(Oxford University Press, 1985) is more focussed on popular forms of horror, but tends to be rather reductive, interpreting them in terms of the three classic monsters of the 19th century: the vampire, the werewolf, and Frankenstein’s monster. More recently, there have been two general studies of the genre—Noel Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror: Or Paradoxes of the Heart(Routledge, 1990) and Joseph Grixti’s The Terrors of Uncertainty: The Cultural Contexts of Horror Fiction (Routledge, 1989), both highly disappointing. Carroll’s book is repetitive, and adds little to the study of the genre. Grixti is not very concerned with the study of actual texts, and is somewhat unconvincing when he is. Grixti’s major contribution is that he provides an introduction to the various different studies of the ‘effects’ of horror fiction. One of the best, and certainly one of the most enjoyable introductions to the genre is Stephen King’s Danse Macabre(Futura, 1982). While it is not always entirely convincing, it is certainly the most readable introduction available. My own introduction, Horror (Batsford, 1992) is also available.

There are a number of different books on the horror film many of which are useful. R. H. W. Dillard’s Horror Films (Monarch 1976), Ivan Butler’s Horror in the Cinema (Warner, 1970) and Carlos Clarens’s An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (Putnam, 1967) are all important, though they mainly concentrate on the period prior to 1970s. Charles Derry’s Dark Dreams: A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film (Barnes, 1977) makes more space for the period after 1960, but for a truly comprehensive study of contemporary films one should consult Kim Newman’s excellent book, Nightmare Movies: A Critical History of the Horror Movie From 1968 (Bloomsbury, 1988).

These earlier books are good introductions to general trends, but they are not primarily concerned with a theoretical analysis of the genre. Andrew Tudor does a very good job of combining these two approaches in his book, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie (Blackwells, 1989), and more straightforwardly theoretical approaches can be found in Pam Cook’s The Cinema Book (BFI, 1985); Stephen Neale, Genre (BFI, 1980); and Barbara Creed, The Monstrous­ Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1993). A particularly useful and challenging study is Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (London: BFI, 1992). This is an excellent and important book.

Theoretical discussions of specific films, themes and subgenres can also be found in a variety of collections, such as James Donald, Fantasy and the Cinema (BFI, 1989), Gregory A. Waller, American Horror: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film (University of Illinois Press, 1987), Barry K. Grant, ed., Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film (Scarecrow, 1984), and Robin Wood and Richard Lippe, eds., American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film (Festival of Festivals, 1979). Robin Wood’s, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (Columbia University Press, 1986) also includes important essays.

There are also several useful studies of specific areas. For example, Peter Biskind’s Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (Pluto, 1983) has several good studies of 1950s horror films, and there is a considerable amount of work on body/horror. Piers Handling’s The Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg (General, 1983) is a good collection, and Tania Modleski’s ‘The Terrors of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern Theory’ (in Tania Modleski, ed., Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Culture, Indiana University Press, 1986) also discusses the work of David Cronenberg. Barbara Creed’s ‘From Here to Modernity: Feminism and Postmodernism’ (in Screen, Vo1.28, No.2, 1987) discusses a variety of body/horror texts, including James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd’s Aliens. Peter Boss’s ‘Vile Bodies and Bad Medicine’ (Screen Vo1.27, No. 1, 1986, pp.14-22) also contains a useful discussion of body/horror.

A wealth of material exists on the dasher film including Kim Newman’s ‘Time After Time’ (in Fear, No. 12, 1989), Stephen Neale’s ‘Halloween: Suspense, Aggression and the Look’ (in Barry K. Grant, ed., Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, Scarecrow, 1984), Vera Dika’s, ‘The Stalker Film, 1978-1981’ (in Gregory A. Waller, ed., American Horror: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, University of Illinois Press, 1987), and most significant of all, Carol J. Clover’s ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film’ (in James Donald, ed., Fantasy and the Cinema, BFI, 1986). Finally, Constance Penley discusses The Terminator in her essay, ‘Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia’ (in James Donald, ed., Fantasy and the Cinema, BFI, 1989). It is also worth consulting The Monthly Film Bulletin and Sight and Sound for discussions of individual films. It is also worth looking out for an edition of The Velvet Light Trap, which is dedicated to the horror film and includes my long essay on The Terminator, ‘Modernity and Subjectivity in The Terminator: The Machine as Monster in Contemporary American Culture’.

There is far less work on popular horror literature. Everett Franklin Bleiler’s Supernatural Fiction Writers, Vols. I & II (Scribners, 1982) contains useful discussions of some of the main writers in the field, as does Darrell Schweitzer’s Discovering Modern Horror Fiction, Vols. I & II (Starmont 1985). Brian Docherty, American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King, (Macmillan, 1990) contains some very good individual essays. Douglas E. Winter’s Faces of Fear: Encounter with the Creators of Modern Horror (Pan, 1990) is a fairly useful, though uncritical, collection of interviews, but there are almost no women writers mentioned within it. As a remedy to this absence, it is worth consulting Kathryn Ptacek’s ‘Introduction’ to her collection Women of Darkness (Tor, 1988), and Lisa Tuttle’s ‘Introduction’ to her own collection, Skin of the Soul, (Women’s Press, 1990).

8. Notes

1. Martin Barker, A Haunt of Fears: The Strange Case of the British Horror Comics Campaign, Pluto, 1984. Back
2. Martin Barker, ed., The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Media, Pluto, 1984. Back
3. For studies of pornography which are exceptions to this general tendency, see Linda Williams, Hard-Core: Power; Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible, Pandora, 1990; and Andrew Ross, ‘The Popularity of Pornography’, in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, Routledge, 1989. Back
4. See, for example, Ivan Butler, Horror in the Cinema, Warner, 1970; and R. H. W. Dillard, Horror Films, Monarch, 1976. Back
5. See, for example, on mass culture theory, Dwight MacDonald, ‘Masscult and Midcult’, in Against the American Grain, Victor Gollancz, 1963; and on post-structuralism, Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, Blackwells, 1983; Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics, Methuen, 1977; Pam Cook, The Cinema Book, BFI, 1985; Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake, Film Theory: An Introduction, Manchester University Press, 1988; and Stephen Neale, Genre, BFI, 1980. Back
6. Stephen Neale, Genre, BFI, 1980, p.61. Back
7. Barbara Creed, ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection’, in James Donald, ed., Fantasy and the Cinema, BFI, 1989. Back
8. Clare Hanson, ‘Stephen King: Powers of Horror’, in Brian Docherty, ed., American Horror- Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King, Macmillan, 1990, p.152. Back
9. See, for example, Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford, 1977; Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture, Verso, 1980; Raymond Williams, Culture, Fontana, 1981; Stuart Hall, ‘Deconstructing the Popular’, in Raphael Samuel, ed., People’s History and Socialist Theory, Routledge, 1981; David Money, ‘Changing Paradigms in Audience Studies’, in Ellen Seiter et al., eds., Remote Control: Television, Audiences and Cultural Power, Routledge, 1989; David Money, The Nationwide Audience: Structure and Decoding, BFI, 1980; David Money, Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure, Comedia, 1986; Mark Jancovich, ‘David Money and Audience Studies’, in Martin Barker and Anne Beezer, eds., Reading into Cultural Studies, Routledge, 1992; and for an account of Cultural Studies in America, see Patrick Brantlinger, Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America, Routledge, 1990. Back
10. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Lawrence and Wishart, 1971. Back
11. V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Seminar, 1973. Back
12. Ibid., p.23. Back
13. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trs. Richard Nice, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984; and Raymond Williams and Nicholas Garnham, ‘Pierre Bourdieu and the Sociology of Culture: An Introduction’, in Richard Collins et al., eds., Media, Culture and Society, Sage, 1986. Back
14. See, for example, Mark Jancovich, Horror, Batsford, 1992. Back
15. See, for example, Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, Columbia, 1986; and Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties, Pluto, 1983. Back
16. See, for example, David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Blackwells, 1989. Back
17. See for example, Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, Collier-Macmillan, 1965; The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, Heinemann, 1974. Back
18. See C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite: On the Ruling Groups in the United States, Oxford, 1956; Dwight MacDonald, ‘Masscult and Midcult’, in Against the American Grain, op. cit.; Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Beacon, 1964. Back
19. Georg Lukacs, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, Merlin, 1971, p.89. Back
20. Jack Finney, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, Sphere, 1978, p.39. Back
21. See Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing. Back
22. See Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing. Back
23. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. Back
24. Barbara Creed, ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine’. Back
25. Judie Newman, ‘Shirley Jackson and the Reproduction of Mothering: The Haunting of Hill House’, in Brian Docherty, American Horror Fiction. Back
26. Dwight MacDonald, ‘Masscult and Midcult’. Back
27. Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie, Blackwells, 1989. Back
28. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. Back
29. Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain, Dell, 1969, p.291. Back
30. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. Back
31. Stephen King, Danse Macabre, Futura, 1982, p.449. Back
32. Ibid., p.451. Back
33. Robin Wood, ‘David Cronenberg: A Dissenting View’, in Piers Handling, ed., The Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg, General, 1983. Back
34. Barbara Creed, ‘From Here to Modernity’, in Screen, Vol. 28, No.2, 1987, pp.57. Back
35. Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self. Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, W. W. Norton, 1979, p.42. See also Peter Boss, ‘Vile Bodies and Bad Medicine’, Screen, Vo1.27, No. 1, 1986. Back
36. See, for example, Annette Kuhn, Alien Zone, Verso, 1990; and James Donald, ed., Fantasy and the Cinema. Back
37. Barbara Creed, ‘From Here to Modernity’. Back
38. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. Back
39. Robin Wood, Ibid.; Kim Newman, ‘Time After Time’ in Fear No.12 1989. Back
40. Vera Dika, ‘The Stalker Film, 1978-81’, in Gregory A. Waller, ed., American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, University of Illinois Press, 1987. Back
41. See, Robin Wood, Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan; and Stephen Neale, ‘Halloween: Suspense, Aggression and the Look’, in Barry K. Grant, ed., Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, Scarecrow, 1984. Back
42. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, p.197. Back
43. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan; and Kim Newman, ‘Time After Time’. Back
44. Carol J. Clover, ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film’, in James Donald, ed., Fantasy aced the Cinema, p.113. Back
45. Vera Dika, ‘The Stalker Film, 1978-81’. Back
46. Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists, p.202. Back
47. Ibid., p.203. Back
48. Carol J. Clover, ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film’, pp.124-25. Back
49. Ibid., p.126. Back
50. Constance Penley, ‘Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia’, in James Donald, ed., Fantasy and the Cinema, BFI, 1989, p.199. Back
51. Ibid. Back
52. Barbara Creed, ‘From Here to Modernity’. Back
53. Lisa Tuttle, ‘Introduction’, in Skin of the Soul, Women’s Press, 1990, p.3. Back
54. Kathryn Ptacek, ‘Introduction’, in Women of Darkness, Tor, 1988, p.ix. Back
55. For a discussion of Anne Rice, see Richard Dyer, ‘Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism’, in Susannah Radstone, ed., Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender, and Popular Fiction, Lawrance and Wishart, 1988. Back
56. Anne Cranny-Francis, ‘De-Fanging the Vampire: S. M. Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry as Subversive Horror Fiction’, in Brian Docherty, American Horror Fiction. Back

Top of the Page

BAAS Pamphlet No. 27 (First Published 1994)

ISBN: 1 85331 148 0

1. Women Travellers in Europe
2. Perceptive Tourists: Hawthorne, Stowe and Alcott
   i. Sophia Hawthorneii. Harriet Beecher Stoweiii. Louisa May Alcott
3. Disciples of the Foreign: Fuller and Wharton
   i. Margaret Fullerii. Edith Wharton
4. Guide to Further Reading
5. Notes

British Association for American Studies All rights reserved. No part of this pamphlet may he reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. The publication of a pamphlet by the British Association for American Studies does not necessarily imply the Association’s official approbation of the opinions expressed therein.

1. Women Travellers in Europe

In 1878, Fanny Kemble (Butler), by now a well-seasoned Transatlantic traveller, remarked:

‘A trip’, as it is now called, to Europe or America, is one of the commonest of experiences … But when I first went to America [in 1832], steam had not shortened the passage of that formidable barrier between world and world … Few men, and hardly any women, undertook it as a mere matter of pleasure or curiosity.[1]

As she indicates, passage between the New and Old Worlds increased dramatically through the nineteenth century—it has been estimated that annual numbers of visitors grew from a few thousand from either side of the Atlantic at the beginning of the century to nearly a hundred thousand at the end. But it was still relatively unusual for women to make the journey, especially in the early part of the period. It was even more unusual for them to travel alone. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sophia Hawthorne, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Julia Ward Howe were all accompanied by their husbands; Emma Willard took her children with her; Edith Wharton, having been initially introduced to Europe under the parental wing, subsequently travelled there with Teddy Wharton or close friends. Unmarried women like Louisa May Alcott and Margaret Fuller could go only when invited to join friends as ‘companions’.

The restrictions of propriety here were compounded by the nature of the venture itself. Practical problems—a matter of concern to all Transatlantic voyagers at this time—were notably acute for women. First, there were the perils and tribulations of the crossing. Although the introduction of steam on the Transatlantic route in 1838 revolutionized travel between Britain and the United States by reducing the length of the passage from about five weeks to about ten days, the trip could still be fairly gruelling, especially for women of delicate constitutions. Not all were as tough as Harriet Martineau who, sailing to the States in 1834, had herself lashed to a binnacle on deck during a violent storm in order to enjoy the dramatic scene. Alcott, who sailed on the first screw mail packet of the Cunard line in July 1865, a nine-day journey, remarks that she was “not very sick, but uncomfortable all the way … I was heartily glad to set my feet on the solid earth, and thought I’d never go to sea again”.[2]

Stowe admits wryly that visions of a sea voyage “as the fulfilment of all our dreams of poetry and romance, the realization of our highest conceptions of free, joyous existence”[3] soon get sharply punctured by actuality. Women also felt particularly keenly the lack of privacy on board: even the Ladles’ Cabin or a shared berth with another of the same sex did not preclude the annoyance of uncongenial company. Danger was always incipient, too, especially in winter; Fuller’s fears and premonitions of disaster, even though she had the shortest ever passage of just under eleven days on the S.S.Cambria in 1846, proved tragically justified on her return journey four years later, when she, her husband, and their baby son were drowned off Long Island, New York.

On arrival at her destination the female traveller’s troubles were by no means over. Most American tourists went to England first, and though they encountered few problems here, things could get harder when they moved on to the Continent. Thomas Cook’s European tours did not start until the 1870s, so before this guides and couriers had to be individually arranged for dealing with transportation, accommodation, routing, finances, and translation of unknown foreign tongues. All this was much more difficult for a woman on her own, particularly in the remoter regions of Europe. Bandits were a dying species in mid­century Italy (much to the disappointment of some romantically­minded female tourists), but other Continental hazards included crossing the Alps, particularly via the treacherous Simplon and Mont Cenis passes, and problems with customs officials, quite apart from the possibility of being caught up in political unrest. Unaccompanied females in Europe, too, were still exposed to the threat of molestation—unwelcome attentions from fellow passengers, for example—in contrast to the proven situation in the States where a woman travelling on her own was perfectly safe.

Despite all these difficulties and trials, the eagerness of nineteenth-century American women travellers to undertake the ‘trip’ across the Atlantic—a project that had often been dreamed about for years before—embodies a common national response. For Americans, the Old World was the goal of longings and anticipations, a place of pre-existent familiarity, known through literature and art, and constructed in advance through the romantic imagination which came prepared to discover what it had already formulated and often idealised. It was both the site of forgotten origins and a land of magic and mystery, representing something which the States could never replicate. As Fuller expresses it, “our position toward Europe, as to literature and the arts, is still that of a colony, and one feels the same joy here that is experienced by the colonist in returning to the parent home”.[4]

For the American visitor, ‘Europe’ was not a monolithic sphere, and Britain and the Continent had distinctive meanings. The former elicited feelings both of belonging and estrangement; to most Americans, Britain was “our old home” (significantly, a large proportion of nineteenth-century tourists were from the Eastern seaboard, descendants of the original colonists), embodying all the tensions and ambiguities inherent in the mother-child relationship. It, too, could be preconceptualised through the aesthetic imagination—in this case, the literary rather than the visual—but it also signified institutions and values which the New World had ostensibly eschewed and which to confront directly could be disturbing: class hierarchies, a powerful established church, an economically divisive social system. National as well as personal self-definition was challenged here, even while the pull was irresistible. Cecilia Beaux, an American painter who studied in Paris, defines this almost unwilled attraction, in describing her first visit to England at the turn of the century:

Upon the dual origin [French and English] which was the birthright Nature had awarded me, France had absorbed and fixed a pursuing lover, but one who remembered the keen onset of an unexpected emotion felt on her approach during a night of fog on her other parent shore. Hidden by night, and a heavy veil besides, the name if not the sight of England had sounded—one of those oracular messages straight from the sources of destiny that pierce and settle in the heart and are never withdrawn from it …
[Later] I knew myself to be a plant whose roots were expanding in a deep warm soil, its own, but never felt before.[5]

Continental Europe, attracting the New World traveller mainly from an aesthetic viewpoint, could be apprehended more easily: its seductive beauties, though awakening the senses and enlarging horizons, offered gratification without commitment, and did not necessarily call up questions of personal heritage and identity. This is not to say that all its facets could be easily accommodated. Culturally, exposure to art which often expressed a more sensual and passionate civilization than that of the homeland, could be difficult for the Protestant mind to deal with. Socially, a more rigid class system with its accompanying gap between rich and poor was both fascinating and disturbing to those brought up on avowedly democratic principles. Politically, for those Americans who were enough concerned (and many, as Fuller complains, seem not to have been), the revolutionary movements of mid and later nineteenth-century Europe invited a new look at the meaning and operation of republicanism. All these potentially disturbing encounters, though, could also provide a psychological re-charging, an experience of new selfhood and new parameters of identity.

An important question for this study is the extent to which the European experience was of particular relevance to women travellers. Did Europe ‘speak’ in any specific manner to the female American consciousness? All release from the normality of the home environment and exposure to a different world which travel enables has a special significance for women, and this was especially true in the nineteenth century when the public/private, active/passive dualities of their lives were so all-encompassing. It is notable, for example, that several of these travellers, already irked by the restrictions of domestic and family duties, express the wish that they had been born men and thus able to enjoy the freedom which maleness confers. More specifically, American women travellers responded to Europe in certain gender-characteristic ways. If, culturally and socially, exposure to an older and more sensually-oriented civilisation was liberating, it was also deeply disturbing for those accustomed to think of themselves as guardians of morality and embodiments of self-sacrifice and restraint. Their reactions to the richness of European art, including the portrayals of their own sex, are especially revealing in their often uneasy juxtaposition of emotional engagement and moralising judgment. At the same time, they often display an admirable independence of spirit, refusing to accept (male) authorized opinion or to validate an aesthetic which traditionally had excluded female expression.

Gender is also a factor in the particular objects of observation. As might be expected, the women pay close attention to domestic concerns and aspects of social or institutional life relevant to their sex. Sometimes this is related to the prime purpose of the visit. Dorothea Dix, who went to Europe between 1854 and 1857 to investigate asylums, for instance, took special note of how women were treated in them. Emma Willard, founder of the Troy Female Seminary and a pioneer in women’s education, visited Europe in 1830 partly to investigate English girls’ schools and to talk to leading English educational reformers so as to see what was being done for her own sex on the other side of the Atlantic. Lucretia Mott and Harriet Beecher Stowe, both deeply involved in the abolition movement, lectured widely throughout Britain to promote their campaign, and in so doing ascertained attitudes not only towards the slaves but also towards themselves as women acting prominently in the public sphere normally prioritised by men. In a number of cases, too, there was a strong and sympathetic interest in the plight of prostitutes and their treatment by a male-centred value system.

Other American women whose visit to Europe was less directly gender or ideologically related, were aroused by current events which drew them into new roles. The revolutionary activity occurring throughout the Continent in the mid-1840s and then again in Italy at the end of the next decade, with its emphasis on freedom from patriarchal tyranny, may have reminded them of their own subordinate and depressed status and encouraged their active engagement in the protests: many foreign women, including Americans, in Florence and other Italian cities in the late 1850s, for instance, worked in various ways to help Garibaldi and his supporters. The most well-known activist on behalf of Italian independence is of course Margaret Fuller, who became deeply involved in the Roman uprisings of 1848-9. Nearly sixty years later, Edith Wharton’s similarly ardent championship of French resistance to German hostilities parallels her own efforts to free herself from the sexual and social restraints of her homeland, so inimical to her personal and creative expansion.

Physically and psychologically, American women travellers also discovered in Europe new possibilities for self-expansion. Often subjected to hardships and difficult conditions with which they were unacquainted at home, they showed unexpected resilience and fortitude, prepared to overlook discomforts in their enthusiasm for the foreign. They also frequently experienced a heightened sense of individuality, as psychically—and sexually, in the case of Fuller—European travel awakened in them an awareness of a new sphere promising greater self-fulfilment. But exposure to the foreign could be disorienting as well: for women, whose sense of nationality is perhaps always more equivocal and precarious than men’s, leaving the homeland could be both liberating and threatening. This ambiguity is articulated clearly by Julia Ward Howe’s niece, Margaret Chanter, brought up in Rome where her mother’s first husband, Thomas Crawford, had been one of the well-known ex-patriot sculptors living in the city. She expresses the feelings of alienation as well as of enrichment which result from becoming a semi-permanent Old World resident:

A childhood and youth passed happily in Rome had quite unfitted me for appreciating the merits of America; I saw the United States with foreign and unfriendly eyes. This is common to all or nearly all children of American parents brought up in Europe … their own country will never be quite their home, they will be guests and strangers, if eventually they come to live in it.[6]

In her recognition of the dangers as well as the blessings of a selfhood created and maintained from living in “the richer intellectual soil of Europe”,[7] Chanter reminds us of that other “wretched exotic”,[8] Edith Wharton, who was to become her close friend. Both women were in some ways bi-national beings, belonging nowhere and with no real patriotic allegiances—“the characteristic of what we used to call ‘the denatured American’”.[9] If their sense of alienation was acuter than most visitors’, it nevertheless represents similar feelings of unease underlying almost all American response to Europe.

In discussing these women travellers, claims of gender distinctiveness in response and representation can only be tentative. In some cases, the significance of gender is subsumed by that of genre. Commentaries such as Hawthorne’s (letters subsequently organised into publishable form), Fuller’s (pieces commissioned for newspaper reproduction) or Wharton’s (carefully written travel texts designed to inform as well as entertain) are consciously entering an essentially male literary arena and are therefore to some extent assuming a voice of masculine authenticity. Conversely, when the foreign experiences are re-presented in the peculiarly female modes of diaries and journals (and when these have escaped destructive editing) we can justifiably look for a more feminine voice, expressing itself in the sphere of private communication rather than of public statement. The evidence of ‘difference’ in women’s travel writing is in itself problematic, as recent critics in this area have shown.[10] Moreover, the authors are often speaking as much as travellers as women, and they may have difficulty in negotiating between the two modes. Nevertheless, their works not only make an important contribution to the body of nineteenth-century Anglo-American travel literature, but they do give another, female, dimension to our knowledge of Transatlantic attitudes in this period, a dimension which until recently has largely been ignored.

In treating the topic of American female travellers, this study focuses primarily on the subjects and methods of textual representation. While the women themselves are historically important, the main purpose is to examine what and how they wrote about their European experiences. For this reason, background and biographical material has been kept to a minimum; additional information can be found in the works cited in the guide to further reading. They have been grouped according to the general nature of their response to Europe. The first three, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Alcott, are in many respects representative mid-century American tourists, who regarded Europe essentially as a cultural and environmental treasure-house with whose riches they had long hoped to become acquainted. Sharing similar backgrounds (all were New Englanders), they reacted to the Old World largely along lines laid down by American travellers before them, although at the same time they articulate their own individuality in their works. The other pair, Fuller and Wharton, although historically half a century apart, are representative of those American visitors who not only wanted to enjoy the riches of Europe but who also sought immersion in its social and political life. For them, encountering the Old World became an ideological and spiritual commitment, involving active engagement. It also involved a process of re-identification, challenging their sense of nationality and selfhood and leading them to present this new personality in their texts.

2. Perceptive Tourists

i. Sophia Hawthorne

Sophia Hawthorne in many ways represents the typical mid-nineteenth century American tourist, following well-trodden paths and predictable in her responses. One difference, of course, is that she was for some time a temporary European resident rather than simply a traveller or vacationer. She and her children accompanied Nathaniel across the Atlantic when he was appointed by Franklin Pierce to the consulship at Liverpool in 1853, and for four years the family lived in England, in Liverpool and then in Leamington. Mrs Hawthorne and her two daughters spent the winter of 1855-6 in Lisbon; in January 1858, they all left for an extended Continental tour covering France, Switzerland and Italy and including a year’s residence in Rome and Florence. They returned to England for one more year, before going back to the States in 1860. Her observations on her foreign experiences, Notes in England and Italy (1869), deal with a trip made to northern England and Scotland in the summer of 1857, and the long Continental visit begun the following year. Narrating an itinerary laid down by generations of American travellers before her, she makes her own contribution to a body of literature to which her husband, among many others, had already added. But whereas his Our Old Home (1863) and his English, French, and Italian Notebooks are relatively well-known, her work, modestly disclaimed in her Preface as never intended for publication “but [written] solely for my own reference, and for a means of recalling to my friends what had especially interested me abroad”,[11] has fallen into almost total obscurity. And yet she is often a more enthusiastic and engaged observer than Hawthorne himself; her eye for social oddities and absurdity—the “Oriental languor”[12] of English cricketers, for instance—and her highly personal response to European art contrast with his laconic, frequently uneasy, reaction to foreign ‘difference’.

Sophia Hawthorne was admirably equipped to apprehend and comment on Europe. She grew up in a cultivated and intellectually stimulating environment, one of the Peabody family whose talents were especially notable on the female side: her mother was a schoolteacher and translator, and her two sisters both became well-known educators and philanthropists in the Boston area. Despite little formal education, she learnt Latin, Greek and Hebrew, was competent in French, German and Italian, and read widely in history. She was also an accomplished painter and sculptress, and, had it not been for ill-health, might have gone earlier to Europe to study art. With such a background, she was ready to respond eagerly to an opportunity which she regarded as the fulfilment of a life-time’s dream—as she records in her first Journal entry in Rome, she feels sheer delight in writing down “the illustrious names of what I have all my life so much desired to see!” (198)

As for so many other American visitors to Europe, anticipation and foreknowledge predisposed her to a romanticised view. For her

Every atom [of Britain] is a jewel. History and poetry transmute into precious stones every particle of its dust … noble deeds and creations of genius make it fairy-land. (189)

Even more, like almost all ‘passionate pilgrims’ to Europe, she turned to Italy as the apotheosis of her dreams, with Rome the culmination of her voyaging. After four months in the Eternal City, on the point of departure for Florence, she expresses “an extraordinary and unexpected regret at leaving Rome” (295), declaring that she would have been “almost inconsolable” had she not known that they were to return, “so potent and profound is the hold this ‘city of the soul’ has upon the mind” (296). Its immense power and classical associations, which purge it of its history of criminality and corruption, irresistibly capture her imagination, the sight of its distant towers and pinnacles on their way back from Florence representing for her a homecoming.

Hawthorne’s romanticising response reconstructs a pre-conceptualised environment in which scenery is mediated through the lens of an aesthetic idealism. Central here is the notion of the picturesque. The archetypal English village, which she found so attractive, encapsulates this visionary landscape: “clusters of ancient cottages, gathered lovingly about a pretty church, which was often a gem of beauty” (86). The intrusion of intransigent reality upon such perfection—such as some “very ugly, small, manufacturing towns” (7) near Leeds—is an affront to her visual sense. Her search for the picturesque finds its fullest satisfaction in Scotland where, once she has got used to the notion that the countryside here is not so “delicately nurtured and polished” (170) as in England, nor bears “marks of the untiring hand of man, polishing and garnishing at every point” (147), the grandeur of the romantic Highland scenery elicits some of her most rhapsodic prose:

I was content with the sublime forms without any drapery … Naked and awful they stood—Michelangelic forms, even as gods, conversing with the skies. (170)

Hawthorne’s appreciation is also dependent on literary and artistic association. The gardens round Peterborough Cathedral are like “some wonderful Arcadia” (79); Newstead Abbey is hallowed by its connections with Byron; and throughout Scotland echoes of Scott continually enrich her enjoyment of this “peculiarly enchanted” realm (181). Her apprehension of Italy’s natural glories is even more dependent on such framing. Scenery is familiarised by reference to Turner’s paintings or Byron’s poetry; at the same time, it has a fairy-tale quality, like the “dreamland” (318) of the snow-crested Apennines, or the “magical beauty” (342) of the view of Florence seen from the surrounding hills. Elsewhere, her employment of metaphors of Edenic paradise, magic, and mystery reinforce her imaginative formulation of the Old World’s otherness.

Hawthorne’s interpretation of European art and artefacts in terms of a cultural tradition lacking in the New World is common to many Americans of the time. Clinging to a past which she wishes to see preserved (she deplores the modern addition of a hunting lodge at Bolton Abbey, for instance), she seeks immersion in an earlier age of dedicated craftsmanship in which creation was an act of devotion, as evidenced by the old pews of York Minster or the frescoes in Santa Maria Novella in Florence:

[The] inspiration of the old masters was from within, a sacred, revered flame; and with it they painted love and prayer and praise and sorrow with inevitable power, however strange and hard their lines and shapes. (438)

Here, of course, Hawthorne is judging according to spiritual, as much as to aesthetic, criteria. The influence of her Puritan background and of her own deep piety can be seen in much of her art criticism. She fails to be moved by Vasari’s or Bronzino’s works because the artists were clearly not devout men, and she attacks the same evident lack of spirituality in English Pre-Raphaelite painting. Her New England nurtured sensibilities are offended by Titian’s Venuses (in contrast to the “maidenly modesty” [350] of the Venus de Medici) which she finds “positively disagreeable … nay, really indecent” (353) and proof that Titian had no acquaintance with innocence and purity. Similarly, she “thoroughly detest[s]” his portrayal of Mary Magdalen, “a very large woman, quite nude”, because of her uncompromising sensuality:

Such a woman  would be incapable of repentance. She is coarse and earthly in every fibre of her frame, and in every recess of her mind. It is a pity that such a woman should be painted so well. I have no doubt it is a portrait, and I am sorry that Titian knew such a person and contemplated her so minutely. It seems to show a depraved taste and nature. (392)

Such disapproval is related to her (predictably) equally distrustful reaction to the excesses of Roman Catholicism in Italy, a familiar attitude of Protestant visitors to the Continent.

It would, however, be wrong to suggest that Hawthorne’s responses are simply those of the well-instructed, orthodoxly receptive tourist. If on the whole she found what she expected to find, her reactions are often not only refreshingly personal but also distinctively gender-oriented. Somewhat surprisingly, she does not devote much attention to social conditions in Europe, especially the signs of domestic suffering or deprivation noted by many nineteenth-century American women visitors.[13] Some of her observations in this respect seem curiously disingenuous, as for instance her amazement that anyone could consent to live in the industrial squalor of northern England; and in Italy, she, unlike Margaret Fuller, makes no attempt to link the sufferings of the Italians under Austrian rule with those of the slaves (or women) oppressed by patriarchal tyranny at home. But in substance and quality, some of her representations do suggest a more obviously female style.

Hawthorne’s description of the pillars and vaulting of Lincoln Cathedral as “numberless fountains, each reaching a different height, full of flowers, saints, and all kind of cunning devices, crystallized in mid-air by the wand of a magician, dripping solid splendour on every side” (41) may be considered an example of this kind of discourse. So may her expression of preference for Gothic over classical architecture:

a crystallized poet,  as it were, of endless variety, of scintillating fancy—soaring in “immortal curves,” baffling geometric conclusions, setting known, established rules at defiance, wild beyond reach of recognised art, flaming like fire, glowing like flowers and rainbows, soaring like birds, struggling for freedom, like the soul, never satisfied. (83)

Emotional and unrestrained, this contrasts with the more objective and controlled language of the male-dominated travel literature of the period. In its disordered and irrational coherence, it is also suggestive of a ‘female voice’ or ecriture feminine as described by Helene Cixous—“Write! and your self-seeking text will know itself better than flesh and blood, rising, insurrectionary dough kneading itself, with sonorous, perfumed ingredients, a lively combination of flying colors and rivers plunging into the sea we feed”.[14]

Hawthorne also speaks as woman when she projects her own feelings on to the scenes or objects before her. When she looks at a quilt embroidered by Mary, Queen of Scots, she imagines the latter’s sad thoughts as she worked it. In portrayals of the Madonna she sees maternal emotions of grief or anxiety: in one of Perugino’s Pietas, Mary’s sorrow is the “grief of all the bereaved mothers since Eve … Her grief is deeper than tears now, and she asks for no sympathy and wishes to hear no word” (380). Similarly, suspending moralistic judgment, she empathises with Guido’s Beatrice Cenci as an image of hopeless desolation:

Never from any human countenance looked out such ruin of hope, joy, and life … a wild, endless despair hovers over [her] … She is a spotless lily of Eden, trailed over by a serpent and unable to understand the desecration, yet struck with a fatal blight. (213)

Not only is there suggested identification with a fallen woman here, but also covert recognition of the devastating effect on women of double sexual standards.

Hawthorne never wholly rejects the voice of national and cultural conditioning and it would be foolish to seek a highly original view of Europe in her work. But she is a sensitive as well as enthusiastic commentator, enough attuned to the spirit of place to recognise wistfully that ultimately the American visitor will always remain a stranger in the Old World:

I wish I could seize something elusive and unsatisfactory in the divine loveliness of this Italy, so as to express what I always feel when I look upon it. There is a dream-like quality in my enjoyment … It is like the ghost of a very precious reality. It is something that has been, even while it is now that I have a sense of it. (467)

For her, as for so many other Americans, this enchanting other is tantalisingly resistant to possession.

ii. Harriet Beecher Stowe

When Harriet Beecher Stowe went to Europe for the first time in 1853 she was already famous as the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a vigorous abolitionist campaigner. The trip was in fact initiated by British emancipationists who invited her and her husband to their country, during which visit the couple attended and addressed anti-slavery meetings in Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee, Leeds, and London. Travelling as a public figure in her own right, unlike Sophia Hawthorne, Stowe was feted wherever she went—often to the point of exhaustion—and was introduced to many of the equally famous figures of the day, including Lord Shaftesbury, Dickens, Thackeray, Mrs Gaskell, and Gladstone. Much of her time, naturally enough, was devoted to stirring up sympathy for her cause and she was anxious to record the progress of anti-slavery activity in Britain.[15] But she was also an eager tourist, determined to see all the requiredsights; and it is as a lively and entertaining example of nostalgic­romantic American travel writing that her account of this visit, Sunny Memories in Foreign Lands (1854) is most notable. As she explains, this was a truly ‘sunny’ visit, and she is determined to show it as such, in contrast to the frequent “illiberal criticisms”[16] made on each other’s countries by travellers from both sides of the Atlantic.

Stowe, like Sophia Hawthorne (whom she met in Europe, returning at the end of her third and last trip in June 1860on the same ship as the Hawthornes), was in many ways a typical mid-century tourist. She came from a cultivated and religious New England family which believed in female education (her sister Catherine kept a school in Hartford, Connecticut, at which Stowe was both pupil and teacher), and which promoted active Christianity (her father and brothers were ministers, and she herself married a Professor of Biblical Literature). Her upbringing encouraged her to look on the Old World as the Promised Land, a part of her heritage to which she was irresistibly drawn with “a kind of thrill and pulsation of kindred” (I,18).Her appetite for European travel was probably partly stimulated by her study of French and Italian, begun when she was seventeen; certainly it had grown into a deep longing by 1836 when, only a few months after her marriage, her husband, Calvin, went to Europe on business:

Only think of  all you expect to see: the great libraries and beautiful paintings, fine churches … My dear, I wish I were a man in your place; if I wouldn’t have a grand time![17]

When she herself was finally enabled to go, seventeen years and seven children later, her anticipation still centred on a pre­constructed ideal:

If I live till spring I shall hope to see Shakespeare’s grave and Milton’s mulberry tree, and the good land of my fathers,—old, old England! May that day come! (L&L, 178)

When this ideal became reality, Stowe responded to it according to the literary and artistic preconceptions which her early acquaintance with the works of writers such as Byron, Scott and Mme de Stael had created. Scotland, which she visited soon after her arrival in the British Isles, is, as for so many Americans, already “dear” to her from her acquaintance with Scottish ballads, “the songs of Burns” and “the enchantments of Scott” (I, 41).

Stratford, of course, is seen through the ghost of Shakespeare, while later, on the Continent, Byron brings Chillon to life and Naples “recalled to my mind so vividly Milton’s description of the infernal regions that I could not but believe that he had drawn the imagery from this source” (L&L, 231).Even while fully aware how the literary imagination reconstructs an accommodating environment—at Glamis, for example, she comments slyly that “the materials which the past gives to the novelist or poet in these old countries” turns ancient castles into “standing romances, made to the author’s hands” (I, 94)—it is a strategy of familiarisation in which she herself takes great delight.

Stowe’s enthusiasm for the picturesque and romantic aspects of landscape, natural and man-made, also echoes contemporary responses. She relishes “the wild, poetic beauty” (I, 61)of the ruins of Bothwell Castle and the way in which “the pointed arches, the clinging wreaths of ivy, the shadowy pines, and yew trees” of ruined Dryburgh, Scott’s burial place, make “the whole air … wild, and dreamlike, and picturesque” (I, 140-1).Typical, too, is her emphasis on the visionary, elusive quality of such beauty. At Heidelberg Castle, the flower-covered fragments seem “inexpressibly beautiful” and haunt her like a “strange dream of joy” (II, 314).Venice, a city which she visited on her second European trip in 1856, belies all the normal experiences of travellers, for whom the unknown rapidly becomes familiar, by remaining “all romance from beginning to end, and never ceas[ing] to seem strange and picturesque” (L&L, 231).

Stowe’s apprehension of the artistic treasures of Europe is in many ways equally predictable. She enters the “dreamland … the lotus-eater’s paradise” (II, 158) which the Paris art world opens up for her (she was too busy to go to galleries in Britain), conscious, like so many of her compatriots, of the paucity of tradition and culture in her homeland. She grasps at the riches with the voracious appetite of “one who has starved all a life, in vain imaginings of what art might be” (II, 159).Her responses are, however, like Hawthorne’s, coloured by her moral and spiritual assumptions. For her, art must draw on Nature, but only in its beautiful and elevating aspects; mere sensuousness is distasteful to her, as evidenced in her attack on Titian’s nude Venuses (“[he] did not seem able to paint innocence and purity, and apparently had no acquaintance with those states of being” [II, 389]). Similarly, she is moved by religious painting only where there is evidence of a truly pious and devoted spirit: Murillo’s work fails to affect her because despite the seriousness of his subject “there is no earnestness of religious feeling expressed” (II, 164), and Corregio’s Nativity is “profanity” because it “make[s] the most solemn mystery of religion a mere tributary to the exhibition of a trick of art” (II, 344). And of course her Protestant principles are particularly offended by what she considers the idolatry of Romanist art.

Stowe is, however, no mere copybook tourist, following guidelines already laid down and echoing received opinion. Her lively and iconoclastic side—perhaps inherited from her strong-minded aunt by whom she was partly brought up—is physically manifested by her behaviour in the Swiss Alps. Here, though earlier on her trip she had been so exhausted by social and professional engagements that she often had to retire to bed, she suddenly sprang to life in an almost “celestial” (II, 288) environment. Silencing their guide’s objections and astonishing her husband (in his interpolated journal entry at this point he comments that “one would almost think her incapable of fatigue” [II, 299]), she walked the nine miles from the Jungfrau snowfield to Grindelwald, scrambled down to see blocks of glacier ice at first-hand, and alone climbed a peak in order to drink in the beauty of “those strange old cloudy mountains, the Eiger, the Wetterhorn, the Schrecken” (II, 295). She also climbed Vesuvius on a subsequent European visit. Such activities are instances of that common nineteenth-century phenomenon—the remarkable emergence of female energies in new, often demanding, surroundings, largely free from the the restrictions of convention and propriety. Stowe exhibits this independence in some of her artistic evaluations. Like Sophia Hawthorne, she often judges from a gendered rather than an aesthetic viewpoint. Raphael’s Madonna di San Sisto, in the Dresden gallery, for example, fascinates her because it speaks to her own maternity:

There was a conflict of emotion in that mother’s face, and shadowed mysteriously in the child’s, of which I queried, Was it fear? was it sorrow? was it adoration and faith? was it a presage of the hour when a sword should pierce through her own soul? (II, 343-4)

Stowe also resists cultural authoritarianism, refusing to accept unquestioningly all canonical evaluations. She rejects the idolatry surrounding the old masters (“Why, I wish to know, should none but old masters be thought any thing of? … I must confess, I have some partialities towards young masters” [II, 278-9]), and stoutly defends her liking for the Princess Charlotte monument in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, despite being told that it is in questionable taste. While eager to experience all the treasures of the Old World, she is ready to challenge what she finds personally unappealing.

Indeed, Stowe does not always take tourism too seriously. Her ironic self-awareness recognises when she is most being ‘the American abroad’, mocking both her own romantic enthusiasms and the circumstances which have evoked them. Her account of an expedition to see the supposed bones of the eleven thousand virgins, slaughtered for refusing to yield up their chastity, in St Ursula’s church in Cologne becomes, in her telling, a miniature farce. She often deliberately punctures the atmosphere she has built up. Her poetic description of a moonlight visit to Melrose Abbey, for instance, is brought to an abrupt halt when she laughingly confesses that they were forced to depart hurriedly by wind and rain. Even in the midst of rhapsodising over the beauties of Alpine scenery, she reminds herself—and us—that “two or three hours’ ride in the hot sun, on a mule’s back, indisposes one to make much of the grandest scenes” (II, 252), while with admirable honesty she deflates the seeming triumph of their ascent to the Mont St Bernard hospice:

As we drove up nearer I saw the little porch in front of it crowded with gentlemen smoking cigars, and gazing on our approach just as any set of loafers do from the porch of a fashionable hotel. This was quite a new idea of the matter to me. We had been flattering ourselves on performing an incredible adventure; and lo, and behold, all the world were there waiting for us. (II, 262)

Partly because of her dedication to the cause of the oppressed in her homeland, and partly because, like all these women tourists, she could never completely separate the physical environment from the people who lived in it, Stowe placed observation of social conditions high on her European agenda. In the parts of Sunny Memories dealing with Britain, she notes the state of health of the rural poor, the morale of servants, and excellent welfare schemes such as the Aberdeen industrial schools and Lord Shaftesbury’s lodging houses for the homeless. She is also appalled by the ubiquitous gin-shops, “flaming and flaring from the most conspicuous positions, with plate-glass windows and dazzling lights, thronged with men, and women, and children, drinking destruction”. (I, 271)

Stowe’s social awareness is not, however, instanced merely by personal attention to suffering or deprivation; in fact she focuses less on such matters than Fuller, for instance, perhaps because in her semi-official tour of Britain she was not shown the worst conditions. For another reason, too, she tended to take a more theoretic or even optimistic view of social circumstances. She was well aware that much of the cultural richness which she so much admired in the Old World was founded on a hierarchical system of inequality quite at odds with American democratic principles. Thus at Warwick Castle, she is both captivated by the romantic “scene of magnificent beauty” (I, 225) which the ivy-covered “perfect specimen of the feudal ages” (I, 238) presents, and uneasy about the exclusive wealth and privilege which it symbolises. Not wholly convinced by the claim that there is no lower class resentment towards such establishments, she tries to validate her own aesthetic pleasure with philanthropic justification:

The influence of these estates on the community cannot but be in many respects beneficial, and should go some way to qualify the prejudice with which republicans are apt to contemplate anything aristocratic … With such reflections the lover of the picturesque may comfort himself, hoping that he is not sinning against the useful in his admiration of the beautiful. (I, 239)

More significantly, Stowe was also aware that much of the anti­slavery support in Britain came from the wealthy and advantaged echelons of society who might be considered as much oppressors of the working classes as, in the United States, white Southerners were of the black slaves. Hence she was anxious to undermine accusations of abolitionist hypocrisy and to show that privilege and beneficence can go hand-in-hand. Her well­intentioned strategy got herself into particular trouble in Scotland. Some of the strongest support for her cause—as well as much hospitality—came from the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, powerful Scottish landowners, and Stowe spends a whole chapter of Sunny Memories in refuting “those ridiculous stories” (I, 301) about the Duchess “turning her tenants out into the snow, and ordering the cottages to be set on fire over their heads because they would not go out” (I, 302). The reference is of course to the Highland clearances which occurred earlier that century, and, as George Shepperson points out,’[18] Stowe’s championing of the Sutherlands’ humanitarian schemes as “an almost sublime instance of the benevolent employment of superior wealth and power in shortening the struggles of advancing civilization” (I, 313) caused deep offence to many Scots for whom memories of the clearances were still very bitter. The insult was considered even greater since, at the time of writing this, Stowe had not actually visited the Sutherlands’ Scottish estates. On her second European visit, Stowe was entertained by the Sutherlands at Dunrobin Castle, and what she saw here gave her no reason to change her mind, as she writes to her husband:

I see evidently happiness and prosperity all through the line of this estate. I see the duke giving his thought and time, and spending the whole income of this estate in improvement upon it … I observe well-clothed people, thriving lands, healthy children, fine school-houses, and all that. (L&L, 218-9)

It is easy to accuse Stowe of wilful myopia here, but her comments do show an attempt to come to terms with a social system which, as she well knew, was hardly compatible with an abolitionist stance—indeed, plantation paternalism was one of the specious arguments used by the pro-slavery faction. This particular confrontation is, moreover, symptomatic of the more general dilemma facing nineteenth-century American visitors to the Old World. Caught between democratic impulses and a romantic love of tradition, Stowe both cherished Europe and experienced it as the site of conditions and beliefs with which her republican spirit was not wholly at ease. As with Twain after her, reverence and mockery are very close bedfellows in her responses. Ultimately, though, her love for a Europe of history and aesthetic beauty predominate; the note of nostalgia in a letter written at the end of her last visit to Europe perhaps articulates her deepest feeling:

It must be true, we can’t have it otherwise … Our Southern Italy trip was a glory; it was a rose—a nightingale—all, in short, that one ever dreams, but alas! it is over. (L&L, 237)

iii. Louisa May Alcott

Independent and high spirited from childhood, as well as physically extremely active (in an age of long skirts, she was a keen runner) Louisa May Alcott was torn between the conflicting impulses faced by so many women of her generation: on the one hand, she longed for freedom and the chance for self-expansion which she could have enjoyed as a man; on the other hand, a strongly developed sense of self-denial and duty towards others made her distrustful of anything that could be construed as self-indulgence. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was a leading spirit in the newly-formed Transcendentalist movement of the 1840s, and his influence, together with that of the equally high-minded friends who visited the Alcott household in Concord (including Emerson and Margaret Fuller) not only provided her with intellectual stimulation but may also have inspired her desire to broaden her geographical and social horizons. Certainly her father must have talked about his trip to England in 1842, and she undoubtedly heard about the Hawthornes’ European experiences, after they returned to America in 1860 and resettled in Concord as the Alcotts’ neighbours.

