Reclaiming Nostalgia
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Reclaiming Nostalgia

Longing for Nature in American Literature

Jennifer K. Ladino

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Reclaiming Nostalgia

Longing for Nature in American Literature

Jennifer K. Ladino

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Often thought of as the quintessential home or the Eden from which humanity has fallen, the natural world has long been a popular object of nostalgic narratives. In Reclaiming Nostalgia, Jennifer Ladino assesses the ideological effects of this phenomenon by tracing its dominant forms in American literature and culture since the closing of the frontier in 1890. While referencing nostalgia for pastoral communities and for untamed and often violent frontiers, she also highlights the ways in which nostalgia for nature has served as a mechanism for social change, a model for ethical relationships, and a motivating force for social and environmental justice.

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1 / Longing for Wonderland: Zitkala-Ć a's Post-Frontier Nostalgia
Indians and nature have been versatile, often contradictory, foils for constructions of white American identity since European settlement. Indians have a long and distinctive history of being both quintessentially “American” and the very antithesis of national identity. In Playing Indian, Philip J. Deloria describes how, for instance, Revolutionary War-era Indians were “noble and customary, and they existed inside an American society that was not British. But Indians were also savage, existing outside of a British society that included both colonists and officials” (26). The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a time of especially dynamic change, as constructions of “savage” Indianness evolved in tandem with conceptions of wilderness. Sometimes Indians were the “natural” occupants of wilderness areas; at other times they were a “problem” for management—a blemish on natural landscapes that needed to be erased to create “pure” natural spaces. In the nineteenth century, whether Indians were romanticized or ostracized depended largely on land availability. In the early part of that century, Indians were often depicted as “picturesque and ‘noble,’” their lives idealized in the face of growing unease about industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. By the end of that same century, as “free land” in the West became scarce and indigenous people were framed as trespassers on desirable property, Indians were more frequently described as outlaw tribes who had “regressed into ‘treacherous, bloodthirsty savages’” (Spence 30). Far from a clean break or an absolute paradigm shift, both depictions—the noble Indian and the trespasser (who could safely be deemed a bit less “savage” with the end of the Indian wars)—persisted into the early twentieth century, informing national park management and public perception.
As spectacular geography replaced Native presence as the primary indicator of wilderness in the American mind, situating Indians as both “self” and “other” enabled white Americans to affiliate themselves with the natural, “savage” elements of Indian culture—a kind of cultural imperialism that accompanied the now trendy tourism of nature—but still justify poor treatment of these “others.” In the modern period, both nature and Native Americans were often posited as preindustrial antidotes for a quickly changing nation and, so, rendered “past tense”—origins, of sorts, to which the American public could return for unreflective consumption and imaginary authenticity (Wall 103). “Playing Indian” in modern America, as tourists at the Field Days did, promised an authentic connection to the nation's “origins” by “help[ing] preserve a sense of frontier toughness, communal warmth, and connection to the continent,” especially to its coveted natural world (Deloria 129).
Arguably “the nation's most sacred myth of origin,” nature, like Indianness, has a long history of being alternately respected and romanticized, or feared and tamed (Cronon 77). As William Cronon explains in “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” wilderness is not just a material reality; rather, popular perceptions of wilderness have always been socially constructed and historically contingent.1 Throughout much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the United States, wilderness, stemming from biblical references, was “a place to which one came only against one's will, and always in fear and trembling” (Cronon 71). By the end of the nineteenth century, however, this understanding of wilderness had begun to change drastically. Cronon notes that rapid industrialization, combined with the nineteenth-century emergence of the American sublime (adapted and popularized by writers like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir) and the construction of the frontier myth (by Frederick Jackson Turner, Theodore Roosevelt, and others), contributed to a reversal of the earlier wilderness ideology. As industrialization marched steadily forward, more Americans cultivated an anti-modern nostalgic backlash to help alleviate the anxieties accompanying technological, economic, and social change. Wilderness was no longer a scary place in need of taming, but a valuable asset in need of protection.
