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{ Acknowledgments }
Any lengthy book, especially one that took as long as this one did to complete, accrues many debts. Early support in the form of a teaching release was ofered by the Research Council of the University of Missouri. Te cohort of the Midwest Nineteenth-Century Americanists (especially Melissa Homestead and Laura Mielke) read numerous chapters, ofered helpful commentary, and provided much-needed camaraderie. My MU colleague Alexandra Socarides was a supportive reader at key moments of the project. Carli Sinclair helped with footnotes and the bibliography. Justine Murison kindly read a chapter at a crucial moment. Maura D’Amore was a generous reader of several chapters and has been a sustaining intellectual friend, helping me to think through the intersections of scholarship, pedagogy, and family life. At Oxford University Press, Katie Bishop was helpful and efcient at every stage of the process. Te book benefted greatly from the critical acumen and generosity of the press readers, Tomas Augst and Christopher Hanlon. Te series editor, Gordon Hutner, was an exacting reader, but also unfailingly patient and supportive.
My children have been witnesses to this process; indeed, my daughters, Sarah and Louise, have never not had a father not working on this book. We will all just have to see what comes next.
I’d most like to thank Emma Lipton, who read the whole manuscript more times than anyone should have had to and whose support throughout the whole writing process and our lives together made everything better.
Earlier portions of the book were published in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Early American Studies and in the essay collection Class and the Making of American Literature: Created Unequal, ed. Andrew Lawson (New York: Routledge, 2014).
{ Introduction }
Tis book charts the rise and fall of a relatively brief cultural moment marked by a surge in the popularity of picturesque literary landscape genres in the United States from the 1830s into the 1870s. Tese literary genres range from aesthetic treatises and design manuals to travel and city sketches, to novels about New England villages, and to “country book” memoirs of suburban life. Previous scholars have tended to dismiss these genres as “sentimental” or “genteel” or to depict the canonical authors of the period as “transcending” or “subverting” the clichéd conventions of picturesque descriptions of American landscapes.1 Instead, the present work integrates analyses of canonical authors such as Hawthorne, Toreau, Emerson, and Melville, with well-known but less studied writers such Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sylvester Judd, Henry Ward Beecher, Donald Grant Mitchell, Cornelius Mathews, Margaret Fuller, Lydia M. Child, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Nathaniel Parker Willis, along with a host of others who have now disappeared completely from our narrative of U.S. literary history. All of these authors are discussed in the context of the landscape design discourse of the period, made most famous by fgures such as Andrew Jackson Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted. Although the literature itself has largely been forgotten, the spaces constructed out of these literary imaginations are far from obscure. Te mid-nineteenth-century literature of picturesque America shaped many of the dominant spaces we inhabit in a modern and even postmodern United States: from the transformation of wilderness into codifed, protected, and commodifed objects of picturesque tourism to the imaginative reconstruction of the New England village into a symbolic expression of the national community, to the development of the suburbs as a privileged site of American manhood, and to the invention of public parks as a solution to urban social problems. In neglecting this literature, we ignore the story of how so-called minor landscape genres helped invent a radically new sense of the nation’s spaces. Tis study restores the
signifcance of this landscape literature as crucial to changed notions of space in the nineteenth century and to the creation of what became the landscape of the modern United States.
Considering the picturesque not just as an aesthetic model but as a multivalent social form—combining ideology, taste, and visual discipline—this study explains how an emergent middle class used the picturesque to remake the U.S. landscape according to their ideals and values. As many have observed, the American middle class was forged out of the economic and social structures of urban life in the antebellum era.2 Tat class perspective, however, was transported from the city to a variety of diferent spaces in the period: Rural areas were turned into tourist sites, farmland and rural villages were converted into suburbs, and even spaces within the city were converted into rural zones for public parks (such as New York’s Central Park). All of these sites expressed the social logic of an emergent middle class that saw landscapes as spaces for the cultivation of picturesque “taste.” Far from the typical bland associations it now carries, the vision of the picturesque embraced by the new middle class of the midcentury was authoritative in relation to the landscape and was diferentiated from the more utilitarian and materialist understandings of capitalist property owners on the one hand and from the views of property held by the working class, whether farmers or laborers, on the other. Tere are few elements of modern notions of U.S. space that were not forged in this moment, and many of our modern notions of environmentalism and cultural reform were articulated through the picturesque in this midcentury moment. Picturesque literary genres consolidated the values of a middle-class identity and transformed the national landscape.
