“A Property In The Horizon”: Placelessness In Nineteenth-Century American

Literature And Culture

By

Todd Goddard

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

(English)

at the

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

2013

Date of final oral examination: 07/02/13

The dissertation is approved by the following members of the Final Oral Committee:

Russ Castronovo, Professor, English David Zimmerman, Professor, English Jeffrey Steele, Professor, English Monique Allewaert, Professor, English William Cronon, Professor, History

© Copyright by Todd Goddard 2013 All Rights Reserved

i

Contents

Introduction 1 - 11

1. The Great Convergence: A Brief History of Cairo, Illinois 12 - 33

2. “This Dismal Cairo”: Charles Dickens and the Politics of Placelessness 34 - 69

3. “Thy Placeless Power”: Melville, Mobility, And

The Poetics Of Placelessness 70 - 98

4. “A Delicious Chaos of Hopes”: Caroline Kirkland’s Desert Places 99 - 136

5. Twain’s Cultural-Geographic Imagination 137 - 169

6. Conclusion 170 - 173

7. Appendix 174 - 181

8. Acknowledgements 182

9. Bibliography 183 - 191

1

Introduction

“‘A Property in the Horizon’: Placelessness in Nineteenth-Century American

Literature and Culture” explores the loss of distinct and stable places in the nineteenth-

century United States. I argue in the following pages that throughout the nineteenth-

century the phenomena of placelessness began to take shape and to be recognized in

various ways by a range of writers and cultural critics.1 Many of these writers, including

Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Caroline Kirkland, and Mark Twain, register a

diminishment of distinct and diverse experiences and identities of place, while others are

unsettled by the loss of stable, bounded, or delineated locales, natural erosion and

ecological decay, and the rapid building up and wearing out of places. Through an

investigation of a range of literary texts and cultural commentary, then, this project tallies

the environmental, social, and cultural costs of placelessness in various forms. Moreover,

while the authors discussed in these pages register a similar sense of placelessness, each

one of them identifies different but related sources or causes of the phenomena, while

also proposing a range of solutions or responses. For Charles Dickens, a sense of

placelessness in the United States derived from the convergence of a democratic ethos of

uniformity with early capitalism, typified by land speculation, while Melville was critical

of the rapid development of new transportation technologies and the accelerating

2

velocities of modernity. Like Dickens, Kirkland targets land speculation but condemns it

for what she sees as its aggressive disruption of community formation and home creation.

Twain departs from these authors by recognizing “place” as inherently open, as always in

process, and as always changing, yet his works never fully relinquish a nostalgic longing

for more timeless, static, and rooted places. Overall, what ultimately connects these

authors are their critical concerns and anxieties about the loss or disruption of place.

While this project examines the representation and theme of placelessness in

literature, it also explores the various stylistic and aesthetic changes associated with it.

From Dickens to Melville, to Kirkland and Twain, we see these writers adopting an

aesthetic and style that respond to the cultural-geographic shifts and to the diverse forces

that undermined stable and abiding places. Each attempts to articulate the subtle and not

so subtle transformations, many on the edge of semantic availability, that for these

authors come to characterize spatial modernity. For example, Dickens constructs a

narrative in Martin Chuzzlewit that aspires to some discursive control over what he sees

as the unbounded nature of American places, while Melville adopts a transient and

shifting style in The Confidence-Man that highlights the challenges associated with

excessive mobility. Kirkland’s deploys wetlands, including swamps, marshes, mires, and

mud-holes, in her frontier narrative A New Home: Who’ll Follow? to stem the dizzying

effects of land speculation, while Twain’s articulates a nostalgic and portable sense of

place in Life on the Mississippi that ultimately survives the inevitable changes and

transformations of place.

3

This project, then, aims to do two things. First, as I have mentioned, it examines the

consequences of economic volatility and geographic nomadism on the stability of towns

and communities. Second, it studies how “placelessness” has been represented in

literature of the period and how it influenced its style and aesthetics. While my

methodology involves close readings and careful attention to literary-historical context, I

also employ an interdisciplinary approach. Drawing on the fields of cultural geography,

history, and literary studies, I juxtapose close readings with textual and archival materials

relating to land use, migration, speculation, and transportation technologies. I ground my

analysis, moreover, by focusing on specific locales, such as Cairo, Illinois, where the

careers of Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain intersect, and that make

visible the intimate relationship between transatlantic economies and local identities.

“‘A Property in the Horizon’: Placelessness in Nineteenth-Century American

Literature and Culture” fills a gap in current literary scholarship by producing a reading

of nineteenth-century American literature that gives sustained attention to its cultural-

geographic contexts. In doing so, it intervenes in recent cultural debates and ecocritical

concerns over the role of “place” in today’s world, as well as the tensions between the

local and the global and the rooted and the mobile. It also takes up Lawrence Buell’s call,

citing anthropological theorist Marc Augé, that “[e]nvironmental criticism must also

confront the proposition that “‘non-places are the real measure of our time.”2 Although

many literary-critical studies explore the role of “place” in literature, no study provides a

2 Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2005), 69.

4

full-length treatment of placelessness or of what Augé terms “empirical non-places” in

the nineteenth-century United States. And if non-places are the measure of our time, this

study locates the origin of the phenomena in that century. The project thus provides a

genealogy for placelessness in the United States, while investigating a set of literary

visions for navigating the matrix of in-between spaces, non-places, vacancies, and

“flatscapes” in modern life. Moreover, it calls for a greater reorientation from temporal to

spatial considerations in the nineteenth century that afford us new understandings of how

we live in, experience, and move about the world.

“A Place in the Horizon”

My invocation of Ralph Waldo Emerson in the title serves as a departure point for a

series of investigations into nineteenth-century literature and culture. The title, “A

Property in the Horizon,” comes from Emerson’s lengthy essay Nature. It served as an

inspiration for this project and captures the essence of some of its key concerns and

inquiries. “The charming landscape which I saw this morning,” Emerson writes, “is

indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns his field, Locke that,

and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a

property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts,

that is, the poet.”3 I was initially drawn to this passage because of its emphasis on

property ownership and by extension land purchase and speculation. (Several writers in

this study point to speculation for contributing to placelessness.) As Emerson suggests, 3 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature in Selected Writings of Emerson, ed. Donald McQuade (New York: The Modern Library, 1981), 5.

5

there is more to the landscape than discreet units of individual property to be bought or

sold for profit. For Emerson, such a myopic view of the land privileges utility and

economic expediency over the holistic beauty of the horizon. The poet (or writer), for

Emerson, may integrate the proprietary parts of the landscape and transcend a singularly

economic assessment of it. Created and layered over time, moreover, landscape serves as

a living synthesis of the land with culture and is in this sense the essence of cultural

geography, a primary focus of this study. Yet the quote interests me for another reason.

The idea of “a property in the horizon” suggests the perennial search for a property in a

ceaselessly receding frontier. It implies a restless mobility that is never satiated, one akin

to Tennyson’s “untravell’d world whose margin fades / For ever and forever when I

move.” For the writers discussed in this study, this restlessness and economic mobility

accounts for the rapid building up and wearing out of places.

Place and Placelessness

Non-places (or placelessness) may be the measure of our day, yet the arguments over

the relevance of place, land use, urban planning and development, cultural preservation,

etc., as well as tensions between localist movements and the forces of globalization, not

only persist but are intensifying. As I write these lines, violent protests in central Istanbul

(first initiated by a large group of environmentalists) are taking place over the

government’s plan to reconstruct historic Taksim Square into a shopping mall designed

6

like an Ottoman-era army barracks.4 Although the protests stem from broader concerns

with the government, the on-going unrest reflects the community’s unease with what one

commentator in Turkey refers to as the destruction of the local “authenticity of their

surroundings” and “the culture of the bland shopping mall” with its “chain stores and

touristy vibe.”5 Such conflicts and concerns certainly evoke the tensions at the heart of

this study and the on-going discussions about the role of place and the pitfalls of

placelessness in our lives today. As this study hopefully makes clear, however, these

debates over the value of “place” and the human costs of its erosion and loss have

important antecedents in the nineteenth-century United States.

To discuss “placelessness” in the nineteenth century we must also have some sense of

“place.” We must consider how writers thought about, articulated, or experienced place at

the time, lest we investigate placelessness simply as a negative, that is, as only the

absence or loss of “place,” without also having some sense of its opposite or alternatives.

The word “place,” of course, was in wide use in the nineteenth-century United States and

used in a range of ways familiar to us today. Among other things, the term frequently

denoted a particular place or region of space, a dwelling house or home, a city, town, or

4 Tim Arango, “Turkish Protestors Get ‘Final’ Warning to Clear Out of Park,” New York Times, June 13, 2013, accessed June 13, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/world/europe/turkish-leader-gives-final-warning-to-park-protesters.html. 5 Kimberly M. Wang, “Readers Capture Istanbul’s Shifting Identity,” New York Times, June 13, 2013, accessed June 13, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2013/06/11/world/europe/20130611-READERTURKEY-5.html.

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village, or an appropriate or natural position for a person or thing.6 Noah Webster’s

American dictionary of 1844 defines it in part as “A particular portion of space of

indefinite extent,” “[a]ny portion of space, as distinct from space in general,” as “[l]ocal

existence,” one’s “[s]tation in life,” and as “[a] city; a town; [or] a village.”7

Although all of the writers herein analyzed touch on these various definitions of

“place,” each of them emphasizes a different aspect of it and registers a different set of

experiences associated with its erosion or loss. While no writer (Melville excepted)

contemplates pure or absolute placelessness or non-place, a state that anthropologist Marc

Augé reminds us does not actually exist (at least on earth and in everyday life), each

registers degrees of place or “senses of place” that amount to subjective perceptions of

their environments, including interpretative perspectives and emotional reactions.8 For

Dickens’s American Notes, places become more placeful or authentic to the extent that

they are historical and concerned with identity. Dickens contrasts what he sees as the

picturesque diversity and historical rootedness of cities like Quebec with the eerie

sameness of American cities and towns. Quebec, Dickens writes, makes an impression

that is “at once unique and lasting.”9 Unlike the fleeting uniformity of many American

locales, Quebec is “a place not to be forgotten or mixed up in the mind with other places,

or altered for a moment in the crowd of scenes a traveller can recall.”10 Places are

6 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “place” 7 Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, 1844, s.v. “place." 8 Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2008), viii.9 Ibid., 230. My italics. 10 Ibid.

8

delineated locales with historical depth and uniqueness, as well as aesthetic appeal. Less

concerned with the age of a place or its historical longevity, Melville (for the purposes of

this study) defines place in relation to space. With an eye to metaphysics, Melville’s

Moby-Dick and The Confidence-Man contemplate place along a continuum with the

“void” (or utter placelessness) at one end and distinct and delineated locales at the other.

Like Dickens, Melville measures place in terms of its heterogeneity and distinction of

geographic identity. The more places seem alike or blend together, the less placeful the

place and the more like undifferentiated space it becomes. For Kirkland, place is defined

largely by what Yi-Fu Tuan refers to as “the affective bond between people and place or

setting.”11 Place is “local existence,” as well as a city, town, or village, and but she also

evaluates it in terms of community attachment, the depth and types of attachment to

people and to one particular place. Twain’s relationship to and understanding of place is

intensely biographical and characterized by a strong sense of nostalgic identification with

particular places. Yet Twain also recognizes in Life on the Mississippi that place is

inherently open and always in process. For Twain, place is an event. Rather than fixed

and unchanging, it is an articulated moment in an on-going and never-ending process of

change (both social and “natural”) and a constant re-ordering of a constellation of social

relations.

11 Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 4.

9

Placelessness in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture

The writers and cultural critics examined in this study provide not only a cultural

record and a literary-historical genealogy of placelessness in the United States, but they

also contribute to our understanding of it as a phenomenon. While all of them anticipate

aspects of the theorizations above, they advance our understanding of placelessness at the

level of theory as well as of lived experience in the nineteenth century.

Chapter One of this study provides a brief history of Cairo, Illinois, an unlikely

location that connects the lives and works of Dickens, Melville, and Twain. In focusing

on Cairo’s early development and its notorious history as a land speculation venture,

“The Great Convergence” highlights and illustrates many of the themes that develop in

the proceeding chapters. In addition to providing vital historical context for

understanding the critiques of these authors, especially Dickens and Melville’s, the

chapter itself, like Cairo which sits at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers,

serves as a confluence of the various issues and concerns developed in the other chapters.

All of the currents of critique in this study converge at Cairo.

Through an examination of Dickens’ American Notes for General Circulation and his

novel Martin Chuzzlewit, Chapter Two investigates Dickens’ disastrous trip along the

Mississippi River in the 1840s and his increasing unease with what he perceived as a

placeless landscape and the homogenized affect of its inhabitants. For Dickens, American

places shared an uncanny “sameness” that was matched only by its eerily similar

citizenry. Dickens recognizes in America something like Relph’s conceptualization of an

10

“inauthentic attitude.” With an interest only in the land’s usefulness and monetary value,

Americans’ relationship to place seemed to Dickens to be nothing more than casual and

superficial. Relph’s claim that such an attitude leads inevitably to “a weakening of the

identity of places to the point where they not only look alike but feel alike and offer the

same bland possibilities for experience” could have been extracted almost directly,

practically word for word, from American Notes.12 Dickens’ anxiety over this sense of

placelessnes, which reaches its zenith at Cairo, Illinois, the ultimate symbol for Dickens

of American placelessness, stems from his fear that such an attitude might spread beyond

America’s borders.

Chapter Three reads Moby-Dick and The Confidence-Man alongside a range of

nineteenth-century cultural documents in order to illuminate Melville’s anxieties over

incessant mobility and the metaphysical implications of placelessness. For Melville, the

borders and boundaries that circumscribed and gave places definition, specificity, and

identity, appeared disturbingly tentative in the wake of proliferating spatial mobilities. If

not in name than in essence, Twain registers in the nineteenth century Thrift’s “‘structure

of feeling’ called mobility,” yet he pushes beyond Thrift and others for an unflinching

look at the metaphysical implications of existing in “almost/not quite spaces.” Moreover,

he builds on Dickens’s critique by focusing his own on Cairo, Illinois, which serves as

the thematic and geographical centerpiece of The Confidence-Man.

12Relph,PlaceandPlacelessness,90.

11

Chapter Four examines Caroline Kirkland’s representations of swamps, marshes,

mires, and mud-holes in her frontier narrative A New Home: Who’ll Follow? and her

deployment of these landscapes to critique the dizzying effects of land speculation. For

Kirkland, who relocated with her husband to Michigan in the 1830s at the height of an

infamous land speculation bubble, speculation impeded her and others ability to build a

lasting home and rooted community on the frontier. Ultimately, Kirkland embraces

wetlands, both thematically and stylistically, as an antidote to speculation and the

incessant circulation of capital.

Through an investigation of Twain’s travelogue Life on the Mississippi, Chapter Five

returns to the river to explore Twain’s articulation of a nostalgic and portable sense of

place that resists what he sees as the inherent instability and inevitable dissolution of

place. Twain anticipates geographers like Massey by recognizing the radical openness

and constant changeability of place. By detailing the physical and cultural history of the

river, moreover, Twain provides his readers with a critical pedagogy or methodology for

reading cultural geography. Through his elaborate description of his education as a

riverboat pilot, he suggests that place itself can be preserved in memory by those properly

trained to read it.

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1.

The Great Convergence:

A Brief History Of Cairo, Illinois

On December 18, 1811, travelers on board the steamboat New Orleans witnessed a

comet blaze across the horizon at the location of Cairo, Illinois. The New Orleans had

launched only a few days before from Pittsburgh to navigate for the first time by steam

power the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. As if the comet were not spectacle enough to

commemorate the occasion, the earth obliged with the terrible New Madrid earthquake

that struck with full force as the New Orleans emerged from the mouth of the Ohio at

Cairo.13 Trees shook and swayed, while thousands of acres of old growth forest and cane

broke free from the nearby shores and plunged into the river. Reports describe foamy

spills on the river the size of flour barrels.14 At one point, according to observers, the

rivers even turned back upon themselves retreating in the direction of their sources, and

some claimed to have seen the mighty Mississippi cut in twain. Awed by the coincidence

of events, superstitious squatters along the river blamed the coming of the new

technology for the violent upheaval. They chided the passengers aboard the New Orleans

13 H.C. Bradsby, “History of Cairo, Illinois,” in The History of Alexander, Union and Pulaski Counties, Illinois, ed. William Henry Perrin (Chicago: O.L. Baskin & Co., 1883), 20. 14 Ibid.

13

and insisted that God was punishing mankind for harnessing the power of nature in the

form of steam. If God had wanted the water to boil, they insisted, he would have done it

himself.15

The events, if not punishment, were portentous. The coming of the steamboats and all

that came with them would reshape the Southern Illinois landscape more violently and

relentlessly, if not as suddenly, than the earthquake. This chimerical new force, as many

at first regarded it, would expedite the flows of people and capital throughout the new

territories and in so doing would rapidly accelerate tremendous transformations to the

environment, as well as to the cultural geography of the region. No longer would

migrants to Illinois need to rely on impossibly muddy roads, nor river transport on

tedious keel boats, flat boats, and canoes. Settlers could with greater rapidity and ease

begin the process of “place” creation in the new territories, while the interior of the

continent would become even more connected to the globe than ever before. Speaking of

the expansionist potential of the Mississippi watershed some twenty years earlier,

General James Wilkinson asked, “Did [God] not provide those great streams which enter

the Mississippi, and by it communicated with the Atlantic, that other nations might enjoy

with us the blessings of our prolific soil?”16 The steamboat would facilitate that

communication, and it would also help to usher in an unparalleled period of land

speculation that would quite literally trade in that “prolific soil” on both sides of the

Atlantic. With the advent of the steamboat, the so-called “great acceleration” gained

15 Ibid. 16 John Seelye, The Beautiful Machine: Rivers and the Republican Plan, 1755-1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 216.

14

traction and Cairo, or what would become Cairo, lay directly in its path: at the “great

convergence” of the nation’s internal waterways.

Of course, the land at the confluence of the rivers was far from blank space. It shared

a rich “natural” and human history long before the prospect of Cairo, and that history was

marked by vast and far-flung connections to other points throughout the continent and the

globe. In the early 1800s, the land that would become Cairo was a largely flat, muddy

peninsula at the nexus of a watershed that more or less drained a continent. Densely

wooded by mulberry, cottonwood, maple, and boxwood, the land boasted rich topsoil and

alluvial riverbanks.17 Built up over generations by recurring floods and deposits, the

peninsula was truly a creation of the rivers.18 But it was also an unfinished work, its form

still emerging from the mold. Its banks left low and its land flat, no one point on the

peninsula rose above the rivers’ reach, and thus it was subject to frequent and devastating

floods.19 And since it was poorly drained, the peninsula often collected waters in lower-

lying marshes and swamps, leaving the occasional inhabitants uniquely susceptible to

malaria and cholera.20 The flooding of the land challenged any attempts at long-term

settlement and would later serve as a major obstacle for Cairo’s promoters.

For centuries, diverse human populations carved out homes on or nearby the

peninsula that exhibited diverse value systems and that were themselves embedded

increasingly in complex networks of socio-political and economic relations. With the 17 Prospectus and Engineers’ Report Relating to the City of Cairo, Incorporated by The State of Illinois (St. Louis: T. Watson & Son, 1839), 15. 18 John M. Lansden, A History of the City of Cairo, Illinois (Chicago: R.R. Donnelley & Sons, 1910), 32-33. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid.

15

coming of Anglo-European settlers, the land was often highly contested, and places were

constructed and defended through violence and over time layered, like a palimpsest, on

top of other places, fully or partially erased. Until the arrival of the Jesuits in the 1700s

The thickly wooded peninsula and the surrounding territory had for centuries been home

to the Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Peoria Indian tribes. In 1703, the

French established a permanent mission and settlement at Kaskaskia, a town just north of

present-day Cairo, and soon after French settlers, along with their black slaves from

Santa Domingo, migrated there to work the lead-ore mines in service to a growing

international market for lead. Despite French efforts to make Kaskaskia feel like home, a

place with similar society and customs, religion, and amusements, it remained distinctly

diverse and multicultural: Of the population of 2,200 in 1707, many were Kaskaskia

Indians and other members of the Illinois Confederation and many inter-married and had

mixed children with the French.21 Years later Kaskaskia would become the official

location of The Bank of Cairo, which would issue bank notes under that name and

location. One could say that the land at Cairo had what geographer Doreen Massey has

termed a truly “global sense of place.”22 It represented, to borrow her words, “a particular

constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus.”23

* * *

21 Bradsby, 67. See also, Frank Norall, Bourgmont, Explorer of the Missouri, 1698-1725 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 107. 22 Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” in Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 23 Ibid., 69.

16

The land ordinances of 1785 and 1787 provided a new, fiercely abstract, cartographic

identity for the land at Cairo and indeed for the newly won lands of the Old North West.

In 1784, Thomas Jefferson led a committee that would devise a plan to organize the

western territories and, in essence, bring “order” to the land. It provided for a large-scale

system of survey and sale that would establish boundaries of various sizes in the shapes

of rectangles. The “rectangular survey,” as it was called, would divide the land into

townships of six-square miles, with the most desirable land surveyed first; one square

mile would be equal to 640 acres, and each lot would be numbered 1 to 36. Given the

uniquely flat and seemingly featureless qualities of the landscape, the terrain of the

Midwest was perhaps uniquely suited to such a survey. Nevertheless, the design of the

grid overlooked almost entirely natural or geologic features, as well as the places

established by former or present inhabitants. Surveyors, for instance, complained of

having to work around and over Indian burial mounds. It was, in essence, a vast re-

mapping of the land, a simultaneous marking and erasure, a linear taming of “the spatial

into the textual and the conceptual.”24 The survey converted the land into a geometric

landscape with base lines, meridians, sections, townships, plats, numbered streets and

alphabetically ordered names. Indeed, such a linear and numerical survey fit well with a

burgeoning market economy based on exclusive property ownership. Land offices were

quickly established to facilitate and record sales that initially would occur through

auction, and lots would be sold at a minimum price of one dollar per acre. The survey

also gave the land at Cairo a new cartographic identity based on numbers, linear

24 Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” 20.

17

measurement, and prices. First surveyed in 1807, the land occupied township seventeen

and comprised approximately 6,288.08 acres. Because of its irregular size, the township

then consisted of only a little more than one-forth the size of the standard 36 square mile

division. Sixty-three townships, each six miles square, separated it from the Wisconsin

state line.25 The land sold for $2.00 an acre, until 1820 when it dropped to $1.25 after

sales of land on credit were abandoned.26 The grid had essentially transformed the land

into a ready-made commodity, a cellular division of identically shaped containers, and

left the task of place-making to migrants.

While the survey was intended in part to facilitate settlement, it also fueled land

speculation, and it was only a matter time before speculators set their sights on the freshly

surveyed land at the junction of the rivers. Since a “section” of land, consisting of 640

acres, was the smallest that could initially be purchased, land speculators were often the

only ones with enough money to afford the initial investment, at a dollar per acre, of

$640. Thus speculators would purchase a section, subdivide it, and then sell off smaller

parcels at marked-up prices. Often the initial purchase would be made on credit, and then

land would be surveyed and readied for sale at auction, or the speculator would plat a

town, promote it, and sell “town lots” to investors and settlers at marked up prices. The

better the prospects of the place, the greater the cost of town lots. In 1817, John G.

Comegys began buying on credit the land in township 17, as well as much of the

25 Lansden, A History of the City of Cairo, Illinois, 30-31 26 Ibid.

18

surrounding territory, a full year before tribal titles were fully extinguished.27 A

Baltimore native and personal friend of Meriwether Lewis, Comegys promptly secured a

charter from the territorial legislature in 1818 to establish the City and Bank of Cairo, and

with one stroke of a pen City and Bank—land and finance—were formally merged.

Indeed, town-promotion and banks depended on each other from their inception. One

helped to provide credit and eventually paper money, while the other provided a parking-

place for capital, albeit until other places proved more lucrative.

The City and Bank of Cairo was to finance itself through town promotion and land

sales, but doing so would require them to compete for capital investment with other

would-be-towns nearby. It would also require protecting Cairo from the rivers, a task that

prove practically impossible. Other promoters had already established the town of Trinity

at the mouth of the Caches River, just six miles north of Cairo, that boasted a steamboat

landing, boat store, tavern, bar, and billiard saloon.28 In the absence of cultural and

historical roots—those that did exist were essentially effaced (at least on paper) by the

survey—Cairo’s promoters took the name and by association, they hoped, the mystique

of Cairo, Egypt. In fact, all of Southern Illinois was becoming informally known as

“Egypt Land,” and other towns sought to capitalize on the exoticism and the allure of

names like Karnak, Thebes, and Dongola, and in some important ways, they were right.29

With the Mississippi modeled as America’s Nile, they portrayed Cairo as the jewel of the

nation. No place in these Western States, they insisted, was “better calculated, as it

27 Bradsby 68. 28 Ibid., 23. 29 Baker Brownell, The Other Illinois (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1958), 4-5.

19

respects commercial advantages and local supply, for a great and important city.”30 The

peninsula did offer easy access to water transportation by way of the rivers and thus to

markets. In country where land travel could be tedious and unpredictable, the rivers

served as low-friction arteries of commerce and trade. But Cairo’s site was undeniably

problematic, since the rivers, especially the Mississippi, could be fickle and destructive.

To sell Cairo in the long run, the partners knew they would need to build levees and

embankments and attempt the unlikely task of bending the Mississippi and Ohio to their

will. Just a year after affairs got underway, however, Comegys fell ill and died, along

with any serious plans to develop Cairo for the next twenty years. Before it got started,

Cairo was dead. And it would take the almost-boundless speculative energies of the

1830s to conjure it back into existence.31

* * *

Land sales boomed in the 1830s and everywhere new towns sprouted into tentative

existence. Although town promoters competed fiercely for capital investment, the lack of

federal banking regulations and lax state laws kept a flood of cheap money in wide

circulation. From 1829 to 1837, the number of banks in the United States rose from 329

to 788, and the circulation of dollars jumped from 48.2 to 149.2 million.32 The number of

loans in the same period nearly quadrupled, although banks increasingly lacked the

specie—that is, precious metals like gold and silver—to back up the paper money

30 Bradsby, 68. 31 Lansden, A History of the City of Cairo, Illinois, 32-34. 32 Robert Sobel, Panic on Wall Street: A Classic History of America’s Financial Disasters (New York: Truman Talley Books, 1988), 38.

20

flowing out of their doors.33 Since few investment opportunities existed at the time, land

provided a way to temporarily fix capital in the hopes of further accumulation.34 Public

land sales nearly tripled in one year’s time, from 4.7 million in 1834 to 12.6 million in

1835, and exploded to a whopping 20 million in 1836. The statistics are dizzying.

Common descriptors, like “speculating spirit,” “land fever,” or “epidemic,” fail to fully

capture the extent of land speculation in the 1830s. Distraught by the revolving door of

speculation and paper money, President Andrew Jackson later complained that “[t]he

banks let out their notes to speculators, they were paid to the receivers, and immediately

returned to the banks to be sent out again and again, being merely instruments to transfer

to the speculator the most valuable public lands.”35 “Indeed,” he added, “each speculation

furnished means for another.”36

In the 1830s, Sidney Breeze, a New Yorker and future United States senator, became

the next man to set his sights on the narrow strip of land sandwiched between the two

rivers. Like Comegys before him, Breeze was inspired by its auspicious situation and no

doubt imagined the vital rivers circulating Illinois goods and capital throughout the nation

with Cairo as the commercial hub and valve. Breeze also recognized the importance of

new transportation technologies to his property, namely, the railroads. Unlike rivers,

railroads offered the chance of transportation networks largely unrestrained by

geographic location, and they offered a chance to connect Cairo to the interior of the 33 Ibid. 34 Paul Wallace Gates, “The Role of the Land Speculator in Western Development,” in The Public Lands:Studies in the History of the Public Domain, ed. Vernon Carstensen (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), 350. 35 Sobel, 39-40. 36 Ibid.

21

state, particularly to Galena and to rapidly growing Chicago in the North.37 In the 1830s,

railroad technology in the United States was still in a fledgling state, but the remarkable

prosperity of the decade encouraged internal development and encouraged construction.

By the end of the decade, there were 450 locomotives in the country and 3,200 miles of

track, as much as the total canal mileage in the States and more than twice the track of all

of Europe.38 “If the railroads did not initiate the industrial revolution,” historian Daniel

Walker Howe suggests, “they certainly speeded up.”39 In newer states, like Illinois

(1818), Michigan (1837), and Wisconsin (1848), the railroads proved especially

influential by providing farmers unprecedented access to far-flung markets.40 Such access

often encouraged smaller migrant farmers to abandon diversified production of crops,

which they had grown in their old homes, in favor of commercial staples like wheat, and

with the aid of railroads they could now elbow their way into big-city markets alongside

large commercial developers.41 As markets grew, moreover, the price of land grew.

Farmers could make a nice profit, especially in the midst of the 1830s, by reselling the

land they had obtained cheaply from the government and moving elsewhere (often

westward) to begin again, a practice that Caroline Kirkland criticizes in Michigan. Thus

the railroads provided an incentive for mono-crop production, as well as small-scale

speculations that kept settlement mobile and uprooted. The idealized yeoman farmer 37 John Lansden, “Cairo in 1841,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, vol. 5, no. 1 (1912), 25-41. 38 Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York: Oxford, 2007), 563. 39 Ibid., 566. 40 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), 55-81. 41 Howe, 567.

22

became increasingly a mobile tradesman and speculator, and his transience was

accelerated on the rails: by the 1840s, railroad mileage had more than doubled to 7,500

miles.42 The “great acceleration” had begun in earnest.

