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1 Facing Alterity The Ethics of Conversion in Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer In September 1759, Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur, having resigned his commission as a second lieutenant in the French Canadian militia , arrived in New York City. Although born in France, Crèvecoeur had been a resident of England before his initial emigration to Canada. It was in America, however, that he would realize the promise of distinction that had previously eluded him. Upon his arrival in New York, Crèvecoeur reinvented himself as “J. Hector St. John”—surveyor, merchant, farmer, and eventually, as A. W. Plumstead suggests, “one of the most admired literary men of his epoch.” Purchasing 120 acres of virgin land near Chester, New York, Crèvecoeur devoted the following six years of his life to the discovery of “what it is to be an American farmer—to be free to enjoy a life he could create himself .”1 This endeavor would prove to be fertile ground for his first and most celebrated book. In 1780, having endured the strains of war, imprisonment, and a forced departure from his newly adopted homeland, Crèvecoeur returned to the country of his birth to begin reworking and revising the “trunk full of manuscripts ” in which he had recorded his travails in the New World. Two years later, under his adopted name, he emerged as the admired author of Letters from an American Farmer. Far beyond its popularity among the literate European audience, Letters gained Crèvecoeur distinction as an American author. Through its rustic images of a “pure, idyllic life” and “gentle geography of meadowland . . . woods, cattle, hogs, birds, [and] bees,” Letters from an Ameri1 . A. W. Plumstead, “Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur,” in American Literature, 1764–1789, ed. Everett Emerson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 214. 17 18 f a ci n g th e o th e r can Farmer would serve as a template for a pastoral vision of an America in which freedom, prosperity, and happiness prevailed.2 If Letters from an American Farmer opened a vista through which the New World could be imagined, its real significance lay in its transformative power. Not only did Letters represent the American territories as a promised land in which the European commoner could discover the miracle of personal metamorphosis , but through language and the performative power of text, Crèvecoeur reinvented himself as the literary first farmer of the American landscape. In 1784, only two years after publication of Letters, Benjamin Franklin would signal the national importance of Crèvecoeur’s book, turning to it as an exemplary representation of the social and physical landscapes that characterized the interior regions of the New World’s enterprise in freedom. Over the next two hundred years, Letters has continued to be read as a representative text of the early American experience—perhaps eclipsed only by Franklin’s subsequent Autobiography—and it has become famous for its particular enunciation of American identity. More traditional interpretations of Letters have read it in three ways: as an initially celebratory presentation of the New World as an Edenic garden, full of the possibility of an unparalleled experience in freedom; as an “impassioned , unqualified defense of American agrarianism”; and as a work that attempts a “straightforward natural and social history of young America” through the experiential eye of its prototypical American narrator, the farmer James.3 At the heart of Letters, and of tremendous import in its classification as an authoritative text, is Farmer James, who comes to embody the myth of the American self through his claim to an individuality that is both unique and symbolic. What is unique about Farmer James is his natural innocence. As the simple farmer, James must rely primarily upon his natural “perspicuity ,” as well as a “warmth of imagination” through which his encounters with the world can be mediated. As James’s minister suggests in the introductory letter, part of what qualifies him for this literary undertaking is not his stature as a man of letters and philosophy, but rather his singular capacity for original reflection. James is the untainted I/eye, a “Tabula rasa, where spontaneous and strong impressions are delineated with facility” (LAF, 11). This untainted innocence makes James a credible individual through whom the “truth” of the American experience can be rendered in print. 2. Ibid., 215. 3. Ibid., 213. [3.143.218.146] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 11:37...

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