Despite its prominence and its pervasive efect on the landscape of the era, the picturesque enjoyed only a relatively brief moment of cultural authority in the United States. Picturesque Literature moves across literary genres and attitudes toward spaces from the mid-1830s through the mid-1870s, exploring how middle-class investment in a quasi-professionalized notion of landscape “taste” reshaped national spaces. By the end of this period, the picturesque would ultimately be replaced by more defnitive forms of professionalism (including the vocational professionalization of architecture and landscape design, city planning, and social work) that characterized late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American middle-class values and identity. Brief
as the moment of this vogue for picturesque literature may have been, this book shows its centrality to a reshaped physical and social landscape and demonstrates the important role literature played in this process.
Focusing on the socially constructed nature of the picturesque landscape and the dialectical role literature plays in both imagining and materially shaping the landscape, this book draws on the theoretical frameworks of social geography and spatial theory by Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, W. J. T. Mitchell, and others. Te construction of so-called natural scenery and its emphasis on the viewer’s gaze as an active part in the creation of idealized landscapes overtly stage the complex work of making space. My understanding of the picturesque partakes of Lefebvre’s triadic distinction between lived, perceived, and conceived space, complicating the lines between some supposedly “real” space and that imagined in narratives containing picturesque description of landscapes. Although it is now typically relegated to the aesthetic realm of postcards and anodyne landscape scenery, the picturesque, when examined closely, reveals a more complex story. Studying the picturesque shows the ways aesthetics, subjectivity, and the social shape the landscape, complicating any easy distinctions between human and nature. As Mitchell explains: “Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture. It is both a represented and presented space, both a signifer and signifed, both a frame and what a frame contains, both a real place and its simulacrum, both a package and the commodity inside the package.”3 Just in being conceived as a “landscape,” the picturesque implicates the viewer as both producer and consumer of the reifed space. Likening landscape to “money,” an abstracted or symbolic “medium of exchange,” Mitchell can help us see the midcentury U.S. picturesque landscape as a cultural nexus where people negotiate social values. Being able to identify a landscape as picturesque becomes a kind of accomplishment and a claim to authority. As David Harvey suggests, landscape “is a form of power, it is a mode of formation of beliefs and desires, it is an institution, a mode of social relating, a material practice, a fundamental moment of experience.”4 Both in the mid-nineteenth century and now, the picturesque hides in plain sight as a discourse of meaning; as Mitchell suggests more broadly, landscape is “a social hieroglyph that conceals the actual basis of its value. It does so by naturalizing its conventions and conventionalizing its nature.”5 Perhaps no mode of “nature” was as conventionalized as the picturesque in
the mid-nineteenth-century United States, and, in conventionalizing itself, it obscured its ideological uses. Te almost obsessive attention to picturesque landscapes and design in the literature of the period hints at its importance, but its focus on the nonhuman landscape scenes implies that its concerns are separate from the social world. Following the work of social geographers and spatial theorists, I argue that literary depictions of picturesque landscapes abstracted the social values that lay beneath them at the same time that they helped instantiate those values physically upon those spaces by encouraging development of U.S. rural and urban locales along picturesque lines.
