Principios de la propuesta pedagógica en modalidad remota

The story this chapter tells took decades to unfold. Because I am following a discourse whose importance became manifest in the act of traveling and the process of narrating that travel, I necessarily follow tangled and circuitous trajectories. The

meanings and implications of this discourse were multiple and changing over the course of much of the nineteenth century. Wonder as a signifier is as much in motion as the subjects who professed to experience it. Given that the history of wonder discourse is much larger than the scope of this dissertation, I provisionally situate the established, if contested, uses of wonder discourse in popular accounts of the American West—as it was defined in the 1830s and 1840s. I begin by summarizing relevant genealogies of wonder and travel from the late medieval period and go on to show that these European traditions of wonder remained part of the cultural discourse of the nineteenth century U.S.

Wonder has long been an established response to traveling in unknown or unfamiliar lands and seeing new things, which do not fit neatly into established

understandings of everyday life. As medieval historian Carolyn Walker Bynum notes, we cannot “wonder at that which we fully understand.”³⁴ Daston and Park begin Wonders and the Order of Nature with a chapter about “writing on extraordinary natural

phenomena in the literature of travel and topography, chronicles, and encyclopedias, which, we argue, constituted the core tradition of medieval reflection on wonders.”³⁵

34 Bynum, “Wonder,” 3.

35 Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 19.

61 Travel and travel literature thus serve as a site for mapping a “Topography of Wonder,”

as their chapter is entitled.

The vast majority of wonders were “topographical,” or “linked to particular places...and often to particular topographical features, such as caves and springs, rocks and lakes.”³⁶ Daston and Park delineate several different kinds of wonders and marvels—

beginning primarily with “experience[s] of the novel or unexpected,” unfamiliar or exotic encounters that were outside of the ordinary and the “more common but puzzling,

counterintuitive, or unexplained phenomena.”³⁷ They note that by the thirteenth century, there was “if not a fixed canon of individual phenomena [that constituted wonders], then certainly a canon of the types of things” that provoked wonder. Writers in the late medieval tradition of “topographical wonder” often wrote about established wonders but also aimed to supplement these with new wonders, hence emphasizing “verification through personal experience and oral report.”³⁸ In this tradition, later travel literature and the “age of exploration” emphasized eyewitness accounts.

For medieval writers, wonders were often located at the “margins of the world.”³⁹ They were marked by newness, diversity, and possible “natural transgression”⁴⁰—and hence travel was a privileged site of the experience of wonder. Daston and Park identify the writings of Marco Polo as an instance of the transformation of travel writing into a genre of wonder writing.⁴¹ In the twelfth and thirteen centuries, wonder and the

36 Ibid., 24.

37 Ibid., 23.

38 Ibid.

39 Medieval maps were usually circular, placing the Holy Land, Europe, and the Mediterranean at the center, leaving the rest of the known world (Asia and Africa in particular) to the margins. As Daston and Park note, most medieval writers agreed that the “most wonderful wonders” were farthest away—in the southern extremities of Africa and the distant East in India. Daston and Park, Wonders, 26.

40 Ibid., 25.

41 Ibid., 33.

62 marvelous had been important categories of experience in romance: “in its rhapsodic descriptions of Eastern luxuries, its emphasis on quest and adventure, its exploitation of the unexpected, its taste for exotic settings, its reliance on magical natural objects, its constant invocation of wonder and wonders, described in terms of diversity, and its association of those wonders with weather and power.”⁴² After Marco Polo’s

collaboration with the writer of romances, Rustichello of Pisa, to produce his “description of the world” (Devisement du Monde), these characteristics became features of travel narratives.

In this context, wonder and marvels were overwhelmingly positive and

desirable.⁴³ This is in part because much of travel literature was secular and portrayed the

“marvels of creation” without referencing a deity or moral order. But in the pre-modern era, wonder also played a part in religious writings—including encyclopedias, bestiaries, and other collections that stressed the “symbolic uses of wonders as keys to scripture,”

indications of moral lessons, and confirmation of God’s power and benevolence.⁴⁴ Religious scholars and writers made wonder into a more sobering emotion, one that stressed “religious awe” above novelty and pleasure.⁴⁵ In the religious context, believers had a pious duty to wonder at all of God’s creation. As a religious discourse, wonder enacted contemplative reverence of the sacred world.

