Please note: Pamela Kincheloe will not be presenting her paper at the conference.
Traveling American writers in the nineteenth century wrote countless textual sketches of the monuments and ruins which dotted the tourist sites they visited. These sketches, or discourses about monuments served as a means to selectively frame and discuss both the American identity and the "other," at home and abroad. One useful way to visualize this process is think of it in terms of what Malcolm Bradbury, in his book Dangerous Pilgrimages (1994), calls "transatlantic refraction." Americans, training their gaze upon Europe, he says, idealized it; they "dreamt of bucolic villages and ancient customs, and longed for "history" -- precisely what they or their forebears had so often crossed the Ocean to escape" (2). At the same time, Americans critiqued Europe, past and present, for being imperialist, backward, and barbaric. What is even more interesting, however, is what happened when Americans looked back at America from their position abroad. They did much the same thing: they framed for themselves a bucolic, picturesque American history, while at the same time they critiqued their contemporary culture as ugly, imperfect and displeasing. In other words, the act of monumental beholding and discourse abroad served as a Claude glass through which writers could look back across the sea, and through which they could frame, idealize, critique, and compare the American past and the American identity against that of the "other," or against Europe. Emily Dickinson wrote: "It is the Past's supreme italic/Makes this Present mean --" (Johnson #1498). As Americans abroad relentlessly searched for and read the past's italics inscribed on foreign monuments, they looked over their shoulders, framing America, and what they found in the glass was both the glory and the shame of the American Republic. For Americans traveling abroad writing about the great European monuments became a textually rich yet economical way to handle this Claudian double perspective on what was "ideal" and what was "real."
Aside from a few studies of Wordsworth's poetry and his use of the memorial, like Cynthia Chase's "Monument and Inscription", there are not many general critical discussions about this process of beholding monuments, nor is there much that examines the literature or poetry that results from acts of beholding monuments. And, apart from American cultural studies like Robert Byer's "Words, Monuments, Beholders: The Visual Arts in Hawthorne's The Marble Faun" (1993), and Joy Kasson's Marble Queens and Captives (1990), there is even less available on what I term "monumental discourse" in connection to nineteenth-century American literature. This is an astonishing gap in scholarship, because, as both Byer and Kasson show, there was a vital, varied discourse about monuments and memorials flowing through nineteenth-century American culture.
Byer gives evidence for this rich vein of discourse in "Words," as he examines the characters in The Marble Faun within the context of two chief manifestations of "monumental beholding" he sees in 1850s America (the monumental oration and the stereoscope). Not only does Byer show that monumental discourse was a widespread cultural feature, but he also demonstrates that writers actively used this discourse toward specific ends. Byer asserts, for example, that Nathaniel Hawthorne was not only aware of his "culture's felt need for monuments," but that he also used monuments as political icons, as "visible embodiment[s] of [a] politically and morally fractured "idea of country" (164,169). Byer also points out that Hawthorne aspired in his romances, which were themselves verbal monuments, to "articulat[e]... contingency and impermanence, through an insistent displacement and fragmentation of the monumental sublime"(164). In short, Byer locates the monument and the sight/site of the monument as places in which writers could depict the construction and deconstruction of American cultural memory, where they could show the "American mind...confronting History" (171).
Kasson further demonstrates that monumental beholding and discourse were pervasive in nineteenth-century America with her examination of the genre of "ideal sculpture"(specifically, idealized statues of women that were created and displayed in nineteenth-century America). She, too, discusses the process of beholding monuments, and the "stories their contemporaries read in them" (1). Kasson shows how we can read, within the discourse concerning statues and the narratives their viewers created around them, "an encoded summary of nineteenth-century Americans' ideas, hopes, fears, and associations surrounding the subject of women..." (2).
Like sites within America, especially Niagara Falls, Westminster Abbey was known as a prominent monument, and it was one which reflected and refracted American attitudes about the American identity. The Abbey was a field abroad where different stories could be read, and a screen upon which both public hegemonies and what Marita Sturken (in Tangled Memories (1994)) calls "conflicting agendas" were projected and revealed. It serves as a site of intersecting histories, a place where we can see how Americans, with varying gazes, used monumental discourse abroad to both cross and subvert boundaries of ideology -- and how, in defining what was "outside" or "other," Americans ultimately defined, reclaimed, or critiqued themselves. So the ways in which the Abbey was beheld, represented, depicted, discussed, and written about, both at home and abroad by American tourists, can serve as a useful indicator of how America was in the process of conceptualizing itself as a nation. This paper tracks varying responses to this site throughout the nineteenth century, and we can see, via the monumental discourse of various American tourists, constant shifts (or refractions) back and forth, in attitude toward the foreign "other" and toward the American identity.
Focusing primarily on the work of the Kentucky poet, Sarah Piatt (1836-1919), the paper builds upon concepts suggested by both Byer and Kasson's work. It, too, is an exploration of the discourse in American letters that surrounded a specific monument. However, though I take up the specific modes of cultural remembering and cultural reading that Byer so eloquently presents as the "activity of monumental beholding," I proceed beyond his focus (which is Hawthorne and the 1850s), and Kasson's (which is "the subject of women" (2)). My study turns to examine the monumental discourse that was embedded in travel literature, a genre that increased in popularity and proliferated throughout the course of the century. In their discourse, we can find Kasson's "encoded summary of nineteenth-century Americans' ideas, hopes, fears, and associations," -- in this case, though, instead of "surrounding the subject of women," the discourse surrounded the subject of the American identity.
I will show how this discourse (in the hands of expatriated writers like my focal poet, Piatt, and her traveling contemporaries) developed beyond the traditional, picturesque styles of Romantic landscape description and association that were holdovers from eighteenth-century conventions of the travel genre. Discussing monuments in nineteenth-century travel narratives became more than a matter of aesthetics; it became a way in which some American writers throughout the century chose to describe, remember, fragment, and dismantle the monumental, monologic sublime of the Past --namely, American, British and European imperialist histories. Writing about monuments allowed "writers to handle civic subjects without being contemporary," and monumental discourse "present[ed] the alluring possibility of a polemic without rhetoric" (North 33, 39). In other words, talking about monuments was a one discursive strategy or tool which allowed writers to engage in an immediate, though ambiguous, political and cultural critique of their culture and of themselves.
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