For Breeze and his partners, the real benefit of the railroad lay in the opportunities it

afforded for town promotion and speculation. Indeed, land speculation and railroads

were so closely connected throughout the nineteenth century that it is often difficult to

distinguish between the two. Because public subsidies to the railroads often took the form

of vast land grants, railroads also became large-scale speculators who promoted and

shaped settlement along its routes, and the promoters of Cairo were no exception. Breeze

and his partners, most notably Darius Holbrook, began lobbying the legislature for the

creation of Illinois’s first central railroad, the Illinois Central, aiming not only to have

Cairo as the Southern-most terminus, but also to construct and control the railroad. If

Breeze and his partners could secure such rights, they might control the flows of

commerce from the interior of the state through to the Mississippi and Ohio rivers; Cairo

would then, ideally, serve as both hub and valve for commodities shipped along the

nation’s waterways. As speculators, however, the railroad remained always a means to an

end: a mechanism to increase the value of the land and returns on speculation.43 With the

rise in prices for Cairo’s lands that would come with the railroad, the speculators could

also then lease or sell town lots at vastly marked up prices from the original purchase

prices. Without the railroad, Cairo would almost certainly cease to exist, while other

42 Ibid., 564. 43 Paul Wallace Gates, The Illinois Central Railroad and Its Colonization Work (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 24.

23

towns along the railroad route would gain valuable access to the interior of the state and

attract capital investment. Railroads were the future and that is exactly where the

promoters wanted to situate Cairo.

Whatever advantages the land at Cairo might have possessed, its true strength (or

weakness) laid in its “vociferous and powerful lobby” and in the magic touch of Darius

H. Holbrook.44 A “shrewd Boston Yankee,” Holbrook had initially traveled to Illinois

from New York in the 1830s to pursue manufacturing charters from the state legislature,

but was soon won over by the chance at fortunes by speculating at Cairo. A first success

for the partners came on January 16, 1836, when the Illinois General Assembly granted

the partners a charter to build a railroad, although the state would take control just one

year later.45 A second success came soon after, when the legislature granted the Cairo

City and Canal Company a corporate charter on March 4, 1837, just two months prior to

the Panic of 1837. The charter was a license to do almost anything: the company could

construct dikes, canals, and levees, buy land, and even create banks, which they promptly

did. Although it had lost for now the rights to build the railroad—a battle that would go

on in one form or another for decades—the company now had broad authority to raise

funds, buy land, and make “improvements.” They had created, in essence, a speculating

trifecta—land, bank, and railroad.

In addition to the railroad, the promoters sought to market Cairo as the city of the

future, a budding commercial metropolis on America’s great frontier, to attract capital

44 Gates, The Illinois Central, 24. 45 Ibid.

24

investment. This required start-up capital to make necessary and immediate

improvements to the land, such as the construction of levees and embankments, to hire

town planners, and to further market Cairo as an attractive investment. Opponents of the

railroad route had already petitioned the legislature to change the railroad’s line on the

grounds that Cairo was not viable because of its susceptibility to flooding.46 Those

pushing for the change consisted mostly of other towns, including Vandalia in the north,

and Salem, Mt. Vernon, Frankfort, Benton, and Vienna, who were all competing with

Cairo and other places for the lifeblood of the railroad.47 Making Cairo at least appear

viable and flood-protected, then, was of great importance. Holbrook disregarded the

time-consuming but more effective method of filling in the land to a grade high enough

above the floodwaters to truly protect it, and instead chose to enclose a large section of

the country with earth embankments along the rivers. Although the levees were

susceptible to water seepage that weakened their foundation and put the town at risk, they

allowed Holbrook and his partners a quick fix and enabled them to get down to the

business of speculating rather than long-term place construction.48 Regardless of their

effectiveness, Holbrook could sell the levees: The faster the “improvements,” the sooner

they could cash-in.

Utilizing transnational capital markets, Holbrook would turn to eastern and European

investors for start-up capital, and in doing so convert Cairo, at least on paper, from a

material place into various financial instruments. Investors would not own Cairo, per se,

46 Lansden, A History of the City of Cairo, 44. 47 Ibid., 44. 48 Ibid., 54.

25

but claims to rates of return based on their investment. For many, Cairo was merely a

promise, a percentage, a mark in a ledger. Holbrook’s plan for financing included two

initial steps. First, obtain start-up funds to build levees, and second, market bonds

collateralized by the land to as many people as would buy. His first stop was New York,

where he managed to obtain a loan of 500,000 from the New York Life Insurance Trust

Company and an agreement from them to secure a series of bonds backed by a trust deed

upon its real estate.49 In effect, the company had thus turned its land into collateral, much

like a mortgage might, with individuals instead of banks as the lenders. Like most bonds

today, purchasers would buy the bonds and obtain a specified rate of interest until the

bonds matured and full payment was made. But selling the bonds was another matter

entirely. For this Holbrook turned to the financial centers of the Old World. Throughout

the 1830s, America had become an attractive investment for the English, as well as the

Europeans, and London banks competed with each other for opportunities—that is,

opportunities to fix capital—by sending agents to America to scout out potential

investments in canals, turnpikes, railroads, and American business.50 Indeed, America’s

frontier in the 1830s was underwritten largely with Old World capital. From 1831 to

1837, foreign indebtedness in America had risen from $89 million to a whopping $242.9

million.51 America had become an investment vehicle, and in the speculative-fever of the

49 Cairo City Property (Cairo, Ill.), “The Past, Present and Future of the City of Cairo, in North America: With Reports, Estimates and Statistics” (Portland, OR: Brown Thurston, 1858). 50 Sobel 39-41. 51 Ibid., 41.

26

1830s, its land had become the most attractive option. It was in this economic

environment that Holbrook set out for London.

Having made several trips abroad, Holbrook soon convinced John Wright &

Company, Bankers of Henrietta Street, Convent Garden, to market and sell the Cairo

bonds secured by the trust deed.52 As it turned out, Wright & Co. had also served as

agents for the state of Illinois and underwrote and sold its canal bonds. Already in

London were Richard M. Young, then a young United States Senator from Illinois, the

former Illinois Governor, John Reynolds, as well as Daniel Webster, who provided

Holbrook with a favorable opinion as to his company’s land titles and deed of trust.53 No

doubt Webster’s opinion—himself an active speculator in western lands—was very

helpful to his cause. Holbrook also enlisted the assistance of William Strickland, perhaps

America’s most famous architect of the time, to design and plan the city.54 Strickland,

who happened also to be in London at the time, agreed to visit Cairo, record an opinion

as to its feasibility for development, and draft a design plan.55 Strickland’s participation

in the venture must also have proved attractive to Wright & Company. It seems Holbrook

had a golden touch and more than a few connections, and, indeed, the money started

flowing.

52 Lansden, A History of the City of Cairo, 55. 53 Ibid., 55. 54 John Reps suggests that Cairo is “a microcosm of many of the diverse and sometimes conflicting trends in town planning of that period.” He adds that in many cities “we can trace the results of what was probably the prevailing attitude toward nineteenth-century town development—that of land speculation and promotion.” See John Reps, “Great Expectations and Hard Times: The Planning of Cairo, Illinois,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 16 (1957), 14-21, 14. 55 Ibid., 15-16.

27

With the help of Wright & Co, “Cairo” circulated, so to speak, throughout England

and Europe, as well as in the States. Improved technologies and extensive networks of

communication facilitated the distribution of advertising materials on a novel and

arresting scale. Although the telegraph was first used in 1839, the same year the Cairo

bonds were put on the market, Wright & Co. probably relied on a rapid and efficient mail

service and mass circulation newspapers. Gilded lithographs depicting Cairo, as well as

circulars and prospectuses, circulated broadly throughout England, Europe, and the

United States. “Cairo” hung in steamboats, taverns, hotels, meeting halls, and anywhere

else the public might catch a view of the investment opportunity.56 Everywhere people

consulted maps to locate the “magnificent public enterprise” newly budding in the fertile

lands of Southern Illinois.57

If the lithographs serve as a guide, what was budding was a magnificent commercial

metropolis marked by movement and circulation, intensive commerce, and also, if only

on paper, a degree of lasting stability and structure (see Figure #1 in Appendix). Drawn

from the perspective of a denuded Kentucky shoreline—the trees presumably harvested

to fuel steamboats—, with a view across the Ohio River, the drawing emphasizes the

solidity and stability of stone and brick buildings and the smoky towers that skirt the

horizon. Far from a semi-submerged swamp, Cairo rises triumphantly into the skyline

and above the rivers’ reach. The many ships on the river, working in concert with the

railroad, suggest a preponderance of movement and circulation. Cairo becomes, at least

56 Bradsby, 28. 57 Prospectus and Engineers’ Report Relating to the City of Cairo, 3.

28

on paper, a major commercial node and nexus of transportation technologies and

connected with other nodes and facilitating flows of capital and goods. Here is Cairo as

conduit for commodities and a space for travelers and consumers. The company’s

prospectus, published as a hardcover booklet with a colorful design and gold lettering on

the cover, touts “the land at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers [as] designed

by nature as a point for the site of one of the most important commercial cities in the

Union.58 The promoters also describe Cairo as a “depot” or “entrepot,” that is, a place

intended for the receipt, storage, and re-distribution of commercial goods.59 As an

entrepot, Cairo would function as a node that channeled, directed, and measured

accelerating flows and vectors. With the exception of the large hotel and house at the

southern tip, the residences appear in linear and uniform rows along the wharf and

waterfront.

The promoters presented Cairo as less an individual and autonomous place than a

point in the circulation of traffic and commodities, a “fixed address that captures traffic”

or always “between addresses.”60 Fluidity, rather than stability, served as its baseline. The

Illinois Central Railroad would, the promoters promised, situate Cairo in vast networks of

transportation, commerce, and communication. The railroad would run like a “back

bone” through Illinois connecting nearly “every town of importance in the State.”61

Branch or cross railroads, moreover, would eventually connect Cairo to dozens of other

58 Ibid., 6, 9. 59 Ibid.60 Thrift, 222. 61 Prospectus and Engineers’ Report Relating to the City of Cairo, 12-14.

29

cities, including St. Louis and commercial capitals across the country, and “make an

uninterrupted line of rail-way from the Atlantic seaboard nearly to the Rocky

Mountains.”62 The Illinois Central alone would connect “the principle towns on the

Mississippi, Illinois, Wabash, Kaskaskia, Ohio and Rock rivers, and connected with

Chicago by the Michigan and Illinois Canal, mak[e] upwards of twelve hundred miles of

inland transportation . . . .”63 With access to “those two great natural highways, the

Mississippi and Ohio Rivers [ ], which, with their tributary streams, embrace at least

five thousand miles of navigable waters,” Cairo would become “the most important

entrepot of produce and merchandise passing to and from the North, East, South and

West . . . .”64

Although Holbrook’s vision proved persuasive and the marketing campaign and sale

of Cairo’s bonds a great success, only a fraction of the capital was apparently invested in

the construction of the town. Instead, with an eye to speculation, Holbrook put the bulk

toward the purchase of more land. The Cairo City and Canal Company had garnered

between $1,250,000 and $2,000,00 through the sale of bonds from Wright & Co., which

must have arrived to Cairo via New York in several waves of financing.65 To celebrate

the first round of investment, Holbrook reportedly held a public address, a kind of open

letter addressed to all the world, in which he boasted of his successes and Cairo’s

illustrious future as the “‘the great commercial and manufacturing mart and

62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., 9. 64 Ibid., 9 65 Bradsby 24; Lansden, A History of the City of Cairo, 55; Reps 18.

30

emporium.’”66 Reports vary, however, as to the extent of “improvements” actually

undertaken with these funds prior to 1842 (the year of Charles Dickens’s visit). Holbrook

purchased large tracts of land surrounding the initial acreage, often paying exorbitant

prices, and completed work on the levees.67 Besides clearing a strip of land, the company

also began construction on the Cairo Hotel, often crowded with company men and

travelers coming and going off boats, at the southern point of the peninsula, as well as a

separate building that served as a spacious residence for Holbrook. The company built a

machine shop, a sawmill, a planing facility, a brickyard, dry docks, and some twenty or

so cottages.68 Surely a great many projects were contemplated, but never undertaken.

Although the machine shop was reportedly equipped with the best machinery then

available, purchased in London and transported to Cairo, it remains difficult to account

for expenditures in the range of a million dollars, let alone the figure of $3.5 million

suggested many years later in a stockholders’ report. Many have accused Holbrook and

his partners—quite justly, it seems—of pocketing large sums of money.

Even after the various construction projects had been completed, Cairo remained

strangely deferred, more representation than material fact, a vision of speculators more

interested in quickly-realized profits than actual “place” creation. By 1841, just a year or

so before Dickens’ arrival, settlers had populated the town, many of them migrant

workers associated with the railroads, to the tune of 2000 persons.69 The town still had

66 Bradsby 24. 67 Lansden, A History of the City of Cairo, 55-56. 68 Ibid., 56-57.69 Bradsby, 27.

31

the feel of being thrown-together, like a mining town that had just leapt into existence

and could leap out just as quickly.70 Proceeding as if the town had some degree of

permanence, residents built a post office, a doctor hung out a shingle, and the local

Catholics founded a church in a rough, board-roofed shanty in the depths of some nearby

woods, from which they hung a bell that rung out each Sunday morning.71 Yet Holbrook

and his partners kept a kind of financial stranglehold on the town that prevented it, so to

speak, from truly taking root. Holbrook refused to actually sell any property in the town

and opted eventually to provide only temporary leases. Surely he imagined that by

holding out until the “city” had been built, the country emerged from its economic

depression, and the railroad constructed, he and his partners would stand to make a

fortune by only then selling lots. Until then, he planned to own Cairo as corporate

property and orchestrate it like a speculating venture. Cairo was truly a corporate town,

and although residents were angered by the policy, they were nevertheless limited to

buying stock, bonds, or leaseholds. Such an approach led to much contention, but it was

not until 1853 when the Cairo City Property Trust, a company affiliated with Holbrook,

first put town lots upon the market for sale.

When the end of the Cairo City and Canal Company finally came, Cairo had become

a striking example of a placeless place. The panic that had begun in 1837 increasingly

tightened the availability of credit in the States, while economic uncertainty and

contraction spread abroad. The chief cause of the company’s failure, however, was likely

70 Ibid. 71 Ibid.

32

the downfall of Wright & Co, apparently forced into bankruptcy by other London

banking houses for its dealings with American securities.72 Given the dire economic

climate, Illinois had abandoned its plan for extensive internal improvements and

construction on the Illinois Central, at least for the time being, ceased entirely. Moreover,

since some shareholders of the company had also gone into bankruptcy, the shares of the

land and operations had passed into the hands of assignees.73 Along with the shares went

unified cooperation, as shareholders, bondholders, and mortgagees likely disagreed about

how exactly to proceed.74 Taken all together, it quickly became clear that not only would

the Cairo City and Canal Company fail but that the whole project of constructing a city

might as well, and people panicked. Creditors, shareholders and residents scrambled to

recover what they could. Not surprisingly, Holbrook had slipped out of town prior to the

mayhem, leaving the town in a state of lawless and uncertainty. Whatever the reasons,

“the Cairo bubble” exploded quickly and residents fled the peninsula in droves.75 In just

months, there were not more than a score of families still living there, and since the

construction of some of the levees had been abandoned, the floods of 1842 left the land in

a state of inundation and decay. The only businesses that then thrived were the ones on

wharf-boats moored to Cairo’s shores (see Figure #2 in Appendix). In a very real sense,

Cairo had become mobile and utterly transient: a city of boats afloat on the currents of the

72 Lansden, A History of the City of Cairo, 171.73 “The Past, Present and Future of the City of Cairo,” 51. 74 Ibid. 75 Bradsby, 28.

33

rivers. That same year, Dickens would travel to Cairo and famously memorialize its

notoriety in his travelogue American Notes for General Circulation.

34

2.

“‘This Dismal Cairo’”:

Charles Dickens And

The Politics Of Placelessness

Dickens and Cairo

Charles Dickens’s visit to Cairo, Illinois, was both typical and unusual. Given its

location at the juncture of America’s two great rivers, it was typical for those traveling to

the western territories to pass Cairo via the Ohio en route from the east to destinations on

the Mississippi, and Dickens was no exception. On an April morning in 1842, Dickens

steamed past Cairo for the first time before setting out for St. Louis and a tour of the

Looking Glass Prairie in Illinois. What makes his visit unusual is his caustic description

of Cairo—arguably the most scathing in American Notes, and that in a book made

famous for its harsh critiques of American society. Not even the slave-owning South,

which Dickens briefly toured before setting out for the West, earns such a volcanic report

from his vituperative pen.

Why? What kind of a “place” was Cairo, Illinois, in 1842? By the early 1840s, Cairo

had become linked inseparably from the land-speculation scandal that surrounded its

creation and of which Dickens was well acquainted. Despite the political connections and

well-funded boosterism of its promoters, the second attempt to found a city at the

35

junction of these rivers had recently failed, and what remained were the waterlogged,

ramshackle remnants of a town that seemed never to have actually begun. Appalled by

the conditions of the place, and no doubt angered over the fleecing of the British public

by Cairo’s promoters, Dickens described Cairo as a “detestable morass,” a “dismal

swamp,” “vaunted in England as a mine of Golden Hope, and speculated in, on the faith

of monstrous representations, to many people’s ruin.”76 He would later fictionalize it as

the dreaded “Eden,” to which Martin Chuzzlewit is drawn in pursuit of a vaunted land

deal only to become cheated and disillusioned.

But what American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit both seem to register—more than

anger over fraudulent land speculation—is an acute anxiety over a by-product of

speculation; namely, a foreboding sense of “placelessness” or “non-place” at Cairo and in

America generally. In this regard, Dickens anticipated cultural and humanistic

geographers who perceive an accelerating erosion of place in the modern world; that is,

the sense that “place(s)” increasingly lack variety, depth, and meaning, and instead

function more like way stations in the midst of the intensifying flows and circulation of

contemporary life. American Notes records the increasing mobility of a society devoted

to the dictates of trade, business, and especially speculation, and, in the midst of an

industrial revolution, marked by transience, instability, circulation, and homogenization.

For Dickens, America had become, in contrast to England, a land without roots, with

“married persons living in hotels, having no fireside of their own” because of their

76 Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (New York: Penguin, 2004), 190.

36

devotion to trade.77 Indeed, American Notes critiques the unsettled and mobile dynamic

that Michael Chevalier referred to in the 1830s as “the every-moving sea of speculation”

in America that makes all here “circulation, motion, and boiling agitation.”78 As with

Chevalier, Dickens found that no “place” was sacred, no place was built to last, no place

but bore the signs of the fleeting and the temporary and the flux and flows of capital

tethered to America’s speculating spirit.

The crux of Dickens’s anxiety in American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit, I suggest,

rests in the relation of identity to the erosion of “place.” One can chart throughout the

course of American Notes an increasing unease with the erosive effects of speculation on

“place,” an intensifying sense of “placelessness” or “non-place,” and a concern with what

Lawrence Buell refers to as the “inevitable and shifting relation between being and

physical context.”79 Just as “places” seemed to lack diverse identities—“flatscape[s]”

absent of variety and depth—, so too did Americans seem to lack distinct individual

identities.80 Characterized by a lifeless homogenization, Dickens’ suggests, the people

mirror the blandness of the physical context; identitylessness follows placelessness and

vice versa. Such a formula recalls Philip Fisher’s articulation of the manufacture of

“democratic social space” and America’s “ethos of democratic uniformity.” Lacking a

consistent geography and comprised of a radical mixture of immigrants, Americans,

Fisher argues, founded a common identity on (and within) a homogenous, cellular

77 Ibid., 268. 78 Chevalier, 309. 79 Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, 62. 80 Relph, Place and Placelessness, 79.

37

division of land—a result of the Jeffersonian Land Ordinance of 1785 and the subsequent

rectangular survey—that ignored the terrain’s features and facilitated a fierce, free-

market capitalism.81 Americans were free to move about the land in a “universal and

everywhere similar medium” and enjoy, at least in theory, the same rights and

opportunities everywhere and the same mass-produced products.82 American Notes

registers not only this homogeneity of the land, particularly what Dickens perceives as

the tenuously-constructed human landscapes, but also the homogenized affect of

Americans themselves.

If Americans founded a common identity on the homogenous division of land and

free-market capitalism, land speculation is where those forces converged. The rectangular

survey was implemented largely as a means to shape the land into easily recognizable

plots that would facilitate land sales and spurred the speculative booms of the nineteenth

century.83 Fisher’s “democratic social space,” then, is also speculative space.

Speculation generated the upheavals that kept “place”—unique, rooted, differentiated

place—from firmly taking root. Speculation thrived on (and within) the “everywhere

similar medium” that Fisher identifies. One might even say that speculation kept

everything in a perpetual state of (economic) revolution: a turning over, an incessant

recreation and re-deposition of everything into new forms—a process akin to the pursuit 81 Philip Fisher, “Democratic Social Space: Whitman, Melville, and the Promise of America Transparency,” in The New American Studies: Essays from Representations (Berkeley: University of California, 1991), 72. 82 Ibid. 83 This is not to say that speculation is democratic. In many ways, speculation corrupted the democratic distribution of land. My argument is that speculation contributed to a form of placelessness that resulted from the convergence of a democratic ethos of uniformity with aggressive forms of capitalism, especially land speculation.

38

of a ceaseless frontier. Frederick Jackson Turner’s claim that the frontier held the

promise of “breaking the bonds of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new

institutions and activities,” also holds true for speculation and its consequent

placelessness. While the old European societies bore the heavy burden of “the Past,”

Chevalier notes, Americans adhere to the motto “Go ahead!” “Every body is speculating,

he writes, “and every thing has become an object of speculation.”84 Speculation drives

“[a]n irresistible current [that] sweeps away everything, grinds everything to powder, and

deposits it again under new forms. [. . .] The soil itself, or least the houses, partake in the

universal instability.”85 Yet these “new forms,” as Dickens observes, bear the same signs

of homogeneity as the previous forms; that is, all that is swept away and ground down is

reconstituted again, albeit in perhaps altered form, yet bearing the same signs of

uniformity.

Lastly, the unease in American Notes stems less from the fall-out from speculation

than from the fear that the democratic-capitalist ethos that fostered placelessness might

circulate beyond America’s geographical and political boundaries. This fear is not

entirely unfounded, given the active participation of English investors in American land

speculation and the grave consequences for those across the Atlantic who invested in

Cairo. Just as American placelessness seems to erode distinct identities, for Dickens, it

likewise seems to erode social distinction and hierarchies that keep people, so to speak, in

their place. For Dickens, the loss of identity follows from the loss of social identity. His

84 Chevalier, 305. 85 Ibid., 309-310.

39

remedy lay in the construction of a narrative that aspires to some discursive control over

the instability of American spaces. As Peter Brooks has suggested, narrative

“demarcates, encloses, establishes limits, [and] orders” and this applies as much to the

spatial as the temporal.86 Doreen Massey’s reflections on maps shed light on this: “It is

an old association;” she writes, “over and over we [attempt] to tame the spatial into the

textual and the conceptual; into representation.”87 “It is not the spatial,” she adds, “which

is fixing the temporal but the map (the representation) which is stabilizing time and

space. Like maps, narratives, I suggest, may attempt to fix the spatial, to stabilize the

instable, to demarcate, enclose, limit, and order the troublingly mobile and dynamic, and

this is the work of Martin Chuzzlewit. By emplacing Cairo (“Eden”) within a tightly

controlled plot, Martin Chuzzlewit attempts to demarcate and enclose, to tame the spatial,

to control and order the flows and circulation of American spaces.

Placelessness

When Dickens arrived at Cairo in 1842, he had just completed a tour of the eastern

states, as well as Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. He finds in Cairo not only a site and symbol

of fraudulent land speculation, but also of disturbing and potentially threatening aspects

of American culture as a whole. As Dickens suggests in his concluding remarks to

American Notes, Cairo reflects the Americans’ “love of ‘smart’ dealing, which gilds over

many a swindle and gross breach of trust . . .”88 “The merits of a broken speculation, or a

86 Peter Brooks, Reading for Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 4. 87 Massey, For Space, 20. 88 Dickens, American Notes, 267.

40

bankruptcy, or of a successful scoundrel,” Dickens writes, “are not gauged by its or his

observance of the golden rule, ‘Do as you would be done by,’ but are considered with

reference to their smartness.”89 Dickens invocation here of the “golden rule,” of course,

plays ironically with the idea that Americans gild over swindles, and Cairo is his prime

example. Dickens surely knew of the “gilded” lithographs of Cairo, which he labels the

“mine of Golden Hope,” distributed throughout England and Europe, as well as of the

losses incurred by the British public, although he omits comment on the willing

participation of the British banks in the scheme. “I recollect on both occasions of passing

that ill-fated Cairo on the Mississippi,” he adds, “remarking on the bad effect such gross

deceits must have had when they exploded, in generating a want of confidence abroad,

and discouraging foreign investment.”90 Yet his fellow passengers (Americans) laud

Cairo as “a very smart scheme” and seemingly condone it because “a deal of money had

been made: and that its smartest feature was, that they forgot these things abroad, in a

very short time, and speculated again, as freely as ever.”91 Better than the initial swindle

for Americans is the chance for a second and third fleecing.

Americans are enamored of speculation, Dickens finds, and devoted to business and

trade at the expense of cultural pursuits and even individual identity. Most striking is his

depiction of how the pervasive “air of business” creates a sense of sameness among the

people—a theme that runs throughout American Notes and intensifies as he travels

westward. “. . . I was quite impressed,” he writes, “by the prevailing seriousness and

89 Ibid., 267-68. 90 Ibid., 268. 91 Ibid.

41

melancholy air of business: which was so general and unvarying that at every new town I

came to, I seemed to meet the very same people whom I had left behind me, at the last.”92

The new towns, the people, and their business pursuits are neatly merged here. The “air

of business” drives the creation of “every new town” to which he seems to arrive in

monotonous succession and where he encounters the very same people with the very

same “air of business.” Like the newly minted towns, the people appear fungible, replicas

brought forth from one mold shaped by the “unvarying” pursuit of profit. These pursuits

also come at the expense of a “greater encouragement to lightness of heart and gaiety,

and wider cultivation of what is beautiful, without being eminently and directly useful.”93

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of American uniformity, as Dickens depicts it, is

its kinship with death itself. If death is the great equalizer—the ultimate reduction of all

animated distinctiveness to a lifeless common denominator—then the pervasive sameness

of Americans smacks gravely of the grave. And this death-like uniformity is inextricably

linked to the pursuit of money: to speculation, to finance, and to a constant attention to

the devices of business and trade. Indeed, throughout American Notes his depictions of

financial institutions and business pursuits increasingly take on an air of the macabre. As

if to punctuate a root cause of this morbidity, Dickens descriptions of the general public

bear an uneasy similarity to the former United States Bank in Philadelphia, which he

describes as that “Tomb of many fortunes; the Great Catacomb of investment.”94 The

“depressing influence of the general body” of the public, with its “systematic plodding

92Ibid.,271.93Ibid.,189.94Ibid.,110.

42

weary insupportable heaviness,” parallels the “gloomy walls” of the bank that entomb

fortunes like a subterranean receptacle of the dead; bank and tomb conflate here, as do

their respective contents.95 The bank also presents a paradoxical combination of lightness

and heaviness that underscores the connection between high-flown finance and death: for

instance, the bank is “a handsome building of white marble,” which simultaneously bears

“a mournful ghost-like aspect, dreary to behold.”96 The combination is not as unlikely as

it may seem: just as speculation and finance tend to extract an abstract value from the

material, so too might death abstract a ghost from the body, leaving the body a heavy,

death-like mass. Moreover, the abstract (or ghostly) establishes a more fungible medium.

For example, any parcel of land differs from another in some respect, but once translated

into linear coordinates and represented by deeds or paper currency the differences are

measureable according to like terms and financial equivalents. Dickens depiction of the

bank, with its “cold, cheerless air,” as a place where “the statue of Don Guzman could

alone have any business to transact,” reinforces these processes.97 What better figure,

Dickens seems to ask, than Mozart’s murderous villain (both statue and ghost) to

patronize such a place? Dickens reminds us here also of another connection between

speculation and death: the profoundly harmful, if not murderous, fall-out from

speculative schemes and smart-dealing that Dickens so despised.

Dickens’ depiction of the death-like U.S. Bank recalls its role in the Panic of 1837

and the “ruinous consequences” that could still be seen in Philadelphia. The bank’s

95Ibid.,189.96Ibid., 109.97Ibid., 110.

43

closure, Dickens observes, has “cast (as I was told on every side) a gloom on

Philadelphia, under the depressing effect of which, it yet labored.”98 Moreover, the city

presents the disturbing sameness he observes elsewhere, as well as its root cause, an

influential air of speculation. Like its invariable citizens, the city itself appears

monotonous, “dull and out of spirits,” and “distractingly regular,” and leaves him longing

for a “crooked street.”99 As Dickens wanders through the city, contemplating the

contagion of speculation that pervades its streets, he observes that the thought of “taking

lodgings in Mark Lane over against Market Place, and of making a large fortune by

speculations in corn, came over me involuntarily.”100

While aboard the steamboat Messenger on the Ohio River, Dickens further comments

on the connection between the death-like sameness of the passengers and their uniform

devotion to finance. He writes: “. . . you might suppose the whole male portion of the

company to be the melancholy ghosts of departed book-keepers, who had fallen dead at

the desk: such is the weary air of business and calculation.”101 “The people are all alike,

too,” he adds, “There is no diversity of character. They travel about on the same errands,

say and do the same things in exactly the same manner, and follow in the same dull

cheerless round. All down the table, there is scarcely a man who is in anything different

from his neighbor.”102 Here the people (or at least the men) appear as the disembodied

and spectral equivalents of their material selves who have seemingly undergone a process

98Ibid.,110.99Ibid.100Ibid.101Ibid.,176.102Ibid.,176-177.

44

akin to those of finance and speculation. Like the land, abstracted and commodified for

the purposes of speculation, the “departed book keepers” appear strangely separated from

themselves. Of course, the practices of slavery—the severest form of speculation—

provide the most extreme and urgent analogue here, a subject often discussed in

American Notes and never far from Dickens mind. Dickens’s seems to suggest that, by

and large, the white settlers he encounters have themselves become, in their devotion to

Mammon, reflections of the very god they worship: “The golden calf they worship at

Boston is a pigmy compared with the giant effigies set up in other parts of that vast

counting house [, America] . . . .”103 The golden calf is the dollar, and in that “vast

counting house” the citizens embody the counters and the counted, the speculators and

the specters. The motto E Pluribus Unum becomes literalized and centralized around the

pursuit of dollars: “Out of many, One” mass embodiment of a standardized and sluggish

currency effaced as if by death.