Te Politics of the Picturesque Taste in England and the United States
Tis book is an outgrowth of scholarship that has elaborated the complicated histories and social meanings of the development of picturesque landscape taste in British Romantic literature. Martin Price’s “Te Picturesque Moment,” a well-known 1965 essay on the rise and fall of the picturesque in English Romanticism, opens by asserting: “Te picturesque, like so much aesthetic theory, was an attempt to win traditional sanctions for new experience.”6 Price’s claim, like that of many other English scholars of the picturesque who followed him, draws attention to the social meaning of landscape aesthetics, and particularly to the uses of the picturesque by a new English middle class in the eighteenth century. Tis new social class brought a new logic to bear upon the English country landscape, claiming a diferent relation to that landscape from that of the aristocracy and peasantry. Tis book fnds a parallel project in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. Te new American middle class turned to the picturesque to “win traditional sanctions for [their] new experience,” fnding new ways to imagine and construct the American landscape from within the inherited aesthetic of the picturesque.7
Te aesthetic terms and qualifcations of the picturesque were frst formalized and debated in late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcenturies in England by such fgures as William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight, who argued at great length—and
without much agreement—about what made an object or landscape picturesque and what was its impact on the viewer.8 All commentators agreed that the picturesque required an uncultivated and rough landscape (if it contained elements of ruin or decay, so much the better) and a self-conscious viewer taking a distanced, purposeful stance in relation to that landscape. Not simply a passive activity, picturesque viewing involved the imaginative reconstruction of the landscape, albeit through very conventional and predetermined “principles of composition” which were so popular as to be almost unconsciously accepted.9 Imaginatively adding or subtracting from the view as required by the rules of picturesque composition, the picturesque ofered an “improved and selected nature.”10 Despite various attempts to theorize and defne it, there was no true consensus about what defned the picturesque. As a result, it is best understood less as a fxed aesthetic category and more as an overarching attitude taken in relationship to the landscape.11 Dependent upon an active gaze and an imaginative engagement with a natural landscape seen from an authoritative distance, the picturesque became a generic stand-in for landscape appreciation and for culture more generally.12 As one modern scholar of the picturesque concluded: “[T]he picturesque became the nineteenth century’s mode of vision.”13
For many scholars of English Romanticism, the picturesque was an empowering discourse for an emergent middle class, and they associated its aesthetic organizing principles with the imposition of a middle class’s “imagination of management” onto the English countryside.14 Once seen simply as a formulaic element of Romantic aesthetics, the picturesque came under politicized scrutiny with the publication of John Barrell’s Te Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place (1972) and Raymond Williams’s Te Country and the City (1973), both of which linked the rise of literary and pictorial interest in “rough” and “natural” landscape with the concurrent, and seemingly contradictory, push toward enclosure in the English countryside, whereby wooded areas—by longstanding tradition available for “common” use—were converted into farmland.15 For Barrell, the two phenomena were analogous, refective of a shared “desire to impose an order on landscape, by laying a structure upon it, or by applying to it abstract, general rules”16 Since then, many scholars studying English Romantic landscape literature and art have elaborated what Ann Bermingham later called an “ideology of landscape,”
highlighting the economic and social values expressed by these forms of representation.17
Within this ideological interpretation of the landscape, the picturesque has been associated with bourgeois managerial labor and with an investment in the “control over valuable cultures.”18 Accordingly, the shif to the picturesque in England has been linked to the rise of new land-management practices that the bourgeoisie transferred from urban settings. Alan Liu avers,
Seen in overview, the picturesque was the deep imagination of the economic institutions then transforming feudal notions of property into the new sense of exchangeable proprietorship that Williams has called the “rentier’s vision.”. . . It was the imagination of a whole method of managing and ultimately policing the rural landscape cognate with new methods of administration learned in industrial centers.19
Tis mode of land management took the form of “the supervision of a precisely disciplined liberty—free, yet never too free,” which was transformed into a bourgeois leisure activity in the form of picturesque domestic design and tourism.20 Seen as an early form of “popular” or “consumer” culture, the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English vogue for picturesque tourism restricted “itself to humble English rural scenery, represented a landscape both familiar and accessible.”21 Although domestic landscape tourism required some degree of economic surplus, leisure, and mobility to reach the picturesque sites, the same aristocratic levels were not required for the Continental tour, which is ofen thought to have instituted the English interest in landscape.22
If the domestic settings of the picturesque were more available to the English bourgeoisie, the particular conventions and protocols of picturesque landscape viewing, with its emphasis on “technique as something that warrants professional cultivation,” ft the specifc demands of a new professional middle class that defned itself through its manipulation of abstracted knowledge.23 As Tomas Pfau argues, “Above all, professionalization involves the elaboration of a distinctive ethos, a new symbolism designed less to display wealth, afuence, and material possession than to signal the profciency of its practitioners— and, in doing so, to facilitate their mutual afrmation as legitimate members in an identifable community.”24 Te picturesque, with its protocols and generic formulas, was a multivalent disciplinary
