At One with the Land: The Domestic Remove—Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland and Matters of National Belonging

Abstract

The idea that where one lives in America affects how one lives and what personal values, politics, and lifestyles one assumes has long been a part of American thought. Writers, moralists, and politicians alike have long mediated on the value of geography in determining lifestyle, and the image of the pastoral idyll has long been proffered as a balm for those wearied by the supposed trials of urban life. Authors of American fiction have historically relied upon the possi­bilities and associations offered by setting novels on the frontier, in the backwoods, in the suburbs, and at any number of other varia­tions on the idea of a retreat from established urban centres. Promi­nent examples abound; most notably, in the nineteenth-century, there was Henry David Thoreau’s writing about his time in a small cabin on Walden Pond. In Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (1854), Tho­reau espouses the value of eschewing material goods and the trap­pings of contemporary society (“etiquette and politeness”) in favour of basic physical necessities and solitude. But Thoreau, writing in the 1850s, is clearly and deliberately writing against a whole tradi­tion in American thought that does not see this kind of removal from a highly ordered society as productive. The earliest evidence of this tradition is the famous speech John Winthrop gave onboard ship in 1630, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1838).