Participation Type
Paper
Session Title
Session 5.09 Literature and Poetry
Presentation #1 Title
“My last long dreamless sleep”: Mythologizing the Female Pastoral in Antebellum Appalachian Travel Narratives
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Both male and female Appalachian travel writers in the 1840s and 1850s deployed traditional notions of the female pastoral ideal within their textual re-creations of their experience in the mountains. Charles Lanman, for example, writing in Adventures in the Wilds of the United States British American Provinces (1856), envisions the Georgia mountains allegorizes a Cherokee girl as the human embodiment or avatar of the Arcadian idyll (the “maiden” who died on a “summer day”), while at the same time portrayed in distinctly erotic terms, what might correspond with Annette Kolodony’s sexualized landscape thesis. For female travel writers such as Anna Maria Wells, a poem such as “The Mountain Church” re-creates familiar scenes of 19th-century mourning and domesticity while foregrounding Wells’ poetic speaker as being decidedly female. In Wells’ work and other female writers from the mid-19th-century, the speaker can actively envisions herself as being the female archetype within the woods and can thus fashion the pastoral myth to her liking. For both male and female writers, the female pastoral archetype would have been an expected, accepted literary trope or symbol; the female figure was often metonymically substituted for the landscape. What made the literary use of the pastoral mode somewhat unique for these writers, however, was the way that male writers could envision crossracial desires (Nahoochee example) and female writers could control and, at times, subvert the Arcadian myth with which their gender was associated.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Michael S. Martin is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Charleston. He specializes in 19th-century American literature.
“My last long dreamless sleep”: Mythologizing the Female Pastoral in Antebellum Appalachian Travel Narratives
Corbly Hall 464
Both male and female Appalachian travel writers in the 1840s and 1850s deployed traditional notions of the female pastoral ideal within their textual re-creations of their experience in the mountains. Charles Lanman, for example, writing in Adventures in the Wilds of the United States British American Provinces (1856), envisions the Georgia mountains allegorizes a Cherokee girl as the human embodiment or avatar of the Arcadian idyll (the “maiden” who died on a “summer day”), while at the same time portrayed in distinctly erotic terms, what might correspond with Annette Kolodony’s sexualized landscape thesis. For female travel writers such as Anna Maria Wells, a poem such as “The Mountain Church” re-creates familiar scenes of 19th-century mourning and domesticity while foregrounding Wells’ poetic speaker as being decidedly female. In Wells’ work and other female writers from the mid-19th-century, the speaker can actively envisions herself as being the female archetype within the woods and can thus fashion the pastoral myth to her liking. For both male and female writers, the female pastoral archetype would have been an expected, accepted literary trope or symbol; the female figure was often metonymically substituted for the landscape. What made the literary use of the pastoral mode somewhat unique for these writers, however, was the way that male writers could envision crossracial desires (Nahoochee example) and female writers could control and, at times, subvert the Arcadian myth with which their gender was associated.
