Light Reveals Wilderness

          This poem, I have to admit, posed a vexing riddle for me for a few days.  As I went about my business – driving to school, fixing supper, scooping the cat box – I could be heard muttering under my breath, “But Light a newer Wilderness/ My Wilderness has made,” over and over, as if repetition could somehow bring about revelation.  Maybe it actually did help a little, because eventually it dawned on me (sorry, couldn’t resist) what Dickinson may have meant.  I think in this poem she was defining wilderness as the unknown, or unexplored territory, and representing light as knowledge or understanding.  When she says, “Had I not seen the Sun/ I could have borne the shade,” I think she is referring to the way that a little learning expands our knowledge but also reveals how much we don’t know or understand.  To paraphrase Martha Beck, one of my favorite authors, we learn a lot about how much we have to learn (Expecting Adam, 5). 

            I think Emerson understood this definition of wilderness, although he doesn’t call it that.  In Chapter V of Nature, he writes, “…we are impressed and even daunted by the immense Universe to be explored.  ‘What we know, is a point to what we do not know’” (505), a quote that is attributed to both Sir Isaac Newton and Bishop Joseph Butler.  Emerson continues, “Open any recent journal of science, and weight the problems suggested concerning Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, and judge whether the interest of natural science is likely to be soon exhausted” (505).  At the same time, Emerson also viewed nature as the greatest teacher:  “Every property of matter is a school for the understanding…the understanding adds, divides, combines, measures, and finds everlasting nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene” (504).  In addition to physical properties, Emerson believed that nature is also the best teacher of ethics:  “The moral influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him.  Who can estimate this?  Who can guess how much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman?  How much tranquility has been reflected to man from the azure sky…?” (506). 

            The way I defined wilderness in my first blog posting for this course was very narrow in comparison to either Dickinson’s or Emerson’s definitions.  I have learned so much from the reading, writing, and discussion of literature that we’ve done in this course!  But, like Dickinson, this “Light a newer Wilderness/ My Wilderness has made” – I’ve learned that my ignorance is much wider and deeper than I even guessed!  So many authors I have yet to read, so many poems to read out loud, so many ideas to wrestle with and mutter under my breath until they yield some meaning to me!  So much unfamiliar territory to explore, and rich and wonderful treasure to be discovered; so many mysteries to solve!  I’ve truly enjoyed exploring literature with all of you this semester, and I wish each of you much joy in learning on your journeys of discovery.

Whitman and Wilderness

            I think Walt Whitman looked at nature and delighted in the handiwork of God.  I love his poem #31 from “Song of Myself” which begins:        

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,

And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,

And the tree-toad is a chief-d’oeuvre for the highest,

And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,

And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,

And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,

And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.        (663-69)

Whitman sees himself, and all his fellow human beings, as being just as much a part of nature and equally worthy, as he says at the beginning of poem #1:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.     (1-3)

I think Whitman probably defines wilderness as everything in the natural world, including people, at least our natural physical selves.  This is not dissimilar to the way I defined it in my first blog posting:  “The root word “wild” connotes to me an untamed spirit of nature unconfined by human technology and restrictions.  It also makes me think of innocence, pristine and uncorrupted.”  I think Whitman’s definition is at the same time broader and more specific, though – he was an amazingly inclusive person!

            Although Whitman frequently expresses unconditional love for humanity in his poetry, he is far less enamored of the works of man.  In poem #30 he says,

Logic and sermons never convince,

The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.                  (653-54)

I think he could see that when we humans cut ourselves off from nature, when we get too hung up on our own works and words, our arts and our sciences, we run the risk of becoming disconnected from our deep selves and thus disconnected from God.  The poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” from the By the Roadside section of Leaves of Grass, articulates Whitman’s perspective on this contrast:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.            (1-8)

I feel like I know just what the poet means.  I myself love science and technology, literature and the arts, but if I spend too much time indoors, buried in books or sitting in front of the computer, I become “tired and sick” too.  I have to get outside, go for a walk in the woods, see the sky and the trees, feel the wind in my hair.  Then I feel like my whole, real self again.  Thank goodness there are many places we can go – city, county, state, and national parks and nature preserves – to interact with the natural world and reconnect with ourselves.  Thank goodness our democracy ensures that these are places where we all can go, not just people who are rich enough to own land!

The Disempowerment of Women and Slaves

            I think that the social condition of women during the nineteenth century was not equal to that of the African American slaves, but I think there are many similarities in the way that both groups were viewed and disempowered by the patriarchal society.