But Cairo represents for Dickens more than just the speculative energies and financial

obsessions of the nation. It typifies the transient character of much of the American

landscape. In contrast to the deep and rooted “sense of place” in England —characterized

by “old churchyards,” “antique houses,” and a sense of rootedness and permanence—the

America landscape seems restless, rootless, mobile, and potentially virulent. The

American landscape is a “flatscape” absent of depth, diversity of landscape, and

authenticity.104 He also anticipates with his depictions the theorizations of

103 Ibid., 36. 104 Relph

45

“placelessness” by contemporary cultural geographers—a concept strikingly appropriate

for Cairo, IL, in the 1840s and indeed for much of America.105 The American landscape,

rife with thinly built towns grounded on the precarious practices and shifting winds of

speculation, seems to lack any stable foundation and is both cause and consequence of

the “sameness” of the citizenry he so dreaded. Just as the people, all committed to the

pursuit of speculation and the pursuit of profit, lack any variety of appearance, so too do

their towns and lands, the objects of speculation. The towns and even the land itself

appear as tenuous and fluid as the speculative fortunes they helped foster or destroy. And

to the extent that identity and place are linked, this sense of placelessness seems both

cause and consequence of the monotonous, death-like sameness of the people. Both land

and people seem locked in a mutually reinforcing process: the more fluid and mobile the

people, the more the land lacks distinctiveness and depth of identity, and vice versa.

Everywhere Dickens finds the cities and towns in America precariously insubstantial

and fleeting, and this reflects the citizens’ transience and itinerant pursuits of business

and speculation. As the geographer Edward Relph suggests, “placelessness” is best

understood as an attitude and the material forms of placelessness its expression.

Traveling through America in the 1830s, Michael Chevalier registers this placeless

attitude: “the American launches with delight into the ever-moving sea of speculation. [. .

.] An irresistible current sweeps away everything, grinds everything to powder, and

deposits it again under new forms. Men change their houses, their climate, their trade,

their condition, their party, their sect. [. . .] The soil itself, or at least the houses, partake

105 Relph, 80.

46

in the universal instability.”106 About Lowell, Massachusetts, Dickens remarks that

“nothing in the whole town looked old to me, except the mud [. . .].”107 “In one place

there was a new wooden church [. . .], which, having no steeple, and being yet unpainted,

looked like an enormous packing-case, without any direction upon it,” and in another

“was a large hotel, whose walls and colonnades were so crisp, and thin, and slight, that it

had exactly the appearance of being built with cards.”108 By likening the church to a

directionless “packing-case,” Dickens highlights the transience of even religious

institutions. The hotel built of “cards” emphasizes both a lack of substance and an

unsteady foundation but also gestures to the speculation in lands that likely contributed to

its construction—gambling and speculation being two sides of the same coin. Dickens

even warns that a heavy foot might “crush the structure beneath him, and bring it rattling

down,” like the bursting of a speculative bubble.109 Even Boston, which Dickens treats

favorably, is “so slight and unsubstantial in appearance—that every thoroughfare in the

city looked exactly like a scene in a pantomime. [. . .] The suburbs are, if possible, even

more unsubstantial-looking than the city.”110 The white wooden houses seem not “to have

any root at all in the ground.”111 Indeed, Dickens emphasizes throughout American

Notes—often in oblique ways—the lack of rootedness in American life and its connection

with an economic system that privileges mobility.

106 Chevalier, 309-310. 107 Dickens, American Notes, 75. 108 Ibid., 75. 109 Dickens, American Notes, 75.110 Ibid., 34. 111 Ibid., 75.

47

Chevalier’s “ever moving sea of speculation” in America precludes, as Dickens

amply suggests, a stability and rootedness to place. Places become instead what Relph

refers to as unstable backgrounds for social and economic roles.112 Yet this instability is

not limited to towns and cities, but also to the land itself. Dickens describes a kind of

upheaval and decay of all things “naturally” rooted, with fallen trees in particular

becoming a metaphor for the uprootedness of the people and the consequences of a

malignant kind of mobility. While traveling on a steamboat to Cincinnati, Dickens

observes the “same old foreground” of uprooted and stunted trees in varying degrees of

decay.113 “The river,” he writes, “has washed away its banks, and stately trees have fallen

down into the stream. Some have been there so long, that they are mere dry grizzly

skeletons. Some have just toppled over, and having earth yet about their roots, are

bathing their green heads in the river, and putting forth new shoots and branches.”114

Here the landscape along the Ohio River, a central artery of commercial traffic and

transportation to America’s western lands, mirrors the uprooted, tenuous towns that are

the casualties of speculation. Like Chevalier’s “ever moving sea of speculation,” the river

provides an apt metaphor, while a pun on the river’s “banks” suggests the floods of paper

money that flowed from the many wildcat banks in the 1830s. Uprooted and awash in the

flows of the river, the personified trees also recall the “ghosts of departed book-keepers”

of Dickens’ fellow passengers. Like the rootless citizenry, the trees suffer from a lack of

rootedness, even as newly “fallen” trees attempt “new shoots and branches” akin to the

112 Relph, Place and Placelessness, 118. 113 Dickens, American Notes, 178. 114 Ibid.

48

newly minted towns sprouting up in the west. Yet without roots both seem doomed to

death and decay.

The sight of Cairo, as well as the Mississippi River, concentrates and intensifies

Dickens’s critique.115 No doubt his sense of the monotony and decay of the landscape had

grossly intensified upon reaching the Mississippi, a river for which he hardly disguised

his contempt. Critics have, in fact, suggested that Dickens found in the Mississippi River

a “metonym for the continent”—for the nation’s lack of fair dealing, its inflated rhetoric,

its hypocrisy, its dubious business practices—and primarily, I suggest, for its sense of

placelessness.116 The Mississippi, “running liquid mud,” has a “strong and frothy current

choked and obstructed everywhere by huge logs and whole forest trees: now twining

themselves together in great rafts [. . .]; now rolling past like monstrous bodies, their

tangled roots showing like matted hair [. . .].”117 Compare this imagery with his

description a few paragraphs earlier of his fellow passengers and the “leaden” mood

aboard the steamboat: “But nothing could have made head against the depressing

influence of the general body. There was a magnetism of dullness in them [. . .]. Such

deadly leaden people; such systematic plodding weary insupportable heaviness.”118

Dickens seems to conflate the passengers with the river, where the passengers present a

morbid and heavy current against which nothing could make head. Although of strong 115 Joseph Meckier suggests that Dickens had an “epiphany” upon reaching Cairo. See Innocent Abroad: Charles Dickens’s American Engagements (Lexington KY: University of Kentucky, 1990), 24. 116 Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, “Topographic Disaffection in Dickens’s American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit,” The Journal of English and German Philology 93, no 1 (1994), pp. 35-54, 38. 117 Dickens, American Notes, 190-191.118 Ibid., 189-190.

49

current, the “liquid mud” of the river suggests an “insupportable heaviness.”119 The

personified trees, moreover, uprooted and tangled together like a mass of dead bodies,

reinforce the macabre consequences of incessant movement and the obliteration of

identity: the trees bind together into one “monstrous body”—that is, one, out of many.

Uprootedness pervades the scenery.

If the Mississippi presents an apt metaphor for Chevalier’s “ever moving sea of

speculation,” Cairo registers as its most overt symptom, or more precisely as both cause

and consequence of a virulent and death-like placelessness. On the morning of April

ninth, Dickens arrived at the juncture of the two rivers at Cairo to find “[. . . ] a spot more

desolate than any we had yet beheld, that the forlornest of places we had passed, were, in

comparison with it, full of interest.”120 Here is Cairo:

At the junction of the two rivers, on ground so flat and low and marshy, that at

certain seasons of the year it is inundated to the house-tops, lies a breeding-place

of fever, ague, and death; vaunted in England as a mine of Golden Hope, and

speculated in, on the faith of monstrous representations, to many people’s ruin. A

dismal swamp, on which the half-built houses rot away: cleared here and there for

the space of a few yards; and teeming, then, with rank unwholesome vegetation,

in whose baleful shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither, droop,

and die, and lay their bones; the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it,

and turning off upon its southern course a slimy monster hideous to behold; a

119 Ibid., 191. 120 Ibid., 190.

50

hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulcher, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise:

a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it: such is

this dismal Cairo.121

People have expended a lot of ink over the years attempting to prove Dickens’s depiction

as grossly exaggerated or to at least provide a rationale for his violent depiction. Perhaps

closest to the mark are the observations of several scholars that Cairo proved an epiphany

for Dickens—a culmination of his increasing discontent and a final realization that his

utopian hopes for this new republic proved unfounded. But Cairo represents more than a

symbol of failure. Cairo is threatening: a miasma, apt to a virulent mobility and capable

of infecting people an ocean away. This “breeding-place of fever,” a potent symbol of the

speculative fever of the nation as a whole—works in concert with the strong currents of

the Mississippi “circling and eddying before it.” In fact, it is difficult even to separate the

river from the ground itself, “so flat and low and marshy” that the flooding river rises to

the “house-tops.” The “disease” of speculation and its dreary consequences are hardly

fixed, but circulatory and “ever-moving.”

Although Cairo seems to present a different brand of placelessness than do the

tenuous and insubstantial towns in Massachusetts and elsewhere, it more accurately

marks an intensification and extreme form of it. Not only is Cairo mobile and seemingly

circulatory, nothing in this “dismal” place is firmly anchored, lasting, or in any way vital.

The promoters abandoned the composition of Cairo and left it instead in a dreary state of

decomposition and de-placement, with “half-built houses [that] rot away” and

121 Ibid.

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surrounded by “rank unwholesome vegetation.” The lack of rootedness and commitment

to authentic place creation has led to a now familiar “rottenness” and to the ultimate

obliteration of identity: death. Cairo itself is figured as a “sepulcher” and swampy grave-

plot worthy, as we have seen, of the “departed ghosts of bookkeepers” in the “great

counting house” of America. Anticipating the vocabularies of contemporary cultural

geographers, Dickens refers to Cairo as “a place without one single quality, in earth or air

or water, to commend it.”122 Certainly “quality” refers to merit, but it also suggests

distinction and characteristic: Cairo is distinguished and characterized not so much by its

uniqueness as by its concentration or intensification of a monotonous and death-like

sense of placelessness.

For Dickens, the risk is less that Cairo exists, but that the effects of placelessness

seem to circulate like a virus, obliterating particularity and distinctive vigor. His text

betrays an anxiety exacerbated during moments of heightened mobility and associated

with an acute unease over the breakdown of the social boundaries and customs that police

identity. The circumstances that lead to the “sameness” of the people that Dickens so

dreads seems to threaten his own sense of self, particularly while in transit on the nation’s

railways and aboard steamboats. On the railroad to Lowell, Dickens observes that

“Everybody talks to you, or to anybody else who hits his fancy.”123 The presumption

implied here is that the “Everybody” makes little or nor distinction between you and

“Everybody” else. The “you” is indistinguishable from the “Everybody.” Later, while

122 Ibid. 123 Ibid., 73.

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boarding a train for Washington, D.C., Dickens writes that men and boys “[. . . ] let down

all the windows; thrust in their heads and shoulders; [. . . ] and fell to comparing notes on

the subject of my personal appearance, with as much indifference as if I were a stuffed

figure.”124 Although he is distinguished here because of his name and foreignness, the

crowd of onlookers remains “indifferent” to his identity and instead reduces him to a

mere object of consideration or speculation.

His harshest critique, however, is reserved for his fellow Englishmen who have

readily abandoned the very social institutions and customs that preserved social and

individual identity: “Of all grades and kinds of men that jostle one in the public

conveyances of the States, they are often the most intolerable companions.”125 These

“Englishmen (small farmers perhaps, or country publicans at home) who were settled in

America, and were travelling on their own affairs” present a case of infection from the

disease (or “fever”) he so fears. First, these men are mobile—men on ”public

conveyances” and “traveling.” Second, all social distinction has eroded. Dickens is

careful to add that these are “small farmers” and “country publicans” to emphasize their

disregard for social standing.

United to every disagreeable characteristic that the worst kind of American

travelers possess, these countrymen of ours display an amount of insolent conceit

and cool assumption of superiority, quite monstrous to behold. In the course

familiarity of their approach, and the effrontery of their inquisitiveness (which

124 Ibid., 127. 125 Ibid.

53

they are in great haste to assert, as if they panted to revenge themselves upon the

decent old restraints of home) they surpass any native specimens that came within

my range of observation.126

His use of the word “United” here implies the “United States,” of course, but also a

sameness and uniformity of character. What seems to cause such unease and even

hostility is the absence of “decent old restraints of home” that anchor and enforce social

identity and that are often reflected in the traditions and institutions of rooted places. In

other words, for Dickens, fixed (social) identity seems to go hand-in-hand with fixed and

stable places, where landscapes often inscribe social hierarchies and arrangements. His

encounters with such men made him “grow patriotic” and presumably long for the

orderings of home.

As if to model the benefits of authentic places and therefore more secure identities

Dickens provides ample descriptions of more rooted places for purposes of contrast. In

St. Louis, Dickens finds the old French portion of the town” endowed with greater

diversity of character and anchored to the soil in a way that sharply contrasts with

American mobility: “…the thoroughfares are narrow and crooked, and some of the

houses are very quaint and picturesque [. . .] such as may be seen in Flanders. Some of

these ancient habitations, with high gable-windows perking into the roofs, have a kind of

French shrug about them; and being lop-sided with age, appear to hold their heads askew,

besides, as if they were grimacing in astonishment at the American Improvement.”127 For

126 Ibid., 125. 127 Ibid., 194.

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Dickens, the French section clearly reflects the diversity of Old World landscapes. His

depiction of its “crooked” streets echoes his earlier dismay with the distracting regularity

of Philadelphia, where he would have “given the world for a crooked street.”128 These

“ancient habitations” suggest tradition and age-old fixity, and they look unhappily upon

the American pursuit of improving or changing the land to increase its value. The

American fascination with improvement lends itself to mobility, as nothing remains

stationary and everything is subject to constant change: “It is hardly necessary to say, that

these [improvements] consist of wharfs and warehouses, and new buildings in all

directions; and of a great many vast plans which are still ‘progressing.’”129 The

“improvements” are the picture of movement and impermanence. The wharfs function as

loading and unloading places for vessels, the warehouses only way-stations for goods and

as places to temporarily stock merchandise. More verb than noun, the American

landscape seems always on the edge of becoming—a perpetual “going to be.”130

Dickens also uses Canada, a place he greatly admires, as a place of comparison.

Quebec, for instance, makes an impression that is “at once unique and lasting.”131 Unlike

the tenuous towns and cities in America, Quebec is “a place not to be forgotten or mixed

up in the mind with other places, or altered for a moment in the crowd of scenes a

traveller can recall.”132 Quebec is a place of distinction, as well as of picturesque

composition: the citadel, the “picturesque steep streets and frowning gateways,” the

128 Ibid., 110. 129 Ibid. 194. 130 Ibid., 213.131 Ibid., 230. 132 Ibid.

55

“splendid views which burst upon the eye at every turn,” mark a sharp contrast with the

death-like sameness of the landscape of in United States. Moreover, from the “motley

crowd of gables, roofs, and chimney tops in the old hilly town,” Dickens observes the

“beautiful St. Lawrence river” below: “all this,” he writes, “framed by a sunken window

in the fortress[,] [. . .] forms one of the brightest and the most enchanting pictures that the

eye can rest upon.”133 The window and the town seem to conspire to create a picturesque

composition that at once orders the landscape. Overall, Canada has nothing of the “flush

or fever in its system,” like the United States, “but health and vigour throbbing to a

steady pulse: it is full of hope and promise.”134 Entirely unlike Cairo, Canada is “full of

hope and promise,” with the “rational comfort and happiness which honest industry may

earn.”135 Although there is business-driven mobility in Canada—the “busy quays of

Montreal; the vessels taking in their cargoes,” the “commerce, roads, and public works—

they are “all made to last.”136 Dickens’s use of italics here underscores his attention to

authentic place creation. The only thing especially lacking in Canada, he adds, is the

quality of the inns, which “are usually bad; because the custom of boarding at hotels is

not so general here as in the States.”137 Canada is less transient and more permanent: that

is, “made to last.”

133 Ibid., 230-231. 134 Ibid., 233. 135 Ibid.136 Ibid. 137 Ibid., 253. Scadder is loosely based on the unscrupulous land speculator in Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow?

56

Martin Chuzzlewit and Eden

Published just two years after American Notes, Martin Chuzzlewit revisits Cairo,

which it fictionalizes as “Eden,” as symbol of fraudulent land speculation and

placelessness. Described as a “hideous swamp,” Eden provides a narrative and

geographic centerpiece for the picaresque journey of young Martin, the novel’s

protagonist, who travels from England to American to make a personal fortune, and who

is drawn by crooked speculators into buying land in the pioneer settlement.138 Mr.

Scadder, the swindling land agent for the “Eden Land Corporation,” serves as the primary

representative of America land speculation and the agent of Martin’s immediate demise.

Dickens’ description of Scadder, moreover, suggests some the primary qualities of

American speculators. “Each long black hair upon his head,” Dickens writes, “hung

down as straight as any plummet line, but rumpled tufts were on the arches of his eyes, as

if the crow whose foot was deeply printed in the corners, had pecked and torn them in a

savage recognition of his kindred nature as a bird of prey.”139 Scadder’s watchful eyes

accord with his practice of speculating, a term that itself suggests visual consideration

and contemplation: “Two grey eyes lurked deep within this agent’s head, but one of them

had no sight in it, and stood stock still.”140 Here his one eye contemplates his

unsuspecting victim, while his lifeless eye suggests the death and suffering that he

delivers to his victims. His hair like a “plummet line” is no doubt a jab at the submerged

138 Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (London: Penguin, 2004), 360.139 Ibid., 338. 140 Ibid.

57

and swampy property, since it gestures to sounding the depth of water rather than to

measurement of dry land. To emphasize Scadder’s unscrupulous methods, moreover,

Dickens includes a drawing by Phiz depicting the shed that serves as the agent’s office

and a conceptual map of the city (see Figure #3 in Appendix). Unlike most American

cities at the time, however, this map is not rectilinear, but web-like. The design loosely

mimics the spider web in the corner of the agent’s office. Just as the web contains caught

flies, so too will Martin and his companion Mark be snared in the speculator’s trap. The

contrast between the imagined city portrayed in the map, which recalls the gilded

lithographs of Cairo circulated throughout England, stands in sharp contrast to the

placeless reality of the Eden that Martin actually encounters.

Although Martin Chuzzlewit depicts Eden as primarily a swamp, it is by no means

static; indeed, this is one of the most compelling and paradoxical features, both in the

novel and in American Notes, of Dickens’ Eden (Cairo). Both Eden “on paper” and Eden

“in fact” are characterized by mobility and circulation, albeit in very different ways. Like

the Cairo depicted by architect William Strickland, Eden “on paper” appears as a hub of

commercial traffic: “It was a small place—something like a turnpike. But a great deal of

land may be got into a dice-box, and why not a whole territory be bargained for, in a

shed? It was but a temporary office too; for the Edeners were ‘going’ to build a superb

establishment for the transaction of their business, and had already got so far as to mark

out the site: which is a great way in America.”141 Dickens’s use of the word “turnpike”

here resonates in multiple ways. It suggests the spiked road barriers once used for

141 Ibid.

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defense, but also the throughways and conduits of road transportation and gates to collect

tolls. Like Eden, they are gateways and liminal spaces, between addresses, and

characterized by movement. While his reference to the “territory” fitting into a “dice-

box” gestures to gambling and specifically to land speculation, the temporariness of the

office (a “shed”) reflects the fleeting and tenuous nature of Eden.

Despite its swampy and stagnant qualities, Eden (“in fact”) is also strangely mobile,

but in a sluggish and oozing way (see Figure #4 in Appendix). As Martin nears Eden, he

encounters uprooted and floating trees that “held up shriveled arms from out the river’s

depths, and slid down from the margin of the land: half growing, half decaying, in the

miry water.”142 Like the unstable land that Dickens describes in American Notes, the

banks of the land are susceptible to the circulatory flows of the rivers, while the uprooted

trees merge with the river and are stuck in a state between life and death. All around Eden

things are “creeping,” “thickening,” “decomposing,” “festering,” “mouldering,”

“settling,” languishing, and oozing.143 Not surprisingly, “The most tottering, abject, and

forlorn among [the score of rotten and decayed cabins at Eden], was called, with great

propriety, the Bank, and National Credit Office. It had some feeble props about it, but

was settling deep down in the mud, past all recovery.”144 Presumably once a wellspring

of cheap paper money and speculation, the bank now is mired in mud and bears the brunt

of decay. The river, moreover, which flows “before the door” of Martin and Mark’s

cabin, reinforces his extreme disillusionment. Having invested his scant savings, Martin

142 Ibid., 358.143 Ibid., 360-63. 144 Ibid., 363.

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surveys the swampy half-village before him and sits, head in hands, “gazing at the current

as it rolled swiftly by, thinking, perhaps, how fast it moved towards the open sea, the high

road to the home he would never again behold.”145 Though the current is swift, it is

appears unlikely to deliver Martin and Mark to their homeland. In the placelessness of

Eden, “return appeared impossible, and restoration to their home a miserable dream.”146

If Eden “in fact” is a turnpike, the toll collector is Charon and their transportation “old

Charon’s boat, conveying melancholy shades to judgment.”147 Thus Eden is a way-station

or in-between space between living and dying.

Dickens’s portrayal of Eden shares the same lugubrious and infectious qualities as

Cairo in American Notes, as well as the connections between placelessness and death.

The images of decay and disease in Eden—the detritus of land speculation—signify this,

as well as the near fatal illness Martin contracts while there. But so too does the lifeless

uniformity of the Americans Martin encounters in the citizenry as a whole. At the

“National Hotel,” Martin encounters guests who “[. . .] in their looks, dress, morals,

manners, habits, intellect and conversation, were Mr Jefferson Brick, Colonel Diver,

Major Pawkins, General Choke, and Mr La Fayette Kettle, over, and over, and over

again. They did the same things; said the same things; judged all subjects by, and reduced

all subjects to, the same standard.”148 Once again, we see E Pluribus Unum literalized

through the conflation of individuals into a bland sameness, and one that parallels the

145 Ibid. 146 Ibid., 358. 147 Ibid.148 Ibid., 335.

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“everywhere similar medium” of placelessness. The bold names of Jefferson and La

Fayette here are ironically combined with the violent surname “Choke” and the mundane

“Kettle,” a combination that mocks their postures of moral superiority and pretensions,

while the other characters share the distinction of military titles, a custom criticized by

many foreign visitors as all too common.149 Dickens’ description points to a double irony

here: In a land where everyone is distinguished, no one is distinguished; indeed, all are

the “same” with every one reduced to one standard “Body” of actions, words, and

thoughts, and the ubiquity of military titles only underscores the collective

commonality.150

Moreover, as we have seen in American Notes, Dickens emphasizes the undergirding

focus of their sameness—money. During an after-dinner party conversation of American

gentlemen, Martin observes that the conversation

[. . . ] was rather barren of interest, to say the truth; and the greater part of it may

be summed up in one word – dollars. All their cares, hopes, joys, affections,

virtues, and associations, seemed to be melted down into dollars. Whatever the

chance contributions that fell into the slow cauldron of their talk, they made the

gruel thick and slab with dollars. Men were weighed by their dollars, measures

gauged by their dollars. The next respectable thing to dollars was any venture

149 For a insightful discussion of names in Martin Chuzzlewit, see Philip V. Allingham’s “The Names of Dickens’s Originals in Martin Chuzzlewit,” The Dickens Quarterly 7, no. 3 (1990), 329-37. Numerous foreign visitors have commented on the widespread use of military titles by Americans in the nineteenth century. 150 Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, 335.

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having their attainment for its end . . . Do anything for dollars! What is a flag to

them!151

The fact that all things can be “melted down into dollars” recalls Chevalier’s observation

that speculation drives “An irresistible current [that] sweeps away everything, grinds

everything to powder, and deposits it again under new forms.152 All here is melted down

and reformed, albeit in the same or similar forms. To build on the conceit, we might also

say that speculation is the fire beneath the cauldron. Speculation turned land into abstract

measurements and financial equivalents, while fueling the tension between the mobility

of capital with place-bound fixity—itself a process of creation and re-creation. Dickens’s

descriptions here also recall the anxieties in the 1780s and 1790s over the establishment

of paper money, with opponents of speculation arguing, as Jane Kamensky notes, that

paper money and the like “amounted to a sort of magic, turning ‘acres by [the] millions’

into ‘transferable, personal, moveable property’—that is, into paper. [ . . . ,] stocks,

bonds, mortgages: paper was one step further removed from the soil it represented.”153

Such notions comport with Dickens’s metaphor of a melting pot of dollars; at root is a

process that transforms all – men included—into fungible units of economic exchange.

Speculation and incessant change seem almost a requirement of patriotism. When

Martin is introduced to Major Pawkins, another “One of the most remarkable men” in

America, Dickens’s informs us that “He was a great politician; and the one article of his

151 Ibid., 266. 152 Ibid., 310.153 Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (New York: Viking, 2008), 35.

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creed, in reference to all public obligations involving the good faith and integrity of his

country, was, ‘run a moist pen slick through everything, and start fresh.’”154 “This,” he

writes, “made him a patriot.”155 Dickens adds,

This made him a patriot. In commercial affairs he was a bold speculator. In

plainer words he had a most distinguished genius for swindling, and could start a

bank, or negotiate a loan, or form a land-jobbing company (entailing ruin,

pestilence, and death, on hundreds of families), with any gifted creature in the

Union. This made him an admirable man of business.156

Here politics and speculation merge, since both involve incessantly starting fresh, with an

unerring commitment to the new. Indeed, Martin sets out for Eden only after he is told

“there is nothing to be done in the old towns.”157 Martin’s speculations are lauded,

moreover, because he thus invests his savings in the “common stock,” a play on the

company stock of Eden and the “common” stock of the people. His engagement with

Eden reflects his venture in the “cauldron” of dollars and thus raises him to the status of

“quite a public man.”158

Dickens’ anxiety in Martin Chuzzlewit, as in American Notes, lay primarily in his

observation that geographical placelessness fosters and reflects a social placelessness. In

America, he suggests, people lack a secure place in the social hierarchy. One might attain

financial success or failure, but little else distinguishes one from another. As critic

154 Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, 261. 155 Ibid. 156 Ibid. 157 Ibid., 334.158 Ibid., 349.

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Patricia Ingham points out, Americans in Martin Chuzzlewit are “seen generically as a

tribe, not individually.”159 Speculation is their national sport, and the dollar their tribal

totem. In Martin Chuzzlewit, Captain Kedgick exclaims, “Our people like ex-citement,”

and excitement is to be found in the speculative pursuit of profit. Chevalier echoes this

sentiment: “[. . .] violent sensations are necessary [for the American] to stir his vigorous

nerves,” and since the pulpit forbids sensual gratification, wine, women, and the display

of luxury, as well as cards and dice, the American, therefore, has recourse to

speculation.”160 “The existence of social order,” he adds, “in the bosom of this whirlpool

seems a miracle, an inexplicable anomaly.”161 This social order, Dickens seems to

answer, is maintained through uniformity—a movement from the distinctive to the

generic—both of people and place.

This uniformity of Americans, for Dickens, extends to their use of the English

language. Throughout Dickens’s oeuvre, the corruption of language or the deviation from

what he sees as standard English marks, as Ingham points out, an “outward sign of

inward forms of corruption.”162 We see this clearly in the colloquialisms and corruptions

of Jonas Chuzzlwit, for instance, and select English characters, but the corruptions of

language in America are found in all ranks of society, particularly when Americans

employ inflated or morally superior rhetoric.163 The fact that language is corrupt in all

159 Patricia Ingham, introduction to The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (London: Penguin, 2004), xviii. 160 Chevalier, 309. 161 Ibid., 311.162 Ingham, introduction, xx. 163 Note that the language here is inflated in ways that mirror the inflation of prices in speculative bubbles.

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ranks of American society disables the use of language as a social marker or reflection of

one’s place in a social hierarchy, the opposite of what language does so readily in

England.

England fairs little better than America in Martin Chuzzlewit, and both countries have

fraud and avarice in abundance. Nevertheless, America serves as a cautionary tale for

England. England may have more than its share of problems, but it is home for the

protagonists and home for Dickens. For better or for worse, England has distinct

individuals and distinct places, distinctly good and distinctly bad. Perhaps Patricia

Ingham is right, that England is “far more sinister and threatening” than America, since at

least in America people know what they are up against.164 No doubt the likes of the

murderous and greedy Jonas Chuzzlewit, the scheming Tigg Montague, and the famously

fraudulent Mr. Pecksniff match, if not outshine, the most corrupt of Americans in the

novel. But herein lies the problem: with few exceptions, it is difficult to point to any

American that stands out as uniquely corrupt, selfish, murderous, or greedy. The

corruption that shines through in English characters is systemic in America, less severe

perhaps, but more diffused, with little chance of escape to a different city or region, or

through the likes of different people. In Ingham’s words, America is “Pecksniff writ

large.”165 All hope is not lost to America: it can still produce a single instance of virtue in

Mr. Bevan, Martin’s benefactor, but the odds seem against it and the exceptions rare. The

busy and business-driven streets of London may have edged out almost all domesticity,

164 Ingham, introduction, xxi-xxv.165 Ingham, introduction, xxi.

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as in America, but England can still provide Martin with the warmth and comforts of

home, as well as a “steak, and strong, stout, stand-up English beer” upon his return.166

London may be “a labyrinth, whereof the mystery was known but to a chosen few.”167

One may grope “for an hour through lanes and bye-ways, and court-yards and passages;

and never once emerge[ ] upon anything that might be reasonably called a street.”168 But

no one will encounter in London the “distractingly regularity” of American streets, nor

leave one “longing for a “crooked street.”169 Although full of rapacity and corruption,

England is home in Martin Chuzzlewit, full of distinctiveness of character and depth of

place.

