Landscapes of Resistance: Polar Allusion and the Northern Frontier in the Fiction of Constance Fenimore Woolson

Abstract

Landscapes of Resistance: Polar Allusion and the Northern Frontier in the Fiction of Constance Fenimore Woolson Jacqueline Justice (bio) As Anne Boyd Rioux opens her biography of Constance Fenimore Woolson, she invites readers to picture Woolson, presenting seven scenes that illustrate how the author’s real-life story is far richer and more complex than the one we typically encounter. The first two seemingly reference Woolson’s childhood home (a child in a parlor and a young woman buying a newspaper for Civil War news); somewhere outside those parlor windows and just beyond the streets where the “newspaper boy [proclaims] the latest headlines of the war,” Lake Erie stretches to the northern horizon.1 As the popular nineteenth-century media represented it, the impenetrable Arctic frontier shared many qualities with Woolson’s Great Lakes childhood home; the region’s winters can be stunningly cold and the frozen lakes pile ice on the shores in jagged heaps evoking the formidable polar landscapes that popular publications favored. Beyond sharing climates and appearances, these northern frontiers symbolized landscapes of resistance that Woolson admired—landscapes where the indifferent ice regularly swallowed up the best-trained men and most technologically advanced ships. [End Page 409] When we prioritize the analytical lens of thwarted imperial obsession—the theme animating the nineteenth-century polar expedition mythos—unexpected connections appear between Woolson’s Great Lakes and Reconstruction South narratives, stories rarely analyzed together. To demonstrate these connections, this study crosses literary landscapes nearly as vast as the icy ones Woolson’s descriptions invite readers to imagine. First, I locate Woolson’s frontier within the larger context of North American frontier ideologies, exploring ways frontier symbols intersect with America’s conflicted postwar imperialist impulse. Following this contextualization, I analyze several Great Lakes narratives. Finally, I provide a close reading of a selected Southern narrative, demonstrating how Woolson uses polar imagery to express an anti-imperialist subtext that emerges as clearly in her Great Lakes romances as it does in her Reconstruction fiction. woolson’s northern frontier Constance Fenimore Woolson was born in 1840 in New Hampshire, the sixth daughter of Jarvis and Hannah Woolson. Within a month of her birth, two of her sisters died, victims of scarlet fever. Her grief-stricken parents, looking for a new start, headed west, settling in Cleveland, Ohio, part of the Western Reserve and a port town that connected the East to the Great Lakes interior. Victoria Brehm and Rioux summarize aptly the importance of this move and the way it shaped Woolson: “Constance not only grew up in Cleveland; she grew up with it.”2 Scholars frequently stress Woolson’s Great Lakes childhood, describing her as “a child of the frontier” and claiming “it would be frontiers that shaped her personal and professional lives until she died in Venice, Italy, in 1894.”3 In addition to growing up on and with the Great Lakes frontier, as James [End Page 410] Fenimore Cooper’s grand-niece she expressed the concern with frontiers (and suspicion of the imperialist agenda driving destructive frontier practices) that was an inherited component of the Fenimore Cooper literary and familial legacy.4 A frontier is essentially a border, a dividing line between what we perceive as under civilized control and what we regard as uncontrolled, wild and dangerous. Frontiers can be geographic. They can also be ideological, dividing accepted ways of thinking from disruptive or divisive ideas. In either case, frontiers are temporary—boundaries push back and wilderness submits. American culture characterizes the frontier variously. Scholars have often prioritized Frederick Jackson Turner’s version as the best articulation of mainstream attitudes in the postwar era. In his seminal essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner claims the frontier experience played an essential role in American culture because it “promoted the formation of a composite nationality,” “decreased dependence on England,” and supported democracy by demanding independent thinking and individual action.5 Turner insists that the struggle to subdue the wilderness and settle the American West held transformative power. Indeed, Turner argues that this experience helped shape the qualities that make Americans exceptional: “To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics” because “coarseness and strength combined...