Independency in Eighteenth-Century American Autobiography. Knoxville: U of
Tennessee P, 1998. 40-85. Print.
Susan Imbarrato employs a
cultural studies approach to argue that Elizabeth House Trist viewed the American
wilderness not as a supernatural vision but as a hostile space in need of
improvement, cultivation, and domestication; Imbarrato speculates that the harsh
reality of being a woman traveling in the winter may have contributed to
Trist’s negative tone about nature (69-70, 74-75). Imbarrato contextualizes Trist’s diary as
meeting the eighteenth-century travel journal genre norms—even though it was
not written for publication—because Trist defines what it is to be American through
her interpretation of the landscape while amusing readers (40-44). Trist’s narration often includes critiques of
people, lodgings, and the desire for a domesticated frontier; the text is
certainly a departure from the ideal imagery found in previous promotional
material for colonial America (44, 70-71).
Despite rough traveling
conditions, the frontier holds promise for Trist because she sees it as the
future site of American cities and towns; she also considers the wilderness
inferior to her home city, the more developed Philadelphia (70). Imbarrato finds that Trist fails to treat
nature as a supernatural force—as was customary—but instead sees it as the
rightful property of Euroamericans, a burden to her travels, an incomplete object,
and a curiosity (71-76). She concludes
that Trist represents neither the “frightened heroine” nor the “strong-willed
homesteader” but instead exists somewhere in-between the two, speaking with the
voice of a proprietor imagining possibilities for development (75-76). The implications of Imbarrato’s chapter are
that Trist’s diary—as a precursor to the secular autobiography—gives academics the
chance to see the “new” world though first-person narration, study a text that
“marks the advance” of early American expansion, and examine the attitudes that
led to this expansion (84).
How Imbarrato’s
Chapter Works
Because
the scholarly conversation about this text is minimal the diaries are
contextualized in the larger conversation about eighteenth-century travel
literature: it is a departure from the captivity narrative and the spiritual
autobiography because the focus of the travel narrative shifts from undergoing
a spiritual journey to a physical journey (40).
Next, Imbarrato reviews the historical contexts for both Trist’s and Alexander
Hamilton’s journeys and states her general claim that studying this genre gives
academics the opportunity to garner first-person knowledge of life in early
America (41-44).
After analyzing Hamilton’s Itinerarium, Imbarrato conducts a
separate analysis of Trist’s diary. The
comparisons of the two texts are unfortunately minimal. Imbarrato concludes that
Trist’s diary offers a glimpse into the mind of one woman traveler who envisions
the nation’s frontier filled with cites and encompassed by nature, while
Hamilton is more removed from his surroundings and instead focused on a masculine
transcendent experience brought on by his encounter with the “wild” frontier
(75-76).
The evidence Imbarrato uses to
support her claims are quotes from primary sources such as the two diaries and
related correspondence written to and by these authors. She also uses information from the diaries to
map out both Trist and Hamilton’s journeys. The rest of her evidence is comprised
of quotes from early American travel writing and diary scholars and Annette
Kolodny—essentially the Trist scholar.
How Does
this Help Me With My Project?
My problem with Trist’s text
is that I am viewing it with modern eyes.
I am having trouble seeing Trist as anyone but one of the Eurocentric
colonizers of the American frontier. It
upsets me when she fails to see that the “wilderness” is already home to
innumerous tribes of Native Americans and instead imagines “American” cities
populating the frontier. Imbarrato’s text,
however, gives me another way to see Trist.
The most interesting part of her argument was that Trist imagines garden
cities surrounded by nature while Hamilton sees it simply as “wilderness” to be
conquered, a place to live out the masculine frontier experience (75-76).
I can use this claim as a
starting point to develop my argument that while Trist mistakenly believes the
frontier needs to be developed for Euroamericans she also did not envision the
concrete jungles that sweep across America today. In her future America, it seems that nature should
be an integral part of life and the roads and towns would simply bring the conveniences
of home to this beautiful landscape. The
fact that Trist acknowledges the beauty of the land and the unfortunate disappearance
of game are evidence that she believed “nature” would continue to be a part of
every American’s life. While Hamilton
saw nature as a place for men to venture into and conquer, Trist sees nature as
interwoven with the reality of everyday life.
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| I don't think Trist imagined this America. We wipe away everything and then build on top of "imporved" land. This small pine forrest by my home was home to deer and herons and many other animals before it was bulldozed down for an ABC Liquor store! |
In America today, we do not believe we live
“in” nature because we only believe it exists beyond the city limits. If Trist’s view had been the dominant one, I
believe America would be filled with the “garden” cities that Kolodny and
Imbarrato believe she imagined. I can
now return to the text, read it from this perspective to find my argument. Perhaps, I could read Trist’s diary in
relation to a landscape painting of Philadelphia that shows the city surrounded
by forests and then to later paintings where factories dominate the horizon. Also, there is something about Trist choosing a
dog as a traveling companion that I would like to examine.
Though I wish she would have taken her Trist/Hamilton,
American male/female paradigm comparison further, Imbarrato’s chapter would be useful
for any lesson about the early American struggle to “construct” an American identity
in relation to nature, travel, and gender.
