In American literature, the rhetoric of mapping is a central trope in the texts of canonical as well as less familiar works. From Christopher Columbus’s first travel reports to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) to road novels like William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways (1982), U.S. authors have created elaborate word maps when describing their personal experiences, characters, settings, or spatial plots. To make sense of such literary mappings, critical studies have long pursued microanalytic approaches delving into word use, etymology, and poetics, or they have applied macroanalytic techniques exploring the history of narrative form, literary genre, and the role of the literary marketplace. From studies addressing matters of place and environment, movement and material culture in American literature, we have learned over time to think about American poems, short stories, plays, and novels as cartographically inflected repositories and proving grounds. U.S writers have explored literary themes and conventions associated with the heroic quest, the sentimental journey, the utopian/dystopian frontier tale, and the poetics as well as the politics of spatial feeling. All this has informed characters including hunters, emigrants, and runaway slaves next to men or women of leisure, working fathers and mothers, and modern representations of children.1
Regarding these approaches, scholars have often pointed out that actual maps, from the rare manuscript to the mass-produced printed artifact, have over the centuries informed the style of American literature. From Stephen Greenblatt to Ricardo Padrón, it has often been noted how in early modern texts maps were a physical part of contact reports and colonial histories, such as Captain John Smith’s The Generall Historie of Virginia (1624) or Cotton Mather’s ecclesiastical tome, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702). It has also been noted how they provided both the literal and the figurative plots for travel accounts ranging from The Discoveries of John Lederer (1672) to William Byrd’s the History of the Dividing Line (c. 1730), or from Nicolas Biddle’s famous edition of the History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark (1814) to Timothy Flint’s Recollections of the Last Ten Years, Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings in the Valley of the Mississippi (1826).2
It has also frequently been observed that between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries many American authors seem to have written their fictional works with a map in hand: James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823) and The Chainbearer (1845) abound with references to land surveyors’ plats; Herman Melville’s novels Redburn (1849) and Moby-Dick (1851) were composed while the author consulted atlas maps and geography handbooks published by Jesse Olney; Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) provides geographic coordinates for navigating the South Pole; and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) offers an intricate metaphor of national identity by meshing language, literary form, and a sketch map of Walden Pond. Similarly, if we fast-forward to more recent literature, maps are appended to works as different as William Faulkner’s psychological novel, Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and John Steinbeck’s travelogue, Travels with Charley (1962). Maps have been a critical reference point in poetry ranging from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) to Elizabeth Bishop’s Trial Balances (1935) or Geography III (1976). Last but not least, maps have a constant presence—as both insert and narrative device—in the pages and endpapers of American fantasy and action novels from Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (1900) to Dan Brown’s illustrated edition of Angels & Demons (2006).
As new scholarship in the form of reader response studies, the history of the book, and GIS-supported textual analysis has shown, we have come to realize that maps have had a much more pervasive influence than previously thought on the production and reception of American literature.3 On the one hand, since the 1980s maps have increasingly come to be considered a vital, paratextual component supplementing sweeping literary surveys; published in anthologies that consider American literature an inclusionary discourse, the occasional historical map is now reprinted along with personal letters, political pamphlets, poetry, drama, and novels.4 On the other hand, as maps have been shown to play a constitutive role in the making of American literature, they have also been recognized for assuming literary agency; case studies that read American literature through maps illustrate how particular cartographic works directly influenced the form and content of a text or even a genre.5
Whether authors have used maps as graphic inserts, direct citation, or wordy approximation, these maps illustrate how through the process of literary adaptation cartography has helped convey the American experience, redefine literary conventions in place-specific and often nationalistic terms, and explore the meaning of America in modern times. Maps accompanying texts illustrate how authors have envisioned unknown lands, processed the colonization of a vast continental expanse and numerous peoples, or reconciled personal desire for property with communal rules over ownership (Pagden; Buell; Newman). In the process of literary adaptation, map references and verbal maps reveal patterns of connection, linking particular literary conventions with spatial imaginings that have prescribed, for example, collective actions, personal perspectives, and above all, real or imaginary settings.6
