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5. Views from the Edge of Empire
- University of Michigan Press
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Chapter Five Views from the Edge of Empire Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into in‹nite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature Few, if any, passages in the American Renaissance canon have been quoted as often as this one from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature (1836). Emerson’s transformation into a transparent eyeball has been called “the representative anecdote of his experience of inspiration.”1 In fact, however, dramatic visual moments carry a heavy rhetorical burden throughout Emerson’s essays, as he himself realized. When he proclaims that “in the woods” there is “no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair” (39), the caveat reveals how crucial seeing is to him. Earlier in Nature, he even dissolves property ownership by uniting various farms with his eyes. “The charming landscape which I saw this morning,” he points out, “is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this ‹eld, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond.” According to Emerson, however, none of these men truly owns the landscape: “There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.”2 Thus his own gaze enables him to order and reshape his environment, to discern the true meaning of the physical world, and, above all, to integrate disparate geographical pieces into a meaningful whole. In “Circles” (1841), seeing becomes a crucial metaphor for understanding itself: “The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it” (232). And in “The Poet” (1844), he longs for a national poet, who “with tyrannous eye” will be able to see the poetry in America’s “ample geography” (281). In all of these examples, seeing is promoted as an active means of ‹guratively controlling fragmented or unruly space, whether that space is ‹gurative (“our present life”) or literal (the 81 farms he sees as he looks at the landscape or America’s “ample geography ”). Though the symbolic power of dramatic visual moments became a hallmark of his style, Emerson was by no means unique in imagining vision as a form of symbolic control or possession. In fact, his use of such moments to convey a sense of mastery or suggest transcendent experience is the domestic counterpart of the “monarch of all I survey” topos that appeared at the margins of expanding American and European empires. Panoramas, for example, enabled Americans and Europeans to come to terms with their expanding empires by enabling them to visualize newly conquered regions. Dramatic moments that parallel such visual experiences occur in a variety of nineteenth-century printed materials as well, including travel narratives and the popular Mexican War ‹ctions of George Lippard.3 But where Emerson, Lippard, and various travel writers employed the “master of all I survey” topos—and responded to new visual technologies that reinforced vision’s signi‹cation of mastery—in a relatively simple and straightforward manner, Herman Melville and Margaret Fuller explored the relationship between vision and territoriality in far more sustained and searching ways in their ‹rst books. In Typee and in Summer on the Lakes in 1843, these writers, like Emerson, found the gaze from above a means of ordering their experience of geographical space. But their experiences in the Marquesas and in the Northwest Territory—in particular their attunement to the complexities of the cross-cultural encounters happening in both regions—provoked them to question the model of control or integration through vision that their contemporaries embraced. That questioning of imperial modes of perception, in turn, facilitated in each of the young authors the development of a unique, mature voice. In 1857, when Melville gave his lecture “Sight Seeing in Rome” in front of a panorama of Rome on display in Montreal, he participated in one of the most popular pastimes of his age.4 But in Typee, he subverts the nineteenth century’s faith in the power of vision. The protagonist Tommo’s experiences on Nukuheva suggest that, in his experience, vision fails to signify possession or dominance (as Pratt, Said, and other scholars of colonialism have argued) or even to reveal information (the basic...