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Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Deserts, Seascapes and Prairies: Landscapes of Contemplation in an Age of Adventure"


Linda Sumption
English Program, City University of New York
sumption@idt.net

This paper will examine how deserts, seascapes and prairies affected three nineteenth- century American travel writers. I will investigate how those barren terrains became vehicles for remarkably self-reflective narratives, even in the face of intrepid national adventurism, and even among the country's most audacious adventurers. At a time when notions of "frontier" blended unsettled, rural and urban landscapes into a model of manifest destiny, promising boundless development and prosperity, these three were sites of intractable wildness, often remarkably unyielding and indifferent to human enterprise. The particular bareness, potential harshness and implacability of sea, prairie and desert made them ideal arenas for the dramas shaped in Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast (1840), Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail (1849), and William Manly's Death Valley in '49 (1894). Together these narratives illustrate how landscapes that seemed the very birthplaces of the ineffable became arenas in which travelers were moved to explore and articulate what they most valued.

In Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Dana's high sea adventures mingle with a meditation upon the value of things left behind: a safe home, emotional ties, and his beloved library. The contrast of tight quarters upon vast, open seas leads Dana to ponder how unbearably near to safety a disaster can be, as when a man -- aloft, adjusting sails -- slips in one of many places onboard where "a miss is as good as a mile." He chronicles the unexpected cruelty and loss of feeling in both captain and mate in a scene devoid "of natural feeling for home and friends." And, to his surprise, he discovers how vital is reading to his sense of well-being.

In The Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman portrays -- like Dana -- a remote landscape, one beyond the eastern "prairies of the poet and the novelist." It is a land of eerie solitude where "there was nothing in human shape amid all this vast congregation of brute forms," a wilderness "ready to impale" the unsuspecting traveler or struggling brute not privy to dangers beneath the prairies' oceanic surfaces. While his awe of the open prairies galvanizes Parkman's relish of militarism, masculinity, and westward expansion, the blank sweep of the prairies also promotes, I believe, a complementary opening in his narrative in which he affirms more tender longings for intimacy and community, however he may have posed as warrior and misanthrope.

In William Manly's account of '49er's in Death Valley, the desert and southern plains become the site for a bitter contest between Manly's longing to remain loyal to families stranded there, and his "dark line of thought" to abandon them as a hopeless cause in order to save himself and his quest for California gold. The dangers of the desert invite Manly to trace his narrative along hazardous gulfs of emotional revelations -- feelings that a more inviting landscape would not easily summon. In creating this memoir of gold rush days, Manly fashions Death Valley into a field of struggle where he negotiates the intense but abiding conflicts in America's mingling of domestic and adventurous aspirations.


Linda Sumption
3967 48th Street,
Sunnyside, NY 11104.
718-672-3722.
sumption@idt.net

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