Drawing on scholarship from literary geography, historical cartography, and studies in spatial theory, this chapter’s principal goal is to provide a limited survey of map genres in conversation with American literature. To explore the form and function of literary maps, the chapter mostly addresses texts published with maps or referencing maps concretely. While territoriality and spatial thinking ostensibly inform all literary maps, the chapter concentrates on the readerly aspect of mobility, on the intersection between the act of reading as a function of movement and the map as the tool and repository providing orientation and direction. In trying to show the range of maps and their literary adaptations, the chapter is organized into three sections designed to track select literary genres across different, at times overlapping, periods defined by popular anthologies of American literature in the English language. The three sections are: “Maps in the Literature of Colonization,” “Maps in the Literature of Nation Formation,” and “Maps in the Literature of Two Gilded Ages, 1900/2000.”7
Maps in the Literature of Colonization
The history of joining maps and American literature begins as early as 1493 with the publication of the bestselling pamphlet De Insulis nuper inuentis (1493), containing Christopher Columbus’s letter to his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, in which descriptions of his experience were supplemented with maplike woodcuts (figure 13.1). Within a decade printers were quick to associate maps with travel accounts—for example, with the dual publication of Martin Waldseemüller’s giant wall map, Universalis Cosmographia Secundum Ptholomaei Traditionem et Americi (1507) and Fracanzano da Montalboddo’s volume, Paesi novamente retrovati (1507). The Waldseemüller map is today celebrated for inventing “America” because it was the first map to name the continent.8 Montalboddo’s anthology, on the other hand, is credited with publishing the first collection of reports detailing journeys to the American continent by, for example, Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, and Gaspar Corte-Real. Within a short time, the genre of the travel report not only took Europe by storm but, with enterprising publishers adding woodcut illustrations, it became associated with maps and the literary trope of mapped information, settings, and events.
Figure 13.1. Christopher Columbus, De Insulis nuper inuentis (1493). Courtesy, Newberry Library.
The topics of early modern travel reports revolved around questions of how to make contact with America, including tales of reconnaissance, the presence of salable natural resources and commodities, the discovery of unfamiliar flora and fauna, and recommendations on how to launch “plantations” or how to negotiate the presence of Native Americans, then called “savages.” The language of the early reports shifted back and forth between personal diary and encyclopedic histories. Authors frequently struggled for words that were capable of reporting unfamiliar plants and objects, thus revealing a linguistic and literary uncertainty on how to render the experience of what literary historians have dubbed the “marvels” or “wonders” of the New World.9 By contrast, the image of maps—even if they were rudimentary, highly inaccurate, and in many instances imaginary—offered a more stable and supposedly more correct view for readers interested in tracking travel routes and picturing the geography and biodiversity of the New World.
Illustrated travel reports that included maps and maplike illustrations—from Georg Stuchs’s Newe vnbekanthe Landte vnd ein newe Weldte (1513) and Hans Staden’s Warhaftige Historia und beschreibung eyner Landtschafft der Wilden Nacketen, Grimmigen Menschfresser-Leuthen in der Newenwelt America gelegen (1557), to the bestselling editions of Theodor de Bry’s anthology, Newe Welt vnd americanische Historien (c. 1650), which included Thomas Hariot’s now canonical work, A Briefe and True Report of Virginia (1590)—shaped the public imagination in two ways. On the one hand, they introduced the myths of American cannibalism, the ubiquity of precious metals (El Dorado), and geographic fantasies of gaining access to the Garden of Eden. On the other hand, they established the tradition that writing and reading about journeys to and inside America required maps as much for the purpose of navigation as for navigating the text itself. For example, the maps appended to Captain John Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia (1624) or John Lederer’s Discoveries (1672) contained dotted lines or large inky crosses, offering readers graphic signposts that cross-referenced the volumes’ table of contents with travel routes and encounters with Native populations in the Chesapeake Bay area and in the Carolina territory through the use of two textual landscapes: the graphic map and the printed word.10
Smith’s Map of New England (1612; figure 13.2) followed a somewhat different narrative model. The map offered a unique palimpsest mixing authorial and literary ambitions, which are matched by the map’s companion text, Description of New England (1612). Toward the end of the report, after numerous observations about American nature and indigenous cultures, Smith offered advice on how to colonize (“plant”) New England by assigning himself controversial powers. In the narrative, he demanded the trust and authority usually reserved for sovereigns and aristocratic members of society occupying government positions. On the map, he not only rebaptized native places with English names—such as “New London,” “The River Charles,” or “Oxford”—but inserted an image of his own likeness in the map’s margins and thus in the iconographic place usually reserved for portraits, heraldry, or other tokens of homage celebrating royalty or sponsors of risky Atlantic expeditions.
