Crevecoeur

1
Crevecoeur

• Emotional Prototype of the American

2
Frederick Jackson Turner

• Historian who declared his frontier thesis in
  1893 American identity is forged by the
  frontier, the space between civilization and
  wilderness
• For Crevecoeur, however, resurrection begins with
  the farmer who clears the land and makes it
  civilizable.
• Only when the pioneer is superseded by the farmer
  can America flourish

3
Romanticism

• Def 18th and early 19th C British/European
  movement, associated with 1) interest in nature
  and the primitive 2) association of human
  moods with moods of nature 3) natural religion,
  or idea that god resides in nature 4) exaltation
  of the individual and of personal (extravagant!)
  expression

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NATURE

• 1) in the Enlightenment furnishes scientific
  thought.
• 2) in Romanticism inspires the imagination

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Romantic nature

• May represent balance and order as in the
  pastoral
• But also power, violence, and forces
  unexplainable by logic or reason
• In other words, it has a dark side

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Crevecoeur questions the Enlightenment principles

• The same sublime hand which guides the planets
  round the sun with so much exactness, which
  preserves the arrangement of the whole with such
  exalted wisdom and paternal care, and prevents
  the vast system from falling into confusiondoth
  it abandon mankind to all the errors, the
  follies, and the miseries, which their most
  frantic rage and their most dangerous vices and
  passions can produce? (173)

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Are humans just another animal running around in
the woods?

• man, an animal of prey, seems to have rapine and
  the love of bloodshed implanted in his heart,
  nay, to hold it the most honourable occupation in
  society we never speak of a hero of mathematics,
  a hero of knowledge or humanity, no, this
  illustrious appellation is reserved for the most
  successful butchers of the world. If Nature has
  given us a fruitful soil to inhabit, she has
  refused us such inclinations and propensities as
  would afford us the full enjoyment of it.7

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Return of the Repressed

• Despite our beautiful laws and advanced
  knowledge, life is still nasty and brutish.
• Cultivation only provides a thin veneer over the
  brute force of Nature.
• Culture is only a facade for our own passionate
  and disorderly Nature.
• Crevecoeur tries to idealize America, but he
  cannot repress its violent and irrational
  tendencies.

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Slave in a Cage

• The slave in a cage is the return of the
  repressed. He represents our most horrible
  qualities in full view. He also foreshadows a
  future of lynching, an especially unattractive
  combination of sadism and racism.
• Lynchingopen public murders of individuals
  suspected of crime conceived and carried out more
  or less spontaneously by a mobseem to have been
  an American invention.
• --Robert Gibson
• 1852-1951 4,730 people lynched in the U.S.

10
D. H. Lawrence

• Franklin is the real practical prototype of the
  American. Crevecoeur is the emotional.
• Sometimes we burn insect with magnifying glasses
  just to see them burn.
• Sometimes we have sex because it feels good, not
  to be fruitful and multiply.
• Sometimes we like to crush the competition not
  for profit but because it makes us feel powerful.
• Literature teaches us what we want ourselves to
  be, but also what we are.