After a spell as a hospital nurse in Washington, DC in December 1862 was abruptly curtailed by an attack of typhoid, Alcott returned home to continue her resolute struggle to help ameliorate the family’s ever-worsening financial situation caused by Bronson’s utopian schemes. But though she was occupied with teaching, sewing and writing, travel to Europe remained the focus of her ambitions. Disappointed in the non-fruition of her first opportunity (a friend of her sister’s asked her to go abroad as a companion, “but as I spoke neither French nor German she didn’t think I’d do” [19]), she eagerly acceded to a proposal which came soon afterwards to go as the nurse-companion to Anna Weld, the invalid daughter of a wealthy ship-owner, who wanted to try the German bath cures. The party sailed on 19th July 1865, landing in Liverpool on the 29th, and then followed a fairly conventional route through England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and France, finally arriving in Nice where they temporarily settled. The meeting in Vevey with Ladislaw Wisniewski, a young Pole on whom the character of Laurie in Little Women is partly based, added to the interest of the tour, but once in Nice Alcott found attendance on the sick girl increasingly wearisome and frustrating. In May 1866, therefore, she decided to leave the Welds and travel on her own to Paris and then London; her sense of release made her, as she says, “as happy as a freed bird” (149). An independent traveller at last, she had an especially “free and jolly time” (150) in London, meeting many well-known people such as Frances Cobbe, Barbara Bodichon, and Mazzini.

In April 1870, she made her second European trip with her sister, May, and May’s friend, Alice Bartlett. This time, she spent longer in northern France, as well as revisiting Vevey. Then, despite the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, she went on to Italy, calling at Lake Como, Lugano, Milan, Parma, Pisa, Bologna, Florence and Rome, where like Fuller she experienced almost non-stop rain for two months. She returned to the United States in May 1871, travelling via Germany and Belgium to London where she saw old friends and places. This was to be her last visit abroad: though later she often expressed the wish to return to Europe, she always felt herself constrained by family duties and her own ill-health.

As a visitor to Europe, Alcott was unequivocally the American tourist, motivated purely by a long-standing and self-pleasing desire—as she writes in her journal on her first trans-Atlantic crossing, “I could not realize that my long-desired dream was coming true” (142). At the same time, Europe for her was less obviously than for most of the other travellers in this study the focal point of a romantic or ideological idealism. This is perhaps best indicated by the fact that she never apparently wished to authenticate her foreign experiences in specific travel texts, in contrast to the other women, all of whom initially or subsequently planned on publication. Alcott used some of her European material in semi-fictional articles for the Independent, later gathered together as Shawl Straps, the second volume of Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag (1872),[20] but her direct personal impressions are contained only in journal entries and letters, collected and published after her death by her first biographer, Ednah Cheney. Alcott’s observations are thus informal and piecemeal, with no organizing theoretic or structural principle behind them, though at the same time they have an immediacy lacking in more formal modes of representation.

It is also worth noting that Alcott’s commentary was subject to the same kind of protective editing as was Fuller’s. As comparison with the recently published new edition of her journals makes clear, Cheney not only ‘tidied up’ her grammar, spelling and punctuation, but reverted to anonymisation or omission wherever she felt Alcott’s material was too personal for public gaze. In particular, she leaves out all direct reference to Alcott’s troubles with Anna Weld. Cancelled remarks such as the following are indicators of Alcott’s increasing frustration at having to look after a querulous invalid instead of being able to make the most of her hard-earned visit to Europe:

I tried my best to suit & serve her but dont think I did so very well, yet many would have done still worse I fancy, for hers is a very hard case to manage & needs the patience & wisdom of an angel …
Dull days here, often homesick & very tired of doing nothing pleasant or interesting …
I decided to go home in May… I’m tired of it & as she is not going to travel my time is too valuable to be spent fussing over cushions & carrying shawls.[21]

All this of course gives a portrait of a much more hard-headed Alcott than Cheney offers.

Like all her compatriots, Alcott ‘discovered’ Europe through cultural pre-familiarity and aesthetic preconceptions. Knowledge of the foreign has already been established through art and literature. In London in 1865, walking through the parks and the well-known streets and seeing Westminster Abbey, she feels “as if I’d got into a novel while going about in the places I’d read so much of “ (143). Scenes in Cologne and Heidelberg are like something out of a cherished picture book, while in Rome, “[I] felt as if I hadbeen there before and knew all about it” (211). Alcott also seizes on the romantic aspects of the Old World: Heidelberg is “a charming old place” and the sight of “the quaint stone images of knights, saints, monsters, and angels” at the Castle, by the light of the rising moon, “completed the enchantment of the scene” (144); Freiburg is “the most romantic place we have been in” (145); and Dinan, with its narrow streets, overhanging gables, and carved porches, set in a valley full of blooming fruit trees, windmills, and a ruined castle, is “the quaintest, prettiest, most romantic town I ever saw” (179). The visual attractions of scenery increase for her the more it conforms to notions of the picturesque: the required elements include castles, towers and walls standing out against a marine background (Nice); a ruined church beside an old ivy-clad mill (Lahou); and a ruined chateau with ivy-covered towers and a resident ghost (Dinan). The glories of Gothic architecture are part of this aestheticized environment, encapsulated by the cathedral at Le Mans which is “like a dream in stone” and which Alcott describes in natural imagery reminiscent of Sophia Hawthorne’s representation of Lincoln Cathedral:

Anything more lovely and divine I never saw, for the arches, so light and graceful, seemed to soar up one above the other like the natural curves of trees or the spray of a great fountain. (190)

Alcott’s romantic enthusiasms became so intense that at one point during her travels she had a dream in which the family house at Concord was transformed into “ great, gray stone castle, with towers and arches and lawns and bridges, very fine and antique” (203) and she herself had become a ghost, haunting its precincts.

Alcott’s supreme delight in visiting “the long-desired Italy” which she found “as lovely as we hoped” (208) is also familiar. Again, the emphasis is on the country’s pictorial qualities as well as on the sense of rebirth it awakens (at Isola Bella, “we felt like butterflies after a frost” [209]). Her detailed description of the journey to Lago di Como, for instance, not only indicates her eye for detail but effectively traces her physical progress in relation to her mounting feelings of expectation and exhilaration:

… the slow winding up, up, up out of the valley toward the sun, which came slowly over the great hills, rising as we never saw it rising before … Little by little we wound through a great gorge, and then the sun came dazzling between these grand hills, showing us a new world … a never-to-be forgotten place, and a fit gateway to Italy … when we came to Lago Maggiore lying in the moonlight we could only sigh for happiness, and love and look and look. (208-9)

Like Stowe, however, Alcott frequently breaks out of the conventional tourist mould. Though Europe is for her the site of realised expectation, it is also a place which is both unsettlingly and delightfully strange. One of her most frequently (over-) used terms of evaluation is “queer”, articulating her feeling of enjoyable disorientation: at Freiburg she sees many “queer costumes” (145); Nice is a “queer old city” full of a “queer set” of people (148); and “the queer sights and sounds” at Morlaix include “funny children … in little wooden shoes like boats” and “funny hats” (177). This ‘othering’ of the foreign as odd or absurd is of course to some extent a defensive strategy, a common feature of much travel discourse in which the observer seeks a means of coming to terms with an alien culture or value-system. So Alcott turns the extraordinary coach-ride from Lamballe to Dinan into a kind of comic set-piece, caricaturing the “queer ramshackle thing like an insane carryall” (178) with the passengers’ trunks perilously roped on top, driven by a reckless hunchback, and containing, as well as themselves, a tipsy Frenchman who quotes poetry and tries to flirt with Alice. The French family staying at their lodgings in Dinan are also reproduced as comic types—the bossy mother, the innocent daughter about to be married point during her travels she had a dream in which the family to a man whom she has seen only twice and who turns out house at Concord was transformed into “a great, gray stone to be a pompous, self-important little soldier, and the vain castle, with towers and arches and lawns and bridges, very fine son of twenty-two, who, under the misconception that he can speak English, fancies himself as May’s lover. Reporting on the wedding itself, which took place while they were there, Alcott further indulges in mockery, highlighting the groom’s discomfiture when the carriage breaks down, referring to the mother as “ma”, and describing everyone at the dinner “gabbing and gabbling as only French folk can” (184). Alcott’s amusement at these and other ridiculous occurrences in France (“their ways amuse us mightily” [182], “a church wedding is a very funny thing” [184]) is founded on a desire to assert superiority through ethnic stereotyping, though it is all ostensibly very good-humoured.

Alcott can, nevertheless, be the actor in her own comedy. Like Stowe, she sees the often absurd gap between the guide-book tourist and the situation of the real traveller. She turns her satirical eye on herself and her companions, motionless in silly little bath-chairs harnessed to obstinate donkeys; and she caricatures the incident in which the romance of a visit to a ruined castle is turned into ignominious retreat from a fierce sow and her twelve piglets. Even a trip into the hills above Vevey which is spoilt by bad weather becomes an opportunity for self-mockery: she depicts the party trudging round under umbrellas, “getting mushrooms, flowers, and colds … [and] sitting on rustic seats to enjoy the belle vue, which consisted of fog” (206).

Perhaps because of the more intimate nature of the diary and letter forms, Alcott’s apprehension of Europe is never aggrandised by hyperbole or conventional rhetoric. In fact, as she herself admits, her eye for the absurd always interposes to prevent too serious and reverential an approach to the foreign. So at a splendid Fete Dieu procession in Tours, she notes how a “very fat and fine priest, who walked with his eyes upon his book and sung like a pious bumblebee, suddenly destroyed the effect by rapping a boy over the head with his gold prayer-book” (192-3). In the case of art and historical artefacts, like Stowe she refuses to accept canonical judgments unquestioningly. So at the chateau at Chenonceaux, though she admires many of the paintings, she has no time for “a picture of Diane, a tall simpering woman in a tunic, with hounds, stag, cupids, and other rubbish round her” (194), and she refuses to be impressed by the generally-admired masterpieces:

The Guidos, etc, I don’t care for so much as they were all grimy and convulsive, and I prefer pictures of people who really lived, to these impossible Venuses and repulsive saints, —bad taste, but I can’t help it. (194)

While in Rome, she goes often to the Capitol “to spend the AM with the Roman emperors and other great men” (212), but her assessment of their appearances is deliberately iconoclastic:

M. Aurelius as a boy was fine; Cicero looked very like W Phillips; Agrippina in her chair was charming; but the other ladies, with hair a la sponge, were ugly; Nero & Co a set of brutes and bad men. (212-3)

A crowd of poor people receiving a royal gift of bread and money, with the splendid snow-covered hills in the distance, is to her, she adds, a far finer sight.

Insofar as it is possible to judge from her brief and somewhat fragmentary commentary, Alcott was not a profound observer of Europe and its ethos. Yet she was clearly deeply affected by her travel there, as her continuing wistful yearning towards it in her later letters and journal entries reveals. As her biographer suggests, her experiences also probably gave her a more objective perspective on her own background, put to good use in Little Women begun a year or so after her first trip abroad and published in October 1868.[22] Her enthusiasm for what she encountered, plus her determination to take it as far as possible on her own terms, too, further exemplifies the position of the nineteenth-century female tourist, eager for foreign experience yet keenly aware how, for a woman burdened with family responsibilities, the chance to travel and really ‘be herself’ was a rare privilege. With more opportunity, indeed, Alcott might have proved herself one of the most vivid and entertaining travel writers of the period.

3. Disciples of the Foreign

i. Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller’s response to Europe, perhaps more than was the case with any other of the women discussed here, was determined by temperament and upbringing. Like the other New Englanders, she was the product of a high-minded, cultured, and morally earnest ethos which both encouraged its women and created in them deep self-unease; like Alcott in particular, she suffered from a sense of divided selfhood. Given a masculine education (that is, classical and literary) by her father, Timothy, who purportedly was disappointed that his first-born was not a son, she was encouraged to develop intellectual independence. As she herself says, the patriarchal model of excellence was always before her—“the all-accomplished man, him of the many talents, wide resources, clear sight, and omnipotent will”.[23] At the same time, she lacked an outlet for her imaginative, passionate side, which she calls the “natural” one (1, 13); only in secret, in the garden or in the little upstairs bookroom where the view of distant hills imbued her with fanciful longings, “glorious … hopes that swelled my heart” (1, 23), could she indulge her fantasies. Conflictual though they were, both these aspects of her development contributed to her deep-rooted desire to visit Europe: her study of Latin, French, and Italian, her concentration on classical history, especially Roman, and her enthusiasm for Goethe (whose biography she wanted to write) aroused her interest in civilizations richer than America’s and made her feel increasingly that “my not going abroad is an insuperable defect in the technical part of my education” (I1, 11); her romantic idealism created discontent with an often uncongenial home environment, carrying “my almost hopeless gaze to the distance” (1, 105). Her adolescent friendship with a visiting Englishwoman, Ellen Kilshaw, provided further impetus, taking her “into that atmosphere of European life to which I had before been tending” (1, 47).

Fuller’s ideological views, as well as her mental and literary training, influenced her subsequent reaction to Europe. Teacher and leading intellectual figure in Boston, she, together with Emerson, Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott, was one of the pioneers of the Transcendental movement, championing its rejection of a constraining past and its belief in the spiritual worth of the individual. From 1839 to 1842 she was editor of its journal, The Dial. An ardent feminist as well, she protested about the disadvantages suffered by her sex in her Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)—enlarged from an earlier Dial article, “The Great Lawsuit”—arguing for greater opportunities and freedoms for women, some of which she herself had enjoyed. She asserts that “we would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man … What Woman needs is … as a soul to live freely and unimpeded”.[24] This challenge to orthodoxy and promotion of female self-expansion was to lead her to take important personal and political steps in Europe; it also predisposed her towards the cause of all who suffered from injustice or tyranny. In Woman in the Nineteenth Century, she links women and slaves as victims of the same unlawful bondage; and while she was working as a journalist in New York, writing for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, she turned her attention to prisons, city charities, and prostitutes. She went abroad, therefore, ready to sympathise—even identify—with all oppressed peoples, perhaps seeing in their struggles an image of her own efforts to achieve genuine self-identity.

The disappointment expressed in her journal for 1833—“All hopes of travelling I have dismissed”[25]—may refer to a half­promised European trip based on her father’s hopes of an ambassadorship from John Quincy Adams which failed to materialise. A second projected visit m 1835, when Fuller’s new friend, Harriet Martineau, invited her to return to England with her, was also doomed to failure: the sudden death of Timothy Fuller and the ensuing family responsibilities prevented her taking up the offer. But her ambitions were finally realized when she was invited to accompany her friends Mr and Mrs Marcus Spring and their young son to Europe in August 1846. She had also been commissioned by her employer, Horace Greeley, to write articles on her experiences for his paper, the letters for which subsequently made up a large part of her posthumously published travel memoirs, At Home and Abroad (1856). The partly professional motive for her visit, combined with her already radical outlook, meant that Fuller took a more than merely self-pleasing interest in the foreign. As Blanchard points out, there had been a shift from her earlier idealistic notion of Europe as a site of personal enrichment—now she was travelling as a journalist, as well as a tourist and a literary pilgrim.[26] Moreover, she was visiting Europe at a time of considerable political unrest and growing nationalistic revolt against repressive regimes. The Old World was thus not only a place for cultural self-expansion but also an arena for engagement of a more political and social nature.

Some of Fuller’s responses, especially in Britain, to which the party went first, replicate the literary-romantic sentiments of other nineteenth-century American visitors, using Romantic artistic ideals as a measure of evaluation. Chester, with its arched gateways, ramparts mantled in ivy, old houses, and ruined cathedral seems to her “a tout-ensemble highly romantic in itself, and charming … to Transatlantic eyes”;[27] Edinburgh Castle, especially impressive in misty moonlight, recalls the atmosphere of one of John Martin’s illustrations to Paradise Lost; echoes of Scott increase the pleasure of visiting Perth, Loch Katrine, and Melrose. Her response to natural landscape, too, is predicated on notions of sublimity and the picturesque: she finds the Lake District scenery, filtered through the poetry of Wordsworth, “wild and noble” (HA, 134), and the pass of Glencoe is “sublime with purple shadows with bright lights between” (HA, 158). Her description of Ben Lomond, on which, having lost her companions, she had to spend the night alone, is particularly self­consciously ‘aesthetic’: despite cold and some apprehensiveness, she extols the “beauty and grandeur such as imagination never painted” (III, 87), and denotes the view from the top “a noble vision, that satisfied the eye and stirred the imagination in all its secret pulses” (HA, 153).

Even amidst these aesthetic and natural glories, however, Fuller was as much, if not more, concerned with aspects of society. She found the social and cultural opportunities highly stimulating, meeting among others Wordsworth, De Quincey, Carlyle, and Mazzini (the last of whom was a major influence on her later involvement with the cause of Italian freedom). She was also, in contrast, deeply disturbed by the signs of human suffering and deprivation. In Manchester she notes the gin­palaces and the evidence of widespread prostitution; in Sheffield she pities “the sooty servitors” (HA, 165) working the furnaces; in London she is appalled by the gulf between its cultural and financial wealth and its dark underside of “misery, squalid, agonising, ruffianly, which stares one in the face in every street” (HA, 170). Her strongest sense of outrage occurs in Scotland where she is most acutely distressed by her own powerlessness to alleviate the suffering. To her, Glasgow “more resembles an Inferno than any other [city] we have yet visited” (HA, 159), and is “the very saddest place I saw in the United Kingdoms … so frightfully cold and dark, her crowded population so sullenly miserable”.[28] In particular, she is shocked by the plight of the prostitutes and the “unimaginable horrors to which are there subjected this most wretched portion of the victims of civilization”.[29] In Edinburgh, too, she deplores the “lower degrees [of poverty], where generation after generation has been crushed into the mud and where air and light cannot penetrate”.[30] Blanchard detects a certain hollowness or superficiality in some of Fuller’s critical observations, noting her abrupt shifts from social indignation to effusive praise of scenery and suggesting that this may have been imposed upon her by the diary form.[31] But it is hard to see other than genuine shock and outrage in these descriptions of conditions so much worse than anything she had previously encountered.

After leaving Britain, the party moved on to France, where Fuller had the chance to explore further the cultural and institutional aspects of an older civilization. In Paris she went to art galleries, participated in the intellectual and literary coteries—meeting, among others, George Sand and the Polish ex-patriot poet and radical, Adam Mickiewicz—and visited evening schools for working men, a children’s hospital, and a refuge for prostitutes. She found the city rich and stimulating, a “great focus of civilized life” (III, 107) and a place “where ignorance ceases to be a pain, because there we find such means daily to lessen it” (HA, 214). But her thoughts were increasingly turning towards Italy, for her, as for almost all nineteenth-century travellers, the real goal of her visit. She had already acquainted herself with its treasures through the writings of Goethe, Forsyth, and Mme de Stael, and her interest in its art history had stimulated her to read about Raphael and Michaelangelo. Above all, it was the country whose “shores … I had looked forward [to] all my life” (HA,217). Most importantly, she expected Italy to satisfy that side of her nature hitherto suppressed, regarding it as a site for new emotional enrichment and expansion—“Once I was almost all intellect; now I am almost all feeling … I feel all Italy glowing beneath the Saxon crust” (II,247). At last, having left Paris on 25 February 1847, the party proceeded by way of Lyons, Avignon and Marseilles—her overriding anticipation of Italy preventing her from noting much about them—to Genoa, from where they went straight to Naples. Immediately she experienced the fulfilment of her conviction that “in Italy, I shall find myself more at home” (III, 121): this was “my Italy … [I] found all familiar, except the sense of enchantment, of sweet exhilaration, this scene conveys” (HA, 217-8).

As in Britain, Fuller responded to the natural and artistic environment in the terms of a pre-familiarised ‘passionate pilgrim’. Her first impressions of Naples make “the then typical tourist’s distinction between eternal Italy and the degraded contemporary Italian”,[32] so that Baiae is divine, and Sorrento is “beyond picture”, in contrast to the “begging, vermin-haunted, image­kissing Lazzarone” (HA, 218-9). Venice is a kind of fairy land, “a dream of enchantment … [in which] art and life are one” (III, 142), and her intoxication with its art is complemented by a new sense of wholeness as she drifts down its canals in a gondola. The wild flowers in the Abruzzi encapsulate the utter beauty of the Italian spring, inspiring the fancy that the “gods themselves walk on earth here” (HA, 426). The Italian lakes, too, perfectly living up to their depiction by poets, and artists such as Turner, are “visions of beauty that daily entrance the eyes and heart” (HA, 238).

Much more, however, Fuller became engaged with Italy’s people rather than with its artefacts and scenery. Writing to Charming from Rome, she makes clear her changed attitude:

I write not to you about these countries, of the famous people I see, of magnificent shows and places … Art is not important to me now … I take interest in the state of the people, their manners, the state of the race in them. (III, 132)

Bell Chevigny has analysed this change in terms of a move from an early position of idealism, from which Fuller viewed life according to universal and timeless values and took only an incidental and abstract interest in society, to one of radical realism, from which she focussed on specific historical and material conditions and the social revisions they demanded. Only after finally separating herself from her American roots could this radicalism fully express itself[33] So Bologna attracted her because of its proliferation of female professors and artists and its educational institutions in which “the intellect of woman has been cherished” (III, 135). In Milan, the number of interesting radicals to be met was far more important to her than the lack of tourist ‘sights’. Even the Renaissance masterpieces in Florence affected her less than she had anticipated, and the highlight of her visit there was her introduction to the city’s intellectual community by her friend, the Marchioness Constanza Arconati Visconti.

But Rome was the central focus of her attention: it was the city of her soul, “something really transcendent, both spirit and body” (III, 141), which called her so strongly that she decided to leave the Springs in Venice in mid 1847 and go back alone to it. Of course it was also the home of her lover and future husband,[34] the Marchese Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, whom she had met during her first sojourn in the city, and this in itself was a powerful reason for her return. Nevertheless, her commitment to it and its people was political and ideological as much as personal and emotional. Increasingly, she came to regard herself as a’Insider’, as she writes to her brother, Richard—“I am now truly happy here really in Rome, so quiet and familiar; no longer, like the mob, a staring, sight-seeing stranger, riding about finely dressed in a coach to see the Muses and the Sibyls.[35] Caught up in the Romans’ efforts to overthrow Austrian domination, and believing that they valued her sympathy, she saw herself as personally involved in the struggle:

I am deeply interested in this public drama and wish to see it played out. Methinks I have my part therein, either as actor or historian. (III, 174)

The public drama she refers to is of course the series of revolutionary uprisings occurring throughout Italy in 1848, in an attempt to shake off Austrian domination. In Rome, these culminated in the Pope’s flight from the city, and the election of a Constituent Assembly and declaration of the Roman Republic, in February 1849. This republican triumph was, however, short­lived: the new French President, Louis Napoleon, diplomatically bent on reinforcing Catholic supremacy in Europe, in April sent an expeditionary force to Rome, commanded by General Oudinot, ostensibly to restore order but in reality to suppress the revolutionary activity; after a two months’ serge, the French finally gained entry to the city and the Republic fell in June.[36] In this stirring period, Fuller became both actor and historian: at the end of April, she was appointed to take charge of a Roman emergency hospital by her friend the Princess Belgioioso; she also resolved to write a history of the events in Italy and Rome, to be completed on her return to the United States.

Fuller’s identification with the Roman cause inevitably colours her writing. Her Tribune letters detail the progress of events and present a penetrating analysis of the political situation, seen through the eyes of one who was a far from disinterested but still discerning observer. Even her response to natural beauty is directed by her republican idealism: rejoicing in a fine Roman spring at last, after three months of rain, she declares that “Nature seems in sympathy with the great events that are transpiring,—with the emotions which are swelling the hearts of men” (HA, 303). Though, however, this ideological engagement developed from her political and social radicalism, as well as from her involvement with Ossoli, the degree of passionate feeling which characterises her accounts is noteworthy. Her intensity of sympathy for Rome, on the knife edge between triumph and annihilation, produces some of her most heightened expression:

City of the soul! yes, it is that; the very dust magnetizes you, and thousand spells have been chaining you in every careless, every murmuring moment. Yes! Rome, however seen, thou must still be adored … Swelling domes, rooks softly tinted with yellow moss! what deep meaning, what deep repose, in your faintly seen outlines! (HA, 336, 389)

Such an outpouring, both deeply emotional and self-consciously rhetorical, suggests, as Blanchard points out, that ultimately Fuller was concerned less with the fulfilment of republican ideals than with the threatened destruction of such pure beauty.[37] In its exuberance and impulsiveness, the deliberate antithesis of a cooler or more logically-structured style, it may also be considered ‘feminine’, illustrating theories of gendered language (female: instinctual and unrestrained; male: rational and consequential). Chevigny postulates that such gendered writing may have been dictated by Fuller’s need to prove herself a woman even while engaging in male intellectual pursuits.[38] Though there may be some truth in this, passages like the above seem as much an immediate as a literary response to circumstances with which Fuller was so intimately connected. If partly conditioned by reader expectation, as well as by a culturally-imbibed Romanticism, she also articulates here the passionate, emotionally susceptible side of her nature.

It is significant that Fuller’s commitment to Italy and to Rome required spiritual as well as physical separation from the country of her birth. Like Edith Wharton sixty years later, Fuller could apprehend and claim Europe only through a denial of her Americanness. Symbolically casting herself as a returned prodigal—“Italy receives me as a long-lost child, and I feel myself at home here” (III, 147), she tells her old friend, Caroline Sturgis—she takes on a new national identity, relocating her native land as a site of alienation and estrangement. Reminders of it become anathema to her: in 1847, she writes from Rome, “I suffer more than ever from that which is peculiarly American or English. I should like to cease from hearing the language for a time” (III, 150). Nearly two years later, in perhaps her final rejection of a purely Emersonian self-reliance, she describes her sense of loss of individual personality, replaced by an alliance with an older tradition:

The spirits of dead men crowd me in the most apparently solitary places. I have no genius at all, I am all the time too full of sympathy.[39]

This process of negotiating a newly positioned selfhood involves not only self-exile but also a sharply critical attitude towards her own country. In Fuller’s changed vision, Americans become the alien ‘others’, dull and unseeing, who cannot abandon themselves to “the spirit of the place” (HA, 220) and who, even after “many years’ sojourn, betray entire ignorance f Italian literature and Italian life, beyond what is attainable in a month’s passage through the thoroughfares” (III, 157). She also constantly reverts to the contrast between the United States and Italy, between a country spoiled by prosperity, soiled by the crime of slavery and unconcerned with true heroism, and one glorying in a spirit of idealism and deeds of brotherhood. Americans are criticised, too, for betraying their own republican ideals and failing to support the Italians’ fight for freedom.

Fuller’s eventual decision to return to America in July 1850 was made partly for the sake of her young son, who had suffered considerably in strife-torn Italy, and partly to see her family again. The tragedy of her death, when her ship went down off the coast of Massachusetts and she, her son, and Ossoli were drowned makes it impossible to know how long she would have retained her devotion to Italy from four thousand miles away. But it is doubtful if she would have ever re-negotiated an entry back into her own country and society. In rejecting her representative Americanness and transforming her ‘alien’ positron into subject status, she became a traveller who really could not go home again.

ii. Edith Wharton

In June 1903, having just returned from Europe, Edith Wharton wrote to her friend Sara Norton, “we are none of us Americans, we don’t think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in an European glass-house, the most deplacé & useless class on earth”.[40] A generation younger than the other women discussed here, Wharton was one of that restless band of Americans, early introduced to the Old World and for ever after torn between two cultures. With her girlish taste “formed by the spectacle of Rome and Paris”,[41] both of which, travelling with her parents, she had seen by the age of six, she was henceforth destined never to feel fully at ease either in her homeland or in the land of her adoption. If her two extended pre-marital sojourns in Europe awoke in her at least one passion she could subsequently share with her husband, Teddy, they also established her chronic sense of rootlessness and ambiguous identity, which she mock-humorously describes as “the curse of having been brought up there [Europe], & having it ineradically [sic] in one’s blood!”[42] That she in fact longed to be a full member of a civilisation which she judged wholly superior to her own is clear n a later wistful comment to Sara Norton that “France continues to be magnificent, & one envies the people who have a real patrie”.[43]

Like Fuller’s before her, Wharton’s relationship with Europe was more profound than that of the other women discussed in this study. Convinced that she, unlike most of her fellow Americans, could truly appreciate the beauties and values of the Old World, she sought to make it her own by gaining admission to its historical and cultural ethos. Like Fuller, too, Wharton was torn between conflicting impulses which had a significant effect upon her response to Europe, but hers were of a rather different kind. Whereas Fuller had to move away from her rigorously intellectual background in order to expand her more passionate side in an environment of harmonised thought and feeling, soul and body, Wharton felt stultified by the philistinism and anti-intellectualism of her native New York and turned to Europe to provide her with mental as well as spiritual stimulation. As her travel writings show, there is some anxiety in her attitude to the Old World, and identification with the foreign other involves attention to that other’s reception of her. Paradoxically, while she felt comfortable in Europe, she also felt challenged by it; her new self-positioning took a more aggressive stance than did Fuller’s. In this respect, it is important to note that her travel texts are a direct representation of her experiences and have not fallen victims to protective editing. Indeed, as R. W. B. Lewis’s excellent biography reveals, apart from her liaison in Paris with Morton Fullerton, unpublicised until after her death and the discovery, in 1980, of a substantial collection of her letters, there is no obvious discrepancy between her public and private responses to Europe. Both her commitment to the Old World and her need to find a means of establishing her place within it are evident in her representations.

Wharton loved England, but for her it was more the source of social and cultural pleasure than of spiritual enrichment. In any case, due to her extended motoring trips on the Continent which for many years occurred almost annually after her marriage in 1885, she was more familiar with Italy and France. She was unable fully to enjoy her stays in London, either, at least while she was still with Teddy, since her chief pleasure was in the city’s literary life while he, wanting only to mix with the British sporting set, insisted on their leaving as soon as possible. These facts alone must certainly account for the relative sparsity of her writing on England, in contrast to her extended accounts of her European travels.

Wharton also looks on England with a more critical eye, perhaps seeing it in some respects as too much like her homeland. She notes dryly the national self-centredness and lack of interest in “any topic whatever outside of the political and social preoccupations of the England of the day”,[44] mockingly describing two dinner-party encounters, one with a noted polo-player, one with a young army officer, both of whom are completely non­plussed by her attempted literary conversation. Of course she had many cultured friends here, including Max Beerbohm, Mrs Humphry Ward, Edmund Gosse, and Henry James, and her dearest experiences in England were those connected with the last of these. Her accounts of her annual visit to James at Lamb House, Rye, celebrate her sense of ‘joyous liberation” as she sees the house at the top of the grass-grown street, and her delight in “its ancient mulberry tree, its unkempt flower-borders”.[45] Wharton found the same sense of magical beauty, emanating from a past era, at “the ancient house of Brede”,[46] home of the Morton Frewens, which, with its vast hall and magnificent fireplaces seemed “strange, ghostly … extraordinarily picturesque”,[47] or at Bodiam Castle in Sussex:

One perfect afternoon we [she and James] spent at Bodiam—my first visit there. It was still the old spell-bound ruin, unrestored, guarded by great trees, and by a network of lanes which baffled the invading charabancs. Tranquil white clouds hung above it in a cloudless sky, and the silence and solitude were complete as we sat looking across at the crumbling towers, and at their reflection in a moat starred with waterlilies, and danced over by great blue dragon-flies.[48]

In England, too, she was alerted—albeit less acutely than on the Continent—to the lack in her native land. On a visit to Cambridge in May 1904, for instance, her rapture at “the gardens glowing with spring flowers, the old mellow walls bathed in pale sunshine” gives way to a gloomy awareness of difference:

How much we miss in not having such accumulated beauties to feed on now & then at home! I enjoy them so keenly that the contrast makes me miserable, & I think it almost a pity for an American who loves the country ever to come to England.[49]

On the whole, England soothed rather than excited Wharton, and she did not feel the same desire to grasp its essence as she did in Italy and France. Italy was her first European love, the site of her earliest foreign recollections and the source of some of her purest enjoyment of environmental beauty. It was the country to which she and Teddy went most frequently in the early years of their marriage, and inspired her collection of travel articles, Italian Backgrounds (1905),and her first substantial work of fiction, The Valley of Decision (1902).Wharton’s response to Italy, like that of the other women, emanates from the notion of an ideal land, a place of irresistible attractiveness in which the visitor, released from the restraints and conventions of the home environment, can discover a new self. This ideal land is so alluring partly because it is known in advance, created from images already formed through literature and artefact. In this aestheticised setting, the ‘real’ is validated by the ‘imaged’ which it recalls, as near Orvieto, where the natural landscape “touches a spring of memory and transports us from the actual scene to its pictured presentment—Turner’s ‘Road to Orvieto’”.[50] At such a moment, “the traveller … loses sense of the boundaries between art and life, and lives for a moment in that mystical region where the two are one” (IB, 154).

Wharton’s realisation of the Italian landscape through painting echoes earlier commentators, and she, like them, uses as touchstones the work of Claude, Poussin, Rubens and Giorgione, as well as Turner. Literary analogies are equally important here: the Bergamasque Alps captivate her through their association with the commedia dell’arte, while the Borromean gardens at Isola Bella on Lake Maggiore “are Armida’s gardens anchored in a lake of dreams, and should be compared, not with this or that actual piece of planted ground, but with a page of Ariosto or Boiardo”.[51] Her emphasis on the dream-quality of Italy, which ‘enchants’ in both meanings of the word, is also a familiar response, but with a particular personal relevance for her. Her travels in Italy were an escape from the creative wastelands she felt Newport and New York to be, and thus represented spiritual renewal. So her descriptions of the magic of Italy in terms of “hallucinations”, “vision”, and “madness” (IB, 40, 41, 42), or of intoxication and mystery, indicate how the country spoke to her instinctual, as opposed to her rational (American), self.

Even at this stage of her life, then, though she had not yet fully separated herself from her homeland, Europe had begun to take on a symbolic significance for Wharton. Italy’s beauty is apprehended through rejection of America’s ugliness, its “modern improvement” (IB, 60),its “depressing uniformity of modern fashion” (IB, 62), and its “crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!”[52] America thus becomes the negative, the alien other, whose great cities lack even the modest architectural dignity of “many a dull little town like Tirano” (IB, 32),and where there is no tradition of “the stratified art of centuries” (IB, 125)or any sense of harmony between man and nature. Only by separating herself from such philistinism can Wharton achieve identification with the Italian spirit and become the true “lover of Italy—the perennial wooer whom every spring recalls across the Alps” (I B, 116).

As she grew older, Wharton increasingly turned her attention to France, making it her European place of residence, and paying only brief visits to Italy. According to Lewis, the disruption of her plans to go on from the Mediterranean into Italy on her first motor trip in Europe in March 1904marks the end of the Italian phase of her life and the beginning of her permanent French affiliation.[53] This affiliation was on the one hand cultural and social. Paris in particular represented to her the apotheosis of civilization, in its belle epoque period before the First World War. Lewis details the Parisian artistic and intellectual milieu to which Wharton’s friend, Paul Bourget, introduced her[54] and which increasingly came to signify the environment in which she could best flourish. France’s superior attractions were also symbolised by its rich literary heritage, and her pilgrimage to Nohant, the home of George Sand, in May 1906, was the highlight of her first ‘motor-flight’ through the country.

Through its representative personalities, then, Wharton was enabled to enter into France’s desired foreignness. Her engagement with its physical environment, natural and man-made, was more complex, the result of a sharper sense of contrast between passive receptivity and more active appropriation. In some ways, France represented for her the same kind of magic which she found in Italy, and she enthusiastically expresses her admiration for a place whose “universal … sense of form”,[55] profound reverence for the past, and innate good taste make it for her the most creatively and intelligently civilised country on earth. Luxuriating in the modern “romance of travel” (ME, 1) which motoring makes possible, Wharton gives herself up to an environment which, like Italy’s, is “picturesque”, “romantic”, and mystical. Beauvais cathedral is “like some climax of mystic vision, miraculously caught in visible form” (ME, 16); Vichy, like Tirano, has had its ordinariness transformed by the “spell” of a “magic wand” which has turned it into a “dream-town” (MF, 52); and Nancy, in the darkness of war-time blackout, becomes “an enchanted city”.[56] Even the burnt-out cathedral at Rheims becomes “a structure so strange and beautiful that one must search the Inferno, or some tale of Eastern magic, for words to picture the luminous unearthly vision” (FF, 185). As with Italy, too, Wharton apprehends scenery in terms of the visual arts: the stimulating variety of the Auvergne landscape, for example, seems “a confusion of scenes romantically combined, as in the foreground of a Claude or a Wilson” (MF, 54); there is a Pre­Raphaelite precision in the Provencal landscape; and the few lights in the darkness of war-time Paris “create effects of Piranesi­like mystery” (FF, 30).

Wharton, however, desires not only to be possessed by but to possess this magic. Lewis points out her compelling desire to establish a connection between the outer world of the foreign and her own personal life, to place herself within “‘the long rich heritage of human experience”‘ encapsulated by France’s treasures.[57] So on the one hand she is eager to become the receiver of impressions and involuntary sensation. Many of the metaphors she employs express this willing receptivity: she becomes “a blank page” (MF, 7) for unknown towns to write their names on, and is happy at being “imprisoned” by the memory of Beauvais (MF, 18); she articulates the tremendous power of Rheims cathedral in terms of “a sense of being possessed by it, subdued to it” (MF, 176). On the other hand, she is not content with being merely the passive recipient of what France chooses to yield up to her, and wants a more positive and active relationship with its otherness, asserting supremacy over it. A Motor Flight opens by celebrating “the delight of taking a town unawares, stealing on it by back ways and unchronicled paths, and surprising it in some intimate aspect of past time” (ME 1); knowledge is gained through pursuit and seizure. An equally possessive desire is expressed m her description of an unmapped hill-town which she mews in the distance—“[I vowed], as we lost the last glimpse of its towers, that next year I would go back and make it give up its name” (MF, 38). Here, she is casting herself as the male conqueror, seeking to break down resistance to her own spiritual expansion.

As has already been seen in the case of Italy, Wharton’s desire to insert herself into the foreign necessitated separation—physical and ideological—from both her homeland and its inhabitants, a twentieth-century reversal of the Old/New World pattern of colonisation. Like Fuller, she chose to live an expatriot existence, staying in Paris even in the darkest war years (where, also like Fuller, she took charge of emergency medical arrangements) and purchasing a house at Hyeres, on the Mediterranean, in 1919. She appropriates France through negation of the United States, rendering its reality by reference to American ‘lack’. The “splendid surprise” (MF, 31) of the little-known mediaeval castle unexpectedly encountered in Dourdan is dependent on this positive /negative dualism—“to taste the full flavour of such sensations, it is worth while to be of a country where the last new grain-elevator or office building is the only monument that receives homage from the surrounding architecture” (MF, 32). The “sight of a well-kept, self-respecting French town” (MF, 51) like Vichy reminds her that such elegance is due not to a millionaire’s riches, but to “wise public expenditure” (MF, 52)—the sort of expenditure which in some modern republics, she comments sardonically, “sometimes seems to produce no results whatever” (MF,100).

Wharton’s two war-time works on France (neither of which is strictly a travel book) more coolly and analytically lay out America’s deficiencies. In Fighting France (1915), the “distinctively French” (FF, 3), its beauty and humanity undiminished even by military activity, is set against the ugliness of the American scene. Of the lion sculpture guarding the Citadel at Belfort, for example, she remarks wryly, “probably it is easier for an artist to symbolize an heroic town than the abstract and elusive deity who sheds light on the world from New York harbour” (FF, 203)—a monument she has already dismissed as “a pompous statue of a goddess with a torch, designated as ‘Liberty enlightening the World’” (FF, 177). In French Ways and Their Meaning (1919), Wharton takes more specific stock of America’s shortcomings, and highlights what France has to teach the New World. Once more she stresses that French civilisation is “so profoundly unlike ours—so much older, richer, more elaborate and firmly crystallised”[58] in contrast with the “idol-breaking instinct of the freest minds in the world” (FW, 30) who, themselves barely out of the primitive state, have no time for the past and no artistic sensitivity:

Any American with eyes to see, who compares the architectural use to which Paris has put the Seine with the wasteful degradation of the unrivalled twin river-fronts of New York, may draw his own conclusions as to the sheer material advantage of taste in the creation of a great city. (FW, 44)

In the social sphere, too, Wharton insists, the French offer a superior way of life—in their open attitudes towards sexual relationships, and the freedoms and responsibilities granted to their women, for example.

Wharton’s treatment of Europe, then, is a complex signifier, revealing as much about herself as about the subject of her discourse. In many ways, the continent about which she writes is the one she wanted to find rather than the one she actually discovered. More than merely seeking to know, even to understand the foreign other, she strove for self-definition through her relationship with it, a relationship fraught with conflicting impulses. Just as she was simultaneously the American Edith Newbold Jones and the European Madame Wharton, so she was also at once the eager recipient of foreign influences and the active coloniser of her land of promise. And ultimately, perhaps she never found the place where she truly belonged.

5. Guide to Further Reading

The primary (printed) sources used here—the women travellers’ accounts of their European experiences—are as indicated in the text and the notes. Biographical material is available in Edward T James et al, Notable American Women 160-1950: a Biographical Dictionary (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap, Harvard, 1971) and in the following more specific works, although most of these pay little attention to their subjects as travel commentators. For Sophia Hawthorne, apart from Julian Hawthorne’s biography of his parents, there is Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s Memories of Hawthorne (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1897) and Louise Hall Tharp’s The Peabody Sisters of Salem (London: Harrap, 1950). Two contemporary biographies of Harriet Beecher Stowe—her son Charles E. Stowe’s Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), and Annie Fields’ Life and Letters—can be supplemented by Forrest Wilson’s Crusader in Crinoline (Philadelphia, London: J. Lippincott, 1941). Apart from Ednah Cheney’s biography of Louisa May Alcott, and Joel Myerson’s and Daniel Shealy’s edition of The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), Madeleine B. Stern’s Louisa May Alcott (London and New York: Peter Nevill, 1952) provides a full bibliography of Alcott’s writings, including details of her articles for The Independent and her Shawl-Straps (Boston: Roberts Bros, 1872), in which Alcott enlarges on and fictionalises her travel experiences. Additional information on Margaret Fuller can be found in Robert N. Hudspeth’s edition of The Letters of Margaret Fuller (Ithaca: Cornell, 1983), Julia Ward Howe’s Margaret Fuller (Boston: Roberts Bros, 1890), and Madeleine B. Stern’s The Life of Margaret Fuller (New York: Dutton, 1942). More recent biographies include Paula Blanchard’s Margaret Fuller. From Transcendentalism to Revolution (New York: Delacorte Press, 1978) and Margaret Allen’s The Achievement of Margaret Fuller (University Park: Pennsylvania State, 1979). Joseph Jay Deiss’s The Roman Years of Margaret Fuller (New York: Crowell, 1969) concentrates on Fuller’s relationship with Italy, using additional MS material, but is somewhat confusingly annotated. The best recent commentary on Fuller as a feminist is Bell Gale Ghevigny’s excellently edited anthology, The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life and Writings (New York: The Feminist Press 1976), which provides useful introductions to each section of Fuller’s writings. The standard works on Edith Wharton remain R. W. B. Lewis’s biography, and his and his wife’s edition of the Letters (though a new edition is forthcoming, using additional material); two useful articles are Mary Suzanne Schriber’s “Edith Wharton and Travel Writing as Self-Discovery”, American Literature, 1987, 59, pp. 257-267, and Alan W Bellringer’s “Edith Wharton’s Use of France”, Yearbook of English Studies, 1985, 15, pp. 109-124.

Writings by other American women travellers not discussed here offer supplementary information: for example Catherine Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad (New York: Harper and Bros, 1841); Constance Fenimore Woolson, extracts edited by Clare Benedict (London: Ellis, n.d.); Julia Ward Howe’s Reminiscences (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1899);and Alice James’s Diary (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1934).

