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Article Excerpt
In his essay on "Symbolic Landscapes," D. W. Meinig argued that certain landscapes "are part of the iconography of nationhood, part of the shared set of ideas and memories and feelings which bind a people together" (1979b, 164). He identified three "symbolic" landscapes, described historically. The first comprised the seventeenth- through nineteenth-century New England village with its central green, or commons, Protestant church, and meeting house. This humanized landscape, according to Meinig, identified American values of democracy and community and the role of religion in shaping the foundation of the nation. As northeastern and midwestern villages and towns grew in the nineteenth century, their Main Streets dramatically represented the growth of commercial interests in the economy. They remain in story and memory today as the nostalgia of small-town community life, and their architecture of marble or granite bank facades and red-brick retail shops gave form to the concept of progress as economic, even as the county courthouse represented the role of law in an emerging society. Finally, Meinig identified the Southern California suburb as the defining landscape of twentieth century America: the single-family house on a small lot, an automobile-centered society of nuclear families, an antiurban spatial rearrangement where race and class were in tension between the former American values of independence and community.
All three symbolic landscapes were cultural landscapes; that is, they were constructs of U.S. society, images of social, economic, and political forces on the land. Meinig's choice of artifacts and images that constitute each of the three landscapes points to specific underlying themes in U.S. culture. Meinig described his interest in symbolic landscapes in an autobiographical essay, A Life of Learning:
I have paid particular attention to symbolic landscapes as representations of American values and generally tried to use the landscape as a kind of archive full of clues about cultural character and historical change that one can learn to read with ever greater understanding. At the same time landscape is always more than a set of data; it is itself an integration, a composition, and one tries to develop an ever keener appreciation of that. It is here that geography makes its most obvious connection with aesthetics, with writers and poets and painters and all those who try to capture in some way the personality of a place, or the mystery of place in human feelings. (Meinig 1992, 16)
The power of Meinig's descriptions enables the reader to conjure up an identifiable image and recognize its symbolic value. These landscape images continue to influence America's understanding of itself and of the conflicting values that shape social and political policies.
Perceptions of the natural landscape, however, have equally formed U.S. culture and shaped social, political, economic, and environmental policies. A discourse on nature and its social representation framed America's historical narrative. Perceptions of and meanings attached to nature and landscape have changed over time. As both Donald Meinig and David Lowenthal observed, "any landscape is composed not only of what lies before our eyes but lies within our heads" (Meinig 1979a, 34; see also Lowenthal 1961; Meinig 1992, 16).
Landscape as nature is but one "version" of landscape, according to Meinig. In "The Beholding Eye" he offers ten versions of landscape that describe "the essence" and "the organizing ideas" that "make sense" out of what is seen (1979a, 34). Landscape as nature is the initial version in Meinig's typology. It is closely followed by landscape as habitat, artifact, system, problem, wealth, ideology, history, place, and aesthetic.
In this article I suggest that "landscape as nature" formed America's other symbolic landscape and that its transformation to a humanized landscape reflected perceptual manifestations of the idea of landscape as characterized by Meinig's ten versions (1979a). In particular, I examine how the natural landscape, initially perceived as wilderness, began to be domesticated and redefined in the nineteenth century and formed the basis for a national culture by artists, writers, tourists, innkeepers, commercial marketers, conservationists, and scientists. These changing perceptions of landscape occurred in the mountains of the Hudson River valley in New York State.
NATURE AND CULTURE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA
From the earliest European settlement a view that the land and forests were a wilderness became the crucible that shaped a new, vibrantly American, culture. Yi-Fu Tuan considered "America's infatuation with wilderness" as "the belief that in wilderness lay the ultimate source of health and well-being for a nation. ... So long as there was wilderness, America, no matter how dire her mistakes in world-making, could always be restored to health, gain new energy" (2002, xix). Art and literature in the early days of the newly independent republic would transform the image of a "howling wilderness" into an iconic symbol of American independence from Europe and would constitute the underlying project of an emergent nationalism (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988; Daniels 1994; Nash 2001; Olwig 2002).
In the early nineteenth century, the transcendentalist movement of writers, artists, and philosophers emerged from within the very heart of the New England village, Meinig's first symbolic cultural landscape (1979b, 165-166). Transcendentalists saw the relationship between wild nature and society as the spiritual core of a New World culture. The movement's leading philosopher, the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote, "In the woods we return to reason and faith" ([1836] 1985, 39); later, his student Henry David Thoreau declared, "In Wildness is the preservation of the world" ([1862] 1989, 206).
By the 1830s, however, the nation had entered the modern era through the economic forces of capitalism and industrialization (Meinig 1993). Urbanization was creating a vastly different settled landscape, and time and space were collapsing under the swift technological changes in transportation and communication. Published in the same year as Emerson's essay "Nature" ([1836] 1985), Thomas Cole, often referred to as "America's first landscape artist," painfully observed: "In this age, when a meager utilitarianism seems ready to absorb every feeling and sentiment, and what is sometimes called improvement in its march makes us fear that the bright and tender flowers of the imagination shall all be crushed beneath the iron tramp, it would be well to cultivate the oasis that yet remains to us, and thus preserve the germs of a future and a purer system" (1836, 3).
"Improvement" was changing the face of the land; Cole saw it as a problem: "The ravages of the axe are daily increasing--the most noble scenes are made desolate, and oftentimes with a wantonness and barbarism scarcely credible in a civilized nation" (1836, 12; see also Meinig 1979a, 39-40). Natural landscapes became cultural landscapes as habitat and artifact (Meinig 1979a, 35-37). A land that had formerly been judged limitless began to suggest boundaries, landscapes of wilderness domesticated, and a middle landscape deemed of moral virtue (Marx 1964).
SEEKING NATURE
To European travelers, as well as to some in the emerging U.S. cultured class, America's roughness may have seemed problematic. However, a distinctly American philosophical narrative on the relationship of humans to the natural world became a focus for national pride and artistic accomplishment (Zelinsky 1973, 36-37; Lowenthal 1976). As part of this discourse, an American grand tour soon evolved for both European and American travelers (Flad 2000, 2001). The itinerary incorporated the landscape of nature more than the landscape of historical or cultural association, for it was to nature that Americans would look for their identity (Huth 1957; Mills 1997). The beauties and power of the natural landscape differentiated America from that of the "immoral," tired Old World.
Nineteenth-century tourism in America reflected this emerging social and political engagement with nature. Artists, essayists, poets, gardeners, and architects developed the rhetoric for a growing middle class, eager to be educated in the arts of refinement (Bushman 1992; Myers 1993). As opportunities for leisure activities increased, new landscapes accommodated them. An early example was the particular role of the mountain-house resort in the development of tourism and the representation of nature during that century.
The turn to natural surroundings, including wilderness, for physical or psychological healing is as old as human history. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers in North America carefully noted the locations of mineral springs, such as West Virginia's White Sulphur Springs, and soon entrepreneurs marketed the waters and the places as spas (Sears 1989,176; Corbett 2001, 9)....
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