A major shift in American environmental values had occurred. Nostalgia for nature had been catapulted into the forefront of the national imaginary, and the nation began to embrace a new ethic of preserving its dwindling natural resources. Perhaps the largest contributing factor to this shift was the declaration by the U.S. Census Bureau, in the year 1890, that the frontier was “closed”: there was no more land for westward expansion. Three years later, Frederick Jackson Turner identified the frontier as central to national identity in his well-known and much-contested essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” With the frontier's closing came the recognition that American nature—a unique cultural asset, often invoked to prove the exceptionalism of “nature's Nation”—was perhaps being tamed a bit too quickly. Up until this time, nostalgia for nature had existed in diffuse literary and artistic cultural enclaves—for instance, in the work of the transcendentalists or the Hudson River School. But nineteenth-century nature was still considered an infinite resource for the nation, and questions about how it might be put to use superseded questions about how it might be left alone. The closing of the frontier, and the concomitant sense that this “resource” was running out, helped solidify what had been relatively minor and disparate nostalgic stirrings into a broader, more dominant, national nostalgia for nature.
Frontier nostalgia in Turner's essay relied on problematic assumptions and rhetorical strategies—including erasing the country's indigenous inhabitants in order to construct a West with “free land” for the taking—and other scholars have detailed the many problems with his “frontier thesis” more thoroughly than I will here. One aspect of the thesis that is crucial for my study is Turner's formulation of the frontier as an origin to which Americans could “return” again and again to establish a national character: “American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character” (187). This kind of “beginning over again” sounds like Said's theory of beginnings, especially insofar as it seems to disrupt the idea of “advance along a single line.” However, while Said imagines beginnings that destabilize both past and present, Turner's “perennial” return works not to reevaluate the present but to reconfirm it as the natural endpoint of a kind of teleological progress. Unlike the authors in my study, whose work follows Said's model by calling into question such progress, Turner situates “expansion westward” along the frontier as a reliable and static national origin myth.
Of course, this origin myth was largely a bourgeois, anti-modern narrative; its nostalgia was felt strongly by some Americans but hardly registered by others. When John Muir wrote of the “thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilised people” who were “going home” to the mountains, it hardly needs to be said that such a home would not have been “universally appealing” (qtd. in Outka 156). Exemplifying what Renato Rosaldo has called imperialist nostalgia, lamentations of “lost” wilderness typically came from elite white males—the people who profited most from the exploitation of the nature whose loss they mourned. Not surprisingly then, this nostalgic longing was complex, dichotomous, and often contradictory. A split tradition of post-frontier nostalgia emerged and was re-coded in two different versions of American history that sought to explain national identity in the modern present. Along with this nostalgia, national rhetoric situating savagery or primitivism against the forces of civilization evolved in new directions during the modern period and beyond. Because this frontier rhetoric is so integral to the work of the writers I analyze in this chapter and throughout this study, I will spend some time here detailing its emergence.
On one hand, the American frontier past was coded as primarily a pastoral, democratic space, occupied by a harmonious community that lived and worked on the land. This version of the frontier remained truer to Turner's idealized national history. Richard Slotkin explains that Turner's nostalgic vision glorified the yeoman farmer and understood “the past as a place in which, once upon a time, our political life was regenerated and purified”; the corrupt present, by contrast, could no longer profit from the frontier's revitalizing effects (“Nostalgia and Progress” 612, 636). In this version of nostalgia, the negative effects of the frontier's taming—such as Indian removal—were quietly overlooked in favor of a neo-utilitarian ethic concerned primarily with appreciation of the natural world. Violence, even while it continued in the present, was downplayed, couched safely within the “progressive” rhetoric of Manifest Destiny or the liberal ideology of uplift. As Paul Outka argues, the sublime landscapes of the American West—especially as linked to (white) national identity via Turner's frontier myth—provided a natural space in which “the racial trauma that had organized the national geography for much of the nineteenth century could be left behind” (154). In the modern United States, a new “cultural nationalism,” based on touring the country's natural wonders, “grew out of a nostalgic ideal of America as nature's nation” (Shaffer 146). The Indian
Field Days demonstrate how tourism erased violent histories even as it became, in effect, a new form of pioneering—a way to experience the frontier in small, safe doses.2
On the other hand, in an alternate version of the turn-of-the-century frontier story, nostalgia for the more traditional frontier remained prominent—nostalgia for the violent West of the boom town and the gold rush, now popularized by dime novels, by Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, and by Western American fiction like Owen Wister's The Virginian. This was the West of the cowboy, a nostalgic national symbol whose popularity coincided, ironically, with the end of the frontier that had spawned him and nurtured his way of life.3 This West was also the proving ground for the figure Cronon describes as the “mythic frontier individualist”: a racialized, masculinized subject position that values and romanticizes “unspoiled” or “savage” wilderness as the site of identity formation (78). In this strand of nostalgia, the frontier's violence was essential for national progress and, as such, was naturalized and even celebrated through its performance (in the popular Wild West Show, for instance) and its canonization in Western literature. Indians and other “uncivilized” groups were implicated in this myth of the West as well, usually as “natural” foils for white identity formation.
