Jeff Dietrich
2012
Adopted & expanded from a paper given at the 2011 NEAA Annual Conference
Abstract
Taking as its historical subject the tale of the Victoria regia, a South American water lily that captured the imagination of Victorian England, this paper examines radical reformations that occurred within the Western understanding of wilderness, as it, and those people who formed and were beholden to it, spawned and then reckoned with the particular American narrative that emerged out of European encounters with the wilderness of the New World.
The paper begins by drawing on the work of Mircea Eliade and Mary Douglas to illuminate some of the structure and form of the idea of wilderness, and argues that the transition that occurred in the New World can be understood as a shift in an ancient narrative, dealing with man’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. My central claim is that this shift can be embodied by a distinction between efforts towards recovery/reclamation and recreation/ simulation, which the Victoria regia illustrates well.
The influence of the emerging simulation narrative can be seen throughout American history in the patterns of development enacted in the United States (drawing on David Nye); in American conceptions of wilderness (Roderick Nash); and in a particularly American domesticity (Amy Kaplan). Kaplan and Foucault together allow us to understand the intricate networks of power that allow this work to proceed.
I conclude that American notions of wilderness are inextricably bound up with this progressive, civilizing narrative, itself indebted to notions of the sacred and of man’s potential to do God’s work on Earth. By this narrative, man’s progress goes, not from religious to secular, but from fallen to redeemed. To ignore the influence it has repeatedly demonstrated would be foolish; in understanding these narratives, we can see how they have manifested, and the ways that they could be harnessed or discarded in the future.
1 | The Victoria Regia in Victorian England
In the spring of 1849, England was abuzz with excitement. The vegetable wonder of the New World had finally arrived in Britain. After a decade of attempts, a seed had survived the journey across the Atlantic, and was successfully germinated, growing into its own in a startlingly rapid seventy-nine days. This flower, already legendary before its arrival, would become an icon of the wonders and potential of European discovery in the New World, a portrait of the beauty of Nature and the splendor of Gods works, and an exemplar of man’s ability to mold and wield them to his will.
Successful repetition of the first germination led to the construction of Victoria regia houses across Britain, which tens of thousands of Britons visited within a year of their opening.¹ In these houses, awed and curious Victorians would stand around artificial ponds filled with the lilies, and some would even venture out to stand atop the leaf. The specific characteristics of the lily—it was exotic, aquatic, and unbelievably large—combined to make it a perfect icon for the Nature-obsessed British. As D Graham Burnett notes:
“It is not easy to characterize the full extent of Victorian infatuation with Schomburgks vegetable wonder. The flower and the tale of its romantic provenance blossomed in Britain amid a garden-obsessed people whose fascination with flowering plants was out-stripped only, and that briefly, by their fascination with aquatic life and aquariums.”
From this fascination sprung a flower that required both a greenhouse and an aquarium, that appealed to both ideas and thus intersected them perfectly.
Constructing a house around the Victoria regia simultaneously ensnared it and placed it within the space of civilization; the successful germination of the flower was for the English a proof of the possibility of control over the wild, of the promise of science and progress. Once successfully brought from the wilderness, the flower is placed into a botanical garden, where it ceases to be wild; no longer embodying all that wilderness implies, it is now available for study, through which it comes within reach of being malleable and controllable.
Figure 1: A Victoria regia house. From Volume 5 of The Horticulturist, 1850. Reproduced in Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed, 153.
In a 1850 woodcut from The Horticulturist, a woman stands easily (if stiffly) on one of the pads. What this illustration doesn’t show is the mechanical infrastructure necessary to allow her to stand on that pad, whose leaf is so delicate that ”a straw held 6 inches above and dropped perpendicularly upon it would readily pass through it.”³ In order for the lilies to support anything near the weight of a person, elaborate webs of planks were erected underneath the pads, to distribute the weight across the entire area of the leaf—much like the effect of laying on one’s stomach on weakened ice prevents it from cracking under one’s feet. This modification of the flower’s natural abilities, and the transcendence of its natural limits, is fundamentally technological. It is a powerful demonstration of the control enacted over the flower in the act of capture and study, a symbol of man’s ability not only to make use of the flower, but to bend it to his will even in matters of his whimsy.
Even the Victoria regia houses bore the mark of man’s botanical, technological engagement with Nature. The architect of the most famous of these, the Crystal Palace, readily offered up his inspiration for the seventeen-acre glass and iron building, saying that “Nature was the engineer... Nature has provided the leaf with longitudinal and transverse girders and supports that I, borrowing from it, have adopted in this building.”⁴ Man’s role in the creation of this building is the same as his role in improving the lily such that it can be perched upon: to observe the work of Nature, to understand it, and to adapt it to his needs and desires as he sees fit.