Figure 13.2. John Smith, “Map of New England.” In A Description of New England (London, [1612] 1627). Rare Books Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
While in principle the genre of the travel report remained relatively unchanged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the accompanying maps suggested a shift in narrative direction. The earliest reports were preoccupied with finding America and focused on the American water/land divide—that is, on the relationship of the Atlantic Ocean to the American coast, including the coastal enclaves, corridors, and possible inroads into the continental hinterland.11 At the same time, the travel reports’ narrative styles experimented with different linguistic options and literary devices as a way of translating the unfamiliar into more familiar terms. While many early reports introduced to the English lexicon neologisms borrowed from European and Native American languages, most applied a Eurocentric approach to their literary craft by packing the American experience into established literary forms inflected by, say, the literary genres of historiography, the conversion narrative, or the emerging protocols of encyclopedic writing used in the natural sciences. By the mid- to late seventeenth century, and thus after nearly two centuries of accumulating information, travel writers began to locate their narratives inside a different hemispheric frame of reference, emphasizing (with many overlaps) the Atlantic world and the American continent as one continuous metasetting.
The representation of the Atlantic world as a literary setting was the product of accounts that conceptualized the New World not in continental terms but as a watery world defined by the Atlantic Ocean, waterways, and islands. Many geographic accounts, such as Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657), resembled in narrative structure and content nautical maps like those compiled by William Hack’s Waggoner Atlas (1682) or William Blathwayt’s Atlas (1675–1685), which merged sea charts with detailed sailing directions in an effort to facilitate both movement and settlement in the Atlantic or Pacific ocean. Ligon’s history illustrates how the English-speaking world, driven by its growing focus on the Caribbean sugar and slave trade, conceived the experience of America as a succession of unrelated settings and a constant movement between the coasts of Europe, Africa, and American islands. Indeed, most of the early period’s literary and even political imagination conceptualized America in uncontinental terms because the geological concept of continents was yet to be fully described and embraced.12
As a result, many European writers and their readers, including members of the British Parliament, imagined America as an archipelago of loosely connected islands linked by bodies of water, tropical storms, and fantasies of geographic autonomy or nightmares of slave rebellion. In his history, Ligon inserted the map A Topographicall Description … of Barbados (1657; figure 13.3), in which toponyms and pictorial elements anticipate descriptions about land ownership, farming techniques, and slave culture. The trope of placing economically active fictional characters inside the setting of American islands in the Atlantic world was perhaps made most popular by Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719). Other works invested in geographic, economic, or spiritual mobility adapted the island theme, such as James Grainger’s Georgic poem, The Sugar-Cane (1764); Thomas Paine’s political essay, Common Sense (1776); Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), describing his itinerant life as a slave during the 1750s and 1770s; the anonymous early American novel, The History of Constantius and Pulchera (1795); and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), in which rudimentary maps depicting the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard provided visual plots for delineating the ideological concept of the “middle state” made popular in Crèvecoeur’s now famous “Letter III: What Is an American?”