The topographical wonders associated with travel that were “at the margins of the world” functioned as part of this creation. Daston and Park note that medieval writers

42 Ibid.

43 This is so, in part, as Daston and Park remark, because merchants like Marco Polo also recognized the logic of supply and demand, which “created value, just as they created wonder” for expensive non-European commodities—spices, dyes, etc. Daston and Park, Wonders, 38.

44 Ibid., 39.

45 Ibid., 40.

63 incorporated foreign and exotic wonders into “a view of nature...as possessed of an

independent internal order” that allowed for variety and difference.⁴⁶ Although the wondrous geographies, animals, and cultures travelers perceived were wondrous because of their radical difference and existence at the margins of the Christian world, they still, on the whole, participated in a Christian cosmos, which allowed for difference and irregularities. Topographical wonders or exotic species were “natural marvels,” and ideas of nature anticipated regular anomalies that, in fact, enhanced “the beauty and diversity of the world.”⁴⁷

Not everything, however, fell within the bounds of nature in this way. Monstrous phenomena—individual events or beings—“erupted in the Christian center, brought on by its corruption and sin.” These wonders were not to be appreciated or enjoyed; they were to inspire “horror, anxiety, and fear.”⁴⁸ Later in this chapter I show that this horror-inducing wonder, which also perhaps influenced the developments of grotesque and gothic aesthetics, was at times still part of the American nineteenth century. Monstrous wonders of this sort were taken to be omens of catastrophes—death, disease, famines, natural disasters, conflicts. They had moral meanings, whereas topographical wonders on the whole did not.

The distinction between what qualified as a positive wonder as compared to a horrifying one has to do with distance and scale. Narratives of wonders at the margins of the European world, Daston and Park argue, functioned like novels or movies do today—

providing pleasure and entertainment and demanding “emotional and intellectual

46 Ibid., 49.

47 Ibid., 50.

48 Ibid., 51.

64 consent” to a form less concerned with authenticity than with providing an expanded sense of the possible.⁴⁹ More local wonders at home—individual deformities or

momentous events (like an eclipse)—signaled frightening destabilizations of the natural order. This dynamic already establishes one of the ways in which wonder inhabits distant

“elsewheres” in the tradition Cronon marks out for wilderness. In the medieval period, however, even when wonders inspired fear, the infusion of romance and travel had created a context in which “Europeans craved direct contact with wonders in all their myriad forms.” Whether marvels were carried home from the East or Africa by travelers or “collected” as first-hand experiences, “they formed part of a social and material culture of the marvelous” that defined nature and its limits in the late medieval period.⁵⁰

This tradition of topographical wonders puts the East and Africa at the heart of European ideas of nature and culture. In this sense, the history of wonder as a sub-field shares in the broader movement, in postcolonial studies and beyond, to think the ways in which the non-European world has shaped Europe, as much as Europe has shaped the non-European world.⁵¹ In turn, this chapter shows how the “European” tradition of wonder, which shaped early encounters with the Americas and thus the Atlantic world,⁵² was still a part of the cultural discourse of the nineteenth century U.S. I begin here by drawing a framework that is Atlantic-focused in its movement—following an ostensibly European tradition into U.S. cultural history. However, as will become clear, other major

49 Ibid., 60.

50 Ibid., 66.

51 Arguably, this movement began with Edward Said’s Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). For more recent scholarship, see Mary Louis Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and

Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth Century England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

52 See Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions and Arellano’s Wonder Texts and Wonder Chambers.

65 perspectives and points of contact, especially those of indigenous populations and the Pacific World, are also important to this story.

Medieval and early modern traditions of wonder were not coherently transmitted in the form of a particular aesthetic or cultural movement, but these inheritances were influenced and changed by aesthetic movements like Romanticism and the development of an American gothic tradition.⁵³ Neither of these movements and genres is my focus here, but the history of wonder in the U.S. does intersect with them. Early in the nineteenth century, the place of wonder in the U.S. was difficult to define.

In the remainder of this section, I draw on three accounts that approach wonder in different ways—two of them actively seek it out, and the third deliberately avoids not just the emotion but also the use of wonder discourse. These three widely read texts—from a range of perspectives: French, American, and British—allow us to glimpse the

ambiguous and contested position of wonder in the early nineteenth-century U.S. I have selected texts here and in the rest of the chapter that address wonder in a condensed way.

The texts I use are, of course, not all about wonder, nor is wonder the sole source or destination for most of them. I present selective readings in order to trace the movements of an under-acknowledged rhetoric and its associated experiences.