Criticism on the American response to Europe has focussed almost exclusively on male figures such as Hawthorne, Howells, Twain, and James. Christopher Mulvey’s Anglo-American Landscapes (Cambridge: CUP, 1983)and Transatlantic Manners (Ibid, 1990)include treatment of Stowe, Fuller, and Alice James. Other useful studies on Euro-American literary and social relations, despite their scant reference to women, are Marius Bewley, The Complex Fate (London: Ghatto and Windus, 1952);Foster Rhea Dunes, Americans Abroad: Two Centuries of American Travel (Ann Arbor: Michigan, 1964),which includes a useful bibliography; Henry Steele Commager, Britain Through American Eyes (New York: McGraw Hill, 1974);and William L. Vance’s splendidly exhaustive and illustrated America’s Rome (New Haven and London: Yale, 1989).Malcolm Bradbury’s pamphlet 9in this series offers a useful literary survey and also has an excellent bibliography.

Finally, there are many recent studies of nineteenth-century female travel offering suggestive approaches to the topic, though they tend to be British-oriented in their subjects. These include Dorothy Middleton’s pioneering Victorian Lady Travellers (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965);Mary Russell’s The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt (London: Collins, 1986);Dea Birkett’s Spinsters Abroad (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989);and Shirley Fosters Across Nell) Worlds (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990). Sara Milk’s Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991)tackles the question of a gender-specific linguistic representation of the foreign, building on earlier studies of imperialist discourse.

4. Notes

1. Frances Anne Kemble, Records of a Girlhood, 3 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1878), 111, 229-30.

Back

1. ed. Ednah D. Cheney, Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and journals [1889] (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1928), p. 142.

Back

1. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands [1854], reprint, 2 vols (Boston: Phillips, Sampson & Co, 1856), I, 1-2.

Back

1. Margaret Fuller Ossoli, At Home and Abroad: or Things and Thoughts in America and Europe (Boston and London: Sampson Low & Son, 1856), p. 250.

Back

1. Cecilia Beaux, Background with Figures (1930), quoted in Henry Steele Commager, Britain Through American Eyes (New York: McGraw Hill, 1974), pp. 595-6.

Back

1. Margaret Chanler, Roman Spring: Memoirs (Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1934), p. 110.

Back

1. Ibid., p. 289.

Back

1. ed. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, The Letters of Edith Wharton (London: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 84.

Back

1. Roman Spring, p. 289.

Back

1. Two excellent studies which examine the characteristics of female travel discourse are Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference (London: Routledge, 1991)and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes (London: Routledge, 1992).

Back

1. Mrs [Sophia] Hawthorne, Notes in England and Italy (London, 1869), p. 3. All subsequent references to this work are included in the text.

Back

1. ed. Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife: a biography, 2 vols (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co, 1885), I, 56.

Back

1. Curiously enough, her husband seems to have been more disturbed by such matters; his writings on Europe often reveal his nagging awareness of the inequalities and suffering inherent in more rigidly hierarchical societies than America’s.

Back

1. ed. E. Marks and I. de Courtivron, New French Feminisms (Brighton: Harvester, 1980),p. 260.

Back

1. The detailed reports of the various anti-slavery meetings she and Calvin Stowe attended are gathered together at the beginning of the book, thus separating them from the main body of the text and emphasising the primary importance of the work as a travel commentary.

Back

1. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Sunny Lands [1854],reprint, 2 vols (Boston: Phillips, Sampson & Go, 1856), I,iv. All subsequent references to this work are included in the text.

Back

1. ed. Annie Fields Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co, 1898), p. 94. All subsequent references to this work, indicated as L&L, are included in the text.

Back

1. George Shepperson, “Harriet Beecher Stowe and Scotland, 1852-3”, Scottish Historical Review, Vol 32 (1953), pp. 40-6.

Back

1. ed. Ednah D. Cheney, Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals [1889] (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1928), p. 139.All subsequent references to this work are included in the text.

Back

1. These sketches are based on Alcott’s actual experiences in Europe, but changed names in them suggest that she intended them to have an essentially fictional status. According to Cheney, they give a “somewhat travestied” account of her trip (173).For this reason, they have not been used as source material for this study, although some of Alcott’s later biographers uncritically collate fact and fiction in this area.

Back

1. ed. Daniel Shealy, Joel Myerson, and Madeleine Stern, The Journals of Louisa May Alcott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), pp. 142, 145, 150.

Back

1. Cheney, op cit., pp. 154-5.

Back

1. ed. Clarke, Emerson and Charming, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, 3 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1852), I, 20.All subsequent references to this work are included in the text. The Memoirs are a valuable source of information about Fuller, but the work suffers from the editors’ anxiety to protect their subject and present an “acceptable” image of her. Thus they contain no reference to her early romances; her liason with Ossoli is played down and made respectable by dating their marriage before the birth of their son, and little attention is given to her political beliefs and activities in Europe. Margaret Allen’s The Achievement of Margaret Fuller (University Park: Penn State, 1979) discusses these omissions and distortions (pp. 15-18); and Bell Chevigny’s critical anthology, The Woman and the Myth (Old Westbury: The Feminist Press, 976) helpfully indicates the differences between MS originals and published versions of Fuller’s letters and journals.

Back

1. ed. Perry Miller, Margaret Fuller, American Romantic: a selection from her writings and correspondence (Ithaca: Cornell, 1963), pp. 149-50.

Back

1. Quoted in Paula Blanchard, Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution (New York: Delacorte Press, 1978), p. 70.

Back

1. Ibid., p.224.

Back

1. Margaret Fuller Ossoli At Home and Abroad: or Things and Thoughts in America and Europe (Boston and London: Sampson Low & Son, 1856), p. 125. All subsequent references to this work, indicated as HA, are included in the text.

Back

1. [Margaret Fuller], “Fragment of a Tour in Scotland” (1846), MS in Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Back

1. Ibid.

Back

1. Ibid.

Back

1. Blanchard, op cit., pp. 253-4.

Back

1. Ghevigny, op cit., p. 422.

Back

1. Ibid., pp. 2-3.

Back

1. There is some doubt about when exactly Fuller married Ossoli, although it seems that their union had been legalised by the time she left Italy to return to the United States. It is fairly certain, however, that her son was born before this occurred.

Back

1. Quoted in Ghevigny op cit., p. 434.

Back

1. The fullest details of the political turmoils of this period and Fuller’s involvement in them are to be found in Joseph Jay Deiss, The Roman Years of Margaret Fuller (New York: Crowell, 1969).Margaret Allen’s study (see note 1 above) also covers some of this ground, especially the nature of Mazzini’s powerful appeal to Fuller.

Back

1. Blanchard, op cit., p. 309.

Back

1. Chevigny, op cit., pp. 10-11.

Back

1. Quoted m Blanchard op cit., p. 301.

Back

1. Letter to Sara Norton, 5 June [1903],ed. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, The Letters of Edith Wharton (London: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 84.

Back

1. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance [1934], reprint (London: Century, 1987), p. 8.

Back

1. Letter to Sara Norton, 1 March [1906], Letters, p. 104.

Back

1. Letter to Sara Norton, 14June, 1916, Letters, p. 380.

Back

1. A Backward Glance, p. 216.

Back

1. Ibid., p. 245.

Back

1. Ibid., p. 248.

Back

1. Letter to Sara Norton, 18November [1908], Letters, p. 165.

Back

1. A Backward Glance, p. 249.

Back

1. Letter to Sara Norton, 5 May [1904], Letters, p. 90.

Back

1. Edith Wharton, Italian Backgrounds [1905],reprint (London: Cape, 1928), p. 153.All subsequent references to this work, indicated as IB, are included in the text.

Back

1. Edith Wharton, Italian Villas and Their Gardens [1904],reprint (New York: Century Go, 1910), p. 207.

Back

1. Letter to Sara Norton, [19 August, 1904], Letters, p. 93.

Back

1. R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: a Biography (London: Constable, 1975), p. 129.

Back

1. Ibid., pp. 161-182 passim.

Back

1. Edith Wharton, A Motor Flight Through France [1908],reprint (Dekalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois, 1991), p. 29. All subsequent references to this work, indicated as MF, are included in the text.

Back

1. Edith Wharton, Fighting France: from Dunkerque to Belfort [1915],reprint (New York: Scribner, 1919), p. 106. All subsequent references to this work, indicated as FF, are included in the text.

Back

1. Lewis, op. cit., p. 169.The quotation is from Wharton herself but is unannotated. The lack of specific annotation is a notable defect in this otherwise excellent biography.

Back

1. Edith Wharton, French Ways and Their Meaning (New York: Appleton, 1919), p. 16. All subsequent references to this work, indicated as FW, are included in the text.

Top of the Page

BAAS Pamphlet No. 26 (First Published 1993)

ISBN: 0 946488 16 9

1. Chronology
2. Introduction
3. Conservation Before The Conservation Movement
   i. American Indian Antecedentsii. Colonial Precedentsiii. The Pioneers Of Nature Appreciation And Environmental Concern
4. The Conservation Movement
   i. Pinchot, Forestry And Utilitarian Conservation
   ii. Sportsmen And Wildlife
   iii. Muir And Preservationism
   iv. The National Parks
   v. From The Twenties To The Fifties
5. The Transition To Environmentalism
   i. Leopold And The Influx Of Ecologyii. The Nuclear Age
6. Unfinished Business
7. Guide To Further Reading
8. Notes

British Association for American Studies All rights reserved. No part of this pamphlet may he reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. The publication of a pamphlet by the British Association for American Studies does not necessarily imply the Association’s official approbation of the opinions expressed therein.

1. Chronology

1864: The Yosemite Grant creates a state park in California
1864: Man and Nature by George Perkins Marsh
1872: Yellowstone National Park established
1878: Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States by John
Wesley Powell
1881: Division of Forestry set up within Department of Agriculture
1885: Adirondack Forest Preserve established in New York state
1888: Boone and Crockett Club founded
1890: Federal census announces the closing of the frontier
1891: Forest Reserve Act empowers the president to create reserves
1892: Sierra Club founded
1900: Lacey Act outlaws interstate shipment of game killed in violation
of state laws
1905: The Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service assumes control
of forest reserves
1906: Antiquities Act permits protection of objects of historical and
scientific interest on public land as national monuments
1908: White House conference of governors on conservation
1913: Hetch Hetchy Valley controversy resolved in favour of water
and power development
1916: National Park Service Act
1918: Save-the-Redwoods League established
1922: Izaak Walton League founded
1933: Civilian Conservation Corps founded
1933: Tennessee Valley Authority created
1935: Wilderness Society founded
1940: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service created
1949: Posthumous publication of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand
County Almanac
1956: Echo Park Dam controversy resolved in favour of wilderness
preservation
1962: Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
1964: Wilderness Act establishes system of national wilderness areas
1968: National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act
Grand Canyon Dam proposals defeated
Redwood National Park created
1969: Friends of the Earth founded
1970: National Environmental Policy Act
First celebration of Earth Day, 22 April
1971: Greenpeace founded
1973: Endangered Species Act
1970-1973: Conservationist legal action blocks construction of
Trans­Alaska oil pipeline
1973: Trans-Alaska Pipeline authorized
1978: Supreme Court blocks construction of Tellico Dam (TVA) in
the interests of the snail darter fish on the basis of
Endangered Species Act
1980: Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act adds over
100 million acres to federal conservation systems
1980: Reagan’s presidency launches assault on conservationist
achievements since Theodore Roosevelt
1981: Earth First! (direct-action deep ecology group) founded
1983: Resignation of James Watt, the most controversial Interior
Secretary since Richard Ballinger
1989: Exxon Valdez oilspill in Prince William Sound, Alaska

2. Introduction

The dialogue between human civilization and the natural world is a fundamental and distinguishing feature of American history. In the post- Columbian American context, the process of environmental transformation was more compressed than ever in the past. Changes that took place over centuries in Europe often happened within a few generations in the New World. As one eighteenth-century commentator (proudly) remarked: we have done the most in the least time of any people on earth. From the beginnings of colonization to the perceived closing of the frontier in the late nineteenth-century, American treatment of the land and its creatures was conditioned by the ‘myth of superabundance’ and an antipathy toward untamed nature. Dazzled by a seemingly inexhaustible cornucopia, American society thrust west without thought or care, convinced of the righteousness of its mission to redeem the wilderness. Eventually, a minority began to count the cost of environmental destruction in material and cultural terms. Around the turn of the century the ideas and values of the earlier nineteenth-century pioneers of wild nature appreciation and environmental concern circulated in an increasingly hospitable climate and a diverse conservation movement emerged. For some—the utilitarian conservationists—the priority was more rational and equitable use of natural resources. Others—the ‘preservationists’ or aesthetic conservationists—rebelled against the very concept of resource exploitation, focusing on nature protection for purposes of recreation, patriotism, and spiritual uplift. With the advent of the atomic age, the natural world was pushed to its limits by post-war economic growth and the fallout from big science and new technologies. Ecological thinking began reshaping public attitudes and drawing attention to an increasingly vulnerable American earth. When Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962, the American environmental movement was about to dawn.

This account pays only cursory attention to well-known highlights such as the Hetch Hetchy and Echo Park dam controversies and the symbolic clash between John Muir and Gifford Pinchot. Nor is there space for details of seminal events like the creation of the first national park and the first national forests, or a list of legislative achievements. It also tries to avoid retelling the treasured stories of conservation folklore, such as the noble campfire discussion in the Yellowstone in 1870 that supposedly gave birth to the national park idea, and Pinchot’s ride on a horse named Jim in Rock Creek Park at twilight on a gloomy February day in 1907 when the rider apparently gave birth to Conservation. Instead, it looks at the cultural context that produced conservation and at how conservation became environmentalism.

Though conservation, whatever its hue, offered a weaker defence of nature than environmentalism would, its preservationist aspect promised the stiffest resistance by pre-environmentalist standards and provided the strongest link with the later environmentalism. So preservationism receives particular attention. While including some milestones and basic chronology, a more important concern is with how the modern US environmental movement has interpreted and utilized the history of conservation and its luminaries.

3. Conservation before the Conservation Movement

i. Native American Antecedents

Though this is a history of white conservation, the claim that conservation ideology and activity predate Euro-American history should be briefly addressed. During the 1960s and 1970s, environmental historians and environmentalists praised the original American in the same breath as chiding the Euro-American. Wilbur Jacobs was convinced that they were “America’s first ecologists.”[1] Stewart Udall, secretary of the interior (1960-68), agreed; modern conservation involved a return to Indian “land wisdom.”[2] Marshalled in support were features of Indian life such as animistic pantheism, a sense of community extending beyond humans, sustainable and reverential agricultural, hunting and gathering practices, restrained technology and population control devices. In 1971, the American public became acquainted with the Indian as conservator through the anti-pollution television advertisements starring the Cherokee actor, Iron Eyes Cody. (A tear runs down Cody’s cheek as urban garbage flows around his moccasins.)

Those who seek to knock the Indian off this saintly pedestal dismiss the ecologist/ conservator image as the latest repackaging of the noble savage myth. The detractor’s case can be stated thus: The relatively light imprint on the land prior to contact reflected comparatively sparse numbers, a limited capacity to inflict damage, and the absence of incentives to greater exploitation. The latter protective barrier fell easily in the face of tempting European trade items and the scale and enthusiasm of involvement in the fur trade in particular shows up the skin-depth of aboriginal eco-friendliness. To the extent that Indian conservation existed, it was pragmatic rather than a manifestation of a superior ethic. Archaeological evidence of Indian abuse of nature casts further doubt on their credentials and the notion of a golden age of man-nature relations in the Americas. Quantities of buffalo bones unearthed at ‘kill-sites’ indicates wholesale destruction. ‘Bison jump’ evidence is especially telling because of the stress on the buffalo hunter and consumer (with ‘nearly a hundred uses’) as the ultimate efficient resource user. The collapse of Anasazi civilization in twelfth-century Arizona and New Mexico through deforestation underscores the aboriginal capacity to upset the ecological balance.

The Indian’s champions have issued a rebuttal along these lines: Far from supporting uniformly sparse, unsophisticated populations, parts of North America were characterized by fairly dense concentrations practising intensive environmental management, especially the use of fire. Yet Natives worked with the land, frequently enhancing natural resource yield. Rather than being deficient, the state of Indian technology reveals a conscious decision not to evolve a damaging hardware. There is no contradiction between empirical and mythopoetic relations with nature. The evidence of wanton faunal despoliation is anecdotal and indicative of an alarming lack of perspective. Isolated and fairly modest instances of indigenous overkill are of far lesser historical significance than the systematic profligacy of white settlers. Condemnation of the Indian role in the fur trade—the only substantial example of Indian wastefulness and vindictiveness—is a blatant instance of blaming the victim. Moreover, even if an aboriginal role in large animal extinction 12,000 years ago is conceded, how is this relevant to the state of Native American environmental relations on the eve of European colonization? Even advocates of the ‘blitzkrieg’ theory acknowledge that there were no significant losses of animal species in America over the centuries prior to contact after these megafaunal losses. Change and adaptation were constant features of Native life before 1492 and the ecological ethic may have developed as a response to Pleistocene overhunting and deforestation in the Southwest. Any post-Columbian lapses from the carefully nurtured Indian worldview resulted from the wholesale disruption of Indian life via disease, trade, dispossession, removal and proselytization. What matters for present purposes, however, is that America’s white pioneers of conservation largely accepted the Indian-as-conservationist argument, though aboriginal attitudes were insignificant in shaping their own outlooks.

ii. Colonial Precedents

The natural bounty of the Atlantic colonies astounded the English (though what astonished them even more was the apparent failure of the indigenes to exploit it properly). Promotional tracts hailed Virginia as “earth’s only paradise.” For all the celebrations of cornucopia, however, shortages of natural resources can be identified from the earliest days of settlement. Intensive hunting to supply the fur trade meant beaver were growing scarce in coastal New England as early as 1640. At mid-century, they were also largely wiped out in what became New York state. By the turn of the century, the fur trade was in decline even in the interior of New England. The wild turkey, a prized food, was also rare by 1700 and even the passenger pigeon, quintessential symbol of New World superabundance, was dying out in the region after two centuries of colonization. The large mammals, such as elk, bear and lynx, had disappeared unmourned from most parts of New England by the early 1700s. The large-scale introduction of livestock sealed the fate of predators like wolves, who needed a fresh supply of food now that deer were increasingly scarce. Cows and sheep were easy pickings and the bounty system put a further price on the head of wildlife. Swamps were drained to eliminate wolf habitat. The forest was steadily stripped for agriculture and to supply domestic fuel, building materials, and a variety of needs ranging from barrels to ships timbers.

Appropriate action was sometimes taken. In 1626, just six years after its founding, Plymouth Colony began to regulate the cutting of timber. In 1681, William Penn laid down that for every five acres of forest cleared in Pennsylvania, one had to be left covered. The Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter of 1691 reserved all trees over 24 inches in diameter for the British navy and protected other pines vital for naval stores—regulations subsequently extended to other English colonies. Game restrictions date from 1639, when the township of Newport, Rhode Island, imposed a six-month moratorium. America’s first game law, which regulated seasons and banned the export of game and hides, was enacted by Connecticut in 1677. By 1700, all other English colonies aside from Georgia had imposed closed seasons on deer.

Lone voices of concern can be detected from the start. But they were diffuse and often casual. None of it constituted a body of thought that can be labeled conservationist. The first to comment on environmental transformation were visiting Europeans. Accustomed to a continent largely devoid of primal nature, they were well placed to note the drastic shift from ‘savagery’ to ‘civilization.’ Scientists appreciated the New World’s value as a laboratory for observing environmental change, reinforcing hypotheses of climate change through deforestation. Peter Kalm, a Swedish naturalist touring America in the 1740s, admonished Americans sharply over their reckless use of timber: “We can hardly be more hostile toward our woods in Sweden and Finland than they are here; their eyes are fixed upon the present gain and they are blind to the future.”[3] The process accelerated after independence, an English traveler in New Jersey in the 1790s noting that “in order to save themselves the work of shaking or pulling off the nuts, [Americans] find it simpler to cut the tree and gather the nuts from it, as it lies on the ground.”[4]

Colonial Americans also noticed the negative side of the conversion of nature’s domain into human habitat. In the mid-eighteenth-century, John Bartram, the self-taught Philadelphia botanist, recorded the depletion of soil fertility resulting from the clearance of riverine lowlands. Before planting, the vegetation retained the debris brought down by streams in flood; the decay of this vegetal matter maintained the richness of the soil. Following clearance, floodwater passed over the land without depositing nutrients, transporting away the top layer of soil from the cultivated land. Apparently unlimited abundance encouraged bad practices. Jared Eliot, leading New England divine and physician, was no opponent of the civilizing process, but wrote in 1748: “When our forefathers settled here, they entered a Land which probably never had been Ploughed since the Creation; the Land being new they depended upon the natural fertility of the Ground, which served their purpose very well, and when they had worn out one piece, they cleared another, without any concern to amend their land … whereas in England they would think a man a bad Husband, if he should pretend to sow … without any Dressing.”[5] Most members of the Virginian colonial intelligentsia worried about topsoil erosion, a process aggravated by cash crop monoculture that produced high yields yet exhausted fertility within five years. The early eighteenth-century observations and warnings of planter- historian Robert Beverley were repeated by George Washington, Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson. From the inventor of the fuel-economizing iron stove, fittingly, came another warning to intervene carefully when engaged in the “attempt to amend the scheme of Providence.” As a cautionary tale (1753), Benjamin Franklin cited the campaign to eradicate the blackbird in New England because of its predations on the corn crop. This backfired, for as the birds decreased, the numbers of a worm that preyed on grass escalated: “finding their loss in grass much greater than their saving in corn, they wished again for their blackbirds.”[6]

Forest devastation was the most visible and pressing drawback of colonization and attracted what little attention these matters received. President John Quincy Adams, in 1828, to discourage speculation on federal lands, tried to secure stricter controls on timber cutting but was rebuffed by an unsympathetic Congress. These eighteenth and early nineteenth-century antecedents of conservation might be seen to indicate that a rootedness promoting a more thoughtful attitude to the land was emerging in the settled east. But caution was entirely out of step with the nation’s restless, westering mood. Adams’s setting aside of a live-oak forest in Florida for naval use was overturned by his successor. “Sell cheap” was the motto of federal land policy from Jackson to the Civil War.

iii. The Pioneers of Nature Appreciation and Environmental Concern

Just as European thought shaped American antipathy to wilderness, Old World intellectual trends wrought a metamorphosis that invested untouched nature with almost paradisical qualities. Values expressing a mix of curiosity, love, admiration, respect and (sometimes) concern for untrammeled nature came to the fore during the first half of the nineteenth-century. Tocqueville, for example, brought his educated European sensibilities to America. As he commented during a trip to frontier Michigan in 1831, the object of which was to find somewhere (and someone) still immune from the torrent of European civilization: “To break through almost impenetrable forests … to sleep out in the damp woods—those are exertions that the American readily contemplates if it is a question of earning a guinea. But that one should do such things from curiosity is more than his mind can take in. Besides, living in the wilds, he only prizes the works of man. He will gladly send you off to see a road, a bridge, or a fine village. But that one should appreciate great trees and the beauties of solitude—that possibility completely passes him by.”

What Tocqueville characterized as “a quiet admiration, a gentle melancholy sense, and a vague distaste for civilised life, a sort of primitive instinct that makes one think with sadness that soon this delightful solitude will have changed its looks” was the stock bittersweet response of the romantic soul.[7]

It followed that the first Americans to view these changes in the European way hailed from the East and from the towns. Perhaps too much attention has been paid to the disaffected literary and artistic gents expressing dismay at the mean-spirited dealings with nature of the vast majority of their fellow-Americans from their comfortable vantage points. Nature appreciation often revealed discontent with industrial civilization rather than love of nature. Much of this was fashionable posturing betraying Wordsworth, Byron and Rousseau’s influence more than the impact of the American wilderness. Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels of the 1820s are riddled with disparaging references to the environmental consequences of frontier conquest. That doesn’t make Natty Bumppo (or Cooper) a pioneer environmen­talist, but does signal a spreading mood of ambivalence, a balancing of the cost of progress against the blessings that Cooper and the rest readily accepted. What they accomplished in a practical sense is miniscule. Historian Francis Parkman tried to persuade the state to buy private lands for a park in his beloved White Mountains and the artist Frederic Church got involved in the effort to establish Niagara international park (1885). The romantics are worth our time, however, because their eloquent questioning of the hegemonic western paradigm of environmental exploitation (to use politically correct language) inspired those of a later generation who did become activists.

A more distinctively American reappraisal of attitudes to wild nature was generated by the needs of cultural nationalism. The use of nature for this purpose stretches back at least as far as Thomas Jefferson’s rebuke to French zoologist Count Buffon in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) that New World mammals were bigger and better than their European counterparts. References to the puniness of the European reindeer alongside a moose and barbs that Roman pillars were not only dwarfed but positively juvenile next to redwoods were a staple of early patriotic puffery. Still, pride in a new land and reverence for sublimity would only become potent forces for change within the context of the frontier’s perceived closing in the 1890s. Parkman’s increasingly gloomy and elegaic prefaces to later editions of The Oregon Trail (1872, 1892) chart the advance of the process by which the “Wild West” was “tamed” and the extent to which its “savage charms” had “withered.”[8]

If there was a Mount Rushmore for America’s green giants, chiselled into the rock would be the faces of Aldo Leopold, John Muir and Henry David Thoreau. Modern U.S. environmentalism’s search for heroes and intellectual pedigree has found its taproots in Thoreau and his Walden (1854). Unlike most of his countrymen, among whom a nineteenth-century English traveller noted “scarcely any such thing as local attachments—the love of a place because it is a man’s own . .. Speaking generally, every farm from Eastport in Maine to Buffalo on Lake Erie, is for sale,”[9] Thoreau found a sacred space and developed a sense of place. The significance of transcendentalism in promoting more tender feelings toward nature in the raw—in Thoreau’s case and in general—has been exaggerated. Unlike most Concord literati, Thoreau’s curiosity was tangible as well as intellectual. Thoreau, the one-time disciple, is embraced as the grandfather of environmentalism rather than Emerson, the one-time master and transcendentalist maestro. This is no quirk of history. The stoical Emerson never waded in a bog to commune with a seething mass of mating toads nor climbed a tree to feel the wind. For the orthodox transcendentalist, the study and appreciation of nature were essentially an extension of the study and appreciation of the human self. To rise above the physical to the spiritual realm required the stimulus of something awe-inspiring, such as wild nature. There was no demotion of the peerless human individual which lies at the core of ecological humility. The material world of nature was valuable to the extent that it served higher spiritual purposes. Nature had no autonomous, animate existence. Most who venerated nature for its symbolism were complacent about change, conceiving of nature as something eternal and immutable. How could mere humans destroy something divine?

Thoreau, by contrast, understood its vulnerability and left a scientific record of a period of intensified environmental impact, whose most striking agents were factories and railroads and of which the most dramatic manifestation was deforestation. Though he appreciated the need to use wood, advocating wise management, his attitude to trees was also shaped by a conviction that nature had rights. In 1857 he wrote in his journal after witnessing the removal of underbrush: “If some are prosecuted for abusing children, others deserve to be prosecuted for maltreating the face of nature committed to their care.”[10] Some have detected in his ranting against a dam on the Concord River (“Who hears the fishes when they cry? I for one am with thee, and who knows what may avail a crow-bar against that Billerica dam”[11]) not only an enlarged concept of community embracing non- humans but also the antecedents of 1980s ‘monkeywrenching’—direct action to liberate enslaved nature. Thoreau found inspiration for his “heathenism” in the Native American—not the degraded contemporary product but the undefiled aboriginal of the past and of the imagination. Contemporary deep ecologists, determined to extract maximum value from such pronouncements and positions, easily consolidate a variety of disparate utterances from different periods of his life into a coherent philosophy.

This imposed consistency overlooks the diversity, equivocality and messiness of his thinking. Proto-ecological elements in Thoreau’s make-up tend to be the result of transcending transcendentalism but he never managed to throw off its shackles entirely. Nor did he emancipate himself fully from the Puritanism transcendentalism rejected. No intellectual in New England’s Puritan heyday lapsed into the decadence of nature poetry, despite being surrounded by more breaktaking and intact wild beauty than remained for Thoreau to praise. Yet he could not liberate himself completely from this powerful heritage. Transcendentalism shared puritanism’s quest for a higher truth and moral code. The clash between Thoreau’s transcendentalist puritan and pagan selves is illustrated by his attraction to vegetarianism. In common with the zealots of Fruitlands, he believed man could rise above his baser animal instincts and residual wildness to a higher plane by avoiding flesh. Against this can be set the enthusiasm with which he caught fish as part of his subsistence economy at Walden Pond, and comments that on encountering a woodchuck he was “strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw.”[12]

Thoreau’s specific proposals were few and often expressed privately. He opined that each Massachusetts township “should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation.”[13] In 1858, inspired by the backwoods of northern Maine, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, he recommended the creation of “national preserves … in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be ‘civilized off the face of the earth.’”[14] Granted, there were no conservation organizations to join, but even had there been, he is unlikely to have joined let alone founded one. In the 1850s, there were far more pressing issues that occupied even his time. And yet, despite his abhorrence of slavery, he refused to join the local anti-slavery society and held reformers as a class in the greatest of contempt.

America’s mystical proto-ecologist has been better known in Britain (and the rest of the world) as a political dissident. Walden was cult reading for late Victorian radicals. Every early socialist intellectual who worshipped William Morris and Shelley as much as Marx and Engels is supposed to have carried a copy in his or her pocket, attracted by its critique of capitalism and materialism rather than its natural history. Robert Blatchford, the author of Merrie England (1893), claimed to have slept with Walden under his pillow. Though Thoreau never intended his paean to wild nature to be a blueprint, its value to the American environmental movement has been precisely the inspirational alternative path he pursued as well as preached. Not only Americans have marched to the beat of his green (as opposed to red) drum. The Victorian Englishman, Henry Salt, his first proper biographer, discovered Thoreau just as he was being converted to socialism, vegetarianism and the cause of animal rights. This lethal combination caused him to quit his teaching post at Eton in 1885 and retire (in semi-solitude—he had a wife) to a cottage in deepest Surrey where he tore up his gown and used the strips to tie his Thoreauvian beans to their poles.

Thoreau was relatively unknown in his lifetime outside Concord. Fellow New Englander and contemporary, George Perkins Marsh, did not suffer the same obscurity. The Marsh family had a secure position in the American intellectual aristocracy and George (1801-82) led a diverse career as lawyer, linguist, businessman, politician and diplomat. His interest in the deleterious role of human intervention in nature focused initially on deforestation in his native Vermont but eventually encompassed the globe. Marsh distilled his accumulated ideas and experiences into Man and Nature: or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864). His great departure was to insist that man was an active and a free agent who shaped the earth more than it shaped him, and, moreover, frequently misshaped it. From his travels and studies, Marsh gleaned an arsenal of data to support his case for mismanagement. The deforested hills of the Mediterranean offered him an environmental explanation for the collapse of ancient civilizations. His American sections covered wildlife destruction but deforestation remained his central theme. The term ‘ecology’ did not yet exist but Marsh had a sound understanding of the proper workings of the natural system, the interrelatedness of parts, and the follies of human interference. He cited the vivid example of the massive destruction of pines by insects, concluding that “there is good reason to believe that man is the indirect cause of an evil for which he pays so heavy a penalty. Insects increase whenever the birds which feed upon them disappear. Hence, in the wanton destruction of insectivorous birds … man … is not only depriving his groves of their fairest ornament, but he is waging a treacherous warfare on his natural allies.”[15]

Many commentators have been unequivocal in their assessments of Marsh’s book. According to Michael Williams: “Here was the first stirrings of environmental awareness and the conservation movement, as it became known in the Western world.”[16] Man and Nature was the most comprehensive, synthetic and scholarly treatment of the relationship between man and nature over time to date. Walden had sold slowly, but Marsh’s first edition sold out within a few months and appeared in Italian editions in 1869 and 1872. A new English language edition, incorporating new material, was published in 1874 as The Earth as Modified by Human Action. Thoreau and Marsh addressed the same issue; proper use of the natural world—specifically use of trees. While Thoreau was short on practical suggestions, Marsh was replete with diagnoses and remedies such as the artificial propagation of fish. Yet he should not be read too narrowly as the precursor of the conservation later associated with Gifford Pinchot. Granted, he was primarily concerned with the dangers of man’s imprudent use of the earth for man himself “The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant.” In the second edition, however, he called for the setting aside of land “in its primitive condition,” not only for education and recreation, but also as “an asylum where indigenous trees … plants … beasts may dwell and perpetuate their kind.” Current attitudes and behaviour were wrong as well as bad for people. “Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste.” He, too, found the American Indian an inspiration in the quest for a better, gentler creed, being particularly impressed by their way of extracting maple syrup, which released sap without damaging the tree.[17]

Another seminal work was John Wesley Powell’s Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States (1878), hailed by Jacobs as “the first study of the land to call for a scientific and environmental understanding of the West.”[18] Powell, a one-armed veteran of the Civil War and explorer of the Colorado River, was chief of the infant U.S. Geological Survey. In the drier West, Powell believed the Jeffersonian homesteader vision bred of the humid, temperate, forested east had met its nemesis. Tossing out the sacred notion of 160 acres and the practise of arable farming, he warned that the West offered no scope for a massive settler influx and that a pastoral economy was the only kind attuned to the character of the land and suggested that 2,500 acres were the minimum required for a viable grazing operation. Powell’s sober views and his emphasis on the role of careful planning and government intervention were denounced as pessimistic and un-American. The report was shelved and the colonization of the ‘Great American Desert’ followed the established pattern.

4. The Conservation Movement

i. Pinchot, Forestry and Utilitarian Conservation

After the Civil War, in the trans-Mississippi West, the conquest of the continent culminated in what Vernon Parrington called the “huge barbecue … to which … all the important persons, leading bankers and promoters and business men, received invitations.”[19] Gilded Age governments remained loyal to the ingrained philosophy of ‘giveaway.’ Under the Timber and Stone Act of 1878, for example, any citizen could buy 160 acres of non- agricultural land for $2.5 an acre without having to live on it. The only requirement was that the buyer swore an oath that they would use the land themselves. Through an act granting swamp and overflow lands to the states, a good deal of prime forest land passed cheaply into corporate hands. In addition to blatant trespass and illegal appropriation, the lumber barons in particular perfected a series of devious methods to thwart the law. Trainloads of city folk were shipped out to a desirable piece of public domain, shepherded to the land office to file their individual timber-and-stone claims, where they paid with money provided by the barons and immediately sold to them. A favourite anecdote concerns the man who homesteaded a piece of prime timberland in Idaho. He swore he had cleared some of the land and planted a crop, cut timber, built a cabin, and eaten the potatoes he had raised. In fact he’d been hired to secure the land for a timber baron. He’d buried a sack of potatoes, built a minature house about four feet square, then dug up some of the potatoes and eaten them. Two days after entering his claim, he filled out the papers and secured ownership. [20]

The first flickers of a conservation conscience inside the federal government were a reaction to deforestation. Carl Schurz, Hayes’s secretary of the interior, was an immigrant who brought the more mature European perspective on natural resource management. In 1877, the reformer issued a report accusing the lumber barons of “not merely stealing trees, but whole forests.” Schurz managed to bring a few corporate culprits to heel and proposed federal forest reserves, reforestation and user fees. The reaction of congressmen from lumber states set the tone for parochial hostility to conservation over the next century. Conservation came out of the East but the major battleground was the ‘vest, which felt the same way about Washington’s proscriptions as colonial New Englanders did about London’s ‘broad arrow.’ Schurz’s conservation, like Powell’s recommendations, was un-American, a sinister bid to impose “Prussian methods.”[21] Wielding the financial axe as their handiest weapon, timber state and territorial politicians fought ‘internal colonialism’ by withdrawing funds for federal enforcement. The growth of saplings like Schurz was overshadowed and stunted by the towering timber barons during the 1870s and 1880s. Still, he had pointed the government toward stewardship, not least by bringing in a professional forester, Bernard Fernow (a fellow German immigrant), as the first chief of the new Division of Forestry. So far, though, there were no trees to look after. The first material success came in 1891 when President Harrison secured (through astonishing luck and duplicity) the Forest Reservation Act, which authorized the chief executive to carve reservations out of the public domain. Harrison withdrew 13 million acres within a month all of them west of the Mississippi. In 1897, Cleveland set aside another 21 million acres, also in the face of extreme congressional disapproval.

Now there were forests but no management policy. “Lock up,” the opposition’s term, suited those who wanted reservations to mean permanent non-use. Enter Gifford Pinchot, who took charge of the Division of Forestry in 1898. The Pinchot family fortune was partly based on logging profits and Gifford’s father, concerned over depletion, was eager for French methods to be introduced from the old country. There was nowhere in America to study forestry, so Pinchot was sent to the finest French and Swiss schools to study under Sir Dietrich Brandis, the German who founded forestry in British India. By the time Theodore Roosevelt assumed the presidency, Pinchot had added 40 million acres of forest reserve. In 1905 the (now) Bureau of Forestry became the U.S. Forest Service (of which Pinchot served as chief until 1911) and the reserves over which it had only recently won control from the Department of the Interior were redesignated as national forests. This institutional legacy was matched by an ideological legacy: the conservation-as-wise-use school, that coalesced around Pinchot. Though forestry was his first and remained his main love, he strove for a coordinated federal policy encompassing trees, soil, water and minerals. He claims to have coined the term ‘Conservation’—whose meaning had previously been restricted to the preservation of fruit and the keeping of bees—though he was aware of the British precedent in India, where government forests were called Conservancies and their foresters known as Conservators. The secret of his success was his intimate personal and professional relationship with Theodore Roosevelt, a rapport between agency chief and chief executive unique in U.S. history. By the 1980s, environmental awareness and consensus in Congress and the nation at large were sufficiently entrenched to frustrate a hostile executive branch. In the early 1900s, facing a legislature loath to fund federal initiatives, commissions and congresses, conservation was entirely dependent on presidential/federal leadership for its strength and momentum. T.R. and G.P. had boundless ambitions. In 1908, they organized a governor’s conference on conservation at the White House. The following year the president hosted a North American conservation conference attended by Canada, Newfoundland and Mexico. The first ‘Earth Summit’ convened in Rio, Brazil, in June 1992 but if T.R. and G.P. had had their way, it would have been held over seventy-five years ago. In contrast to Bush’s isolation in 1992, Roosevelt’s regime was in the vanguard of world conservation. During his administration’s dying days, he was planning a global conference. His successor, Taft, killed the initiative.

Pinchot’s policies were packaged for public consumption as a democratic crusade and the traditional view was that conservation typified the reformist, trust-busting nature of the Progressive era. Reassessments of Progressivism have directly affected interpretations of conservation. Samuel P. Hays rejected the liberal view, not to demonstrate that conservation was conservative, but to stress its essentially apolitical, modernizing character. Conservation, he argued, epitomized the managerial, efficiency, planning and generally technocratic goals of Progressivism, with its attempt to transfer decision-making from politicians to experts.[22] Opposition to unrestrained laissez-faire and haphazard exploitation did not make conservation anti- corporate. There is evidence that big business found it quite congenial. Curbs on production, avoidance of waste and reforestation met with the approval of businesses facing resource shortage in the long term and welcoming curbs on competition. The fiercest critics were often ‘the people’ not ‘the interests’.

For all the talk of ‘scientific management’ (which did not mean management on ecological principles), commercial gain remained the yardstick; in the national forests, grazing took precedence over watershed protection. There was obviously less difference between unregulated grazing and regulated grazing than between grazing of any kind and no grazing. It may have represented an advance over pioneer practise but involved much less of a break with the past in terms of attitudes to nature. The famous Alaska coal lands leasing dispute also obscured a high degree of ideological convergence between the warring parties. The controversy, after all, was over how, by who, and when the resource should be exploited, not over the principle of development. For Pinchot, non-use was as bad as wasteful use. Conservation was the solution to “the one great central problem of the use of the earth for the good of man.”[23] Utilitarian conservationists approached the natural world just as the sociologist, Lester ‘yard, approached society; bent on redesigning and improving. “The first great fact about conservation,” Pinchot reiterated, “is that it stands for development … The first principle of conservation is development.”[24]

Trees were a crop and forests were tree farms, so the forest service’s home in the agriculture department made sense. Pinchot fought efforts to create game reserves in national forest. He tried to bring existing national parks within his empire and, adamant that not an inch of land should be taken out of production, opposed all new ones. He preferred the company of lumber executives to that of neo-transcendentalists. Interestingly, he drew on the prudent husbandry of the American Indians—as opposed to their earth-worship—for support: “centuries before the Conservation policy was born, here was Conservation practice at its best.”[25]

The public, however, was less interested in utilitarian conservation than in preservation (‘aesthetic conservation’). The former emerged largely from within the federal government. The latter lacked a power base at the top and functioned more like a modern, grassroots environmental protest movement. Prominent at this local level were women—the fertile seedbed for a plethora of private reform initiatives in the late nineteenth-century. Women were among the earliest members of the Boston-based Appalachian Mountain Club (1876) and San Francisco’s Sierra Club (1892), and featured in more than a teamaking role. They spearheaded local campaigns to save New Jersey’s Palisades, California’s Calaveras Big Trees, and Colorado’s ancient cliff dwellings. The Daughters of the American Revolution, over 70,000 strong at the turn of the century, had a doughty conservation committee chaired by Mrs James Pinchot, Gifford’s mother, and the women’s conservation movement generally remained loyal to Pinchot until Hetch Hetchy. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs (1890) was another formidable instrument of persuasion, representing over three-quarters of a million women by the early twentieth-century. Mrs John Dickinson Sherman, chairwoman of the federation’s conservation committee, threw herself into the campaign for a national park service, writing 700 personal letters in 1916.[26] Birds, above all, attracted female attention. Women dominated early Audubon Society campaigns and, by 1915, counted for slightly over 50% of Auduboners. Women, through their hats, were large consumers of bird products. Their efforts (importation of wild bird feathers was banned in 1913) were assisted by the whims of fashion which, once again, came to the rescue of wildlife. Just as the shift to silk hats had saved the beaver, so the survival of certain birds was assured in the 1920s when large ungainly hats—often festooned with entire birds—largely became extinct; the bob provided no anchorage for a hatpin.

Contemporary feminists may cringe over women’s motivation. Conservation and preservation became magnets of righteousness attracting old stock Americans of both sexes unsettled by the forces of industrialization, urbanization, industrial conglomerations and ‘new’ immigration. Though opponents denounced the antics of ‘long-haired men and short-haired women,’ some women saw their involvement as an extension of the traditional female role as conservators of the home, the child, and the race. And for women like Mrs Matthew T. Scott, president general of the D.A.R., the values and racial purity of Anglo-America also needed protection. As she told the Second National Conservation Congress in 1910: “We … ancestresses of future generations, have a right to insist upon the conserving not only of our soil, forest, birds … fishes … but also upon the conserving of the supremacy of the Caucasian race in our land.”[27] Aesthetic conservation remains a supremely patriotic cause. Though shorn of its uglier overtones, love of the untamed American earth is a key facet of Americanism. As a bumper sticker issued by Earth First! exhorts: “American Wilderness: Love it or Leave it Alone.”

ii. Sportsmen and Wildlife

Wildlife provided the most numbing evidence of environmental despoliation. Buffalo and pigeon were the most blatant examples. John James Audubon, the first great American naturalist, demonstrates, though, that the sheer fact of mass destruction and disapproval thereof were insufficient to promote concern, let alone action. Audubon witnessed the wholesale slaughter of passenger pigeons in Kentucky in 1813, describing how “the authors of all this devastation began to move among the dead, the dying and the mangled, picking up the Pigeons and piling them in heaps. When each man had as many as he could possibly dispose of, hogs were let loose to feed on the remainder.” Yet he foresaw no long-term impact from the activities of “the tyrant of creation, man,” reflecting that though “persons unacquainted … might naturally conclude that such dreadful havoc would soon put an end to the species … I have satisfied myself by long observation that nothing but the gradual diminution of our forests can accomplish their decrease.”[28] 1813 was still the heyday of superabundance and the myth of inexhaustibility. Restrained estimates put the pre-Columbian pigeon population of the U.S. at between 3 and 5 billion and until the 1870s, despite the type of carnage Audubon witnessed, more pigeons hatched than were killed. The last wild pigeon was killed in 1899 and the last representative of the species, Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. In 1492 an estimated 60 million buffalo roamed North America. By the 1820s, the last specimen east of the Mississippi had been shot. A government survey in 1894 could only find about 80 wild animals and a further thousand or so in parks or ranches. The heyday of slaughter came in the 1870s, when buffalo were shot as a meat supply for railroad construction workers, to provide leather for the transmission belts of eastern industry and the boots of British soldiers, to supply robes for carriage rides, for trophies to adorn the study walls of eastern aristocrats, just for fun, and, not least, to starve out the last recalcitrant Indian tribes. This nearextermination provided the impetus for wildlife conservation.

John Reiger believes the role of wildlife and sportsmen has been neglected by historians of conservation. Distinguishing between two classes of hunter—those who shot for the market and the sportsmen who indulged in the chase for a variety of non-material reasons—the hunter-historian tries to show that love of nature and love of hunting were (and still are) compatible. The emergence of a professional ethic and group identity in the 1870s is seen in the mushrooming of mass circulation, national newspapers such as Forest and Stream and the proliferation of sportsmen’s clubs (over 300 by 1878). From the 1870s onwards, state law regulated bags, seasons and methods, set up game commissions and appointed wardens. Commercial hunting was abolished and the crowning achievement, the Lacey Act of 1900, outlawed interstate trade in game killed in violation of state laws. In 1903, Roosevelt created the first wildlife refuge—Pelican Island, Florida. (The first informal wildlife refuge was arguably Afognak Forest and Fish-Culture Reserve off the coast of Alaska [1892].)