technique like so much of the culture of professionalism. As Liu suggests, the picturesque was a discipline that created authority through subjection: “Te object of the picturesque was ‘command’ [of the landscape], which, frst of all, required the regimentation of the viewer. . . . Command over the viewer was then interchangeable with the viewer’s own command over the landscape.”25 Te practitioners of picturesque sensibility subjected themselves to its protocols, to its regimented and formulaic way of seeing the landscape, but as a result of this discipline, they could imaginatively (and also sometimes literally) take control of the landscape and dominate its meaning. Te English bourgeois appropriation of the “symbolic” or “cultural capital” of picturesque aesthetic discourse can be understood as an “imaginative appropriation” of the countryside from the two social classes previously associated with it: the poor rural farmers or laborers and the wealthy aristocratic gentry.26
Te rise of interest in landscape has been long understood as part of a project of cultural nationalism, as part of the articulation of American exceptionalism. In her study of nineteenth-century American landscape painting, Te Empire of the Eye, Angela Miller identifes this art as “a form of symbolic action” that sought to resolve “[c]onficts between freedom and order, change and continuity, growth and stability” and thus reinforce national unity.27 One of the seminal statements of this rise of landscape appreciation was Tomas Cole’s “Essay on American Scenery” (1835), which aimed to instill an appreciation of landscape and to foster national pride. As Cole exhorts his readers:
[Scenery] is a subject that to every American ought to be of surpassing interest; for, whether he beholds the Hudson mingling waters with the Atlantic—explores the central wilds of this vast continent, or stands on the margin of the distant Oregon, he is still in the midst of American scenery—it is his own land; its beauty, its magnifcence, its sublimity—all are his; and how undeserving of such a birthright, if he can turn towards it an unobserving eye, an unafected heart!28
For Cole, sensitivity and appreciation of American landscape scenery was a “birthright” as well as a test of one’s national identity. Paradoxically, appreciation of distinctive American scenery both formed and tested national identity. In the opening essay of his 1852 collection of essays and engravings entitled Te Home Book of the
Picturesque, E. L. Magoon explained that “[t]he diversifed landscapes of our country exert no slight infuence in creating our character as individuals, and in confrming our destiny as a nation.”29 Antebellum advocates of landscape art made appreciation of American landscape an overdetermined symbol of national identity.
Following British scholarship on the ideology of landscape, American art historians have also studied the social signifcance of American landscape art, linking its rising popularity in the nineteenth century to the rise of an American middle class.30 Angela Miller argues that the “disinterested” eye of the viewer of the landscape occludes the self-interested individual of the emergent market culture, helping members of the new American middle class to justify their position within society and solidify social distinctions. She identifes this ideological project of American middle-class landscape taste, of which the picturesque was a central element, as “a conservative endeavour.”31 Although Miller points out the ways that the aestheticized protocols of landscape appreciation enforced American middle- and upper-class social distinctions, especially in relation to the presumed utilitarian approach of the working class, she also notes the irony that this aestheticized denial of landscape use-value was in tension with the broader middle-class investment in a market culture.32 Although ostensibly a conservative power move that stabilized middle-class identity, the picturesque, as further chapters will demonstrate, was also used to critique some of the central elements of that identity, resulting in stances such as nascent environmental conservationism and a range of other antimarket reformist attitudes that had the potential as much for radically destabilizing the status quo as for conservativism. Tis does not mean that the picturesque was a radical force in midcentury U.S. life; it would be more accurate to say that the particular confguration of its concerns worked to remake the nation’s space to refect the deeply ambivalent relationship that the new middle class had to the market in this period. Perhaps no one fgure encapsulated these political tensions around the picturesque more than Andrew Jackson Downing, who, as landscape architectural historian David Schuyler claims, promoted “the emergence of a picturesque aesthetic in architectural and landscape design” and “more than any other individual, shaped middle-class taste in the United States during the two decades prior to the Civil War.”33 Although the central premise of Downing’s major work,
A Treatise on the Teory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America (1841), was to promote landscape gardening as a fne art, he also defended the picturesque over the beautiful, privileging a model of design that emphasized neither artifcial polish nor an imitation of nature. Instead, it prized a “nature improved by art.”34 Downing was the great popularizer of the picturesque in the midnineteenth-century United States. Although his work refected a deep commitment to the English tradition of the picturesque, he was committed to establishing a distinctively American version of the landscape style. Downing ofered a model of landscape exceptionalism, positing an American republican ideal in contrast to European models:
Here the rights of man are held to be equal; and if there are no enormous parks, and no class of men whose wealth is hereditary, there is, at least, what is more gratifying to the feelings of the philanthropist, the almost entire absence of a very poor class in this country; while we have, on the other hand, a large class of independent landholders, who are able to assemble around them, not only the useful and convenient, but the agreeable and beautiful, in country life.35
Far from the grand estates of European aristocrats, Downing’s idealized picturesque country home was a symbol of democracy, a mode of living available to a wider range of Americans. At the center of Downing’s vision of distinctively American space was the republicaninfected “independent landholder” whose land ownership was integral to his vision of American subjecthood.36 Although later works such as Cottage Residences (1850) ofered patterns for more modest designs suitable to lower-income home builders, Downing’s design vision was most clearly directed to “the emerging middle class that aspired to the tasteful dwellings and the associations of home he promoted.” Some contemporaries critiqued him for his privileging of a meticulous private domestic realm that was unattainable by most Americans.37
In addition to designing plans for rather more modest houses later in his career, Downing also became an important voice for creating public parks, though, as we will see in Chapter 4, this efort to create democratic public spaces of picturesque design had its social complications. Even before these more explicitly egalitarian design projects, Downing touted his design ethos as a general contribution to the public good. Whether beautiful or picturesque, Downing’s design
entailed not merely aesthetic appreciation and private enjoyment, but social infuence:
Our country residences, evincing that love of the beautiful and the picturesque, which, combined with solid comfort, is so attractive to the eye of every beholder, will not only become sources of the purest enjoyment to the refned minds of the possessors, but will exert an infuence for the improvement in taste of every class in our community.38
Te beneft of picturesque design was not merely private pleasure, but the public good of generally improved taste throughout the community. Tis was a common theme in Downing’s vision of picturesque design. In response to a reader’s letter to his magazine, Te Horticulturalist, complaining about a “GRACELESS VILLAGE” in which he had recently settled, Downing argued that landowners who built an attractive home under the proper guidance could function as “apostles of taste,” encouraging a general improvement in village life.39 Te previous year, in another article for the same magazine, entitled “Moral Infuence of Good Houses,” Downing asserted: “We believe in the bettering infuence of beautiful cottages and country houses—in the improvement of human nature necessarily resulting to all classes, from the possession of lovely gardens and fruitful orchards.”40 Downing’s vision of picturesque taste promoted exceptionalist nationalism, which argued that in the United States, unlike in Europe, domestic home improvements engendered by picturesque design could be experienced by “all classes.”41 But while Downing’s reformist perspective made the professionalized knowledge of landscape gardening and architectural design a discourse for enacting social change, he also emphasized the cultural authority of those who executed picturesque design on the landscape, whether in the form of nascent design professionals like himself or those (implicitly upperand middle-class readers) who read his works and applied the sensibility to landscape design. Downing authorized his middle-class readers to transform American culture through picturesque design. Tis exercise of cultural authority made Downing and the picturesque crucial to middle-class midcentury Americans.
Downing’s work joined a host of other writings that explicitly instructed readers that appreciating picturesque American landscape scenery constituted a distinctive didactic discourse and form of cultural authority. Examples include N. P. Willis and William Bartlett’s
American Scenery (1840), a multivolume collection of engravings of landscape scenery and descriptive commentary, and Te Home-Book of the Picturesque (1852), a collection that paired engravings of landscape scenery, descriptive commentary and theoretical meditations on landscape aesthetics. Warren Burton’s aesthetic treatise SceneryShowing (1852), which carried the subtitle “Word Painting of the Beautiful, the Picturesque, and the Grand in Nature,” overtly claimed that the didactic project could be used “to awaken perception and relish by presenting appropriate objects” in its readers.42 Burton was at great pains to demonstrate that scenery appreciation is a skill to be learned and practiced: “It is remarkable how a taste for scenery will grow, with pleasure deepening upon pleasure, if it is only steadily and repeatedly directed.”43 Explicitly pedagogical, Burton half-joking asserted that “we truly wished that there might be such an establishment as a Scenery School, and that we could be appointed Professor of the charming science of the Picturesque” (231). Over the course of his argument, Burton plotted out techniques for encouraging people to appreciate landscape scenery, telling stories of successes he had had in teaching children in “scenery-seeing” (230). Describing the process, he observed: “Tey seemed interested in the sight. At any rate they looked, and looking was a discipline that would lead into pleasure” (230). Burton’s claim perfectly encapsulates the ideological dynamics of the picturesque that Liu described in his analysis of the English picturesque: Te subjection to discipline of the viewer in learning how to appreciate the picturesque landscape is exchanged for the pleasure of commanding that landscape.44 Tis progression from pedagogy through aesthetics to (private) pleasure and (public) authority constitutes the core dynamic of midcentury literary landscape literature and is traced throughout this book in a host of literary genres of the period, from travel writing to novels and from city sketches to texts about public parks.
