Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America: The World Turned Upside Down by Robert Lawson-Peebles

Abstract

Most of the criticism I have of Hypocrisy and Self-Deception in Hawthorne's fiction applies to the second-half of the book. Up to the chapter on Dimmesdale, which is in the middle, this study exhibits freshness and a degree of true originality. The second-half, however, deteriorates substantially as if it were greatly hurried and unrevised. The level of language becomes more informal, the opinions more subjective, and the style less polished. A careful revision certainly would have corrected references to “recent” essays by other critics that are now eight or nine years old. Surely haste must be responsible for the tiresome repetition of expressions that wordily involve “the reader.” In the space of only a page and a half(pp. 92-93), Harris writes: “we are to imagine,” “we get the idea,” “we know,” “we also know,” “we are told,” “we know,” “we know,” “we are informed,” “we see,” “we learn,” “we infer,” and “we know.” Strangely, the pattern of effectiveness in this book seems roughly to parallel Harris’ charting of Hawthorne’s career. Emory University William B. Dillingham Lawson-Peebles, Robert. Landscape and Written Expression in Revolu­ tionary America: The World Turned Upside Down. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988. 396 pp. Cloth: $39.50. Recognizing that writers of the Revolutionary generation failed to create an abundance of fiction and that little of what was produced is today esteemed, readers may wonder why Landscape and Written Expression is being reviewed. The opening paragraphs of LawsonPeebles * Epilogue to this compelling study offer the beginning of a response to that question. “It seems to me,” he writes, “that a major theme (or constellation of themes) in American culture is the mutability of the environment, the fear of regression among the inhabitants, and the instable relation between the text and the terrain it is supposed to describe and systematize. . . . The world (and the word) turned upside down has intrigued and afflicted a number of writers. Their work . . . finds its origin in the Revolutionary generation” (p. 263). Over the next two pages he offers a suggestive checklist of writers working within the tradition he identifies that includes, among others, Hawthorne and Melville, Kerouac, Heller, Morrison, Cather, Barth, and even Stephen King. The diversity of this group points toward the richness and breadth that attend the argument Lawson-Peebles develops by looking closely at, for the study of American fiction, the superficially irrelevant texts ofJedidiah Morse, Noah Webster, Benjamin Rush, Philip Freneau, Thomas Jefferson, Timothy Dwight, H. H. Brackenridge, Crevecoeur, and Meriwether Lewis, Lawson-Peebles’ Revolutionary “case studies.” These constitute the bulk of this volume and map the route to a new reading of the fictions of Charles Brockden Brown, an afterword demonstrating Poe’s indebtedness to Brown and some of his contemporaries, and a glance ahead to see what modem and contemporarywriters contribute to this developing theme. Lawson-Peebles begins by assuming “a correspondence between the political and cultural republics” of America that extends the military engagement into the realm of“a wider quarrel with Old World attitudes toward the New” (p. 1). For better and for worse, he argues, the founding generation inherited the environmentalist attitude that found a clear relationship between nature and culture, that shaped expectations which, in turn, shaped perceptions of the character of the newly formed republic and provided the basic vocabulary for describing the American landscape (“the land as precept” [p. 4])—assumed, imagined, or longed for. His methodology thus links close textual readings attached to specific events with “percep­ tual geography” and Whorfian linguistic theory wherein language mediates between Self and World. To structure a cluster of competing attitudes toward the expanding republic, Lawson- Peebles constructs two flexible Old World paradigms. His “Columbian model” stresses a belief in universal symmetry, an image of American abundance, pastoral health, the existence of the Noble Savage in a modern day paradise that draws upon a “rhetoric of inexpressibility” inherent in Old World texts stretching back to Plato. His “Vespuccian model” instead stresses “the rhetorics of novelty and negation”—“what Europe is, America is not” (p. 11)—a poten­ tially nihilistic attitude admitting a landscape fraught with “images of a sterile miasmic land of libertinism” and human degeneration...