Liquid Landscape. Michele Currie Navakas
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Travels suggests that some parts of North America require another version of personal and political belonging, according to which one achieves permanent inhabitance by taking very shallow root, spreading continually over the earth, or even floating just above it. For it is precisely because the Pistia stratiotes refuses firm fixity that it remains ineradicable, and can always “find footing” and “spread and extend” itself once more. Bartram’s reflections on local Florida roots may thus be read as an important contribution to the history of landed possession on the continent. Considered as such, these reflections also constitute one reason for including Travels more centrally in U.S. literary history alongside other reflections on local landscape, such as those by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. In Letters from an American Farmer (1782) Crèvecoeur’s narrator moves across several American geographies and ultimately finds that different parts of North America produce different versions of character. In the frequently anthologized Letter III (“What is an American?”), for example, Pennsylvania fosters an idealized version of Jeffersonian agrarianism, but other parts of North America require a revision of this ideal.38
If scholars have no trouble accepting Crèvecoeur’s Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Nantucket, and Wyoming as valuable contributions to the literature of North American place, personhood, and belonging, then we should also accept Bartram’s Florida as such. After all, early Americans living in the United States easily could have read Travels alongside Letters: editions of each text were printed in Philadelphia during the early 1790s.39 Furthermore, long after its initial publication, Travels inspired American artists, naturalists, travelers, and writers.40 Bartram’s Florida landscape reached an enormous U.S. audience in particular through the popular works of François-René Chateaubriand, who never visited Florida and draws extensively on Travels in the novel Atala (1801) and later in Travels in America (1828). In fact Bartram’s Florida roots in particular captivated Chateaubriand, for “floating islands of pistia” populate the setting of Atala.41
If reflections on root-taking by both Crèvecoeur and Bartram supplied early Americans with metaphors of attachment to North American ground, then why not pair these authors in anthologies of American literature, in the classroom, and in our research and writing? Doing so establishes that the mosaic of U.S. imaginings of founding is richer than we have supposed. For Bartram provides what Crèvecoeur does not: a theory of landed possession in the absence of secure material foundations. Indeed, reading Travels as both a natural history of Florida and a complex theory of root-taking in North America paves the way for a consideration of other published and popular writers on Florida during the early national period—such as John James Audubon—as theorists of early U.S. identity no less fascinating than Crèvecoeur.42 Throughout the following chapters of this book I take such an approach to all materials, from maps of Florida to novels by canonical U.S. writers: these texts establish both the conceptual relevance of Florida to discussions of American character and the literary value of Florida to our understanding of various themes and genres of U.S. writing as the nation’s borders emerged and expanded.
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Each chapter that follows centers on a different set of related, iconic features of the Floridian landscape—shifting shores, scattered islands, coral reefs, swamps and hammocks, and the roots of palmetto shrubs and orange trees, respectively—that provoked early observers to realize that founding required something other than firm fixity to a single section of ground. The cultural and political implications of this realization change, of course, as the book proceeds chronologically.
The first two chapters establish the influence of Florida’s liquid landscape on early North American practices and perceptions of landed possession. These chapters show that the same shifting grounds that many observers declared “uncultivable” in fact generated ways to think in terms other than those of an emergent nationalist narrative grounded in terra firma. As the book proceeds into the mid-nineteenth century, it charts how reefs, swamps, and hammocks that many living in the United States dismissed as “impenetrable” prompted some writers to think otherwise. For authors of several popular antebellum genres—including captivity narrative, female picaresque, and frontier novel—Florida offered a way to see beyond the limits of plantocratic and imperial accounts of space and subjectivity that increasingly underpinned the intertwined projects of American slavery and expansion. This book then moves into the post-Civil War period. During this time many observers considered Florida’s resistance to more familiar modes of root-taking to be evidence of the region’s destiny to remain a “backward” periphery of the United States. Yet I show that some authors, such as Stowe, found that this resistance afforded productive alternatives to more familiar Reconstruction-era concepts of domesticity and reform. Altogether these chapters demonstrate that Florida’s fluidity inspired a rich set of materials through which to observe something that scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture had already begun to suggest: imaginings of self, nation, and empire were more varied, conflicted, and contingent on the local particularities of various landscapes than many of the period’s better-known philosophical, political, legal, and literary formulations of these concepts indicate.43
By restoring reflections on Florida to the history of U.S. imaginings of self, nation, and empire, Liquid Landscape continues the work of unsettling an overly solid historical, geographical, rhetorical, and theoretical conception of the United States that was not shared by everyone calling it home. Certainly the conception of the U.S. nation as rightfully coextensive with a stable, solid, contiguous, and sharply outlined landmass served many nationalist purposes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A number of literary, cultural, and historical studies have shown that this continental ideal fostered a much-needed sense of national independence at the time of the Revolution. It also signified the nation’s destiny to become one people united under a single power during the post-Revolutionary period, and it sanctioned expansionist territorial claims during much of the nineteenth century.44
However, while many North Americans embraced this idea in a wide range of genres—including classic works of American literature, decorative arts, and influential political essays and legal documents—many contested the continental ideal, even from the earliest moments of the nation’s founding. For it promoted a political and cultural definition of the United States as a self-enclosed, ever-expanding nation of settlers united under a strong federal government—a definition that not everyone shared.45 As recent scholars of empire usefully remind us, the nation emerged from and never fully displaced a “variegated colonial world” of many peoples and polities with their own concepts and practices of space, place, and belonging.46 This fact challenges us to question the iconic imperial image of an evenly shaded map and recover imaginative alternatives to a nationalist narrative that depends on stable and contiguous land.47
Liquid Landscape answers this challenge by turning to the farthest southern reaches of the continent, reasoning that no other North American ground combined topographic instability, geographic indeterminacy, and demographic fluidity as obviously and dramatically as Florida. Certainly other parts of the continent resisted agricultural development, compelled settlers to contend with changes in the land, posed geographic challenges, and hosted heterogeneous populations.48 Yet no other part simultaneously shifted perceptibly because of hurricanes, sinkholes, and swamps; belonged to the U.S. South and the Caribbean; and harbored itinerant enclaves of exslaves, pirates, Spaniards, and Native Americans. Put another way, we already knew that continental ground was rarely as firm, enduring, arable, and divisible as the abstract ideal of land informing so many familiar philosophical and legal conceptions of property, settlement, and expansion in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America. But Florida tells crucial stories of U.S. space and place, settlement and belonging, territory and sovereignty, that emerge in the absence of secure foundations.
Chapter 1
Liquid Landscape: Estuary, Marsh, Sink, Spring, Shore
The third volume of John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography (1835) contains a description of the Brown Pelican perched upon a mangrove in the