            I assume that the quote used in one of the previous questions -- "Knowing that there exists in the minds of men a tone of feeling toward women as toward slaves, such as is expressed in the common phrase, "Tell that to women and children", etc. -- was written by Margaret Fuller, but I could not find it in the excerpt from "The Great Lawsuit" that is in our text book.  After our class discussion last Thursday I re-read Fuller's essay because I wanted to see the exact words she used in comparing women to slaves; the closest thing I could find was this statement:  "But that is the very fault of marriage, and of the present relation between the sexes, that the woman does belong to the man, instead of forming a whole with him" (747). 

            This concept of ownership, that one human being is the property of another, is at the very root of 19th-century America's oppression of both women and slaves.  A woman was considered a chattel, the property of her father, and then of her husband, just as the slave was considered the property of her or his master.  Slaves were granted fewer human rights than women -- if a woman's husband died, for instance, he could not leave his wife to another man in his will as he could his slaves, and I think that unlike slaves, women by this time were legally allowed to inherit property -- but both women and slaves were considered as things rather than as free human beings.  Neither group was permitted to vote; this disenfranchisement prevented them from using judicial or political means to improve their circumstances.  At the conclusion of her captivity narrative Harriet Jacob states, "Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage" (825).  Although Jacobs was referring to the typical "happy ending" for popular novels of her day, I believe her statement also gives voice to the deeper truth that for 19th-century women, marriage was usually antithetical to freedom!  (And alas, so it has also proved to be for many of us in the 20th and 21st centuries!)

            In his preface to Frederick Douglass' narrative, William Lloyd Garrison argues that many people are ignorant of this basic aspect of slavery (the definition of a person as a thing), and are moved only by descriptions of physical cruelty to slaves.  "They do not deny that the slaves are held as property; but that terrible fact seems to convey to their minds no idea of injustice...As if it were less cruel to reduce a human being to the condition of a thing, than to give him a severe flagellation, or to deprive him of necessary food and clothing!" (928)  I was horrified and deeply moved by Harriet Jacobs' separation from her children, hiding for years in her grandmother's cramped attic (which reminded me very much of Anne Frank's situation):  "I heard the voices of my children.  There was joy and there was sadness in the sound.  It made my tears flow.  How I longed to speak to them!  I was eager to look on their faces; but there was no hole, no crack, through which I could peep" (818).  But I was also horrified by Margaret Fuller's description of the exchange she observed between a woman and her husband regarding their young daughter's education and future:  "...he said, "I shall not have Maria brought too far forward.  If she knows too much, she will never find a husband; superior women hardly ever can.'  'Surely,' said his wife, with a blush, 'you wish Maria to be as good and wise as she can, whether it will help her to marriage or not.'  'No,' he persisted, 'I want her to have a sphere and a home, and some one to protect her when I am gone'" (746).  And of course, it is the husband's opinion which has the weight of law and will prevail, unless his wife can somehow surreptitiously educate her daughter.

            Not being allowed to raise or educate your children as you wish is not as bad as having to go into hiding and be completely separated from them, but it is still a form of oppression, and I find it a chilling and insidious one.  Women in an oppressive marriage must go into hiding, not physically as Harriet Jacobs did, but mentally and emotionally.  They must hide their desire to learn and to think for themselves, and they must find some way to encourage this freedom of thought in their children without arousing their husband's anger.  The conversation that Fuller described reminded me very much of Frederick Douglass's description of his master's reaction when he discovered that his wife was teaching Fredrick to read: "A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master -- to do as he is told do do...if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him" (945).  In both situations the desire of the oppressor is the same, to keep the oppressed ignorant.  Why?  To maintain the oppressor's power and control!  Oppression can be viewed as a continuum, with total freedom and equality on one end and complete subjugation on the other.  The experience of the African American slave represents the latter extreme, but the experience of being a woman in the 19th century would be much closer to that end of the continuum than to freedom and equality.

What Would Margaret Fuller Say about Rip Van Winkle?

