“You feel embodied with the cataract:” American girls, landscape and national identity in the early republic

ABSTRACT

This article examines how American girls and young women in the early republic formed a new sense of a “corporeal” national identity while touring areas of the Hudson River valley and the Great Lakes. Based on a reading of the travel writings of fifteen white, middle and upper-middle class, American girls and young women travelling between 1802 and 1835, it demonstrates first that during the tours within the United States the girls underwent a multisensory familiarisation with the landscape, which both bolstered their confidence and concretised much of their theoretical knowledge gained during their studies. Second, when touring the Canadian shores of the Great Lakes their focus was on constructing both its landscape and its people as “other”. The article closes with a consideration of how these young women’s travel writings may offer a new perspective for the study of a gendered national identity formation in the early United States.

KEYWORDS:

• National identity
• American girls
• early republic
• tourism
• Hudson River

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the text of the article, I refer to the girls by their names at the time the diaries were written, rather than by their married names. The diaries are catalogued currently under their married names (which appear in parentheses).

2 Although Frances Trollope’s first words at seeing the Niagara Falls were “I trembled like a fool”, she was very impressed at their sight (1832, 302–303).

3 Other historians have attended to the ways a new American collective national identity was imagined in social events (Allgor 2002): parades, fêtes, Fourth of July celebrations (Waldstreicher 1997; Newman 1997; Travers 1997), and commemoration ceremonies for the Revolutionary War dead (Purcell 2002).

4 Scholars have focused instead on adult-authored texts for children and on the role children and youth played as readers of, and as fictional characters in, national literature (e.g. Alryyes 2001; Duane 2010; Murray 1988; Sánchez-Eppler 2005; Weikle-Mills 2013; Wright 2016). Susan A. Miller recently suggested that assent to adults’ political agendas may also be a form of children’s agency (2016).

5 These include nine girls (aged 10 to 21) and six young single women (aged 22 to 25). Besides Elizabeth Ruffin of Virginia, all the others hailed from New England or the mid-Atlantic states. Eliza Southgate wrote letters, while all the others kept journals, written in the form of an epistolary diary or as a daily entry. Six of the journals were explicitly addressed to a best friend, sister, or cousin, with whom the diarist intended to exchange diaries when she returned home. The journals cover the few weeks or months of travel and begin and end abruptly.

6 Walter Bowne would go on to be elected mayor of New York City, 1829–1833.

7 They used the terms “relics” for natural items they collected and “souvenirs” or “curiosities” for (usually manufactured) items they purchased.

8 During the nineteenth century “Hail Columbia” was one of the United States’ unofficial national anthems.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation [grant number 864/19].