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6. The Columbian Exchange: Pocahontas and The New World
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120 6 | The Columbian Exchange: Pocahontas and The New World Among the deepest and most indelible fictions of American national origin is the notion of the “new world” encountered by the earliest English colonists—a world typically characterized as a dense wilderness populated by “children of the forest” and untouched by the hand of any culture. Forming the backdrop of almost all subsequent narratives of nation, this idealized image of America as an unblemished garden and as a virgin land constitutes a rich trompe l’oeil landscape, an imaginary locale designed to convey a story of emergence that is also constructed as a story of return. As the environmental historian Alfred Crosby writes about what is now known as the Columbian Exchange, “The two worlds, which God had cast asunder, were reunited, and the two worlds, which were so very different, began on that day to become alike.”1 Perhaps the most dramatic subplot in this drama of origins is the legendary rescue of John Smith by Pocahontas, an event that has been credited with saving the settlement of Jamestown from certain destruction . A story of interracial romance and mutual exchange, the history of the first English colony in America has been shaped by a myth of organic union, symbolized and expressed through the protagonists of the narrative, avatars of the Old World and the New. In the contemporary period, however, a different story has emerged about the world-altering encounter of the Virginia Company and the powerful Algonquian chief Powhatan in Jamestown in 1607, a story The Columbian Exchange: Pocahontas and The New World | 121 that highlights the transformation of the environment, the ecological shifts, and the social changes the colony brought about. The history of the first permanent English settlement, long celebrated for establishing representative government in English America and repudiated for introducing slavery in the English colonies, is now understood as inaugurating the destruction of a native empire and initiating the creation of a whole new ecosystem. As one author writes, “For English America, Jamestown was the opening salvo in the Columbian exchange. In biological terms, it marked the point when before turns into after.”2 Taking the myth of national origin at its most nascent point, Terence Malick’s The New World both challenges and reinforces the traditional story of the encounter, depicting it as both harrowing and full of utopian possibility, presenting the narrative as a tone poem of contrasting and dissonant parts. On the one hand, it amplifies the erotic and emotional bond between Smith and Pocahontas, conveying a tantalizing possible world of interlayered consciousness, interwoven cultures and natures with merging differences rendered through dual interior monologues and flowing associative images connected by a gliding, drifting camera. On the other hand, it portrays the founding of Jamestown as an environmental disaster, providing an eco-critical reading of the history of the earliest colony. The violence and perversity of the settlers makes them appear to be a malignant species—an invasive, alien life-form that simply does not belong in the Edenic world of precolonial North America. Deforming the landscape with borders and fortifications, denuding the land around them of all trees and grasses, burning the Indians out of their villages in order to plant tobacco—the settlers degrade the ecology of forest and marshland, and in the process degrade their own subjectivities and culture, resorting to murder and cannibalism, indulging in sadistic tortures, and abandoning their children. In this essay, I argue that The New World reorients the settlement story of Jamestown, one of the foundational myths of nation, in a way that effectively defamiliarizes the viewer’s experience of place, history, and identity. The film folds together the fictional romance of Smith and Pocahontas with the historically documented story of Jamestown, structuring the narration and the focalizing perspective around these two characters, and later around the figures of John Rolfe and Pocahontas, who become husband and wife. A radical experiment in narrative form, [34.230.68.214] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:11 GMT) 122 | The Columbian Exchange: Pocahontas and The New World the film can be considered a form of historical “revisioning,” as Robert Rosenstone describes the process of re-imagining the historical past.3 It portrays history both in terms of the “inside” and in terms of the “otherness ” of historical events, presenting the interior lives of the characters , their fragmentary thoughts and reflections, while at the same time emphasizing the “otherness” of the historical past, underlining its remoteness, its...