Despite the notion that America shares with England “the commonest of all vices [,

selfishness],” America still appears to represent a unique threat to England, and one that

Dickens seems to address by emplacing Eden (Cairo) in a tightly woven narrative

structure that asserts some discursive control over the New World’s circulating spaces. In

so doing, Dickens employs a picaresque narrative structure that posits America (and

American spaces) in a cautionary tale, and fixes Eden in particular as the central turning

point in a highly controlled narrative of moral and geographic ordering. In short, he

provides a moral map in the narrative that grafts onto the geographic one. Traveling by

coach, transatlantic packet-boat, railroad, and river steamboat, Martin’s journeys from

Wiltshire to London to New York, to various places in America, eventually to the

166 Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, 517-518. 167 Ibid., 131. 168 Ibid. 169 Dickens, American Notes, 110.

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“hideous swamp [Eden],” where he suffers an almost fatal fever, and then back to

England.170 His geographic progression coincides with his alleged moral progression or

redemption, and Eden marks the point of his moral reversal. “It was long before [Martin]

fixed the knowledge of himself so firmly in his mind that he could thoroughly discern the

truth,” Dickens writes, “but in the hideous solitude of that most hideous place, with Hope

so far removed, Ambition quenched, and Death beside him rattling at the very door,

reflection came, as in a plague-beleaguered town; and so he felt and knew the failing of

his life, and saw distinctly what an ugly spot it was.171 Here “Eden” figures ironically as

an Anti-Eden, where gaining “knowledge” is rewarded and expulsion not only desirable

but vital. To remain in Eden is to die, as Martin discovers and only narrowly avoids.

England is both the physical point of departure and the point of return, and so America

remains land-locked and essentially stabilized, in a narrative sense, between England.

Martin Chuzzlewit thus plots America as the outbound destination from home and crafts

this particular journey as one of potential ruin and death. The reader is cautioned to avoid

the circulatory flows of American spaces, while situating the reader safely back to

England. Moral plot and geographic plot merge here, as the novel maps out Martin’s

journey to moral redemption. America serves as the end road of his selfishness and the

point of moral reversal; Martin bottoms out, so to speak, in Eden, and the reader serves as

witness to the folly of Martin’s “Adventures,” a synonym for speculation, and his almost

ruin in America.

170 Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, 360. 171 Ibid. 497.

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Dickens also emplaces America in the context of a sequence of interlocking chapters

at the center of the novel that alternate between the two societies, with the transition

between them marked by a critical irony that highlights the circulatory and corrupting

aspects of American spaces. In an abrupt transition from Pecksniff’s house in England to

America, Dickens highlights the obtrusiveness of American technology—in the form of

the ubiquitous railroad—and America’s tendencies toward incessant movement. “The

knocking at Mr. Pecksniff’s door,” Dickens writes, “though loud enough, bore no

resemblance whatever to the noise of an American railway train at full speed. It may be

well to begin the present chapter with this frank admission, lest the reader should imagine

that the sounds now deafening this history’s ears have any connection with the knocker

on Mr. Pecksniff’s door [. . .] more than a thousand leagues away [. . .].”172 The clamor of

the American railroad here reaches across an ocean and, as if restless for attention,

interrupts even the narrative itself. In a subtle meta-fictional gesture, Dickens points to a

loud restlessness capable of overwhelming the narrative and also the supposedly more-

rooted places of England. Even Mr. Pecksniff’s house, tucked away in Wiltshire, cannot

escape the railroad’s reach and arguably the call to speculation that so closely

accompanies it. By overlapping the two chapters, letting each chapter and geographic

location bleed into the other, Dickens suggests the susceptibility of England, while

simultaneously interlocking American spaces within the narrative, as if to cordon them

off.

172 Ibid., 327.

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The stakes of placelessness in Martin Chuzzlewit are clear. As in American Notes,

placelessness fosters a lack of variety, both of landscape and people, a bland lifelessness

absent of beauty, and a transience and mobility that destabilizes the vitality and

rootedness of communities. Such placelessness, as Relph suggest, derives from an

attitude of placelessness that is inextricably linked with land speculation. Speculation,

with its fleetingness, its lack of commitment to authentic place creation, and its emphasis

on capital accumulation, fueled this placelessness in America in the nineteenth century.

For Dickens, Americans’ “Go ahead!” spirit is expressed most clearly in speculation and

is in turn linked to death. Before Martin sets out for America, Dickens warns of the

potential consequences of uprootedness in a passage that seems to sum up his critique.

“Change begets change,” he writes.

Nothing propagates so fast. If a man habituated to a narrow circle of cares and

pleasures, out of which he seldom travels, step beyond it, though for never so

brief a space, his departure [. . .] would seem to be the signal for instant

confusion. As if, in the gap he had left, the wedge of change were driven to the

head, rending what was a solid mass to fragments; things cemented and held

together by the usages of years burst asunder in as many weeks. The mine which

Time has slowly dug beneath familiar objects, is sprung in an instant; and what

was rock before, becomes but sand and dust.”173

All that characterizes America, at least for Dickens, seems here represented: incessant

change, movement, and the shifting sands of speculation. For Dickens, to disrupt the

173 Ibid., 288.

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rootededness of one’s life, one’s community, one’s “narrow circle of cares and

pleasures,” is to invite confusion, destruction, and death. If Americans, as Dickens

insists, seek nothing but change, then America is doomed to become “sand and dust,”

ground into powder, and perhaps deposited again under new forms. Like the original

Eden of Genesis, expulsion from the garden meant death: “for dust thou art, and unto dust

shalt thou return.”174 In Dickens’ American “Eden,” the reverse is true.

174 Genesis 3:19b.

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3.

“Thy Placeless Power”:

Melville, Mobility,

And The Poetics Of Placelessness

“It gives as great a shock to the mind to think of pure nothing in any one place, as it does to think of it in all; and it is self-evident that there can be nothing in one place as well as in another, and so if there can be in one, there can be in all.”

Jonathon Edwards, “Of Being”

“Nothing has an enduring place, except in so far as its place is determined in our minds.”

Rene Descartes, Principles of Philosophy

Two years before Charles Dickens traveled the Mississippi River past Cairo, Illinois,

during his 1842-American tour, Herman Melville visited his uncle in Galena, located in

the Northwest section of the state.175 The Panic of 1837 had crippled much of the nation

175 Dickens records his impressions of Cairo, Illinois, in his 1841 travelogue American Notes for General Circulation. Cairo was the site of a fraudulent land speculation venture that involved great financial loss for British citizens and banks alike. In what has become an infamous passage,

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and the unemployment rate, as much as ninety percent in some urban areas, had

skyrocketed. Just twenty at the time, Melville was eager to begin an occupation and

hoped that Illinois might just prove out. The Galena Directory for 1847 describes the

town as far enough away from the Mississippi “to be free from the pestilential influence

of its miasmatic exhalations,” yet near enough to partake in its commercial potential.176

With its economy based on lead mining, Galena had escaped much of the pain inflicted

by the Panic, and thus many men, especially from New England, had left their homes in

the East to seek their fortunes there. Gamblers and gambling halls abounded in Galena, as

did many steamships coming and going from its port. In short, Galena was a boomtown

and by 1845 had become the most important commercial port along the Mississippi.177

Yet Melville found his uncle, whose family was sick with various fevers from the

unhealthy climate, in serious financial trouble and with criminal charges pending for

embezzlement from his former place of employment. With few options and little or no

financial support, Melville left Galena and within six months signed onto the whaleship

Acushnet, which would carry him far from home and well into the Pacific.

The trip to Galena provided Melville with a first-hand experience of trans-Allegheny

America, as well as a likely first-hand glance of Cairo, Illinois, the place that would later

serve as the narrative centerpiece of The Confidence-Man. That the Mississippi serves as

the setting for Melville’s great satire of the nation is in keeping with his assertion in

Dickens describes Cairo as a swampy and deadly locale lacking any redeeming qualities whatsoever. He would later fictionalize Cairo as Eden in his novel Martin Chuzzlewit. 176 The Galena Directory, and Miners Annual Register for 1847-8, Number One (Galena, 1847), 5. 177 John W. Nichol, “Melville and the Midwest,” PMLA 66, no. 5 (1951), pp. 613-625.

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Israel Potter that “the Western spirit is, or will yet be (for no other is or can be), the true

American one.”178 That Cairo proves the final resting spot of the Fidèle and marks the

exact middle-point of the novel, with twenty-two chapters on each side, suggests its

centrality to Melville’s satire. This makes sense geographically: Cairo rests at the

confluence of America’s two great rivers—the Mississippi and Ohio—and thus marks the

convergence of a watershed that drains the better part of the continent. The “great

Mississippi musters his watery nations,” writes Melville in Mardi, including the “Ohio,

with all his leagued streams.”179 Cairo makes sense from a thematic perspective if we

consider its beginnings as a fraudulent land-speculation venture (a confidence game of

the highest order) and particularly its aura in the mid-nineteenth century of ceaseless

mobility and placelessness. By the time Melville penned The Confidence-Man, Charles

Dickens had already gone a long way to memorializing Cairo as “a breeding-place of

fever, ague, and death; vaunted in England as a mine of Golden Hope, and speculated in,

on the faith of monstrous representations, to many people’s ruin.”180 Melville

incorporates Dickens’ reading and employs Cairo as a metonym for and symbol of the

nation’s damaged social spaces.

Drawing on the field of cultural geography, the following pages adopt Cairo as a case

study and geographic-historical lens through which to investigate Melville’s unease with

the erosion and absence of abiding places, which in turn are linked to proliferating spatial 178 Herman Melville, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years in Exile (New York: G.P. Putnam & Co., 1855), 244. 179 Herman Melville, Typee, Omoo, Mardi, ed. G. Thomas Tanselle (New York, Library of America, 1982), 1023. 180 Dickens, American Notes, 190.

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mobilities in the first half of the nineteenth century. While critics have pointed to

Melville’s celebration of travel and the freedoms of movement, fewer have commented

on his concern for the consequences of mobility on the integrity of place and the

implications of placelessness for identity and authorship alike. What we see in Melville’s

works, particularly in Moby-Dick and culminating in The Confidence-Man, is a place-

anxiety or place-panic that derives in part from the accelerating velocities of modernity

and a sense of the increasing loss of stable, bordered, and bounded places.181 In extreme

forms, such placelessness figures forth in his works as the void, a boundless and eternal

“Nothing” akin to infinity and zero wherein all distinction of identity and place disappear.

Melville registers other permutations in the increasing loss of distinct and delineated

places, in natural erosion and ecological decay, in the rapid building and wearing out of

place, and in the transportation technologies that underwrote many of these phenomenon.

I argue that we can chart an evolution from Moby-Dick through The Confidence-Man in

Melville’s responses to the dizzying effects of mobility and to the instability of place. In

the former novel, Melville posits an internal topography of the self that retains the

integrity of distinct borders and heterogeneous identity. What hope this move offers for a

stable position in the midst of incessant mobility disappears in The Confidence-Man, his

dark satire of the nation, where Melville figures Cairo as the site of an apocalyptic

collapse of distinction that produces a void-like state. In so doing, he challenges the 181 My use of the terms “place-anxiety” and “place-panic” is informed by the work of philosopher Edward Casey, particularly as those terms are discussed in Getting Back into Place: Toward A Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 2009). For Casey, we are apt to experience place-anxiety or place-panic when “we confront the imminent possibility of there being no place to be or to go. We feel not so much displaced as without place (ix-x). An extreme example, he suggests, is the horror of the nuclear annihilation of places.

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prevailing myth of progress in the nineteenth century tethered to and defined by mobility,

yet simultaneously proffers the chance for renewal of distinctiveness, stability,

rootedness, and difference.

Beyond examining Melville’s thematic interventions to the challenges posed by

mobility and placelessness, my aim is to explore the aesthetic and stylistic shifts

associated with mobility and to do so in light of place-related anxieties. Like Hawthorne,

Kirkland, Whitman, and Twain, Melville attempts to articulate subtle (and not so subtle)

transformations, many on the edge of semantic availability, that characterize the period

known as “the great acceleration” and that are closely associated with fierce forms of

free-market capitalism. He adopts, in turn, an aesthetic and style that punctuate the

cultural-geographic shifts posed by mobility and the diverse forces that undermine stable

and abiding places. Melville serves, then, as an early voice that antedates the on-going

cultural debates and ecocritical concerns over the role of place in modern life, the

synergies and antagonisms between the local and the global, and the tensions between the

rooted and the mobile. His novels offer a genealogy of placelessness in the United States,

as well as a set of visions for not only understanding the effects wrought by the

increasing velocities of modern life, but also for navigating its ever-increasing matrix of

in-between spaces, non-places, vacancies, and “flatscapes.”

The Great Acceleration

Despite our familiarity with the massive expansion of transportation and

communication technologies in the first-half of the nineteenth century known as the

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“Great Acceleration,” it remains nevertheless difficult today to imagine the explosive

effects wrought on almost all peoples’ lives. In 1815, a network of short roads, often

poorly maintained and difficult to traverse, connected family farms to nearby towns or

docks on navigable waterways that served as the main arteries for long-distance travel

and commerce.182 Realizing the need to unite the nations’ vast land holdings—a task that

became imperative following the Louisiana Purchase—Albert Gallatin, along with

Thomas Jefferson, proposed the creation of a system of roads and canals stretching from

Maine to Georgia and from the Mississippi to the Atlantic.183 Gallatin’s idea to create

both national unity and a national market through an interconnected transportation system

was realized in the decades between 1800 and 1870.184 Between 1816 and 1840, the end

of the canal boom, some 3,326 miles of artificial waterways were constructed—enough

miles to span the entire continent—at a total cost of roughly $125 million (about $3.4

billion today).185 The Erie Canal, which re-shaped the economic and social landscapes of

both the East and West, opened for business in 1819, the year of Melville’s birth.186

The invention of steam power in the early 1800s was the first artificially-powered

propulsion system in human history.187 In 1811, the steamboat New Orleans set out from

Pittsburgh to navigate for the first time by steam power the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

The occasion coincided not only with the appearance of a comet that passengers saw

182 Howe, 40. 183 Ruth Schwartz Cowan, A Social History of American Technology (New York: Oxford University, 1997), 93-94. 184 Ibid., 97. 185 Ibid., 104.186 Ibid., 103. 187 Ibid., 99.

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blaze across the sky at the location of Cairo, but also with the New Madrid Earthquakes

that tumbled trees and river banks into the roiling currents. Squatters on the river,

shouting at the passengers aboard the New Orleans, claimed the earthquake was God’s

retribution for harnessing nature in the form of steam.188 Just nine years later, steamship

service was provided on all of the tidal rivers of the East Coast and in Chesapeake Bay.189

Seventeen steamships plied the western rivers in 1817 and 69 did so by 1820. By 1855,

there were 727.190 With increased speed and greater carrying capacity (3290 tons in 1817;

170,000 tons in 1855), steamboat transportation increased a hundredfold between1820

and 1860. Such ships transformed life on western rivers where traffic had long consisted

of flat-bottomed barges powered by poles and human strength. Larger steamers provided

service on the Great Lakes, especially on Lake Erie. Steamboats, like Melville’s Fidèle,

were faster than any other mode of transportation at the time.191 Where flat boats had

taken up to six weeks to float from Pittsburgh to New Orleans and four months to go

back up river, the steamboat Enterprise made the trip in 1819 in twenty-five days, and by

1850 much larger ships made it in two weeks or less.192 During his trip to Galena,

Melville traveled aboard several western steamboats, one of which likely carried him

down the Mississippi River to Cairo and up the Ohio River, the passage that Twain’s

Huck and Jim famously fail to accomplish.

188 Bradsby, 20. 189 Cowan, A Social History of American Technology, 108. 190 George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution: 1815-1860 (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1951), 63-64; see also, Cowan, A Social History of American Technology, 108. 191 Cowan, A Social History of American Technology, 110. 192 Ibid., 110.

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The railroads surpassed all of these technologies in terms of speed and volume of

traffic, although these transportation systems were often integrated. Between 1830 and

1840, railroads had grown from an infant technology into the predominant transportation

system in the United States, with the nation’s railroad use far surpassing that of any other

country. In 1840, the United States had almost twice the number of railroad mileage than

all of Europe,193 with the total mileage of railroads (3,328 miles) matching that of canals.

By 1850, it had expanded to 8,879.194 During the land-boom years of the 1850s, and

especially in 1857, mileage soared, reaching 30,626 in 1860. Of course, land speculation

and railroads had always come hand-in-hand. The promotion of Cairo was premised on

the creation of the Illinois Central Railroad, which Paul Wallace Gates describes as “a

grand scheme conceived by speculators to increase the value of their lands.”195

Progression or movement through space was also frequently conflated with historical

movement or “Progress.”196 New metaphors of mobility also began to spring up, with

“circulation” and “progress” being perhaps the most common.197

Speed and mobility became entangled not only with “Progress” but also with national

identity and democratic freedoms, links that would become common refrains in United

States’ history. Indeed, it would be difficult to parse the automobile or the turnpike from

American identity or popular notions of democracy. To move one’s body incessantly

193 Note that Europe had 1,818 miles of railroads, while the Unites States had about 3,000. Taylor, The Transportation Revolution: 1815-1860, 79-80. 194 Ibid., 84. 195 Gates, The Illinois Central Railroad, 24. 196 Thrift, 200. 197 Ibid.

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through space by means of transportation technologies was both expression and physical

enactment of American identity and democratic social mobility. Writing for Harper’s

New Monthly Magazine in June 1865, Robert Tomes would ascribe a uniquely mobile

temperament to Americans: “The American is a migratory animal. He changes places

with such facility that he never seems so much at home as when leaving it.”198 Tomes

naturalizes movement here as an essential characteristic of national identity, with places

serving as way stations or fixed nodes in networks of traffic. Note also how the idealized

noun “home” is set aside for the predicate verb phrase. The American is located or

positioned as most “at home” in the temporal act of departure from it. Tomes continues:

The facilities for travel are in proportion to the American necessity for practicing

it. With miles of railroad and length of navigable river more than those of all the

rest of the world together, a citizen of our vast republic passes with ease and

rapidity from the Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, or from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Thus readily moving over a great continent, within the limits of his own country,

he becomes almost unconscious of space, and so habituated to travel that he

thinks no more of counting the hundreds of miles of his frequent journeys, by

railway and steamer, than the steps of his daily walk.199

Here travel becomes less an option than a necessity: space demands movement for the

American, and movement becomes a necessary condition of being American. The Great

198 Robert Tomes, “The American on Their Travels,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 31, no. 181 (June 1865): 57. 199 Ibid.

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Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, like the vast and physically differentiated landscapes

between New York and California, become little more than a medium through which

travelers pass, as particularity gives way to a universal and everywhere-similar medium

for movement. The generic traveler, like the landscape itself, also becomes abstracted.

Unconscious of space and always en route, bodily steps are replaced by the passivity of

mechanized travel, the convenience of ample facilities for comfort and consumption, and

the ease of speed over vast distances.

“Thy Placeless Power”

In many of Melville’s novels, the concern we see with mobility has less to do with the

act of incessant movement per se than with the consequent instability or diminishment of

the stopping place. For Melville, any vision of progress linked to mobility carries serious

implications for place, and he mounts a stark critique of such visions in Moby-Dick and

particularly in The Confidence-Man, as we shall see. The vertiginous mobility erupting

about him at mid-century, he shows, exacerbated the disappearance of richly varied and

distinct experiences of place and the deterioration of bordered, bounded, sound, and solid

places. In making such connections, Melville anticipates the contemporary voices that

connect the proliferation of placelessness in the modern world with incessant movement

and speed. As geographer Nigel Thrift points out, “In a world of ever-intensifying

mobility it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine space as bounded,” as localities lose

their spatial individuality and autonomy to become diminished points in the circulation of

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traffic.200 Thrift’s description of the transformation of place into “almost/ not quite

spaces”—that is, into nodes that channel, serve, or direct accelerating flows, vectors, and

velocities—resonates with Robert Tomes’ observations of the American who readily

sheds places and feels most “at home” in movement.201 In both instances, place (even

home) is reduced to the status of a kind of way station in networks of movement. For

Melville, the reduction of place to a mere resting space includes the increasing loss of

stability and integrity. Indeed, he foreshadows the (quite Melvillian) observation by

Deleuze and Guattari that “Between things does not designate a localizable relation going

from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal

movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that

undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.”202 In Deleuze and Guattari’s

figuration, the “banks” stand in for place and the “stream” for the ever-accelerating

mobility that accelerates even more so as place erodes. Melville employs these images of

flowing water and eroding soil as metaphors for the erosive relationship between mobility

and place in Moby-Dick and later in The Confidence-Man, where the Mississippi River

figures as antebellum mobility. Yet Melville develops his understanding and expression

200 Nigel Thrift, 222. For an interesting discussion of the relation between mobility and place, see also anthropologist Marc Augé’s Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, vii-xxii. As I discuss in the Introduction, Augé’s study examines “non-places,” or the malls, motorways, and airports that comprise what he terms supermodernity. For Augé, non-places are “unprecedented extension[s] of spaces of circulation, consumption and communication corresponding to the phenomenon we identify as ‘globalization.’” For an extended treatise on the fate of place in the modern world, see Edward Casey’s Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. 201 Ibid., 222. 202 Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 25.

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of placelessness most fully in Moby-Dick, where he searches for a response

commensurate with its challenges.

The ocean provides Melville with perhaps the best location to contemplate place in its

most elemental forms. It compels him to ponder questions about the importance and

absence of place and ultimately the relation between place and the divine. In Moby-Dick,

the sublime immensity of the ocean conjures a sense in Ishmael of the infinite: “[I]n

landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God.”203 To go to sea

brings with it the chance to trace the world back to its prehistoric origins, back to the very

creation of the world. Upon descending into its “unwarped primal world,” Pip discovers

“God-omnipresent,” while on the ocean floor he finds “God’s foot upon the treadle of the

loom.”204 From out of the ocean’s “firmament of waters,” God weaves the earth’s places

into existence.205 Melville’s use of the word “firmament,” moreover, references what is

arguably the first act of creation (the separation of earth and sky) and in turn the first

creation of place. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, central to Moby-Dick’s symbolic

architecture, Genesis begins with God’s establishment of the horizon, distinguishing light

from darkness and sea from sky: “And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst

of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’ And God made the firmament,

and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were

203 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1967), 97. 204 Ibid., 347. 205 Ibid.

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above the firmament; and it was so.”206 As Melville recognizes, the creation of the

horizon in Genesis provides the first act of spatial distinction.207 Philosopher Edward

Casey points out the importance of such distinction in his landmark study on place, where

he explains that we need the horizon if the world is to retain its identity. Without it, he

argues, we would be lost in “a primal mist of indifferentiation, a perceptual morass, a

‘slush’ of indetermination.”208 Thus the ability to posit oneself in one place as opposed to

another begins with God’s separation of sea from sky. In this cosmological framework,

Melville suggests, God and emplacement are inextricable. But just as the presence of God

can explain the creation of distinct and differentiated places, God’s absence can also

engender a terrible sense of placelessness.

If the source of Melville’s unease with mobility lay in the diminishment of place, his

place-anxiety or place-panic derives from the possibility of total placelessness or atopia,

with the threat of the “void” at the extreme end of the placeless spectrum. The fear of the

void, an infinite, vacant expanse of space, haunts Melville’s Moby-Dick and helps to

206 Gen. 1: 1-7. The issue of place inevitably comes up in most creation myths. The narratives of cosmic creation often must involve movement along some temporal sequence (i.e., Before/ After) from placelessness to place-filled creation. The act of creation becomes increasingly complex when we consider that the initial creative act requires some place from which to occur. In other words, the act of creation must have its own place. For a fascinating discussion of the role of place in creation narratives, see Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 3-22. 207Gen.1:2retellsthestoryofcreationinwaysthatperhapsmorerobustlyemphasizeplace.HereGodformsmanfrom“thedustoftheground,andbreathedintohisnostrilsthebreathoflife;andmanbecamealivingsoul”inanactoffusionthatarguablymeldsthephysicalpropertiesofplacewiththespiritual.Godalsocreatesunique,geographicallyoriented,andpurposedplaces:“AndtheLordGodplantedagardeneastwardinEden;andthereheputthemanwhomhehadformed.”208 Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, 11.

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explain his fear of the loss of distinct and delineated places. In the diminishment of place,

Melville sees a frightening slide away from particularity toward de-centered universality,

from bounded place to infinite space, and from individuality to the diffusion (and

possible destruction) of the self. The ideas of universalism and infinite space were only

tolerable for Melville if in fact a divine spirit infused the universe. One might forfeit

particularity (of self, of place) with some comfort at the prospect that God’s essence

infuses the empty spaces of the universe, as Christian scholars asserted. The claim by

Andrew Delbanco, that Melville could never escape the suspicion that “his feelings for

divine immanence were illusory—and at the next moment, the luminous world fades

away and he finds himself in chill and darkness,”209 echoes Hawthorne’s well-known

observation that Melville “can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.”210

Ishmael’s confrontations with “the heartless voids and immensities of the universe” are

likewise indissociable from the question tersely posed by Starbuck, “Great God, where

are you?”211 As we see in Moby-Dick, placelessness is a tolerable notion only in a God-

infused universe; in the absence of the divine, the icy vacancies of the universe inspire

the deepest anxiety.

The void appears throughout Moby-Dick in various shades and permutations, yet its

sharpest edge is figured forth in the white whale, whose hieroglyphic nature and

209 Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York: Vintage, 2005), 282. 210 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English Notebooks. ed. Randall Stewart (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1941), 432. 211 Melville, Moby-Dick, 422.

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impenetrable whiteness is redolent with infinities and voids.212 The terror of the whale’s

“placeless power” is prefigured in Redburn when the eponymous character gazes from

the ship’s rigging at night into the “black gulf [of the ocean], hemmed in, all round, by

beetling black cliffs. I seemed all alone; treading the midnight clouds; and every second,

expected to find myself falling—falling—falling, as I have felt when the nightmare has

been upon me.”213 Redburn’s vision occasions the deepest anxiety because he gazes upon

the vista of the cosmic abyss. Indeed, there is no place to catch him from falling. The

passage echoes Pascal’s pronouncement uttered two centuries earlier that “[t]he eternal

silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.”214 The whiteness of the whale, of course,

elicits a similar reaction.215 Ishmael queries,

Is it that by [whiteness’s] indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and

immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of

annihilation, when beholding the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness

is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the

concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness,

212 Robert Martin Adams, NIL: Episodes in the Literary Conquest of Void During the 19th Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 144. 213 Melville, Moby-Dick, MD, 417. Melville, Reburn: His First Voyage (New York: Penguin, 1986), 113. 214 Blaise Pascal, Pensées. ed. L. Lafuma (Paris: Editions de Luxembourg, 1951), fragment no. 201. The fragment reads in French as “Le silence éternal de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.” 215 I agree with Robert Martin Adams that to assign the whale any specific signification, even the void, reduces the book’s import. I also agree with his expansive assessment that the whale becomes “a multiple metaphoric window opening on Nothing.” See Adams, NIL, 144.

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full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism

from which we shrink?216

The threat here that so troubles Ishmael and that conjures the void is the absence of

specificity or differentiation in the blankness of whiteness. If whiteness is all-colors, it is

simultaneously no color, and herein lies the rub for the democratic ideal of e pluribus

unum. To achieve the universal is to forfeit unique personality and the particulars that

make up the individual and the author alike. Melville finds in the void a cosmic analogue

for the philosophical conundrums of a democratic ethos of uniformity. The white whale,

of course, succeeds in destroying the Pequod, whose crew is ripped into the void-like

“yawning gulf” of the sea, with the concluding image of the vortex neatly merging

mobility—mechanical, boundless, endless circular motion—with destruction.217

Subtler variations of the void appear in the romantic effort, simultaneously alluring

and problematic, to paper over it with Pantheism. Ishmael succumbs to this temptation

when in a moment of heightened sensation brought about by squeezing the gelatinous

sperm he desires to forego his own particularity to join in with the universal. “I squeezed

that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; [. . .] I found myself unwittingly squeezing

my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules [. . .]. Come; let

us squeeze hands all around; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us

216Melville,Moby­Dick,169.217 David Charles Leonard, “Descartes, Melville, and the Mardian Vortex.” South Atlantic Bulletin 45, no. 2 (1980): 13-25.

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squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.”218 One could

hardly imagine a more democratic sentiment. The moment transcends its obvious

homoeroticism to evoke an orgiastic merging of selves, wherein Ishmael embraces a

benevolent pantheism—akin to a kinder, gentler void—that promises brotherhood and

eternal fellowship, if not union with the divine. As with the strict void, however,

individual identity here is forfeited, along with the distinctiveness of material objects and

place. Where the crystallized sperm begins or his fellow shipmates end becomes

perceptually uncertain, akin to the “colorless all-color of atheism.” The whiteness of the

“very milk and sperm of kindness” serves as an optimistic rebuke to the chilly voids and

vacancies shadowed forth by the whiteness of the whale.

The consequences of self-forfeiture or self-diffusion are broached again in the often-

quoted chapter, “The Mast-Head.” Once again the reverie seems to infuse the universe

with a kind of benevolence, yet it belies the reality of physics and the ocean waters

below. The youth in the mast-head imagines himself dissolving into the undulating

motion of the waves beneath him:

[. . .] lulled into such an opium-like listlissness of vacant, unconscious reverie is

this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at

last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of

that deep, blue bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; [. . .] But while

this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at

218 Melville, Moby-Dick, 349.

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all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover.

And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you

drop through that transparent air in to the summer sea, no more to rise for ever.