            I think that Margaret Fuller would have understood and sympathized with Rip Van Winkle’s ideas about the value of wilderness.  For Rip, the beautiful wooded wilderness of the Kaatskill Mountains is a place of sanctuary, the only place left where he can escape from his wife’s abusive treatment.  “Poor Rip was at last reduced almost to despair; and his only alternative to escape from the labour of the farm and the clamour of his wife, was to take gun in hand, and stroll away into the woods” (459).  The wilderness is the one place where he can find peace and simply be himself without being castigated for it.  Fuller expresses a similar sort of idea when she says, “If any individual live too much in relations, so that he becomes a stranger to the resources of his own nature, he falls after a while into a distraction, or imbecility, from which he can only be cured by a time of isolation, which gives the renovating fountains time to rise up” (745).  Her use of the masculine pronouns “he” and “his” demonstrates her understanding that persons of both genders need periods of solitude in order to realize their true selves. 

            Further, I think Fuller would have recognized that the Van Winkles’ marriage was not representative of any of the “four kinds of equality” (739) she wrote about:  “the household partnership” where “their relation is one of mutual esteem, mutual dependence” (739); “intellectual companionship” (739); “mutual idolatry” (739); or “the religious, which may be expressed as pilgrimage towards a common shrine” (743).  When one partner’s frequent verbal and emotional abuse makes the other partner miserable, as it does in the Van Winkle household, it is not a relationship between equals.  As Fuller says, “Union is only possible to those who are units,” (745), and in abusive relationship the balance of power is severely out of whack.  Irving offers several examples of Dame Van Winkle’s “tart temper…and…sharp tongue” (458), but to me the most convincing evidence of her abusive behavior is the statement that “everything he [Rip] said or did was sure to produce a torrent of household eloquence” (458).  Psychologist Patricia Evans, in her excellent book The Verbally Abusive Relationship, aptly describes this kind of behavior:  “…the anger addict will reconstruct whatever he hears in such a way that it becomes for him the ‘reason’ for venting his anger on his partner” (Evans, 110).  Dame Van Winkle treats the family dog as abusively as she does her husband (see the first full paragraph on page 458), but in the end her foul temper brings about her own demise, in a moment of irony that made this reader laugh out loud:  “she broke a blood vessel in a fit of passion at a New-England pedlar” (464).

            I think Margaret Fuller would have appreciated Rip Van Winkle’s predicament and approved of his escaping into the mountains, and I think she would have been fair-minded enough to realize that in adult couple relationships, the male is not always the oppressor.  Fuller voices the balanced perspective that “Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism…There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman” (744).  However, I think she also would have recognized that a woman in Rip’s situation would have far fewer options for coping with it.  In Fuller’s and Irving’s day, a woman’s place was considered to be in the home – from which she could hardly stroll off into the woods for the day to get away from her abusive husband!  The patriarchal culture’s withholding of basic human rights from women – education, professional pursuits, a political voice – kept untold numbers of women economically dependent on their husbands with no hope of freeing their “incarcerated souls” (745).

Evans, Patricia.  The Verbally Abusive Relationship.  2^nd ed.  Avon, MA:  Adams Media Corp., 1996.  Print.

Contradictions and Ironies

            I've encountered many contradictions and ironies in our readings this semester, but the most poignant was the contrast between the noble ideals espoused in “The Declaration of Independence,” and how Native Americans, African Americans, and women were denied the “inherent and inalienable rights” (342) of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (342).   

           Regarding “The Declaration of Independence,” it was very interesting to read Jefferson’s original draft with the additions and deletions that were made to the final document.  Particularly ironic was  the part – deleted from the final Declaration – where Jefferson, who owned many slaves, condemns the practice of slavery and blames it on King George III:  “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere…Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce” (344).

            In his powerful oration, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” Frederick Douglass magnificently articulates the perspective of the American slave regarding American liberty:  “To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery…” (991). 

            In “The Declaration of Independence,” Jefferson also characterizes all Native Americans as “the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions of existence” (344).  First, the irony:  the inhabitants of whose frontiers?  Hello, the Indians were here first!  Second, the contradiction:  many Native Americans did not behave as he describes.  Cabeza de Vaca gives a detailed account of how Malhado, Avavares, and Arbadao people treated the Spanish explorers with kindness and generosity. 

            Although women comprised roughly half of the population in 1776 just as they do now, women are not even mentioned in “The Declaration of Independence.”  They could not vote, were denied opportunities to pursue education and careers, and were viewed as belonging to their fathers and husbands.  As Margaret Fuller pointed out a little over a half a century later, “…that is the very fault of marriage, and of the present relation between the sexes, that the woman does belong to the man, instead of forming a whole with him” (747).  Liberty this is not, and women were permitted to pursue happiness via only one narrow path, that of marriage and motherhood.