For our purposes, it is the Victorians obsession with the garden that we can most understand as part of the larger story here being told. Burnetts garden-obsessed people are not simply a Victorian trope; they exist within a larger historical narrative of Europe and America—the so-called Western peoples. The tale of the Victoria regia is a pitch-perfect illustration of the early European at-tempts at simulated nature, an impulse that attempts to capture and control the manifest physicality of the wilderness and convert it to an ordered, controllable, reproducible garden.
2 | Discovery
The idea of simulating Eden was germinated in Enlightenment ideals of Truth and science, and expanded by the rise of liberalism and the notion of progress, but it did not become definable as the direction and trend of thought on the matter until the discovery of the New World. Before delving into this historical narrative, though, it is important to be acquainted with the work of Mircea Eliade, who can provide us with a key framework for understanding the relationships between wilderness and civilization in Western, and specifically American, existence.
Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane articulates the central distinction that must be made between the two basic types of space that we experience. Its basic relation to wilderness and civilization is immediately relevant even from the title—civilization is sacred, wilderness is profane—but it is not as simple as that. Our desire to conquer the profane, instead of simply tolerating it and separating ourselves from it, has its roots in a different tradition and a different impulse. Eliade is useful to us in that his argument allows us to understand the extent to which this dichotomous model is ingrained in our understanding of our physical world, and to provide a terminology by which we can articulate the missionary relationship that we have cultivated with the wilderness.
What happens in the transition from re-discovery to re-creation, from El Dorado to the botanical garden, is essentially that we cease to see Eden as a physical space, materially manifest in the world and simply in need of finding. Instead, it exists in the collective memory, a time and place that is not physically accessible to us, but is still sanctified. In Eliade’s terms, we celebrate Eden though festival—we relive it despite never having lived it before, bring ourselves back to the moments before and the moment of the Fall as best we can, for it exists in time immemorial, in illo tempore⁵. Through doing so, we allow it to retain the importance that it had at that moment to which we call back, but still, it remains that the Garden no longer exists in the material world; the work of Western man, aware of this fact, can then be to manifest it.
The United States provides us with a crucial and interesting case study, allowing us to look at the processes surrounding this transition in the area about which they were centered. I will accomplish this by looking at the patterns of development enacted in the United States (drawing on David Nye); American conceptions of wilderness (drawing on Roderick Nash); and a particularly American domesticity, interwoven with the wilderness/civilization dichotomy, that can reveal a crucial facet of the place of the home within the new-found societal labor of simulation (drawing on Amy Kaplan). Reckoning with Kaplan and Michel Foucault will allow us some access to the intricate networks of power that allow this work to proceed, whatever its intentions—and whomever its principal actors—may be.
3 | Cultivation
Nearing the close of the frontier, an impulse began to emerge in America to preserve wilderness in the form of national parks and wilderness preserves. Roderick Nash, the author of the seminal Wilderness in the American Mind, speaks of this transition, saying that though there was a push towards preservation based on ethics and aesthetics, the pioneer generation rarely judged wilderness with criteria other than the utilitarian or spoke of their relation to it in other than a military metaphor. It was their children and grandchildren, removed from a wilderness condition, who began to sense its ethical and aesthetic values.⁶ These generations, in Nash’s mind, engaged with the wilderness as a place that was existentially threatened. In response, they endeavored and largely succeeded to stop human encroachment onto those areas that they deemed and savable and worth the effort.
However, this ’preserved’ wilderness was not truly wild, not the same as the wilderness encountered in the age of exploration and the era of the frontier. It seems obvious that Yellowstone National Park is not a forest primeval, and that the relationship that people have with it goes little farther than recreation and aesthetics. What occurred at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th was a sort of retreat from the impulse to control wilderness through destruction, but it remained indebted to attempts to order nature, to box the wild outside of civilization, and to control it such that it could be used for the things for which humans want it. In the national park phenomenon, wilderness is explicitly separated from civilization, and remains abject. It is still profane space, still diametrically opposed to the sacred. The difference was that wilderness started to be recognizable as useful, and even necessary, in the efforts towards simulating the Garden.
This represented an evolution within the narrative, seeing wilderness as potentially useful beyond immediate material application. The preservation of nature within a national park or a wildlife reserve was based, at least in part, on an impulse to protect something that could have utility in the future. It was, even, a pioneering act of humility, the child of an emerging interpretation describable as Whig history, wherein efforts should be made not to destroy a thing because it contains the potential for more than is currently available to be gleaned out of it—and, in fact, this potential might be the key to Eden, the final piece of a yet-incomplete puzzle.
Man’s attempts to preserve Nature are interwoven with the desire to recover Paradise, and as such are tantamount to attempts to recover the cosmological, religious, mythical experience of the world outlined by Mircea Eliade and visible in the pre-Lapsarian man outlined, for instance, by John Milton. In short, post-Lapsarian man desires to be redeemed. He attempts to accomplish this redemption through botanical simulation, through creating a worldwide garden, are an effort of a particular type, which relies on and is inseparable from a sense of a technological mankind.