The assertion that concern for wildlife rather than concern for forests, reclamation or parks marks the origins of conservation dethrones both Pinchot and the preservationists. Instead, Reiger enthrones George Bird Grinnell, arguing that the editor/proprietor of Forest and Stream was the earliest and most important influence on T.R., preparing him for Pinchot. Another revisionist impact is the pushing back of organized conservation’s origins to the 1870s. And whereas many historians characterize the conservation impulse as middle- class, Reiger identifies upper-class sportsmen as “the real spearhead.” His effort to pinpoint hunting and fishing as the key experience in the making of most early conservationists (“that first crucial contact with the natural world”) will never convince the non-hunting majority in the contemporary environmental movement but he is justified in heralding the prestigious Boone and Crockett Club (1888) as “the first private organization to deal effectively with conservation issues of national scope.”[29] Most importantly, he sees sportsmen as being in the vanguard of all three major foci of conservation activity in the late nineteenth-century; not only wildlife but also forests and national parks. Sportsmen were especially interested in effectively protecting Yellowstone’s beleaguered game, Grinnell leading the campaign for legislation (secured in 1894). Sportsmen who lobbied for parks—where all game was protected—cannot be accused of mere self- interest. Nor can Grinnell when he formed the Audubon Society in 1886—an organization dedicated to protecting non-game birds. He also used Forest and Stream to campaign for efficient forest management, advocated for reasons quite independent of game habitat preservation.

The elite Boone and Crockett Club (membership restricted to a hundred who had killed “in fair chase” at least three North American big game trophies) took its code from the British aristocracy but its name from the two most famous hunters in American history, from the days when hunting was a basic pioneer right. Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, in the context of the 1880s, were precisely those unscrupulous pot hunters who jeopardized their sport. That Francis Parkman was a member reveals a good deal. So does the role in its founding of politicians like future Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge. A prime function of sport hunting was the ritual reinforcement of old values in a changing America, a patrician protest against crass materialism and a nativist defence of American natural patrimony threatened by foreigners who hunted for base reasons. Unsurprisingly, many sportsmen conservationists shared the Anglo-Saxon supremacism of the time and regarded the outdoors as a wholesome, proper environment for Nordics, whereas lesser breeds flourished in the cities.[30] Game laws gave an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Revulsion against the status of songbirds in Italian cuisine led to some state laws banning the use of lime and nets, the barring of aliens from carrying or owning firearms and even from hunting altogether.[31] Hunting could also be a more positive expression of frontier nostalgia and cultural patriotism. For pioneering ecologist Aldo Leopold (an ardent, life- long hunter) there was “value in any experience that reminds us of our distinctive national origins … i.e. that stimulates awareness of history. Such awareness is ‘nationalism’ in its best sense … a boy scout has tanned a coonskin cap, and goes Daniel Booneing in the willow thickets below the tracks. He is re-enacting American history. He is, to that extent, culturally prepared to face the dark and bloody realities of the present.”[32]

iii. Muir and Preservationism

In the late 1970s, the California Historical Society chose John Muir as the greatest figure in Californian history. And for the modern American environmentalist, a visit to John Muir’s home at Martinez, California, is an act of homage of the same order as a pilgrimage to Lenin’s Tomb once was for a member of the Soviet Communist Party. Muir (1838-1914) spent his first eleven years in Dunbar, Scotland, followed by a spartan upbringing on a lean pioneer farm in Wisconsin, where he was force-fed a stern puritan ethic by his cruel father. Unlike Thoreau, Marsh and Pinchot, Muir experienced the direct, workaday confrontation with wild nature that usually bred hostility. He was one of the few early conservationists to emerge from within the pioneer tradition. He finally cut loose for ‘the University of the Wilderness’ and his travels eventually brought him to California. He spent the early 1870s living in Yosemite Valley, working at odd jobs and wandering in the Sierra, absorbing himself in glacial studies. In the later 1870s, as middle age caught up, Muir settled into family and business life as a fruit farmer. Forays into the mountains also became fewer as he threw himself into conservation politics. Muir is often portrayed as a scion of Thoreau but he came down to fight for what he loved. The skillful mountaineer became a skillful politician through a campaign to transfer Yosemite Valley to the surrounding national park. By the early 1900s, his writings were nationally famous and he could rarely walk in his cherished spots without suffering the smothering attention of his devotees.

The adolescent Muir’s unrelenting biblical diet shaped his every thought and expression. Christianity lay at the root of his environmental ethics. Muir’s case provides powerful support for those seeking an alternative Christian vision to set alongside the dominant anthropocentric tradition pilloried by Lynn White in his celebrated essay (1967) on Western religion’s responsibility for the environmental crisis. Muir threw out his father’s God but took in a more generous, almost pantheistic deity. Climbing mountains took him closer to God’s only true temples. He near-worshipped Emerson and carried Nature with him into the mountains but transcendentalism and romanticism merely reinforced his Christian convictions. According to a recent biographer, he first read Walden in 1872 at age 34.[33] The gulf between transcendentalist identification with nature and Muir’s visceral affection was highlighted when the ageing Emerson visited Yosemite in 1871. Muir invited his hero to spend a month hiking in the Sierra. Emerson declined, preferring the comforts of a hotel bed, explaining that “solitude is a sublime mistress but an intolerable wife.” That Emerson preferred “carpet dust” to a fragrant bed of pine needles was for thirty-something Muir a “sad commentary on the glorious transcendentalism.”[34] Muir had no need of mistresses. Wilderness solitude was for him the sublimest of wives.

In a journal entry in 1867-68, Muir lashed out at man’s dominion from God’s position:

A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot render in some way what they call useful to themselves. They have precise and dogmatic insight into the intentions of the Creator … Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit—the cosmos? They are earth-born companions and fellow mortals … They, also, are his children … How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies! They … are part of God’s family, unfallen, undepraved and cared for with the same species of tenderness and love as is bestowed on angels in heaven and saints on earth.[35]

A major debate within a burgeoning Muirian scholarship focuses on the originality of his thought. The older view is that his primary significance fies in effective publicization of orthodox transcendentalist ideas. Deep ecologists, however, are keen to claim him as a subversive and early biocentric, citing his avant garde sympathy for the renegades and sinners of the animal kingdom—rattlesnakes, grizzlies and other predators—and expressions of contempt for ‘Lord Man.’ Though he clearly went far beyond Emerson and even Thoreau, the effort to construct a politically correct Muir tends to skip over elements such as his friendship with and admiration for magnates like E. H. Harriman, the owner, among other things, of the California state legislature and the Southern Pacific Railroad, who assisted Muir in securing the Yosemite recession. Yet the cultural context that ensured Muir was more influential than his New England predecessors deserves as much attention as the question as to whether his thought was derivative or innovative. Unlike Thoreau, Muir did not find himself stocking his library with his unsold books. The first 1,500 printing of The Mountains of California (1894) sold out within a few months and magazines with a circulation of 200,000, such as the nation’s premier literary journal, Century, eagerly solicited his articles. American society was clearly more receptive to the wild message by the end of the century. Muir’s literary success has to be considered in the context of the mood of anxiety born of the announced closing of the frontier and the wilderness cult that developed to cope with the implications for a frontier-nurtured culture. Frontier nostalgia and the celebration of the ‘strenuous life’ as a virile antidote to the dangers of national middle age and emasculating over-civilization forged a macho form of wilderness appreciation more potent than romanticism. The celebration of the wild in the wake of the frontier’s apparent passage into history was part of a groundswell that produced the Boy Scout movement and made a bestseller of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903).

The tale of the rumpus following San Francisco’s application to dam the 2 square miles of 1100 square-mile Yosemite National Park represented by Hetch Hetchy Valley (1909-13) is probably the best known incident in U.S. conservation history. That the controversy marked the final break between Pinchot and Muir and set in stone the distinction between utilitarian conservation and preservation is a basic convention in the historical literature. Suffice to add that the dam threat was good for preservationism. It provided the first opportunity to put the case for wilderness preservation before a national audience. Hetch Hetchy also emphasized the dilemma of many Americans, within whom Pinchot and Muir vied for ascendancy. Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, had done a lot for the preservationist cause but came down, in this particular instance, on the side of the utilitarians, as did about a third of the Sierra Club. The Hetch Hetchy controversy seems a surprisingly modern one. The tactics are familiar; coalitionbuilding, lobbying through letters, petitions, telegrams, and articles. One broadside was sent to 14,000 newspapers. One senator received 5,000 letters protesting the decision to approve the permit. Through intensive lobbying, citizen-led aesthetic conservation received a political education. Hetch Hetchy suggested that future disputes over wilderness would figure prominently in U.S. political debate. Not least, it gave the preservationists an outrage, a guilt factor on which to play whenever parks were threatened: ‘Remember Hetch Hetchy!’ The most important immediate lesson was that the parks could not be defended on aesthetic grounds alone. The onus was on their advocates to prove that more revenue could be generated through preservation than by resource extraction.

iv. The National Parks

“Coca-cola, basketball, and National Parks: American contributions to world civilisation.”[36] The national park can be seen as a democratic reinterpretation of British precedent; the Victorian urban park and medieval royal hunting reserves like the New Forest. Indirect American precedents—urban and rural—can also be found. Colonial Massachusetts’s Great Ponds Act of 1641 set aside some 90,000 watery acres in perpetuity for public fishing and wildfowling. The industrializing nation’s growing desire for outdoor recreational opportunities was seen in the rural cemetery movement, such places being used for picknicking and taking the air as well as visiting the dead. The first of these was Mount Auburn, near Boston (1831). Though Boston Common was set aside as early as 1634, New York City’s Central Park (1861) was the first tract dedicated by a municipality entirely for public recreation and a hundred cities had followed its example by 1892. It is no coincidence that landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, its planner and an early manager, proceeded to play a leading part in the creation and management of the Yosemite Grant (1864, see below), serving as its first custodian. A more direct precedent was the establishment of the Hot Springs Reservation, Arkansas, in 1832, reserved for the nation to thwart private appropriation.

George Catlin, renowned painter of the vanishing Native American, is now usually credited with the national park idea. In 1832, while travelling in what is now South Dakota among herds of buffalo and ‘the wildest tribes’ and rueing their imminent extinction, he expressed the hope that these

joint tenants … might in future be seen, (by some great protecting policy of government) preserved in their pristine beauty and wildness, in a magnificent park, where the world could now see for ages to come, the native Indian in his classic attire, galloping his wild horse, with sinewy bow … What a beautiful and thrilling specimen for America to preserve and hold up to the view of her refined citizens and the world, in future ages! A nation’s park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature’s beauty![37]

A fine example of how the romantic and primitivist spirit favourably reshaped perceptions of wild nature. Yet when national parks were created they bore little resemblance to Catlin’s living museum on the Plains.

Yellowstone is the icon but some regard Yosemite as the first national park in all but name. In 1864 the federal government (despite the preoccupations of the civil war) ceded to the state of California some 40 square miles of majestic scenery and the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees in the Sierra Nevada, to “be held for public use, resort, and recreation; … inalienable for all time.” Again, the move was a response to the beginnings of private acquisition. The concept was formally established in 1872 with the 3,300 square mile Yellowstone National Park in the Wyoming Rockies. The objects of attention here were fabulous geysers and bubbling mud pots. The size of the withdrawal can be explained as an insurance measure; there might be more geothermal wonders. The agricultural worthlessness of the region smoothed the bill’s passage. Once more, the move was to check the filing of legitimate private claims to public domain. No money was provided to manage the park until a meagre appropriation in 1877 and wildlife in particular remained unprotected until cavalry units appeared in 1886. ‘Geyser jamming’ continued through the 1870s. Hoping to provoke unnaturally spectacular eruptions, early visitors habitually clogged Old Faithful with trash.

Just as the U.S. Forest Service institutionalised the utilitarian ethos, the National Park Service (1916) granted preservationism official recognition. The parks are often regarded as the embodiment of the anti- commercial, idealistic impulse of conservation. Wilderness was preserved through park creation but this was not their raison d’etre. Their purpose was to to protect wonders of nature like giant sequoias, tumbling waterfalls, and gushing geysers from private exploitation. Conservation (let alone ecology) had little to do with the early park movement. The demands of cultural nationalism supplied the impetus. Lacking Europe’s historical and artistic monuments, Americans strove to combat cultural anxieties by enshrining their natural treasures. It followed that only stunning scenery and freaks of nature qualified. All late nineteenth-century parks conformed to the original criteria of monumentalism and worthlessness in terms of resource extraction. Areas known to contain commercial timber or minerals were excluded and park size was often reduced to exclude natural resources once they came to light. All were located in the still-wild mountain West. In 1890, Sequoia, General Grant and Yosemite National Parks came into being in the Sierra Nevada. (The Yosemite Grant was restored to federal control in 1906, becoming the heart of the Yosemite park.) Mount Rainier National Park, focusing on perhaps the most impressive single peak in the lower 48 states, was carved out of the North Cascades in 1899, the words ‘national park’ being first used in the enabling legislation for Rainier. The monumentalist, ‘rock and ice’ trend continued into this century, embracing the volcanic wonders of Crater Lake (1902) and Lassen (1916), and the rugged alpine scenery of Glacier (1910).

These national parks were matched by state parks, many of them east of the Mississippi. New York state took the lead here. For many Americans and Europeans, the tawdry commercialization and harnessing of Niagara Falls was the most shameful symbol of the youthful nation’s failure to appreciate its natural splendours. The bid to protect some of the area, begun formally in 1867, came to fruition in 1885 with the dedication of the Niagara Falls Reservation. That same year, the state legislature set up the Adirondack Forest Preserve, decreeing that an area the size of Switzerland should remain “forever wild” in the interests of watershed protection, public recreation, and wilderness preservation. Often overlooked in standard accounts is the Antiquities Act of 1906, which authorized the president to designate as national monuments by proclamation federal areas containing objects of historic, prehistoric or scientific value. Monuments almost immediately established included Devils Tower, Wyoming, Petrified Forest, Arizona, and Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. The advantage was that the temporizing of Congress and the delays inherent in the normal procedure for setting up parks could be circumvented at a stroke and a number of national parks originally came in through the back door as national monuments: Grand Canyon, Olympic, Zion and Bryce Canyon. And since the criteria for monuments were much vaguer than for parks, they sometimes proved far more amenable to environmental considerations. Saguaro cacti and redwoods, for example, achieved initial protection as monuments. Moreover, the monuments received much less publicity than the parks and were less prone to tourist development pressures. This neglect could furnish greater protection for nature than the parks.”[38]

Designation as park or monument did not protect per se from economic development. The Hetch Hetchy dam is prime evidence of the vulnerability of the fledgling parks as soon as a material use surfaced. Spared the lumberman, grazier, and miner, if not the dambuilder, parks succumbed to a different form of pressure-that exerted by mass tourism. The park service may have salvaged the parks from financial uncertainty and administrative confusion, but was ensured a complex future by coming into being with a dual, ambiguous mandate to “provide for the enjoyment [of the parks] in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” Yet early proponents had little choice but to offer them as public “pleasuring grounds.” They had to beat utilitarian conservation on its own terms and meet the public at its level, justifying the parks’s existence to congressmen by emphasizing their usefulness and egalitarian appeal. Politicians would have laughed out parks to protect nature for its own sake or in the interests of wellheeled wilderness buffs. Muir knew this and assumed wholeheartedly the role of booster, conceding in 1898 that “even the scenery habit in its most artificial forms, mixed with spectacles, silliness and kodaks; its devotees … frightening the wild game with red umbrellas” was encouraging and good for the cause. [39]

Boosting visitation involved hotels, roads and entertainments, like the firefall, bear feedings, Indian rodeo, and zoo in Yosemite. Yellowstone developed its own carnival atmosphere. It made sense that the first director of the National Park Service (1915-29), Stephen Mather, was a successful businessman (like many fellow Sierra Clubbers) who applied his skills to selling the parks. Assisted by wartime disruption of travel to Europe, and backed by the railroads and the American Automobile Association, he launched a ‘See America First’ campaign. Already by the 1920s, more visitors came by automobile than by train. Few Americans (least of all Muir) thought that opening the parks to the automobile was anything but positive. After all, the Sierra Club’s declaration of purpose included the undertaking “to explore, enjoy and render accessible” the Sierra Nevada. One of the few apprehensive voices was that of the famous Scottish alpinist (and Liberal politician), James Bryce. In 1912, the British ambassador to the U.S. warned the American Civic Association that America was losing its distinctiveness in terms of the unusual abundance of wild places it once enjoyed. With specific reference to Yosemite and the deepening American love- affair with the auto, he preached:

There are plenty of roads for the lovers of speed and noise, without intruding on these few wild places where the wood nymphs and the water nymphs ought to be allowed to have the landscape to themselves. If Adam had known what harm the serpent was going to work, he would have tried to prevent him from finding lodgement in Eden; and if you were to realize what the result of the automobile will be in that wonderful, that incomparable valley, you will keep it out. The automobile means dust, it moves too fast and interferes with detailed esthetic enjoyment, it prevents contemplation, it destroys the whole feeling of the spontaneity and freshness of primitive nature.[40]

Autos were given the green light in 1913. The first Ford entered Yellowstone in 1915. The survival of the parks as viable institutions was assured, but their survival as nature was less certain. :Most visitors were auto-powered and viewed the parks as another roadside attraction. Others sought contact with nature but not necessarily wild nature. The smallest group—the purists—were prepared to take the wilderness ungilded but their interest remained anthropocentric. Spirits like Muir, who extolled the rights of nature, especially those of its least popular forms (like rattlesnakes) were a curiosity. Most preservationists happily countenanced predator eradication in the parks. The establishment of Everglades National Park in Florida (1934) over the protests of traditionalists who felt this area of dreary swamp was unworthy of hallowed park status marked a considerable victory for the biocentrists; the appeal of the Everglades resided in its wildlife. Steps were also taken to peel off some of the lily’s crasser layers of gilding. Bear feedings were abolished in Yellowstone and Yosemite in 1941 /42. Despite such biocentric gestures, the preservation of representative wildlife and environmental samples, “vignettes of primitive America” (to quote a pathbreaking report of 1963) are still struggling to become park service priorities.

Only now are Catlin’s “monotonous” grasslands gaining recognition as a candidate for admission to the system. Catlin, ironically, had employed the worthless lands argument himself, predicting that the Great Plains, from Canada down to Mexico, “ever must be, useless to cultivating man.”[41] He wildly underestimated their suitability for corn and wheat, hand hunger, and the capacities of technology. So when interest in elevating grasslands to park status emerged, only two significant remnants of tallgrass prairie survived (due to unsuitability for the plough), in the Flint Hills of eastern Kansas and Oklahoma’s Osage Hills. The proposed Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Oklahoma contains plenty of movement when the wind caresses the tallgrass but has lacked the more charismatic forms of animate nature since the teeming buffalo and their aboriginal hunters bit the dust. Reclamation of the biological past (and even the partial fulfillment of Catlin’s vision) will involve reintroducing elk, buffalo and pronghorn antelope.

A more tangible problem is the ‘being loved to death’ phenomenon. Overcrowding in Yosemite had struck one visitor as a problem as early as 1931. This wag felt that the only difference between it and an intersection in Los Angeles was that “they had trees and no traffic cops in Yosemite Valley, while at Seventh and Broadway they had no trees and a traffic Cop.”[42] The Sierra Club took formal note of the problem of overload in 1951 when it dropped the “render accessible” provision from its bylaws. Since the 1960s, biocentric dissent has flourished as never before. The most strident attack on the development faction within the park service and ‘industrial tourism’ was mounted by Edward Abbey, novelist and sometime seasonal park ranger, whose plan (1968) for their ‘salvation’ included: “No more cars in national parks. Let the people walk. We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they too, are holy places.”[43] Back with a twist is the patriotic idea of the national park as a shrine, a treasure on a par with the finest of human culture.

v. From the Twenties to the Fifties

Initially it may seem that periods of conservationist awareness and achievement coincide with the conventionally identified ages of reform: the Progressive era, the New Deal, and the New Frontier/ Great Society. So to the extent that America retreated from reform after 1917, the progress of conservation is also believed to have suffered. Yet the momentum had begun to fall off with T.R.’s departure (1909). Conservation under Taft degenerated into vapid meaninglessness, being stretched to cover a multitude of desirables even conservation of the money supply. The impact of World War One, which renewed the emphasis on squeezing maximum productivity out of natural resources, was seen in the admission of sheep to the national parks. A string of Republican regimes hostile to intervention unless it advanced corporate interests was bad news for a movement dependent on a vigorous central initiative.

The Teapot Dome oil leasing scandal is usually cited as the best indication of the backsliding temper of the twenties with regard to natural resource husbandry—the reservation for navy use of oil reserves being seen to epitomize the Progressive spirit. Others are less willing to accept that the impulse evaporated entirely. As historians look beyond Teapot Dome, and breathe life back into the corpse of reform,, so a fuller, more favourable picture of conservation is emerging. Burl Noggle argues that the zeal with which leading pre-war conservationists pursued the wrongdoings and wrongdoers in the Teapot Dome affair shows the Progressive spirit was alive and kicking.[44] And we have been reminded that aesthetic conservation came of age in the 1920s: “It was in the Jazz age … that the nation began its love affair with the national parks.”[45] The park service’s authority was demonstrated as early as 1919, when it defeated proposals to dam part of Yellowstone to irrigate Idaho farmland.

That post-war pursuit of prosperity and conservation were by no means antithetical is suggested by the founding of the Save-the-Redwoods League (San Francisco, 1918) and the Izaak Walton League (Chicago, 1922). Almost 40% of the former’s inter-war councillors were businessmen. (The era’s nativist tendencies were evident in the urge to preserve the remnants of an arboreal master race. Just as the Nordic was the finest human product of evolution, so the redwood was the perfect product of botanical evolution.)[46] The moving force of the fishermen’s fraternity, Will Dilg, like many of Walton’s founding members, were in sales and advertising. They worried about the loss of their favourite fishing holes and the emasculating tendency of modern civilization. Enervated boosters and regular fellows responded in droves to the call that drove Sinclair Lewis’s George F. Babbitt into the backwoods with his rod and flies in search of uninhibited masculinity. As Dilg explained in the league’s journal: “we are composed of thousands upon thousands of HE MEN.”[47] By 1925, there were over 100,000 Waltonians, vastly in excess of any other conservation organization. One of them was Herbert Hoover, who may have struck many as a cold fish, but was a passionate angler. The secretary of commerce’s inaugural address as honourary president of the Waltomans stressed that less pollution meant more fish. Extolling its “rejuvenating joy,” he showed that contact with “primitive nature” was part of twenties rugged individualism.[48] Through a series of (highly civilized) camping trips in frontier settings, Henry Ford expressed his nostalgia for the old America his product was doing so much to destroy. Ford was also a keen ornithologist and in 1911 had provided the financial backing for the Permanent Wild Life Protection Fund, the war chest of William Hornaday, the early century’s leading wildlife protectionist. The auto king instructed America’s six hundred Ford dealers in 1912 to write their congressman in support of a migratory bird protection bill.

Misleading as it is to speak bluntly of conservation’s return to favour in high places after 1932, the New Deal did give a fillip to the cause. The Civilian Conservation Corps was undoubtably FDR’s (and the nation’s) favourite New Deal programme. If any aspect of the New Deal can be called FDR’s personal creation, it was the CCC.[49] FDR’s usually sunny disposition was rarely sunnier than on the photographs of him lunching outdoors with some of the 2.5 million unemployed young men who served in its ranks. The CCC built dams, telephone lines, logging roads, trails, lookout towers and firebreaks in the national forests. On rangelands it re-seeded worn terrain, strung up barbed wire, dug wells, filled gullies, erected storage dams for thirsty cattle, and wiped out forage competitors like prairie dogs. The corps also planted trees—many of them for the christmas tree industry. In the national parks the accent was also on improving on nature. To enhance recreational opportunities, the corps built cabins, swimming pools, campgrounds, and ski facilities, and dammed streams for lakes. ‘Roosevelt’s Beavers’ is a more accurate label than ‘Roosevelt’s Tree Army.’ Prior to 1934, ranchers and sheepmen had run their stock at will over the arid and semi-arid public lands of the West. The Taylor Act withdrew from homesteading all remaining federal grazing lands and transfered them to a fee charging grazing service. The shift from sale to lease and regulation with the basic principle of development unchanged was classic Pinchotianism. The Tennessee Valley Authority was the ultimate monument to the utilitarian notion of integrated river basin development, delivering industrialization, flood control, and rural electrification. TVA captured conservation’s socio-economic reformism and its notions of planning, management and enhancement. Conservation’s main purpose remained not so much the defence of nature as the devising of more sophisticated, sustainable methods of attack.

Harold Ickes, the nation’s longest serving Interior Secretary (1933-46), invested a lethargic, sycophantic department with some of the same backbone and esprit de corps that Pinchot had instilled in the forest service. His achievements for both utilitarian conservation and preservation are another reminder of the dangers of casting the story of American conservation in terms of a simple dichotomy. Ickes pursued the creation of national parks with the same enthusiasm he put into mega- projects like Grand Coulee Dam. FDR also took a strong personal interest, making time to visit a number of parks. Both played a key role in pushing preservationism toward greater parity with the traditional developmental orientation of federal conservation.[50] The size of the park system more than doubled during Ickes’s tenure and the number of national monuments almost trebled, marking the FDR years as the most dynamic period of expansion in park history.[51] Even foresters were beginning to see beyond the timber to the trees. During the thirties, a faction called for the acceptance not only of recreation but also of wildlife and wilderness protection as legitimate objectives alongside timber harvest. In the vanguard was the wealthy radical and professional forester, Robert Marshall. By his death in 1939, sixteen wilderness areas had been set up within Indian reservations and 14 million acres of national forest withdrawn by administrative decree.

Conflict within preservation receives less attention than the conflict between preservation and utilitarian conservation. Yet grumblings from the ‘purists’ grew louder in the 1930s and Ickes moved closer to their position. In typically cantankerous fashion, he ranted against the auto and the degeneration of parks into “Coney Islands.”[52] Olympic and Kings Canyon in particular were striking triumphs, not only as they were fashioned out of national forest, but also because they were deliberately conceived as wilderness parks. A further break with the Mather- Albright tradition was the shift at the top of the park service in 1939 from a Mather-Albright protege to Newton Drury, an outsider with strong connections to leading preservationist organizations. A miffed Albright is alleged to have remarked that “Drury wants things so natural in the parks that he would like people to check their contraceptives at the entrance station.”[53] Nevertheless, preservationism, pure or impure, remained firmly anthropocentric. Spiritual uplift or fun? The priorities were both human.

FDR’s love of trees found its most expansive outlet in the shelterbelt programme of the Soil Conservation Service. 18,000 miles of trees were planted as part of the effort to heal the Great Plains between 1934 and 1941. Donald Worster has singled out the Dust Bowl as the most severe environmental catastrophe in the entire history of the white man on this continent.[54] The plainsmen blamed the weather and the thrust of federal relief was to mitigate a temporarily difficult situation until rain restored normality. Feed and seed loans were advanced, mortgages were refinanced. Reform measures were agronomist; shelterbelts, wells, removal of marginal land from production, and subhumid farming techniques. More technocratic conservation; improved means to traditional ends. Few Americans looked beyond the drought (as Worster does) at the long-term causes rooted in the nation’s habits and attitudes to nature. A handful did see the ‘dirty thirties’ as the logical outcome of capitalist culture. Pare Lorentz’s ‘The Plow that Broke the Plains,’ a documentary produced for Tugwell’s radical Resettlement Administration, implied that the sod should never have been busted, cast the tractor as the villain of the piece, and communicated a subliminal desire to deconstruct the settler’s monocultural reconstruction of the grasslands. The bold rhetoric of the federal report, The Future of the Great Plains (1936), about accepting natural restraints on the human economy—as Native Americans did prior to the beginnings of white occupation in the 1850s, and as Powell had recommended in the 1870s—was not reflected in its recommendations, which did not go far beyond government purchase of submarginal lands.

New Deal conservationists and a crop of ecologists found the nation little more receptive than Powell had found it a half century earlier. True, Marsh’s Man and Nature was dusted down and an Oklahoma botanist, Paul Sears, published a book, Deserts on the March (1935), which identified soil destruction as a crucial factor in the collapse of great civilizations. But as soon as the rains returned and war boosted demand, more virgin sod was busted and marginal land was put back into production.[55]

There is a tendancy to identify the Republican recapture of the presidency as the crucial act in the demise of New Deal conservation. The arrival at Interior of Douglas ‘Giveaway’ McKay, a Chevrolet dealer, is seen as the beginning of the backlash. According to Senator Wayne Morse, fellow Oregonian Republican, McKay’s appointment was “very good for the reactionary forces that are out to plunder the people.”[56] But Clayton Koppes pinpoints the Fair Deal as the source of discontinuity. In 1946 complacency set in when Ickes was replaced by Julius Krug, a former chief engineer for TVA. Krug’s priority was public power and preservationism left him cold.[57] TVA became little more than a power-generating unit tied to fertilizer production. The potential of the Taylor Grazing Act was ignored. Krug cuddled up to the graziers, quashing efforts to make them pay a realistic price. Ickes had thwarted the logger’s efforts to gain access to prime spruce in Olympic National Park during the war but Krug signalled willingness to delete its commercially valuable timberlands. The drift away from preservation continued under Oscar Chapman, who approved the Echo Park Dam in 1950 (see next section). Truman himself was supremely indifferent to the national parks, being the only president since Cleveland who failed to add any. In some respects, conservation’s fortunes improved under Eisenhower. McKay dropped the controversial dam in Echo Park and even added a new national park. He blocked moves to reduce Olympic, plant a reservoir in Glacier, and explore for oil in Everglades. On the utilitarian front, the federal government continued to expand its role in generating power though largely abdicating responsibility for directing its sale and use. The revulsion against large-scale reclamation projects in the 1960s, whether private or public, Democrat or Republican, would reveal the depth of the estrangement between traditional utilitarian conservation and the nascent environmentalism. Public support for preservation and environmentalism was growing regardless of changes in policy at the top.

5. The Transition to Environmentalism

i. Leopold and the Infusion of Ecology

If Thoreau is the nineteenth- century guru of contemporary environmentalism, and Muir its turn-of-the-century idol, then Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) is the mid-twentieth-century prophet—the great who almost made it into the promised land of the environmentalist era. Recent surveys confirm the status of his A Sand County Almanac (1949) as the movement’s bible. According to Dave Foreman, of the deep ecology group, Earth First!, it is “not only the most important conservation book ever written, it is the most important book ever written.”[58] Leopold was not born a prophet. His gradual awakening was a harbinger of the direction in which conservation would move. He began his career as a Pinchot protege, being one of the first graduates of Yale School of Forestry, established with Pinchot family money and dedicated to Gifford’s policy. Leopold’s first forest service assignments (1909) were in the Southwest and he took with him his mentor’s attitude to timber and wildlife as resources to be managed for maximum production of species valuable to humans. Useful wildlife meant deer and other game species. These discriminations had characterized wildlife conservation since the first alarm bells sounded for the buffalo. No animal was more vilified than the wolf, denounced as the “most despicable” of American creatures by wildlife protectionists and ranchers alike. Extermination of predators was one way to produce a healthy surplus of game and in 1920 the young forester vowed to track down “the last wolf or mountain lion in New Mexico.”[59]

The unforeseen consequences of successful predator eradication provided a painful object lesson in Leopold’s ecological education. Deer populations in the Southwest rocketed (between 1906 and 1924 in Grand Canyon Game Preserve, numbers increased from 4,000 to 100,000), exceeding the food supply and then crashing through mass starvation (60% in the Grand Canyon preserve died in the winter of 1925/6). Overpopulation and consequent denudation became a problem in the Midwest and Northeast too. Leopold no longer thought in terms of good and bad animals, nor of the land as a commodity. During the 1920s the dissident scientist also discovered Thoreau, who helped him to think of the land as an indivisible community of living organisms. Another major influence was Charles Darwin. Some approached evolutionary science and the ‘survival of the fittest’ notion as further legitimation of human dominion over nature. Yet central to Darwinian thought was the ‘web of life’ and the demotion of humankind from its position above and apart from the rest of nature to the rank of “plain member and citizen” of the biotic community. Evolution offered an entrance for ecology and was a potential boost to biocentrism. It taught Leopold humility and interdependence and restored a pre-Christian sense of kinship: humans were just “fellowvoyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution.” [60] Another landmark in his growing disenchantment with inherited conservation was a trip to Germany in the mid-1930s. Trained to share Pinchot’s admiration for Europe’s intensively managed woods, he found them aesthetically dreary and botanically deficient. He calculated that most native plants in German forests had been eliminated by deer herds maintained at unnaturally high levels through predator control and artificial feeding. The result was a sterile monoculture with attendant decrease in soil fertility.

By this time, he had moved on to the U.S. Forest Service Products Research Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. There was appropriate irony in the emergent ecologist submerged in an institution devoted to finding better ways of bleaching woodpulp and so forth. After a few frustrating years, he quit government service in 1928 to follow interests closer to his heart, working as a wildlife management consultant funded by the sport hunting ammunition manufacturers. His pioneering role was recognised in 1933 when the University of Wisconsin created for him the nation’s first chair of wildlife management. Leopold devoted much of his private life in his later years to restoring the battered, logged over lands of a portion of Wisconsin’s sand country, where he bought an abandoned farm and planted native pines and wildflowers.

Leopold was an historical ecologist determined to publicize the role of nature in a larger than human history. By the 1930s, what little prairie remained in Wiconsin survived by default in graveyards. He described a “yard-square relic … unreachable by scythe or mower” that flowered with Silphium each July. Then, one year, the fleck succumbed to the mower’s predation and he lamented how “If I were to tell a preacher of the adjoining church that the road crew has been burning history books in his cemetery, under the guise of mowing weed, he would be amazed and uncomprehending.”[61] Leopold and Frederick Jackson Turner were practically neighbours in Madison for a couple of years in the mid-twenties and Leopold took the historian’s conviction about the cultural importance of the frontier in America to heart. He too feared the loss of American exceptionalism, mourning the day when “the pack train will be dead, the diamond hitch will be merely rope, and Kit Carson and Jim Bridger will be names in a history lesson. Rendezvous will be French for ‘date’ and Forty-Nine will be the number preceding fifty.” He also took Turner a step further, asking: “is it not a bit beside the point for us to be so solicitous about preserving [American] institutions without giving so much as a thought to preserving the environment which produced them and which may now be one of our effective means of keeping them alive?”[62] In 1935 he and Robert Marshall were operative in founding the first organization specifically dedicated to wilderness preservation the Wilderness Society.

Like Thoreau, Leopold’s influence was largely posthumous, based on A Sand County Almanac, the essay collection he’d been working on since the 1920s but for which he’d been unable to find a publisher until the week before he died. In “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Leopold explained how he began to see the ecological light watching “a fierce green fire dying” in the eyes of a wolf he’d merrily shot as a trigger-happy young man. He had been struck by the ‘value of a varmint’ to the natural system as a whole, of which the mountain was his metaphor: “I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain … I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed … to death … a mountain lives] in fear of its deer … Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf” Nature, Leopold had learnt and now taught, has no favourites. The ultimate human delusion was to believe that the parts of value to humans would function without the other bits. Hence the need “to preserve all the parts”—a mechanistic image likely to appeal to his audience. The concluding piece, “The Land Ethic,” calls for humankind to renounce its concept of land as property and include the natural world within its ethical system. He attributed the lack of real progress in conservation (which “still consists largely of letterhead pieties and convention oratory”) to the failure to adopt a noneconomic ethic.[63]

ii. The Nuclear Age: 1945-62

The injection of ecology was insufficient to produce environmentalism. Ecological thinking forced an expansion and redefinition of conservation only in the context of a new order of scientific and technological menace. Earlier conservationists faced threats that were mild by post-war standards. Whatever the dangers to the land itself, they had assumed that the sky and water were inviolate. Before the war, Rachel Carson, a biologist and accomplished popular science writer, confidently believed that “much of nature was forever beyond the tampering reach of man: he might level the forests and dam the streams, but the clouds and the rain and the wind were God’s”.[64] Damage inflicted by detergents, insecticides, chemical fertilizers and synthetics was a post-1945 problem. Biologist Barry Commoner, the public face of ecology for millions of Americans, argued in 1971 that productive methods adopted since 1945 were responsible for 80-85% of total pollution output. He reported fantastic increases in the production of non-returnable soft drink bottles (up 53,000%), synthetic fibres (up 5,980%), plastics (up 1,960%) and pesticides (390%).[65]DDT, a wonder chemical invented in 1939, and deployed by the U.S. military in the war to control insect-borne diseases in Italy and the Pacific was redeployed on the domestic front against garden and field pests. The now familiar pollution issue muscled its way onto the agenda and became the leitmotif of the new environmentalism.

The splitting of the atom was the ultimate manifestation of the ageold, Baconian desire for total human mastery over nature. The bomb and its sibling, the peaceful atom, were catalytic in the advent of environmentalism. Insufficient Americans responded sufficiently positively to the alleged potential of military or civilian applications. The scientist’s public education movement began with the St Louis Citizens Committee for Nuclear Information (CNI) in 1958. CNI provided an antidote to official information on radioactivity, believing that decisions about science and its relationship to public and environmental welfare were too important to be left to politicians and so-called experts. Fallout provided an object lesson in ecology that no amount of Leopoldian eloquence could match. The interrelatedness of all forms of planetary life within one community was dramatised by Project Chariot, a proposal in the late 1950s to blast a harbour in arctic Alaska using nuclear devices. Opponents stressed the danger to native peoples from radioactive isotopes that concentrated as they moved up the relatively short and simple arctic food chain. Lichens saturated by radioactive nutrients were grazed by caribou which in turn were the staple of the local indigenes. Radioactivity levels in the bones of Alaskan Eskimos were already the highest in the nation.[66]

As the first American commercial reactor came on line in Pennsylvania in 1957, many conservationists remained sanguine about the potential of nuclear power as a clean, renewable energy source, not least as an alternative to damming wild rivers. The public debate over fallout from testing in Nevada during the 1950s, however, helps explain the galvanising impact of Carson’s Silent Spring (1962)—often dubbed the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of  the environmental movement. Fears were already being voiced by the end of World War Two, the scientific evidence to support the sceptics was already available, and Carson had tried to publicize the dangers as early as 1945. But Reader’s Digest was interested in bats rather than a piece on DDT. Within twenty years, her heavily-documented book about a potentially dull and arcane topic—pesticides—topped the bestseller lists and was serialized in Reader’s Digest, precipitating a controversy comparable to the furore a century earlier over The Origin of Species. Americans had been prepared by a decade-long discussion of the harmful effects of an insidious substance on humans and the rest of nature.[67] Carson’s opening scene of a small town rendered silent and lifeless by a “strange blight” drew on countless resonant images of nuclear holocaust: “in the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams.[68]

Loss of faith in the benefits of science and technology and doubts over the entire thrust of human progress were close to the core of emerging environmentalism. Gloom and pessimism were new quantities. Traditional conservation was upbeat about the future, confident in the capacity of human contrivance to make the earth ever more efficient and productive. Neither did the preservationists pose many questions about basic values. A park here and a wilderness area there seemed enough for most. In the 1950s, Joseph Wood Krutch, a literary critic and biographer of Thoreau, warned that “Man’s ingenuity has outrun his intelligence.”[69] In 1966, Commoner called for “a new conservation movement . . . to preserve life itself.”[70] Ecology did not necessarily push conservation away from primary concern with human welfare. The post-war era of fresh menace also enhanced its anthropocentric content, even if one now needed to distinguish between what microbiologist Rene Dubos called “crude” and “enlightened” anthropocentrism.

Economic and demographic progress were both cause of the environmental crisis and the source of fresh attitudes. Affluence produced effluence but also a greater concern for quality of life issues like environmentalism, while increased leisure time expanded the clientele for outdoor recreation and the demand for wild nature. By 1950, a seventh of the GNP was being spent on leisure, fueling a booming outdoor goods industry—ranging from motorhomes to lightweight backpacking equipment. In 1950, there were 33 million visitors to the national parks. By 1983, visitation had risen to 327 million. Rising levels of education and an increasingly youthful population (by 1965, 50% of Americans were under 25) also contributed to the flowering of an environmental movement. Continuity between conservation and environmentalism was mostly provided by preservationism, which now came of age.

The wilderness cause—a key preservationist tenet—moved in from the periphery of conservation to the forefront of environmentalism. Wilderness symbolized a healthy ecosystem as well as offering a spiritual sanctuary and scope for satisfying a rising demand for ‘primitive’ recreation. The defeat of the Echo Park dam proposal in the 1950s illustrates the divergence between conservation and environ­mentalism. Ambitious plans to harness the Colorado involved drowning the canyons of Dinosaur National Monument. The preser­vationist community united and launched a massive campaign of persuasion. Particularly effective was the waving of the bloody shirt of Hetch Hetchy. A Sierra Club film juxtaposed shots of a dismal Hetch Hetchy reservoir at low water with footage of Yosemite Valley bursting at the seams with visitors on the same day. Wilderness enthusiasts had won the latest test case over the sanctity of the park system and demonstrated their numerical strength and political savvy.

The flowering of the so-called third conservation movement (that of the New Deal is frequently designated the second) was encouraged by the Democrats’s good husbandry after their recapture of the presidency in 1960. Stewart Udall, who served as chief custodian of the nation’s natural resources during the Kennedy Johnson years, brought greater dedication to the conservationist cause than any Interior Secretary since Ickes. The passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964 after a ten-year congressional deadlock provided the machinery to create a national wilderness system. Udall’s department also pioneered a system of National Seashores—the first significant additions to the national park system since the New Deal. Bids to dam the Colorado that would have impinged on Grand Canyon National Park were finally defeated in 1968, when Udall, an Arizonan, came round to the preservationist viewpoint. The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968 created a system for the protection of free-flowing rivers modelled on the Wilderness Act.

Meanwhile, preservationist organizations underwent professional­ization and tremendous expansion. The Sierra Club appointed its first fulltime, paid executive director in 1952. Under David Brower’s evangelical leadership, the genteel Californian hiking coterie became an aggressive, sophisticated and national political force. (Some would say the club was simply returning to its radical, Muirian roots after a period of complacency after 1914.) Brower attracted comparisons with John Brown in his mission to save the planet. A consequence of the club’s higher profile and greater militancy was the loss of its tax­deductible status in 1966, a move that did nothing to curb its popularity. In 1960, its membership stood at 15,000. By 1970, it had increased to 135,000.

6. Unfinished Business

How successful was nature’s defence prior to the onset of environmentalism? Plenty of scenery has been preserved but from the ecological standpoint of nature itself accomplishments under conservation were modest. And for radical critics of the main thrust of environmentalism, the cause of ecology and the ‘rights of nature have not advanced much since the early 1960s, despite the aforementioned achievements of that decade. Take the spotted owl. Over three-quarters of its habitat, the old-growth forests of Oregon and Washington, has been destroyed. The Endangered Species Act (1973) has furnished some protection but boundary lines in this case and others usually remain political, excluding the most commercially (and biologically) valuable areas. The similarities between Disneyland and the best-known national parks persist. In Yosemite Valley you can buy a takeaway pizza, develop your snapshots and rent a video. And though the massive Alaskan additions in 1980 more than doubled the amount of designated American wilderness and parkland, biologically critical terrain known to be oil-bearing (notably the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) has yet to receive the more durable and comprehensive protection conferred by park or wilderness status.

Thirty years after Silent Spring conservation for ecological ends is still in its infancy. Biodiversity is the key concept. Predator extermination in the national parks ended in 1936 but while grizzlies have been preserved in Yellowstone park, for example, dozens of other grizzly species have gone. Due to the loss of genetic diversity, many preserved animals constitute ‘the living dead.’ Defective sperm, kinked tails and other abnormalities among the thirty surviving Florida panthers in Everglades National Park indicate deteriorating genetic fitness—the natural world’s equivalent of the Hapsburg chin. Equally important are the maintenance of species diversity (the range of species within a habitat) and ecosystem diversity (the variety of habitats within a region). Statistics indicating quantity of protected land can be misleading. What counts ecologically is the distribution of these areas throughout a representative range of ecozones. Plenty of high alpine tundra is protected in California, yet hardly any of the state’s far more biologically productive grasslands, riparian forests or coastal wetlands remain. Nature must be defended outside the existing parks and refuges if marginalized species are to stand a chance. Over half the currently documented threats emanate from outside protected units. Since 1945 interference with inflowing water has drastically cut the population of freshwater wading birds in Everglades National Park. Logging continues in critical watersheds adjacent to Redwood National Park (1968) in northern California.

If John Muir had wandered around his beloved Sierra Nevada in 1992, the year his Sierra Club celebrated its centennial, he might also have concluded desolately that not much has been achieved since his death in 1914. Despite having grown to over 600,000 members, the club has been unable to defend the mountains that inspired it. Only 10% of the range is contained in parks. Over half the Sierra belongs to the U.S. Forest Service which remains devoted to Pinchot’s goal of timber harvest. Two-thirds of California’s giant sequoia are unprotected. Fire suppression has produced forests congested with brush and saplings and the soil, denied flaming rejuvenation, grows sterile. Pollution damages the trees that remain and those nominally protected in the parks. Streams are muddied by run-off from eroded clear-cuts, overgrazed range and road cuts. Urbanization is encroaching as Californians flee their connurbations. Many of the fastest growing counties in the nation’s most populous state are in the Sierran foothills, resulting, not least, in the reduction of the mule deer’s winter range. Smog levels in the parks rival those of urban California. Hundred mile views have been reduced to a bare five miles.[71] America’s natural wonderlands were well on the way to becoming denatured—‘mere’ scenery—when the parks were created in the heyday of conservation at the turn of the century. Now its getting hard to see even the scenery. America’s surviving non-human inhabitants—animate and inanimate—have yet to switch from a defensive to an offensive mode.

8. Guide to Further Reading

* For full bibliographical details, see the appropriate reference in the Notes as indicated.

