City of Nature: Journeys to Nature in the Age of American Romanticism (review)

128Reviews Grandissimes more and more looks like not a passport to immortality but a visa about ready to expire. The idea that he somehow anticipated William Faulkner will carry him no further than the footnotes of a multi-volume literary history. Though Turner's selections hold enough exploded prophecies to make anybody wary, I can predict no hope for Cable unless the mainline South, or at least the mythical general reader, comes back to treasuring him as the local colorist of a vanished New Orleans, whose polyglot tensions he transmuted into an exoticism kept believable by his inwoven humor. Meanwhile, Turner has brought the critical heritage thoroughly up to date and has added to the very valuable body of scholarship he left us. Duke UniversityLouis J. Budd Rosenthal, Bernard. City of Nature: Journeys to Nature in the Age of American Romanticism. Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1980. 273 pp. Cloth: $16.50. In Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West remarks sardonically of skyscraper city: "Americans have dissipated their racial energy in an orgy of stone breaking. In their few years they have broken more stones than did centuries of Egyptians." What is the source for this ecstasy of city expansion in America? Capitalistic greed? Historians might agree, but the urban dream had its emotional or imaginative roots in an urban myth, argues Mr. Rosenthal in this monograph on American romanticism and the myths of society and nature found in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Cooper, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe and popular expressions of the era. It is now practically a dogma that these romantic writers' works exhibit as much animus toward the city as Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, though for different reasons. Distrust of the city is as engrained a feature of the American intellectual landscape as the escape into nature. As Morton and Lucia White in 1962 have stated in The Intellectual versus the City (inexplicably ignored by Rosenthal), "Most of them distrusted or hated the city, but some like Thoreau, fled from it to the woods alone; some like Emerson, went to Concord, where they could take sociability or leave it for the nearby woods; and some, like the Brook Farmers, went to the woods in socialist phalanxes" (p. 31). As for Cooper's readers, "they imbibed his heady brew of romantic animosity toward the city" (p. 201). However, Rosenthal quarrels mainly with Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden (1964), which asserted the existence in America of a pervasive pastoral myth derived from Virgil and which recoiled from the prospect of the despoliation of nature by the machine and by implication the city. In Rosenthal's rebuttal, he shows a literature much less anxious than at first appears about the improvement of nature, or at least ambivalent about progress and the growth of cities. He suggests two different strains. One is a "romantic quest" or journey motif in popular novels, "a journey into the wilderness from which would emerge nature and the city" (p. 27); nature and city are fused in the happy endings of the adventure fiction of Cooper and his followers. The other motif derives from the romantic preoccupation with the self; this takes the form of "a journey that would lead to nature and the city of the self (p. 27) . Or to state it another way: many romantics in America felt that civilization would finally reside in individual minds, not in the world's streets, buildings, theaters, and temples. Rosenthal's title, City of Nature, clearly contains a paradox of profound significance, but was there a mythic city of nature in the American mind? Yes, as long as we refuse to Studies in American Fiction129 equate nature with wilderness, as for example, Perry Miller has insisted upon in Errand into the Wilderness. There is another, competing definition, Rosenthal cogently maintains in Chapter 2, "Nature in the Land of Milk and Honey," an equation of nature with products , industry, civilization: "Nature was the builder of cities, the codifier of laws, the guiding spirit of commerce. . . . Nature as wilderness carried a pejorative connotation" (p. 32). The fulfillment of this nature in the fictions of Poe, Cooper, and other popular novelists would be the city as garden, the...