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chapter one Representing America The American as Traveler in the Work of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and William Bartram In every perception of nature there is actually present the whole of society. The latter not only provides the patterns of perception in general, but also defines nature a priori in relation to itself. theodor adorno J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782) has long been read as an American national epic, a founding document of the newly emerging United States. D. H. Lawrence famously stated, “Franklin is the real practical prototype of the American. Crèvecoeur is the emotional” (29). Albert E. Stone, in his 1963 introduction to the Penguin edition of Letters, goes so far as to suggest, “American literature, as the voice of our national consciousness, begins in 1782 with the first publication in England of Letters from an American Farmer” (7). These critics, and many who follow their lead, have thus viewed Crèvecoeur’s Letters as a reflection of the beliefs of a representative individual writing during a particularly volatile, ambiguous period. The ambiguity of the period, most critics argue, is reflected in the lack of coherence so often seen in a book that John Seelye, for instance, calls “deeply disjunctive” (Beautiful Machine 131). However, these critics fail to appreciate the role the text itself played in the construction of a national identity. Rather than simply forming the foundation on which Crèvecoeur based his work, American national identity was forged in part through the writing and publication of the text itself. William Bartram’s Travels (1791), too, participated in the production of an American national identity during the critical years immediately surrounding the Revolutionary War. While Bartram’s book purports to be a rather innocent account of a romantic botanist rambling through the fields and forests of the southern colonies, Travels actually addresses questions that were of vital interest 20 chapter one to the emerging republic, particularly those concerning the fundamental identity of the new nation and its inhabitants. As in Letters, Bartram’s book does not merely reflect the surroundings in which it was written but actively constructs the natural, political, social, and cultural environments generally viewed as its foundation. Both Crèvecoeur and Bartram participate in this nation-building process primarily through the construction of a narrator who becomes representative of American national identity. Through the representation of a narrative persona, each of these two authors seeks to embody the numerous competing discourses available to him as an author. In many ways, Larzer Ziff describes both Bartram and Crèvecoeur when he argues that if we consider that Letters constitutes a reality rather than simply reflects a pre-existing one, “then we see that the eruption of physical conflict at the close is an externalization of irreconcilable differences within the writer’s position rather than the intrusion of public events into an otherwise felicitous private life. These differences exist as a conflict between what is valorized in the writing and the act of writing itself. To read the Letters as an embodiment of a cultural reality rather than a picture of external reality is to deny the gap between private circumstance and public event” (Writing 22). Therefore, the intrusion of revolution, for instance, or the eruption of the chaos of a hurricane represents the tensions and contradictions of the author’s position as much as the realities of the historical situation. By attempting to embody the American national identity through the construction of a narrative persona, each of these two authors recreates the entire nation in his own image as he reflects the contradictory ideologies that have produced him. Travel is more than incidental to this process, for movement of many types determines these representative figures and contributes to the attempted resolution of these contradictory ideological impulses. For both Crèvecoeur and Bartram, travel is constitutive of national character. Unlike Europeans, they suggest, Americans are free to travel widely, both geographically and socially, so travel serves as an indication of Americanness. However, the travel in which Americans participate further broadens their views and provides them with a variety of perspectives that together form the American character, so travel not only serves as an indication of American freedom but also creates the freedom that Americans enjoy. Thus, Crèvecoeur and Bartram argue, travel is both a sign and a symptom of American freedom and national identity...

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