Widespread interest in the history of conservation/ environmentalism coincided with environmentalism’s emergence as a prominent issue in the 1960s. Valuable starting points are Arthur A. Ekirch, Man and Nature in America (1963) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), Udall’s accessible The Quiet Crisis and the Next Generation (1988, an update of his 1963 original)’, and “The American View of Nature” in Russel B. Nye’s This Almost Chosen People (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1966). An introduction via biography is Douglas H. Strong, Dreamers and Defenders: American Conservationists (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988). Peter Wild, Pioneer Conservationists of Western America and Pioneer Conservationists of Eastern America (Missoula: Mountain Press, 1979 and 195) covers much of the same ground (if less effectively) but includes some lesser knowns. Richard H. Stroud, ed., National Leaders of American Conservation (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985) provides exhaustive biographical data.

Essential overviews are Gordon B. Dodds, “The Historiography of American Conservation: Past and Prospects,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 56 (April 1965), pp. 75-81; Roderick Nash, “The State of Environmental History,” in Herbert Bass, ed., The State of American History (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970, pp. 249-60; “American Environmental History: A New Teaching Frontier,” Pacific Historical Review 41 (1972), pp. 362-72; Lawrence Rakestraw, “Conservation Historiography: An Assessment,” Pacific Historical Review 41 (August 1972), pp. 271-88; Richard White, “American Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field,” Pacific Historical Review 54 (August 1985), pp. 297-335; and Philip G. Terrie, “Recent Work in Environmental History,” American Studies International 27 (October 1989), pp. 42-65.

Various anthologies meet the needs of a growing number of environmental history/history of environmentalism courses. The most recent and imaginative is Roderick Nash, ed., American Environmentalism: Readings in Conservation History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990), a revision of 1968 and 1976 editions. Nash has also edited Environment and Americans which contains historical interpretations rather than primary sources. Donald Worster, ed., American Environmentalism: The Formative Period, 1860-1915 (New York: Wiley, 1973), contains lesserknown selections and is slanted toward history of science. Frank E. Smith, ed., Conservation in the United States, 5 vols (New York: Chelsea House, 1971) is useful mainly for legislative and administrative details. By contrast, McHenry and Van Doren, A Documentary History of Conservation in America’ covers a broad range of human responses to nature and is dominated by literary, journalistic and other cultural sources.

For the European background consult the historical geographer Glacken’s monumental Traces on the Rhodian Shore, which first appeared in 1967. For the impact of colonization see Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1972) and Kirkpatrick Sale’s impassioned The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (New York: Penguin, 1991). On the question of Native American conservationism consult J. Donald Hughes, American Indian Ecology (El Paso: Texas Western University Press, 1983) and Vecsey and Venables, American Indian Environments’. For reviews of the literature pro and con see J. Baird Callicott, “American Indian Land Wisdom? Sorting Out the Issues,” Journal of Forest History 33 (1989), pp. 35-42, and Richard White, “Native Americans and the Environment,” in W.R. Swagerty, ed., Scholars and the Indian Experience: Critical Reviews of Recent Writing in the Social Sciences (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). The process of environmental transformation triggered by colonization is discussed in William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). Carolyn :Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), takes the story through the industrial revolution. For the environmental consequences of westward expansion see Richard A. Bartlett, The New Country: A Social History of the American Frontier, 1776-1890 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), section 4; Jacobs, “The Great Despoliation: Environmental Themes in American Frontier History,” Pacific Historical Review 47 (February 1978), pp. 1-26 (reprinted in American Indian Environments)’. John Opie, “The Frontier and the Environment,” in Michael P. Malone, ed., American Frontier and Western Issues (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), pp. 7-25, shows the link between frontier revisionism and environmental history. Cultural and intellectual factors conducive to aesthetic conservation are discussed in art historian Hans Huth’s Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes (1957) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825-1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), deals with wilderness appreciation among American artists. Lee Clark Mitchell Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-Century Response (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), traces how the receding frontier was memorialized in art, literature and photography. Mitchell argues that creative individuals like Catlin, Cole and Cooper may have been exceptional in talent but were unexceptional in their sentiments, representing an ambivalence over progress and a sensitivity to the loss involved that was more widespread than has been realized. Schmitt, Back to Aature26, while not directly concerned with conservation either, is an illuminating discussion of various turn-of-the-century manifestations of enthusiasm for nature—from the popularity of nature education and landscape photography to summer camps and the cult of the wilderness novel. The definitive intellectual history of wilderness appreciation is Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (1967) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 3rd rev. ed., 1982). Frank Bergon, ed., The Wilderness Reader (New York: Mentor, 1980) is an anthology of classic American writings on wilderness. For details of political campaigns see Craig W. Alfin, The Politics of Wilderness Preservation (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982). Also worth consulting is Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). Wilderness, it should hardly need pointing out, is a Euro-American cultural concept—and as ethnocentric as most—rather than a tangible environmental condition. Native Americans, of course, had no equivalent word or concept.

Most of the founding fathers/ grandfathers have received full monographic treatment in addition to their coverage in the aforementioned texts by Strong, Wild, Udall and Nash. For definitive biographies see David Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh: Versatile Vermonter (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958); Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: 3ohn Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954); and Laura Wood Roper, FL 0: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). For Thoreau’s role see Worster, Nature’s Economy, Part 2. A treatment stressing Thoreau’s value to the contemporary deep ecology cause is Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness, which treats Muir and Leopold in similar fashion. Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), discusses the trio’s contribution to environmental ethics. Muir’s popularity is reflected in a rash of recent studies. The first based on his personal papers is Fox, The American Conservation Movement”, which serves double duty as biography and study of the fortunes of preservationism since Muir’s death. Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and the American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) is less a biography than a study of his ideas and ethics. Frederick Turner’s Rediscovering America:John Muir in His Time and Ours (New York: Viking, 1985) is of limited value to the uninitiated. Lisa Mighetto, ed., Muir Among the Animals: The Wildlife Writings of John Muir (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1986), has a revealing introduction on Muir and animal rights. Fox and Cohen have largely supplanted the older yet still engaging narratives by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life ofyohn Muir (New York: Knopf, 1945), William F. Bade, The Life and Letters of john Muir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923-24), and James Mitchell Clark, The Life and Adventures of Yohn Muir (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1980). A detailed account of Muir’s political leadership is Holway R. Jones, Yohn Muir and the Sierra Club: The Battle for Yosemite (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1965).

Pinchot languishes in comparative neglect. The most recent treatments are Clifford Geary, Gifford Pinchot: Forester and Politician (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), Harold T. Pinkert, Gifford Pinchot: Private and Public Forester (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), Roderick Nash, From These Beginnings: A Biographical Approach to American History (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), chapter 8, and Samuel P. Hays, “Gifford Pinchot and the American Conservation Movement”, in Carroll W. Purcell, ed., Technology in America: A History of Individuals and Ideas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981). For his predecessor, see Andrew Denny Rodgers, Bernhard Eduard Fernow: A ,Story of North American Forestry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951). The zoologist Paul R. Cutright’s Theodore Roosevelt: The Making of a Conservationist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985) is short on analysis. Robert Shankland’s Steve Mather of the National Parks (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1954), is undocumented but the only biography. Donald Swain, Wilderness Defender: Horace M. Albright and Conservation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), covers the Mather administration as well as its successor. The most manageable treatment of Leopold’s ideas is Susan L. Hader, Thinking Like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude toward Deer, Wolves, and Forests (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974). Three substantial works marked the centenary of his birth. Curt Meine, Aldo Leopold.- His Life and Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987) is formidably detailed if rather iconolatric. For comment on Leopold’s most influential work by historians and philosophers see J. Baird Callicott, ed., Companion to A Sand County Almanac: Interpretive and Critical Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987) and Thomas Tanner, ed., Aldo Leopold: The Man and His Legacy (Ankeny: Soil and Water Conservancy, 1987). Scholars agree on the significance of Leopold and his legacy. The debate turns on the originality of his ideas. For a straightforward treatment of the leading 1930s wilderness campaigner see James M. Glover, A Wilderness Original; The Life of Bob Marshall (Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1986). The nearest to a biography of Rachel Carson (which includes selections from her writings) is a book by her friend and editor, Paul Brooks: The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972). David Brower’s autobiography, For Earth’s Sake: The Life and Times of David Brower (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1990), includes much of his written output in connection with various causes.

There are fewer studies of prominent organizations. See Michael P. Cohen, History of the Sierra Club, 1892-1970 (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988) for the fullest treatment. Michael L. Smith, Pacific Visions: California Scientists and the Environment, 1850-1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) is of some relevance to the club’s history. The Save-the-Redwoods League is treated in Schrepfer, The Fight to Save the Redwoods46. James B. Trefethen, An American Crusade for Wildlife: Highlights in Conservation Progress (New York: Winchester, 1975) covers the Boone and Crockett Club. See also Oliver H. Orr, Saving American Birds: T. Gilbert Pearson and the Founding of the Audubon Movement (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1992). Thomas B. Allen, Guardian of the Wild: The Story of the National Wildlife Federation, 1936-1986 (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987) is an official, celebratory chronicle of the largest U.S. conservation organization. Marcia Myers Bonta, Women in the Field; America’s Pioneering Women Naturalists (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991) provides twenty-five female portraits. Material on organized womens’ groups in the early decades of conservation /preservation can be found in Janet Robertson, Those Magnificent Mountain Women: Adventures in the Colorado Rockies (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).

Coyle, Conservation; An American Story of Conflict and Accomplishment”, claims to be the first history of the conservation movement. This undocumented, political account by an engineer is dominated by Pinchot, forestry, and utilitarian conservation in general -soil, river basin management, irrigation and rural electrification. For more probing discussions of conservation as an aspect of Progressivism see J. Leonard Bates, “Fulfilling American Democracy: The Conservation Movement, 1907 to 1921,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44 (June 1957), pp. 29-57; Hays’s revisionist Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (1959)22; James Penick, Progressive Politics and Conservation: The BallingerPinchot Affair (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1968); and Elmo R. Richardson, The Politics of Conservation: Crusades and Controversies, 1897-1913 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962). Merchant discusses the female role in “The Women of the Progressive Conservation Crusade,” in Environmental History (1985)21. Mandatory if hagiographical reading on the role of sportsmen and wildlife protection within the conservation movement is Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation29. Dunlap, Saving America’s Wildlife”, focuses on non-game animals (especially wolves and coyotes) and the role of science, providing a non- hunter’s perspective. See also Lisa Mighetto, Wild Animals and American Environmental Ethics (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991). For legal details see James A. Tober, Who Owns the Wildlife?. The Political Economy of Conservation in Nineteenth-Century America (Westport: Greenwood, 1981) and Michael Bean, The Evolution of National Wildlife Law (New York: Praeger, 1983). A valuable regional study is Morgan B. Sherwood, Big Game in Alaska: A History of Wildlife and People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).

Donald C. Swain, Federal Conservation Policy 1921-33 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963) takes the political and administrative story through to FDR. New Deal historians have rarely done justice to the role of conservation. An exception is Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), Part 5; “The Battle for Public Development.” For FDR’s role see A. L. Riesch-Owen, Conservation Under FDR (New York: Praeger, 1983). See also Swain, “The National Park Service and the New Deal” 4’ and Koppes, “Environmental Policy and American Liberalism”. Elmo R. Richardson, Dams, Parks and Politics: Resouce Development and Preservation in the Truman and Eisenhower Era (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1973) pushes the political narrative forward to 1960.

For a discussion of socio-economic changes favourable to environmentalism’s emergence see Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence.- Environmental Politics in the United States. 1955-1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). On the shift from conservation to environmentalism see also Clayton R. Koppes, “Efficiency, Equity, Esthetics: Shifting Themes in American Conservation,” in Donald ‘Vorster, ed., The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 230-51. Donald Fleming, “Roots of the New Conservation Movement,” Perspectives in American History 6 (1972), pp. 7-91, provides a complementary analysis of environmentalism’s intellectual origins. For an interim perspective see Grant McConnell, “The Conservation Movement: Past and Present,” Western Political Quarterly 7 (1954), pp. 463-78. Also worth consulting are compilations by John Opie, ed., Americans and Environment: The Controversy over Ecology (Lexington: Heath, 1971), and Carroll Pursell, ed., From Conservation to Ecology (New York: Cromwell, 1979). Michael McCloskey, “Wilderness Movement at the Crossroads, 1945-1970,” Pacific Historical Review 41 (1972), pp. 346-61 discusses the new era’s impact on a vintage cause.

The various components of the natural environmental and different categories and agencies of conservation/ protection are receiving attention. On trees, the thoroughness and readability of Williams, Americans and their Forests 16 is unlikely to be surpassed in the near future. Still useful is Thomas C. Cox et al., This fVell-Wooded Land: Americans and Their Forests from Colonial Times to the Present (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985). See also Harold K. Steen, The U.S. Forest Service: A History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976). The seminal park study from a cultural/ intellectual standpoint is Runte, National Parks (rev. 1987)40, which seeks to dispel the aura of altruism. An earlier, essentially political and administrative narrative is John Ise, Our National Parks: A Critical History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961). Individual studies are Runte, Yosemite:: The Embattled Wilderness (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), Richard A. Bartlett, Yellowstone: A Wilderness Besieged (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), and Alston Chase, Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986). Runte and Chase are savagely critical of park policy. On the state level see Philip G. Terrie, Forever Wild: Environmental Aesthetics and the Adirondack Forest Preserve (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985). Local and regional studies are flourishing. J. Ronald Engel, Sacred Sands: The Struggle for Community in the Indiana Dunes (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1983) discusses the three-quarter century campaign to protect a piece of Lake Michigan shoreline near Chicago. Peter A. Coates, The Trans-Alaska Pipeline Controversy: Technology, Conservation and the Frontier (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 1991) is the first monograph to investigate the evolution of conservationist concern over Alaska since 1867.

7. Notes

1. Wilbur R. Jacobs, “Indians as Ecologists and Other Environmental Themes in American Frontier History,” in Christopher Vecsey and Robert W. Venables, eds., American Indian Environments: Ecological Issues in Native American History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1980), p. 49. Back
2. Stewart L. Udall, The Quiet Crisis and the Next Generation (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1988), p. 12. Back
3. Robert McHenry and Charles Van Doren, eds., A Documentary History of Conservation In America (New York: Praeger, 1972), p. 172. Back
4. “Indians as Ecologists,” p. 51. Back
5. Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western nought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 692. Back
6. Ibid., p. 693. Back
7. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, Appendix IV, (London: Fontana, 1968), pp. 977, 968, 975, 989. Back
8. Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail (Boston: Ginn, 1910), xxxvi. Back
9. Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Yackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Knopf, 1975), p.103. Back
10. As quoted in Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 73. Back
11. Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 37. Back
12. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York: New American Library, 1980), p. 143. Back
13. Milton Meltzer, ed., Thoreau: People, Principles and Politics (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), p. 165. Back
14. Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (New Haven: College and University Press, 1965), p. 321. For Salt’s biography see The Life of Henry David Thoreau (London: Richard Bentley, 1890). Back
15. George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 34. Back
16. Michael Williams, Americans and their Forests: A Historical Geography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 145. Back
17. Man and Nature, pp. 36, 43, 327 (2nd edition), 36, 39. Back
18. “Indians as Ecologists,” p. 53. Back
19. Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, vol 3: The Beginnings of Critical Realism, 1860-1920 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930), p. 23. Back
20. David Cushman Coyle, Conservation: An American Story of Conflict and Accomplishment (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1957), pp. 16-17. Back
21. The Quiet Crisis, p. 87. Back
22. Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959). Back
23. Gifford Pinchot, Breaking New Ground (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), pp. 322. (Pinchot’ autobiography.) Back
24. 24. Gifford Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation (Garden City, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace, 1910), p. 42. (Pinchot’s self-promoting account of early conservation.) Back
25. Breaking New Ground, p. 25. Back
26. Peter Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 159. Back
27. Carolyn Merchant, “The Women of the Progressive Conservation Crusade, 1900-1915, in Kendall E. Bailes, ed., Environmental History: Critical Issues in Comparative Perspective (Lanham: University Press of America, 1985), p. 165. Back
28. David D. Anderson, ed., Sunshine and Smoke: American Writers and the American Environment (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1971), pp. 171-72. Back
29. John Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), pp. 21, 48-9, 23. Thomas R. Dunlap, “Sport Hunting and Conservation, 1880-1920,” Environmental Review 12 (Spring 1988), pp. 51-60, takes issue with Reiger’s thesis on several counts, questioning the extent to which wildlife protection and sportsmen were representative of Progressive era conservation. Donald J. Pisani, “Forests and Conservation, 1865-1890,” Journal of American History 72 (September 1985), pp. 340-59, also argues that a conservationist ethic predated Progressivism. Back
30. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1916), pp. 37-45. Back
31. Thomas R. Dunlap, Saving America’s Wildlife: Ecology and the American Mind, 1850-1990 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 12, 179. Back
32. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 177. Back
33. Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), pp. 82-3. Back
34. As quoted in A Documentary History of Conservation, p. 69. Back
35. John Muir; William Bade, ed., A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), pp. 136, 139, 98-99, 139. Back
36. Roderick Nash in John C. Hendee et al, Wilderness Management (Washington, D.C.: Forest Service, Department of Agriculture, 1978), p. 43. Back
37. George Catlin, North American Indians (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 263. Back
38. See Hal Rothman, Preserving Different Pasts: The American National Monuments (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1989). Back
39. A Documentary History of Conservation, p. 292. Back
40. Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), pp. 158-9; Roderick Nash, Environment and Americans: The Problem of Priorities (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), p. 63. Back
41. North American Indians, pp. 262-63. Back
42. Robert G. Athearn, The Mythic West in Twentieth-Century America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986), p. 199. Back
43. Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), p. 60. Back
44. Burl Noggle, “Oil and Politics,” in John Braeman, Robert Bremner and David Brody, eds., Change and Continuity in TwentiethCentury America: The 1920s (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), p. 52-53. Back
45. Donald C. Swain, “The National Park Service and the New Deal, 1933-1940,” Pacific Historical Review 41 (February 1972), p. 313. Back
46. Susan Schrepfer, The Fight to Save the Redwoods: A History of Environmental Reform (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983) p. 43. Back
47. The American Conservation Movement, p. 161. Back
48. Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and President, 1920-33 (London: Hollis and Carter, 1952), p. 157. Kendrick Clements, “Herbert Hoover and Conservation, 1921-33,” American Historical Review 84 (February 1984), pp. 67-88, focuses on the great engineer’s proclivity for utilitarian conservation and his achievements in that field. Back
49. John A. Salmond, The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942: A New Deal Case Study (Durham: Duke University Press, 1967), p. 8. Back
50. See H.T. Watkins, Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes. 1874-1952 (New York: Henry Holt, 1990). Back
51. “The National Park Service and the New Deal,” p. 316. Back
52. Ibid., p. 330. Back
53. The Fight to Save the Redwoods, p. 76. Back
54. Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 24. Back
55. Ibid., pp. 181-230 for New Deal conservation with regard to agriculture. Back
56. Elmo Richardson, “The Interior Secretary as Conservation Villain: The Notorious Case of Douglas ‘Giveaway’ McKay,” Pacific Historical Review 41 (August 1972), p. 335. Back
57. Clayton Koppes, “Environmental Policy and American Liberalism: The Department of the Interior, 1933-1953”, in Environmental History: Critical Issues in Comparative Perspective, p. 451. Back
58. Mark Vaz, “Leaves of Green,” Sierra 71 (May/June 1986), p. 56. Back
59. David Rains Wallace, “Sand County’s Conservation Prophet,” Sierra 72 (November/December 1987), p. 64. Back
60. Sand County Almanac, pp. 24, 109. Back
61. Ibid., p. 46. Back
62. Aldo Leopold, “Wilderness as a Form of Land Use,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 1 (1925), pp. 403-4, 401. Back
63. Sand County Almanac, pp. 129-32, 207, 209. Back
64. Frank Graham, Since Silent Spring (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970), p. 13. Back
65. Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Confronting the Environmental Crisis (London: Cape, 1971), pp. 142-3. Back
66. Peter A. Coates, “Project Chariot: Alaskan Roots of Environmentalism,” Alaska History 4 (Fall 1989), pp. 1-31. Back
67. Ralph H. Lutts, “Chemical Fallout: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Radioactive Fallout, and the Environmental Movement,” Environmental Review 9 (Fall 1985), pp. 211-25. Back
68. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 21-22. Back
69. Joseph Wood Krutch, The Measure of Man (Indianapolis: Bobbs­Merrill, 1954), p. 25. Back
70. Barry Commoner, Science and Survival (London: Ballantine, 1971), p. 151. Back
71. See Tom Knudson, “The Sierra in Peril,” five-part special report; The Sacramento Bee, 9-13 June 1991. Back

Top of the Page

BAAS Pamphlet No. 25 (First Published 1993)

ISBN: 0 946488 15 0

1. Introduction
2. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: The Politics Of Poetic Form
3. Songs Of The Self
4. Conclusion: Beyond Language
5. Guide to Further Reading
6. Notes

British Association for American Studies All rights reserved. No part of this pamphlet may he reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. The publication of a pamphlet by the British Association for American Studies does not necessarily imply the Association’s official approbation of the opinions expressed therein.

1. Introduction

I

This study has a double focus. The rise to critical prominence in the United States of the so-called ‘Language’ poets is both remarkable in itself, and a development that sets the achievements and dominant styles of post-war American Poetry in a new, and a questionable light. What follows is first of all a critical introduction to Language poetry; to its origins, personnel, stated aims, and distinguishing features of method and content.

Although the group includes one or two elders such as Clark Coolidge and Michael Palmer who, as it were, wrote poetry before there was Language, this development has brought to public attention a range of authors equal if only in their unfamiliarity to non-American readers: to mention Ron Silliman, Steve Benson, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Barrett Watten, Leslie Scalapino, Stephen Rodefer, Craig Watson, Steve McCaffery, Bob Perelman, Robert Grenier, Hannah Weiner and Diane Ward would by no means exhaust the list of salient contributors. Jerome McGann, a sympathetic onlooker, takes the view that in Language writing ‘poetry appears at a crisis of its traditional modes of expression.”[1] Rod Mengham detects a utopian impulse in the will-to-crisis, seeing in the Language group’s aggressive deconstruction of literary subjectivity an ambitious and (if it works) fundamental reorientation of the relations between poem, writer, and reader, ‘bringing to an end the long history of poetry which privileges the writer’s mind’. The new poem will include ab initio ‘a preconception of how, when and where it will be read.’[2] (Apparent echoes of Reception Theory and poststructuralist accounts of the writing process are not coincidental, and will bear investigation at a later stage.)

It would be easy to show the divergence of Language poetry from the more conservative traditions of American verse; a Language poem looks and sounds nothing like a poem by Robert Lowell or James Dickey or Louise Gluck. More vexed, and likely to prove of greater historical consequence, is the relationship between Language writing and the various post-war American avant-gardes; the Beats, the Black Mountain or New York schools. The generation of Robert Creeley or Ed Dorn, writers born for the most part in the 1920s, had managed by and large to hang on to its radical and progressive credentials until the 1980s – until, that is, the advent of Language poetry. Before turning to the poetry of today, it may be useful to sketch once more the literary terrain of the post-war period in which that earlier radicalism took root.

II

The poetic consensus in America, one that held steady for around forty years, involved the antagonistic but balanced co-existence of an establishment literature (epitomised first by Auden, finally by Lowell) and a loosely left-Bohemian opposition, represented by Donald Allen’s famous anthology The New American Poetry.[3] The New American Poets had their own hierarchies and preacher or teacherly figures (Robert Duncan, Charles Olson), but retained a fraternal proximity to the counter-culture and spirit of rebelliousness that reached its maximum level of social diffusion in the late 1960s. Like the aroused lovers and sprightly musicians depicted on Keats’s Grecian Urn, these poets were frozen in time; doomed never to win, to topple the poetic establishment, but allowed to keep their Dionysiac wildness, and an air of dangerous experimentalism. Although the huge Collected Poems of Allen Ginsberg comes complete with a name and subject index, while the photograph on the dustjacket bestows on its subject all the glamour of a retired banker, Ginsberg would until very recently have been the poet most identified with ‘youth’ by America’s reading public. The moment of Language poetry is therefore a critical moment for the whole post-1945 period in American poetry. The poetic Urn – be it Well-Wrought and classical or the Dionysiac kind – would at long last appear to have been broken. In the chapters that follow, I will ask whether the soi-disant vanguardism of the City Lights generation is given a decisive knock by Language; are Ginsberg and John Ashbery (whose influence and prominence since the mid-1970s loom larger than Lowell’s ever did) merely the new Establishment? Ale the Language writers, Blasting and Making It New in the poetry stakes, just the latest wave of New American Poets who will one day be comfortably assimilated into the old?

III

The generation that came to prominence in the late 50s and early 60s was divided internally according to geographical region. The Beats were associated chiefly with the West Coast, finding a supportive context in San Francisco’s traditional tolerance towards homosexuality, as well as the literature of psychic exploration and political dissent initiated by the ‘San Francisco Renaissance’ of Kenneth Rexroth and his contemporaries.[4] By contrast the New York School (Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler et al) pursued careers in the art world that brought them into contact with Abstract Expressionist painting, as well as the influence of immigrant Surrealists, and the side of New York culture which has always endeavoured to face Europe rather than the Americas.[5] Meanwhile in the backwoods of Carolina, its last rector, Charles Olson, was fighting to keep Black Mountain College open for a Faculty of independent minds that had included Robert Duncan and John Cage; Robert Creeley, an external examiner who stayed: and a student body barely younger than its teachers, that included Edward Dorn, Fielding Dawson, and John Wieners.

It is important to note that each of these separate regions maintained its own particular access to publication and dissemination of work. The differences in typography, page-size and other design features, that distinguish the books published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti at the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco from, say, the early pamphlets by Ashbery or O’Hara appearing under the imprint of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, could not be greater. Each carries its own cultural associations which bear on wider social issues, as well as the politics of poetry.

Michael Davidson speaks for a whole generation of poetry readers when he recalls ‘an older “bohemian” student’ lending him a City Lights Pocket Poets volume on a school bus in 1959.

Not only had I never read poems like that (we were still trying to figure out why the horse did stop in the woods on a snowy evening), I had never seen books made like that. Its small format and stapled binding bespoke a portability intended for immediate access, a book one was meant to read on the bus or standing in line. And there was something about the way my friend handed the book to me that signalled secrecy and solidarity at the same time.[6]

A few years earlier, John Bernard Myers’ gallery in New York had published Turandot, a pamphlet of poems by John Ashbery now so rare and sought-after that even its author does not possess a copy. At the time, however, Myers’ enthusiasm for the new poetry was not shared by visitors to the gallery. While abstract canvasses costing thousands of dollars were a chic acquisition (and a reminder of the new American triumphalism), the pamphlet costing two dollars didn’t sell. Where the West Coast poetry book was a sign of the burgeoning counter-culture, building on a regional tradition of political dissidence, the East Coast book was at best a de luxe adornment.

Of course, to paraphrase a line from John Ashbery, these distinctions can be brought to life in order to be dismantled. A simple geographical model of the contesting poetries and poetics brought together in the Allen anthology will not quite do. The contradictions are multiple: Lunch Poems, the most popular collection by New York poet Frank O’Hara, was published by City Lights in San Francisco. Ginsberg, the poetic voice of the West Coast, has lived for many years in New York, and his work contains far more references to that city than does, for example, John Ashbery’s. An historical account of Robert Duncan’s development would need to place him in the mutually inimical contexts of Black Mountain College, with its house-style of austere self-sufficiency and heterosexist swagger, and the more bardically exotic Berkeley Renaissance of Brother Antoninus and the gay, Orphic poet Jack Spicer. In fact, the lines along which the geographical distinctions do hold, and had purpose, are ultimately not to do with physical locale, but with procedural antipathies. The Beats, the New Yorkers and the Black Mountaineers liked to be seen to be at odds with each other on methodological and political grounds. The claim of each coterie to prime visibility was strengthened by the combative assertion of its differences from rival groups.

Frank O’Hara, for example, condemned the Black Mountain addiction to ‘the serious utterance, which isn’t particularly desirable most of the time’, seeing in Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems a congested neo-Poundian gravitas that could only sit in the reader’s way.[7] In his mock-manifesto ‘Personism’, included by Donald Allen in the anthology, O’Hara dismissed the contemporary agonising over linebreaks and questions of form that had spread in the wake of Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’ manifesto: ‘You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, “Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.”‘[8] Yet O’Hara’s poems didn’t just run’, or if they did it was along and then beyond pathways explored by the French Surrealists. André Breton and his followers were important precursors of the New York group through the mediating influence of the art world, in which O’Hara and Ashbery had begun successful middle-class careers, the former as assistant and then associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art. John Bernard Myers of the Tibor Gallery had been the managing editor of View, Breton’s journal-in-exile. As a result of such professional connections, Allen Ginsberg and others were able to accuse the New York coterie of East Coast snobbery with a European bias. Ginsberg’s elegy for Frank O’Hara (killed in an accident in 1966) mixes tenderness and regret with a sharp attack on O’Hara’s milieu, in particular its supporting cast of Ivy League brahmins on the make:

I tried your boys and found them ready
sweet and amiable
collected gentlemen with large sofa apartments
lonesome to please for pure language:
and you mixed with money
because you knew enough language to be rich[9]

Here we see the reopening of old antagonisms. Ginsberg’s disinclination to adopt a ‘pure language’ returns us to the agenda of Walt Whitman (his chief rhetorical influence) and William Carlos Williams (his mentor), in calling for a severance of pioneering American poetics from Europe and the Old World. With all three poets, this call was the literary expression of a dissident politics. Yet, if O’Hara ‘mixed with money’, Allen Ginsberg’s own radicalism was nothing if not mixed, as his programme for sexual and psychic liberation came to dissolve in the deluded and diluted Romanticism of a 60s hippy culture it had helped to create. These ironies and arguments have been well charted, and it is not the aim of this study to repeat them. It will be more helpful to examine the ways in which the emergence and intervention of Language poetry have shunted all those debates and procedural antagonisms into a new light and, perhaps, a new vulnerability, one that emphasizes the affinities between the New American Poets at the expense of the internal differences on which they themselves tended to dwell.

IV

The early poems of Steve Benson show the crude, innovative power of Language poetry in the 1970s. Their rhetorical strategies are drastic, and initiate a critique of Benson’s poetic precursors:

I want to go out for love tonight
If you want to get existential a moment
Fabricate a lie darling
This crisp determinate, silvery bill
Glance into the fat of my hand
(“‘I want to go out for love tonight

the hair along her navel to vagina line feels like tingling
9 persons found dead on freeway early this morning
metal plates in the street I never consider their function
just flip pages in the dictionary forget the word adjudicate
alongside the room grazes a treetop birds swing out from
nylon hose flung out the window in mild abandon
let me read you this aloud
(‘As Is’) [10]

The poetry’s jaded undercutting of a romanticization of self and its affections is undercut in its turn: does ‘This’, in the first excerpt, refer to the ‘lie’? What then, if anything, can truly be said to be ‘determinate’ here? Linguistic reference is angled sufficiently sharply to be a personal issue, but never within a specific social context – or even a specifically gendered context, as the ‘her’ that ends a later line shifts at once into ‘Him the man I’m sitting next to’. The poem’s constant recourse to a feint of reference, followed by a glancing blow, leaves us with a free-floating anxiety of agency, the unplaceability of what might signify ‘love’ and what ‘a lie’ exemplifying its inextricably mixed pleasure and threat. In the second excerpt lines connoting pleasure and threat are more sharply distinguishable, from a readerly viewpoint, but the poet’s laconic admission that this text may be on permanent vacation from literature’s traditional functions and responsibilities (‘forget the word adjudicate’), is counterbalanced by persistent reminders of the textuality of lyric poetry. ‘let me read you this aloud’, reminds us quite precisely that he can’t. In sum, the devices of estrangement employed by the two texts are each other’s mirroring opposite: the first implies an abdication of conventional literary control through its immersion in the weird twinning of sexual overtures and cynical withdrawal, where the second simply dumps the whole thing on the reader and says, you sort it out – if you want to.

The strategies may differ but Certain literary antecedents are common to both. Benson’s ‘you’ is a contemporary descendant of the ‘you’ of Apollinaire’s Zone, and Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’. Punctuation may have gone, but the initial capital letter of each line in the first excerpt, the typical length and nearly toneless tone of both, do recall, however vestigially, the run of casually intimate invective in the French and Francophile lyric from Baudelaire through Rimbaud and Surrealism to Frank O’Hara. Apparently even that rhetorical vestige may have smelled too strongly of a ‘pure language’ to Benson. Also in the late 70s he produced a sequence called Blindspots; the title poem begins as follows:

there are problems
situationsthere are … illusions,
allusions …
there are collusions …

There was a race horse called Gunga Din.
He had a problem,
by his own definition.
So he changed his name
to Samson.
Then he felt that he had
another kind of situation.
So
he walked over to the foul line,
sort of eased over to the foul line,
knocked up against it,
handled it for a while with his fingers
till it began to flake
and fray against his fingers.

The italicised portions of the text are not stage directions, as in a drama, but transcriptions of an actual event. Anyone suspicious that the reader was to be set up as the dupe of a neo-Dadaist tease might well find their suspicions confirmed by the author’s prefatory admission that Blindspots (which occupies seventeen pages of printed text) ‘was an unrehearsed, improvised oral poem I spoke as I determined it, moving between the audience and a brick wall’ in reaction to three stereo tapes by a collaborator, playing at the time.[11] During the last decade Benson has pushed this kind of risky strategy to legendary extremes: for a text entitled ‘The Town of He’, for example, committing to memory long passages from, among other sources, Peter Pan, Johnson’s Life of Swift, Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and Cabeza de Vaca’s 1542 report to the King of Spain regarding his peregrinations from Florida to Mexico, in order to offer spontaneous oral recombinations of their contents for the delectation of the audience at New York’s Ear Inn on an evening in May, 1985.

So Benson’s handling of pre-existing materials in order to make them ‘flake’ and ‘fray’ even more, is not without its humorous side. Nor is it without seriousness, a seriousness related to that very preexistence. By his own account Benson is ‘passionately in love with conversation’. Lyn Hejinian has likewise noticed this shift of emphasis away from subjectivity, writing that Benson’s work issues always ‘from within a full milieu’. Benson’s poetry offers a polemical reversal of the now traditional model of relations between poem, poet and reader. Conventionally, the act of writing establishes an individualised claim to certain experiences, the originality of the claim attested by a linguistically unusual array of expression, which may be retrospectively summarised as that poet’s ‘style’. The poem, by these dimming lights, is ultimately a privileging of mind over its objects. This position may be said to have had its heroic phase in the Romantic period, surviving along the various strata of Modernist poetics in a dwindling and anxious form. The manifest social inefficacy of poetry has tended, in a utilitarian age, to push its practitioners into the frail refuge of alienated subjectivity. Here the very removal of poetic style from other, more common forms of expression has become poetry’s own subject and remaining consolation. By direct, indeed violent, contrast, Benson’s work reverses this process, insisting (as does most if not all Language poetry) that the self is basically a construct of social networks, no free agent, but rather a living and breathing point of intersection for various social and historical pressures or codes. The element of madcap role-playing in Benson’s work can be viewed as an exploded diagram of this social reality as exhibited by one speaker. Its background, its theoretical matrix is (was) that of scientific Marxism. Its artistic working-out in Benson’s poetry is, interestingly, anything but assured; there is no purposeful subscription to a political manifesto, but rather a series of constantly changing postures of unease. The multiplicity of discourses that go to make up the single self are heard as simultaneous, and conflicting. Benson’s ‘conversation’, his ‘full milieu’, is invariably troubled by ‘the immense amount of motion that is a person’s life’.[12]

Most Language poetry is less honestly awkward than Steve Benson’s. The wry comedy of Ron Silliman’s work, or the attractively patterned reminiscence of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, both of which will be discussed later, are easier to take. (Indeed, the Hejinian text appears to be everyone’s favourite Language book, and the first to make it onto the syllabus.) Many of the suppositions of these works are shared by Benson’s, but he does clarify certain facets of Language practice by so insistently going to extremes. Of particular significance is his use stretched to the point of parody, of improvisatory techniques and a stress on orality, (‘let me read you this aloud’), which were of course key points of procedure for the earlier generation of New American Poets.

V

Whatever their differences, the Black Mountain, Beat and New York Schools shared a commitment to poetry as individualistic expression. Partly a literary matter bound up with the persistence of Romanticism this emphasis can also be read as a reaction to the sullen conformity of American life in the period of Cold War. A stress on self-expression and the right to a private language unites the poetry, painting and music of the post-war years. This was the period in which jazz found a new popularity and a new critical respect, with players like John Coltrane and Albert Ayler pushing the rhythmical innovations of BeBop into fabulously extended improvisations, heard at the time as articulating all kinds of emotional, ethnic and mystically philosophical tensions. In fact, this was the age of improvisation; Ginsberg’s and Jack Kerouac’s ‘spontaneous bop prosody’, the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, John Cage’s use of the aleatory to make each musical performance unique and, as 1950s monochrome fanned out into the peacock colours of the 60s, the collective improvisation of the ‘happening’ and the first Pop Festivals.

The 1970s, therefore, may be read with hindsight as a period of aftermath, in which individual careers were consolidated, but where artistic individualism as a trailblazing credo sank to the point of parody in the culture of narcissism exemplified and recorded by Andy Warhol. It is at this point that poets such as Steve Benson begin to publish and perform. One could read in his emphasis on spoken improvisation a manic extrapolation from, and subversion of, the improvisatory aesthetic laid down by the jazz saxophone, Charles Olson’s emphasis on the breath in his Projective Verse essay, and the principles underlying Ginsberg’s urge to ‘set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping’.[13] Michael Davidson has coined the useful term ‘expressivism’ to cover these artistic developments of the Cold War period. The following chapter will be an attempt to sketch a summary of Language theory and practice, and to test Davidson’s dual hypothesis that ‘language-writing offers the most thorough critique of expressivism in post-war writing, even while building upon the earlier generation’s accomplishments’. Davidson may slightly exaggerate the case, in summarising post-war poetics as one in which ‘muscular and physical response is valued over reflective or discursive moments’, tout court.[14] The Maximus Poems are nothing if not discursive, and reflective. But Davidson has located what may prove to be the most significant turning point in American poetry for thirty years.

2. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: The Politics of Poetic Form

I

It seems appropriate at this point to put the New American Poetry on hold, in order to give a brief chronological account of the development of Language poetry, together with a précis of the theoretical debates and positions that the poets have wanted most frequently to put under close scrutiny. To move from theoretical essays to poems, rather than the other way about, is itself an acknowledgement of the heavy emphasis this movement has always laid on theory, discussion, teaching, and the opening of possible avenues from poetry to politics.

The first published use of the term ‘Language Poetry’ may well have occurred in 1975, when Ron Silliman edited a selection of work by nine poets (including Bruce Andrews, Clark Coolidge, Robert Grenier and Silliman himself) for Alcheringa magazine. There Silliman writes of the poets associated with (now defunct) little press poetry magazines like This, Big Deal and Tottel’s as “called variously ‘language centred’, ‘minimal’, ‘nonreferential formalism’, ‘structuralist’. Not a group but a tendency in the work of many.”[15] By this time Stephen Rodefer had begun to publish poems which carried a wit and verbal agility sponsored by the New York School; and Steve McCaffery had produced an interesting early work, ‘Ow’s “Waif” the poems of which result from ‘a calculated action upon a specific word-source or “supply-text , a use of ‘found’ materials that clearly derives from the cut-ups of William Burroughs, and the work of John Cage.[16] McCaffery would go on to edit a special number of the journal Open Letter in 1977 though in the verdict of Lee Bartlett ‘once again it seemed to argue not for a movement but rather for a disposition.’[17] That ‘disposition’ was more international at this early stage than it would be subsequently. Along with the Americans known to Silliman, one would want to cite Canadians such as McCaffery and Christopher Dewdney, and some maverick British poets such as Paul Buck, whose magazine Curtains was combatively interested in the political implications of an extremist use of language. The more inflammatory poems by John James were relevant at this point, as was the work of a number of poets resident at one time or another in Cambridge, and represented by its small presses and journals: Tom Raworth, for example, perhaps the most consistently interesting poet writing in Britain today: and at the younger end, poet-scholars like Rod Mengham, and the late Veronica Forrest-Thomson, whose work anticipates much of what has happened since. In fact her book Poetic Artifice was the direct catalyst of an important theoretical text by Charles Bernstein, Artifice of Absorption.

It was Bernstein, and his co-editor Bruce Andrews, who formalised the ‘disposition’ into something nearer a movement through the appearance of their bimonthly journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the first issue of which appeared in February 1978. Devoted to poetics, the journal combined a fabulously elliptical house-style with the urgency of a bulletin; strict limits were set on the length of book-reviews, many of which run to a hundred words or less. The first third of this review of Kit Robinson by Gary Lenhart will convey the general flavour.

You can fill in the spaces in these poems with facts, as Kit Robinson does in “7 Days in Another Town.” You only lose the special music like the wind everywhere in these pages. Discrete vowels poke no holes. No tantrums hack. Restrained verse turns credible, mostly jump jump.[18]

It certainly made a change from the TLS. Short pieces on Marx, schizophrenic discourse, and the performance of poetry appeared alongside a putative revision of the canon, entailing respectful notices of new work by John Ashbery, and reassessments of Louis Zufosky and the late Laura (Riding) Jackson. Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) found a new prominence.

Summarizing the magazine’s different projects, its editors were to lay stress on an orientation for L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E beyond Language poetry alone; Bernstein and Andrews drew attention to

our analysis of the capitalist social order as a whole and of the place that alternative forms of writing and reading might occupy in its transformation. It is our sense that the project of poetry does not involve turning language into a commodity for consumption; instead, it involves repossessing the sign through close attention to, and active participation in, its production.[19]

There are two things to note here, before moving forward into an engagement with the argument as such. From a European perspective at any rate, this would appear to be the first group-resurgence of a specifically socialist programme in American letters since the 30s. But if L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is taken at its word, as returning to an agenda of revolution for the dispossessed, rather than libertarianism for the disaffected, as in 60s campus unrest, this is still a discourse shaped by the university. The Marxist lexicon of commodity fetishism and the social order is filtered by a vocabulary that derives from the various developments in literary criticism since 1968. As a matter of historical fact, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was the first published, collective evidence of the impact of what university literature departments now summarise as ‘theory’ on the practise of poetry in America.

The achievements, characteristic range of style, and the crucial dilemmas of Language writing were there from its inception in the late 70s, in this journal. Here were to be found: a project for massive social change; a collective project to write and to analyze poetry in relation to the impact of European theory; and the attempt to yoke the two under a repertoire of poetic styles that claimed antecedents in Ashbery, Russian Futurism and Tender Buttons. If it is hard not to see a discrepancy between the aims and the achievements of Language poetry, that must partly be because the ambitions were so heroically gargantuan. (And, some might argue, because of a thinness in their poetic models.) If it therefore becomes necessary, as well as easy, to pick holes in Language arguments, it is still worth noting and saluting the enormity of what these poets have wished to write their way into. Their work and the questions it raises form a standing rebuke to the prevailing mediocrity of America’s cultural output during the Reagan and Bush administrations.

II

From the outset, one strategy of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing lay in the recognition of the intractability of the tasks in hand, followed by a doubling of the linguistic stakes. If it proved difficult to develop a prose which would operate satisfactorily as a combined theory of poetry, economics and revolution, then that difficulty would be surmounted by a bravura leap, as in this display of acrobatics by Steve McCaffery:

Grammar is a huge conciliatory machine assimilating elements into a ready structure. This grammatical structure can be likened to profit in capitalism, which is reinvested to absorb more human labour for further profit. Classical narrative structure is a profit structure.

Grammar, as repressive mechanism, regulates the free circulation of meaning (the repression of polysemeity into monosemeity and guided towards a sense of meaning as accumulated, as surplus value of signification).

To have registered, say, certain parallels between the rise of the bourgeois novel and the expansion of the Industrial Revolution would not have told the reader anything new. The novelty of McCaffery’s analysis lies in its internalization of political struggle within a macrocosmic linguistic model. The fight for and against certain kinds of language becomes immediately a struggle for new political arrangements, affinities with roughly contemporary developments such as Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, work by Julia Kristeva, and other radical and interdisciplinary approaches being clearly present. As a set of suggestive parallels, the new Language model is at least as plausible as the Europeans’ polemic. His failure to convince is tied to McCaffery’s unwillingness to concede the element of rhetoricity in his project. He dare not, because the scale of Language’s ambitions leaves him no option but a double-or-quit gamble on the impressiveness of his own schema. The alleged parallels between economic and linguistic structures become ingenious, overly intricate, and in the end ludicrous:

A grammatical critique can be mobilized by presenting language as opaque and resistant (sic) to reinvestment. A language centered writing, for instance, and zero-semantic sound poetry, diminishes the profit rate and lowers investment drives just as a productive need is increased.[20]

As Rod Mengham has observed of such ‘bursts of legislation’ by McCaffery and Bruce Andrews, ‘it does not follow that any and every formulation of political economy can be applied in the field of language’, even if the general feasibility of a comparison between the workings of language and capital be conceded.[21] Where Mengham detects an excess of confidence in the scope of the comparison, one might just as easily diagnose an equally neo-Shelleyan anxiety. Just so, the breathless conclusion of Epipsychidion with its insistence that everything in the linguistic and sexual spheres must and shall intersect leads precisely to their pyrotechnic expiry. There is a long tradition in modern English and American poetry of barely acknowledged, would-be legislation.

The more customary Language position, again contemporary with the arguments of literary theory, is that the various kinds of linguistic dishevelment and terroristic circuit breaking available to poetry belong to, as well as pointing up, social/linguistic reality as a site of incessant contestation and contradiction. This does not prevent the resurgence of fabulously Romantic ambitions such as McCaffery’s, which might ultimately be read as over-compensations for the marginalization of poetry within the social arena it so desperately yearns to reconstruct. The early L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E manifestos dared not afford to be sceptical. Any such qualities were exiled to the poly- or ‘zero-semantic’ propensities of the poetry.

