The West of Frederick Jackson Turner in Three American Plays

Abstract

On muggy evening of July 12, 1893, World Colombian Exhibition in Chicago included presentations ranging from English Popular Culture in Middle Ages to Early Lead Mining in Illinois and Wisconsin. audience had begun to thin out by time last speaker, little-known teacher from University of Wisconsin, stood before gathering to present The Significance of Frontier in American History. By middle of twentieth century, successors such as George Rogers Taylor would judge Frederick Jackson Turner's paper to be the most widely known essay in American history, one which revolutionized historical thought in United States (v).1 At same time, Turner unintentionally provided an analytical tool that has been little used so far by observers of American culture, particularly as it could be applied to that most public manifestation, stage. If theatre can be argued to be one of most enduringly telling measures of how America views itself,2 its depiction of frontier-or The West-should not only lend itself to Turnerian analysis but also serve as measure of how perceptive Turner actually was in delineating this fundamental, if partially mythic, element of American psyche.3 It was Turner's contention that ft]he existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and advance of American settlement westward was fundamental to establishment of American values and to what might be called abstractly the American character.4 In 1926, he would re-explain this line as edge that served as the barometer of society expanding into wilderness (Jacobs 165). dynamism of line, was, in not only barometric (not only an instrument of measurement) but regenerative, catalyst for human correction and renewal. In compelling way, it helped to create distinctive national personality: perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, its continuous touch with simplicity of primitive society, furnish forces dominating American (Significance 2). Consequently, according to Turner, it is to that the American intellect owes its striking characteristics . . . coarseness and strength, its restless inventiveness particularly, the exuberance that comes with freedom (37). It was as if Frederick Jackson Turner were seeing America itself as dramatic archetype, particularly as he placed this American character into context of future that would be at war with its past. While Turner asserted that fh]e would be rash prophet who should assert that expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased, he nonetheless envisioned poignant possibilities arising from loss of an uncirumscribed frontier: Movement has been its dominant fact, he wrote of American character, and, unless this training has no effect upon people, American energy will continually demand wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For moment, at frontier, bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant (37-38). Under his scenario, American psyche would undergo powerful shift from ever again to never again. This component of Turner thesis has been viewed by some to help in understanding expansionism of American foreign policy at end of nineteenth century.5 Turner himself had speculated in 1891, two years before Chicago Exhibition, that a law of might well see completed filling of American West replaced by an economic colonization of South America (Bogue 97). What he may well have sensed but did not articulate was potential for different sort of imperialism-the colonization of forwardlooking American spirit by its own past. This would be stuff of playwrights rather than socio-economic historians-and when one turns to American stage, safety valve concept has come to its feet through ways in which American frontier characters are defined and redefined by felt presence and felt loss of Turner's moving edge. …