4 | Tools of the Trade
This idea, of a mankind that exists alongside and inseparable from technology, is well articulated by David Nye, whose work explores (to co-opt the title of his book) a technological narrative of America as Second Creation. He serves a central role in outlining the dialogue between the sacred and the profane, the natural and the civilized, that occurs in American narratives. These, as I have said, are themselves versions of preexisting and anciently rooted Western notions, altered in a beautifully self-reflective meeting between the Western conception of wilderness and the forces of civilization as enacted by settlers who forged into that wilderness. What Nye does is to articulate the uniquely American aspects of the industrialization of the world, the role of paradigm-shifting tools—the axe, the mill, the railroad, and irrigation—in the development of America.
Technology is, for Nye, that which defines mankind, the epitome and basic description of who we are and what we can do in the world.⁷ In this Western narrative, technology is a creation entirely of man, made as a result of the expulsion from Eden. God commanded that man till the soil of the Earth so that he may eat from it and survive, but it was this manifestation of mans will and capacity to enact change in the world that allowed him to imagine that he could thrive.
Tools are objects imbued by man with his agency, his capacity for influence and change. They are what precipitates and makes possible the dream of recreation and simulation of Eden, for without them, man is limited in his potential. It is technology that provides the potential to magnify, to fully realize and make manifest, the immense power of which is man is capable. Nyes technologies can be understood within this context as the things which make possible in America both the first steps—the taming of the wilderness—and the imagined future steps of simulating that which has been lost: the transformation of the land from the wilderness, to the rural, to the garden.
His is an interesting perspective in that it places agency firmly and unshakably in the hands of man. It is very much a product of a post-Lapsarian, modern existence, in which mans interactions with the world are inseparable from the tilling of the earth, unaccomplishable without investing some of our agency into material objects. From this investment, we return power, and the ability to imitate and surpass the acts of our forefathers.
Abraham Lincoln gave an address in 1859 that invoked the ’first of the old fogies, father Adam’ in describing the simplicity and blissful ignorance in which he lived: he was without neighbors with whom to share knowledge, and ate no part of his breakfast from the other side of the world (and, in fact, had no conception of such a thing as another side of the world). Lincoln admitted that he was materially wealthy, though: “In the way of land and live stock, Adam was quite in the ascendant. He had dominion over all the earth, and all the living things upon, and round about it. The land has sadly been divided out since; but never fret, Young America will re-annex it.”⁸
This re-annexation, which would be carried out only in America and by Americans, is inseparable from the space and experience of the frontier, and a necessary first step in re-creating that Paradise that Adam inhabited before the land was divided out. This work occurs in a space between wilderness and civilization, what we may describe as a space of liminality. The various embraces and rejections of that space in civilized society speak to the in-between spaces present in the progression narrative of Edenic recovery/ simulation.
Similarly, the frontiersman was a bizarre hybrid, an in-between object, negotiating civility and savagery, wilderness and civilization. He was painted as an emissary of civilization, “an agent of civilization battling man’s traditional foe on behalf of the welfare of the race,” and so he set out into the wilderness, with Nye’s technologies in hand, to do the work of civilization, which also remained the work of God and the sacred.⁹ During the course of his duties, however, he was cast out, alongside that which he was attempting to cleanse, purify, and civilize, for he was corrupted, polluted, dirty with the savagery he took on in the frontier. He engages with the world of the civilized as representative and creator, emissary and exile at once.
The concept of abjection, as articulated by Mary Douglas, provides a useful and applicable model by which to understand the place of the frontiersman (and the frontier) in this context. It can also be useful in understanding the place of the Indian, the natural, the savage—in short, all that the forces of civilization cast out.
The idea of the abject, that which is outside of the symbolic order that we inhabit, exists primarily in our encounters with it, the moments when we are forced to interact with it despite its position outside of our world. There is in this encounters an important spatiality, which lends itself to the concept at large; this aspect of the abject is articulated by the Native American writer William Apsess as the space of abjection, relegated to its own separate zone, outside the symbolic and social order through its physical separation from the civilized. In this spatialized understanding of the abject, we find echoes of Eliade, in the notion that the abject inhabit the profane, while those within the symbolic order inhabit the sacred.
