National Fantasy and the Landscape

The constructs that have helped to shape national identity and the collective national fantasy have been a topic that I have been studying this semester in my class on the landscape, so it was interesting to see parallels in The Anatomy of National Fantasy. It reminds me that no creative product is created in a vacuum (not just pretty pictures/not just an interesting story—there are underlying structures and messages inherent in the work) and that they are products of a society with many veils of meaning, much of which is tied in some way to the concept of desire. Just as “Alice Doane’s Appeal” and The Scarlet Letter can be deconstructed to reveal Hawthorne’s notion of personal/national representation, so too did landscape painters create their seemingly benign pictures to construct an America “as a domestic, and yet a strange and foreign place” much like Hawthorne uses his writing to underpin a greater discourse on society, politics, and ethics. Of course, it is an appropriate corollary—Hawthorne was born in 1804 and died in 1864 and lived for a time in the Berkshires. In the mid-nineteenth century Thomas Cole and other Hudson River School artists were making overtly symbolic paintings about the nation and its transformation from sinful and primitive to civilized and enlightened, often focusing on the very territory that Hawthorne lived.

Lauren Berlant explains that “America” is an assumed relation and an explication of collective practices within the political space of the nation (including a “tangled cluster” of juridical, territorial, genetic, linguistic, and experiential) that bind us together in the space of the “National Symbolic.” Berlant explains that “national fantasy” is the term to describe how national culture becomes local—through images, narratives, monuments, and sites that circulate through personal/collective consciousness. Stated and unstated literal and metaphorical meanings shape national form, and the landscape paintings of the nineteenth century (and subsequent mass-produced images of the land) were loaded with literal references to beauty, bounty, wilderness, the sublime, and progress as much as the metaphoric connotations that encouraged Manifest Destiny, decimation of native populations, and rampant development. By personifying the nation as a woman further reinforced the notion of desire and of possession.

The chapter, “America, Post-Utopia: Body, Landscape, and National Fantasy in Hawthorne’s Native Land,” most resonates in its parallels to how the landscape in the visual arts was used metaphorically for the construction of National Fantasy. As the author explains, early American utopian nationalism developed a fundamental antagonism between the National Symbolic, which emphasized the dream of collectivity and unity, and pragmatic political discourse. (p. 33) Prior to the mid 1800s, landscapes followed Jeffersonian ideals of the nation as a peaceful, agrarian utopia, with a similar dream of collectivity and unity. Pastoral and woodland scenes dominated the time as if to reinforce the collective will of a people and the leaders of the day. Yet, as the political and capitalist aims shifted to a more aggressive push for dominance in the world market and political realm, artistic intentions also shifted.

The new landscape paintings depicted the Native Americans as helpless primitives instead of the noble savage, and the landscape itself was imbued with new metaphoric associations with power, technological advancement, and the total settlement of the wilderness areas of the country. The land was something to conquer and exploit—to ravage as if it were a gendered, receptive, and fertile ground. Berlant explains that one of the three elements in Hawthorne’s creation of the National Symbolic through the articulation of subjectivity and landscape is the construction of the narrative linkages between landscape, historical time, and sexuality.(p. 35) But while Hawthorne represents the image of woman as the caretaker of national history through “images of grotesque, ancient women,” most symbolic figures in the visual arts saw the image of national identity as either a woman of the earth, dressed in Greek toga or as a dignified Native American woman, and later as a cultivated, finely dressed lady. She explains that the image of the decrepit woman is an unacceptable and improper source of national culture, but the only available source of what is valuable about “our” collective past—intentional devices to reveal the anxiety about the discrepancy between the value of “private” historical knowledge and its grotesque origins.(p. 36)

Historical landscapes are invested spaces, a locus of memory intended to recall or reinforce the intersection between the everyday and the momentous, all wrapped up in a package that serves to codify our national fantasy. The Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and many other natural wonders in America are gendered symbols of American greatness presented as spectacle. Historic sites, marked by the recollection of what happened on a particular spot rather than a physical/visual wonder, are also spectacle constructs meant to reinforce a collective identity and establish a shared history. As Berlant remarks, “This is the American utopian promise: by disrupting the subject’s local affiliations and self-centeredness, national identity confers on the collective subject an indivisible and immortal body, and vice versa.” (p. 49) Thus, the landscape becomes a politicized symbol of nation hood and a vehicle to make history vital by shaping it into something that transcends its subjectivity and temporality. Hawthorne critiques the production of American “national” identity, but for the visual arts, such deconstruction does not appear until modernism replaces representation and its symbolic content with the anarchy of abstraction.
-Julie Sasse