Figure 13.3. Richard Ligon, A Topographicall Description and Admeasurement of the Yland of Barbados in the West Indyaes: With the Mrs. Names of the Seuerall Plantacons (1657). Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.
The focus on Oceanic and Caribbean geographies began to wane as literature devoted to traveling within the confines of the continent grew during the eighteenth century. Fueled by the territorial conflicts between France and England, these works and their maps included travelogues, natural histories, and geographies, which over the course of time expanded in geographic reach as well as literary purpose. While early tours like Sarah Kemble Knight’s Diary (1704) of a journey from Boston to Connecticut or Alexander Hamilton’s Itinerarium (1744) from Annapolis to Boston served to chart, albeit without the use of maps, the movement between different local cultures, later works that included maps, such as Peter Kalm’s Travels into North America … Enriched with a Map (1773) and Jonathan Carver’s Travels through the Interior Parts of North America (1778), became international bestsellers.
The continental perspective emerged more fully in writings based on some of the most influential maps sponsored by government institutions. It was John Mitchell’s Map of the British and French Dominions in North America (1755; figure 13.4) and his treatise The Contest in America between Great Britain and France (1757) that not only projected a continental reach for the British American colonies, but provided language reflecting imperial ambitions pursued first by the British Empire and then later by American politicians negotiating the territorial claims of the United States of America. A similar impact can be attributed to Lewis Evans’s A General Map of the Middle British Colonies (1755), published along with his volume Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical and Mechanical Essays (1755). Both the Evans map and his literary analysis of the mid-Atlantic region contributed to the emerging Enlightenment narrative depicting America as a pastoral setting capable of accommodating European immigrants despite Native American land claims and the increasing dependence on slave-based economies during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.13
Figure 13.4. John Mitchell, A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America (London, 1755). Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
It is in the early texts accompanying maps that readers will find some of the best illustrations for understanding how maps informed literature of the late colonial period and beyond. Combining literary conventions pioneered by European travel narratives—emphasizing the experience of the traveler/narrator, the careful tally of natural resources, and even the aesthetic appreciation of natural phenomena—both the eloquent and the laconic accompaniment borrowed amply from cartography’s vocabulary and visual orientation to better describe spaces, materials, and peoples. On occasion the authors’ preoccupation with maps had its pitfalls—for example, when European travelers lost their way because they had naively followed Native American maps, which, unlike Western cartographic representations, marked places in spatiotemporal terms;14 or when natural conditions, like shifting coastal sands, thwarted the authors’ desire to establish literal and figurative boundaries, as described in William Byrd’s History of the Dividing Line (1730);15 or when the map itself was deemed a tool superior to the English language, as suggested by Thomas Jefferson’s first chapters in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1784).16 In the examples where colonial authors purposefully prepared maps to accompany their writings, their textual representation borrowed from the map’s graphic mode of communicating authority by referencing map titles and geodetic accuracy, the cartographic lexicon, and the supervisory “at a glance” method of visualization. Information was presented selectively or generalized, allowing writers to name, edit, or omit contested places or unpleasant experiences. While references to maps, coordinates, and measurements transformed geographic descriptions into literary maps, the same rhetorical ploy frequently silenced American voices, including Native Americans, European minorities, members of the working class, and the enslaved.