53 Much work has been done on Romanticism in the U.S. See, for example, Richard E. Brantley, Coordinates of Anglo-American Romanticism: Wesley, Edwards, Carlyle & Emerson (Gainesville:

University Press of Florida, 1993); E. Miller Budick, Nineteenth-century American Romance: Genre and the Construction of Democratic Culture (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996). In recent years,

Romanticists have been especially active in the development of eco-criticism and ecological ethics. See Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) and An

Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). The Gothic is less prolifically studied, but several strong accounts are: David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski, Frontier Gothic:

Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature (London: Associated University Presses, 1993);

Teresa A. Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Robert Martin and Eric Savoy, eds., American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2009).

66 Traveling to the U.S. to study the nascent democracy, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville is one of the first writers to assess Americans’ relationship to wonder. In the early 1830s, Tocqueville was met with disbelief when he wanted to experience the wonders of American wilderness. In July of 1831, when he arrived in Detroit, Michigan, he found that Americans had no desire or capacity to experience wonder in wilderness, and they could not understand his desire to leave civilization in search of wonder.⁵⁴ Astonished by his aim to explore the wilderness, the Americans he encounters refuse to help him find his way:

It was not as easy as one might think to inform ourselves [of how to get to the wilderness]. Crossing nearly impenetrable forests and deep rivers, braving foul swamps, sleeping exposed to the humidity of the forest: these are feats that the American will undertake willingly to earn a dollar, because that is the point. But to do such things for the sake of curiosity is beyond his comprehension. Inhabitant of the wilderness, he values only the works of men. He will gladly direct you to visit a road, a bridge, a beautiful village, but that we might value large trees and solitude is absolutely incomprehensible.⁵⁵

Tocqueville’s writing here exemplifies how Americans, who were working to build homes in “the wilderness” could not see any wonder or reason to desire wonder where Tocqueville, the foreigner, seeks it. Paul Kucera’s dissertation on “Abroadlessness: The Sense of Wonder and Nineteenth-Century American Travel Writing,” which focuses of Americans’ travel abroad with one chapter on the domestic travels of Washington Irving,

54 This account is from Voyage en Amérique, a collection of letters and short essays, including “Quinze jours au désert.” Translations of Tocqueville are all my own. “Nous touchions... aux bornes de la

civilization.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Voyage en Amérique, ed. R. Clyde Ford (Boston: D.C. Heath and Co., 1909), 19.

55 “S’en informer n’était pas chose aussi aisée qu’on peut le croire. Traverser des forêts presque

impénétrables, passer des rivières profondes, braver les marais pestilentiels, dormir exposé à l'humidité des bois: voilà des efforts que l’Américain conçoit sans peine s’il s’agit de gagner un dollar, car c'est là le point.

Mais qu'on fasse de pareilles courses par curiosité, c'est ce qui n’arrive pas jusqu’à son intelligence.

Ajoutez qu’habitant d’un désert, il ne prise que l’oeuvre de l’homme. Il vous enverra volontiers visiter une route, un pont, un beau village; mais qu’on attache du prix à de grands arbres et à une belle solitude, cela est pour lui absolument incompréhensible.” Tocqueville, Voyage en Amérique, 19-20.

67 Margaret Fuller, Francis Parkman, and Bayard Taylor, echoes the sentiment Tocqueville expresses here. Kucera writes that: “The means of engendering the wonder available during travel, and in travel writing, is available only as a function of abroadlessness:

only, that is, when the obsession with Home (and its corollary, Abroad) has been

foresworn.”⁵⁶ When Tocqueville finally finds someone who will help him, he notes that the man, Mr. Biddle, who was in charge of selling unsettled lands in Michigan,

“understood perfectly [with wonder] what he wanted to do.”⁵⁷ To Tocqueville, it is a wonder that Americans seem to have no interest in American landscapes beyond

domesticating them for settlement. Before embarking for Detroit, he discusses the beauty and destruction of American landscapes, remarking that, as a “daily witness to these wonders, the American does not see anything in all of this that surprises him.”⁵⁸

This passage has a counterpart in a section of the later (1840) Democracy in America (Vol. 3) in which Tocqueville is discussing the sources for poetic thought and poetry among democratic peoples. For Tocqueville, poetry is about the ideal, and democracy figures the nation as an ideal. He argues that “The Americans do not have poets; I would not, however, say that they do not have poetic ideas.”⁵⁹ He further explains this point:

In Europe, we think a great deal of the wilds of America, but the Americans themselves never think about them; the wonders of inanimate nature find them insensible, and they do not perceive the admirable forests that surround them until they fall beneath their hatchets. Their eyes are fixed upon another spectacle. The

56 Paul Q. Kucera, “Abroadlessness: The Sense of Wonder and Nineteenth-Century American Travel Writing” (Dissertation, Michigan State University, 2003), 160.

