In her Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt compares the "generalizing voice" of ethnography to the landscape narrator of the travelogue as they are informed by the "global project of natural history": "one produces land as landscape and territory, scanning for prospects; the other produces the indigenous inhabitants as bodyscapes, scanned also for prospects. Together they dismantle the socioecological web that preceded them and install a Eurocolonial discursive order whose territorial and visual forms of authority are those of the modern state." Pratt's discussion of the complementary agendas of ethnography and travel writing centers on the structuring image of land--land as territory and inhabitants as bodyscapes--that collapses the colonizing and imperialistic agendas of the "global project of natural history" into the conceptualization of the modern nation state. In both cases the act of systematizing and authoritatively articulating identity is implicated in the act of literally and figuratively staking a claim to the land and delineating its borders.
Pratt's discussion informs my reading of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters From an American Farmer, which have long been considered the foundation of the American national canon. Published in 1782 and following close on the heels of the American revolution, they came to articulate the central cultural myths that constituted America as a new nation. Primarily, the letters propagate the cultural myth that associates the development of the national character with a close and symbiotic relation to the American land. Under the assumed and explicitly innocent narrating persona of James the farmer, Crèvecoeur, a Frenchman by birth, writes a formative and authoritative ethnography and travelogue of America, which paradoxically defines the farming of the fertile and maternal American "garden" as the activity that most clearly encapsulates the essence of this new and modern land.
This marriage of the rhetoric of ethnography and travel writing, in which the land acts as a fount of both knowledge and literary capital, shapes and authorizes Crèvecoeur's text. Indeed, when Crèvecoeur described his years in America to the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, he rather inaccurately portrayed himself by borrowing from the idealized persona of the eighteenth century naturalist and traveller: "I never was but a simple surveyor of lands, a cultivator of my own grounds, or a wanderer through the forests of this country." This foundational American text however, a text that both describes the birth of the American nation and inaugurates its canon, is structured by a reversal that renders its articulation of enduring and authoritative national truths highly problematic. The idealized depiction of America, and the symbiotic relationship between naturalist/traveller and maternal landscape it implies, is progressively undermined toward the end of Letters. By the end of Letters the central image of a nurturing maternal garden has been replaced by images of a predatory and savage landscape which leads the narrating persona to renounce his role as ethnographer and to decide to "go native."
My paper examines the uncanny reversals that shape Crèvecoeur's Letters as they comment on the interaction of the complementary agendas of travel writing and nation building. Crèvecoeur's shifting authorial and narrating personas--he is both a Frenchman writing an account of America for the delectation of Europe and an American writing the nation's autobiography--are thus a sign and symptom of the shifting boundaries of national space and competing definitions of what actually constitutes America.
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