Maps in the Literature of Nation Formation
After the Revolution, map-illustrated travel writing evolved into a popular genre, allowing several generations of authors to explore the new nation in small- or large-scale accounts as well as to experiment with the genre’s formal parameters.17 Sketch maps accompanied the regional tour documented by William Bartram’s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, etc. (1791), which was quickly recognized for its elegiac tone and fantastical depiction of the American South. Similarly, Timothy Dwight’s more ponderous Travels in New England and New York (1823) provided a new generation of writers with detailed descriptions and an early realist narrative model by meshing geography, statistics, and local history. By contrast, much more detailed maps accompanied the reports of transcontinental expeditions, such as William Clark’s map supplementing Nicholas Biddle’s History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark (1814), or Charles Preuss’s maps published in John Fremont’s polemical Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, and to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843–44 (1845).18
In these writings, even the most rudimentary map—like the one drawn by Bartram—emerged as a much-valued reading index for cross-referencing the journeys’ geographic progress with literary musings about the narrator’s psychological state, the region’s cultural geography, or its natural environment. Indeed, it could be argued that in the course of the nineteenth-century, maps fostered literary strategies that turned map-sourced descriptions into poetic or philosophical masterpieces exploring questions unique to the American experience. In particular, these questions addressed identity concerns in the age of industrialization, as can be seen in the mappings and meditations about life in Concord, Massachusetts, and the United States in general in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) or his essay “Walking” (1862).19
While travel writers used maps that sketched travel routes and traversed spaces by charting everything from small woods to the whole continent, perhaps the most popular form of vicariously experiencing a journey around the new nation was made available to ordinary people by a burgeoning schoolbook industry that incorporated local and national maps into geography lessons. Early slogans, like Noah Webster’s 1788 exhortation that “a tour of the United States ought now to be considered as a necessary part of a liberal education,” spurred many authors and readers to consult geography books and their companion atlases as a way of traveling the country without having to leave the comfort and safety of the home or classroom.20
Bestselling textbooks, such as Jedidiah Morse’s Geography Made Easy (1784), shaped the geographic imagination of American writers for half a century by providing prototypes in literary mapping according to which foldout maps—like Amos Doolittle’s A Map of the United States of America (1784; figure 13.5)—inventoried the geography, economy, and cultural customs of every region. A unique literary feature of subsequent editions published by Morse and a host of other geographers was the textbook journey to geographic landmarks, such as Niagara Falls in upstate New York, Natural Bridge in Virginia, Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and so forth. At the same time, another narrative feature of early national textbooks was the literary construction of regionally inflected fictional character types, such as the thrifty New Englander or the lazy Virginia Gentleman. While biased and offensive even by contemporaneous standards, these place-based stereotypes informed geography lessons that required students to apply their textbook knowledge by touring the national map with both eyes and fingers in search of the places and people that represented the “American character.”21
Figure 13.5. Amos Doolittle, A Map of the United States of America (1784). In Jedidiah Morse, Geography Made Easy (1784). Courtesy, Newberry Library.
At this point in the survey it is important to note that after the heyday of travel narratives and geography books, not many genres in American literature emerged that contained actual maps documenting the act of inhabiting space, the culture or aesthetic of territoriality, or the emotional or psychological implications of moving across space or defining spatial relations in natural or human-made settings.22 A bibliographical search of American literature tracing actual map inserts in printed works published between 1800 and 2000, especially in prose fiction, yields a surprisingly small number of examples. From the standpoint of the sociology and economics of literary production this may come as a surprise, because historians of book and print culture have demonstrated that in the course of the nineteenth century maps were rapidly becoming inexpensive artifacts, while publishers were increasingly willing to invest in book illustrations.23 From the standpoint of literary studies, moreover, the lack of actual maps is almost baffling in light of the frequency with which American authors used map references in their creative efforts to convey the American experience in thematic terms, exploring the vagaries of westward migration, the journeys of ex-slaves, the dispossession of Native Americans, and the proprietary claims of new settlements—emphases that correspond to many of the emergent thematic maps charting everything from diseases and crops to demography and history.24
Although the bulk of literary works, from eighteenth-century sentimental journeys to twentieth-century poetry, lacked the material presence of physical maps, three types of prose fiction displayed a strong affinity with popular map genres during the nineteenth century: picaresque narratives and small-scale overview maps; frontier stories and large-scale promotional maps; and sensational fiction and river maps.
