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Chapter 1: Theoria and Liberal Governmentality: Travel in Bret Harte’s Overland Monthly
- University of Nebraska Press
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35 chapter 1 Theoria and Liberal Governmentality Travel in Bret Harte’s Overland Monthly when the Overland began publishing in 1868, periodical culture and the western travel industry were not as enmeshed as they would become in subsequent years. But decades later, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, magazines became increasingly complicit in the ongoing conquest of the West. A 1900 national magazine advertisement for the Northern Pacific Railroad depicts an Indian man lying face down near a precipice, his right arm hanging off the edge of the cliff. Superimposed over the outline of his prone body is a map of the Yellowstone Park rail line: the St. Paul and Minneapolis stops are near his moccasins, Detroit is near his upper calf, Billings is on the waist of his buckskin trousers, and so on, until the map and his seemingly lifeless body culminate at his right braid, dangling off the cliff and marked as the city of San Francisco. The text of the advertisement invites readers to “send 6cts for the book”to learn “the story of a railway in Wonderland” and discover “the changes time has made in this old Indianland.”¹ The advertisement requires little interpretive legwork and seems to mean exactly what it depicts: decades of railroad tourism have mowed over indigenous populations, turning a wild western “Indianland”into a tame, touristic “Wonderland.”The advertisement employs the signifiers of wilderness to produce the “civilized”western travel experience. Chris J. Magoc notes that at the chapter 1 36 turn of last century tourist attractions such as Yosemite and Yellowstone were, in the genteel eastern imagination, still viewed as sufficiently wild as to be legitimate threats to one’s health and well-being.² In this sense the advertisement suggests not only safety but cultural luxury: a groomed Wonderland that has been neatly packaged into a “story.” This overt imperialism eventually became intertwined with western tourism in part because the act of travel always has political implications . The presumption of autonomy that enables the citizen to cross boundaries and borders (along with the property rights that provide the financial wherewithal for travel) is a foundational liberal value. Freedom of movement was central to Locke’s theory of selfhood, stemming from his conception of the natural—that is, the apolitical or nonnational—origins of individuals. Under classical liberalism, it is less that freedom of movement follows from liberal individualism and more that liberal individualism follows from the principle of movement. Locke writes that“a child is born a subject of no country or government”and is instead “a freeman, at liberty what government he will put himself under, . . . [not] bound up by any compact of his ancestors.”³ For Locke, the individual is autonomous, unbound by past contracts of parents or nation, and in possession of the inalienable right of consent. Autonomy of movement—the right to travel—was accordingly an integral part of the foundational liberal narrative and was reimagined by stories of touristic contact in the Overland Monthly. The Overland under Harte placed a tremendous emphasis on travel articles, to the extent that it might easily have been mistaken for a travel magazine. The first article in the first issue of the new magazine claimed to be about “rational living,” which author W. C. Bartlett seemed to equate with little more than having a well-formed“vacation philosophy.”4 The magazine emphasized the political, aesthetic, and intellectual benefits of travel in a large percentage of its narrative fiction and nonfiction, ultimately normalizing the touristic experience. To do this, its nonfictional narratives often framed travel as a point of contact (and potential conquest) between “wild” and “civilized” [3.81.97.37] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:36 GMT) theoria and liberal governmentality 37 persons and spaces. Those narratives followed Locke in identifying travel as integral to the production of liberal selfhood. It is tempting to conclude that the late-century Indianland advertisement stands as a repudiation of this basic link between liberalism and travel. By the time the advertisement began circulating, the cultures of magazines, advertising, and tourism were thoroughly intermeshed, and the Indianland advertisement would seem to suggest the illiberal zenith of their admixture.5 After all, it literally sold modern tourist comforts on the back of a slain Indian. The Indianland advertisement , however, was no late-century anomaly, nor should it imply an uncomplicated repudiation of an earlier culture of western liberalism. It was merely the most vivid distillation of a long...