Perhaps the man who best embodies this second, more violent manifestation of the frontier is Theodore Roosevelt. Slotkin explains how Roosevelt developed and popularized a particular variation of Turner's frontier myth. While Turner's work downplayed the frontier's violence, Roosevelt's sense of frontier history emphasized not only the “egalitarian democracy” fostered by frontier life but also “the course of savage war” that helped created a “class of those invested with heroic, history-making capacities”—a “race of heroes” of which Roosevelt counted himself a member (Gunfighter 54). Slotkin concludes that the balances each man struck between nostalgia and progressivism were different, since each embraced a slightly different myth of the frontier: Turner's was “thoroughly nostalgic in its contrast of happy past and troubled present,” but Roosevelt's adaptation valued the enduring potential of the frontier in the present. For Roosevelt, positive “effects on racial morale” could and should be maintained via “a disciplined program of preaching, mythmaking, exercise, and conquest” that drew on historical struggles to further national agendas and revitalize national identity. In other words, Roosevelt's frontier was “not an alternative to the present, but was its justification”—a national resource to be mined in the service of imperialist projects (Slotkin, “Nostalgia and Progress” 636).
We might say, then, that Turner embodied one pole of the frontier's new split—a pastoral and less outwardly violent pole, which emphasized a break with the past and foregrounded environment rather than race as the key factor in shaping national identity—while Roosevelt embodied the other, in which a “new class of hero-leaders” that included the “wilderness hunter and Indian fighter” kept the “spirit of the frontier” alive (Slotkin, “Nostalgia and Progress” 611, 636). This comfortable binary is complicated, though, by Turner's frequent association with violence in contemporary, especially scholarly, discourse and Roosevelt's widespread association with nature preservation. A self-made “frontier individualist,” Roosevelt is also well known and respected by many of today's environmentalists for his substantial contributions to nature conservation. And for good reason. The National Forest Service was created under his guidance, and he set aside millions of acres of land for forest reserves and national monuments. But if Roosevelt's nostalgia was beneficial for some environments, it was detrimental to Americans who did not occupy the identity category he privileged—the white, middle-to upper-class, heterosexual male.4 For one thing, Roosevelt promoted both nature's preservation as an antidote to excessive civilization and the tourism-driven development that, ironically, molded that nature into a “reflect[ion of] the very civilization its devotees sought to escape” (Cronon 78). Moreover, Roosevelt's prescription for Americans to “get back to nature” was an elitist one, which ignored historical and cultural differences between people. The brief, rejuvenating sojourns into nature he advocated were only available to those with adequate leisure time, ample money, and the right skin color.
Ultimately, Roosevelt, like Turner, did draw on rhetoric and myths that were “thoroughly nostalgic”—and he did so in a way that early American theorists of nostalgia had foreclosed. Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer had admired nostalgia as an indication of excessive patriotism, but American doctors of the eighteenth century saw the “disease” as a sign of an unhealthy country and initially repudiated the idea that it might exist in the United States. Specifically, the American military doctor Theodore Calhoun considered nostalgia to be “a shameful disease that revealed a lack of manliness and unprogressive attitudes” (Boym 13). But by the early twentieth century, Roosevelt had claimed frontier nostalgia as not just available but a patriotic resource that helped bolster confidence in the nation's “manly” progressivism (“Nostalgia and Progress” 634). Perhaps because Roosevelt saw himself as a member of the “race of heroes” evolved from the rigors of the frontier, elitism and racism infused both his domestic and foreign policy. Roosevelt posited nature as an antidote to “race suicide”: the fear that the white race was dying out due to excessive civilization, leaving it unfit to compete with more “primitive” races. In response to this perceived threat, Roosevelt lauded male virility, which could be regained through the patriotic duty of contact with wilderness. Not surprisingly, then, he advocated extending the U.S. frontier abroad, through imperialism, and he celebrated conflict and conquest as character-building traits.
Gail Bederman explains that, for Roosevelt, “regression to savagery was only temporary and proved the Americans’ racial superiority” (182). The term “savage” could apply to African Americans as well as to Indians, for Roosevelt, since he considered both to be “uncivilized” (181). Thus, being “close to nature” could function as either a disparaging association, if you were a person of color, or as a desirable connection—provided you were a white male and only temporarily dabbling in the wilderness for the ultimate benefit of civilization. A comparable double standard informed national park visitation. For instance, George Bird Grinnell, an influential preservationist who helped designate Glacier National Park, encouraged Americans to “’uncivilize’ themselves a bit and return to the mountains on a regular basis,” whereas he instructed Blackfoot Indians “to become ‘civilized’” and assimilate into the American mainstream (Spence 78).