Especially during the first decades after Independence, American readers would have found that small-scale maps, like the Doolittle map in Morse’s school geography, not only depicted the nation, the continent, and the trans-Atlantic context, but provided a graphic aid for following the plot of many picaresque stories and novels. Like their European counterparts, American picaresque works chronicled the travels and travails of a single or sometimes multiple characters, usually of low social standing, whose movements ranged across the globe and tended to be episodic as well as highly unstructured. This was because their progress was randomly subjected to fate, storms, and pirates rather than stationary conditions, rational planning, or social contracts.25
In the anonymous novella, The History of Constantius and Pulchera (1795), the heroine or “picara” embarked on an improbable tour that took the reader from Philadelphia to various settings along the North Atlantic rim (Essex, Massachusetts; Bordeaux, France; Lisbon, Portugal; etc.), only to return in the end to the capital of the United States. Similarly, in James Butler’s Fortune’s Football (1798), the male protagonist, the “picaro,” occupied in quick succession geographic locales that included London, Venice, Malta, Algiers, London, Quebec, Florence, Esfahān, Baghdad, Moscow, and again London. While the characters’ rapid encounters with randomly placed settings were central to the story, picaresque tales like these required readers to consult small-scale maps—that is, maps showing large areas—in order to track the stories’ plots. Indeed, the haphazard movement of characters in picaresque novels, such as Royal Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797) or Charles Brockden Brown’s Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist (1803–1805), loosely resembled the design of board games. Cartographic board games—from Thomas Jefferys’s Royal Geographical Pastime: Exhibiting a Complete Tour Round the World (1770), to John Walker’s Walker’s Geographical Pastime (1834; figure 13.6), to Milton Bradley’s The Game of Round the World (1873)—mimicked the journeys of novelistic characters, allowing readers to behave like players whose actions relied on chance rather than on personal intent or cultural reason.
A similarly calculated suspension of readerly protocol informed the mapping motifs in fiction grappling with life on the western frontier. A good example is Caroline Kirkland’s fictionalized biography and novel of frontier manners, A New Home—Who’ll Follow? or Glimpses of Western Life? (1839). It described the experience of a middle-class East Coast family that, after being displaced by the economic crash of 1837, traveled to southern Michigan following the paths laid out by large-scale promotional maps—that is, by maps showing a smaller area, like John Farmer’s An Improved Edition of a Map of the Surveyed Part of the Territory of Michigan (1835; figure 13.7). Farmer’s map and those designed by land speculators depicted a territory that was not only neatly subdivided according to the township system decreed by the U.S. Land Ordinance Act of 1785, but that contained the core elements of modern infrastructure, including roads, towns, river crossings, and so forth.
Figure 13.7. John Farmer, An Improved Edition of a Map of the Surveyed Part of the Territory of Michigan (New York, [1835] 1836). David Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com.
In the case of Kirkland’s narrative, however, after enduring detours, impassible roads, and nonexistent settlements, the characters (and readers) quickly discovered that the map preceded the territory—that is, that the details on the map were imagined projections rather than factual representations of conditions on the ground. Or, as Kirkland wrote, according to an “emblazoned chart” advertising Michigan, “There were canals and railroads, with boats and cars at full speed. There was a steam-mill, a windmill or two; for even a land-shark did not dare to put a stream where there was scarce running water for the cattle; and a state-road, which had at least been talked of, and a courthouse and other county buildings.” She reinforced this picture of advertising hype—more accurately, of the way land speculators tricked prospective settlers—by quipping that “besides all this, there was a large and elegantly decorated space for the name of the happy purchaser.”26 Similar tales commenting on the way maps bewitched sensible characters, or bemoaning the blind trust in the authority of maps, can be found in the sea novels by Herman Melville (Mardi, 1849; Moby-Dick, 1851), in the gothic tales of Edgar Allan Poe (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 1837; “The Gold Bug,” 1843), and in Charles Dickens’s American novel, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844), which included a testy account of how promotional maps made false promises and lured unsuspecting emigrants to the American frontier.
