Home on the Horizon: America’s Search for Space, from Emily Dickinson to Bob Dylan (review)

In this exploration of “America’s search for space,” Sally Bayley uses the life and work of Emily Dickinson as her “lead” to “trace the figure of the threshold in American literature and culture—the doorways, passageways, windows and crossing points that negotiate the relationship between ideological fixtures and fittings of the home life and the imaginable but unforeseeable out of doors” (3). Though her subtitle implies a linear or chronological search, Bayley ranges freely among a wide variety of cultural artifacts, arriving eventually at an intriguingly Dickinsonian conclusion: “In the American imagination, to be at home is to dwell perpetually in the possibility of leaving” (174).

Among the many artifacts Bayley touches on are plays by Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Parker, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet; novels by Henry James, Zora Neale Hurston, Willa Cather, Carson McCullers, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, Phillip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, Mark Twain, Don DeLillo, and Frank Baum; memoirs by Annie Dillard and Siri Hustvedt; poetry by Anne Bradstreet, Charles Olsen, W. H. Auden, and Sylvia Plath; songs by Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Robert Earl Keen, and the Dixie Chicks; paintings and drawings by Frederick Church, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, and Bob Dylan; architectural and landscape designs by Andrew Jackson Downing, Frederick Law Olmstead, and Frank Lloyd Wright; films by Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, John Ford, David Lynch, the Coen brothers, and Quentin Tarantino; and several television series, one of them a 1950s portrayal of “sunny suburbia” incorrectly identified as Beaver Knows Best (85). In a discussion of under 200 pages, including notes, it is not surprising that only a few of these receive more than a brief mention.

Bayley is at her best analyzing twentieth-century work, especially in the visual arts, but her analysis frequently does not go far enough. Her treatment of Edward Hopper, for example, includes this description of the evocative painting that appears on the cover of the book:

Here, a young black woman in a striking red dress stands, arms folded, on the threshold of a southern house. The house shutters are closed and she stares away from our view of an open landscape stretching towards a horizon. . . . Hopper’s composition stages a moment of self-doubt, of private resignation in the midst of unenclosed and unmarked natural space: the wide-open spaces of the prairie landscape that engulf her choice . . . . Only the dark, shuttered windows and the tenebrous form of the roof serve as reminders of her mental imprisonment, a condition easily forgotten if she were to look out behind her, upon the bright blue sky and light-coloured prairie grass that make up a significant proportion of the canvas.

(67)

The painting is one of several identified as having “subjects [who] seem to hover awkwardly in an incomplete translation of lived space” (66). In her discussion of the painting, Bayley does not consider two details that might be important: Hopper completed the work in 1955 and entitled it South Carolina Morning.

If the setting is South Carolina, the landscape behind the brooding subject is not a prairie, but marshland, and the thin line of green that merges with the bright blue rectangle to form the horizon probably represents salt water, hardly a suitable surface on which to consider making a home. If this is a morning scene, why is the woman wearing a red dress, generally considered more suitable for evening? And what circumstances have led to this “moment of self-doubt [and] private resignation”? Bayley suggests that “it is distance that Hopper’s young black woman of South Carolina Morning seems to fear: the effect of objective distance, a reckoning with the subjective spin of home life” (80). Might a young black woman in South Carolina have other sources of fear in 1955, only one year after the Supreme Court’s decree that the line between “separate” and “equal” be erased “with all deliberate speed”?

In providing...