Crèvecoeur in Wyoming

Recent decades have seen a profound revision of our reading of Crèvecoeur in two complementary fashions. A vertical enrichment has reframed a naïve, pathos-laden, essayistic, and barely ironic Letters, recasting it as a novel. Foregrounding the delineation of character, overall narrative structure, and the ironizing of literary conventions and forms, Grantland C. Rice persuasively argued that the figure of James should be read as a mock counterpart to the ethnographic conventions associated with the Abbé Raynal. Responding to continental conventions, the Letters, unified around the character of James, emerges as a kind of bildungsroman of the New World author, a novel debunking utopian tendencies. Crèvecoeur, in this reading, perhaps even “supervenes Franklin as the prima facie of the self-made American man of letters” (117). In a similar vein, Christine Holbo explored the conventions of imaginative discourse, the complex layering of narrative styles, and the novelistic progression of the Letters. Ralph Bauer recently offered a compelling variant of this argument in tracing the Letters’ “meta-historical irony” (211), the fiction of authentic speech (213), and how “Farmer James breaks through the various levels of historiographic authorship involved in the writing of Natural History, thus deliberately transgressing against the division of labor that constructs its scientific authority” (215).

Meanwhile, a second tendency (among many of the same scholars) has stressed a horizontal expansion of our reading, retrieving Crèvecoeur from the national, parochial, or even backwoods setting of earlier scholarship, in which he was the proto–U.S. American par excellence, instead locating him in the transatlantic and hemispheric world. Christopher Iannini has offered a reading of an author “whose concerns were continually refashioned by his itinerancy in the eighteenth-century Atlantic,” comprehensively detailing Crèvecoeur’s references to the Caribbean world. The “transatlantic dimension” of this fundamentally “itinerant” writer reveals him to be firmly “rooted in enlightened cosmopolitanism” (202). Bauer similarly stressed “Crèvecoeur’s rebellion against his subordinate position as a colonial in his relation to European Men of Science” (214).

These two expansions, textual and intertextual, of novel and cosmopolitanism, have been salutary. If an older criticism treated, in selfcongratulatory fashion, the sincere yeoman’s “philosophy of farming” and the American exceptionalism of the melting-pot, the new criticism sees instead a metatheoretically driven critique of an Atlantic sphere of commerce fundamentally defined by slavery. Where earlier critics had struggled to politically situate Crèvecoeur’s epistles in relation to the sudden trauma of the American Revolution, later scholars have found a dystopian novel about Atlantic republicanism itself. Instead of pathos-laden scenes of plowing, beekeeping, and hummingbirds written by the hearths, we now have carefully crafted critiques of mercantile epistemology written to the salons. The expansion is already evident in, and was perhaps anticipated by, trends of anthologization. The shining star of the Crèvecoeurian constellation, the third letter,“What Is an American,” is now joined by one or both of two vicinal works, the Charleston letter on slavery (stressing the cosmopolitan, north–south transit) and the concluding letter, “Distresses of a Frontier Man” (stressing the fictional, dystopian arc of the work).

My interest in this essay is an interrelated set of problems indirectly suppressed by this new Crèvecoeur. For, metonymically, the reframing of “Letters” (as novel) and “American” (as cosmopolitan) have resulted in the displacement of “Farmer,” which now juts out as the most ironic of titular terms. Crèvecoeur’s class position is transferred from the socioeconomic realm of agriculture, as he is recast as the intellectual theorist of economics. If he is not completely declassed, his admission to the international big leagues of aristocratic-bourgeois theory leaves one wondering about the significance of his agrarian production, leaving the class dimensions of the older analytic now all the more apparent. In viewing Crèvecoeur as the itinerant intellectual, what do we lose of his career as a farmer? Does his biographical experience as an agrarian small producer (or, for that matter, his experience in the French military) matter any more, and if so, how? Relatedly, we might wonder about Crèvecoeur’s extensive commentary on, and theorization of, the dynamics...