Angela Miller described the nineteenth-century rise of American landscape sensibility as part of a “conservative endeavour,” but it is more appropriate to link Downing and the picturesque sensibility to the ambiguous social politics of midcentury middle-class “selfculture.”45 Tat project entailed acquiring education and cultural authority beyond the traditional classroom that ofen took the form of reading “enriching” literatures such as conduct, technical (scientifc and aesthetic), and philosophical treatises, and attending cultural
institutions of “moral entertainment” such as Mechanics and Young Men’s Institutions, Mercantile Libraries, and the Lyceum circuit (Burton’s text was originally given as a series of lyceum talks), where the proliferating moral, historical, scientifc, and aesthetic discourses of the period were presented. Originally aimed at young American men to encourage “the cultivation of an internalized system of morality,” the ethos of self-improvement and the acquisition of authoritative discourses connected self-culture to the broader realm of what would later be understood as middle-class professionalism.46 Te politics of antebellum self-culture refect the ambiguous place of the middle class within the contested claims to authority from Jacksonian populist democracy, traditional elite cultural authority, and a nascent professional authority.
Although Downing’s writings are a career-long argument for the professional authority of the landscape designer, the dissemination of his ideas outward into mid-nineteenth-century America made them more subject to appropriation for diferent purposes. Not everyone could own a country estate or design the landscape and buildings to maximize the picturesque efect, but not having such estates would not matter to the imagination of the newly self-cultivated American. As Ralph Waldo Emerson, the designated philosopher of the midcentury middle class, famously asserted in “Nature” (1836): “Te charming landscape which I saw this morning . . . no one has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is the poet.”47 Te proliferation of discussions of the picturesque made the process of visually integrating the landscape available not only to the landowner or the poet (each a kind of elite position), but also to anyone willing to read Downing or any of the many popular writings on the picturesque. Advocates envisioned the picturesque as a readily transmissible and widely disseminated skill that transferred authority to the most basically trained viewer; they also saw the picturesque as a shif from material to symbolic authority that suited the middle-class investment in nonmaterial capital as a source of status in the period. Middle-class advocates of the picturesque imagined a discourse that could be readily transmitted to the working class as well. As we will see later, proponents of the development of urban public parks saw them as an ideal way to cultivate a broader appreciation of landscape and refnement more generally. Tere is little doubt, however, that the picturesque, with its contradictory mix of reform and conservatism,
worked most to legitimate middle-class status and authority within the conficted social world of nineteenth-century America.
Recovering the Picturesque and the Utopian/Ideological Cultural Work of Literary Landscape Genres
Tis book examines the distinctive literary prose genres of the picturesque and the American spaces that they helped to construct, both imaginatively and materially, at midcentury. It attempts to understand why literary landscape genres were popular and why such a range of authors and readers within this particular period so seriously engaged with the picturesque. Te formulaic category of the picturesque (along with its related categories of the beautiful and sublime) dominated depiction of the landscape, producing a huge body of literature that ofen appears to modern readers to be generic, in the sense of being repetitive, unoriginal, and even trite. Picturesque literary genres devoted substantial time to self-conscious viewing of formulaic landscapes at the expense of character development, plot, and social observation, which are the standard elements of the kinds of nineteenth-century writing now deemed most praiseworthy. Modern readers can rightfully ask: Why did midcentury American readers like this stuf? I see an answer in the power of the genre itself, especially in the formulaic protocols of landscape viewing that the picturesque inculcated. Lauren Berlant argues that the “[s]uccessfully accomplished genre is a utopian performance, a scene of mastery in contrast to disappointing life, with its rhythm of failed experiments.”48 Te imaginatively constructed picturesque landscapes in their generic familiarity (whether in the observer’s gaze or in the writer and reader’s literary experience) reveal the power of mastery over a formula, the “utopian performance” of seeing exactly what one expects to see, or, even more importantly, of the ability to take an undiferentiated space and transform it into a landscape to ft one’s needs and purposes. If modern readers see tedious repetition in the recurrence of lengthy descriptions of picturesque landscapes in midcentury texts, readers of the day found a more complex process that blended discipline with enjoyment, as I noted earlier in Burton’s explanation in “Scenery-Showing”: “[L]ooking was a discipline that would lead into pleasure.” Subjecting themselves to the discipline of reading
generic landscape descriptions, midcentury readers of picturesque landscape genres reveled in their mastery of the conventions, associating themselves with the texts’ ability to claim the cultural authority to impose the self on the landscape.
