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Conclusion I Look, You Look, He Looks; We Look, Ye Look, They Look: Manifest Destinies Given Jewett’s failure to see Native Americans or to see from their perspectives in The Country of the Pointed Firs, we must conclude, to some degree, by acknowledging the ways writers reproduce, even as they redress, the problem of American vision: its conflation of perception and rhetorical construction through visual metaphors that lay claim to knowledge and authority while excluding many individuals and historical realities. American writers throughout the nineteenth century critique the epistemological claims that would conflate literary texts with the visible real even as they continue to take up the mandate that is epistemological at its core—the mandate to look knowledgeably at a conflicted nation and thereby to build a national literature that derives not from the capricious gymnastics of the imagination but from what Emerson called the American writer’s “original relation” to the external world (Nature 7). It is in this continued link between epistemology and nation that the problem recurs. Thus, we must note that while Dickinson ’s “miles of Stare” may mock the all-knowing transparent eyeball, her figure also emerges to defend the speaker’s own bold claim to have “known” something that others repeatedly miss: that the typical 1861 North American viewer is one left staring in astonishment after the vanishing of a “Thing / That dazzled,” a “Gaiety” that “Dissolved . . . utterly.” The poem’s ironic epistemological claim and metaphorical flurry may be savvier than the easy omniscience and language theories of the Emersonian eyeball, but by casting the surprising loss of gaiety as the typical American viewpoint, she elides the trenchant views of millions of Native Americans as well as slaves and others on the continent for whom the notion of a freshly lost national gaiety 168 Conclusion was irrelevant and who faced the presence of national violence rather than simply the absence of gaiety. Moreover, despite its critical bent, the speaker’s easy claim to a landscape of blank miles bears discomfiting similarity to the rhetorical tradition of casting the New World as empty of Native communities . The House of the Seven Gables is similarly troubling, for during Hawthorne ’s search for a responsible literary vision, he pays only scant attention to the fact that this houseful of gazes colliding over the question of contested land ownership is tied to a suppressed history of acquiring land unjustly from Native Americans: the house itself is apparently in dispute only among the Pyncheons and the Maules, but it is rumored that somewhere hidden in its walls is an old (and, it turns out, worthless) Native American deed that promises vast tracts of land to its finder. As in Jewett’s text, Native Americans are there but not there, invoked obliquely as original inhabitants but long removed from relevance except as benign gossip, rumor, or relic. As Lucy Maddox argues, there were few things the nineteenth-century American writer could write about without engaging “the question of the place of the Indians in national culture”; thus, “the American writer was, whether intentionally or not, contributing to the process of constructing a new-nation ideology, a process that both necessitated the removal or supplanting of inappropriate forms of discourse and justified the physical removal and supplanting of the Indians” (11). The visual discourse I have examined was at the very center of the new-nation ideology Maddox points to, and as writers contribute to the discourse, they circumscribe in many important ways such “removal or supplanting” by insisting precisely on literary seers who undermine the transparently selective eye. But most writers remain caught up in the process of building a national literature derived from or otherwise rooted in visual acts—invested in an “original relation” to the external (American) world—even if they do so ironically; and while those visual acts may lead to insights, they also remain selective, rhetorical, and full of oversights. As Maddox indicates, to pursue this process of nationbuilding is to be right in the middle of the very discourses that were displacing Native Americans, and if writers do not choose to address this displacement directly, their avoidance is still a form of engagement. Indeed, it is perhaps the most direct form of engagement, for it silently reproduces the silent erasure of the rhetoric of manifest destiny.1 But we are not simply back where we started. If writers’ new visions sometimes remain problematic, their contrariety and accumulation nevertheless strive to make the figural...

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