Re-Viewing the New World

Abstract

James Doyle, ed. Yankees in Canada: A Collection of Nineteenth-Century Travel Narratives. Downsview, Ont.: ECW, 1980.231 pp. Stephen Fender. Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. 241 + ix pp. Carolyn Gilman. Where Two Worlds Meet: The Great Lakes Fur Trade. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1982. 136 + vii pp. William H. Goetzmann and Joseph C. Porter. The West as Romantic Horizon. Omaha: Center for Western Studies, Joslyn Art Museum, 1981.128 pp. Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Paul Hulton. America 1585: The Complete Drawings of John White. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press and British Museum Publications, 1984. 213 + ix pp. Lee Clark Mitchell. Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-Century Response. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.320 + xvii pp. Bryan Jay Wolf. Romantic Re-Vision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century American Painting and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 272 + xx pp. Surely among the most-quoted passages in American fiction is the final scene of The Great Gatsby when Nick Carraway offers his musings the evening before he flees the "haunted" East for his home in the West. Sprawled out on the beach behind Gatsby's now-closed house, Carraway gazes across Long Island Sound, toward the Buchanans' also-closed house—its green light extinguished—and watches the moon rise. Gradually, he says, he "became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world"; at that moment, he thinks, "man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired...." He continues, of course, and links Gatsby's wonder with that of these sailors, concluding, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." In this same vein, too, Carraway says that he is "brooding on the old, unknown world." Without rehearsing yet again well-known interpretations of these passages, crucial both to any understanding of this novel and of American culture, it is evident that Fitzgerald here strikes a chord that has continued to sound, not only in American fiction but in American scholarship as well. Like Carraway, scholars have found themselves perpetually drawn to the "old, unknown" land, to that "fresh, green breast of the new world" which met our forebears as they stood in "the presence of this continent" stretched out ever-westward before them.1