Tis book studies a range of American texts beyond design manuals and aesthetic treatises, in which the shaping of picturesque landscape scenery is a central or constitutive element of the narrative. Each chapter focuses on a specifc genre and the particular kind of space with which it was associated, whether it be rural tourist sites, cities, the suburbs, urban public parks, or New England villages. Although each genre has its own qualities and constitutive elements, extensive descriptions of the picturesque are a shared formal and thematic concern. Tese genres were conventional for their period: Readers knew what they were looking for and actively sought out the experience of reading picturesque landscape descriptions. Some of these genres were relatively short-lived, while others remain common even in our present-day literature. Yet the purpose of the project is not to map out, in Hans Jauss’s formulation, “the horizon of expectation” of these genres, neither categorizing nor classifying the distinctive formal traits of each genre.49 Instead, my primary concern is to explore the social meanings of literary landscape genres, however loosely confgured, that were associated with a specifc site or type of space in the period; to map out the representation of that space; and to explore how the genre might have afected or shaped contemporaneous understandings of that space. Tis project reads literary genres as “essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specifc public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact.”50 Reading literary landscape genres in this way, this book charts the ways the textual staging of the picturesque sensibility helped an emergent U.S. middle class not just to see the landscape in a particular way, but also to cope with, even possibly actively control, the new formations of space being constructed at the moment.
Te frst two chapters focus on the literary form most commonly associated with the picturesque: the sketch. Te literary sketch, the short form refecting the picturesque’s investment in informality, self-conscious framing, and visual contrast, was an enormously popular form in nineteenth-century United States.51 Although initially associated with short nonfction, the popularity of Washington Irving’s
1819 Te Sketch Book of Geofrey Crayon demonstrated how the sketch could migrate into fction and even longer narrative forms, including the novel and the travelogue. Appearing primarily in magazines and newspapers, the literary sketch tended to be identifed particularly with the experience of place and space, whether it be rural or urban. As the frst two chapters of this book demonstrate, the midcentury literary sketch worked to normalize middle-class understandings of urban and rural spaces, using the picturesque to privilege middle-class perspectives and uses of these spaces.
Perhaps the most stereotypical spaces of the picturesque are rural locales with notable landscape features turned into tourist sites. Te increased leisure and assets of the midcentury American urban middle class sparked the rise of a domestic tourism industry, creating conventionalized tourist routes in the Northeast that identifed the meaning of the rural landscape in its scenic possibilities. Picturesque tourists claimed a superior appreciation of an aestheticized rural landscape that they neither owned nor worked, in comparison to those economically above and below them, who could only see its material properties and economic possibilities. In claiming this privileged perspective on the landscape and its meanings, the picturesque travel sketch empowered the urban bourgeoisie to redefne U.S. rural space as something other than a frontier to develop. Tis picturesque transformation in the understanding of rural space was bolstered by a steady fow of picturesque travel sketch writing in the periodical print culture and beyond. Te travel sketch was didactic, modeling the proper way to experience the picturesque to its middle-class readers, and repetitive, ofen reproducing very similar descriptions of the most common sights on the tour routes. As a result, the travel sketch genre has largely been neglected in literary critical studies. Even in its midcentury heyday, the American picturesque travel sketch started from a defensive position: Many European, British, and even some domestic commentators claimed that the lack of historical associations and ruins on the American landscape rendered it uninteresting and largely unsuitable for picturesque tourism.
