Goodness, beauty, and the aesthetics of discipline in Timothy Dwight's landscapes

Abstract

Timothy Dwight, eighth President of Yale, traveled widely in the Northeast for more than 20 years before his death in 1817. His observations were posthumously published as Travels in New England and New York. For all its loose organization, pomposity and ‘droning sameness’ of style, the text reveals an extraordinary range of observation and a deep awareness of literary and philosophical approaches to landscape. In characteristically eighteenth-century fashion, he sees the aesthetic and the moral as inextricably linked. Travels constitutes a deeply tendentious and supremely ideological reading of landscape as Dwight seeks to refute the claims of condescending Europeans and reveal the supremacy of New England religion and culture, as guaranteed by freehold land and the properly regulated worship of an established church. Dwight's landscape ideal symbolically controls potentially irreligious and unruly people using several inflections of neoclassical visual aesthetics, including the framing and spatial bounding of the picturesque and the insertion of elite leaders in country seats and cities, marked off by signs of architecture and refinement. This fusion of the moral and the aesthetic amounts to an aesthetic disciplining of the landscape. In Dwight's text we also glimpse a distinctly Calvinist and Federalist landscape ideal, which differs in some ways from the symbolic landscape of agrarian republicanism.

Keywords:

• Timothy Dwight
• aesthetic
• landscape

Notes

1. In the published text, which resulted from editing and re-editing by Dwight and his heirs, the trips are arranged into 13 ‘Journeys,’ with additional topical sections, for example, on the Iroquois and New York State. Although many visits are dated in the text, Dwight sometimes added asynchronous facts gleaned from reading, correspondence, or subsequent visits, so that a specific report or observation in the text cannot always be dated with certainty. The Introduction and Notes in Solomon's scholarly edition (Dwight 1969) provide a wealth of information on the trips and their chronology.

2. All references to Travels indicate the volume number and page in T. Dwight (1969).

3. The political struggle to disestablish the church, which Dwight resisted, nevertheless succeeded in Connecticut in 1818 and in Massachusetts in 1833.

4. A creed stemming from thought of Jacobus Arminius (d. 1609), developed in opposition to the strict Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Arminianism later informed Methodism. Dwight opposed it in principle.

5. The prodigies of self-discipline Dwight exhibited in his habits of working, eating, exercising and sleeping are a recurrent theme in biographical works (e.g. Silverman 1969, p. 19).

6. Accounts of Burke's and Gilpin's landscape aesthetics may be found in Olwig (2002).

7. For example, near Saratoga he correctly observes that some eminences were previously islands (III p. 162). He collects pebbles at different sites on Long Island. Since they are all rounded, he infers that they have been worked for a long time by water. This is consistent, Dwight feels, with Whitehurst's idea that the Deluge radically changed the configuration of land and sea (III, pp. 205–206).

8. Kornfeld (1995) remarks on the brutal simplicity of Dwight's treatment of Native Americans compared to that of other writers of the time.

9. This is precisely the ideal celebrated in Dwight's Greenfield Hill, 1794.

10. To make this point, the term ‘neoclassical’ has been used to refer to the complex of visual-aesthetic ideas stemming from eighteenth century British theorists such as Burke and Shaftesbury. Another time-honored use of the term is to describe systems of classically derived pediment- and portico-based architecture that became widespread in the United States during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There is no attempt to limit the term to any one of the variants such as Federal, Greek-Revival, Jeffersonian, etc., that were so labeled after Dwight's lifetime.

11. An eye for these gigantic trees, and for the way pioneers were destroying them, is an appealing proto-environmentalist element in Dwight's writings.

12. The relevant passage was excised from the published version of Travels, but appears in the notes to the modern edition of Barbara Solomon (Dwight 1969, II, pp. 400–402).

13. Jeffersonian agrarian republicanism was social, too, of course (e.g. Jackson 1970). What is distinctively Federalist and Calvinist here is Dwight's strong resistance to centrifugal tendencies and his insistence on moral and specifically religious oversight.

14. The settlement of Cazenovia, NY is a focus of Hugill's study (1995).

15. The Hartford Convention was a meeting of representatives of some New England states that convened in December 1814. New England Federalists strongly opposed Jefferson's policies of Embargo, and did not generally favor the War of 1812. Historians see the convention as a milestone in the decline of the Federalist party's prestige. Dwight's brother Theodore was an active Federalist politician who served as secretary to the Convention.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John S. Pipkin∗

∗John S. Pipkin is Professor of Geography and Planning at the Geography and Planning, University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY, USA