Heed it well, ye Pantheists.219

Notable here are the recurring images of repetition and duplication with merger and

union: the ceaseless cadence or rhythm of the waves blends in the vacancy of his

thoughts. The sentences themselves move forward softly punctuated with commas and

semi-colons until the hard stop of the period, as the youth’s identity returns. Vacancy

lingers here as both text and subtext, while Descartes’ vortices again suggest ceaseless

movement without the promise of a final rest or a final meaning.220

In Moby-Dick, Melville’s response to these place-anxieties, all of which, as we have

seen, implicate the integrity of the self, is to articulate a space within the individual-

author that is both impregnable and sovereign, secure and bounded, and particular and

unique. In “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” he describes the ideal American author as “the

man who, like Russia or the British Empire, declares himself a sovereign nature (in

himself) amid the powers of heaven, hell, and earth.” The parenthetical emplacement “(in

himself)” posits a bordered and secure topography within the self. Such is an act of will

and a declaration of individual and authorial independence akin to the creation of

nationhood. Authorship thus becomes not a cosmopolitan admixture, but particular and

specific. Moreover, it is decidedly topographic in nature, a locale that one might delineate 219 Ibid., 140. 220 Leonard, “Descartes, Melville, and the Mardian Vortex,” 13-25.

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on a map and a secured place that one is arguably free to move about the land or “watery

part of the world” secure and intact.221 In this space the author is free to escape what

Melville describes in the same essay as the world’s “dull common places” or the

proliferation of what Philip Fisher describes as “democratic social space,” an everywhere

similar medium that equalizes all citizens toward homogeneity.222 Democracy in

principle, Ishmael maintains, “radiates with end from God; Himself! . . . [T]ake high

abstracted man alone and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same

point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary

duplicates.”223 It is this unnecessary duplication, this common-denominator of place and

self, the “dumb blankness” in the landscape of snow, that Melville aspires to escape by

locating place in the self.

At stake for Melville is nothing less than the autonomy of the authorial-self and the

survival of the individual whose very being is premised on the existence of place. As

Heidegger reminds us, “To be is to be in place.” Although certainly not Melville’s

mouthpiece in Moby-Dick, Father Mapple and his pulpit, a “self-containing stronghold,”

suggest the kind of emplaced authorial-self that Melville envisions. Ishmael observes

“Father Mapple after gaining the height, slowly turn round, and stooping over the pulpit,

221 I agree with Wai-Chee Dimmock’s analysis in Empire of Liberty that for Melville “Authorship is almost exclusively an exercise in freedom, an attempt to proclaim the self’s sovereignty over and against the world’s.” Wai-Chee Dimmock, Empire of Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Where I depart from her argument is in its insistence that Melville internalized the logic of empire and manifest destiny. Instead, I read Melville’s spatialization of the self as an assertion of bounded particularity. 222 Fisher, 70-111.223 Melville, Moby-Dick, 387.

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deliberately drag up the ladder step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving

him impregnable in his little Quebec.”224 Bounded and impregnable, Father Mapple’s

self-sovereignty is anchored to and defined by a stabilized geography that distinguishes

him from the members of his congregation. We might even say that his proprietary

relationship with the land (his little Quebec) lends him the Lockean grounds for selfhood.

We again see this spatialization of the self in the “Isolatoes” aboard the Pequod, who do

not acknowledge “the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate

continent of his own.”225 And like the nation itself, “Yet now, federated along one keel [.

. .].”226 The model set forth here by Melville captures the challenge of the young republic

to retain the distinct independence of the Isolatoes, each rooted to his own unique

continent and joined in common purpose without succumbing to “the common continent”

or “mankind in mass.” Of course, Ahab manages to frustrate this very challenge by

violating or breaching the integrity of the individual selves and by ultimately absorbing

the crew into “one and all with Ahab.” By doing so, Ahab bends the liberty of the

individual to his own will and into a common mass of men turned equally to his goals.

* * *

The threat of the void, as it is figured at sea in Moby-Dick, appears in other

permutations on the land itself, where we find it suggested in Melville’s later works in the

aura of placelessness and in the restless velocities and mobilities of modernity. Indeed,

224 Ibid., 43. 225 Ibid., 108. 226 Ibid.

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the void’s vacancies echo in the lack of abiding places and in the erosive instability of the

land, as we see in Melville’s mythical representation of the island of Nantucket (see

Figure #5 in Appendix). Prior to his writing Moby-Dick, Melville had never visited the

island, and its role as a major whaling port had long been superseded by New Bedford.

Yet Melville’s representation revives its fabled past as the primary port and profit center

for the world’s whale fisheries. With a short chapter devoted to it, Melville portrays its

culture as one of almost pure mobility. We are told that Nantucketers exceed the imperial

nations in global reach and spatial ambition: “Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile

Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing

banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's.”227

Nantuckers are all movement: they go, issue forth, “take to the sea,” “overrun,” wade out,

push off, launch, and “conquer.”228 In addition to their economic pursuit of whale oil,

their commitment to mobility may stem from their island’s own lack of determinacy: it

seems forever poised on the verge of watery disintegration. In a curious aside, Melville

requests that readers take out a map and peruse the island, as if its cartographic (and

literary) representation might help to stem its erosion or give the island a more stable

shape or form.

Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world

it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, [. . .] Look at it—a mere hillock,

and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than

227 Ibid., 62-63. 228 Ibid., 61-63.

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you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome

wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don’t grow naturally;

that they import Canada thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to

stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like

bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their

houses, to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an

oasis, three blades in a day’s walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes,

something like Laplander snow-shoes; [. . .], that to their very chairs and tables

small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles.229

The abundance of semi-colons here, themselves arguably vague, somewhere between a

period and a comma, underscores the island’s own movement and indefiniteness. Like the

sentences in the description, the island lacks full stops and is neither fully here nor there.

(The shape of the island even resembles a semi-colon!) With the absence of trees and

grass, the island lacks a “background” or foundation or any sense of rootedness and

adheres only to planted weeds and imported thistles that allows the island to abide. A

model of seashore erosion, an absorptive and permeable “ant-hill,” Nantucket seems

always at risk of washing away into an oceanic placelessness. Although we are told

“these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois,” we quickly find out

otherwise with Cairo and The Confidence-Man.

* * *

229 Ibid., 61-62.

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The town of Cairo, Illinois, had become synonymous with fraudulent land speculation

since at least the publication in 1842 of Charles Dickens’ American Notes. It was also

well known for its active river traffic, which Mark Twain would later write about in Life

on the Mississippi, for its role in the creation of the Illinois Central Railroad, and for its

general state of abandonment, disrepair, lawlessness, and incessant flooding. From its

earliest beginnings, Cairo had been linked to transportation—first as a prospective hub

for river commerce, managing cargo on both the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, with a

canal that facilitated such traffic, and second as the southern-most home of the Illinois

Central Railroad that was to stretch from Northern Illinois through to Cairo, linking the

rivers with the heartland. Yet because of its low-lying geography and poorly built levees,

Cairo was plagued with incessant flooding that would frequently inundate the peninsula

and disrupt attempts at settlement. Swampy collections of water and marshes also bred

ague, yellow fever, and cholera. Like Melville’s Nantucket, Cairo seemed always on the

verge of being reclaimed by the rivers. Both geographically and socially the peninsula

remained unsettled and indeterminate.

Melville was well aware of Cairo’s reputation before penning The Confidence-Man.

He had read Charles Dickens’s American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit, and he alludes

frequently to both books throughout the novel, especially in his descriptions of the

Mississippi and Cairo. Dickens was the first author, though certainly not the last, to

recognize Cairo as damaged social space. It was transient, dilapidated, and an uncanny

mixture of stagnancy and mobility. After traveling past Cairo in the spring of 1842 during

his first tour of the States, he describes it as

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[. . .] a spot so much more desolate than any we had yet beheld, that the forlornest

places we had passed, were, in comparison with it, full of interest. At the junction

of the rivers, on ground so flat and low and marshy, that at certain seasons of the

year it is inundated to the house-tops, lies a breeding-place of fever, ague, and

death; [. . .] A dismal swamp, on which the half-built houses rot-away: cleared

here and there for the space of a few yards; and teeming, then, with rank

unwholesome vegetation, in whose baleful shade the wretched wanderers who are

tempted hither, droop, and die, and lay their bones; the hateful Mississippi

circling and eddying before it [. . .].230

Though surely of a very different quality, Dickens’ hyperbolic description is reminiscent

of Melville’s depiction of the mythological Nantucket. Although Cairo lacks the

abundance of sand, both share a watery instability. Where Nantucket lacks any roots or

rooted things whatsoever, the defining quality of land subject to erosion, Cairo has

masses of “vegetation” slowly rotting the town into oblivion, and both lack any sense of

specificity and shape. While Nantucket is a sandy mass of indeterminacy, Cairo with its

swamps and marshes blends water and land in a way that resists precise delineation. Yet

the desolation of Cairo is not due to geography alone. The speculators who moved their

capital elsewhere left the rotting houses “half-built,” the dense flora cleared only “here

and there” for the space of a few yards, and the levees unfinished and ineffectual. The

residents, migrating in search of employment and away from the squalor, have moved on

230 Dickens, American Notes, 190.

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to other fly-by-night towns. In short, Cairo was finished before it had begun. No doubt

Cairo is a long way from the icy silences of the strict void of Moby-Dick, but with its lack

of discernable borders and boundaries, its decay, its incessant watery movement, its

general indeterminacy, and its overall placelessness, Cairo slouches uneasily toward the

void.

The Confidence-Man registers a socio-cultural milieu that is premised on transit and

which exists increasingly from point to point, in way stations and in-between spaces, and

along the cross-points of Jefferson’s rectangular grid. Here place, region, history, and

home have a diminished and diminishing sense of importance. This is the world of The

Confidence-Man, which begins and ends on a Mississippi steamboat. The Fidèle, which

begins “at the watery-side in the city of St Louis,” pauses its downriver momentum only

as it docks periodically to take on or expel passengers. Even more than Moby-Dick,

which begins on land, The Confidence-Man takes place entirely on the water and entirely

in motion. As if at sea, moreover, there are almost no reference points from land. Lacking

the rich descriptions of Moby Dick and the sensuous details of the river we find in Huck

Finn, the novel is uniquely void of environmental detail and description. We know also

that this was a stylistic choice on Melville’s part, since he deleted descriptive passages of

the river and landscape from the final manuscript.231 The scant detail we do get consists

231 The deleted fragment entitled the “The River” includes an array of natural details. I quote here only enough to give a sense of the richness of the description:

As the word Abraham means the father of a great multitude of men, so the word Mississippi means the father of a great multitude of waters. His tribes stream in from east

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only of nondescript “houseless” and “small wayside landings.” The erasure of place from

the landscape resembles the erasure of distinct identities of the passengers who we are

told merge or meld into a collective mass: these “variety of mortals” are transformed by

the “all-fusing spirit of the West, whose type is the Mississippi itself, which, uniting the

streams of the most distant and opposite zones, pours them along, helter-skelter, in one

cosmopolitan and confident tide.”232

In the hyper-mobile world of the novel, characterization becomes a satiric tool in

Melville’s hands, as readers are asked to identify and assess characters, like travelers

themselves, based only the most external and superficial of details—an article of

clothing, a color, an object, or an occupation. The novel enacts Nietzsche’s observation

that “[w]ith the tremendous acceleration of life mind and eye have become accustomed to

seeing and judging partially or inaccurately, and everyone is like the traveler who gets to

and west, exceeding fruitful the lands they enrich. In this granary of a continent, this basin of the Mississippi, must not the nations be greatly multiplied and blest? Above the Falls of St. Anthony, for the most part he winds evenly in between banks of flags or thight tracts of pine over marbley sands in waters so clear that the deepest fish have the visible flight of the bird. Undisturbed as the lowly life in its bosom, feeds the lonely life on its shores, the coroneted elk and the deer, while in the watery forms of some couched rock in the channel, furred over with moss, the furred bear on the marge seems to eye his amphibious brother. Wood and wave wed, man is remote. The unsung time, the Golden Age of the billow.

For the complete manuscript of The Confidence-Man, including unpublished fragments, see Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ed. Elizabeth S. Foster (New York Hendricks House, 1954). 232 Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), 14.

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know a land and its people from a railway carriage.”233 Since travelers come and go in

this “place full of strangers,” Melville delineates the characters with sharp, simple strokes

of detail, since all are in transit and thus quickly forgotten.234 Black Guinea’s list reads

like a police report, where witnesses only remember flashes of distinguishing detail,

partial and inaccurate: “Oh yes, oh yes, dar is aboard here a werry nice, good ge’mman

wid a weed, and a ge’mman in a gray coat and white tie, what knows all about me; and a

ge’mmen wid a big book, too; and a yarb doctor; and a ge’mmen in a yaller west; and

ge’mmen wid a brass plate; and a ge’mmen in a wiolet robe; and ge’mmen as is a sodjer;

and ever so many good, kind, honest ge’mmen more aboard what knows me and will

speak for me [. . .].235 The reader shares the task of the “bystander” who, speaking of

Black Guinea’s character references, wonders, “But how are we to find out who all these

people are?” Yet the novel artfully resists such a task, since the characters often share

these same identifying features. Guinea’s list, as H. Bruce Franklin suggests, expands

“until it fills the universe of The Confidence-Man; his list ultimately includes

everybody.”236 Moreover, we are reminded frequently that along this trip a new batch of

strangers is always in the offing.

That Guineas’ list ultimately includes everybody brings us back to the “all-fusing

spirit of the West.” If everyone is an avatar of the confidence man, then singularity and

233 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 132. 234 Melville, The Confidence-Man, 333. Note that the word “stranger” implicates place. The Greek word ἄτοπος / atopos—literally, “no place”—means “out of place” or “strange.” 235 Ibid.,19-20. 236 H. Bruce Franklin, introduction to The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), xxi.

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difference has given way to unity and commonality. In this sense, the passengers of the

Fidèle are little different than the crew of the Pequod: both ships move toward certain

destruction in “one cosmopolitan and confident tide.” We see this in the subtle but

definite diffusion of individual identity throughout the novel. Not only are these

characters not distinct, but the novel concludes, as we shall see, in darkness and a cosmic

collapse of difference and all sensorial detail.

In the novel’s conclusion, The Confidence-Man ends with a slide toward the complete

erasure of distinction. With an echo of the voids in Moby-Dick, I suggest that Melville

conjures a kind of reverse cosmogensis by which the universe of the novel is dismantled,

but which holds forth the possibility of recreation and the re-introduction of particularity

and distinction. The introduction of a cosmos recurs throughout the novel and becomes

increasingly more pronounced in the final chapter. In the gentleman’s cabin hangs a

“solar lamp,” whose light, Melville tells us, “rippl[es] off with ever-diminishing

distinctness, till, like circles from a stone dropped in water, the rays died dimly away in

the furthest nook of the place.”237 An obvious stand-in for the sun’s rays, the solar lamp’s

fading light parallels the broader movement in the novel toward the loss of distinction.

Other lamps swing in the cabin, which, like “ barren planets, [ ] had either gone out from

exhaustion, or been extinguished by such occupants of berths as the light annoyed, or

who wanted to sleep, not see.”238 Various images here reinforce the movement of the

chapter. The darkened “planets”—“barren” and void of detail—establish a micro-cosmos

237 Melville, The Confidence-Man, 332. 238 Ibid., 332.

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in the Fidèle’s cabin, while those passengers wanting to sleep enact a process by which

all distinction disappears. Sleep, of course, is the ultimate equalizer, besides death,

whereby all individuals lose particularity. Soon the solar lamp “begins to burn dimly” and

is eventually extinguished by the hand of the cosmopolitan—the ultimate composite and

universal figure—leaving the sleepers free to sleep and the cabin in undifferentiated

darkness. Nonetheless, Melville reserves the possibility of renewal or re-creation with his

well-known final line: “Something further may follow of this Masquerade.”239 What that

something is, of course, we are not told. Yet if the sun again rises, it will do so on the

horizon, the first creative-act of distinction and difference from the silence and cosmic

darkness.

239 Ibid., 350.

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4.

“A Delicious Chaos of Hopes”:

Caroline Kirkland’s Desert Places

Caroline Kirkland’s nature writing has been largely overlooked. While critics have

called for greater attention to the environment in her works, few have yet taken up the

challenge in any sustained way.240 This chapter takes up this call by examining

Kirkland’s representations of wetlands, including swamps, marshes, mires, and mud-

holes, in her frontier narrative, A New Home: Who’ll Follow? (1838).241 I approach

Kirkland’s narrative as belonging to what David Mazel has called a “marginalized

domestic environmental tradition” that was less concerned with preserving wilderness

than with the more practical considerations of making a healthy home and community

240 See for example Karen Kilcup’s “‘I Like These Plants That You Call Weeds’: Historicizing American Women’s Nature Writing,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 58, no 1 (2003), 42-74. Kilcup calls for greater critical attention to nineteenth-century women’s nature writing, particularly Caroline Kirkland’s (42-47). See also David Mazel’s American Literary Environmentalism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 136-139. Mazel argues for a broader conception of “‘the environment’” and environmental writing that could include writers like Kirkland. For a very brief discussion of Kirkland’s contribution to a “gynocentric” alternative to “the cult of wilderness,” see Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 25. Buell notes that the importance of middle-class women’s frontier narratives has “so far been recognized more in Canada than in the United States.” 241 Caroline Kirkland, A New Home, Who’ll Follow? (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990).

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there, while not marring the beauty of the place.242 While Kirkland certainly focuses at

times on environmental preservation, her primary concern is with making a home and

building a community on the frontier. Her marginalization as a nature writer may stem

from her belonging to what Karen Kilcup describes as a neglected “alternative tradition”

that regards “nature in the context of gender politics or struggle for social amelioration

[more] than as a separate political or cultural concern.”243 This, too, seems true of

Kirkland, whose engagement with the natural world is so intertwined with her socio-

cultural concerns and her critique of gender politics as to be inseparable. Add to this the

obscurity of her works,244 her relative conservatism,245 her at times snobbish or

ambivalent attitudes toward her neighbors, her intended elite-eastern readership, and her

participation in land speculation—the very practice she so strenuously condemns—and

her nature writing becomes problematized in ways that resist recuperation. Her writings

do not lend themselves to critics seeking a clean, unproblematic, radical, or even

idealistic connection between women and nature.246 For these very reasons, though, her

work remains vital to broadening our understanding of environmentalism’s history.

242 Mazel, 136-137. 243 Kilcup, 46. 244 For example, compare Kirkland’s availability with the works of other nineteenth-century women writers, such as Celia Thaxter, Susan Fenimore Cooper, and Sarah Orne Jewett, whose works are much more readily available. 245 In her well-known introduction to A New Home, Sandra Zagarel notes that Kirkland was “a liberal who came to believe that there was considerable progressive potential within the existing social order” (xii). Kirkland also held that the woman writer should be “responsible for working within the boundaries of decorum and avoiding public censure” (xviii). See Zagarel, introduction to A New Home: Who’ll Follow? (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990). 246 Kilkup, 46.

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This chapter examines one facet of Kirkland’s nature writing and one particular type

of landscape—wetlands. I employ the term broadly to include a range of ecosystems and

landscapes, including swamps, marshes, bogs, mires, and mud holes. Focusing on A New

Home: Who’ll Follow? (“ANH”), I argue that Kirkland adopts these land features as an

unlikely ally to encourage home creation and to counter the disruptive practices of land

speculation. Her attentions to wetlands are radically out of step with a mid-nineteenth-

century culture wedded to projects of “improvement” and the painstaking separation of

land from water.247 Such landscapes often earned the name “desert places” because of

their resistance to development.248 Despite the everyday inconvenience and problems

they posed for settlers, wetlands provide Kirkland with a symbolic, more static alternative

to the landscapes of navigation, mobility, and circulation she associates with speculators.

To create a home—one invested with domestic comforts and in relative harmony with the

natural world—she suggests, one needs to remain invested in one place. Wetlands thus

become for Kirkland a counterforce to economic mobility, as well as a counterweight to

the high-flown and abstract misrepresentations perpetuated by promoter-speculators. In

her skepticism of efforts at ordering and controlling nature in the name of “enterprise,”

Kirkland tacitly advocates for the existence of natural infrastructures, like wetlands, that

regulate and manage the flow of water and support diverse flora and fauna. She also

247 Decades would pass before swamps would be popularly embraced as sites of refuge from increasing urbanization, industrialization, and a dominant capitalist order 248 See David C. Miller, Dark Eden: The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Miller analyzes a popular turn in America in the 1850s and 1860s toward new landscapes, including swamps and marshes. Thus Kirkland’s attention to these landscapes predates this turn by several decades.

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offers an early model for living in landscapes by pooled waters, muddy expanses, and

watery inundation.

The threat of speculation, for Kirkland, extends beyond home creation and care for

the natural world to the lives of women on the frontier. As she amply argues in ANH, the

frontier life posed special difficulties for women who were often tasked with establishing

a home amidst a “thousand deficiencies which her rougher mate can scarce be taught to

feel as evils.”249 The plight of women is made worse, she insists, by a culture of

speculation that discourages efforts at domestication, which would in turn improve the

quality of their lives. She finds in wetlands, I suggest, a symbolic environmental counter-

model—feminine and communal, cooperative, curvilinear, and relatively stationary—to a

male-dominated capitalist order defined by individualism, competition, linearity, and

excessive circulation, and that she perceives as existing in opposition to community and

home. Within this configuration, Kirkland gradually subverts the conception of wetlands

as “desert places,” while simultaneously foregrounding the social wastelands left in the

wake of speculation. Her critique extends beyond representation, too, to encompass

stylistic and aesthetic choices in ANH that mirror the very qualities of these swampy-

landscapes. Her self-described “desultory” and “wandering” style reflects the

characteristics of the land and mounts a literary intervention on behalf of the home and

the natural world of which it is a part.

249 Kirkland, ANH, 146.

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Pinckney, Michigan

When Caroline Kirkland moved with her husband from New York to the frontier in

the 1830s to found the town of Pinckney, Michigan, she participated in a wave of

westward emigration fueled by land speculation. The opening of Lake Erie to navigation

facilitated travel for the many new settlers arriving in Michigan by way of steamship or

sailboat. The Kirklands probably traveled by way of the Erie Canal to Buffalo and then

boarded a steamship bound for Detroit. Land sales records from the 1830s suggest the

massiveness of the migration and land-purchase enterprise. Between 1830 and 1836 the

number of acres of land purchased in Michigan in one year rose from 147,062 to

4,198,823.250 The 1836 figure, totaling $5,241,228.70, marked a record number of sales

in one year for any state or territory in the country.251 According to federal census

records, the population of Michigan grew from 8,765 in 1820 to 212, 267 in 1840.252 To

borrow an inelegant but apt phrase, Michigan was a “hot commodity.” Land fever was

even put to verse. One “Emigrant’s Song,” initially published in a Detroit newspaper in

1831, reads:

Come all ye Yankee Farmers, Who’d like to change your lot, Who’ve spunk enough to travel Beyond your native spot, And leave behind the village Where Pa’ and Ma’ do stay, Come follow me and settle

250 Willis F. Dunbar and George S. May, Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State (Grand Rapids: Eastern Michigan University, 1995). 251 Ibid. 252 Ibid.

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In Michigania. [. . .]

Then come ye Yankee Farmers, Who’ve mettle hearts like me And elbow-grease in plenty, To bow the forest tree; Come take a ‘Quarter Section,’ And I’ll be bound you’ll say, This country takes the rag off, This Michigania.253

By encouraging settlers to uproot themselves, to abandon local villages and family in

favor of pioneering, it illustrates Kirkland’s recognition of the link between speculation

and the break up of community. Few of these uprooted settlers, she argues, actually

settled in one place for any long duration, but rather stayed only long enough to sell their

land for profit before moving on to repeat the process elsewhere. The poem punctuates,

moreover, the subjection of the natural world to Enlightenment order and to the spirit of

commerce. Despite Kirkland’s fierce critique of these practices and attitudes toward the

land, she and her husband nevertheless purchased several quarter sections with the hopes

of promoting the town of Pinckney and capitalizing on the fervor for emigration and

speculation.

Despite her fierce critique of speculation, the Kirklands were land speculators. While

we do not know the extent of Caroline Kirkland’s own agency in the decision to move to

Michigan and participate in town promotion, we do know that her husband William

Kirkland purchased up to thirteen-hundred acres of forest, prairie, and swamp land in

253 Dunbar and May, Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State.

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several sections of Putnam township in Livingston county with the intent to sell town lots

(see Figure #6 in Appendix).254 William presumably oversaw the subdivision of the land

into ranges and blocks to provide easily saleable plots—the same process Kirkland would

critique in ANH. Like the countless other promoter-speculators in the Midwest at the

time, William also advertised the town in language that certainly seems to obfuscate the

reality of the marshy landscape. “The village of Pinckney,” the circular reads, “is situated

in the southern part of Livingston County, on Portage Creek, two miles from its entrance

into Portage Lake. It is in the midst of one of the finest and best settled agricultural

districts in the State. [. . .] A healthier spot is not to be found in Michigan.”255 There are

no mentions of the “ague” (later determined to be malaria) or the ubiquitous swamps that

saturate Kirkland’s narrative. In keeping with customs of precise market measurement,

William adds, “The lots are 66 feet in front by 132 feet in depth. The streets are four rods

in width, and the public Square is sixteen rods square.256

To consider these historical details is a step toward understanding Kirkland’s critique

of land speculation and also her literary embrace of wetlands. But these details also

complicate Kirkland’s narrative, as well as our reception of her as a cultural critic and

nature writer. Does Kirkland, for instance, participate directly (or indirectly) in and profit

by the same practices of land speculation that she vociferously criticizes in ANH? Such a

question may account in part for why her nature writing has been “resistant to 254 Carleton Langley Keyes, “Caroline Kirkland: A Pioneer in American Realism” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1935), 121. 255 Franklin Ellis, History of Livingston County, Michigan (Philadelphia, Everts and Abbott, 1880), p. 274 256 Ibid.

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recuperation,” as Karen Kilcup has pointed out, “especially by critics seeking a relatively

unproblematized, even idealistic, connection between women and nature.”257

Nevertheless, Kirkland does distinguish in ANH between her husband’s brand of town

promotion and those of other speculators. As historian Paul Wallace Gates explains, the

term “speculator” is a loose one and meant different things to different people in different

regions.258 “To the frontiersman,” he writes, “it meant [among other things] an eastern

capitalist who bought up large quantities of newly offered land in anticipation of settlers

to come,” a definition that seems to encompass the Kirklands’ activities.259 But Gates

also notes that frontiersman typically distinguished between resident and absentee

speculators: “Only non-resident owners of land who were not contributing to the

development of the West by making improvements upon their lands were regarded by

him as speculators and were the object of resentment.”260 For Kirkland, the term certainly

includes absentee speculators, but also those who, seduced by a prevailing “madness” for

speculation, seek to gain quick profits from the sale of the land (those who consider their

land as “merely an article of trade”) rather than to create a home.

It also encompasses, for Kirkland, a broad group of individuals who participate in a

range of fraudulent activities involving land sales, as well as those with grand schemes to

build vast fortunes and vast cities, which she opposes to her and William’s “modest”

efforts at founding a village and preserving the beauty of the natural world. Whether

257 Kilcup, 44. 258 Gates, “The Land Speculator in Western Development,” 350. 259 Ibid. 260 Ibid.

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these distinctions prove substantive or persuasive differences remains open to debate. But

Kirkland gestures to the sometimes-tenuous line she draws between her and her

husband’s activities as town promoters and those actions of others. As she admits in

French, “Il est plus aisé d’être sage pour les autres, que de l’être pour soi-même.”261

The Desert Places of Speculation

Kirkland delineates a range of ways that land speculation practices rendered

communities and frontier locales as social desert places. Although she holds professional

speculators as particularly at fault for these conditions, she also recognizes the influence

of a generalized “spirit of speculation” that led would-be-settlers to excessive itinerancy,

rather than to settlement and community formation. Addressing the habit among people

to uproot themselves in pursuit of quick profits, she writes,

[. . . ] the habit of selling out so frequently makes that home-feeling, which is so

large an ingredient in happiness elsewhere, almost a non-entity in Michigan. The

man who holds himself ready to accept the first advantageous offer, will not be

very solicitous to provide those minor accommodations, which, though essential

to domestic comfort, will not add to the moneyed value of his farm, which he

considers merely an article of trade, and which he knows his successor will look

upon in the same light.262

261 Kirkland, ANH, 5. The quote translates into English as follows: “It is easier to be wise for others, than for oneself.” 262 Ibid., 22.

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That Kirkland suggests the “home-feeling” is a “non-entity” in Michigan underscores the

urgency of her critique, yet her qualification “almost” leaves some little room for possible

change. Absent is that “home-feeling”—the experience, sensation, or perception of home.

The land, lived on and understood primarily as a fungible commodity, is developed with

only market value in mind, rather than as a place worthy of long-term residence and

developed as a facet of a larger communal experience. As Kirkland adds, “I have

sometimes thought that our neighbors forget that ‘the days of man’s life are three score

and ten,’ since they spend all their lives getting ready to begin.”263

If frequent movement and unsettlement characterize the vast majority of everyday

Michigan “settlers,” Kirkland associates professional speculators with flows and

circulation. She grounds her critique, moreover, in the Michigan landscape, linking

speculators with rapid rivers and deep channels, as opposed to the more modest flows of

streams and the relative stasis of watery landscapes like swamps, ponds, and marshes.

This figuration becomes explicit in her naming of “Harley Rivers,” an eastern speculator

and the president of the fraudulent Tinkerville Bank, whose very name denotes rapid

movement and flow, and also in her depiction of the “tour” of speculators who survey the

Michigan countryside “with a view to the purchase of one or two cities.”264 Kirkland

displays her cleverness and naturalist knowledge here by describing this hapless crew as

“shoals of speculators,”265 since shoals are composed primarily of granular materials

deposited by currents and in this case of “those borne westward by the irresistible current 263 Ibid., 22. 264 Ibid., 25. 265 Ibid.

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of affairs.”266 Of course, the “affairs” are those of land speculation, whose “currents” pull

people helter-skelter incessantly throughout the west. That shoals are often narrow and

linear in the midst of currents, moreover, implies the speculators’ narrow focus on profits

and on the linearity of boundaries and measurement used to carve up the land into articles

of trade.

The speculators’ hopes for deep navigable waterways capable of sustaining large-

scale commerce are quickly frustrated by the low-lying realities of the Michigan

landscape. As the crew surveys the “Grand Junction” of “Shark River” with “another

considerable stream,” the speculators strain to imagine the vast waterways needed to

support “the towers and masts of a great commercial town.”267 Of course, there is nothing

“grand” about this junction, and the “shark” in “Shark River” gestures only to land

sharks. Not only do the waterways lack the requisite depth for commercial navigation, the

land is admittedly “a leetle marshy.”268 As the group follows “the bank as closely as the

marshes would allow [. . .],” they soon conclude that “[t]here was something a little

cooling in the aspect of the marshes, and, although nobody liked to say so, the ground

seemed rather wet for city building.”269 Although the marshes “cool” the “Western

fever” of the speculators the men nevertheless imagine ways to transform the landscape

to suit their purposes. With more than a tinge of irony, Kirkland adds, “[. . .] they saw at a

glance how easily the marshes could be drained, the channel of the Shark deepened, and

266 Ibid., 50. 267 Ibid., 26-28. 268 Ibid., 28. 269 Ibid.

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the whole converted into one broad area upon which to found a second New York.”270

These changes, of course, would be anything but easy and would require a radical re-

formation of the local ecosystem.

Given the watery composition of these low-lying bottomlands, the touring speculators

aim not for its development but for the fraudulent advertisement and rapid sale of the

land to gullible buyers. As Kirkland suggests, these acts of misrepresentation—much

more so than the swamps and desert places themselves—are largely responsible for

disrupting community formation and place creation because they frustrate the

expectations of buyers and would-be settlers. For the speculators, re-envisioning the land

entails re-writing the landscape, that is, erasing the wetlands and inserting dry land and

deep waterways. In the revised panorama, “Majestic steamers plied their paddles to and

fro upon the river; ladies crowding their decks and streamers floating on the wind. Sloops

dotted the harbours, while noble ships were seen in the offing.”271 So too have other

routes of travel and commerce appeared, including “canals, rail-roads and bridges.”272

Gone from the representation are the actual shallow waters, marshlands, and the “dead

silence, the utter loneliness, [and] the impenetrable shade, that covered the site of the

future city.”273 Kirkland’s indictment of these practices lies in their effects on the

defrauded settler-purchasers. When those who have “staked their poor means on strips of

270 Ibid., 30. 271 Ibid., 30-31. 272 Ibid., 30. 273 Ibid., 28.

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land which were at the moment a foot under water”274 awake to “reality,” they have

“feelings of no slight bitterness.”275 Having uprooted themselves to relocate to Michigan

under false pretenses, they become displaced and embittered. These migrants, she adds,

realize too late that “it kills old vines to tear them from their clinging places,”276 and

having been misled they are unable or unwilling to plant new ones in Michigan. That

such speculation practices foster social desert places becomes clear when we learn that a

year following the tour, “There is nobody there [at the junction of the rivers], but those

[the speculators] hire to come.”277

The communal absence, the social vacancy, the sense of placelessness left by

speculators becomes especially apparent in Kirkland’s depiction of Tinkerville, a

neighboring town to Montacute and home to the “Merchants and Manufacturers’ Bank of

Tinkerville.” In contrast to Montacute modest growth, the so-called development of

Tinkerville by “enterprising men” was to follow an ambitious plan with a host of

buildings “‘going up’ immediately”278 An amalgamation of plans and schemes,

coordinates, and circulars, the actual town consists merely of a smattering of log cabins,

as Mary Clavers quickly discovers when she attempts to visit: “[ . . . ][W]e proceeded,

thinking the end of our journey could not be distant, especially as we saw several log-

houses at intervals, which we supposed were the outskirts of Tinkerville. But we were

soon disappointed in this; for the road led through a marsh, and then woods again, and 274 Ibid., 31. 275 Ibid., 140. 276 Ibid., 146. 277 Ibid., 32. 278 Ibid., 84.

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such tangled woods, that I began to fear, in my secret soul, that we had wandered far

from our track [ . . .].”279 Of course, the log houses are all that make up the town.

Kirkland’s juxtaposition of the “marsh” with the “town,” moreover, works to punctuate

the town’s social desertification. Clavers finds the marsh “without difficulty”; it is

Tinkerville she misses. Despite its supposed “emerging glories,” the speculators have

largely abandoned the town for new ventures. The “big stump” at the town’s center

symbolizes its stunted growth. Like the airy, abstract promotional circulars that depict it,

the town consists more of things that are “talked much of” and that “could be erected,”

rather than of those things substantive and realized.280

Kirkland’s Wetlands

Kirkland’s adoption of wetlands in ANH, if tacit and at times ambivalent, is rooted in

her project of home-creation on the frontier and what she sees as a gendered division

between the practices of speculators (masculine) and those efforts at domestication

(feminine). The frontier becomes a site of contestation for Kirkland between masculine

and feminine alternatives of what settlement might look like over the course of national

expansion.281 In this context, Kirkland sets out to establish a new home that is stable and

largely in harmony with the natural world. That Kirkland focuses on wetlands derives in

part from their natural resistance to “improvement,” but also from their association with

279 Ibid., 85. 280 Ibid., 84. 281 Both of these alternatives in Kirkland’s narrative seem to require a practice of active erasure of Native Americans from the landscape; Kirkland gestures to Native Americans in ANH only in passing.

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the feminine. Take for example the etymology of the word “mother” offered by Noah

Webster’s First American Dictionary (1828), which includes such word associations as

“matter,” “stuff,” the “materials of which any thing is made,” “the soil of the earth,”

“mold,” and “a thick slimy substance.”282 Webster’s entry even ponders whether the word

“mother” derives from “mud,” which the Phoenicians considered to be the “substance

from which all things formed.”283 These associations likely derive from an idea of

“mother earth” as a place of origin, but they also connect the female to particular

landscapes. All of these words could just as easily apply to swamps or mud-holes, as to

mother. Kirkland’s “Michigan mud-holes” and other wetlands, then, take on a new

resonance in this light and reflect not only the feminine (as mother), but also the

domestic.

One such role that wetlands play for Kirkland is as a counterforce to the movement

and circulation she associates with speculation. At a practical, every-day level, wetlands

posed frequent obstacles to travelers on Michigan roadways and impeded any hopes for

rapid commercial traffic. While not stopping the nomadic impulses of settlers per se, they

quite literally slowed down the pace of daily life and provided Kirkland with an apt

symbol for tempered mobility and modest growth. Through a series of roadway episodes

in the first-third of the narrative, for instance, Kirkland repeatedly has Mary Clavers

confront swamps and muddy roads that obstruct her travel, topple her wagon, and

literally “anchor” her in place. Our first introduction to Mary Clavers occurs amid her

282 Noah Webster, First American Dictionary, 1828, s.v. “mother.” 283 Ibid.

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“first visit” to the area that would become Montacute and her first confrontation with a

“Michigan mud-hole.”284 Kirkland highlights the slowed movement along the muddy

roads by suggesting that she writes “for the benefit of future travelers, who, flying over

the soil on rail-roads, may look slightingly back upon the achievements of their

predecessors.”285 Although the first steam-powered railroad operated in 1837 in

Michigan—the same year the Kirkland’s moved to Pinckney—she anticipates the

budding network of railways that would soon traverse the landscape. These future

passengers, of course, would only “fly” over the soil, evermore distanced—floating like

the representations of the speculators—from the physical, material experience of the land.

Later, we find Clavers successively sunk in “a quaking bog,” toppled into a marsh, and

“anchor[ed]” to a “black swamp,” as she begins to learn about the land and become, quite

literally, attached to the place. As her appreciation of place grows, she also increasingly

laments the trappings of technology, like the railroads, that accelerate life, disaggregate

settlers, and break up communities. Of course, Kirkland links such technologies to the

speculators. When Mr. Mazard, a crooked speculator, draws up yet another “emblazoned

chart” of a “choice location,” he includes “canals and rail-roads, with boats and cars at

full speed.”286 When Kirkland contemplates the slow-growth state of Montacute, she

reflects, “Irredeemable little are we; unless, which Heaven forefend! A rail-road stray our

way.”287

284 Kirkland, ANH, 5. 285 Ibid. 286 Kirkland, ANH, 83. 287 Ibid., 187.

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Modest, slow-moving streams and pooled waters, like ponds, lakes, and swamps,

provide Kirkland with a natural analogue for the modest growth of villages and small

communities, as opposed to the more ambitious plans of city-planning speculators. As

Kirkland explains in the opening pages of A New Home, she and her husband purchased

the land that would become Montacute “on the banks of this to-be-celebrated stream.”288

“‘The madness of the people’ in those days of golden dreams,” she continues, “took

commonly the form of city-building; but there were a few who contented themselves with

planning villages, on the banks of streams which certainly never could be expected to

bear navies [. . .].”289 These slow-moving or standing waters, Kirkland suggests, counter

(both literally and figuratively) the motion and speed implied by such popular phrases as

“‘prodigious undertaking!,’” “‘race of enterprise!’ [and] ‘march of improvement.’”290

Indeed, the presence of “enterprising men” in the vicinity, who value building at a “rapid

rate,”291 put “all upon the alert.”292 Kirkland, whose explicit “philosophy was of slow

growth,”293 punctuates at every turn the beauty and domestic value of “lazy, quiet

stream[s],”294 the “murmurs” and “delicate harmony” of “a bubbling stream,”295 or

“lovely lakes, each a lonely gem set deep in masses of emerald green, which shut it in

completely from all but its own bright beauty.”296 The lakes here, like the swamps and

288 Ibid., 4. 289 Ibid. 290 Ibid., 187. 291 Ibid., 58. 292 Ibid., 84. 293 Ibid., 40. 294 Ibid., 151. 295 Ibid., 150. 296 Ibid., 73.

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marshes Kirkland describes, defy in their very seclusion and green overgrowth the forces

of speculation and commerce, while their nestled, self-contained beauty serves as a model

for the modest villages Kirkland idealizes. Like the qualities she ascribes to the slow-

moving streams and solitary lakes, Kirkland explains that “The growth of our little

secluded village has been so gradual, its prosperity so moderate, and its attempts so

unambitious [. . .].”297 In accord with Kirkland’s ideal village, the Michigan environment

fosters the “waveless calm of a strictly wood-land life.”298

Kirkland’s swampy landscapes also confound efforts at measurement—the lines,

angles, and geometry associated with speculation—as well as the spatial ordering of the

rectangular survey imposed upon the west. Thomas Jefferson’s rectangular grid, created

and imposed through the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787,

carved the Michigan territory into townships of 36-square-miles, composed of 1-square-

mile blocks of land called sections.299 Jefferson originally proposed the plan to promote a

class of land-owning yeoman farmers that would in turn support the budding democracy

in part through their self-sufficiency. This Euclidian ordering, a non-varying grid with

square subdivisions, largely ignored the natural topography of the land, and in both

intention and practice, transformed it into easily recognizable and saleable parcels. Land

sales occurred, at least initially, at auction and at the time of the Ordinances sold for 1

dollar per acre. While much of the frontier and agricultural literature has taken for

297 Ibid., 187. 298 Ibid., 148. 299 Hildegard Binder Johnson, Order Upon the Land: The U.S. Rectangular Survey and the Upper Mississippi Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 37-49.

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granted the idea that these geometric orderings were an advantage for settlement, helping

the settler, as Frederick Jackson Turner pointed out, “to easily and certainly [ ] locate his

farm and the forester his forty,” Kirkland challenges the obsession with measurement and

speculative plotting that attended this market geometry. The grid reflected not only a

culture committed to a democratic ethos of settlement and land ownership but also one

that embraced markets and exchanges as well.300 As historian Ted Steinberg observes, the

“grid helped draw the land into the world of exchange,” and thus into the world of land

speculation.301 The grid transformed the land, its rich variety and topography, into “a

uniform set of boxes easily bought and sold.”302

Kirkland frequently reminds the reader in that Michigan land is subject to

measurement and a market-based ethos that reduces it to “merely an article of trade.” At

various points in the narrative, Kirkland stands witness to what David Zimmerman has

called the “frenzied plotting of the land” by speculators who measure out the land into

village lots and promote them to speculators and settlers alike.303 Upon surveying the

“village site” with her husband and Mr. Mazard, one of several villain-speculators in A

New Home, whose words come out in “measured softness,” Kirkland notes the plans for

the “[t]he public square, the water lots, the value per foot of this undulating surface,

clothed as it then was with burr-oaks, [. . .] these were almost too much for my

300 Ted Steinberg, Down To Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 61. 301 Ibid. 302 Ibid, 60. 303 David Zimmerman, “Unplotting the Land: The Wandering Narrative of Caroline Kirkland” (paper presented at the Narrative Conference, East Lansing, Michigan, April 13, 2002).

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gravity.”304 “The water lots,” she adds, “were too valuable to sell save by the foot [ . .

.].”305 Although Kirkland knew that her family finances depended upon the promotion

and sale of village lots, she is nevertheless disconcerted by the method. Just as she is

tasked with naming the village, she also knows that “the village plot was to be drawn

instanter—lithographed and circulated through to the United States.”306 Her description

of the land, too, with its rolling hills of bushy green burr-oaks, aligns uneasily with the

market-driven delineations that carve up the land into incremental denominations. Its

curvy undulations contrast with the linearity of the “square” and “foot.” Her animating

personification of the land (“clothed”) contrasts with the lifeless commercial ordering of

it. Although “plotting” is clearly connected to settlement, her unease with the methods

suggests otherwise, that is, that plotting is connected even more so, as we have seen, to

speculation and unsettlement.

Kirkland’s watery desert places prove indifferent or downright hostile to efforts at

measuring and plotting the land and more broadly to human enterprise. Quoting

Nathaniel Willis, a writer and her friend, Kirkland seems to find a correspondence in the

Michigan wetlands with what Willis refers to as “‘an instinct of [our] nature that scorns

boundary and chain; that yearns to the free desert.’”307 Because of the inherent difficulties

they pose for development, wetlands remain largely “‘unappropriated and open.’” They

invite not “‘subduing method’” but the “‘immeasurable liberty of foot and dwelling-304 Kirkland, ANH, 11. The name Mazard suggests the cross between a buzzard, man, and a hazard. 305 Ibid. 306 Ibid., 12. 307 Ibid., 148.

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place.’”308 The kind of “dwelling place” she imagines here through Willis’s words is not

one measured by “boundary and chain”—the terms and implements of the surveyor and

speculator—nor “per foot,” but by a process of dwelling that permits things to remain

free as they are, shaped only by the contours of ecological processes and of the land

itself.309 The measurement of speculators, she later muses, leaves “an objectless blank

where was before a delicious chaos of hopes; substituting dull certainty for [ ] exquisite

flutterings [. . .].”310 Her use of the word “blank” here recalls the absence and vacancy of

non-places like Tinkerville that, while measured out and lithographed, lack the human

commitment—indeed, the human presence—for dwelling or the building up and sharing

of lasting communities. The “delicious chaos,” on the other hand, suggests not only the

ecological complexity and relative shapelessness of wetlands, but also the heterogeneous

admixture of settlers dwelling together in closer accord with the natural world.

Kirkland draws a sharp distinction between the soggy weight and heft of her wetlands

and what she views as the airy, abstract, and detached qualities of land speculation. While

speculators circulate “floating” misrepresentations of the land, ones that distort and are

detached from the land’s natural features, speculator-bankers engage in a range of

practices that further the gap between representation and reality. One is the practice of

pledging land as collateral for the production of paper money, which Kirkland depicts as

a kind of financial fiction. While the General Banking Law of Michigan of 1837 enabled

308 Ibid. 309 Kirkland’s expression of dwelling here, through Willis, anticipates the Heideggerian notion of “dwelling.” 310 Kirkland, ANH, 178.

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speculator-bankers to pledge their land-holdings, the value of the land along with its

natural features could easily be misrepresented. This practice, in turn, often rendered the

paper money secured by such land of questionable value. Kirkland describes the

Tinkerville bankers as magicians who commit a kind of financial sorcery by converting

the Michigan landscape into paper notes and those notes into actual fortunes.

[ . . .] [T]hese cunning magicians set themselves about concocting a new species

of gramarye, by means of which the millions of acres of wild land which were left

on their hands might be turned into bonâ fide cash—paper cash at least [. . .]; this

was the magic of the cauldron [. . .]. It was only ‘bubble-bubble,’ and burr-oaks

were turned into marble tables, tall tamaracks into draperied bedsteads, lakes into

looking-glasses, and huge expanses of wet marsh into velvet couches [ . . .].311

Kirkland’s use of the word “gramarye” here refers to the sorcery-like transmutation of the

land first into financial notes and second into a host of urban luxuries, yet it also

implicates, etymologically speaking, “letters” and literature. Not only do speculators

circulate fictional representations of the land—ones that blot out swamps and deepen

rivers—but they also distribute bank notes premised on a financial grammar by which

signifiers increasingly separate from the signified, and where paper notes and words alike

float freely detached from the reality of the things they ostensibly represent. The “bubble-

bubble” here links these floating representations with the speculative land bubble that in

turn inflates the “value” of the notes.

311 Ibid., 121.

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While the banks inflate the value of their lands to secure the fraudulent bills, they also

issue paper money without the requisite specie (gold and silver coins) that provides the

notes with material value. As Kirkland suggests, without adequate specie or coinage that

essentially anchors the paper money to some material value, the notes become nothing

more than “wragged paper.”312 The less specie kept in reserve by the bank, the more

fraudulent and less representative its bank notes. These practices, as we shall see, stand in

contrast to Kirkland’s literary treatment of the Michigan landscape, as well to the

weighty, substantial qualities of the swamps and muddy landscapes she embraces. That

Kirkland so detests such practices testifies to the substantial harm they caused to would-

be settlers and to community formation along the frontier. Not surprisingly, the same

speculators responsible for the stunted Tinkerville comprise the “‘Merchants and

Manufacturers’ Bank of Tinkerville”—with Mr. Rivers as “President”—a Wildcat bank

that issues paper money and that patently lacks the specie to secure it. In lieu of gold and

silver coins, a pair of bank commissioners discover upon investigation that the bank’s

“boxes of the ‘real stuff’ which has been so loudly vaunted, contained a heavy charge of

broken glass and tenpenny nails, covered above and below with half-dollars, principally

‘bogus.’”313 The contrast between the paper notes and the “heavy charge” here mimics

the relationship between the watery weight of the swamps and the “floating”

representations of rapid currents and dry land set forth in promotional circulars. The

contents of the box, broken glass and nails, speaks to the destructive and dismantling

312 Ibid., 126. 313 Ibid.

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consequences of the fraud: the glass and nails that build homes and communities have

been reduced to the charge of a sham.

Understanding such banking practices and Kirkland’s reaction to them becomes

essential to understanding her critique of literary frauds and her reconsideration of

Michigan’s wetlands. All are forms of abstraction detached from material realities and all

strike blows at the socioeconomic well being and longevity of the community. When the

Tinkerville bank finally fails, as so many other “Wildcat” banks did at the time, Kirkland

describes the consequences in terms of deconstruction and dismantlement: One can

hardly imagine, she writes, having to watch “the unroofing of the humble log-huts of

Michigan.”314 Her choice of “unroofing” suggests the antithesis of home creation and the

counter-action to her personal project of creating a new home. Instead of stewarding the

land in service to home and community, the bankers instead plant “Dead sea apples”—

ones that kill off the life around them. That Kirkland figures their actions in terms of a

largely lifeless body of water contrasts with the fecundity of her swamps and marshes.

The suffering felt by settlers, moreover, registers at a domestic and familial level: As

settlers attempt to cash in “their splendid-looking bank-notes, their hard-earned all, for

the flour which was to be the sole food of wife and babes through the long winter, [they

discover] that these hoarded treasures were valueless as the ragged paper which wrapped

them!”315 Of course, those savvy enough to discern the fraud and the impending crash

turn “the splendid notes [ . . .] into wheat and corn” as quickly as possible,” that is, into

314 Ibid. 315 Ibid.

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material items of necessity.316 As Kirkland points out, even legitimate money is nowhere

less important than in the forest, where residents tend to assess objects by their “real

value.”317 “[T]oll-wheat,” she adds, is a currency that never depreciates.”318

Kirkland’s indictment of fraudulent speculation practices extends to a range of

literature that misrepresents the Michigan landscape and provides anything but an

accurate evaluation of its qualities and characteristics. As with misleading circulars and

promotional materials, romanticized literary representations of Michigan create false

expectations for migrants that in turn lead to hardships, often from lack of adequate

preparation, and to feelings of bitterness that disrupt efforts to build cohesive

communities. After providing a detailed account of how one might traverse a Michigan

mud-hole, Kirkland relates how when she first “‘penetrated the interior’ (to use the

indigenous phrase) all I knew of the wilds was from Hoffman’s tour or Captain Hall’s

‘graphic’ delineations.’”319 Her use of the phrase “penetrated the interior” here suggests

the language typical of masculine adventure narratives, often characterized by conquest

and exploitation, and correlates such narratives with speculators, whom Kirkland refers to

as “heartless adventurers.”320 She adds, “I had some floating idea of ‘driving a barouche-

and-four anywhere through the oak-openings [. . .]. But I confess, these pictures, touched

by the glowing hand of fancy, gave me but incorrect notions of a real journey through

316 Ibid., 124. 317 Ibid., 186. 318 Ibid., 123. 319 Ibid., 6. Kirkland refers here to Charles Fenno Hoffman’s book Winter in the West (1835) and probably to James Hall, an author of many books about frontier life, including Letters from the West (1828) and The Sketches of History, Life and Manners in the West (1834). 320 Ibid., 126.

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Michigan.”321 These misrepresentations, for Kirkland, are akin to efforts of speculators to

exploit the gap between representation and reality: If airy circulars and bank notes

unmoored from the materiality of specie may cause great harm, the “floating” pages of

these texts commit similar frauds. Speculators and authors alike circulate their notes and

profit from their frauds. And while confronting an unexpected mud-hole may not defeat

the spirit of migrants or wreck a community, the repeated confrontation with unexpected

obstacles and frustrated expectations often did.

Kirkland seeks to counter these floating representations by anchoring hers—like her

wagons that repeatedly become anchored in the swamps and mud—to what she sees as

the material realities of the Michigan landscape, particular its wetter, heavier, muddier

features. Her marshes and mud-holes function as a kind of literary or environmental

specie, underwriting her notes and giving them “real” value, while serving as a weighty

counter force to the “floating” representations of speculators and those of Western

romance writers. In the opening pages of ANH, Mary Clavers’ first description of a mud-

hole begins her evolving education about the Michigan landscape and the realities of

frontier of life. Essential to the narrative’s satire, the mud-hole also serves as the first

challenge to a range of counter narratives—romantic, speculative, or otherwise—that

misrepresent the land. Kirkland begins the episode by mocking her own initial

misconceptions, describing the woods in a romantic vocabulary seemingly detached from

the realities of the land. The woods, she writes, are “gay in their first gosling green suit of

321 Ibid., 6.

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half-opened leaves, [as] the forest odours [ ] exhale[ ] with the dews of morning and

evening [. . .].”322 After gesturing to a number of romantic poets, including Charles

Lamb and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and touting Percy Shelley’s ability to find in flowers

“fanciful comparisons and deep-drawn meanings,” Kirkland turns promptly to a

description of the land actually before her—a “detailed memoir” of a “Michigan mud-

hole.”323 The sharp contrast between the romantic poets and the mud-hole punctuates the

role that these seemingly less fanciful features of the land play in her narrative.

Kirkland’s vow to keep her narrative “‘decidedly low’”—a phrase that most critics

interpret as her ironic commitment to rub elbows with her less-worthy frontier

neighbors—takes on a new environmental meaning. Such a mud-hole, she adds, is apt to

“occasion a sudden jolt—a breaking of the thread of one’s reverie—or in extreme cases, a

temporary stand-still or even an overturn for the rash or unwary.”324 The mud-hole here

jars the traveler-settler out of romantic reverie, as does the work of literary realism for the

neophyte settler and reader. A “memoir” of a mud-hole quickly grounds “floating

idea[s]” of “fancy” associated with romantic literature and speculation. It also “ushers”

forth the “unimpeachable transcript of reality”325 she promises and marks the beginning

of her “real journey through Michigan.”326 If we consider Kirkland as a proto-realist, a

claim proffered by many critics, then realism has its roots in speculation and in the

Michigan landscape.

322 Ibid., 5. 323 Ibid. 324 Ibid. 325 Ibid., 1. 326 Ibid., 5. My italics.

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ANH charts a process for Kirkland’s Mary Clavers of learning to read the Michigan

landscape with new eyes. Her eastern notions and her literary (romanticized) education of

the west have provided her with little actual knowledge of the land and therefore without

the tools necessary to actually make a new home. If her first description of the “Michigan

mud-hole” above sets the realistic tone of her narrative, her first encounter with a

“quaking bog” marks the beginning of her new environmental literacy. After initially

misreading the land before her as a “broad expanse of what seemed at a little distance a

smooth shaven lawn of the most brilliant green”—an echo of the poet’s “first gosling

green” quoted above—she soon learns that what is truly “brilliant green” is herself and

her own naïveté. She quickly discovers that the stretch of land is actually “a quaking

bog—embracing within its ridgy circumference all possible varieties of ‘Muirs, and

mosses, slaps and styles.”327 She continues:

Down came the horse—and this was not all—down came the driver; and I could

not do less than follow, though at a little distance—our good steed kicking and

floundering—covering us with hieroglyphics, which would be readily deciphered

by any Wolverine we should meet, though perchance strange to the eyes of our

friends at home.328

Her use of dashes here cleverly mimics the stuttering action of the physical collapse,

which signifies nothing less than Mary Clavers’ western baptism in a murky bog: she is

327 Ibid., 7. Kirkland quotes here from Robert Burns’ “Tam o’Shanter” (1791). In the poem, these landscape features lie between Tam and his home. For Kirkland, they will contribute to her education of the land and to home creation. 328 Ibid., 7-8.

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both anointed as a fledgling “Wolverine” and also provided with a kind of western

Rosetta Stone for deciphering the landscape’s vernacular and its muddy “hieroglyphics”

that cover her body. Kirkland’s narrative does become “decidedly low” here, as Mary

Clavers is literally immersed in the land. This environmental vernacular also mimics the

local language or western phrases used by her new neighbors that she gradually learns

and notes throughout ANH. Indeed, this muddy episode marks one of several important

transitional moments for Kirkland’s satire. Clavers’ identification of her “friends at

home” orients her “home” as still in the east, rather than in the west. Back “home,” for

Clavers, is still back east, but as her understanding of the local landscape increases, she

begins to reorient her perspective to her new home in the west.

Kirkland frequently turns to these muddy, swampy landscapes to consider the acts of

“reading” and even re-writing the land. That she often refers to these landscapes as

“inky” suggests their centrality to the writing of her own narrative, as well as to their

interpretative potential.329 In one of several formative moments along Clavers’ western

learning curve, Kirkland depicts her protagonist as yet again stuck in swampy land. As

Clavers struggles to interpret the landscape, Kirkland describes the land variously as a

“marsh,” a “mash,” a “miry slough,” a “bog-hole,” “a swamp,” “black pudding,” and

finally as this “expanse of inky mud.”330 Her very range of vocabulary suggests not only

her attempt to know and to articulate this new land but also its resistance to definition and

delineation. This inky mud, she suggests, is still wet and ready to write the western land

329 Ibid., 35. 330 Ibid.

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anew, but it is available only to the experienced. As Kirkland attempts to negotiate this

“expanse of inky mud” by stepping across “tempting green tufts, which looked as if they

might afford foothold,” they sink “under the slightest pressure.”331 Unable to properly

read the land—the “green tufts” gesture once again to her own greenness and her

“tempting” but romantic preconceptions—she is unable to get “ashore.” Her emphasis

here on observation (“looked”), moreover, underscores the act of visual interpretation.

Not yet able to properly read the landscape, she must “lose [her]self in a book” instead,

resigned to the ink on the page.332 Later, after much experience and as a seasoned local,

Kirkland reflects on her wandering “in this delicious solitude, not ‘book bosomed;’ for, at

such times, my rule is peu lire, penser beaucoup [ . . .].333 Having relinquished the book,

she is present, thoughtful, able to experience the landscape in an unmediated way. The

“solitude” here is not the dreary solitude experienced by the speculators on the banks of

the Shark River, but Kirkland’s “delicious chaos of hopes.” To those acquainted with

nature’s objects, Kirkland suggests, it “‘speaks always the same well-known language, [.

. . ] like the music of one’s native tongue, heard in a some far-off country.’”334

The Health of the Country

Of course, while watery desert places serve Kirkland as rich sources of literary

materials and inspiration, they also posed a host of real challenges for travelers and

settlers. Wetlands, in particular, carried the very real and serious risk of diseases. Chief

331 Ibid. 332 Ibid. 333 Ibid., 150. 334 Ibid., 149. She quotes here from William Hazlitt, the British critic and essayist.

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among them in Michigan was the “ague,” now generally recognized as malaria. While we

now know that malaria is caused by a microscopic parasite spread by mosquitoes,

antebellum Americans believed that diseases spread primarily by way of miasma,

unhealthy vapors and noxious air associated with pooled or stagnant waters. Noah

Webster’s American Dictionary of 1839, for instance, described “miasma” as the

“Infecting substances floating in the air; the effluvia of any putrefying bodies, rising and

floating in the atmosphere.335 Bottomlands with an abundance of stagnant waters,

swamps, or rotting sloughs, were viewed suspiciously as miasmatic and thus potentially

dangerous. It was but a small step for settlers from noxious water, yellowed, oppressively

still, and dark with decay and putrefaction, to noxious, contagious air. Almost a century

before the word “malaria” came to describe the actual disease, medical authorities in the

early-nineteenth century described the vapors that emanated from swamps and wet

lowlands by the same name, “malaria” or mal-aria, which translates, quite literally, as

“bad air.”336 Thus while speculators may have discounted wet lowlands as impediments

to commerce and “improvement,” migrating settlers generally avoided them, despite their

richer soils and fertility, in favor of drier elevated lands typically associated with better

health. Whether correctly informed or not, migrants had become accustomed to a

vocabulary, popularized by everything from promotional circulars to newspapers and

adventure literature, which spoke to the relative health of the land in regions throughout

the west: phrases like “healthy” land, “sickly” places, “salubrious,” and “miasmatic”

335 Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, 1839, “miasma.” 336 Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (Basic Books: New York, 2002), 114.

