English 102: British and American Literature, 1650-1780
Professor Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook

Contact Zones II: Colonial Textuality

Locke: "In the beginning, all the world was America."

Letters from an American Farmer (passages to read closely)
Letter I: "Introduction" (all)
Letter III: "What is an American?" (40-44)
Letter IX: "A Description of Charlestown" (151-54, 162-65)
Letter XII: "Distresses of a Frontier Man" (all)

The FORM of LAF: "Epistolarity" (the letter form) suggests important 18th century values. A popular cliche is that a letter is "a window" into the writer's heart. The letter exchange connotes reciprocal emotional and psychological transparency.

In this sense, it is formally the analogue to the model of the good citizen, whose life is an open book (see Franklin's Cato, Busy Body 3, and the pun on books/bodies in his "Epitaph").

Two key issues for our consideration:

1)the ideal of a transparent society (mediated by print culture) and 2)the bodies that disrupt that ideal of transparency.

Compare James to Mr. Spectator (Spectator 1, 1711) as observers of their respective societies.

Mr. Spectator is a disinterested, disengaged observer of the public scene, whose desire to reform others is represented as purely benevolent. He moves through the social scene almost invisibly, because his social identity corresponds to the public "norm" of the citizen as white male landowner. He specifically makes the point that he is "well versed in the theory of an husband or a father" but isn't one himself (my emph., 2325). (See Swift's parody of this figure of the disinterested reformer in "Modest Proposal"). Disinterestedness, metaphorically presented as disembodiment, as an early 18th-c. ideal for citizenship.

How does this earlier, and English, model of disembodied/disinterested citizenship play out differently in the North American colonies during the "convulsions" of the Revolutionary decades?

Letter I: Setting the Scene of Writing
In the letter-exchange with Mr. F.B., the well-educated and "enlightened" Englishman, how does James understand what he can provide to Mr. F.B.? Perhaps the ideal of transparence only exists on paper: James's wife reminds us that neighbors gossip and the colonial authorities keep an eye on what's going on (21).

Letter III: "Naturalizing" Americans
[Cf. Randy's question about the Declaration: "Who's included in the American 'we'?]
"We know...no strangers; this is every person's country" (55); everyone gets a place at the American table, if they work for it. "America" conceptually "works" because self-interest and political stability are bound together: the new American's "labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest" (44).

Letter IX: The Slave's Body
Charlestown as anomaly; the slave in the cage as a body that marks irreducible differences among those living in America.

Letter XII: Enforced embodiment/Self-interest unleashed
-fantasy of "the cool, the distant spectator" and the king brought to the colonies in their bodies as fathers, husbands, and citizens (193-94).
-James's resolution: rupture with the colonies, retreat to a New New world among the Indians.

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