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1. Longfellow’s Evangeline The Origins of American Myth and Cajun Memory In 1927, Huey P. Long visited St. Martinville, Louisiana, on his gubernatorial campaign tour. As he stood under the Evangeline Oak along the shore of Bayou Têche, he invoked the romanticism of the Evangeline myth to frame his campaign promise of better times for Louisianians: “Evangeline wept bitter tears in her disappointment, but it lasted through only a lifetime. Your tears in this country, around this oak here, have lasted generations . Give me a chance to dry the tears of those who still weep here” (Long). This moment in history demonstrates how completely an American author’s character became not only the dominant image of an ethnic group for the rest of the nation and the world, but also the reference for selfhood among Louisianians. Evangeline’s prominent place in American, Louisianian, and Cajun memory extends from its author’s significant role in the New England publishing world, but it also arises from the ashes of cultural representation. At a time when the representation of ethnic minorities in American literature signified a need to create an American self as not Other, Evangeline produced a separate notion of Other as American , changing the face of Acadians in Louisiana and of Americans forever in the national literary imagination. By writing Evangeline (1847), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow created a unique American tale and established a new American literary character while claiming a place for Acadians in the history of the United States. According to Barry Jean Ancelet, Longfellow “clearly sought to be the interpreter of the new American adventure” at a time when the “Acadian exile was not a matter of early United States history” (“Elements” 119). The poem introduced American readers to their Acadian neighbors, which Charles Calhoun emphasizes when he argues that Evangeline “put the Acadians, and the plight of the Acadians, on the map” (259), an American map. Longfellow chose the Acadians as his vehicle for portraying new developments in national literature both to claim them as fitting native 14 Longfellow’s Evangeline: American Myth and Cajun Memory / 15 characters on which to place American identity and to make this identity absolute by assimilating native differences to Anglo-American culture . Evangeline remains a reminder not only of the cultural formation of American literature, but also of the Acadian journey to Louisiana and of Acadian assimilation to American identification, a journey that led to the formation of a people called Cajuns. In Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790– 1860, Jane Tompkins questions the formation of the literary canon by positing that readers should reconsider certain popular nineteenth-century novels because of their contemporary cultural impact. Tompkins reevaluates such works as James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in terms of the cultural context in which they were written and to which they were addressed. Even though his reputation has declined (only to be revived every so often), Tompkins reminds us of Longfellow’s position as one of the “cultural spokesmen at mid-century,” when all three of these American authors wrote bestsellers (28).1 Tompkins’s thesis sheds light on Longfellow’s work and its popularity, especially because he was a cultural arbiter of literary merit through his position in Boston and his contributions to the North American Review, which supported such careers as Nathaniel Hawthorne ’s.2 If one agrees with Tompkins that “looking is not an activity that is performed outside of political struggles and institutional structures, but arises from them” (23), and if one chooses to study literature in its cultural context, then Longfellow’s work, especially Evangeline, takes on a whole new meaning. By pushing Tompkins’s theory a step further to assume that literature continues to do cultural work beyond its original era and that this work can evolve to address any present moment, then one can argue that Evangeline not only affected both the American public that originally read it and the Louisiana Acadians of which it speaks, but also affects to this day the descendants of these Acadians and the national imaginary space in which they reside. While Tompkins’s study sheds light on the cultural context within which American literature thrived, Richard Bauman adds another dimension to any reading of Longfellow’s work through his examination of the nationalization and internationalization of folklore. Bauman studies the process by which an Indian dream narrative of oral origin became part of Longfellow...

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