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were commonplace, as were assessments of the quality of the climate and the dryness of

the land.337 Despite the apparent prevalence of low wetlands in the area, Kirkland’s

husband, William, would nevertheless claim in a advertising circular published in a

Detroit newspaper that “A healthier spot [than Pinckney] is not to be found in

Michigan.”338 Yet as Kirkland makes clear, cases of “the ague” were as abundant as the

wetlands that helped to incubate the mosquitoes and malarial microbes that caused it.

As any reader of Kirkland knows, the “ague” plays a central role in ANH and an even

greater one in later works, like Forest Life (1844), where the sickness actually structures

much of the plot and provides thematic links between narrative fragments. Although

Kirkland adamantly acknowledges the dangers and discomforts associated with the

disease, she also suggests that surviving it marks a kind of rite of passage for long-term

settlers. In doing so, she implicitly recruits an unlikely ally in the “ague,” one that

engenders the pitfalls of residence in these low-lying regions, but also holds out the

promise of sustainable communities and a commitment to place. She does this, in part, by

positioning as parallel two types of fevers that define the western experience: one the

“western fever”339 (or speculating fever) and the second the “fever-agur.”340 While the

“fervour of the speculating mania”341 leads to “the madness of the people” and a

“feverish longing after unearned enjoyments,”342 the latter manifests as “chill[s] and

337 Ibid., 2. 338 Ellis, 274. See also 275-78. 339 Kirkland, ANH, 24. 340 Ibid., 60. 341 Ibid., 121. 342 Ibid., 77.

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fever,”343 intense pain, and even “delirium.”344 While “western fever” prompted people to

move locations with more frequency and thus disrupted efforts of individual adaptation to

new environments and climates, Kirkland suggests that a process of acclimation may in

time lesson the likelihood of infection and the severity of the ague. In keeping with

popular beliefs about abrupt adjustments to new places, Kirkland implies that a period of

sickness is practically necessary to accustom the body to the region’s ailments.

The “ague,” then, served as a kind of “seasoning” sickness, whereby newcomers

became adapted, so to speak, to the new place.345 Clavers undergoes here own seasoning,

when, in her state of inexperience, she takes to late night walks outdoors with her

husband until both are “prostrated” with the ague. Although certainly painful, she soon

opines that experience, “care and a rational diet will enable most persons to avoid this

terrible disease.”346 As with the ability to read the landscape, experience with how

conduct oneself on the frontier might curtail sickness. She also realizes that the “ague”

itself seems a manageable illness: Once stricken, she asserts that she “might certainly

die,” though she soon admits her mistake when the physician “verified his own assertion,

that an ague was as easily managed as a common cold.”347 Throughout ANH, Kirkland

executes a rhetorical move that both admits the severity of the ague, while simultaneously

mitigating its significance to life in Michigan. As she notes, those long-term residents,

cautious and acclimated to the place, and “settled for years in [this] open country,” 343 Ibid., 62. 344 Ibid., 60. 345 Valencius, 22-34. 346 Ibid., 50. 347 Ibid., 62.

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remain “yet in perfect health.”348 As in echo of her husband’s claim about the health of

the land, moreover, Kirkland adds that “These agues are, as yet, the only diseases of the

country,” and even those from the east with “sensitive lungs” find themselves “renovated

after a year on the peninsula.”349 “October passed without a single death,” she adds.350 As

if anticipating the inevitable counter-arguments that might be launched against such wet-

lowlands, Kirkland admits that given the prevalence of “the ague,” “One learns to feel as

if the climate must be a wretched one, and it is not till after these first clouds [of sickness]

have blown over, that we have resolution to look around us—to estimate the sunny skies

of Michigan, and the ruddy countenances of its older inhabitants as they deserve.”351

Time and experience, she suggests, will outlast “the ague,” if not the “western fever.”

The importance of the swamps and even the ague, for Kirkland, extends beyond

initiation or “seasoning” to encompass an environmental expression of, if not model for,

heterogeneous, egalitarian community formation in the west. As commentators have

readily observed, Kirkland struggles with reconciling her upper-class Eastern attitudes

with those she found in the wilderness “beyond the confines of civilization.” Yet if she is

never fully comfortable with “equality, perfect and practical,” the “sine qua non”” of the

west, she increasingly acknowledges as her book progresses the dangers of “pride” and

the futility of rigid class distinctions on the frontier.352 The swamps and the “ague” they

nurtured provide Kirkland with a natural analogue for exploring and expressing the 348 Ibid., 50. 349 Ibid., 62. 350 Ibid. 351 Ibid. 352 Ibid., 183-184.

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limitations of class-based pretensions of difference and privilege. While miasmas blurred

the boundaries between humans and the land, the ague worked as a social leveler, quite

literally putting the rich and poor, easterner and westerner alike prostrate on their backs,

and thus flouting the social distinctions that ostensibly separated one settler from another.

As Kirkland suggests, the ague can be avoided only through effort and informed,

patiently-gained experience—both of which she elevates to the status of virtues in a

ANH—rather than by proud, abstract social distinction. These watery environments also

troubled clean delineations and clear boundaries: the anomalous masses of swamps,

murky mixtures of water and land, life and decay, death and fecundity, were inherently

liminal spaces. Settlers inhaled the fetid exhalations of the swamps and immersed

themselves in it, like Kirkland’s children who fall into and regularly wear the local mud

on their clothes, carrying the land with them in and out of doors. With such a

promiscuous commingling of humans with their environments, the distinction between

human and human likewise eroded: people breathed the swampy air back and forth

between them. In their murky indefiniteness, these swampy landscapes mirror what

Kirkland refers to as the “mingled mass of our country population,”353 or, as she writes

elsewhere, the “western country, where every element enters into the composition of that

anomalous mass called society.”354

Finally, Kirkland also utilizes the wetlands as a staging for mishaps and pitfalls

associated with class-based pretensions. We see this most clearly perhaps when Clavers

353 Ibid., 145. 354 Ibid., 76.

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attempts to transport her eastern valuables across Michigan’s swampy landscape. Her

attempt to fit her oversized belongings into a small western cabin has frequently been

read as transitional moment in the text. Loaded down with “myriad articles” of eastern

convenience that seemed “absolutely necessary” when packed, Clavers soon realizes—

while being taunted by her more seasoned neighbors—that they are “ridiculously

superfluous” on the frontier.355 Yet the satirical force of the episode begins during their

journey to the cottage, when the Claverses attempt to pilot their “top-heavy” wagon—a

symbol of imbalanced, upper-class pretension—through a low-lying marsh, where, she

adds, “it was impossible to discern the inequalities which yet might overturn us in an

instant.”356 Of course, her choice of the word “inequalities” here punctuates the class-

based tensions that underlie the narrative: An inability to recognize and forfeit class

pretensions on the frontier might indeed bring about their downfall. Here the swamps and

marshes work as a kind of metaphorical (and literal) social leveler. We see this moments

later when their “noble” horse “Prince” falls into the “miry slough”: his display of his

own “good blood”—his “kicking and plunging”—only makes his condition worse. And

after failing to walk out of the marsh, Clavers herself admits to “regaining her low-chair,”

an admittedly low and more humble station. Later when her excessive belongings outsize

her lodgings, she begrudgingly admits “the truth,” that “common sense was all on the

355 Ibid., 35. 356 Ibid.

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side of [her neighbors], who wonder out loud in the local vernacular, “What on airth’s

them gimcracks for?”357

* * *

The risks of reading Kirkland’s nature writing, as I have done here, include

contributing to the easy idealization and essentialization of the relationship between

women and nature, which many critics have gone far in deconstructing or problematizing.

Yet she also offers us an important opportunity to examine underrepresented genres of

nature writing. As we have seen, Kirkland’s ANH often explicitly reinforces what Karen

Kilcup refers to as the “universalizing and totalizing [of] gender dualities” in relation to

the natural world.358 Kirkland clearly associates a patriarchal-capitalist order with the

disruption of home creation and settlement, as well as with the commodification of the

land and the careless destruction of the natural world. She associates women, in turn,

with a domestic “refining process, the introduction of those important nothings on which

so much depends,” namely, the creation of a comfortable and invested home. While a

woman may not do so alone, she adds, “Hers is the moving spirit.”359 But she also

associates women with the creation of a home on the frontier and within the natural

world. Not only do women attend to those natural beauties that adorn the home (“By and

bye a few apply-trees are set out; sweet briars grace the door yard, and lilacs and current-

357 Ibid., 42. 358 Kilcup, 72. 359 Kirkland, ANH, 147.

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bushes; all be female effort”360), they are also apt to appreciate the beauty of the natural

world more than their male counterparts, avoid its needless destruction, and at times take

an active hand in its preservation.

While Kirkland’s writing, then, may reinforce gendered divisions in relation to the

natural world, she simultaneously offers us the chance to better understand neglected

genres of nature writing and to thus broaden our understanding of environmental history.

First, Kirkland’s intense focus on wetlands in ANH predates by several decades a

growing interest in and attention to these otherwise neglected landscapes as sites of

refuge from urban life and the forces of capitalism. Second, she provides a realistic

account of frontier landscapes and settlers’ engagement with them. Third, while serving

as an important early example of American realism, ANH reflects a hybrid genre of

nature writing, both satire and village sketch, that mimics in its “wandering” style the

very characteristics of the Michigan landscape. Lastly, by concerning herself more with

creating a new home on the frontier rather than with wilderness preservation, Kirkland

broadens our understanding of what might constitute environmental writing and ideally

invites more critical attention to nineteenth-century women’s nature writing.

360 Ibid., 147.

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5.

Twain’s Cultural-Geographic

Imagination

Although Caroline Kirkland may have embraced wetlands as an antidote to the

disorienting velocities associated with land speculation, Mark Twain famously celebrates

America’s biggest river. Few people and even fewer writers have so closely observed the

geography of the Mississippi River, or of any river for that matter, as Mark Twain. In

Life on the Mississippi (1883), published more than forty years after Kirkland’s A New

Home (1839), Twain recalls his apprenticeship as a cub pilot on the Mississippi and his

intense education of the river’s complex and ever-changing geography. “There’s only one

way to be a pilot,” a young Twain is told by the pilot Mr. Bixby, “and that is to get this

entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A B C.”361 Later, Twain learns that

through diligent study the “face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book” that

could be read by the river-educated and which in turn would yield up its secrets.362 For

the would-be pilot, reading the river involved learning a new vocabulary, or a range of

subtle signs in the river that signaled the presence of snags, sawyers, shoals, stumps, and

361 Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, ed. James M. Cox (New York: Penguin, 1985) 76. 362 Ibid., 95.

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sandbars, among other hazards, any of which could prove perilous to the navigation of a

two-hundred foot Mississippi steamboat. “In truth,” Twain explains, “the passenger who

could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it, painted by the

sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all,

but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading-matter.”363 Careful reading practices,

then, allowed Twain to skillfully pilot riverboats, but the Mississippi offers other readings

and lessons, as well.

This chapter argues that Twain’s river in Life on the Mississippi functions not only as

a “book,” one that can be read for clues on the physical make-up of the river or as a guide

to piloting, but also as a critical pedagogy or method for reading geography itself. I argue

in the following pages that Twain employs the river as a guide for reading cultural-

geography rather than only physical geography, and in doing so he anticipates recent

critical debates on the nature of space and place, the relationship between temporality and

spatiality, human interactions with the landscape and the environment, as well as the

tensions between the local and the global. Through his extensive presentation of the

river’s history and its physical details, including its incessant volatility and changeability,

and accounts of human interactions with and historical events along the river, Twain

proffers a vision of space that is radically open, relational, in process, and interconnected,

and likewise at odds with essentialist notions of space as static, bounded, absolute,

complete, or authentic. For Twain, then, learning to read the river meant learning

363 Ibid.

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something profound about how culture is produced and worked out in particular

landscapes and spaces. Such spatial theorizations, moreover, suggest a broader political

project for Twain’s Life on the Mississippi than has often been recognized. A view of

space as open, in process, and a product of interrelations, recognizes the constructed

nature of identities (a familiar theme in Twain’s works), as well as a genuine openness of

the future that contrasts with the grand narratives of “Progress,” “Development,” or

“Improvement [ . . . ].”

Such an understanding or conceptualization of space seemingly contrasts with notions

of Twain as an intensely place-based writer. Twain’s depictions of places, like Hannibal,

Missouri, have become iconic and closely associated with nostalgia for rooted, authentic,

and relatively static places. Indeed, the very framing of Life on the Mississippi involves

the adult Twain’s supposed return to the river of his childhood, that is, to his home, to a

place of familiarity, and arguably to a richer set of connections. “After twenty-one years’

absence,” Twain writes, “I felt a very strong desire to see the river again, and the

steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left; so I resolved to go out there.”364 I

argue here that Twain uses the familiar narrative of the return home—or at least the

longing for a return—to further develop his sense of the nature of space, that is, of the

ever-changing production of space and its interconnected construction. Throughout Life

on the Mississippi, Twain repeatedly evokes the familiar idea of going home as an act of

traveling back in both time and space as a kind of nostalgic performance, only to subvert

364 Ibid., 167.

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this notion by punctuating the ever-changing nature of place. It is only through memory, I

suggest, that Twain ultimately manages to fix or stabilize place. In the memory of the

writer, akin to the memory exercised by the skilled riverboat pilot, Twain is able to offer

a more political and effective form of nostalgia—one that recognizes place as open and

yet enables Twain to return “home,” to retain portable sense of place, to adhere at will to

the old familiar things. For as with Huck Finn, there is no actually going home. All one

can ultimately do is to “light out for the territories” with a portable sense of place.

Twain’s Critical Pedagogy:

Twain’s education as a pilot was intensely geographic. His learning to “read” the

river involved studying the river’s contours, its ever-shifting channel, its fluctuating

depth, its protean riparian zone, and the changing landscape along the shore, as well as a

subtle vocabulary comprised of floating logs, slanting marks, faint dimples, “tumbling

‘boils,’” lines and circles, and sliver streaks on the water.365 His success as a pilot,

moreover, depended on his correct interpretation of this language.366 Of course, a failure

to know the river’s alphabet and to interpret its language could carry grave consequences:

365 Ibid., 94-96. 366 The name “Mark Twain,” of course, Samuel Clemens’s penname, is intimately linked to the river as a measurement of its depth and to his work as a pilot. The term “mark twain,” shouted by river boat men, signaled a measurement of “two fathoms,” a depth indicating water that was just sufficiently deep enough to allow for safe navigation. However, it also indicated water that was barely deep enough. As James M. Cox suggests in his introduction to Life on the Mississippi, the term also signals “dangerous passage and not the safe water that Mark Twain on another occasion said the term denoted.” See James M. Cox, introduction, Life on the Mississippi, ed. James M. Cox (New York: Penguin, 1985), 19.In returning to the Mississippi River, Twain returns to the origin of his name. In his novels, Twain seems also to name characters after the river’s natural features. For instance, Tom Sawyer shares his name with a “sawyer,” a submerged log in the river that was a great danger to boats.

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Twain’s education was a lesson of necessity. “The passenger who could not read [the

river],” writes Twain, “was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on its surface [. .

.]; but to the pilot that was an italicized passage; indeed, it was more than that, it was a

legend of the largest capitals, with a string of exclamation points at the end of it; for it

meant that a wreck or a rock was buried there that could tear the life out of the strongest

vessel that ever floated.”367 Of course, Twain does not intuit this new vocabulary. His

knowledge of the river derives largely from Mr. Bixby, a pilot and Twain’s river mentor,

who teaches Twain his “A B C[s]”368 and how to decipher the text (the “dead language”)

of the river.369 His education, moreover, involved more than learning to read the river’s

subtle signs and extended to learning a vast geography in apparently minute detail.

Having kept a notebook that “fairly bristled with the names of towns, ‘points,’ bars,

islands, bends, reaches, etc.,”370 Twain explains that at one point he still had to learn not

only “the names of all the towns and islands and bends, and so on, by heart, but I must

even get up a warm personal acquaintanceship with every old snag and one-limbed

cottonwood and obscure wood pile that ornaments the banks of the river for twelve

hundred miles,” and even know them in the dark.371 In the process, Twain apparently

becomes an expert, along with many other riverboat pilots, in reading and interpreting the

physical landscape of and along the Mississippi River.

367 Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 94. 368 Ibid., 76. 369 Ibid., 94. 370 Ibid., 77. 371 Ibid., 80-81.

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This geographic education extends to include a vision of human or cultural geography

that Twain in turn embeds in his Mississippi narrative. Twain’s descriptions of the river,

including its natural history, physical features, topography, channel location, and patterns

of flow, all serve as a kind of critical pedagogy or methodology for reading geography.

Even while Twain writes about his own education as a riverboat pilot—his patient and

gradual education of reading and interpreting the language of the river—he is

simultaneously inculcating his readers with a critical attitude about and a habit of reading

and interpreting geography itself. Twain uses the river to illuminate ways of reading

spatial relationships between locales, such as the tensions between the local and the

global, spatial variation among cultural groups, the spatial functioning of society, and

even theorizations of the very nature of space and place. Thus Twain essentially nests

various levels of pedagogy: embedded within a narrative about the education of a pilot—

a narrative that itself recalls various pedagogical moves employed by his mentor, Mr.

Bixby—is a method for reading a more nuanced and broader geography than simply the

natural aspects of the river.372 In other words, there is a pedagogy or method embedded

within a book about a book (that is, the river as a book). As I have already stated, this

pedagogy is also inherently political, premised in part on notions of social justice.

Twain’s geographical pedagogy is not necessarily Marxist in orientation, although at

times it seems to be influenced by a consciousness of the stresses and fractures of

capitalism. Yet Twain’s pedagogy is critical in the sense that it seeks to accomplish what

372 I do not mean here to diminish or subordinate the task of learning the natural features of the river, but rather to emphasize the different, though related, projects of education taking place in Twain’s narrative.

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Ian Shor has referred to, speaking in another context about critical pedagogy more

generally, as “Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath the

surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, [. . .] to understand the deep

meaning, root causes, social context, ideology [ . . . ].”373

The Body of the Nation

Twain begins his geography lesson in the opening pages of Life on the Mississippi by

highlighting the river’s extensive reach and its relational interconnectedness, while

simultaneously setting up an ironic contrast with his epigram that he will develop

throughout the book. His choice of epigram, which he titles “The ‘Body of the Nation’”

and which he draws from a small section of the “Editor’s Table” in Harper’s Magazine,

February 1863,374 serves to not only command attention to the geographic expansiveness

and overall immensity of his project—that is, the expanse and immensity of the

Mississippi River—but also to suggest a parallel between the river and human spaces and

places. “But the basin of the Mississippi,” it reads, “is the Body of the Nation. All the

other parts are but members, important in themselves, yet more important in their

relations to this. Exclusive of the Lake basin and of 300,000 square miles in Texas and

New Mexico, which in many aspects form a part of it, this basin contains about 1,250,000

square miles.”375 As the textual entrance to the narrative, the passage establishes the vast

373 Ian Shore, Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 129.374 Editor’s Table, “Indivisibility of the Nation,” Harper’s Magazine, February, 1963, 413-418, 413. 375 Twain, Life on the Mississippi, epigraph.

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scope of Twain’s geographic undertaking: in discussing “life” on the Mississippi, Twain

is essentially discussing a spatial mass and thus spatial relations much more expansive

than the river itself. Like the river with its far-flung tributaries, this vast space is

composed of constituent parts or places and is interconnected in vital ways. Indeed, the

personification of the river as a “Body” implies that the constituent parts, though

“important” in themselves, exist only in relation to one another. Without the other, the

one would cease to exist. Discussing the river’s physical geography, Twain later

elaborates on the interconnectedness of the river. “No other river,” he writes, “has so vast

a drainage-basin: it draws its water supply from twenty-eight States and Territories; from

Delaware, on the Atlantic seaboard, and from all the country in between that Idaho on the

Pacific Slope [ . . . ].376 Echoing his epigraph’s emphasis on the river’s geographic reach,

Twain highlights here the river’s interconnectedness with a vast number of places.

Although focused on the Mississippi’s watershed, Twain description here sets up an

analogy for the relational interconnectedness of space.

But Twain also employs the epigraph in other rhetorical ways. His unusual choice, a

selection from a Civil War-era, anti-sucessionist editorial arguing for the necessity of the

nation’s geographic integrity, stands in sharp contrast with the sense of geography that

emerges in Life on the Mississippi. Published in Harpers magazine in 1863, the “Editor’s

Table” commentary responds to Lincoln’s second annual message to Congress (1862),

wherein Lincoln famously evokes the “great body of the Republic.” After briefly

376 Ibid., 39.

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summarizing Lincoln’s claims that “the United States is specially adapted to be the home

of one nation” and that “the American nation is by the law of nature one and indivisible,”

the editors set about the task of examining these propositions in the “cool light of

physical science.”377 Fully supportive of Lincoln’s rhetorical vision, the editors go on to

reinforce the analogy between the individual and the nation, claiming, “A nation, like an

individual, consists of body and soul. Its soul is its people; its body is the territory they

inhabit.”378 They then embrace a form of geographic determinism (“the whole course of

human history has been prescribed and prophesized in the physical structure of the

globe”379) that seeks to support the natural inevitability of the nation’s geography. They

argue, then, against sucession and embrace the natural law “written in the physical

structure of our land and in the development of our people, that the American nation is

divinely ordained to be one and indivisible.”380

At first glance, Twain’s choice of epigraphs seems unusual. Twain knew the river

intimately from his training and time served as a pilot, and he had read actively in various

natural histories of the Mississippi in preparation for composing Life on the Mississippi,

particularly for its opening chapters which set out physical and historical details of the

river. Why then does Twain choose a passage for the epigraph written some twenty years

earlier and anchored in Civil War rhetoric, rather than from another or more recent

history? On the one hand, as I have already discussed, the epigraph does establish a sense

377 Editor’s Table, “Indivisibility of the Nation,” 413. 378 Ibid.379 Ibid. 380 Ibid., 418.

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of the river as interconnected and relational, a concept he will later relate to “place” more

generally. It also establishes what most any other natural history would establish—a

sense of the spatial magnitude of his project: the size and reach of the Mississippi River

Basin. Yet I suggest that the epigraph functions in a more substantial way by ultimately

establishing a contrast between its geographic logic and that of Twain’s broader

geographic vision and political project. Of course, Twain is famous for his ironic use of

subjects and materials and this is no exception. My contention is that Twain

fundamentally takes issue with the personification employed by the epigraph and more

broadly with its rhetoric, including and perhaps especially Lincoln’s, that utilized

allegory and sought to establish the United States as a personified body. As we shall see,

the geographic vision he sets forth in Life on the Mississippi is largely at odds with and

repeatedly seeks to undermine one that by its very nature reinforces a vision of space as

fixed, predetermined, and somehow authentically coherent.

Before proceeding to examine Twain’s geographic pedagogy, I will pause briefly here

to consider the geographic and political implications, as Twain seems to address them in

Life on the Mississippi, of spatialized allegory and personification generally and in the

epigraph specifically. First, Twain resists the notion of fixed space that is implicit in

personification. As Angus Fletcher has pointed out, the very act of personification

situates the agent (i.e., America) as always “frozen into an eternally fixed form” (i.e., the

body).381 By embodying America, so to speak, Lincoln and others have attempted to

381 Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 66.

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impose a stable regime of meaning upon a vast space. In this formulation, space becomes

not only fixed and closed—locked within the form of the body, a bounded figure in

space—but also determined and timeless. To borrow an image from geographer Doreen

Massey, this is a view of space as always already divided up.382 This view also tends to

turn geography into history and space into time.383 Such a view of space, as Twain

suggests, is problematic in several ways. First, it tends to close off possible futures, since

there is only one historical trajectory and one narrative rather than many in this

conceptualization. Even the object of the allegory (America) has little or no power to

create its own future or its own narrative. As Wai-chee Dimock suggests, writing about

the agent (or agency) locked within this personification, “narrative action for him is no

more than an autotelic function, no more than the reflexive unfolding of what is already

an ontological provision.” The agent, she adds, “enacts an edifying career of destined

progress.”384 Second, the establishment of this fixed national space whitewashes any

history of conflict in the establishment of its borders. Such a view represses the bold fact

that the “Body of the Republic” resulted from years of historical conflict: broken

treatises, war, and annexation.385 Lastly, Twain also seems to register the trappings of

imperialism embedded within this personification. If America is a body, then that body

can certainly grow into other spaces, including Cuba, Mexico, or the Philippines, and in

382 Massey, For Space, 6 383 Ibid.384 Dimock, 25. 385 Ibid.

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so doing subsume other narratives and other histories into its own, as if those spaces were

also always already divided up.

The Geography of the River

Twain’s depiction of the openness and changeability of the river and by extension the

openness and changeability of space is obviously and directly at odds with a notion of the

land as an indivisible body. Twain repeats with remarkable frequency throughout the

book the propensity of the river to shift directions, to change its channel, to erode its

banks, to build or shape the land, and to flood or destroy towns and communities. The

land along the Mississippi, according to Twain, exists in an almost constant state of

formation and reformation and thus so too does the “body.” As Twain makes clear, the

most common occurrence of change along the river is the “cut-off.”

The Mississippi is remarkable in still another way—its disposition to make

prodigious jumps by cutting through narrow necks of land, and thus straightening

itself. More than once it has shortened itself thirty miles at a single jump! These cut-

offs have had curious effects: they have thrown several river towns out into the rural

districts, and built up sand bars and forests in front of them. The town of Delta used

to be three miles below Vicksburg: a recent cut-off has radically changed the position,

and Delta is now two miles above Vicksburg.386

386 Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 40.

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“Both of these river towns,” Twain adds, “have been retired to the country by that cut-

off.”387 Such cut-offs wreak havoc on the petrified stability and order implicit in the

personified body. Here the bodily parts of the Republic break and shift locations subject

to the ever-fluctuating Mississippi. Indeed, through repeated references to the volatility of

the river, Twain seems to delight in playing with the spatial vision set forth by Lincoln

and replayed in the epigraph. If the American nation is “by the law of nature one and

indivisible,”388 as the Harper’s editors suggest, then Twain’s nature tells a very different

story. For Twain, the natural law “written in the physical structure of our land” is not

static and immutable, but unpredictable, apt to sudden change, radically open, and

unfixed.389 Even the physical geography and relative situatededness of whole towns are

subject to reorientation. These locales are not already and always divided up by divine

decree, but are migratory and may with little warning shift their positioning relative to

other locales.

Also in conflict with the fixed “body of the Republic” is Twain’s articulation of space

as always in process. Using the river as a natural analogue for human constructions of

space, that is, as a body of water that both mirrors the process of the production of space

by humans and that also works dialectically, in conjunction with humans, to shape and

reshape human environments over time, Twain suggests the near-constant processes of

space creation.

387 Ibid. 388 Editor’s Table, “Indivisibility of the Nation,” 413. 389 Ibid., 418.

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The mud [carried by the river], solidified, would make a mass a mile square and

two hundred and forty-one feet high. The mud deposit gradually extends the

land—but only gradually; it has extended it not quite a third of a mile in the two

hundred years which have elapsed since the river took its place in history but over

two hundred miles in 120,000 years.390

The mass blending of mud and water here suggests the unclear demarcation between land

and water, solidity and fluidity, and stasis and movement. The land was and always is

under a fluid-like construction. Just as dirt from throughout the Mississippi River Basin

slides, drains, erodes, or collapses into the river or its tributaries, so too does the river

build up the land, albeit here at a geologic pace, that serves as the grounds of human

settlements. The emphasis on the glacial pace of “deposit,” moreover, sets the everyday

activities of humans in sharp relief against the ever-unfolding history of spatial processes

and change. Indeed, Twain’s casual observation about the river’s gradual pace of change

directly undermines the notion of a stable national space pre-determined by “nature.” The

very idea of the “nation” and of a stabilized, always divided-up space diminishes greatly

in the shadow of 120,000 years of riparian process. Figure #7 in Appendix, an illustration

from the first edition of Life on the Mississippi, suggests this spatial instability and

indeterminacy: Titled “Caving Banks,” the image shows the sheer and steep banks, a

cluster of houses situated perilously close to the muddy river, and farmers plowing the

fields. The little farming community here, quaint as it perhaps looks, is anything but a

390 Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 40.

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closed, static, fixed, or coherent system. As the river shifts direction or its banks cave into

the water, the farmers themselves will need to shift and re-locate. Of course, the river can

also build up or otherwise alter land at accelerated rates too. As Twain notes, “Although

the Mississippi’s mud builds land but slowly, down at the mouth, where the Gulf’s

billows interfere with its work, it builds fast enough in better protected regions higher up:

for instance, Prophet’s Island contained one thousand five hundred acres of land thirty

years ago; since then the river had added seven hundred acres to it.”391 The resounding

point here is that physical space comes and goes; it is always in flux. Viewed through a

geologic lens, Twain recognizes, space was and always is in process, even if its timetable

for change does not always accord with human clocks or the urgencies of daily calendars.

Of course, spatial movement and change, Twain realizes, do not occur only in river

channels or along riparian zones, but happen according to geologic timetables and vast

geologic processes, like the creation, movement, and dissolution of glaciers that carved

out the landscape over thousands of years of much of the Mississippi River Basin.

Writing just two years earlier in A Tramp Aboard (1831), Twain describes his travels

along glaciated landscapes in Europe, his hikes along moraines, and his camp atop a

European glacier. When Twain and his travel companions contemplate how best to get

back to the nearest town, they humorously conclude to ride the glacier, which Twain

likens to steamboat travel, that was “moving all the time” and carving up the landscape as

391 Ibid., 41.

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it did so.392 After realizing that “we did not seem to be gaining any on the scenery,” he

concludes that “This confounded thing’s aground again.”393 He writes:

‘The Gover Glacier travels at an average rate of a little less than an inch a day.’ [ . . .]

One inch a day, say thirty feet a year; estimated distance to Zermatt, three and one-

eighteenth miles. Time required to go by glacier, A LITTLE OVER FIVE

HUNDRED YEARS! [. . .] [ ] I revealed to Harris the fact that the passenger part of

this glacier—the central part—the lightning-express part, so to speak—was not due in

Zermatt till the summer of 2378, and that the baggage, coming along the slow edge,

would not arrive until some generations later [ . . .].394

Although a richly comic episode, the passage proves at least two things: first, that Twain

was well acquainted with glaciated landscapes and the constant change they wrought

upon the land, albeit at a glacial pace, and second, that Twain curiously connects the

glacier, by inference, back to the Mississippi River. The passage certainly resonates with

the opening chapters of Life on the Mississippi, wherein Twain describes the scope and

physical history of the Mississippi, and with claims like this the following: “Nearly the

whole of that one thousand three hundred miles of old Mississippi River which La Salle

floated down in his canoes, two hundred years ago, is good solid dry ground now.”395 By

connecting the glacier to his experiences on steamboats, he posits a suggestive parallel

392 Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1899), 453-456. 393 Ibid. 394 Ibid.395 Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 41.

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between the slow upheaval of the landscape by the glacier and the ever-changing

landscape along the river. Here is a view of space that is certainly permeable, where the

land itself migrates and moves according to its own deep-time clock and along various

trajectories and that is always in process.

In dwelling on the spatial or physical dynamism of the river and its surrounding

landscape, Twain also presents a vision of human places as always under construction or

always in process. On the one hand, as we have seen, human space is always constructed

and reconstructed by the river itself and by other natural causes, both on long and short

timelines, while on the other hand human places are themselves always in flux as

products of dynamic flows, migrations, interrelations and interconnections. Twain’s

spatial conceptualization here predates a notion of place articulated by some

contemporary geographers who, like Doreen Massey, see place as a product not of “some

long internalized history” but as “constructed out of a particular constellation of social

relations, meeting and weaving together as a particular locus.”396 For Massey, places can

be imagined as “articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings”

rather than as bounded, secure, homogenous, fixed, or fully coherent.397 In this sense,

place is no secure ontological object, but a process or event revealed at a moment in time

and defined in part by the connections it has with other places in the world, what the

historian William Cronon has called “the paths out of town” or the connections one place

396 Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” 154.397 Ibid.

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has with the rest of the world.398 In this sense, place is defined not by authenticity,

permanence, and rootedness, but constructed out of an endless array of ever-changing

interconnections and processes from outside.

Twain develops this idea of place as process in Life on the Mississippi in part by

establishing, as we have seen, the relational and interconnected nature of the river itself—

the river serves as a model or methodology for human spaces and places—, but also by

highlighting the interconnectedness of specific locales along the river, as well as the

layered histories that, like the river’s mud and sediment that accumulate over time, build

up or erode to make place an ever-changing product of multiple histories and trajectories.

If the river for Twain is a great confluence—a fluid convergence of waters from “twenty-

eight States and Territories,” from “fifty-four subordinate rivers that are navigable by

steamboats, and from some hundreds that are navigable by flats and keels”399—then the

land along the river, its various towns, villages, and cities, are the product of human

convergences and on-going interactions over time. Twain demonstrates this first by

illustrating in the book’s opening pages the rich multi-cultural history of the area along

the river. For instance, Twain briefly describes the journeys of the many explorers who

traveled throughout the region and who at one time or another held various claims upon

the allegedly pre-destined “body of the Republic,” such as Hernando de Soto (“the first

white man who ever saw the Mississippi River, saw it in 1542”),400 then Joliet and

398 William Cronon, “Kennecot Journey,” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. William Cronon et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company)., 1992), 33. 399 Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 39.400 Ibid., 41

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Marquette (who eventually floated down the river and “passed the mouth of the Ohio” at

Cairo, Illinois),401 and later Rene-Robert de la Salle, who had “conceived the idea of

seeking out that river and exploring it” and who eventually did so in 1681 (as Twain

notes, he would also “pass the mouth of the Ohio” at Cairo).402 Of course, as Twain

gestures to here, ownership of the land along the Mississippi had frequently changed

hands, with its various borders and boundaries shifting and reconfiguring over time,

while possession was often worked out through violence and historical conflict. Space

and place here are not rooted and authentic since time-immemorial, but are rather the

product of human convergences and on-going interactions over time.

Perhaps Twain’s most strenuous challenge to place as cleanly bounded and

permanent, with unproblematic and internalized histories, derives from his depiction of

the difficulties of assigning locales long-lasting geopolitical boundaries. Borders for

Twain are not rigid and closed, but open and apt to change and shift. In his description of

the river’s fluctuating nature, Twain underscores not only the natural volatility that so-

often wreaks havoc with human places, as we have seen, but gestures toward the socio-

political (human) dynamism of such places, as well. As Twain suggests in his discussion

of the river’s history, geo-political boundaries are not the result of providence but rather

of historical struggle, treatises, warfare, and annexation, and are thus themselves

frequently shifting. Recalling the history of settlement along the Mississippi River and

elsewhere, Twain notes the exploitation of Native Americans. He writes,

401 Ibid., 47. 402 Ibid., 43-44, 47.

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[ . . .] Spaniards were robbing, slaughtering, enslaving and converting them;

higher up [along the Atlantic seaboard], the English were trading beads and

blankets to them for a consideration, and throwing in civilization and whiskey,

‘for lagniappe;’ and in Canada the French were schooling them in a rudimentary

way, missionarying among them, and drawing whole populations of them at a

time to Quebec, and later to Montreal, to buy furs of them. Necessarily, then,

these various clusters of whites must have heard of the great river of the far west

[. . .].403

While the multicultural and often-violent history that Twain presents here is not

surprising, his inclusion of it highlights the cultural interconnectedness of North America.

It also makes clear the various populations vying for proprietary control of spaces and

thus the power to establish (temporary) boundaries and to assign identity to places for a

time.404 Of course, such a dynamic view of human geography, wherein borders and

boundaries shift as a result of historical conflict, is made even clearer in the afterglow of

the Civil War.

The volatility of Twain’s river in Life on the Mississippi both reflects and exacerbates

the instability of geopolitical boundaries. Writing about the river and Twain’s

construction of “meaning” in Life on the Mississippi, T.S. McMillin suggests that Twain

creates an interplay “between the natural history of the river (physical facts) and its social

history (facts from ‘historical history’) [that] requires the kind of perspective that comes 403 Ibid., 43. 404 David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, 261.

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from conceptual overlook.”405 That “conceptual overlook,” I suggest, is profoundly

geographic and this interplay between the river and humans continually transforms

places. In a comedic passage that underscores the shifting nature of geopolitical

boundaries, Twain notes that, given the river’s tendency to shorten itself through cutoffs,

“any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower

Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will

have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single

mayor and a mutual board of alderman.”406 Although obviously humorous, Twain’s

geographic conceptualization here is not to be dismissed. It captures in tongue-in-cheek

fashion the shifting nature of the land, the potential fluidity of socio-political borders, and

the possibility (in the long view) of the fusion of places or fissures. If historian Arif

Dirlik is correct that “place is the location [. . .] where the social and the natural meet,”

then “place,” the junction of the social and natural, in Twain’s formulation is in constant

flux.407 Yet Twain’s formulation ultimately subverts Dirlik’s: where Dirlik finds that the

physical world tends to lend place fixity, Twain seems to find just the opposite. For

Twain, both the natural world and social worlds seem not timeless and fixed, but dynamic

and even turbulent.

405 T.S. McMillin, The Meaning of Rivers: Flow and Reflection in American Literature (University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 2011), 7. 406 Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 147. 407 Arif Dirlik, “Place-based Imagination: Globalism and the Politics of Place,” in Places and Politics in an Age of Globalization, R. Prazniak et al. (Lanham MA: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), pp. 15-51.

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Twain’s presentation of the river’s geographic upheaval and its power to disrupt

geopolitical borders is not limited to humorous speculations. Rather, Twain repeatedly

highlights in various contexts the interplay between the natural history of the river (its

physical facts) and the social history (the facts from “historical history”). Indeed, this is a

division that Twain himself gestures to in the opening pages of the Life on the Mississippi

(“Let us drop the Mississippi’s physical history, and say a word about its historical

history—so to speak”).408 Using an example that proves especially pertinent in the

aftermath of the Civil War, Twain notes:

A cut-off plays havoc with boundary lines and jurisdictions; for instance, a man

living in the State of Mississippi to-day, a cut-off occurs to-night, and to-morrow

the man finds himself and his land over on the other side of the river, within the

boundaries and subject to the laws of the State of Louisiana! Such a thing,

happening in the upper river in the old times, could have transferred a slave from

Missouri to Illinois and made a free man of him.409

If we are to think of place, as Doreen Massey suggests, as open, as “woven together out

of ongoing stories, as a moment within power-geometries, as a particular [and temporary]

constellation within the wider topographies of space,” Twain suggests here that nature

itself is no firm anchor. 410 The natural world, far from being timeless and immovable, is

itself always moving and changing. The river here also plays with social history—a fact

408 Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 41. 409 Ibid., 40. 410 Massey, For Space, 133.

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that resonates in interesting ways with Twain’s other narratives, namely, The Adventures

of Huck Finn. By carving its way through various borders, the river literally challenges

the stability of jurisdiction and punctuates the challenge of defining and enforcing

borders in “moment[s] within power-geometries.”411 As Twain’s river shows, these

geometries are readily apt to change. Writing elsewhere about the Mississippi, Twain’s

notes, “In this region the river passes from Kentucky into Tennessee, back into Missouri,

then back into Kentucky, and thence into Tennessee again. So a mile or two of Missouri

sticks into Tennessee.”412 Here the jurisdictional and political boundaries practically blur

together. This is not to say that jurisdictions are meaningless. As Twain points out, a

slave in “the old times” would certainly care about her or his side of the river. But Twain

does point out the relative fluidity of geo-political or social borders and to the openness

of place more generally.

As we have seen, one of the most notable features of Twain’s text is his interweaving

of the Mississippi’s “physical history” with “historical history” in way that demonstrates

the flux and openness of place.413 Twain repeatedly juxtaposes the river’s shifts and

volatility with the turbulent changes in social, cultural, and political conditions that

contribute to the production of space. He suggests, moreover, a kind of dialectical

interplay between these forces (as mentioned above) with each shaping and re-shaping

the other and ultimately shaping and re-shaping places. One example is Twain’s

treatment of historical Vicksburg, Mississippi and its role in the Civil War. As Twain 411 Ibid. 412 Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 196. 413 Ibid., 41.

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observes, the war radically transformed the socio-economic and political make-up of

Vicksburg. During the bombardment of the city, residents borrowed into the banks of the

river during the war for shelter (see Figure #8 in Appendix). “The [caves] were mere

holes,” Twain writes, “tunnels, driven into the perpendicular clay bank, then branched Y

shape, within the hill.”414 The contingency of place becomes strikingly clear here amidst

the struggle of power relations. The image of some 3,000 residents (“merely the

population of a village”) as underground cave-dwellers also suggests an intimate nexus

between human space and the river’s physical space in an interplay that shapes and re-

shapes Vicksburg.415 The interplay becomes even more striking when we learn that the

river has later moved “the lofty hill-city, Vicksburg”: “A cut-off has made a country town

of it,” Twain writes, “like Osceola, St. Genevieve, and several others. There is currentless

water—also a big island—in front of Vicksburg now.416 While we may not be able to

capture the fullness of the contingency of place, as cultural critic James Donald suggests,

it can at certain times present itself more clearly.417 Twain’s captures just such a moment

in this articulation of Vicksburg.

Perhaps the example that best illustrates Twain’s geographic vision comes in his

detailed discussion and development of Napoleon, Arkansas. Indeed, Twain’s treatment

of Napoleon throughout Life on the Mississippi operates as a loosely constructed plot,

holding together various sections of the narrative, while serving as a kind of case study in

414 Ibid., 257. 415 Ibid., 258. 416 Ibid., 257. 417 James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1999), 168.

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geography. On the one hand, Napoleon illustrates a vision of place as a product of

interrelations and interactions on the level of the local and global, while on the other the

town’s fate punctuates the tenuousness of borders and boundaries. Indeed, his depiction

of the town undermines any notion of place as authentic or always already divided up. In

the book’s opening chapters, Twain establishes the town of Napoleon as the site of

historical (global and multi-cultural) interactions. “Then, to the admiration of the

savages,” he writes, “La Salle set up a cross with the arms of France on it, and took

possession of the whole country for the king [ . . .]. These performances took place on the

site of the future town of Napoleon, Arkansas [. . .]. He continues:

Marquette’s and Joliet’s voyage of discovery ended at the same spot—the site of

the future town of Napoleon. When De Soto took his fleeting glimpse of the river,

away back in the dim early days, he took it from that same spot—the site of the

future town of Napoleon, Arkansas. Therefore, three out of the four memorable

events connected with the discovery and exploration of the mighty river occurred,

by accident, in one and the same place. It is a most curious distinction, when one

comes to look at it and think about it. France stole that vast country on that spot,

the future Napoleon; and by and by Napoleon himself was to give the country

back again!—make restitution, not to the owners, but to their white American

heirs.418

418 Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 48.

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By relating a remarkable set of historical coincidences, Twain establishes the

convergence of far-flung cultures, European but also Native Americans, in one particular

place. The convergence is all the more striking because of Napoleon’s intense localism:

one can hardly imagine a locale more “local” or less associated with cosmopolitan

interconnections. Yet long before the physical location was named Napoleon an array of

multi-cultural forces were contesting the location and enacting power geometries that

would establish place for a time being. Few anecdotes illustrate better the negotiation and

articulation of geo-political boundaries established through historical conflict and

violence, while undermining the notion of the providential “body of the Republic.” The

“local” here is hardly a closed system or one rooted from time immemorial. That these

events all involved discovery and exploration of the river, moreover, connects Napoleon

and its fate with Twain’s broader vision of life on the Mississippi.

Twain also depicts local Napoleon as established within more contemporary webs of

transnational narratives. By doing so, Twain suggests a notion of place as a nexus of

narratives or as a constellation of cultural trajectories at a particular point in time and thus

always in process. Twain vision amounts to an understanding of place, in the words of

geographer Tim Cresswell, as an “event rather than a secure ontological thing rooted in

notions of the authentic.”419 In what amounts to a minor plotline in the context of Life on

the Mississippi, Twain tells a story about hidden gold that involves the Civil War and also

an array of characters in Germany, himself included, who are all connected by Napoleon,

419 Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 40.

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Arkansas, at various points in time. In brief, the story involves Twain’s need, while

touring the Mississippi River for the purposes of the book, to do an “errand” at

Napoleon.420 We later learn about a series of events that occurred during the Civil War,

including robbery and murder, that in turn culminated in buried gold.421 When asked to

retrieve the hidden fortune by an acquaintance in Karlstrasse in Bavaria and to send the

money to victims to make amends, Twain agrees. In what amounts to a Poe-esque

narrative of murder, intrigue, buried gold, mistaken burials, and morgues (note that

Twain gestures to a “Captain Poe” just pages before introducing the narrative), Twain

embeds a commentary on the nature of human geography and place. Napoleon,

Arkansas—a place akin to Hannibal, Missouri, Twain’s home and the location of his

most famous Mississippi narratives—is just the sort of place that in Twain’s hands would

represent the rural, the quaint, the intensely local aspects of American life. Yet in this

telling of the story, Napoleon is defined less by a provincially internalized history than by

its connections with external events. It becomes, like the Mississippi itself, a confluence

of tributaries (or stories) over time converging to make up the place of Napoleon. When

we consider that Napoleon is also the place where Twain first learned of his brother’s

accident (and eventual death) aboard the steamboat Pennsylvania, these more

cotemporary events echo, albeit with less historical significance, the earlier convergences

at Napoleon of distant cultures and their explorers.

420 Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 232. 421 Ibid., 232-233.

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The Napoleon plotline culminates when Twain learns that the town has been entirely

destroyed by the river. As his steamboat approaches the bend in the river where he

expects to see Napoleon, Twain is shocked to discover that “The Arkansas River [had]

burst through it, tore it all to rags, and emptied it into the Mississippi!”422 In a passage

that captures much of Twain’s geography lesson, he sums up the ultimate contingency of

place, as well as the intense interplay between the physical history of the river and human

history:

Yes, it was an astonishing thing to see the Mississippi rolling between unpeopled

shores and straight over the spot where I used to see a good big self-complacent

town twenty years ago. Town that was county-seat of a great and important

county; town with a big United States marine hospital; town of innumerable

fights—an inquest every day; town where I had used to know the prettiest girl,

and the most accomplished in the whole Mississippi Valley; town where we were

handed the first printed news of the ‘Pennsylvania’s’ mournful disaster a quarter

of a century ago; a town no more—swallowed up, vanished, gone to feed the

fishes; nothing left but a fragment of a shanty and a crumbling brick chimney!423

Overall, Twain’s presentation of Napoleon here sets forth a view of “place” as event and

as process. From the Native American “owners” to Marquette, De Soto, and the “white

American heirs,” the destroyed town has repeatedly been transformed has changed hands.

Even the present name of the town “Napoleon” obviously gestures to the locales multi-422 Ibid., 247. 423 Ibid., 247.

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cultural heritage and to almost certain change. That the town itself has been destroyed by

the river underscores the shifting uncertainty of even the physical conditions within

which place takes form. Twain’s inclusion of before-and-after illustrations of Napoleon

(see Figures #3 and #4) punctuates his vision of the temporariness of place. That he

includes his own personal details in the town’s demise—that he knew “the prettiest” and

most promising girl, that Napoleon is where he first heard of the explosion of his

brother’s steamboat—seems to introduce a sense of nostalgia for the inevitable loss of

place. How one deals with the inherent instability of place is a question that Twain deals

with elsewhere in Life on the Mississippi.

Twain’s Portable Sense of Place

Twain’s perspective on geography in Life on the Mississippi poses potential problems

and certainly questions for the specificity and stability of place and our experience of it.

Indeed, the very premise of the book invites questions about place, memory, change, and

loss. Essentially a travel book, Life on the Mississippi describes Twain’s return to the

river’s region after nearly twenty years away. Thus, Twain frequently sets his experiences

of the river in the present against his memories in the past to tally the many changes to

the river and its towns. “After twenty years’ absence,” Twain writes about his return, “I

felt a strong desire to see the river again, and the steamboats, and such of the boys as

might be left; so I resolved to get out there.”424 Twain’s first stop is to St. Louis, where he

laments the absence of riverboat men. “I saw there none of the swell airs and graces, and

424 Ibid., 167.

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ostentatious displays of money, and pompous squanderings of it,” he writes, “which used

to distinguish the steamboat crowd from the dry-land crown in the bygone days, in the

thronged billiard-rooms of St. Louis. [. . .] Manifestly a glory that once was had dissolved

and vanished away in these twenty-one years” [ . . .].425 Twain’s choice of language here,

especially “dissolved” and “vanished away,” clearly links the changes wrought on the

socio-cultural aspects of St. Louis with those he witnesses on the river. The steamboat

crowd and culture have eroded and washed away like the alluvial banks of the

Mississippi. Of the changes to the river, Twain writes: “I could recognize big changes

from Commerce down. A big island that used to be away out in the mid-river, has retired

to the Missouri shore [. . .] The island called Jacket Pattern is whittled down to a wedge

now, and booked for early destruction. Goose Island is all gone but a little dab the size of

a steamboat [. . .] One of the islands formerly called the Two Sisters is gone entirely [. .

.].”426 Twain recognizes that, in Massey’s words, “what is special about place is not some

romance of pre-given collective identity or of the eternity of the hills,”427 but is instead

what geographer David Harvey would call temporary “‘permanances.’” For Harvey, like

Twain, “[t]he process of place formation is a process of carving out ‘permanances’ from

the flow of processes creating spatio-temorality. But the ‘permanances’—no matter how

solid they may seem—are not eternal but always subject to time as ‘perpetual

425 Ibid., 169.426 Ibid., 190. 427 Massey, For Space, 140.

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perishing.’”428 How, then, does Twain reconcile his sense of nostalgia for and the loss of

place with his recognition of place as open, as event, as process?

My suggestion here is that Twain finds a response or position in his early training as a

river boat pilot and in his sense of the political promise of such a view of geography. Not

only does Twain’s vision of place as “open” allow for an “open” future, rather than one

frozen into the form of allegory, it also makes visible the historical conflict that shaped it

(an view that remains relevant for a nation with imperial ambitions). This politically

positive sense of place appears in Mr. Bixby’s ambiguous claim during Twain’s training

as a riverboat pilot that the value of the river lays in its changeability. Finding the details

of the ever-changing river practically impossible to learn, Twain recalls his frustration.

[. . . ] I would find that tree inconspicuously merged into the general forest, and

occupying the middle of a straight shore, when I got abreast of it! No prominent hill

would stick to its shape long enough [. . .] but it was all dissolving and changeful as if

it had been a mountain of butter in the hottest corner of the tropics [ . . . ]. [Yet Bixby]

said,--‘That’s the virtue of the thing. If the shapes did n’t change every three seconds

they would n’t be of any use [ . . . ].429

One can hardly imagine a more fluid, metamorphic sense of place than Twain presents

here. It is practically magically, mythically transformative, and certainly difficult to

navigate, and yet Bixby locates the river’s virtue and value in just this transformative

428 Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, 261. 429 Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 89.

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condition. So what is Bixby’s lesson? Perhaps it is that place as open and changeable

retains a sense of use and vitality, as well as political promise, that a fixed, unchanging

geography does not.

While Twain seems to appreciate the politics of an open view of place, he outlines a

way to preserve a portable sense of place, one that retains the distinctiveness and

rootedness of place, protected in part from its inevitable change and dissolution, that he

we find in his evocative regional writing. For instance, who can think of Twain without

also thinking of the rich particularity and seemingly-provincial timelessness (indeed,

changelessness!) of Hannibal, Missouri? This is a lesson he also learns from Bixby.

“There’s only way to be a pilot,” Bixby explains, “and that is to get this entire river by

heart. You have to know it just like A B C.”430 For Twain the pilot, this involves

memorizing literally all of the “‘points,’ bars, islands, bends, reaches, etc.” on the

river.431 Bixby’s comparison of learning the river to learning the alphabet extends the

lesson into the realm of language and thus into the realm of the writer. In short, intense

practice and a potent memory, for the pilot and writer alike, are necessary for memorizing

the details of place, but it is not quite enough.

We also learn that one has to learn the shape of the river. On navigating the river in

the nighttime, Bixby tells Twain, “My boy, you’ve got to know the shape of the river

perfectly. It is all there is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything else if blotted

out and gone. But mind you, it has n’t the same shape in the night that it has in the day-430 Ibid., 76. 431 Ibid., 77.

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time.”432 Bixby’s claim that this shape is “all there is left to steer by on a very dark night”

suggests the possible melancholy that attends the loss or change of place. Once Napoleon

is “blotted out and gone,” Twain the writer can only rely on his knowledge of its shape,

that is, its overall look and feel or its “sense of place” that one retains in the trained

memory. Bixby likens this knowledge to learning the shape and feel of the hallways in

one’s own home. “How do you follow a hall at home in the dark?” Bixby asks. “Because

you know the shape of it. You can’t see it.”433 What Bixby seems to suggests here is that

the pilot needs more than just immediate sensory knowledge of the ever-changing river.

Given the ever-changing banks and channel of the river literally memorizing its details is

not quite enough. As Bixby insists, “[Y]ou only learn the shape of the river; and you

learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that ’s in your

head, and never mind the one that ’s before your eyes.”434 This is no doubt the task of the

writer, as well as that of the pilot. Twain must know the shape (or character) of the river

and of places like Hannibal (the Hannibal of his boyhood) even when it is no longer

before his eyes or when after it has inevitably and forever changed its shape and form. In

the end, perhaps this is the only way that we can really preserve place, that is, to carry it

with us as a portable sense of place.

432 Ibid., 85. 433 Ibid. 434 Ibid., 86.

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Conclusion

As readers of this study hopefully recognize, placelessness in the nineteenth century

has important analogues in today’s world at the beginning of the twentieth-first century,

and vice versa. Since at least the 1970s, geographers and others, especially Edward Relph

and anthropologist Mark Augé, as well as Nigel Thrift, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Edward Casey,

have theorized “placelessness” or “non-place” in an attempt to understand the

transformations taking place in today’s world in the midst of ever-increasing levels of

globalization and a range of other conditions. My hope is that this study suggests

important similarities between experiences of placelessness in the past and those in

today’s world, as well as proffers a set of literary visions for navigating these unsettling

spaces.

Geographer Edward Relph was one of the first to theorize the phenomena of

placelessness in modern life. In so doing, he helped to bring “place” as an object of

inquiry to the attention of geographers, while warning of its vulnerability. Using

phenomenology as his methodology and interpretative lens, Relph’s Place and

Placelessness (1976) addresses the “taken-for-granted nature of place and its significance

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as an inescapable dimension of human life and experience.”435 It examines the

widespread sentiment that localism and the variety of place and landscapes that

characterized preindustrial societies are rapidly diminishing and may disappear

entirely.436 Relph points to the proliferation of entertainment districts, commercial strips,

synthetic or “pseudo-places” (think shopping malls designed like Ottoman-era army

barracks!), instant towns and suburbs, industrial complexes, and new roads and airports,

as evidence of the “casual eradication of distinctive places and the making of

standardized landscapes that results from an insensitivity to the significance of place.”437

More recently, the theorist Marc Augé has observed an unprecedented extension of

what he calls “‘empirical non-places,’ meaning spaces of circulation, consumption and

communication.”438 These non-places, Augé argues, are “the real measure of our time,”

and as such they present a new and important object of inquiry for anthropologists and

others. “The multiplication of what we may call empirical non-places,” he writes, "is

characteristic of the contemporary world. Spaces of circulation (freeways, airways)

consumption (department stores, supermarkets), and communication (telephones, faxes,

television, cable networks) are taking up more room all over the earth today. They are

spaces where people coexist or cohabit without living together.439 Non-places are

primarily the spaces of travelers and consumers and are marked by “the fleeting, the

435 David Seamon and Jacob Sowers, “Place and Placelessness” in Key Texts in Human Geography, ed. P. Hubbard et al. (London: Sage, 2008), 43-51. 436 Ibid., 79. 437 Ibid., Preface. 438 Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2008), viii.439 Ibid., 110.

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temporary and ephemeral.”440 We coexist increasingly, Augé suggests, in a world of

transit points and temporary abodes, and we surrender to dense networks of means of

transport. In contrast to “rooted” places that bear the inscriptions of the organically social

and a shared collective history, non-places are characterized primarily by movement,

circulation, and transience.441 The result is an unsettling sameness, both of identity and

place: “And the same hotel chains, the same television networks are cinched tightly round

the globe, and to cross international borders brings no more profound variety than is

found walking between theaters on Broadway or rides at Disneyland.”442

One aim of this project is to trace the origins of these contemporary phenomena,

briefly articulated here by Relph and Augé, into the nineteenth century, while exploring

the economic and ideological conditions that gave rise to them. But more than simply

excavating a genealogy of placelessness in the United States, this study contributes to

American literary scholarship by providing a literary re-mapping and geographic re-

orientation of the United States in the nineteenth century. Such a project, I submit, is vital

to not only an understanding of American geography but also to American literature and

culture in the nineteenth century. It challenges the notion of an American map comprised

of heterogeneous spaces and of one structured by crisp boundaries and clean

demarcations between one locale and another and between home and abroad. While

locales, of course, were in the purest sense differentiated in countless ways, many of the

authors and cultural critics here studied suggest an eerie and problematic homogeneity 440 Ibid., 63. 441 Ibid., viii. 442 Ibid., xii.

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pervading American spaces, as well as the porous instability of its various borders and

boundaries. The project also contests a view of geography as exempt or as somehow

outside of history. As geographer Doreen Massey argues, space is neither closed,

coherent, nor authentic, but an “ever-shifting constellation of trajectories,” both porous

and permeable.443 In Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, we find an early analogue to such a

view of place, that is, that the production of space is intimately linked to historical

conflict and change (both “natural” and social). By examining the spatial vision of these

authors, then—that is, by taking seriously the interpretative significance of space—this

project proposes a view of place as an active construction rather than as a passive and flat

medium upon which events occur in time. It thus furthers the extension of the works of

Henry Lefebvre, David Harvey, and others—a task recently taken up by a range of

literary critics—to American literary studies.444 If Miles Orvell and Jeffrey Meikle are

correct that American culture is “the history of place-making and of the instantiation of

meaning in the structures, boundaries, and configurations of space,” then the history of

American placelessness carries significant implications for American culture history and

American studies. Indeed, placelessness may ultimately prove a process of the

simultaneous construction and deconstruction of American culture.445

443 Massey, For Space, 151. 444 See, for instance, Hsuan Hsu, Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Mark Rifkin, Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Miles Orvell and Jeffrey L. Meikle, eds., Public Space and the Ideology of Place in American Culture (New York: Rodopi, 2009).445Miles Orvell and Jeffrey L. Meikle, eds., Public Space and the Ideology of Place in American Culture, 10.

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Appendix

Figure #1: Prospective view of the City of Cairo, Illinois, by William Strickland, c. 1838

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Figure #2:Cairo,Illinois,andtheMouthoftheOhioRiver,byHenryLewis,c.1846

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Figure #3: “Eden as it appeared on paper”

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Figure #4: “Eden as it appeared in fact”

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Figure #5: “Nantucket, 1858”

179

Figure #6: An early plat map of Pinckney, published in a Standard Atlas of Livingston

County, Michigan, 1895.

180

Figure #7: “Caving Banks,” from Life on the Mississippi (1883)

181

Figure #8: “Vicksburg,” from Life on the Mississippi (1883)

182

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my dissertation director, Russ Castronovo. I am immeasurably

indebted to Russ for his unwavering support, generosity, humor, encouragement, and

wisdom throughout the years. I would not have completed this project without him.

I would also like to thank David Zimmerman. David provided voluminous comments

to these chapters and dedicated many hours of conversation to helping me through this

project. His encouragement has been invaluable, and I will always admire (and aspire to)

his dedication as a teacher. I am also indebted to Monique Allewaert and Jeffrey Steele

for their time, conversation, and constructive criticism.

Since my arrival at Wisconsin, Bill Cronon has been an important teacher, mentor,

and friend. I cannot thank him enough for his time and generosity. He has taught me

much about what it means to be a teacher and scholar.

Lastly, I wish to thank Maureen Rogers for her unfailing encouragement,

companionship, warmth, and intellect. I can’t imagine my making it to Utah without her.

183

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