5 | A Particularly American Domesticity
We can more clearly imagine how the frontier and its settlers were considered to both pure and corrupted, civilized and savage, sacred and profane, through a consideration of Amy Kaplan’s work on domesticity in America. Her Manifest Domesticity outlines the role and reach of the domestic in the American civilizing narrative, with a focus on the ways in which domesticity was at once relegated to the space of the home and imbued with the responsibility for the act of civilization:
On the one hand, domesticity’s ’habits of system and order’ appear to anchor the home as a stable center in a fluctuating social world with expanding national borders; on the other, domesticity must be spatially and conceptually mobile to travel to the nation’s far-flung frontiers... Domesticity inverts [the relationship of foreign and domestic] to create a home by rendering prior inhabitants alien and undomesticated and by implicitly nativizing settlers.
She also draws out in detail a relationship between the role of the mother in the home and the role of the pioneer in the frontier; according the Kaplan, the mother has dominion over the frontier homestead, a dwelling that ’itself is a little world; an ark of civilization amid an ocean of foliage’ . Her responsibility to continue the work of her husband, by defending against the encroachments and invasions of the wild into the ark of the home, whose internal space of order is designed to and must provide reprieve from the chaos and danger of the wild that can exist mere steps from it. Her domestic empire is at risk of contagion from the very subjects she must domesticate and civilize, her wilderness children and foreign servants, who ultimately infect both the home and the body of the mother.
In this inevitability of infection and corruption, there exists a clear mirror to the frontiersmen who were rejected in the Atlantic states as having become tainted with savageness. We can understand the abjection of that which has been into the wilderness as providing a real source of anxiety for those within the Edenic narrative, which holds that all man had been forcibly ejected into the wilderness. By distancing itself from anything wild, the civilized allowed itself to imagine a reconciliation of an otherwise problematic barrier to recovery; efforts to become civilized (enlightened), even after this initial encounter with wilderness, and attempts to create an ideal civilization (botanical garden) implied the ability and worth of those attempting them, and allowed them to understand their place as being one of enlightenment and potential, in contrast to that which existed in the wild spaces of the world, which had no potential beyond being in service of the civilized.
The story of Eden in the West is one of ancient age and eternal relevance, a tale of mankind’s place in the world that ultimately imbues man with the ability to simulate Gods works, that gives it the power of gods. If we understand ourselves as situated within that tradition, we can see the ways in which it affects us, the ways in which it affects those who are at the helm—of the country, the company, the church—and the ways in which these narratives and heritages influence our understanding of how we live, move, think—in a phrase, how we exist—in the world.
Our sense of what we can claim as civilized and what we can label wild extends far beyond forests and cities and into modern politics, economics, and social interactions. It is a narrative of inclusion and exclusion, of what belongs and what does not, and those metrics are so intimately interwoven into our existence that we cannot imagine life without them.
In America, the ancient Western narrative met its vastest wilderness, a west-facing, endless expanse of Edenic potential. Behind every tree, around every river-bend, at the peak of any mountain, man could suddenly encounter the cherubim and the flaming sword. There was, of course, an existential threat in this potential, a danger that created in the wilderness a constant unknown, one that held both the threat of extreme violence and the promise of eternal reprieve. It was this narrative that first drove European man westward, into the wild, searching for Paradise.
But he did not find Eden—not among the forests of New England, or past the Appalachians, or past the Mississippi, nor among the Plains, atop the Rockies, in the Pacific Northwest, or in the rivers and rain forests of South America. There was no Garden to be found, and the narrative was forced to conclude that mankind would not find Eden on this Earth.
This recovery narrative met in the Americas something that forced it to adapt to the world as it found it, to itself engage in the processes that it outlines, which occur when civilization and wilderness meet in the liminal, occasionally abject space between them. It is the confluence of this adaptation and the technology created by man to change the world that allows us to understand the genesis of the Edenic recovery/simulation narrative in its current form. Its reckoning with industrialization, with modernity, with Enlightenment ideals, can all be understood as a product of its place within the progressive, civilizing narratives of the West.
Bibliography
¹ Burnett, D. Graham. Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000. Print. 150-151.
² Ibid. 151-152.
³ Ripley, George; Dana, Charles Anderson (1861). "Leaf". The New American cyclopaedia: a popular dictionary of general knowledge. New York: Appleton. p. 992.
⁴ Burnett, D. Graham. Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000. Print. 152.
⁵ Cf. Eliade, Mircea. Willard R. Trask. The Sacred and the Profane: the Nature of Religion. Trans. Willard R. Trask. San Diego: Harcourt, 1987. Print.
⁶ Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967. 43.
⁷ Cf. Nye, America as Second Creation.
⁸ Nye, David E. America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings. Cambridge: MIT, 2003. Print. 284.
⁹ Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967. 41.
¹⁰ Kaplan, Amy. "Manifest Domesticity." American Literature 70.3 (Sept. 1998): 581-606. Print. 591.
¹¹ de Tocqueville, quoted in Kaplan.
¹² Kaplan, Amy. "Manifest Domesticity." American Literature 70.3 (Sept. 1998): 581-606. Print. 590-591.
¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹⁰