A Feeling Farmer: Masculinity, Nationalism, and Nature in Crèvecoeur’s Letters

In Letter 2 of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, the narrator, James, reminds his epistolary correspondent that “when you were here, you used, in your refined style, to denominate me the farmer of feelings” (23). In this single clause, Crèvecoeur reveals several of the defining conflicts for American nature writers of the late eighteenth century: the clash between “refined” Europe and “rude” America, the disunity of pastoralism and frontier ideology, and the vexed relationship between reason and emotion. Due largely to the multi-layered nature of Letters, literary critics have not been unified in their interpretations of Crèvecoeur’s phrase “farmer of feelings.” Some have seen this idea as a nationalistic celebration of James’s capacity for expressing emotion, while others have treated many of James’s own observations as the wry, ironic commentary of Crèvecoeur the author, whose own view is seen as dark and cynical. A reading that preserves the tension between these interpretations, however, reveals a vacillating definition of nationhood and masculinity. From this perspective, Letters from an American Farmer may be seen not only as a manifesto of early American nationalism but also as a book that reveals the deep ambivalence that American men felt about the burgeoning American nation, about their identities as men, and about the natural environment. The interrelationship of these factors has important implications not only for James but for the American landscape itself.

Although Letters from an American Farmer was published in 1782, it was written in 1774, two years before the Declaration of Independence, a fact that becomes especially significant when we consider the relationship between Crèvecoeur’s vision of masculinity and Thomas Jefferson’s. When Jefferson asserted in 1776 that “all men are created equal,” he was making a claim about American national identity: that American political life would offer more access to common men than England’s system did. True, some people were more “equal” than others—this claim to equality excluded those who were not white, male, property-owning American citizens—but Jefferson’s formulation dramatically redefined how these American men viewed their political entitlement and their masculinity. The Declaration of Independence described manliness in terms of resistance to tyranny: “[The King] has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.” A man, for these revolutionary thinkers, was by definition one who opposed the absolute power of the king. As Anthony E. Rotundo explains, “This new addition to the old definition of manhood had subversive implications, for a social order based on rank could only exist where men were encouraged to submit” (16). Many scholars have placed Crèvecoeur within a group of writers and thinkers who were challenging the authority of the British government by asserting the sovereignty of the individual. While the nationalist ambitions in Crèvecoeur’s work should not be overlooked, it is also important to remember that Crèvecoeur wrote during a time when Jeffersonian national identity was in its embryonic stages, before the publication of the Declaration of Independence and toward the end of a period when submission to authority was not considered antithetical to manliness. When Crèvecoeur writes about what it means to be an American, he is referring as much to masculine identity as he is to national identity, both of which were experiencing a period of profound transformation and doubt.

The connection between nationalism and masculinity—and the destabilizing uncertainty of both—is evident in the nationalistic discourse of the late eighteenth century. Benjamin Rush’s late eighteenth-century essay “Of the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic,” for example, attempts to catalog the qualities that should be taught to boys in the American education system, with the idea that these boys will grow to embody the perfect union of American nationhood and manliness. Rush and other writers encouraged men to be physically vigorous yet intellectually nimble, pleasant yet willful, mild-mannered yet assertive, and self-reliant yet devoted to the good of the community. Dana...