Two classic American novels in particular intertwined the graphic logic of cartography with the delineation of territorial integrity, plot design, and the readerly habit of tracing stories with map in hand: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). In chapter 14 of Stowe’s abolitionist novel, popular river maps—like Norman’s Chart of the Lower Mississippi River (1858; figure 13.8)—were at the heart of one of the novel’s more poignant scenes of literary mapping. Sitting on the moving deck of a riverboat, Tom surveyed the Southern plantation landscape from the perspective of the mapmaker, in the process revealing as much as hiding the conditions on land, here how the images of neatly surveyed plantations disguised the fact that their picturesque appearances were founded on the brutal regime of slavery. Throughout, the novel’s plot presupposed a cartoliterate audience capable of following the fate of the principal characters, as they traveled southward on the river from state to state into the heart of American slavery and northward along the treacherous route toward the Canadian border and freedom. While Stowe only implied the river map, she offered a more concrete map source in an episode reminiscent of the more academic textbook lessons discussed above: the New England character of Miss Ophelia (and thus Stowe’s implied readership) studied the course of the river using “Morse’s Atlas,” linking the novel’s plot either to Jedidiah Morse’s Modern Atlas Adapted to Morse’s New School Geography (1822) or to Morse’s North American Atlas (1845), published by his son, Sidney E. Morse.
Figure 13.8. B. M. Norman, Norman’s Chart of the Lower Mississippi River by A. Persac (New York, 1858). David Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com.
River maps loomed even larger in Twain’s famous tale about childhood and rebellion, Reconstruction America, and the culture of racism. What is well known today is that as a former river pilot Twain used his intimate knowledge of the Mississippi River when creating verbal depictions of its meandering course, overgrown banks, and islands, thus adding descriptive authenticity to the otherwise fictional construction of the characters’ vernacular speech and actions. What is perhaps less known is the fact that Twain was childhood friends with river pilots who not only helped create actual river maps, such as Lloyd’s Map of the Lower Mississippi River from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico (1862; figure 13.9), but also served as models for Twain’s fictional character of Tom Sawyer.27
Figure 13.9. J. T. Lloyd, Lloyd’s Map of the Lower Mississippi River from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico (New York, 1862). David Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com.
More generally, the river map left its generic mark on the way both Stowe and Twain structured their novels’ narrative arc. River maps tended to be designed in the tradition of the “strip” or “ribbon” road maps invented by John Ogilby, and thus would consist of narrow paper sections showing only the land located to the left and right of the river. At the same time, they were often assembled as scrolls that were housed in wooden boxes with a display window, allowing pilots (and also travelers) to manually turn the ribbon map to match the boat’s position on the river. The narrative structures of the two novels behave similarly to these pilot maps: characters rarely stray from the river’s course; compared to the detailed descriptions of the river, the hinterland remains mostly invisible; and the rapid movement of the novels’ scenes, which critics today tend to consider a forerunner of a modern “filmic” technique and sensibility, resembles the mechanical motion of scrolling through pilot or ribbon maps (while anticipating the future reels of celluloid pictures).