I examine the way American travel writers responded to this charge in my frst chapter, “Te Travel Sketch: Picturesque History and American Exceptionalism on the Landscape.” Although modern scholarship has tended to dismiss the picturesque travel sketch as
superfcial, this chapter demonstrates how writers used the picturesque to consider how the American past was indeed inscribed onto the rural landscape, how demographic shifs might transform the American land in the future, and whether America could be picturesque without recapitulating European histories of dramatic class diferences and national and religious conficts. Te chapter studies three well-known American Romantic authors who might not be most commonly associated with travel writing: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Toreau. It is notable that all three turned to picturesque travel writing early in their careers. Tey published (or at least sought to publish) their frst books within this genre, suggesting the ways that the popularity of the genre might have made it appealing as a way to reach a wider audience, but also the ways that the genre allows the writers to think deeply about issues within the U.S. landscape. Te chapter begins with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s early picturesque travel writing in the 1830s, initially produced for his unpublished early book project “Te Story Teller,” which imagined the efects of picturesque travel on the art and consciousness of an aspiring American writer. Seldom examined now, Hawthorne’s early picturesque domestic travel sketches respond to the residual presence of the violence of the American past on the touristic landscape and to the threats that immigration posed for the future American landscape. Te second section of the chapter focuses on Margaret Fuller’s, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 which embraces the picturesque as a response to the utilitarian ethos of frontier development and considers its efect on the future of the nation. In the process, Fuller must try to deal with the limitations of the picturesque in the failed example of Native Americans, whose ghostly traces and remnants in the landscape haunted her travels. Te fnal section focuses on some of Toreau’s earliest travel writing, starting with his frst non-Dial publication, “A Walk to Wachusett” (1843), and then examining his frst book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Although Toreau’s interest in the picturesque was frst noted in the 1930s, scholars have largely dismissed it, fnding the supposedly superfcial aesthetic concerns of the picturesque at odds with Toreau’s idealism. My reading argues against this attitude not only in regards to Toreau, but also for Fuller and Hawthorne. For all three, the picturesque was critical to understanding the American landscape and history. Tese writers applied its
spatiotemporal protocols to think through the relationship of human to natural time, the resonances of the national past on the present (particularly in the residual presences of Native Americans and the colonial past), and the future efects of spatial expansion and new people (particularly immigrants) on the American landscape.
Most ofen associated with rural or country views, the picturesque sketch was also applied to urban settings, playing an important role in shaping how the city was understood during the mid-nineteenth century, when urban populations were undergoing unprecedented growth. Te antebellum city has been identifed as the site of formation of an American middle-class identity in the context of historical attention to class divisions in American life, but relatively little attention has been paid to the role played by the picturesque city sketch. Instead, scholars of nineteenth-century U.S. literature typically saw midcentury writing about the city as dominated by the sensationalist mode, with both fctional stories and nonfction sketches portraying the city as dark and treacherous. By contrast, in Chapter 2: “Te City Sketch: Walking in the Picturesque City,” I explore the place of the picturesque in the midcentury city sketch, both in the nonfction forms that proliferated in New York City newspapers in the period and in the fction that derived from these sketches. I argue that the city sketch played a role in articulating the new middle-class identity by establishing a distinctive position in city life between the wealthy and the working class. Te city sketch normalized a middle-class perspective through the persona of the sketcher whose walks through the city turned the other classes, their behaviors and practices, into spectacles and objects of their gaze. Finding beauty and pleasure in the variety of surfaces and people in urban life, the urban picturesque presented a far less antagonistic relationship to city life than sensationalism. Te picturesque articulated a perspective on the widening divide between wealthy and poor in the city, imagining an abstract in-betweenness that came to defne the complexities of a middle-class identity. Tis chapter examines the urban picturesque in mid-nineteenth century city-sketch writing, including the work of Lydia Maria Child (Letters from New-York [1841–1843]) and Margaret Fuller (as book editor for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune, 1844–1846) and even a writer more associated with sensationalism such as George G. Foster (New-York in Slices [1849] and New-York by Gaslight [1850]). In addition, the chapter studies fction that appropriated city