Indeed, some of the criticisms I (and others) have made of Roosevelt could just as easily be made of the newly formed NPS.5 If nature in its pristine state was the antithesis of civilization, then groups of people who were considered closer to nature were also antithetical to the (white) civilized world. Moreover, if nature was, by definition, the place where humans were not, then identification with nature meant certain groups of people were effectively dehumanized. These cultural logics indicate the powerful effects of the period's progress ideology, dependent as it was on an opposition between savagery and civilization, with its sense of inevitable movement toward the latter. They also suggest that turn-of-the-century racism was, to some degree, predicated on nostalgic constructions of nature.
At their most extreme, concerns about preserving the white race emerged in Southern literature of the period that promoted identification with regional landscapes combined with a racialized nostalgia for exclusively white communities. Thomas Dixon Jr.’s The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan demonstrates this nostalgia at its worst; it anchors white supremacy in the natural world in order to legitimize and promote class- and race-based violence. Although Dixon's nostalgia might be an extreme case, the blatant racism of his “romance” did not prevent it from being made into the popular motion picture Birth of a Nation, a film still acknowledged, in spite of its racism, as an important part of film history. A more mainstream instance of a comparable form of nostalgia might be Gone with the Wind, a film notable for its celebration of Southern landscapes and its nostalgia for the passing of the South's way of life, including the racial hierarchies that enabled some to enjoy leisurely lives within the plantation system. As I will discuss in later chapters, the Dixonesque strand of nostalgia for nature was later picked up by the Southern agrarian regionalist movement and represented by the anthology I'll Take My Stand, as well as (in less overtly racist forms) in regional political movements like the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s. This strand of nostalgia, while not dominant, illustrates the dangerous tendencies of nostalgia to draw racial boundaries and foster destructive ideologies.
Racial boundaries were, of course, central to turn-of-the-century nation-building projects that relocated and reproduced frontier violence via American imperialism. Within the nation's boundaries, Richard White explains how “descent from true Americans” became the new standard for citizenship once the frontier experience was no longer an option (47). Of course, new immigrants could claim neither frontier experience nor native ancestry; thus they became “dangerous” and “unassimilable” in the eyes of those who, like Roosevelt, prized “true Americanness” (White 47). Patricia Limerick identifies a related effect of the frontier's closure on ethnic minorities as she remarks on the role of nostalgia during this time period: “When Indian war dances became tourist spectacles, when the formerly scorned customs of the Chinese drew tourists to Chinatown, when former out-groups found that characteristics that once earned them disapproval could now earn them a living, when fearful, life-threatening deserts became charming patterns of color and light,
the frontier could be considered closed, even museumized” (“Adventures” 74). In effect, the closed frontier and its accompanying nostalgia cemented racial difference in the national imaginary. People of color and other “out-groups” could be included in the nation only as tourist attractions or as emblems of disappearing cultures. These people's histories—including their contributions to building the nation—were effectively “museumized” or erased. Nostalgia aided in legitimating these unfortunate erasures, but it was also a key tool in resisting them.
* * *
The dominant nostalgic narratives embedded within and spread by the National Park Service and political figures like Roosevelt, combined with the even more extreme versions of nostalgia found in texts like Dixon's, left little space for writers of the time to rewrite nostalgic nature stories for alternate purposes. However, within the “hazardous play of dominations” perpetuated by hegemonic narratives, there is always room for exploitation (Foucault, “Nietzsche” 148). One author who successfully wrote about nature counter-nostalgically is Zitkala-Ơa, a Yankton Dakota writer and activist whose poignant and often critical autobiographical stories and Lakota-Dakota legends were published during the early twentieth century. Born on the Yankton reservation in South Dakota, she left home at a young age to pursue a boarding school education at White's Manual Institute and Santee Normal Training School. She later attended Earlham College (which was all-white), taught briefly at the notorious Carlisle Indian School, then redirected her energies to political activism. Her three-part autobiography, which was reissued in American Indian Stories in 1921, was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900. As Jeffrey Myers points out, this meant she was publishing at the same time, even in the same journal, as W. E. B. Du Bois—who had just theorized “the problem of the color line”—and Muir, who was championing nature preservation (Myers 116). Like these other writers, Zitkala-Ơa intervened in the broader discourse about race and nature at the turn of the century. She wrote to preserve her tribal culture—and, as her pan-Indian activism indicates, all tribal cultures—to locate Indians squarely in t...

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