Notwithstanding the collectivism of their aims, the practice of individual poets gathered under the Language umbrella shows great variation. Ron Silliman’s ongoing multi-volume sequence The Alphabet and the minimalism of Craig Watson’s work could hardly be further apart in style or procedure. What would seem to unite all these poets, however, is the nature of their interest in the politics of poetic form. This is not confined to questions of purely literary innovation and influence. Language poetry is predicated on the belief that the visible and audible divergence of poetic language from customary discourse does itself mark out the ground of subversive political activity. In one of many calls to the linguistic barricades, Bruce Andrews voices an impatience with the ideological closure implied by single meaning: stop repressing the active construction, the making of meaning, the making of sense – social sense.’[22] The insistence here is not merely on the opening up of the means by which meaning is made; the poem in such a case would resemble one of those high-tech buildings that wears its piping and elevators on the outside – startling, but in no sense out of sync with the capitalist projects it houses.

Rather, as I have shown, the intention of Language is to disclose the workings of linguistic expression so as to open up wider issues of social meaning, by analogy. It is with analogy, imported in order to shrink the distance between poetry and more acknowledged modes of legislation, that the problems appear. As Charles Bernstein announces, in the afterword to the collection of papers from which this chapter draws its subtitle; ‘The poetic authority to challenge dominant societal values, including conventional manners of communication, is a model (my emphasis) for the individual political participation of each citizen.’ Even at its most intensely polemical, Bernstein’s writing is characterised by a hyperactive wit recalling the provocations of Dada and Surrealism. His use of modishly ecological imagery to back up the argument about a political relevance for poetry is seno-comic, perhaps, once more, because of an unacknowledged uncertainty about the validity of his argument:

Poets don’t have to be read, any more than trees have to be sat under, to transform poisonous societal emissions into something that can be breathed. As a poet, you affect the public sphere with each reader, with the fact of the poem, and by exercising your prerogative to choose what collective forms you will legitimate. The political power of poetry is not measured in numbers: it instructs us to count differently.[23]

The words used here may bounce off their referential vectors like the energy field in a Kirilian photograph, to adopt an analogy used elsewhere by Bernstein, but the argument gets damaged in the process. Trees don’t have to be sat under, arguably, to be trees; but poems, surely, do have to be read. Yet when they are read, the ‘fact of the poem’ alone seems poor soil from which to expect to see the ‘political power of poetry’ flourish.

Bernstein has been advancing these same arguments since the late 1970s. ‘So writing might be exemplary – an instance broken off from and hence not in the service of this economic and cultural – social – force called capitalism. A chip of uninfected substance; or else, a ‘glimpse’, a crack …’ [24] A chip, a glimpse, a crack; a ‘model’ for political participation; there is always, always has to be, a metaphor to bridge the gap between poetry and the world outside it that every socially conscious poet since and including Shelley has strained to bridge. Elsewhere, ironically, the Language poets are only too aware of the unbridgeability of the gap between words and things. Language poets want the political sphere to be an exception to the linguistic rule whose unacknowledged sway their work is otherwise, ironically, so intent on disclosing. To date, the problem for Language has been that of language.

III

Words are always late for the event. Words can point to, describe, sketch, shadow, haunt – do anything but be their object. And yet, the act of reference, always doomed to miss its target, still generates linguistic life, which poetry in particular has learned to cultivate; at times, indeed, taking the element of accident or slippage from communicative meaning as its own province. Once again Shelley’s poetry is instructive, in part because of his peculiar ability to both enter a delirium of poetic language, but enter in order to critique its limitations. Epipsychidion is again a powerful example: it begins by the poet’s lancing a hundred verbal epithets at the absent object of thought (‘Emilla Viviani’), only to concede their inefficacy:

I measure

The world of fancies, seeking one like thee,
And find – alas! mine own infirmity.

This ‘infirmity’ becomes, however, the ground of poetic life.

A Metaphor of Spring and Youth and Morning;
A Vision like incarnate April, warning,
With smiles and tears, Frost the Anatomy
Into his summer grave.[25]

The skewed victories of poetic language, its transformation of the failure of referentiality into the strange triumph of the non-representational, do of course figure prominently in the modern poetry of Europe and America. The precursors claimed by Language writing – John Ashbery, the Surrealists – show this acutely. It would be inappropriate to an introductory study such as this, but perfectly possible to demonstrate a continuing persistence of Romanticism that might include the Language project without either domesticating it unfairly, or collapsing the important divergences of Language from its poetic predecessors.

This chapter will conclude with an enquiry into particular examples of Language poetry, to see if the slippage of signifier from signified, and of poetic language from social reality – which problematises the prose manifestos – can be turned to a victory in poetry, however Pyrrhic or Shelleyan.

IV

The opening poem of a sequence or collection is a traditional locus for the poem about poetry, or about poetry’s catalysis; a transitional writing where theoretical prescription and active practice may meet visibly, but only to bid farewell. The two poetic overtures under discussion are the opening page of Bob Perelman’s book-length sequence of prose poems, a.k.a. (1984), and the first work in a cycle of a hundred poetic texts, Raik by Ray DiPalma (1989).

Here is the opening of Perelman’s first page:

I am often conscious, yet rain is now visibly falling. It almost combines to be one thing, yet here I am again. Though he dreamed he was awake, it was a mistake he would only make at a time like that. There are memories, but I am not that person.[26]

and here is the opening of Raik‘s poem:

20 minutes of indolence
44 years of speculation
emblematic pretext five
the specific molded ilk [27]

Such comparisons are invidious, in one sense; an artificial juxtaposition of two texts with no necessary connection, bent into proximity by the exigencies of an outsider’s agenda. Yet, one only ever reads for some purpose or to satisfy some particular need, a reality that Language poetry itself has not been slow to note.

The Perelman poem announces at once that it is to be an examination of consciousness. Right from the Cartesian parameters of the opening words, it is clear that this is going to be an enquiry into the phenomenology of perception and consciousness, mind and its objects. That the instances offered to the reader are not going to be self-evidently or conventionally rational is also made an issue from the outset. The first sentence is not constructed as if its second half were a non sequitur, yet it is – at least in terms of conventional expression. The second sentence is similar in construction. The third reverses this approach; apparently a non sequitur, it actually makes experiential sense; the mistake of thinking yourself awake when you are not could indeed happen only in dreams. The final sentence of the paragraph summarises a key theme for the text as a whole: that while the history of a person’s memory appears to him or her to be continuous and ongoing, the self is self-divided. You are not now the person you once were, for good or ill, and not merely in terms of the change from a child to an adult, but by implication, from minute to minute, from perceptual scene to scene. Perelman’s last phrase replicates the close of a lyric by Frank O’Hara, ‘How to Get There’:

and we drift into the clear sky enthralled by our disappointment
never to be alone again

never to be loved

sailing through space: didn’t I have you once for my self?
West Side?
for a couple of hours, but I am not that person [28]

Perelman may or may not be quoting O’Hara, consciously or unconsciously. Either way, his poem establishes itself as in the O’Hara line: that is to say, consciousness-centred in a speculative and exploratory way that will use devices of estrangement, defamiliarization, parataxis and the whole grab-bag of modernist method to both detain the reader’s attention, and define the text as poetic.

By contrast, DiPalma’s text takes textuality as its dominant subject, ab initio. I did not have to forcibly just- the lines as I typed them out just now on my word processor. Each line is exactly the same length, in characters and spaces. There are five lines, and they include the word ‘five’. As the first in a sequence of a hundred related poems, this first is in a sense the pretext, a word that is also included. Form and formalism are very clearly on the poet’s agenda, and the rest of the poem, if not the book, is going to be the logical development of a ‘molded ilk’. The potential for tonal warmth, or even tonal variation, would seem to have been deliberately abjured to clear the way for an atmosphere of rather strict experiment. In fact, the rest of the poems are of varying lengths, but are equally box-like in form, use a considerable amount of repetition, and frequently open up their first line for recombinant possibilities as each page proceeds. The microscopic attention to words and letters that has always characterized the poetry of Tom Raworth, (who published alongside DiPalma in the days before Language), is the stable basis of the work under scrutiny. The strong implication of Raik is the inaccessibility of consciousness outside language – it is literally and purely a language poem.

The texts show certain common interests – in repetition and the recombinant potential of language, and in verbal quirkiness, for example. (It is significant that all the devices they share may be found in the work of Gertrude Stein.) Yet the differences of approach are vital, and rooted in the history of poetry as well as each author’s personal style. Here is a later poem from Raik in its entirety:

Overandovergoes
formandform’sop
acityisislateri
sitlatertheveil
edinsideandoutt
oextendtherando
minthewaterstri
ppedofitspatina
rawradlantsurmi
seonelistenandt
wotransformlaug
hedandplacidpeg [29]

The chief limitation of this kind of poem lies in its fealty to a pre-existing theory. Ultimately it is as soluble as a crossword puzzle. Multiple meanings do hang around the fourth line; (is it ‘sit later the veil,’ or ‘is it later the veiled inside’?) but this is not the kind of poetic ambiguity likely to lure one back for repeated rereading. The lack of spacing turns the text into an obstacle course, a retardation clearly intended to stimulate meditation on the working processes of reading and writing which are normally submerged in habit. At this level, it is a mildly instructive essay on ‘formandform’sop/acity’, though I suspect that most readers could have done with a bit more ‘rawradiantsurmi/se’. At any rate, the steps by which one moves from picking out individual words to thinking about more general operations of language are quite clear. In keeping with this, Steve McCaffery notes on the back of the cover of Raik that the poems seek to ‘resensitize the materiality of words’. His next statement seems more questionable: ‘These poems yield primary encounters with orthography and lexicon that induce political beyond aesthetic implications.’ Here again is the excessive confidence in poetry’s capacities, and its corollary anxiety that any poetry whose alms are less than world-changing has collapsed into aestheticism.

It is significant that Perelman retains while DiPalma abjures methods of approach and stylistic features of the new American Poetry, what Michael Davidson termed ‘expressivism’. While DiPalma would seem more engaged by Dadaist, Futurist and Concrete methodology, Perelman maintains a purchase on the consciousness centred lyricism of Robert Duncan’s and John Ashbery’s generation. I would argue that there is a general tendency in Language poetry for those texts which are more open to the expressivist heritage to work more successfully than the purist approach, typified by Raik or the (to my eyes, barren) work of P. Inman. This holds true within the work of individual poets, also. Stephen Rodefer’s Four Lectures has a dazzling wit, outshining the later and more programmatic Emergency Measures; yet when Rodefer’s style seems most his own, it also shows a straight continuity from texts like Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger and the poems of Frank O’Hara. The remainder of this study will be concerned to test Davidson’s claim that Language offers a potent critique of expressivism, alongside the possibility that Language writing at its best actually uncovers unexplored resources in American poetry of the post-war period.

3. Songs of the Self

I

If the New American Poets such as Dorn and Wieners and O’Hara published work that was grounded in an expressive individualism, the burden of particular poems often lay in the disclosure of divisions within the self. The unspeakable visions of the individual, to revive Jack Kerouac’s motto for poetry, tended to issue in practice as speakable visions of the individual’s not-being. The pleasures of reading the New American Poetry are to be discovered through a paradox: while poets in the 50s wrote under the oblique influence of continental existentialism, a philosophy of loneliness brought home by the activity of producing alienated poetry in a time of Cold War and commercialism, the self-splitting in the poetry can signal the aspects of selfhood that link and overlap in relationships and the social world.

Frank O’Hara’s poetry, for example, gives voice to the psychodrama of a self caught between the shaping pressure of will, and the self-opening of desire and the propensity to float into identification with the other. These tensions are often exploded in complex sorts of comedy, rather than resolved, as in O’Hara’s most famous poem ‘In Memory of My Feelings’:

Grace
to be born and live as variously as possible. The conception of the masque barely suggests the sordid identifications. I am a Hittite in love with a horse. I don’t know what blood’s in me I feel like an African prince I am a girl walking downstairs in a red pleated dress with heels I am a champion taking a fall I am a jockey with a sprained ass-hole I am the light mist
in which a face appears
and it is another face of blonde I am a baboon eating a banana I am a dictator looking at his wife I am a doctor eating a child and the child’s mother smiling I am a Chinaman climbing a mountain I am a child smelling his father’s underwear I am an Indian sleeping on a scalp
and my pony is stamping in the birches,
and I’ve just caught sight of the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria.
What land is this, so free?[30]

No-one but Frank O’Hara could have written this, and the passage would be well-known and probably viewed as a crucial episode by any reader who valued his poetry. Yet this passage, stamped ‘O’Hara’ as definitively as Howl or Gunslinger is stamped as the apogee of its author’s style, is about the fission of discrete identity into a carnivalesque though alarming democracy of selves. And in broad terms, so is Ginsberg’s Howl, which pits the ‘minds of my generation’ against ‘Moloch’; and so is Dorn’s Gunslinger, whose narrative ‘I’ dies part way through Book II, to make way for less ontologically conventional company. The ultimate discoveries of the New American Poetry carry implications at variance with their neo-existentialist and individualistic stance. One strand of implication leads to a more social poetry which that generation was unwilling to pursue. Social meant societal, and although Dorn, O’Hara and Ginsberg all produced notable anti-racist poems (for example), the ethic and objective remained libertarian, and hence individualistic. By contrast the Language poets were able to draw on the social implications of the New Americans’ self-multiplication, encouraged by continental ‘theory’. New ways of interpreting selfhood as constructed within a web of interactive codes, set society and the creative powers of language into a new relation. As with the post-war influence of existentialism, French literary theory has had important stylistic and procedural consequences in American Poetry.

Of course the New American Poets did not spring fully-formed out of the Donald Allen anthology. Alongside the influences already mentioned of the San Francisco Renaissance, Surrealism and Modernism, the vernacular objectivism of William Carlos Williams is a ubiquitous catalyst; so is Whitman. The passage quoted from O’Hara’s ‘In Memory of My Feelings’ exists in a clear line of descent from Walt Whitman’s great lists, and from his happy conflation of two, seemingly contradictory philosophical positions: rampantly Romantic egotism (‘I contain multitudes’), and self-dissolution into those multitudes:

Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars … [31]

Notwithstanding the huge stylistic and other changes since Whitman’s time, the same attempts to understand experience through apparently divergent rhetorics of selfhood, nationality, race and gender are canvassed at speed by Frank O’Hara. Of course there are tones in O’Hara that are alien to Whitman: in ‘In Memory’ comedy is more than tinged with horror, a vertigo at the dissolution of fixed identity, and the lines to do with the arrival of settlers in the New World are shadowed by a historical bitterness howled down by Whitman’s booming attempt to sing the unity of dis-united states; as D.H. Lawrence so tartly noticed. The period when ‘In Memory of My Feelings’ was written, tends to now be celebrated for an allegedly guileless and Romantic cult of expanded awareness. Much of O’Hara’s poetic comedy is a reactive registration of the vertigo such an unsettling, desired but feared, can cause. The poem is about ‘how to be open but not violated, how not to panic’ as the painter Grace Hartigan observed.[32] She is the ‘Grace’ at the beginning of the quoted excerpt, though that whole sentence is chiselled on Frank O’Hara’s tombstone: Grace to he born and live as variously as possible. The double meaning of the joke shows amply enough the double potential of the poem’s discoveries about self which are also a duplicity. Of all ‘my many selves’ it is ‘the serpent in their midst’, cunning and venomous survivor, who must be saved, for poetry’s sake. Yet the division of the self can lead to Grace, also.

II

Stephen Rodefer published his first collection of poems in 1965, the year before Frank O’Hara’s death, and a decade before Language. Like that of Clark Coolidge and even Ron Silliman, his work might therefore be read as related to, but not circumscribed by either of the two ‘generations’. Four Lectures (1982) is in no sense a transitional work, but one that both continues directions for poetry inaugurated by O’Hara and his peers, from a coign of vantage informed by the new debates around structuralism and the politics of poetic form:

In Tehran to show pleasure they throw candy and rose water
on each other in the street, knowing how.
A dry, brown mushroom from Menlo Park with no price.
On his deathbed Breughel instructed his wife to burn some of his
(paintings
as they could get her into trouble, lending personality to his oeuvre.
Paranoia is a carful. Step into her bed.
(‘Words in Works in Russian’)[33]

What structures the writing’s poetic intelligibility is the ‘knowing how’ that the reader brings from his or her own habitation of the codes that make particular societies at particular times comprehensible. Rodefer’s comedy is, in a sense, Saussurean. Any activity is meaningless, in itself and only given sense by context and convention. (e.g., try throwing ‘candy and rose water over someone in a street in Bellaire, Ohio, rather than Tehran and see if they ‘show pleasure’.) The poem’s bizarre juxtapositions argue that we should stop making sense, and look instead at how sense is made. The ‘dry, brown mushroom’ picked in the Park has no price, is not for sale. This small instance of common property has escaped from a particular code, that of commerce; but the mycological memento is not in a state of pure being. Carlos Williams’ prelapsarian urge to show the reader a thing as if for the first time looks dated, by this agenda; things and persons are always already constructed by linguistic networks. But like the dying Breughel, the perceptive reader can crack the code and picture alternative arrangements, a propensity that has always got imaginative humans ‘into trouble’.

Four Lectures is, in Ron Silliman’s words, ‘part carnival, part war’, a designation that would fit his own work also. His Sunset Debris (cf. Rodefer’s Plane Debris) a thirty-two page text from 1986, is made up entirely of questions:

Could you hear the violin? Did you go back to smoking? Did you quit the work, half-done, then go back to it, completing a bit at a time? Did it ever occur to you that she might not want it, might have it, might not need it? Did it ever propose itself as a question of privacy? Did you like the colour of the curtains? Did you ever wonder what it felt like, burst of semen into the throat? Doesn’t kidney failure haunt you? Can’t you foretell arthritis, ulcer, loss of hair, loss of teeth? When will it be your turn for the infarction? Did you see the snow? Did you do the job? Didn’t you hope to avoid language that passed itself off as a mockup of consciousness? Didn’t you suggest a formula just to get the haters of formulae pissed off? Won’t you, given the chance, betray everyone? Did you see how the soldiers, bringing the dead back in body-bags, chew gum?[34]

We are used to reading as interactive, as a process that as it were allows us to get a word in edgeways. We get into some relation with the text in reading, likely to be bored or dismayed by the opposing poles of either an utterly dominant reading, a case of deja-vu, or annihilation by the writing. Silliman’s text courts the second possibility, a terroristic interrogation that shifts tack with each question. It is an extended reminder of textuality, of the fact that our participation in any text is silent and in a sense imaginary, a fiction. Silliman is attempting a democratisation of categories of experience we might have preferred to keep separate, from those of ‘privacy’ (sex, bodily dysfunction and disease) to those of the polis (war and work). Yet the poet is not in any sadistic sense hidden from view while manipulating the reader. The hope ‘to avoid language that passed itself off as a mockup of consciousness’ appears self-directed, and would also summarise the projects of Language in relation to O’Hara and the earlier generation. (By referring to them, famously, as his ‘I do this, I do that’ poems, O’Hara openly conceded the element of ‘mockup’.) Silliman, like Rodefer and Perelman, uses the defamiliarizing non sequitur as a shock-effect. But so did T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. What is new here is the shift of poetic ground from the self-consistent authority of the poet’s voice, his style or ‘mockup of consciousness’, to the ‘knowing how’ through which any statement claims validity.

Style is undoubtedly a casualty of these changes, within the twentieth century understanding of style as modes of artifice whose recurrence guarantees authenticity of personal expression. A reader who prizes the individuality of voice in O’Hara or Olson over the nature of the issues poems raise would undoubtedly see the work of Rodefer et al as related to, but thinner than, the New Americans’. Indeed there is a case (which I cannot quite bring myself to make) for arguing the near irrelevance of any ‘issues’ to a poetry such as O’Hara’s or Charles Olson’s. For all the emphasis on history or locale, the reversed Jericho of Olson’s aim ‘to build out of sound the walls of the city’ makes of the polis a subjective act of utterance.[35] Just as O’Hara’s mock-manifesto ‘Personism’ does more than mock, so there was more to his objection to ‘the serious utterance’ than a suggestion that Olson lighten up. The apparently comic utterance can surprise with seriousness, a device exploited constantly by O’Hara, as by Lord Byron before him. It is no coincidence that the dramatic individuation of poetic voice was essential to the practice of both writers.

III

In the more impressive work by Rodefer and Silliman, such as the latter’s multi-volume, continuously engaging epic The Alphabet, style is an achievement not of voice so much as a primarily visual recording of social signs. Less introspective than the New Americans, and entirely without the tragic lyricism of John Wieners or Jack Spicer, they do still rely more on ‘a mockup of consciousness’ than the manifestos would care to claim. What, a book-length chunk of The Alphabet, does this throughout, and superbly:

Zen grocer, Eyes ache
after day at CRT.
A teenage girl with a bright smile,
safety pin through her nose. Bike messenger’s
wire basket. Wall up around construction site
with several generations of peeling posters.
Stepping outdoors, the cold air makes my eyes water.
Umbrella handle carved like the head of a duck.
Empire devastates the dominant: End the War
in ’94. Patterned white stocking
over thick black ankle. Tremendous
formal out-thereness of the haiku
translates into greeting card mush.[36]

What is What if not language, late for the event as ever, re-creating past experience as present? Doubtless the account is not entirely ‘faithful’, and its true present is the field of the unfolding text: but the repertoire of recording devices comes straight from Williams and the Beats. ‘Wall up around construction site’ omits articles of grammar in a style – would-be-photographic, impatient for immediacy – learned from Ginsberg. The interest in haiku is also traditionally San Franciscan. Indeed,

A teenage girl with a bright smile,
safety pin through her nose.

is virtually using that form, its ways of working not dissimilar to Kerouac’s ‘A Haiku’:

The little worm
lowers itself from the roof
by a self shat thread.[37]

Both offer a simple image which is then jerked out of the frame of readerly expectation by a slightly unpleasant detail of physicality, (the safety pin, ‘shat’) which is then accepted as real, and integrated into the image as an achieved miniature, a haiku. Kerouac’s vermiform triplet is itself one ‘self shat thread’ of text, a celebration of sturdy independent life which, without labouring the point, one could read as consonant with Beat individualism. Silliman’s punk girl with safety pin is a poetic image from a more social world. I suspect that white, western readers of a certain age and older have never quite got used to the spectacle of adolescent girls choosing to pierce their noses. However, to other readers/observers, those below a certain age for example, the fashion is familiar, and so the two-line image would operate quite smoothly, without any jerk of incongruity. By such means the whole force of Silliman’s poetic points towards ‘several generations of peeling posters’, a history of changing signs. Ron Silliman may be the first and last major structuralist comedian in the American tradition.

But if certain techniques employed here build on Beat achievements, there is also a criticism of post-war expressivism at work in Rodefer and Silliman. The more bardic stretches of Allen Ginsberg have not worn well, and their fall from relevance has been accelerated by books like What and Four Lectures. Here is Ginsberg cruising on the full tank of his own Whitmania, crowned King of the May (‘Kral Majales’) by Prague’s youth in the spring of 1965:

And I am the King of May, which is the power of sexual youth,
and I am the King of May, which is industry in eloquence and
action in armour,
and I am the King of May, which is long hair of Adam and the Beard
of my own body
and I am the King of May, which is Kral Majales in the
Czechoslovakian tongue,
and I am the King of May, which is old Human poesy, and 100,000
people chose my name.[38]

Silliman and Ginsberg write at opposing poles of what is simultaneously a politics and a poetic form. If the revolutionary ambitions of the Language manifestos are put aside in favour of actual poetic practice, the politics implied by the work – which need no manifesto, at least with the stronger poets – become challenging and effective. The ludicrous cosmic preening of Ginsberg’s jaunt around Prague is not only a culpable evasion of the political at a site of acute political tension, but a failure of language which the practice of more recent poetry can help us to deconstruct accurately.

Ginsberg is stuck in a view of language as symbolic. Sexuality, comic kingship, the ‘Czechoslovakian tongue’ and ‘old Human poesy all nest inside each other as translucent symbols, stretching from a Romantically ecstatic first-person singular out to the nebulae. It is a late flowering of Whitman’s Transcendentalism, which is a kind of Coleridgean Romanticism, brusquely stripped of its hang-ups and handed a megaphone in the theatre constructed from America’s revolution. The Language emphasis on allegory rather than symbol, metonymic urban bric-a-brac rather than grand metaphors of the psyche, the secular rather than the mystical; all combine to deflate the vatic ambition of Beat prophecy and self-absorption while opening up new avenues for a poetry of expanded social awareness.

IV

The prominent achievements gathered behind the banner of Language do not exclusively demote the person in order to point towards the social. The work of Lyn Hejinian, particularly My Life, brings autobiography and the construction of personality to the fore. This text both builds on and departs from the simple promise of its title, conspicuously omitting the dramatic highlights of the conventional life-narration. My Life contains no climactic anecdotes of sexual encounter, motherhood or vocational decision, though the consequences of such absent moments, pivotal in the autobiographies of the famous, are everywhere in the text. Marjorie Perloff sees an element of playful satire in this refusal, writing of Hejinian’s work that it ‘calls attention to the impossibility of charting the evolution of a coherent “self’, the psychological motivation for continued action’.[39] Despite such a lack of forward propulsion, the textual first person is not presented as the passive tabula rasa for the social codes prevalent in her lifetime, though we all are that, intermittently, as the text acknowledges with a dry wit: ‘Now that I was “old enough to make my own decisions,” I dressed like everyone else.’ Instead the prevalent method is a collage of what are arguably non sequiturs, broadly comparable to the techniques sketched in Rodefer and Silliman’s work. Their instinctive leaning is towards the brilliant image and the snappy one-liner, however, where Hejinian’s characteristic tones are restrained and delicate:

What a situation. The refrigerator makes a sound I can’t spell. The finches have come at last to the feeder. The magician had come to entertain the children at the birthday party. It was called mush, and we ate it for breakfast in patterns, like pudding. We were like plump birds along the shore. Green night divining trees, scooped too. What memory is not a “gripping” thought.[40]

For all the quietness of its immersion in reminiscence, My Life is as open-ended as What or Four Lectures in its aversion from the mockup of consciousness, faked and traditional coherence. Instead the reader is invited to participate in the production of meaning, choosing perhaps to stress the syntactical parallelism in the third and fourth sentences of this extract as the ground of sense: or noting that ‘The refrigerator makes a sound I can’t spell’ uses a child’s perceptions to make relatively sophisticated points about the divergence between values of sound and semantics, points that the conspicuous poeticism ‘Green night divining trees’ underscores in a different way. The work’s formal exoskeleton combines restraint and openness in a comparable ambiguity. Written at the age of 37, My Life contained precisely that number of sections, each of which was 37 lines long. In republishing the book at the age of 45, Hejinian has stayed true to form, and added the numerically appropriate quota of sections and sentences. The new material fits seamlessly into the old, each chosen life-sentence as opaque and yet open to the construction of meaning as any other.

Michael Davidson argues that in the inevitable attempt by the reader to find connectives where the divergent sentences refuse to yield them readily, opacities and silences may be imbued with qualities intrinsic to the experience of women in society. Taking the juxtaposed phrases ‘Women, I heard, should speak softly without mumbling. The obvious analogy is with music.’, he remarks:

The idea that girls should speak softly without mumbling or that one should learn to listen is a bit of adult wisdom whose social consequences have only recently been challenged … When Hejinian asserts that “the analogy is with music,” she refers both to the organisation of her sentences and to the way that women’s silence is analogous to the “elusive” properties of music.[41]

The ‘elusiveness’ of a female voice disenfranchised by the discourse of male authority is of course a topic on which the various feminisms have reached diverse conclusions. Hejinians’s is not (as far as I can detect) affiliated to any particular set of prescriptions. Published in its first version in 1980, My Life does however appear to both side and take issue with the feminist innovations of the time.

By the late 70s, a loosely deconstructive approach acknowledging the French theorist Luce Irigaray, and stressing the unplaceable place of woman’s language as the Other, or unconscious of the male, had become part of American debates. Other, less theoretical and more historicized models were in play, including nineteenth century Methodism, and more importantly the spiritual autobiographies of Puritan women. Language writers such as Susan Howe have been able to make productive use of the latter, but a throughgoing if quiet irony in Hejinian’s sense of her own relationship to the meta-narratives of history, collective endurance and progress, appear to make any such affiliation problematic for her. There is undoubtedly a sense in which My Life is offered as a confessional text, and can therefore be related to developments of the time within feminism; yet the literary devices adopted by Hejinian are as complex and potentially rebarbative as any in the traditional armoury of male Modernism: straightforward communication is deconstructed satirically as well as embroidered poetically in this Life. Her writing appears to run along lines at times parallel to Irigaray’s Speculum, but to be distanced from psychoanalytic approaches, with their stress on introspection, and the assumption of a unified self. Not only does Hejinian reject the cultic imagery of witches, goddesses and other mythic paraphernalia; thematic representation of women’s lives is almost absent from her work. This is a feminist writing, in certain respects closer to the work of Denise Riley in England than to most Language poetry, that abjures formulaic summary of women’s biological or economic identity or Oppression. In Hejinian’s ‘rejection of closure’, to take the title of an essay by her, speaks an individualistic feminism that sees literary work as determining the criteria by which it is to be read.

Though elusive, Hejinian’s work may be more productive than poems by Nicole Brossard or Louise Dupré, whose affiliation to the new French feminism of Hélène Cixous seems all too literal and neat. Language-related in its preferred devices, Brossard’s work stresses the enactment rather than description of present experience, only to contradict her own project by gearing it so neatly to a fixed agenda preceding the text:

the entire skin the fictional skin the epidermis
deep in her eyes lies the very question of everyday living
the impression that the lower belly is generating sign
saliva that substance directly secreted by the exposed
body
like a page full of potentialities [42]

This is a poetry that talks about what it isn’t (‘crazed with desire’). It might usefully be contrasted with the work of Diane Ward, a body of writing more truly ‘full of potentialities’; contemporary with the Cixousian imperative towards poetic corporeality, but not dwarfed by its embrace:

Last night I was the mouth pressed to the shoulder
blade at the same time I was the hardest edge
of the bone itself. I was two figures, no three,
shrinking away toward the distant line labeled
horizon, known to trade its place with you.
The three figures were drawn together twice;
first, as stick figures or in full perspective
on white paper by the hand that’s free to dream,
clearing the way for the second drawing,
the moment that imagination always knew could
include you, me, and the spectrum of pronouns
conducting a conversation as background to
the ragged line of isolated bodies moving as
one, voluntarily bunched together then released.[43]

The ‘spectrum of pronouns’, rather than a separatist confinement to the pronouns of what American feminism once termed ‘her story’, facilitates a dazzling moiré patterning of subject-positions, using the poem as model for a Romantic desire whose aim is still spillage back into the extra-poetic. Ward’s poetry celebrates the ‘hand that’s free to dream’; as with Hejinian, artistic activity is proposed as a model of what Silliman calls in another context ‘unalienated work’. The poem ‘stands in relation to the rest of society both as utopian possibility and constant reminder of just how bad things arre.’[44] This is perhaps overly ingenious, allowing Language poetry’s habitual revival of Modernist devices the luxury of a retrospectively self-justifying choice between utopianism and terrorism, as the necessity arises. A more generous and accurate account might propose that, in a hypothetical triangulation of feminism, Language writing and the heritage of the New American poetry, each might learn from the other – if only from their gaps and omissions.

4. Conclusion: Beyond Language

I

The social orientation of Language poetry and the model of the avant-garde coterie that was exploited by the New American Poets point equally but differently to ideas of community. The evaluation of the Beat writers current in America, exemplified by Ted Morgan’s biography of William Burroughs, Literal Outlaw, or the reissue of Kerouac’s jazz-poetry as a boxed set (complete with explanatory booklet), scavenges for biographical anecdote filtered through nostalgia. The Beats are, by this account, made mythical; the sex and drugs and angst merely Halloween masks for Tom Sawyer and his gang. The emphases are finally on non-revolutionary lawlessness, peer-bonding, and the utopian ‘possibilities of a community in a world dominated by authoritarian elders’. In his definitive account of the relationship between poetics and community at mid-century, The San Francisco Renaissance, Michael Davidson remains sympathetic to the writing but intent on deconstructing the myth:

Within the “enabling fictions” of community surrounding the San Francisco Renaissance can be glimpsed the utopian hopes for some kind of Gemeinschaft that was rapidly being replaced by suburban anonymity and the new corporate state. Such fictions do not diminish the integrity of the movement but suggest the difficulties that post-war writers had in separating themselves from the society they criticised.[45]

The North Beach ‘scene’, Jack Spicer’s barroom Round Table, Beat adventures ‘on the road’ did in one sense vanish as they appeared, mirages driven back by the irresistible advance of consumer capitalism. And yet the vital and massive cultural changes in American culture around the late 60s and early 70s drew directly on the Beat blueprint, and remain the cultural lexicon for nonconformist expression.

Language poetry has inherited the urge towards rebellion, but has had to mount its critique from within the golden age of credit and the shopping mall; dissidence has been bought off. Late capitalism is not the only marginalising force: Language at the theoretical level is, as it were, terribly late socialism, the belated intervention in American literary debates of an informed Marxist perspective. But while the worldwide collapse of communism is unlikely to prevent Ron Silliman from continuing with The Alphabet, recent events have hardly brought Language interests and innovations into mass culture, in the ways that brought the Beats a real fame and influence. Instead, radical American poetry has been pushed back into the arms of the University; ‘the 500 pound gorilla at the party of poets’, in Silliman’s choice phrase, and one in whose embrace the would-be revolutionary can at best squirm. But if the number of tenured Faculty members hired directly because of their Language enthusiasms ‘can be counted on the fingers of one hand after an industrial accident’ – Silliman’s Union Card has clearly been countersigned by William Burroughs – it is also the case that ‘language poetry is already integrated into the institutional discourses of the academy’.[46] Jerome McGann, Marjorie Perloff Michael Davidson and George Hartley have published important books and articles; and the replies to a questionnaire to poets about employment in a recent issue of Tyuonyi magazine suggests that the University is where poets are found, even if it isn’t the same poets two years running. (‘My job as an adjunct faculty member at UCSD helps keep my family solvent, but, of course, there’s no job security’, was a typical account.)[47]

And yet the anecdotal evidence from Creative Writing programmes in the States suggests that where Language material has been read, students pick up a single style to be deployed at will. This is confirmed by an instructive anecdote from England. Ken Edwards is the editor of Reality Studios, now an innovative press, but until recently a magazine:

By 1983, I had received, among the many eager unsolicited submissions arriving for Reality Studios, one from an American poet who enclosed some Surrealist-style poems with a note to the effect that if I didn’t like them this person could send me some in a “Language poetry style”, or “like Charles Bernstein”. This told me two things : one, the language poets (and Bernstein in particular) had definitely arrived; two, the movement had reached its culminating point or point of failure (that is, when people start imitating its effects without understanding its bases) remarkably early. Since resistance to reification is a central driving force for these poets, such a development gives rise to decidedly mixed feelings.[48]

It may be that an accelerated disposability is now a feature of the life of things, and that a jaundiced and unfairly premature codification of intellectual developments is as built into the system as the ‘need’ to upgrade your computer, hi-fi, etc. However, if ‘the movement’ has peaked, perhaps the term ‘Language poetry’, useful as a handle, should be relegated to the past in order to facilitate getting to grips with what is in truth a provocative variety of poems and poetics.

II

Although the intervention of the new poetry has helped prolong the flagging careers of one or two older practitioners, its influence leaves recent books by the stars of The New American Poetry untouched. Robert Creeley’s latest collection Windows (1991) weighs in at over a hundred and fifty pages, all, alas, focused on the same foreboding at mortality. Even weightier is John Ashbery’s Flow Chart (1991), a single poem of over two hundred pages. This magnificent and magnificently indulgent work is hardly a sign of diminished energies, but it builds on a repertoire that was running smoothly well before Language. Edward Dorn is probably the poet of his generation to have campaigned with most persistence and vituperation against recent developments; his claims might carry more weight if his own recent Abhorrences (1990) were less a series of armchair outbursts, an irritable flipping of the cultural zapper. Having won his spurs, the Gunslinger appears to prefer carpet slippers.

The current impact of the new poetry on British writing is interestingly divergent. In a published lecture on ‘Language, Poetry, and Language Poetry’ Edwin Morgan draws attention to the importance of Stein, and of Russian Formalist concepts like ostranenie to the newest American poetry. However he betrays a very British kind of impatience in chastising the poets for proffering work ‘which may be almost but never quite solved’, as if the poem were a crossword it would be irritating not to be able to complete.[49] More fertile ground has been tended by a number of relatively fugitive and often university-based journals, from the Oxford-based fragmente to Equofinality in Cambridge; David Marriott’s Archeus, Paul Green’s Spectacular Diseases are also an ongoing archive of Language’s effects on British poetry and poetics.

Most of all, however, the literary effect of Language will have been to redraw the map of American poetry after 1945; in part, through the work of Rodefer or Silliman, to add to the sum of texts that repay rereading, but also to show the earlier work in a new light. The 50s generation emphasised the performative and individualistically gestural aspects of poetic writing somewhat at the expense of a social analysis, of a kind which the more recent writers have been able to supply. Whether their attempts to, in Olson’s phrase ‘write the republic’, have produced any single text as powerful as The Maximus Poems is another matter. At the least, they further the case that the New American Poetry was, in toto, the strongest the republic had produced.

5. Guide to Further Reading

1.Critical Introductions and anthologies

One might begin to find a pathway here by distinguishing between those theoretical or critical texts that have been produced by poets from within the Language movement, (however academic their orientation), and those that have been produced by university-based critics with some pedagogical or other investment in Language.

Chief among the first would be Charles Bernstein’s collected essays, Contents Dream (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1986). Of all the Language poets, Bernstein has been from the outset the most tirelessly willing to provide manifestos, position-papers, and summaries of intent. Artifice of Absorption (Philadelphia, Penn.; Singing Horse Press/Paper Alr, 1987) is perhaps his most compelling work in this area.

Language began with the journal of that name, edited by Bernstein and Bruce Andrews; their The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U.P., 1984) offers a generous selection of reprinted materials, and retains the polemical edge that was so striking about the magazine at the time. Of course Language Poetry is not synonymous with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the magazine. However, while there could be endless debate about whether David Antin or Jackson MacLow or a dozen other names should or should not be included within the circle, this book-length gathering of work from the magazine does at least allow a crucial phase of recent American poetry to be presented with coherence and clarity. Also of interest, and also published by Southern Illinois University Press, are Writing/Talks, edited by Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten’s Total Syntax (both 1985). The transcribed debates in the second are particularly helpful in establishing a theoretical matrix through which the poetry might be read, or taught, now.

There are two outstanding anthologies of Language poetry: Language Poetries, ed. Doug Messerli (New York; New Directions, 1987), and In the American Tree, ed. Ron Silliman (Orono, Maine; The National Poetry Foundation, 1987). The second has the broader overview. Silliman also contributes one of the liveliest talks in an excellent collection of transcribed papers and discussion, The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, ed. Charles Bernstein, (New York: Roof, 1990). The contributions by Susan Howe and Nicole Brossard are especially pertinent to an assessment of the relations between feminism and Language.

Ron Silliman’s book of connected essays The New Sentence (New York: Roof, 1987) will be of help not only to readers attempting to understand Language poetry in relation to wider issues of politics and social change (in which Silliman is both ambitious and helpful), but to those attempting to situate the new poetry in relation to post-war American avant-gardes, as this study has done. The critical use of a term such as ‘avant-garde’ can never be problem-free, and a book this size lacks the space in which to tackle the various theoretical approaches through which the term has been excavated historically and opened to question in recent years. In some respects, Peter Burger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (Manchester U.P./Minnesota U.P., 1984) remains the most authoritative recent analysis of the term, though that authority has itself been put into question by the recent collapse of classical Marxism, including the belief in historical determinism on which a study like Burgers rests its case. More promising avenues of enquiry are opened by the Slovenian critic Slavoj Zizek; books such as Looking Awry (MIT Press, 1991) throw concepts of high and low art, vanguard and mainstream into a productive turmoil. In a series of related books published over the last ten years, Marjorie Perloff has argued for an understanding of the avant-garde which privileges artistic production over political ambitions; see in particular The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbauld to Cage (New Jersey: Princeton U.P., 1981). More recently, Michael Davidson’s The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-century (Cambridge U. P., 1989) and Geoff Ward’s Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (St Martin’s/Macmillan, 1993) are complementary accounts, to the extent that the first looks West for an account of Language’s antecedents, where the second draws out the East Coast influences.

The first critical book on Language to appear from inside the university was George Hartley’s Textual Politics and the Language Poets (Indiana U.P., 1989), which has been joined by Linda Reinfeld’s Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue (LSU Press, 1992), as this book was going to press. The final chapter of Christopher Beach’s ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition (California U.P., 1992) is also of relevance, and brings into focus the relationship between Language and Modernist writers such as Pound and Gertrude Stein on which this essay has only been able to touch. As readily available to readers with access to a university library will be the occasional articles in Critical Inquiry on Language poetry and related topics, particularly Lee Bartlett’s ‘What is “Language Poetry”?’ (Vol. 12, no.4, 1986), Jerome McGann’s ‘Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes’ (Vol. 13, no. 3, 1987), and a typically provocative and mercurial offering from Charles Bernstein, ‘Optimism and Critical Excess (Process)’ (Vol. 16, no. 4, 1990).

Several British journals of poetry and criticism have produced special ‘Language issues’, of which fragmente 2, 1990, has been the best so far. (fragmente is edited from Trinity College, Oxford, by Anthony Mellors and Andrew Lawson, who continue to show a commendably un-Oxonian intrepidity in the field of contemporary poetry.) A special issue of Verse (Vol. 7, no.l) guest-edited by Jerome McGann, seemed by contrast more interested in domesticating its chosen materials within a Great Tradition.

2. Poetry:

To dilate at length on which of the many names associated with Language poetry are most worth reading would be to repeat the argument of this brief study. At the time of writing however, it would misrepresent the currently lively condition of American poetry not to cite the work of Steve Benson, Ron Silliman, Stephen Rodefer, Bob Perelman, Diane Ward, Lyn Hejinian and Craig Watson, as the basis of a reading programme. There are a number of poets about whom this study has had little or nothing to say for reasons of space, rather than any critical objection, and these would certainly include Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, David Bromige, and poets with an investment in minimalism or programmatic repetition, Aram Saroyan, Tom Clark and John Giorno, respectively. A full-length history of Language writing would certainly want to take more account of the work of Clark Coolidge and Michael Palmer, two ‘elders’ of the movement, than I have been able to do here.

Nationality was another consideration. Language has become a more purely American phenomenon than was true in the relatively fluid context of the late 1970s and early 80s. The work of a major Canadian poet, Christopher Dewdney, and (to my eyes) Britain’s greatest poet, Tom Raworth, run as it were on parallel tracks to Language, and might frequently be thought to overtake it.

Both poets are published, like so many Language poets, by Geoffrey Young’s press The Figures (5 Castle Hill, Great Barrington, MA 01230). Ode angle of entry to this material might legitimately be through its presses – The Figures, Roof or Something Else – as much as authors’ names. The Figures has led the way since the 1970s, in standards of imaginative book production as well as editorial Policy.

Another door which a more substantial history might have opened, but which it must be left to the reader to unlock, would have let in the visual and auditory contributions of Concrete and Sound poetry, respectively. Both intersected with Language, to some degree; just as the New American Poets of the 1960s were influenced by the implications of multi-media experimentation by John Cage and others, so the present-day inheritors of that poetry have been alert to the changing technology of recorded sound, and other developments coming from outside literature. ‘Language’ is one segment in a kaleidoscope of American experimentalism.

3. Access to Sources:

Although Language material is beginning to find its way on to the British syllabus, access to primary materials can be difficult, outside London. Paul Green, Spectacular Diseases, 83B London Road, Peterborough, Cambs., is the official UK distributor of most of the books mentioned in this study, and an excellent source. The following booksellers are among those who stock Language material on a regular basis, and who will deal by post: Compendium Books, 234 Camden High Street, London NWl 6QS; Alan Halsey, The Poetry Bookshop, 22 Broad Street, Hay-On-Wye, via Hereford, HR3 5DB; Peter Riley, 27 Sturton Street, Cambridge CBI 2QG. Waterstone’s are getting there.

6. Notes

1. Jerome J. McGann, ‘Contemporary Poetry, Alternative Routes’, Critical Inquiry, VoI. 13, no 3, Spring 1987. p. 643. Back
2. Rod Mengham, untitled review of Andrews, Bernstein, Coolidge, McCaffery and Watten, Textual Practice, Vol. 3, no. l, Spring 1989. p. 121. Back
3. Donald Allen, ed. The New American Poetry. (New York: Grove Press, 1960). Back
4. A more extended account of these connexions may be found in Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century. (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1989).