57 “...comprit cette fois à merveille ce que nous voulions faire.” Tocqueville, Voyage en Amérique, 20.

58 “Temoin journalier de ces merveilles, l’Américain ne voit dans tout cela rien qui l’étonne.” Tocqueville, Voyage en Amérique, 10.

59 “Je conviendrai aisement que les Américains n’ont point de poètes; je ne saurais admettre de même qu’ils n’ont point d’idées poétiques.” Alexis de Tocqueville, De la Démocratie en Amérique, Volume 3 (Paris:

Pagnerre Editeur, 1848), 145.

68 American people see themselves marching across these wilds, draining swamps, turning the course of rivers, peopling solitudes, and subduing nature.⁶⁰

This “magnificent image” of conquest and domestication structures daily life in the U.S., according to Tocqueville, supplanting the appreciation of non-human wonders.

If wonder, exploration, and conquest go hand in hand, as Stephen Greenblatt has argued in Marvelous Possessions, in the context of the early settlement of the “New World” in the sixteenth century, Tocqueville’s texts suggest that by the time nineteenth-century visions of Manifest Destiny and settler colonialism⁶¹ were looking westward in the U.S., wonder was nowhere to be found in the practical materialism of settlers and pioneers. Only Tocqueville, as an outsider whose livelihood does not depend on

settlement and domestication of the land, seems able to experience the wonders of nature and appreciate the “untrodden” wilderness. In short, wonder here is an aesthetic

experience that seems to stand in direct opposition to the practical and material considerations of settlement and domestication.

Tocqueville’s seeking out the wonders of wilderness bears the influence of Wordsworthian Romanticism, which is more closely associated with the sublime. As I

60 “On s’occupe beaucoup en Europe des déserts de l’Amérique; mais les Américains eux-mêmes n’y songent guère. Les merveilles de la nature inanimée les trouvent insensibles, et ils n’aperçoivent pour ainsi dire les admirables forêts qui les environnent qu’au moment où elles tombent sous leurs coups. Leur oeil est rempli d’un autre spectacle. Le peuple américain se voit marcher lui-meme a travers ces deserts, desséchant les marais, redressant les fleuves, peuplant la solitude et domptant la nature.” Tocqueville, De la Démocratie, 145-6.

61 Settler Colonial Studies is an emerging field that differentiates itself from colonial and post-colonial studies. One of the significant differences the field posits between settler colonialism and colonialism is the kind of relationship each system forges with “indigenous ‘others;’” colonialism operates on the permanent subordination of others, where settler colonialism essentially awaits the erasure of these others and works to erase itself: “whereas colonialism reinforces the distinction between colony and metropole, settler colonialism erases it.” Lorenzo Veracini, “Introducing Settler Colonial Studies,” Settler Colonial Studies 1 (2011), 3. For more on settler colonialism, see Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen, eds., Settler

Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies (New York: Routledge, 2005);

Alyosha Goldstein and Alex Lubin, eds., Settler Colonialism, special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 107, n.4 (2008); Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Houndmills: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2010).

69 elaborated in the introduction, for Fisher, the sublime is an aestheticization of fear,

whereas wonder is an aestheticization of delight. The Romantic appreciation of nature shares something with the type of wonder associated with medieval religious,

contemplative awe—as well as the tradition of wonder and horror. Wordsworth’s longing for the wild was related to his response to the French Revolution, inspired in part by the ideas of freedom in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s work. Scholars suggest that Wordsworth’s appeal to “untamed nature” can be traced to Rousseau’s notion of the “noble savage,”

which in turn was foundational for the Revolution: “Those who followed Rousseau thought of the countryside as pure and uncorrupted by the evils of town and court life.

This in turn was a reaction against a decadent aristocratic society that was too

sophisticated, too artificial, and too unnatural. Rousseau put forward the idea of the return

sophisticated, too artificial, and too unnatural. Rousseau put forward the idea of the return