            One of the unique and wonderful things about America, however, is that the noble egalitarian principles set forth in our founding documents have helped us to gradually evolve into a country more closely resembling those ideals.  Brave and articulate souls like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Margaret Fuller, and many others have pointed out the disparities between those principles and their contemporary realities, and helped us move forward as a society.  We still have a long way to go, but the literary works we've studied this semester, and the social changes that accompanied them, help me feel more optimistic about our country’s future.

Ben Franklin's Virtues vs. Wilderness

            I would have to agree that Ben Franklin’s ideas about virtue are the antithesis of the ideas about wilderness that we have discussed with regard to our prior readings.  In previous blogs, I've written about how wilderness has been variously characterized as free and untamed, harsh and dangerous, a sanctuary, an enemy, a place of confusion, and a condition of being alone and friendless.  In Franklin’s autobiography, we find no references to wilderness as such; Franklin is very much a man of the urban community.  He sees the moral improvements he seeks to make in himself as a means of overcoming his own nature:  “I wish’d to live without committing any Fault at anytime; I would conquer all that either Natural Inclination, Custom, or Company might lead me into” (284).  By imposing order on the chaos of his innate thoughts and behaviors, Franklin is, in a way, taming the wilderness.  His statement that “In reality there is perhaps no one of our natural Passions so hard to subdue as Pride” (292) demonstrates this perspective.

            In Blogs 5 and 6, I explored the idea of wilderness as a state of being cut off from human society.  Franklin sees individual self-improvement as a means of strengthening human society and promoting national progress (and thus antithetical to wilderness).  On page 290, Franklin describes in detail the ways in which his cultivation of virtues has made him a better citizen.  In particular, “To Industry and Frugality the early Easiness of his Circumstances, and Acquisition of his Fortune, with all that Knowledge which enabled him to be an useful Citizen, and obtain’d for him some Degree of Reputation among the Learned” (290).  Several paragraphs later, he asserts that “…it was therefore every one’s Interest to be virtuous, who wish’d to be happy even in this World” (291).  In Franklin’s view, virtue strengthens community and reinforces the individual’s bond with his/her community – thus keeping the wilderness at bay.

Wilderness in Anne Bradstreet's Poetry

            The two different voices we hear in Anne Bradstreet’s poetry – that of Anne, the emotional and questioning woman, and that of Mistress Bradstreet, the proper Puritan wife and mother – create an interesting tension between individuality and conformity.  Although at first glance this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the concept of wilderness, I think that it actually does.  In my last blog posting I explored the idea of wilderness as a personal condition of being alone and friendless, cut off from the social and material support of one’s community.  Fear of this kind of wilderness can be a compelling reason to conform to the social norms of that community, so as not to be cast out from its safety and security.  This was much more the case in Anne Bradstreet’s time than in ours (at least for American culture in general). 

            I think this is probably one of the main reasons why Mistress Bradstreet’s poetic voice seemed to overrule Anne’s most of the time.  For example, in her poem “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment,” Anne’s voice speaks passionately throughout most of the poem of her intense longing for her absent husband:  “I, like the Earth this season, mourn in black, My Sun is gone so far in’s zodiac, Whom whilst I ‘joyed, nor storms, nor frost I felt, His warmth such frigid colds did cause to melt” (7-10).  But Mistress Bradstreet’s voice speaks in the last few lines of the poem, paraphrasing a Scriptural description of marriage:  “Flesh of thy flesh, bone of thy bone, I here, thou there, yet both but one” (25-26).  A similar sequence of poetic voices occurs in the poems “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who Deceased August, 1665, Being a Year and a Half Old” and “Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 10^th, 1666.” 

            I think this pressure to conform is also evident in her poems “The Prologue” and “The Author to Her Book.”  Because it was highly uncommon in Anne Bradstreet’s time for a woman to be so erudite and articulate, she found it necessary to display the modesty required of a Puritan woman by criticizing and discounting her own literary work:  “If e’er you deign these lowly lines your eyes Give thyme or parsley wreath, I ask no bays; This mean and unrefined ore of mine Will make your glist’ring gold but more to shine” (“The Prologue” 45-48).  In “The Author to Her Book,” Anne characterizes her poems as “Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain” (1) and cleverly uses a sewing metaphor (women’s work!) to lament, “In better dress to trim thee was my mind, But nought save homespun cloth i’ th’ house I find” (17-18).