Back

1. See Geoff Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets. (St Martin’s/Macmillan, 1993).

Back

1. Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance. p. ix. Back
2. Edward Lucie-Smith, interview with Frank O’Hara, in O’Hara, Standing Still and Walking in New York. (Bolinas, Cal.: Grey Fox Press, 1975). p.13. Back
3. Frank O’Hara, ‘Personism: A Manifesto’. Donald Allen, ed. The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. (New York: Knopf, 1971). p. 498. Back
4. Allen Ginsberg, ‘City Midnight Junk Strains’. Collected Poems 1947-1980. (New York: Harper and Row, 1985). p.458. Back
5. Steve Benson, As Is. (Berkeley, California: The Figures, 1978). p. l, p. 48. Back
6. Steve Benson, Blindspots. (Cambridge, Mass.: Whale Cloth Press, 1981). p. 9, p. 5. Back
7. See Steve Benson, Blue Book. (Great Barrington and New York: The Figures/Roof, 1988). p. 16 ff. Back
8. Ginsberg, Collected Poems. p. 130. Back
9. Michael Davidson, “‘Skewed by Design”: From Act to Speech Act in Language-Writing’. fragmente 2, Autumn 1990, pp. 44-5. Back
10. As given by Lee Bartlett, ‘What is “Language Poetry”?’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 12, no. 4, Summer 1986, p. 742. Back
11. Steve McCaffery, ‘Ow’s “Wafi”. (Toronto: The Coach House Press, 1975). Unpaginated. Back
12. Bartlett, ‘What is “Language Poetry”?’, p. 742. Back
13. Gary Lenhart, untitled review, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 11, January 1980. Unpaginated. Back
14. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, ‘Repossessing the Word’. In Andrews and Bernstein, eds. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984). p. x. Back
15. Steve McCaffery, ‘From the Notebooks’. Ibid., p. 160-1. Back
16. Mengham, Textual Practice, p. 119. Back
17. Bruce Andrews, ‘Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis’. Charles Bernstein, ed. The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy. (New York: Roof, 1990) p. 24. Back
18. Charles Bernstein, ‘Comedy and the Politics of Poetic Form’. Ibid., p. 236 ff. Back
19. Charles Bernstein, ‘The Dollar Value of Poetry’. In The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, pp. 138-9. Back
20. Shelley: Poetical Works, Ed. Thomas Hutchinson (corr. G.M. Matthews) (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1970). pp. 413-4. Back
21. Bob Perelman, a.k.a. (Great Barrington, Mass.: The Figures, 1984). p. 1. Back
22. Ray DiPalma, Raik. (New York: Root, 1989) p. 1. Back
23. The Collected Poems Of Frank O’Hara, p. 370. Back
24. DiPalma, Raik, p. 38. Back
25. The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, p. 256. Back
26. Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself. The Complete Poems (ed. F. Murphy) (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1989 rept.) p. 87. Back
27. As given in Marjorie Perloff, Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters. (Austin and London: Texas U.P., 1977) p. 141. Back
28. Stephen Rodefer, Four Lectures. (Berkeley, Cal.: The Figures, 1982) p. 22. Back
29. Ron Silliman, The Age of Huts. (New York: Root, 1986) p. 32. Back
30. Charles Olson, The Maxim us Poems. (Berkeley, Cal.: California U.P., 1983.) p. 600. Back
31. Ron Silliman, what. (Great Barrington, Mass.: The Figures, 1988). pp. 51-2. Back
32. Jack Kerouac, Heaven & Other Poems. (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1987) p. 17. Back
33. Ginsberg, Collected Poems. p. 353. Back
34. Marjorie Perloff, “‘The Sweet Aftertaste of Artichokes”: the Lobes of Autobiography: Lyn Hejinian’s My Life’. fragmente 2, p.54. Back
35. Lyn Hejinian, My Life. (Providence, R.I.: Burning Deck, 1980). pp. 3~6. Back
36. Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance. p. 213. Back
37. (Fiona Strachan, trans.) Nicole Brossard, Surfaces of Sense. (Toronto: Coach House Quebec Translations, 1989) p. 31. Back
38. Diane Ward, ‘Nine-Tenths of Our Body’, Never Without One. (New York: Roof, 1984) p. 46. Back
39. Ron Silliman, The New Sentence, (New York: Root, 1987) p. 61. Back
40. Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance, p. 67, pp. xi-xii. Back
41. Ron Silliman, ‘Canons and Institutions: New Hope for the Disappeared’. In The Politics of Poetic Form, p. 157, p. 164. Back
42. Philip Foss and Charles Bernstein, eds. Patterns/Contexts/Time: A Symposium on Contemporary Poetry. (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Tyuonyi, 1990). p.10. Back
43. Ken Edwards, ‘Language: The Remake’, fragmente 2, p. 58. Back
44. Edwin Morgan, Language, Poetry, and Language Poetry. (Liverpool University, Dept. of Classics & Archaeology: The Kenneth Allott Lectures, No. 5,1990) p. 5. Back

Top of the Page

BAAS Pamphlet No. 24 (First Published 1993)

ISBN: 0 946488 14 2

1. Introduction
   (Radical aesthetics and politics; holistic strategies;
   contemporary parallels; Happenings)
2. Performance Theatre
   (The Living Theatre; The Open Theatre;
   The Performance Group)
3. Political Orientations
   (Black Theatre; Feminist Theatre; Gay Theatre;
   El Teatro Campesino; The San Francisco
   Mime Troupe; The Bread and Puppet Theatre)
4. Aesthetic Orientations
   (Robert Wilson; Richard Foreman)
5. Guide to Further Reading
6. Notes

British Association for American Studies All rights reserved. No part of this pamphlet may he reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. The publication of a pamphlet by the British Association for American Studies does not necessarily imply the Association’s official approbation of the opinions expressed therein.

1. Introduction

The nature of radicalism in the theatre is complex: the aesthetic and political senses of radicalism are not easily reconciled, yet theatre is the art form in which aesthetics and politics are most inextricably linked. R.G. Davis, founder of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, addressed this issue in his 1975 article, “The Radical Right in the American Theatre”: he distinguished the theatre of the radical left, which engages in picket lines and demonstrations as part of its work”, from that of the radical right, which “is an extension or a deviation from the bourgeois theatre, and is closely aligned with the aesthenc avant-garde”.[1] Davis, as a partisan of the radical left he identifies with die San Francisco Mime Troupe, El Teatro Campesino and the Bread and Puppet Theatre, uses the distinction to repudiate the alternative radicalism of the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre and the Performance Group. All of these groups, and others, are considered in this pamphlet under headings that to some extent acknowledge the opposition proposed by Davis. But underlying these two apparently irreconcilable versions of radical theatre there is, I would suggest, a common set of assumptions and intellectual strategies that inform both political and aesthetic frames of reference. A sense of this fundamental orientation provides the means to understand both the strengths and weaknesses of radical theatre, and the nature of the tension between the two aspects of its radicalism.

I propose to deal with radical theatre groups in three categories. In the first are those who found the experimental theatre group as such to be a compelling model of the structural possibilities for society in a time of revolutionary political visions and proliferating countercultural lifestyles. As a central metaphor for the community as a whole, these theatre groups considered their own structure and working practices, as well as the form and content of their work, to have an exemplary function: their aesthetic principles reached towards political significance in every aspect of their organization. Theatre and its creative and performative activities became in itself a mode of living, expanding under the rubric of performance theatre into a radical subversion of many prevailing assumptions about the concept of theatre and the ways it is produced and experienced. Groups in the second category emerged from specific political contexts to serve political ends: in such cases the role of theatre itself was more narrowly defined, and its forms emerged in a dialectic with the causes they served. in these groups aesthetics followed from politics, rather than vice versa: but their political stance also evoked through this reciprocity between ideological and strictly theatrical considerations. Toward the end of the sixties the always latent individualism in the theatre’s models of communality regained currency, allowing the emergence of a third radical orientation in which aesthetics obscured politics: the social and political dimensions of theatre were truncated to allow an exploration of the encounter between the theatrical medium and the individual perceiving mind.

In all these contexts radical groups confronted the web of formative dualisms that conventionally preside over the creation, production and reception of theatre: text and performance, stage and auditorium, performer and spectator, performer and character, action and dialogue, author and director, author and actor, art and life … Generally, one term in these oppositions is privileged in establishment theatre, so that the other has a subordinate function, serving the ends of or operating within terms defined by its dominant partner. The characteristic feature of the aesthetics of the radical theatre was the attempt to resist the hegemony of many of these dualisms, and to substitute for them a holistic framework by which the inequity of the two terms is overcome. By holism I mean a disposition to reject dualistic models of related phenomena or concepts in favour of a gestalt interpretation which insists upon the unity of the whole and the presence in it of characteristics or values that are destroyed by dualistic (or atomistic) representations. The conceptual whole is regarded as irreducible either because the prevailing dualism is invalid or because it is unable to account for certain features of the whole. Accordingly, the intellectual process by which holistic ends may be approached takes one of two courses. It may subvert a prevailing dualism, denying its polarities and identifying qualities that manifest the continuity between them. Or, it may transcend the extant dualism, asserting a synthetic whole in which the opposed terms remain discrete but are united by qualities to which they have a common relation. in aesthetic terms, these two ways of overcoming hierarchical dualisms were often confused, yet they have very different outcomes. While transcendence achieves an ideal holism, subversion resolves itself into a reductive monism: by obliterating distinctions, a monistic framework can only consolidate or invert (depending which term absorbs the others the inequality of its dualistic equivalent. The contemporary situation of radical politics involved an equivalent confrontation with those dualisms enshrined in the inequalities of the political establishment: but also, and much more immediately, it invoked a repudiation of the monistic response implied by assimilationist and liberal reform. The overriding characteristic of sixties radical politics was therefore separatism, in apparent contradiction to the radical aesthetics with which it nonetheless shared an underlying holistic orientation.

The holistic predilections of the avant-garde theatre groups of the period have numerous analogues in the contemporary political, social, cultural and spiritual climate. in fact the diversity of forms in which such orientations are manifested makes the task of identifying sources extremely problematic. The complex interrelationship between the spheres of culture, politics and aesthetics blurs easy distinctions between the seminal and the symptomatic, and the means of adjudication are beyond the scope of this pamphlet; but certainly the evidence is abundant. Perhaps the most salient feature of the political climate of the fifties is the rigidification of ideological polarities consequent upon the Cold War: the Manichean extremes to which this led political rhetoric, together with its co-option as a tool of right wing conformism, demanded a radical response that questioned the framework itself. The necessarily holistic form such an anti-Manicheanism would take also needed to resist the ultimately monistic homogeneity of a rapidly advancing consumer culture. This was the essential point the New Left extracted from Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man: that contemporary American mainstream culture had developed the capacity to absorb and negate all opposition, obliterating its contradictions in a monism driven by consumer materialism. The fragmentary structure of New Left radical resistance can be understood as resulting from this suspicion of coercive homogeneity, in relation to both the mainstream culture and the liberal co-option of Old Left causes.

The appeal of Zen to the counterculture of the sixties can also be considered in this light. it offered a means of redressing the alienation produced by the prevailing dualisms of self and community (exacerbated by competitive individualism) and mind and body (exacerbated by impotent intellectualism). Zen offered a radical reaffirmation of the unity’ of the practitioner with reality, a perspective accessible to the American sensibility perhaps in terms of a modern, secular transcendentalism. But it did not provide the means to distinguish between the monism of a pure obliteration of differences and the interrelation of discrete particles that would constitute a true holism, and to that extent, as with the emerging drug culture, risked losses as serious as its gains. its influence is nonetheless undeniable, in the realm of art as much as in general culture. The overarching aesthetic imperative of the era, to overthrow the dualism of life and art, is a manifestly Zen aspiration.

If a single figure could be identified in which the aesthetics of holism were encapsulated, it would be John Cage. He was profoundly influenced by Zen and indeed by Thoreau and his presence in the history’ of avant-garde aesthetics is remarkable. Cage’s redefinition of music as (potentially) all sound, and theatre as similarly latent in all visible and audible activity was a vitally enabling (and radically’ holistic) gesture. While at Black Mountain College, Cage introduced Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double, which was translated there by Mary Caroline Richards: when a copy came to the attention of Julian Beck and Judith Malina at the Living Theatre, it precipitated the advent of performance theatre. in the summer of 1952, also at Black Mountain, Cage orchestrated an event retrospectively identifiable as an ur-Happening – a ‘concerted action’ involving simultaneous piano, gramophone, poetry, dance, lecturing, films and slides. Later he taught courses in avant-garde music at the New School for Social Research in New York, and several of his students there made a subsequent impact upon avant-garde aesthetics: among them was Allan Kaprow.

The term “Happening” was taken from Kaprow’s 1959 piece, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, performed for an invited audience in a Greenwich Village loft. The mixed-media performance events that became generically known as Happenings were one of the most vital influences upon the radical theatre of the sixties, but they originated in a series of logical extensions of the scope of art, and evolved towards theatre via a series of synthetic manoeuvres in a contemporary dialectic about the nature of the artwork. in terms of Kaprow’s own artistic development, the emergence of the Happening can be charted through Assemblages and Environments, each category constituting an advance in the attack on prevailing dichotomies. Assemblages, by incorporating everyday objects into sculpture, breached die barrier between the artist’s or spectator’s own context and the realm of art. Environments, which redefined the artwork as the entire physical arena in which it was experienced, overcame the institutionalized anathema of the gallery, space. The general thrust was towards a transcending of all categorical dualisms by which art was opposed to life. in the Happening, this objective was further served by a synthesis of the realms of vision and sound, of the static and the animated, and finally the observer and the participant.

Kaprow indicates that the process of composition remained the same throughout these mutations, being based upon collage, the juxtaposition of discrete elements designed to establish formal continuity with ordinary experience. Michael Kirby, in his introduction to the first (1965) anthology of Happenings, formalizes this characteristic as ‘compartmented structure’, making it crucial to his definition of Happenings.[2] Compartmented structure implies composition with sequential or simultaneous discrete units, devoid of any narrative or causal connection. In Happenings it is linked with what Kirby, calls nonmatrixed performance the performance matrix being, the imaginary, dimensions of time, place and character created within the actual circumstances of conventional theatre. By remaining rigorously in the here and now the action of Happenings refused that duality, as another aspect of the divorce of life and art. Kirby highlights these characteristics to correct the common perception of Happenings as unscripted and improvised. the structural composition of a Happening was always clearly defined, whilst allowing great scope for chance occurrences within that framework; and the concept of improvisation implies ad hoc invention within a matrix, whereas Happenings are characterized by nonmatrixed indeterminacy. There are clearly elements of Dada and Surrealism in this preference for the illogical, collage and the operations of chance; but Kirby’ insists that the indeterminacy of Happenings should not be understood as a programmatic Dadaist attack upon reason, arguing that it is alogical rather than illogical (again, a holistic manoeuvre).

The convergence of art and theatre initially led to Happenings that adopted standard performance conventions, but this tended to truncate the implications of the form, the logic of which soon pushed it beyond theatre. So, Kaprow’s summary of the essential characteristics of Happenings includes the fragmentation of the space and time in which they occur (so refusing the segregated space and time of art represented by an evening at the theatre). In the same way, the original concern with space and sound that prompted Kaprow’ s move into Happenings shifted towards a focus upon audience participation and response. The division between observers and participants had been undermined in the earliest Happenings: the audience were given the opportunity to participate, such audience involvement being provided for by the open structure of the Happening script. Ultimately, however, Kaprow proposed that “audiences should be eliminated entirely”.[3] All those present at a Happening would be participants, and briefed as to the parameters of their role. Essential to this concept of the Happening is the non-professionalism of the performers: they do not in any sense lose themselves in a role, and so remain present to the immediacy of their perceptions and experiences. Such a criterion is indicative of the end to which the Happenings were gravitating: their synthesis of all elements of art and life, including the roles of participant and observer, eventually focused all discrimination upon the one remaining duality – that between perception and the consciousness of it. The significance of the Happenings lies in this attention to perception. Their guiding principles always excluded the possibility of any sort of commentary’ upon life, and to the extent that they could be seen as imitations of their milieu (in their preference for everyday and junk materials, or principles of juxtaposition, for example) this was not a descriptive enterprise but an assertion of continuity. The objective was always to test and explore the nature of perception, not merely in an “artistic” context but as such, and above all to develop a sensitivity to its operations. But while the guiding concept of perception was holistic, the effort to remove their own status as art from the equation led to a monistic reductivism that denied the Happenings any analytical potential, and they quickly outlived the interest generated by their radical originality, becoming repetitious and ordinary’. But given the rationale of a pedagogical mission – the siting of aesthetic experience as a faculty of perception in itself – the Happenings can be understood to have invented their own redundancy.

The Happenings exerted an enormous influence upon the direction of radical theatre in America in the sixties. Their aesthetic project, the location of aesthetic experience, of perception and the consciousness of it, at the heart of their performance rationale, signalled a major development in the idea of theatre as an aesthetic experience that was later to emerge in the “Theatre of images”. But more directly’, their break with the established framework of performance conventions – the separation of performance and audience space, the passive audience – and their exploration of principles of immediacy in performance, multiple focus, variable time and action, and the displacement of language, all became essential concerns of those involved in performance theatre – through whom they gained even wider currency.

2. Performance Theatre

Radical theatre practice in the sixties developed in terms of at least four structural dualism: actor and character; creation and performance; stage and auditorium; and theatre and life. A holistic approach to these oppositions produced “performance theatre”, a concept that came to be defined by the work of three groups: the Living Theatre, led by Judith Malina and Julian Beck; the Open Theatre, led by Joseph Chaikin; and the Performance Group, under Richard Schechner.

The concept of the actor developed by these groups is exemplified in Schechner’s objections to Method acting, and in particular the principle of “affective memory” or “emotional recall” in which an actor finds the emotion required for a particular scene by reliving an equivalent personal experience. The inadequacy of such an approach, he argues, is that it falls to retain both conviction and pretence in acting: “It is wrong to call a feeling aroused by affective memory an ‘illusion’; physiologically it is exactly what it was the first time, only now it is an effect without its original cause”.[4] This absence of illusion means in effect the obliteration of the actor in the character: it is acting as pure conviction. Affective memory therefore dichotomizes the elements of acting: conviction is absolute from the actor’s interior perspective, the awareness of pretence having been displaced onto the preparatory technique. Schechner insists that conviction and pretence must be co-present within the actor’s performance for the concept of acting to have its full meaning. Such co-presence retains the mimetic doubleness lost in Method acting, and is therefore the richer for the “surplus energy” of its simultaneity. He cites Brecht, and the “method of physical action” of late Stanislavski, neglected in American Method training: here the first principle is mimesis, containing both conviction and the awareness of role which is pretence: the actor is both involved and removed from the part.

In this model, the opposed terms “conviction” and “pretence” are held in suspension by a holistic concept of mimesis as self-conscious role play. But the holistic approach that motivated most of the innovations of these theatre groups was often confused with a monistic collapse of opposed terms: and this confusion transformed many of their gains into serious losses. If instead of proposing a conceptual gestalt that contains the dichotomy between conviction and pretence, Schechner had proposed (as he might have done) a direct continuity between actor and character, neither one being the exclusive domain of “self” or “role”, then again the actor’s self-consciousness is the released third term, but this time it is immanent in both the others, and expresses their continuity. Such a model would not be the immersion of self in role of affective memory, nor the dialectic of self and role of the Brechtian model Schechner actually proposes. It would be the obliteration of any distinction between self and role, so that the two become simply coextensIve and there is a loss of mediation between them.

The uneasy proximity of this second holistic stance to the first is apparent in Joseph Chalkin’s writings on The Presence of the Actor which take the form of notes written during his work with the Open Theatre.[5] Chalkin’s thoughts on the actor were first stimulated while doing Brecht with the Living Theatre, but when he sought to extend his ideas in the context of the intensely and explicitly actor centred environment of the Open Theatre, a mutation in his attitude to Brecht occurred: Chaikin’s actor’s perspective substituted a continuity between the actor and the world for the actor’s synthetic position as mediator between the play and the world, and so obliterated, rather than transcending, the dualism of art and reality. Self and role then form a continuum, not a dialectic: rather than the actor as the site of a mediation between self and role, we have the actor as a model of unified personality. The crucial influence is Grotowski’s “Poor Theatre”, which centred upon the internal resources of the actor: Grotowski found the Open Theatre, whose actors shared an exceptionally compelling presence with those of his own Polish Lab, the only American company worthy of his endorsement. But his explanation for the power of this presence also makes clear the cost: “It is because his nature has been unveiled. He is not divided between certain mental conceptions, that is to say, an intellectual ‘me’ and all the rest; he is a whole being. He is at the same time the spirit and the body, the sex and the intellect, the biology and the lucidity, and this ‘and’ is not this and that, it is all one”.[6] The singularity of this “nature” leaves no room In such an actor for any dynamic interaction of conflicting elements: instead of mediation and synthesis, we have an absolute monistic whole. Such singularity is a source of power in performance, but also involves sacrifices that were apparent in the Open Theatre’s The Serpent (1968).

The Serpent originated in acting exercises, but was organized around the story of Genesis, in particular the Fall and Cain and Abel. The first sequence of the play, however, is a reenactment of the assassination of President Kennedy. Two couples kneel on stage as in an open car. An “assassin-director”, pointing an imaginary rifle toward the car, calls the numbers of twelve frames by which the action of the assassination is frozen into a series of iconic moments. The scene shifts instantly to the Garden of Eden. Five actors, holding apples in their hands, form both the Tree of Knowledge and the Serpent. When Eve and Adam have fallen into temptation, apples are scattered across the floor for the actors to gorge themselves upon; the fruit is also offered to the audience. The carnival atmosphere gives way to a crescendo of God’s curses. Then comes the killing of Abel, methodically and ignorantly: “And it occurred to Cain to kill his brother. But it did not occur to Cain that killing his brother would cause his brother’s death”.[7]

The play ends with the “Begat” scene, in which the actors, to the intoning of the relevant verses of the Bible, discover each other and sex, and plunge into an enactment of mass copulation. Finally the men transform into children, the women into mothers, then all decline into old age and death. In dealing with this mythic material, the actors sought to break through the cliche’ images to find authentic personal references. The problem arises when this private authenticity has to be generalized: Chaikin insisted that collaborative work could elicit “deep common references”, but such generalization depends upon a haphazard trial and error procedure arising from the group’s commitment to an acting method based upon the integrity of the actor’s personality. The resultant performance is therefore a fragile and highly contingent whole. Chaikin wrote in the program notes to The Serpent, “Don’t lose any thought wondering what connects the scenes or what logic applies from one scene to the other. The connections are in your head”.[8] The considerable success of the production was attributable to its use of myth as an aid to this reconnection: it allowed the group to achieve a suggestive power that was universally acknowledged. But its non-explicitness was also a fundamental weakness: it rendered the work unable to elicit associations beyond the obvious and familiar. The personal projection of the actors’ selves, while certainly the source of a general resonance, ultimately denied the play any objective framework and limited its capacity to analyze its own material.

The creative procedures used by the Open Theatre in constructing The Serpent are exemplary of the pressure towards a synthesis of artistic forces – a holistic approach to the creative process – that prevailed among those involved in performance theatre. There was a written text for The Serpent, and it was written by a playwright -Jean-Claude van Itallie – but the process by which this text was arrived at differed significantly from the conventional relationship between writer and performers, and from the Open Theatre’s previous work with van Itallie. In writing The Serpent, van Itallie was present from the beginning of the group’s improvisatory exercises, functioning less as the originator of the text than as its scribe, its recorder and orchestrator. Instead of a dualistic model in which the written text stands in opposition to the various aspects of its realization, the Open Theatre adopted a holistic creative method in which the function of playwright is coordinated with those of director, actor and designer into a single artistic endeavour.

This impulse was shared by many of the theatre groups of the time, manifesting itself in various degrees, from revisionary productions of standard texts to a total exclusion of the text as such. The former approach, practised by both the Living Theatre and the Performance Group in their appropriations of Sophocles and Euripides respectively (and generally confined to the work of safely dead playwrights) accorded with Grotowski’s attitude to the dramatic text as pretext. The latter, textless strategy, most comprehensively adopted by the Living Theatre, took to heart Artaud’s call to “renounce the theatrical superstition of the text and the dictatorship of the writer”.[9] There was a certain disingenuousness about this call to creative unity, however: in many cases, underlying the superficial transfer of power to the coordinated collective artistic faculties of the theatre group, was a much more monolithic appropriation of the authority of the writer by the director. Despite the Living Theatre’s organization as an anarchistic collective, its domination by Beck and Malina was never in doubt; Chaikin was discreetly authoritarian in his direction of the Open Theatre; and Schechner has since acknowledged the tendency himself with regret for its consequences in avant-garde theatre. But a distinction also needs to be drawn between the coordination of nonetheless still distinct creative functions in a unified artistic endeavour as practised by the Open Theatre, and the essential collapse of these functions that occurs at the limit of collective creation, the textless, improvisatory events best represented in the Living Theatre’s Mysteries and Smaller Pieces (1964) and Paradise Now (1968).This is a distinction between holistic and monistic practice, and again the benefits of the former prove illusory in the latter. In Paradise Now there was no script. The event, which lasted upwards of four hours, was structured in some detail and that structural outline or map was provided in lieu of a programme. It detailed eight stages of revolution each comprising a rite, a vision and an action leading to the next level. The play begins with actors moving among the audience, whispering a series of plaints: “I’m not allowed to travel without a passport”; “I don’t know how to stop the war”; “You can’t live if you don’t have money ; I’m not allowed to smoke marijuana”. Each one swells in crescendo to a howl. Finally, with the cry “I am not allowed to take off my clothes”, the company does so, and all congregate semi-naked on the stage; members of the audience often joined them. As the play proceeds, rites and visions such as “The Vision of the Death and Resurrection of the American Indian” (in which the company form into a spectacular pyramid), and “The Rite of Universal Intercourse” (in which actors and audience join in a “love pile” on stage, writhing and anonymously caressing anyone within reach), alternate with often protracted debates and confrontations between actors and audience. The event culminates in a procession out of the theatre into the street.

Within this framework is left enormous scope for improvisation, so that the performance is itself the process of creation each time. This absence of fixed form is thoroughly integrated into the intentions behind the piece, as Beck makes clear: “We said in preparing Paradise Now that we wanted to make a play which would no longer be enactment but would be the act itself that we would not reproduce something but we would try to create an event in which we would always ourselves be experiencing it, not anew at all but something else each time”.[10] The Living Theatre’s procedure in Paradise Now conflates the duality of creation and performance, for the fundamental reason that the performance, as an incitement to anarcho-pacifist revolution, cannot be a reenactment but must be “the act itself’. The words “collective creation” at the bottom of the chart provided for Paradise Now referred not to some extant piece, but to the process of the evening’s event, and included whatever contributions the audience themselves could provide. But there remains an element of self-deception in the aspiration of the actors to experience “something else each time”. The alternative Beck rejects, to experience the event anew each time, is the form of scripted performance: there is a tension between the general prescription and the specific realization. In an improvised context, no such tension exists: each occasion is at liberty to define itself entire. The only possible outcome of such an open creative role, and one the Living Theatre were repeatedly found guilty of accepting, is rigidification: an inevitable slide into formula and closing down of possibilities. This applied not only to the options pursued by the actors themselves, but also to the responses they were willing to accept from the audience, so that the apparent openness came increasingly to mask an underlying coercion. At the Open Theatre, actor’s improvisations were as fundamental to the creative process, but they never became a performance strategy. Whereas spontaneity more often than not reverts to conventional formulae, an essential stage in the creative process adopted by the Open Theatre was the weeding out of cliche responses, working through the banalities of improvisation in order to reach its more profound and substantial core. Collapsing the distinction between creation and performance elided the critical reciprocity of this stage of their interaction.

The Performance Group were reprimanded by Grotowski for a similar transgression when they included some of his actors’ exercises at the beginning of Dionysus in 69 (1968), but in fact the play had a mixed economy combining a formal text derived from Euripides’ Bacchae with improvisatory actions among the actors and between actors and audience. Its most important feature was its engagement with the dualism of performers and audience, stage and auditorium. An “environmental”, a theatrical environment embracing the whole performance site, was designed for the play by Michael Kirby and Jerry Rojo: it consisted of a complex of scaffolds, planks, ladders and platforms upon which the actors cavorted and the audience found what vantage points they could. The audience were allowed into the theatre space one at a time, while the actors performed their acrobatic exercises all around. On Grotowski’s advice, parts of the play were performed naked: such was the first scene, the Birth Ritual, in which Dionysus, having introduced himself both as Dionysus and as the actor playing the part, is passed through a birth canal formed from the bodies of five men lying face down, bestridden by four women. Dionysus emerges from between the women’s legs and invites the audience to participate in a celebration of his nativity. There commences a ritualized orgy in which the actors simulate sexual encounters with members of the audience, many of whom participated in the revels. Pentheus, King of Thebes, appears as a conservative figure who is both repulsed and attracted by the proceedings. He confronts Dionysus, but is mocked and humiliated by the Bacchantes, and compelled (offstage) to perform fellatio upon Dionysus. He is then condemned to die, and the women, their hands dipped in red paint, alternately caress and claw him to death. The actors then step out of role, wash the “blood” from their bodies and get dressed, while Dionysus, from the top of one of the towers, announces his candidacy for President and showers the audience with “Dionysus in 69” buttons.

In its environmental incorporation of the audience into the performance space and its powerful appeal to audience participation the play was a notable success. At the same time, it raised some of the fundamental problems in the concept of audience involvement, problems which generated resonances with the exploration of “the politics of ecstasy” that defined the play’s thematic structure. The argument of the play, as illustrated in the brutal murder of Pentheus, was that the ecstasy of liberation can be quickly transformed into tyranny. At the same time, the group clearly aligned themselves with Dionysus against the reactionary Pentheus. The group’s interactions with the audience, mainly on a physical and sexual level, were simulated but designed to break down the distinction between feigned and real response. Having elicited such responses, the group found themselves drawn by the logic of the situation into one of two equally undesired scenarios, as Stefan Brecht argued in his contemporary analysis of the play: if the action concerned goes on to suppress the sexuality and aggression it has aroused, “we have a conservative society or theatre. If it stimulates and uses them, a fascist society or theatre”.[11]

The Living Theatre were the most comprehensive proponents of interaction between audience and performers, particularly in Mysteries and Paradise Now. Mysteries opens with a single actor standing silent and impassive onstage. There he remains until the audience are provoked to action. This was usually confined to a predictable range of jibes and a certain amount of debate within the audience over what they were or were not entitled to expect from a trip to the theatre. The important point is that a degree of hostility was generated, for it was this hostility upon which the Living Theatre’s performance fed. In this they adhered closely to the precepts of their mentor Artaud and his “Theatre of Cruelty” – the performance is a violent therapy for the illness of contemporary humanity, a drawing out of the “plague” by which he signified the disharmonious split between the spiritual and physical self. The process involves transgressing the boundaries between stage and auditorium and a similar conflation of the roles of (active) performer and (passive) spectator. The final scene of Mysteries is an enactment of Artaud’s plague, in which the group, distributed along the aisles among the audience, perform protracted, agonized deaths culminating in a profound rigor mortis. The rigid bodies are then lifted by the neck and ankles, and stacked in layers onstage. The variations of audience response to this scene, which the Living Theatre performed throughout Europe as well as in America, are instructive both in themselves and in the ways they were interpreted by the performers. In Europe, the scene was usually understood as the Holocaust – except in Vienna where it was apparently interpreted as a mass orgasm. The audiences tended to participate by dying with the performers, and those who proved sufficiently rigid corpses were lifted and included in the funeral pile onstage. In America, by contrast, the general audience response was to comfort the dying. Schechner, in an interview with Beck and Malina, offered the interpretation that “Americans don’t like to participate in death. Comforting is a sentimental act; dying is a committed act”.[12] But actually the two forms of participation are different in kind. Dying with the performers constitutes a complete refutation of the dualism of actor and spectator, a form of participation that affirms a monistic community of people, audience and actors, within the theatre. Comforting the performers, on the other hand, shares the effect of a participatory community but retains a sense of separate roles, an irreducible divide between performer and spectator, across which this mutuality of action takes place. To die with the performers is certainly a committed act, for it implies that there is no transaction taking place between actors and audience: there is nothing to be communicated that is not already known and understood, and all that remains is to express solidarity. Malina also records a series of aggressive responses that the scene provoked on their European tour: on several occasions when she died she was kicked and tickled, had her fingers bent back and her hair set on fire; in Amsterdam the audience carried the dead out of the theatre with the intention of dropping them in a canal. Beck’s understanding of this behaviour, that it was “To get the corpse not to be a real corpse”[13] is altogether too confined to the terms of the performance: these audiences had no need to prove anything so self-evident. Rather, this behaviour is a hostile, or at least mischievous message to the group that the audience are not playing; that they do not accept the terms of the performance.

These extremes of response highlight the problems raised by the Living Theatre’s strategy of eliciting hostility from the audience in order to purge and sublimate it into a love compatible with their desired anarcho-pacifist revolution. These problems were exacerbated in Paradise Now, where the revolutionary objective was explicit and singular. Hostility proved rather more intractable than the theory required, and while it was certainly crucial to the theatrical effect of their performances, its significance as a political tool was other than that the group professed to be exploiting. While insisting upon their love for the audience, the group used oppressive and aggressively confrontational tactics. The audience’s concomitantly aggressive responses resolved into either absolute dismissal or uncritical support of the group, according to the direction in which the hostility was channelled. The idea that the expression of repressed hostility leads to a moral catharsis is theoretically suspect and historically contradicted: to the extent that the Living Theatre won their audiences they were susceptible to the charge frequently levelled at them, especially in Europe, of resorting to fascist methods.

The sort of appeal to audience participation that is open to accusations of fascism is exactly that in which the consciousness that it is participation is lost. This loss of awareness, or simple collapse of the distinction between performer and spectator, is the critical factor which allows participation (as a collaboration aware of the difference of the collaborators) to descend into coercion. Unfortunately such a distinction was only drawn by the Open Theatre, whose use of audience participation showed a suspicion of the authoritarianism implied in generating actual physical responses, and extended no further than the distribution of apples after Eve’s temptation in The Serpent. Both the Living Theatre and the Performance Group, on the other hand, were committed to full involvement of the audience, and adopted the means best able to achieve it – forms of direct physical and especially sexual interaction in which the distinction between a participatory role and direct personal involvement is most difficult to sustain. There are numerous recorded examples of the response of the audience at these performances exceeding the bounds of the cast’s toleration, and of the attentions of the actors exceeding the toleration of members of the audience. The Living Theatre were notorious for the psychological and physical harassment to which they could subject any member of their audiences whom they suspected of opinions incompatible with their own. Their invocation of “free theatre” in Paradise Now, when the group and many of the audience were often high on drugs and the fraught atmosphere, produced reports of violent confrontations and even allegations of rape.

During the “caress” in Dionysus in 69, female members of the cast were vulnerable to the abuses of opportunistic men in the audience, who were regularly guilty of a cynical exploitation of the circumstances. But to the extent that these performances collapsed the distinction between role play and direct personal participation, how could such abuses actually constitute a cynical exploitation of the circumstances? The limit case of audience participation is a monistic model of the theatre environment in which the distinction between real behaviour and performance has broken down. This result was actively pursued by proponents of environmental theatre in spite of the complications. Schechner puts just this case when he addresses the problem of conflict between actors and audience arising out of the collapse of the defined territories of stage and auditorium into a single space: “Such conflicts have to be coped with in terms of the performance. They can be turned to a capital advantage if one believes that the interaction between performers and audience is a real and valuable one”.[14] The opportunity for a “capital advantage” – the dividend of a holistic treatment of the terms “performers” and “audience” – is based on what turns out to be a monistic conflation of the ideas of the “terms of the performance” and a “real and valuable” interaction. Schechner records performances of Dionysus in 69 during which members of the audience had to be restrained from responses to the “caress” deemed to be beyond the “terms of the performance“. But when Pentheus attempts to make love to a randomly selected member of the audience, the play itself is built upon the assumption that, at some point, he will exceed the mandate of performance and be repulsed.

If incitements to audience participation succeed in collapsing the distinction between performance and actual involvement, then, its apologists equivocate as to the status of the newly formed whole. But in fact the aesthetic distance between involvement and performance is rarely confounded, and certainly not in the case of those members of the audience who seek to exploit their apparent contiguity. The participation of intelligent audiences remains role play because it is not naive participation: it is not the child’s cry of “Behind you!” or the bumpkin’s advice to Hamlet. The participation of a more sophisticated theatre-goer will always retain a sense of doubleness – as the adoption not simply of a performing role, but of the role of performer. It involves a transcendent perspective, in other words, in which the distinction between spectator and participant remains intact; and the tension between these poles is fundamental to the experience.

Implicit in all these experiments with audience involvement is an attack upon the most fundamental dualism addressed by these groups: that of the categories of theatre and life. The attempt to transcend or subvert that dualism embraces all the more specific applications of holistic methodology so far considered, and is itself symptomatic of the extraordinary presence of theatre and its forms in the countercultural life of the sixties. The Living Theatre was the group most fully committed to subverting the opposition between theatre and life, propounding instead an anti-art aesthetic which rejected the duplicity of representation, stigmatized as “illusion”. Their express objective was to overcome the intrinsic absence in representational theatre by presenting instead the plenitude of theatre as pure event, wholly actual and present to the participants. Membership of the Living Theatre, who lived and worked as a commune, was always likely to involve arrest and periods of imprisonment for offences such as non-payment of taxes or public indecency, and prolonged periods of personal privation such as the group endured on their European tour. Political commitment therefore always took precedence over artistic criteria in the group’s definition of their theatrical objectives.

The solution was to equate artistic functions with personal qualities, and reached fruition in Paradise Now. The rationale for Paradise Now was that the performance was itself an event in which the audience, led by the actors, are actually drawn towards the paradise of permanent anarcho-pacifist revolution. For such an objective to make sense, there could be no barrier between theatre and life, no point at which the revolution is abandoned as a role temporarily explored before returning to everyday reality. Malina explains how the group proposed to ensure the continuity of the performance with the world beyond it: “Anything I say to you in the lobby is very much part of the play. If Paradise Now can be said to have a direction, it is that I don’t have to put on any kind of an act … But it means that if I’m talking to you in the lobby I should have what used to be called a super-objective, taking whatever we’re talking about into the level of what Paradise is as far as I can at that moment”.[15] The actors, then, personally enact the continuity between art and life as it operates in their own lives – in that the orientation towards their concept of Paradise does indeed run through both their personal convictions and their theatrical performance. But Malina’s vacillation between presenting this continuity as “not putting on any kind of an act” and as “very much part of the play” suggests a residual concept of the division of art and life in even this most committed of theatrical events. Paradise Now was originally designed to end with the actors leading the audience out into the street to carry the revolution to the community. When this happened at the end of their first performance in America at Yale, several members of the group including Beck and Malina were promptly arrested for indecency. They were constrained, on pain of further arrests, to accept an undertaking not to accompany the audience beyond the confines of the theatre in subsequent performances. The New Haven Chief of Police commented, “As far as we’re concerned, art stops at the door of the theatre, and then we apply community standards”.[16] The Living Theatre complied.

Nonetheless there remained a general commitment among these theatre groups to an idea of theatre that was not defined by the representational dualism of art and life. The primary influence was Artaud, whose own commitment in The Theatre and its Double was to a theory in which, “between life and the theatre there will be no distinct division, but instead a continuity”.[17] Language in particular imposes a tyranny of representation upon the theatre, and Artaud’s theory involved a reaction against the rupture “between things and the ideas and signs that are their representation”.[18] He proposed that words should be used for their sensual qualities, the shape and sound of their articulation, their physical rather than just their signifying properties. A” three groups experimented with language as pure sound, deforming its signifying function by chanting, wailing, and elongating and fragmenting its syllables. But suspicion of language ran deepest in the Open Theatre, fuelled by the flagrant abuse and manipulation of language in politics and the media and by the inadequacy of words to accurately communicate the personal explorations of the group’s acting exercises. In fact the Open Theatre’s actors’ exercises were originally conceived as a means of “getting away from talking”, and included experiments in breathing rhythm and wordless voice that were designed to explore its non-signifying properties. The ultimate objective was never to reject language completely, however, but to redefine its function in theatre. Chalkin, and for that matter Artaud, proposed that language in the theatre should be utilized for its substance, the physical facts of speech, as well as its meaning.

Despite its suspicion of audience participation, the Open Theatre shared in the aspiration to a theatre beyond the representational dualism of art and life. But their formulation of it, as expressed by Chaikin, was significantly different: “The theatre, insofar as people are serious in it, seems to be looking for a place where it is not a duplication of life. It exists not just to make a mirror of life, but to represent a kind of realm just as certainly as music is a realm”. Here the division between theatre and life is to be superseded by a third “realm” which, like music, possesses its own unique qualities. Chaikin goes on, “But because the theatre involves behaviour and language, it can’t be completely separate from the situational world, as music can”.[19] This realm must be transcendent, rather than autonomous, because its media, unlike the medium of music, are inherently representational. To the extent that performance theatre succeeded in holding the dualism of representation and presence in suspension, it generated a dynamic reciprocity between the two which is absent from much conventional theatre. To the extent that it collapsed the opposition and offered itself as pure presence in its enthusiasm for the immediacy of the event, it lost that depth – and in the process lost consciousness.

3. Political Orientations

In a sense any form of protest constitutes an attack on prevailing dualisms: inequality between races, classes, genders or sexual orientations is the prioritizing of a normative group, just as the privileged interests of such a group rationalize internal policing and foreign wars. To agitate against some aspect of this prioritization is to deny the validity of the hierarchical dualism it implies: the tendency is to assert instead a holistic equivalence of its terms. Such was the nature of the civil rights movement in the fifties and early sixties under the dominant influence of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and non-violent direct action. The main theme was desegregation, its form moral reprehension. In the theatre it was most notably articulated in Loraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), which confronted Broadway audiences with the prejudice by which the integration of a black family into American middle class life is prohibited. Five years later Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) advanced a very different argument in Dutchman and The Slave, marking a transition in the politics of black Americans that can be related to a more general transformation in the politics and theatre of protest in the period. In Dutchman, the middle-class assimilationist Clay is halted on a subway by a sexually provocative white woman, Lola. Clay warns that the alternative to his assimilationism is violence, but is himself stabbed by Lola. The passengers drag him from the train, and the play ends as another young black enters the compartment. The protagonist of The Slave, Walker Vessels, confronts his white ex-wife and her liberal husband Easley in an effort to liberate himself from his assimilationist past. Vessels is accused of inverted racism (a charge he does not answer), and goes on to kill Easley. But as Easley himself makes explicit, this is ritual drama: Vessels’ act is an individual rite of passage, violence a repudiation of the alternative ritual to which Clay is sacrificed.

The shift from integration to militant separatism and black power was a realization that equality could never arise from black assimilation to a social order defined by whites. This was an illusory holism, its collapse of racial dualisms actually producing a monistic social order in which white culture would remain irreducibly proprietary. The value of the civil rights movement was to be seen not in its victories over segregation, but in its demonstration of the possibility of a specifically black empowerment: the pursuit of equal entitlement to universal values was superseded by an anti-monistic assertion of racially specific values. In the theatre, while the Negro Ensemble Company played to integrated audiences, Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre in Harlem affirmed a nascent cultural nationalism by addressing itself exclusively to blacks. Baraka’s The Baptism and The Toilet, (also produced in 1964, but originating in his Greenwich Village bohemian phase) were cast in universal thematic and aesthetic terms: their preoccupations are personal identity and development, appearance and reality. They engage in social analysis, exploring the conflicting demands of society upon the individual, but they are not racial plays. His shift to cultural nationalism is a recognition that the “universal” is already culturally defined, is in fact an exclusive category operating to marginalize cultural elements alien to the dominant culture. Although the line between cultural nationalism and inverted racism was sometimes blurred in the rhetoric of black power, the conceptual distinction is plain: the objective is not to invert the monism of establishment culture, but to subvert it by consolidating black cultural solidarity. Such is the orientation of Baraka’s Slave Ship (1967), which exploits the form of an Afro-American historical pageant to maxImize its argument for the continuity of a specifically black sense of cultural identity. It is notably the Uncle Tom figure, the black who identifies with the dominant culture and so betrays the interests of his race, who is singled out as the enemy throughout history. To some extent Baraka’s later repudiation of cultural nationalism in favour of communism can be interpreted as a progression beyond anti-monism to the pursuit of a transcendent holism cast in terms of economic equality. Certainly it involved the rejection of much of his earlier work as chauvinistic, and in plays like S-1 (1976), this redefined fight against the capitalist regime produced a previously unthinkable appeal to the assimilationist middle class, now seen as merely lackeys of the system, equally deprived of the means of production. But more probably the economic criteria have here simply obliterated ali other distinctions, instituting a new revolutionary monism: the absence of dialectic in the plays would tend to suggest this latter interpretation.

Ed Bullins, strongly influenced by Baraka, was an outspoken advocate of black power, and briefly Cultural Minister for the Black Panther Party. In his The Gentleman Caller (1969), a black working-class maid forcibly educates the middle-class male protagonist about the falseness of the white values that have seduced him by killing the rich mistress who embodies them. It is a parable, its ritual aspect showing the influence of Dutchman and The Slave. Even the plays of his “Twentieth Century Cycle”, beginning with In the Wine Time (1968), insist upon metaphoric interpretation in their framing and disrupting of naturalistic features, and make cultural signifiers of the everyday rituals of black life around which they revolve. Cultural nationalism is pervasive in Bullin’s plays, but with a critical awareness that is absent from Baraka’s work after 1964. Dialect Determinism (1965), for example, satirizes revolutionary ideologues, its messianic “Boss Brother” evolving through a series of demagogic roles to end as an eager martyr to nationalism. Bullins resists the foreclosure of debate characteristic of agit-prop even when he most imitates the form: in Death List (1970), a revolutionary cleans his gun while reciting a list of black leaders who are traitors to black solidarity; but at the same time a woman harangues him, denying his authority, suggesting extenuating circumstances, questioning the outcome of violence. The play ends with the revolutionary offstage and the sound of a single shot: it has the function of a question. Within this interrogative context, however, his anti-assimilationism remains constant. In The Taking of Miss Janie (1975), inter-racial rape becomes a symbol of the impossible relationship between blacks and white liberals, the inevitable repudiation of a patronizing friendship that could only consolidate the forms of oppression.

Given the frequency with which black separatism exploited the imagery of sexual aggression, black women had a difficult relationship to the feminist debate that began to gather momentum towards the end of the sixties. Being doubly marginalized, black women have a particular insight into the confusion of dualistic, monistic and holistic ideological frameworks. Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964) established the traumatized psychological terrain over which the contradictory claims of racial identity and sexual identity fragment the black woman, locating her only resolution in death. As black cultural nationalism and subsequently radical feminism sought to consolidate and affirm the marginalized identities of blacks and women, rejecting the bogus monistic unity of integrationist politics, the black woman encountered a secondary monism perpetuating her oppression within each of these groups. The black feminist debate was energized by Ntozake Shange’s For colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf (1975), in which the painful emergence of self-worth in black women is wrested from the oppressions even of language and logic in dance and poem collage. The interference of dimensions of marginality that characterize the black woman’s position leaves no unified site on which to build an identity: instead it must be done on the run (or in a dance), in the gaps of syntax and logical schemata. But this same irreducibly plural identity positively contributes to the suspension of discrete elements in unity that characterizes a genuinely holistic perspective, and forbids any relapse into covertly monistic forms. This potential has to a degree informed feminist discourse in general, and feminist theatre has benefitted from its belatedness among the radical theatres of the period.

The first explicitly feminist theatre in America was established by Anselma dell’Olio in 1969: the New Feminist Theatre addressed feminist issues directly and powerfully within the clearly defined limits of a conventional theatrical structure and aesthetic, and liberal feminist arguments. Indicative was their production of Myrna Lamb’s But What Have You Done for Me Lately? (1969), in which a man implanted with a uterus is subjected to the trauma of unwanted pregnancy. The polemical thrust of this role reversal, its “how would you like it?” rhetoric, implies both its address to an establishment audience and its liberal focus upon the double standards oppressing women. Dell’Olio retained personal authority as a director, and although she went on to produce feminist theatre within a more adventurous aesthetic context In her improvisational Cabaret of Sexual Politics, she continued to seek establishment audiences and resisted the affirmation of any particularized womanhood in her desire for “universality”. The suspicion that this universality in itself deferred to the forms of patriarchy, and that liberal feminism in general aspired no higher than a dubious immanent holism, led to the emergence of a theatre dedicated to an anti-monistic radical feminism.

It’s All Right to Be Woman Theatre, formed in 1970, were a radical feminist collective who rejected the hierarchical group structure retained by dell’Olio as implicitly patriarchal, and instituted an affirmative separatism by restricting their audiences to women only. Their performances originated in improvisations around life material supplied by members of the group, and in performance they retained this orientation towards the expression of feelings rather than theatrical statement. Often this improvisational technique would be explored further in performance, the actors miming dream narratives volunteered by one of the group or a member of the audience. Such an approach was firmly grounded in the methodology of consciousness-raising, developed by Kathie Sarachild and widely adopted as a radical feminist strategy for propagating solidarity and enabling participants to become “woman-identified”. The concept was extended by the Minneapolis group, At the Foot of the Mountain Theatre, in their 1976 production, Raped: the performers interrupted the play with documentary rape testimonies, elevating it to a “ritual drama” in which the audience were also encouraged to participate.

The same radicalization of sexual politics prompted many of the preeminent women in avant-garde theatre to make a decisive break in their careers: Roberta Skiar left the Open Theatre after The Mutation Show to form the Women’s Experimental Theatre; Megan Terry abandoned New York to establish the Omaha Magic Theatre; Martha Keams left the Bread and Puppet Theatre for the Wilma Theatre. Radical feminist theatre appropriated much of the current experimentation of performance theatre to a specifically female aesthetic: groups like the Women’s Experimental Theatre and At the Foot of the Mountain made their plays non-linear, resisted the authority of narrative closure, used documentary style and addressed their audiences directly. The prevalence of these techniques, as well as the importance of consciousness-raising (and its performance equivalents, audience participation and discussion) indicates a concerted effort to subvert the dualisms of art and life, performers and audience. But this underlying holism within the anti-monistic context of radical feminism easily reverts to the forms against which such groups had reacted: the assertion and consolidation of difference tended towards a simple inversion of received gender polarities, and the consequent advocacy of a counter-universalism. Such tendencies are apparent in the way the assertion of female gender values gravitated towards an essentialist concept of “Woman”, the most obvious aesthetic manifestation of which is the advancement of l’ecriture feminine and its associated discursive forms. While radical feminist essentialism was embraced in the context of an urgent political need to affirm sexual difference, it elided any differences that threatened the integrity of womanhood: differences of race, and of sexuality. Feminist separatism led to a politicized idea of lesbianism, but sublimated as female bonding and woman-identification: lesbian sexuality itself was a threat to the homogeneity of womanhood, introducing a multiplicity of sexual roles. More recently, lesbian theatre such as that centred upon the WOW Cafe’ in New York has used just this availability of multiple sexual roles to move beyond radical feminist ideology. Instead of a concept of the female as defined by sexual difference (which remains subordinate to the patriarchal dualism and so abets its mode of gender representation) they enact the female as the site of differences. Performers and audience participate in a foregrounding of culturally constructed gender roles by parading the interchangeability of “butch” and “femme” lesbian roles, generating a theatrical context in which femininity itself is represented as drag. This presents gender as a rigorously holistic site that recognizes the interference of sexual, racial, economic and cultural differences and by denaturalizing them, denies any essentialist concept of identity: it foregrounds the enculteration of gender by showing its polarities in competition with others in the Construction of subjectivity.

Gay theatre, and more particularly the “Theatre of the Ridiculous”, has also made vital use of the affirmation of role in its sexual politics -not that politics as such is manifested in a theatre whose fundamental aesthetic orientation, camp, is an absolute refusal of anything so earnest. The catalyst for this theatre was Jack Smith, whose pop art films Flaming Creatures and Normal Love established the most salient features of its sensibility: a spirit of travesty and the celebration of bad taste, sexual ambiguity and eroticism, and an extravagant flamboyance of manner. The Playhouse of the Ridiculous was established by John Vaccaro and Ronald Tavel in 1966, their first play being The Life of Lady Godiva. In their brief collaboration, Tavel and Vaccaro created a theatre in which contradiction and paradox were constitutive. It nihilistically exposed the pretensions of a humanity conceived of as irredeemably low, sordid and ridiculous, camping the ultimate illusion of love in an avowedly amoral burlesque. At the same time, it sustained a perversely ethical commitment to truth in its refusal of redemptive illusion; its insistence upon universal artifice propagated a resilient aestheticism, a real aspiration towards the beauty it seemed to deny; and out of this emerged an illicit sense of tragedy. Tavel left in 1967 and Charles Ludlam, who had been an actor in the group, became its new playwright. After two productions (Big Hotel and Conquest of the Universe), Ludlam also split with Vaccaro to found the Ridiculous Theatrical Company and launch a new production of the latter play under the title When Queens Collide. Vaccaro’s apparent talent for volatile collaboration was further manifested with the introduction of Kenneth Bernard, whose talents, particularly in The Moke-Eater (1968) and Night Club (1970), brought a nightmarish grotesque to the Ridiculous vision.

The camp sensibility has been well articulated by Susan Sontag, who tempers her appreciation of it with misgivings about its refusal of political engagement. But to withdraw so ostentatiously from the political arena is in itself a very political act, and equates directly with the rejection of condescending assimilation as a political goal by black nationalism and radical feminism. The nurturing of a camp sensibility is a far-reaching affirmation of difference, and the sexual role-play of transvestism and androgyny in which it delights compares with the feminist theatre’s redemption of sexuality from the binary opposition of biological gender. Charles Ludlam has identified the political significance of the Ridiculous theatre in just such terms: “Politics is about spheres of influence, and in that sense it is political. If a man plays Camille, for instance, you begin to think it’s horrible, but in the end you are either moved or won over. You believe in the character beyond the gender of the actor, and no one who has experienced that can go back.[20]

There is no question of disengagement in the Chicano theatre of Luis Valdez, established in Delano, California in 1965 explicitly to support the strike of Chicano field workers and the struggle to establish a farmworkers’ union. El Teatro Campesino recruited performers from among the workers themselves and their performances, usually given from the flatbed of a truck, were aimed unambiguously at sustaining the morale and political commitment of the strikers. Their ‘actos” relied upon broad comedy – slapstick, impersonations – and the use of stereotypes as the vehicle of political satire. Actors performed with signs around their necks designating them as Huelgista (striker), Patroncito (grower), Esquirol (strikebreaker/scab), and Contratista (contractor). The Teatro’s immersion in the community it served made audience participation intrinsic to its aesthetic in a pre-theatrical way It could never be for the East Coast performance groups: this Interactive solidarity is the characteristic vehicle of an anti-monistic, oppositional definition of interests. The actos are particularly concerned to resist any pernicious assimilation to the ideological perspective of the growers: in Las dos caras delpatroncito (The Two Faces of the Boss, 1965) the Esquirol is deluded into a subservient alliance with the Patroncito – whose mask he takes on. In Vietnam Campesino (1970), the Campesinos are shown to have more in common with the Vietnamese peasants than with the Anglos and the military who conspire to oppress them both. The very specific solidarity of the Campesinos took on larger cultural implications for the Chicanos, and an emergent cultural nationalism began to inform the plays. Stereotypes, functioning to define the strikers oppositionally, were supplemented by archetypes serving to reconnect the Chicanos to their cultural heritage. Alongside the actos the Teatro developed the corridos, stylized dramatizations of Mexican ballads, and the mitos, in which contemporary events were represented through ritual, legend and myths that located Chicano culture in a context of Aztec mythology and Mayan philosophy. In 1970, Valdez established El Centro Campesino Cultural as a collective dedicated to the promotion of Chicano cultural nationalism and the celebration of the barrio. But at the same time, the Teatro Campesino maintained a sense of the multiplicity of Chicano identity. The very fact of language guaranteed the prominence of this condition from the earliest actos: they moved freely between Spanlsh and English, accommodating non-English speakers through the transparency of their meaning and the extensive use of mime. Valdez took the syncretism by which Chicano culture contalns both its pre-Columbian and Christian heritages as a defining characteristic, finding parallels between the doubleness of the Mexican-American and that enshrined within Mexican culture itself in the system of Indian mythology. So the figure of Quetzalcoatl and the symbol of the Plumed Serpent come to express the possibility of a holistic reconciliation of the diverse elements of Chicano culture. Nor does this philosophy remain marginalized within that context: Zoot Suit, described by Valdez as an “American play”, reached Broadway in 1979. Valdez has since become involved in the film industry, the 1982 movie of Zoot Suit being a deliberate “mainstreaming” of his concept of Chicano cultural integrity in the furtherance of a holistic multiculturalism in American society at large.

Before forming El Teatro Campesino, Valdez had been briefly a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and had taken with him their concern with mime and commedia dell’arte techniques. The San Francisco Mime Troupe was founded by R.G. Davis in 1959, initially to explore the avant-garde possibilities of mime. The shift to commedia which began with The Dowry (1961) accompanied a movement out into the parks of San Francisco and the need to attract popular interest. Commedia techniques, the use of stock characters defined by masks and set piece situations allowing improvisational comedy and visual jokes (all drawing upon the foundations of the group’s background in mime) enabled the group to draw a crowd, sustain their attention and respond flexibly to the performance situation. Civil rights issues, Vietnam and repeated clashes with the authorities radicalized the group through the sixties, and their performance techniques were turned to political use in such plays as A Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel (1965), which addressed racial oppression in Watts in anticipation of the riots there. In L’Amant Militaire (1967), Joan Holden adapted Goldoni to the needs of anti-Vietnam protest, at the same time taking the group beyond its pacifist assumptions towards active resistance. Accompanying this radicalization was a shift in the dynamics of the group itself, and Davis’s loss of authority led to his departure in 1970. The group subsequently became a collective, adopting an increasingly agit-prop stance in its attempts to reach a working-class audience. Instrumental in the split with Davis was an emergent feminist resistance to the patriarchal structure of the group, and their first post-Davis play, The Independent Female, or A Man Has His Pride (1970), articulated this concern in its attack upon male chauvinism; it also marked a further shift towards identification with popular audiences by replacing the stylistic framework of commedia with native melodrama. The group became committed to collective creation, producing didactic pieces on the methodology of subversion such as Meter Maid and Ripping Off Ma Bell (1970), and a further satire of Vietnam, The Dragon Lady’s Revenge (1971), which implicated the CIA in the Indo-China heroin trade. The group dedicated itself increasingly to the objective of political mobilization, explicitly conflating art and politics and regarding theatre as an articulation of political community, while Davis went into print to register his dissent from the group’s post-1970 orientations. Davis’s objections and the group’s responses as articulated by Joan Holden centre upon several aspects of the relation between political theatre and holistic principles. Davis was distressed by the loss of dialectics resulting from the group’s increasing didacticism, distinguishing sharply between their earlier political theatre, which retained an investigative function, and their later agit-prop, which merely supported an established agenda. Holden points out that The Independent Female was drastically revised after discussion with a committed feminist audience in which the play was severely criticized. But this illustration of the group’s continuing openness to political debate is extrinsic to their art, and in fact the criticism centred upon the way the play’s parody of melodrama tended to undermine its feminist message. In accepting the criticism, the group resolved the dualism of art and politics in favour of a monistic suppression of art. The issue of collective creation turned upon the same argument: Davis felt that it could only be a dissolution of specialized talents, the agent of a homogenizing mediocrity in the name of equality. Holden insisted that it did not function in this way, that it implied a levelling not of talents but of power relations: the process did not involve collectivized creative roles but, precisely, a system of “checks and balances”.[21] This appears to be a valid holistic framework, but it is vitiated by the fate of her own script for The Independent Female; and The Dragon Lady’s Revenge, which had five writers, was stylistically fragmentary in consequence. Ultimately, artistic criteria were not balanced by political Imperatives, but checked.

Probably the theatre group most associated with protest against the Vietnam war was Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre, whose giant puppets paraded at many of the era’s marches and demonstrations. In the Bread and Puppet Theatre the developments of the aesthetic and political avant-gardes were most fully integrated, and for that reason its relationship to the competing frameworks of monistic, anti-monistic and holistic principles was exceptionally complex. It was founded in 1962, the name expressing Schumann’s belief that “theatre should be as basic as bread”,[22] that theatre should feed the mind just as the bread passed round by the group after performances fed the body. The Christian imagery expresses Schumann’s religious concept of art, its function as the framework for communality that religion once was, and indicates the group’s ambiguously holistic aspirations. In combination with (and perhaps opposition to) the theatre’s bread were its puppets: Schumann experimented a great deal with puppets and masks, from plaster face casts and skull masks to giant caricature figures like the “Shark Plane” and “Uncle Fatso” (instantly identified with Johnson); from Japanese Bunraku puppets to the sad, wise oriental faces and huge expressive hands of the “Gray Ladies”. Schumann has said that “alienation is automatic with puppets”,[23] and their aesthetic importance was fundamentally Brechtian. The group’s puppeteers generally worked in clear view of the audience, sharing with and exemplifying for them a critical distance from the puppets they manipulated. In the sixties the puppets served as vehicles for communication of a political content in allegory, dumb show and agit-prop sketches, and the aesthetics by which this was facilitated were the anti-monistic principles of Brechtian dissociation, resisting the illusionist conflation of life and art, actor and character. This dissociation ought to be assimilable to a properly holistic perspective in which it becomes a dialectic, but the religiosity of Schumann’s art appears to have worked against it. Stefan Brecht has shown that the group’s anti-war agitation was associated with its early liberal-pacifist, Old Left phase: and following the transition to radical resistance with the emergence of the New Left and such associated countercultural movements as the Yippies – the phase which marks the political equivalent of the anti-monism of their aesthetic – the Bread and Puppet Theatre gradually withdrew from the centre of political action. The group’s presence was greatest at the early parades, with Gas for Vietnam in Washington, 1965, or The Shark Plane in the 1966 Fifth Avenue Parade. Their Vietnam plays (Fire, A Man Says Goodbye to His Mother, Burning Towns, Johnny Comes Marching Home) tend to treat the war as archetypal, infused with the desire for transcendence of Schumann’s Christian mysticism. This sat uneasily with a climate of political confrontation, and in 1970 Schumann abandoned New York for a farm in Vermont.

The subsequent development of Bread and Puppet was towards a more and more inclusive concept of theatre. Schumann declared, “We will build a circus … and in the circus we will demonstrate the whole world”.[24] In 1975 Schumann staged a bicentennial “Domestic Resurrection Circus” on his Vermont farm. The event included pageants, processions, tableaux, impromptu and set piece performances, sculpture, dance, music, songs, feasts and circus in a festival based upon the structure of medieval mystery play cycles. Despite the formal diversity, the impetus towards a romanticized idyll of communion was pervasive, and Schumann’s holistic aesthetic seems always to translate into a monistic political idealism. An oppositional politics does remain in evidence: Schumann pointedly centred his bicentennial celebration upon the American Indian, upholding native American cultural and philosophical traditions. But even this is drawn into the prevailing dissolution of differences by an appropriation of the unifying symbolic role of the circle and the principle of oneness with the environment that characterizes American Indian philosophy. This does not function within opposition to serve a sustainable anti-monism, but diffuses into a generalized spirit of affirmation: it is at least questionable whether the anti-monism of political opposition is resilient enough in Schumann’s theatre to prevent its overriding holistic impulse from reverting into an ideologically entopic non-differentiation.

The case of the Bread and Puppet Theatre serves to illustrate a particular dilemma of political theatre. Underlying radical political stances is the ideal of a truly holistic social structure enabling equality without oppressive conformism, whether this is articulated in cultural, economic or sexual arenas. But the expression of political radicalism is necessarily oppositional, characterized by the anti-monistic phase needed to distinguish its always deferred holistic ideals from monistic assimilation to prevailing structures. Because artistic freedom is rather less embattled than certain political freedoms, and because political opposition requires a sense of oppositional community, the aesthetics of radical political theatre very often share the holistic paradigm by which performance theatre sought unity with its audiences. But these holistic paradigms are themselves liable to at least two fatal distortions: to become monistic, and so repeat the power structures they purport to oppose; or to become universal, subsuming political anti-monism in an inevitably premature transcendent unity no longer capable of any opposition at all.

4. Aesthetic Orientations

Radical theatre provided a public forum for the activism of the sixties, but it also fostered a more private aesthetic attuned to the shift in cultural climate that placed the self at the centre of attention in the seventies. Two figures who exemplify this aesthetic orientation are Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman, both of whom established themselves in the late sixties as amateur directors exploring an intensely personal theatrical imagery. In 1968 Robert Wilson set up the Byrd Hoffman Foundation, dedicated to running workshops and giving performances in theatre, dance and related arts. Byrd Hoffman was the name of a dancer who in 1958 had helped Wilson overcome a speech impediment that had afflicted him up to the age of seventeen. The therapy, which was based on the release of tension through physical exercises, was later applied by Wilson in his own work with brain damaged children, and had a significant place in his concept of theatre and the displacement of language within it. Principles of the juxtaposition of images – both simultaneously and sequentially – operate centrally in Wilson’s theatre, as in the Happenings. The plays do often have representational aspects, but these are in the service of an emphasis on the present moment of aesthetic experience. His concerns are form and rhythm, shape and sound, rather than character, plot, scene and dialogue. His performers, like those involved in Happenings, were (at least in the earlier plays) non-professionals, and appear generally as themselves, not in character.

In its visual character, Wilson’s theatre is reminiscent of a masque: he uses the stage as a canvas on which complex images are constructed and presented much as in a tableau vivant. Wilson trained as an architect and aspired briefly to be a painter before settling upon the theatre, and he proceeds in the terms of those disciplines. The space of the stage is primary in his plays: the action is restricted to slow, carefully choreographed movements through the spatial order. These are frequently diagonal traverses of the constructed planes of the stage image, which is formally characterized by a perspectivist layering of visual elements. The temporal dimension of the plays is abstracted from ordinary experience by its lack of causal logic (there is no narrative coherence to their action, formal unity being located in the development of images); by the slowness of the action (performers moving with varying degrees of slow motion); and by the extraordinary length of the performances. Wilson’s early plays each incorporated their predecessors, The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud (1969, 4 1/2 hrs) including The King of Spain (1969) as its second act, and the 1971 version of Deafman Glance (8 1/2 hrs) incorporating Freud as its fourth act. The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1973) included Freud, Deafman Glance and material from Overture (1972) and Ka Mountain (1972) in its seven acts, and lasted twelve hours. Ka Mountain itself lasted twenty-four hours in Paris, and in Iran extended over seven days. This extraordinary assault on the audience’s capacities of attention is very much akin to the strategies by which the Happenings brought the powers of awareness into question, and the intended effect is the same: to make explicit the operations of awareness in the audience to the extent that this becomes itself the argument of the play, which addresses itself to its reform.

Wilson’s plays make no statements, offer no nugget of meaning: they offer visions, and the sense that they are significant – that they are meaningful, but quite possibly the unique significations of their meaning.[25] This synonymy of the play with its significance contrasts with the dualism of referenial meaning: it is an imminent holism antithetical to the functioning of language. Stefan Brecht has characterized Wilson’s project as the development of a “right~brain dominated theatre”,[26] structured according to the faculties associated with the right side of the brain, which is visual, intuitive, imaginative and synthetic in its operations. Verbal, causal, logical and analytical faculties are characteristic of the left brain, which is therefore commonly the site of language disabilities – and the attempt to create a theatre which circumvents them has direct links with the therapeutic strategies Wilson learned from Byrd Hoffman. The right brain is primarily visual, but also tactile, aural and conceptual: the common feature of its faculties is synthetic apprehension. A right~brain theatre must therefore be pre-eminently holistic, creating and apprehending wholes not by the linear accumulation of discrete units of imagery but as gestallen, in one. This model of theatre involves the displacement of language, and in Wilson’s early plays words are used more as aural phenomena than as agents of meaning. But ultimately a holistic concept of theatrical apprehension must synthesize the right- and left-brain modes themselves. Such is the development in Wilson’s theatre that began with A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974), in which Stefan Brecht, who was directly involved, locates a new concern to engage with linguistic meaning. For this play, as in the subsequent $-Value of Man (1975), Wilson used Christopher Knowles, a brain-damaged boy, as the mediator between play and audience and between modes of understanding. But in his mediation Knowles emerged as a superior-victim, accentuating rather than resolving the opposition: Wilson’s attempt to incorporate language tended to be dominated by the need to subvert its authority. The tension persists through Einstein on the Beach (1976, his best known work, augmented by the music and lyrics of Philip Glass) and the more direct treatment of language in I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating (1977), which ironizes the structure of dialogue. The difficulty would appear to be inherent in the project of a holistic model of theatrical meaning: because of the self-reflexive turn by which Wilson’s theatre addresses the very faculties that conceived it, the holistic model itself is constituted by its dualistic opposition to analytical orientations.

The link between Wilson’s theatre and that of Foreman is quite close: both present an evolving series of complex images upon the stage without recourse to any logic of narrative or thematic unity, or indeed any inherent purposiveness that could imbue it with communicative intent. Both are therefore ultimately concerned with the faculties and nature of awareness. While Wilson’s theatre does not present itself as a specific awareness, however, Foreman’s is offered, by its contextual framing and Foreman’s own presence as the orchestrator of each performance, as the documentation of his own. Foreman’s proximity to Wilson is apparent in his favourable review of The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud in terms of the conceptual apparatus by which he explains his own theatre. Foreman contrasts Wilson’s approach with the traditional concern to evoke specific emotion in response to a specific object, identifying instead “a non-manipulative aesthetic which would see art create a ‘field’ situation within which the spectator can examine himself (as preceptor)”.[27] The role of the spectator, self-consciously formulating a response to non- or multiply-determined phenomena, is synthesized with that of the artist. The resistance to communicated meaning is also a programmatic attempt to transcend the opposition between art and life: Foreman explicitly equates the “real” with the “impenetrable”. This is not to say that meaning, or at least its aura, is excluded: he describes the play’s “most powerful” last act, for example, as a twentieth century nativity scene. But meaning is itself conceived of as a field, evoking a “whole spectrum of feeling”, in which is epitomized “the freedom-bestowing alm of art”.[28]

Foreman’s avant-garde work has been performed under the auspices of the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, his first play, Angelface, appearing in 1968. His Ontological-Hysteric style was established in Total Recall (Sophia=(Wisdom): Part 2) (1970), HOTEL CHINA (1971), Sophia=(wisdom) Part 3: The Cliffs (1972), Vertical Mobility (Sophia=(wisdom): Part 4) (1974) and PAIN(T) (1974): visually, it was characterized by an increasingly deep, narrow stage, divided into frames; strings linking props (and sometimes actors); and coloured lights, buzzers, taped dialogues and projected text multiplying the dimensions of the presentation. Foreman’s premise was to break down the theatre into its elemental structure, and treat those elements – story, action, sound, light, composition, gesture – “in terms of the smallest building block units, the basic cells of the perceived experience of both living and art-making”.[29] He has also termed his theatre “polyphonic”, to indicate the way these elements work to fragment each other leaving the spectator “relatively free from empathy and identification”.[30] The continuity with the Happenings is very evident: Foreman’s art is atomized in order to assert a universality of phenomena subject to the synthetic attentions of consciousness with which he is preoccupied. Gertrude Stein was another vital influence upon his concept of theatre, in particular her distinction between “entity” writing and “identity” writing and the whole chain of oppositions it subordinates. Foreman’s allegiance to entity writing is to a concept of art as a pure thing-in-itself, and so characterized by the collapse of traditional theatre’s formative dualisms: it is timeless, present and immediate; a discontinuous, organic process rather than The Slave of causal relations; an actuality rather than a reconstruction; an introspective consideration of the human mind rather than the social dynamics of human nature. The continuous present of Stein’s landscape plays is the space in which his work unfolds; it is also incorporated into his method of composition, which is foregrounded both in the plays themselves and in his considerable theoretical output. One such piece declares his belief in “the efficacy of false starts” – Stein’s “beginning again and again” – a principle which aims at sustaining the field of possibility beyond the process of creation: “My habit is to try and write BEFORE writing … through such an ‘I MIGHT of writing, the rest of the world of the not-written is still somehow available … ” [31] The rationale for sustaining attention to the process of creation within the work itself is precisely that this process is not unique to the artist in question (myself) but typical of the building up which goes on through all modes of coming-into-being”.[32] Foreman’s aim is to show “how it is with us, in consciousness … moment-by-moment”, emphasizing the interaction between consciousness and reality. The general collapse of theoretical dualisms in his art serves to concentrate all dynamic tension upon this relation, which is treated holistically: he locates his plays “where event undergoes its sudden flashlike transformation into idea … there on that level, with the process rather than before (in event) or after (in idea) … in that place where sense arises”.[33]

Behind this orientation lies a polemic against art that “tries to convince (usually in the realm of feeling)” and the imperative towards mastery it implies. Most theatre, he urges, is “subtly enslaving to those who ‘make the effort’ not to be bored by what they already know to be true (i.e. their own emotional responses to murders, loves, betrayals, righteous indignation in the face of injustice, and all those other fine things that classical art is always ‘about’)”.[34] Foreman therefore chooses to locate his theatre at the point “where signification makes its choices,’ and this situation, rather than the hermeneutic activity that would lead beyond it, is its ultimate goal: “The choices themselves aren’t the important thing, but the being there, where everything is available, where all options are still present, that is the DELIGHT! In the MIND! Where one can laugh and be wise and free and in paradise!”[35] This is the highest reach of the holistic aspiration, as a paradise of suspended potentialities, a sort of negative capability, in which is achieved a “distribution of the self over the spread network of what is available”. Implicit in such an approach to theatre is a concept of failure, of which (Foreman acknowledges) his work is itself a document. The fall from paradise is a necessary consequence of the admission that “it ALWAYS makes sense. Sense can’t be avoided”.[36] Themes, conventionally understood, do emerge. Foreman himself identifies as examples the exploration of the relation of knowing and dying to habit and convention in Pandering to the Masses (1975), or the urge to tumescence of “body-things” as they try to swamp mind-things In Rhoda in Potatoland (1975). But more fundamentally, there is a selfreflexiveness in Foreman’s project which must necessarily displace its principles into products: “the writing is generated in a certain way which ends up producing structures with a form and texture which is the very embodiment of the theories and goals which are the ‘reasons for doing the writing”‘.[37] Accordingly, the resistance to “mastery”, to the delineation of specific meaning, becomes in itself “the meaning”. Commenting on his use of disjunction to resist unified meaning by actively engaging the spectator within a polysomic field, he says: “To create that field (rather than allowing the consciousness to be hypnotized) my plays keep ‘changing the subject.’ But is it changed? Since the subject is the field …”.[38] As a record of the impossibility of its own aspirations, Foreman’s theatre is a compelling example of the paralysis of endless self-transcendence induced by a holistic impulse turned inward.

In 1981, Richard Schechner published an important two-part essay entitled “The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-Garde”. The essay provoked a vociferous response, to the effect that the avant-garde was very far from in decline. Perhaps Schechner’s title was wrong: what he does describe, with a clear awareness of his own share of the responsibility, is the demise of the holistic aspirations that animated radical theatre in the sixties and seventies. Taking the issue of creative control as his benchmark, he acknowledges a wilful confusion on the part of directors between holistic collective creation and an individualistic appropriation of the creative authority of writers. This paradigm of the individualist canker within communitarianism underlies the decline of performance theatre into the “extreme personalism” of autobiographical solo performance; the increasing marginalization of the theatre as a political forum and model of community; and the introversion of theatrical aesthetics in the apotheosis of subjectivity. But Schechner recognizes, in his own terms, the abused distinction at the root of these transformations: “A director is concerned with the holistic nature of the production … It’s much different to make a part into the whole than to make a whole from many parts”.[39]

Even supposing a decline in radical theatre, at least in terms of the number of significant groups and their level of activity, its worth cannot be measured without considering its relation to the mainstream In American theatre. Sam Shepard, for example, emerged as a major playwright directly out of the avant-garde envIronment off-off-Broadway. He was closely associated with the Open Theatre, and has since collaborated with Joseph Chaikin in Tongues (1978) and Savage/Love (1979). His ironic view of the Happenings and the radical belief in performance as event-in-itself does not diminish the clear parallels in his own work, in which character, action, dialogue are not representational but presented, as material for the engagement of the imagination. His plays are explorations of consciousness his own, as his frequently personal imagery indicates, but also his audiences’, invoked in the process of imposing coherence upon the fields of his symbolic play. This form of audience relation also constitutes his qualification of the more overt strategies of audience involvement practised by performance theatre groups (which was the issue at the centre of his disagreement with Richard Schechner over the Performance Group’s production of The Tooth of Crime in 1973). Again, his concern with language as sound, with its rhythms and with its force as incantation, is recognizably related to the radical theatre’s explorations in language. In this respect David Mamet, by now equally canonical, might be invoked. Mamet’s metatheatrical preoccupations in A Life in the Theatre (1976), which played with the ubiquity of role and performance, responds to (and inverts) the radical theatre’s fundamental insistence upon various forms of the conflation of theatre with life; but a more specific connection may be found in his attitude to language. The naturalistic aura of Mamet’s dialogue should not obscure the fact that he is vitally concerned with language in its own right, and in particular with aspects of its opacity to communication – the same emphasis upon the non-signifying surface that had preoccupied the avant-garde. Mamet’s use of language often subordinates the advancement of the dialogue to essentially musical criteria, especially in such early plays as Duck Variations (1972). The opaque surface of language, divorced from its referents, serves as a defence against problematic emotions in Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974); it furthers the transposition of the rhetoric of business onto the world of crime in American Buffalo (1975); and it facilitates the appropriation of unquestioned values to the salesmen’s patter in Glengarry Glen Ross (1983). Increasingly the dramatic context frames and ironizes linguistic opacity; the theatrical premise remains rooted in the radical loss of faith in language that occurred in the sixties.

The context of political radicalism implicit in that remark is pertinent to other eminent contemporary playwrights. August Wilson, for example, who achieved recognition with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1985) and has since won Pulitzer Prizes for Fences and The Piano Lesson (in 1987 and 1990), is a more introspective heir to the angry separatism of the Black Arts Movement. As well as the inevitable, acknowledged influence of Baraka, there are echoes of Bullins’ twentieth-century cycle in his basically naturalistic dramas, which are nonetheless similarly conceived of as an allegorical history of the black experience through each decade of the twentieth century. Wilson’s stature as a playwright rests squarely upon his own talents; but the process of racial self-examination his plays engage in is both more measured and more secure in addressing an establishment audience than would have been possible without the accumulated weight of oppositional radical black theatre. A similar argument might be advanced concerning contemporary women playwrights such as Wendy Wasserstein and Marsha Norman: both invoke the material of feminist polemics in their plays without finding it necessary to maintain a stance hostile to the theatrical establishment. Wasserstein, in Uncommon Women and Others (1978) and Isn’t It Romantic (1983), was able to accommodate feminist themes to commercial success by wrapping them in the conciliatory ambience of comedy. Her 1989 Pulitzer Prize winning The Heidi Chronicles makes the same use of collusive wit (rather than the oppositional satire characteristic of radical theatre) to create empathy with a protagonist who functions less as a vehicle of feminism than as an exploration of the individual woman’s problematic relation to that context. Marsha Norman, in Getting Out (1979) and ‘night Mother (1983, Pulitzer Prize), transforms feminist concerns into dramas of the human condition. In this way the establishment’s anti-separatist demand for universalism is satisfied without negating the specificity of the female perspective: despite its exclusive focus upon the drama of a mother-daughter relationship, ‘night Mother was not perceived as a feminist play. While radical feminists remain suspicious of the terms of this canonization (noting, for example, that it depends upon a substitution of the isolated self for the communal emphasis of radical theatre groups), it nonetheless testifies to the effectiveness of their efforts to affirm the autonomy and intrinsic value of woman.

The radical theatres of the sixties and seventies were a vital and significant force for the interrogation of received notions of both the forms and the uses of theatre. Their persistent exploration of the latent possibilities in all aspects of the relation between theatre and life, individual and community, performance and experience, created an environment unusually rich in theatrical possibility. They produced some memorable theatre, and much more that is consigned to obscurity: but they also changed the ground on which theatre in general is created, and it is this enabling function of the radical theatre that is its most considerable legacy.

5. Guide to Further Reading

For full bibliographical details, see the appropriate references in the Notes, as indicated.

The most comprehensive guide to American radical theatre is volume three of C.W.E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century American Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), entitled Beyond Broadway, which includes extensive discussion of performance theatre and useful chapters on most of the other theatres treated here. Margaret Croyden, Lunatics, Lovers and Poets,[6] offers a more intimate perspective upon some of the same material, and is particularly good on performance theatre and its sources. James Roose-Evans, Experimental Theatre from Stanislavsky to Today, rev. ed. (London: Studio Vista, 1973), also offers chapters on the influence of Artaud and Grotowski, gives special notice to the Bread and Puppet Theatre, and surveys “America Today”. A more detailed analysis of the range of American radical theatre is Theodore Shank, American Alternative Theatre (London: Macmillan, 1982). John Lahr, Up Against the Fourth Wall[8] is a valuable source for first hand accounts of performance theatre productions. Zoltan Szilassy, American Theatre of the 1960s (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), provides an overview in the context of the Happenings and new performance theories, and takes notice of “regional alternative theatre”. For discussions centred upon the playwright, see Ruby Cohn, New American Dramatists 1960-1980 (London: Macmillan, 1982), who includes the Becks under this heading. A valuable reference work with a similar emphasis upon the playwright is D.L. Kirkpatrick, ed., Contemporary Dramatists.[29] Due to the nature of some of the theatre discussed eye-witness accounts of performances are a vital resource: Croyden, Shank and Lahr are valuable in this respect, as is Leslie Epstein, “Walking Wounded, Living Dead”, New American Review, 6 (1969), 230-51, which is a detailed account of the Living Theatre’s Mysteries, Paradise Now, Antigone, and Frankenstein. A useful anthology is John Lahr and Jonathan Price, eds., The Great American Life Show,[7] which includes The Serpent and the schedule of Mysteries as well as more readily available plays by Bullins and Baraka. TDR (Tulane Drama Review/The Drama Review) is the most important periodical for both contemporary reviews of avant-garde performances and retrospective analysis. Performing Arts Journal has a great deal of valuable material, and Theatre Quarterly is occasionally useful. The New York Times also gave significant notice to many of the groups represented here.

The three essential sources for the Happenings are Michael Kirby, ed., Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology,[2] Allan Kaprow, Assemblages, Environments & Happenings,[3] and Richard Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means: An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments and Other Mixed-Means Performances (1968; London: Pitman, 1970). Kirby includes an important introduction, statements by artists and descriptions of Happenings (including “18 Happenings in 6 Parts”); Kaprow’s format is similar, but with little overlap of selected material. Both are generously illustrated. Kostelanetz provides a theoretical introduction that follows Kirby and Kaprow, and includes conversations with such figures as Cage, Halprin, Rauschenberg and Kaprow himself. Further contextualization is offered in Zoltan Szilassy, “The European Origins of Happenings and New Performance Theories”, in Tibor Frank, ed., The Orgins and Originality of American Culture (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1984), pp. 431-8.

Two primary texts for the Living Theatre are Judith Malina, The Enormous Despair (New York: Random House, 1972), and Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre: the Relation of the Artist to the Struggle of the People (San Francisco: City Lights, 1972). TDR published their interview with Richard Schechner, “Containment is the Enemy”,[10] and “Paradise Now Notes”, TDR, 43 (1969), pp. 90107. Another interview was published as “Radicalizing the Classics”, Performing Arts Journal, 14 (1981), pp. 26-40. Periodical criticism includes Saul Gottlieb, “The Living Theatre in Exile”, TDR, 32 (1966), pp. 137-52; Lyon Phelps, “Brecht at the Living Theatre”, TDR, 37 (1967), pp. 125-31; an important review by Stefan Brecht, “Revolution at the Brooklyn Academy of Music”, TDR, 43 (1969), pp. 46-73; and Paul Ryder Ryan, “The Living Theatre in Brazil”, TDR, 51(1971), pp. 21-30. Note also Leslie Epstein, as noted above, who is a valuable witness. Joseph Chalkin, The Presence of the Actor,[5] provides insights into the workings of the Open Theatre. Several Chaikin interviews are also worth consultation: “The Actor’s Involvement”, TDR, 38 (1968), pp. 147-51; interview and “Fragments”, TDR, 43 (1969), pp. 141-7; and “Closing the Open Theatre”, Theatre Quarterly, 16 (1974-5), pp. 36-43. Also relevant are Jean-Claude van Itallie, “Playwright at Work: Off Off-Broadway”, TDR, 32 (1966), pp. 154-78; and Roberta Sklar, “Terminal‘, interview, 149-157. Light on the Performance Group is provided by Richard Schechner’s substantial theoretical writings, collected in Public Domain,[4] and Performance Theory, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Routledge, 1988). Of particular importance are “6 Axioms for Environmental Theatre”;[14] “Speculations on Sexuality, Performance and Politics”, TDR, 44 (1969), pp. 89-110; “Audience Participation”, TDR, 51 (1971), pp. 73-89; and the two-part “The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-Garde”, Performing Arts Journal, 14 (1981), pp. 48-63, and 15 (1981), pp. 9-19. Stefan Brecht’s running commentary on Dionysus in 69 [11] is an essential critical review.

A good account of the black theatre of the period is provided by Genevieve Fabre, Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphor: Contemporary AfroAmerican Theatre, trans. Melvin Dixon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). Addison Gayle, Jr., ed., The Black Aesthetic (Garden City: Doubleday, 1971), has a useful drama section (pp. 263-330); and Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (London: W.H. Allen, 1969) includes several chapters directly pertinent to the theatre. The development of feminist theatre is charted in Dinah Luise Leavitt, Feminist Theatre Groups (Jefferson: McFarland, 1980), and Elizabeth J. Natalle, Feminist Theatre: A Study in Persuasion (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1985); Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), offers a more sophisticated theoretical analysis. The Theatre of the Ridiculous is most comprehensively treated in Stefan Brecht, Queer Theatre (1978; London: Methuen 1986), one of his series on “The Original Theatre of the City of New York: From the Mid-60s to the Mid-70s”; and a valuable interview with Charles Ludiam appeared in Performing Arts Journal.[20] Renate von Bardeleben, Dietrich Briesemeister and Juan Bruce-Novoa, eds., Missions in Conflict: Essays on U.S.-Mexiean Relations and Chicano Culture (Tubingen: Narr, 1986), includes three essays on El Teatro Campesino, and Luis Valdez’ own perspective in the early years is represented in “Teatro Campesino: Interview”, TDR, 36 (1967), pp. 70-80. An essential source for the San Francisco Mime Troupe is by founder R.G. Davis, The San Francisco Mime Troupe: The First Ten Years (Palo Alto: Ramparts Press, 1975); see also his exercise in self definition against performance theatre, “The Radical Right in the American Theatre”.[1] The causes of his split with the group are set out in “Politics, Art, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe”, Theatre Quarterly, 18 (1975), pp. 26-7; and responded to by Joan Holden, “Collective Playrnaking: the Why and the How”.[21] Holden’s case is supported by Theodore Shank, “Political Theatre: The San Francisco Mime Troupe”, TDR, 61 (1974), pp. 110-17. The Bread and Puppet Theatre is exhaustively treated in Stefan Brecht, Peter Shumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre (London: Methuen, 1988), two fat volumes of Brecht’s dense annotational prose. Peter Schumann’s important interview, “The Bread and Puppet Theatre”,22 can be supplemented by his “Bread and Puppets”, TDR, 47 (1970), p. 35; the same issue includes George Dennison’s review of Fire, pp. 36-43, and a substantial essay by Stefan Brecht, “Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre”, pp. 44-90. See also John Townsen’s review, “Bread and Puppet’s Stations of the Cross”, TDR, 55 (1972), pp. 57-70; and especially Florence Falk, “Bread and Puppet: Domestic Resurrection Circus”.[24]

Robert Wilson’s work is well analyzed from close range in Stefan Brecht, The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson.[25] See also Louis Aragon, “An Open Letter to Andre’ Breton … on Robert Wilson’s Deafman Glance”, Performing Arts Journal 1 (1976), pp. 3-7. Richard Foreman’s own essays are essential to an understanding of his theatre: see Reverberation Machines,[30] which includes playscripts. Kate Davy, Richard Foreman and the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981), is the best critical analysis, including useful illustrations and descriptions of performances. See also Michael Kirby, “Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theatre”, TDR, 58 (1973), pp. 5-32; and Florence Falk, “Ontological-Hysteric Theater: Setting as Consciousness”, Performing Arts Journal, 1 (1976), pp. 51-61.

6. Notes

1. R. G. Davis, “The Radical Right in the American Theatre”, Theatre Quarterly, 19 (1975), p. 67. Back
2. Michael Kirby, ed., Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1965). Back
3. Allan Kaprow, Assemblages, Environments & Happenings (New York: Abrams, n. d. [1966]), p. 195. Back
4. Richard Schechner, “Exit Thirties, Enter Sixties”, in Public Domain: Essays on the Theatre (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 7. Back
5. Joseph Chaikin, The Presence of the Actor (New York: Atheneum, 1969). Back
6. Jerzy Grotowski, 1969 interview quoted in Margaret Croyden, Lunatics, Lovers and Poets: The Contemporay Experimental Theatre (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 166. Back
7. Jean-Claude van Itallie, The Serpent, in John Lahr and Jonathan Price, eds., The Great American Life Show: 9 Plays From the AvantGarde Theatre (New York: Bantam, 1974), p. 94. Back
8. Joseph Chaikin, quoted in John Lahr, Up Against the Fourth Wall: Essays on Modern Theater (New York: Grove, 1970), p. 173. Back
9. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 124. Back
10. Judith Malina and Julian Beck, “Containment is the Enemy”, interview with Richard Schechner, TDR, 43 (1969), pp. 24-5. Back
11. Stefan Brecht, rev. of Dionysus in 69, TDR, 43 (1969), p. 163. Back
12. “Containment is the Enemy”, p. 35. Back
13. Ibid., p. 34. Back
14. Richard Schechner, “6 Axioms for Environmental Theatre”, 39 (1968), p. 50. Back
15. “Containment is the Enemy”, p. 26. Back
16. Rev. of Paradise Now, New York Times, 28 Sept. 1969, p. 27. Back
17. The Theater and Its Double, p. 126. Back
18. Ibid., p. 7. Back
19. The Presence of the Actor, p. 25. Back
20. Charles Ludlam, interview, Performing Arts Journal, 3 (Spring/Summer 1978), p. 78. Back
21. Joan Holden, “Collective Playmaking: the Why and the How”, Theatre Quarterly, 18 (1975), p. 30. Back
22. Peter Schumann, “With the Bread and Puppet Theatre”, interview, TDR, 38 (1968), p. 64. Back
23. Ibid., p. 70. Back
24. Schumann, quoted in Florence Falk, “Bread and Puppet: Domestic Resurrection Circus”, Performing Arts Journal, 2 (Spring 1977), pp. 20-21. Back
25. Stefan Brecht, The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (1978; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), p. 9. Back
26. Ibid., p. 10. Back
27. Richard Foreman, rev. of The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, Village Voice, 1Jan. 1970, rpt. in The Theatre of Visions, p. 425. Back
28. Ibid., p. 427. Back
29. Richard Foreman, quoted in D. L. Kirkpatrick, ed., Contemporary Dramatists, 4th ed. (Chicago: St. James Press, 1988), p. 157. Back
30. Richard Foreman, Reverberation Machines: Later Plays and Essays (New York: Station Hill, 1985), p. viii. Back
31. Ibid, p. 239. Back
32. Contemporary Dramatists, p. 157. Back
33. Reverberation Machines, pp. 190-1. Back
34. Ibid., p. 235. Back
35. Ibid., p. 191. Back
36. Ibid., p. 190. Back
37. Ibid., p. 238. Back
38. Ibid., p. 193. Back
39. Richard Schechner, “The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-Garde, Performing Arts Journal, 15 (1981), pp. 11-12. Back

Top of the Page