Maps in the Literature of Two Gilded Ages, 1900/2000
The absence of maps representing places and providing orientation in the old and new canons of American fiction continued into the twentieth century. If we exclude nonfiction writings, a bibliographical subject search of paratextual metadata (using OCLC) reveals only a smattering of printed maps supplementing novels, poems, and plays. When maps were present, they had usually been added to anniversary editions or lesson plans for teaching classic works such as Melville’s Moby-Dick or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.28 Yet, the cartographic imagination abounds in American literature, in particular in novels inspired by the rise of the modern city and suburbs, technological change, and transnational awareness. In particular, authors specializing in genres of “lowbrow” fiction, like the penny-press Western or detective mystery, emulated the graphic code of cartographic representation to give depth and structure to imaginary landscapes, characters, and actions. For example, Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) and Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) applied the language of cartography and the representational value of “maps” to better delineate places and perspectives, in particular when creating the illusion of utopian, islandlike settings located in the unruly territories of the western continent. Conversely, modernist mappings by authors like John Dos Passos playfully enlisted the reading experience of urban street maps. In the case of Faulkner’s conception of “Yoknapatawpha County,” a unique insert map accompanying Absalom! Absalom! offered graphic guidance to multiple plot strands and point of views, in short becoming a cartographic blueprint for tracking a multitude of objects, emotions, and voices. Through the invocation of the visual experience of the “map,” twentieth-century literary mappings opened up fictive worlds that were multidimensional. Their spatiality was contingent on a dialectic pitting geographies against antegeographies, according to which imaginary places not only existed outside known spaces but through the act of mapping appeared similar to or contiguous with the physical geography of the here and now.29
Indeed, if we consider American literature a discourse network “1900/2000” (to borrow Friedrich Kittler’s term), thus bracketing modern American literary history, we will discover three literary genres devoted explicitly to maps: the grand-tour account; journeys to fictional worlds; and the American road trip.
The theme of the mapped “grand tour” entered American fiction during the antebellum decades in the form of fictional or personal travel accounts describing visits to South America, the European continent, and the Holy Land for both children and adults. In works written for both audiences, rudimentary map inserts served the dual didactic purpose of teaching historical and national geography while providing blueprints for tracing the movement of fictionalized guides in works such as Samuel G. Goodrich’s Peter Parley’s History of the Wanderings of Tom Starboard (1834) or John L. Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (1837).30 After the Civil War, a burgeoning market for young adult fiction transformed the grand tour into gender-specific genres. Offering geographic authentication and lectoral guidance, map inserts were thus commonly found in Elizabeth W. Champney’s “Vassar girls” adventures (see her Three Vassar Girls in South America: A Holiday Trip of Three College Girls …, 1885) and in Hezekiah Butterworth’s multibook “Zigzag” series for boys. For example, in Butterworth’s Zigzag Journeys in the Western States of America: The Atlantic to the Pacific (1884), a foldout map was used to illustrate the size of the United States by fitting Europe into the space between California and the Mississippi River, while the volume’s endpapers contained map fragments to illustrate diverse travel routes next to images showing various modes of transportation (figure 13.10). Each of these fictional travel accounts, wittingly or not, commented on the travelers’ shifting perception of time and space, the impact of speed, or the experience of rapid relocation using novel forms of transportation. Inspired by Jules Verne’s novel, Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), the American journalist Nellie Bly made headlines by embarking on the ultimate “grand tour”—later described with a map in Nellie Bly’s Book: Around the World in 72 Days (1890)—in which she raced around the globe in order to break Verne’s imaginary travel record, with newspaper audiences tracking her progress via maps and telegraphed reports.31
Figure 13.10. Hezekiah Butterworth, Zigzag Journeys in the Western States of America: The Atlantic to the Pacific (1884). Courtesy, Newberry Library.
Changes in society and technology resonated strongly in the first American works of science fiction and later in the burgeoning genre of fantasy novels. Today, readers are perhaps most familiar with maps emphasizing the kind of stationary geographies, sweeping vistas of countries, continents, or parallel worlds exemplified by the extraterrestrial canals and waterways of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess on Mars (1912) or the landscapes of Middle Earth in J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy Lord of the Rings (1937–1949). Other imaginative settings occur in well-known works like Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz (1900), or in Christopher Paolini’s bestselling children’s book Eragon (2003). Less familiar are the fictional maps showing imaginary journeys to and territorial designs of unknown continents, the moon, and the deep sea that emerged parallel to scientific reconnaissance missions into the heart of Africa and Asia, reflecting innovations in engineering and military experiments that relied on steamships, submarines, balloons, and railroads.
Popular novels by Jules Verne and his imitators capitalized on what must have been an insatiable appetite for stories that mixed sensational plots and scientific theories. A story that caught the attention of American readers for nearly a century revolved around the “Hollow Earth” theory. In 1818, and thus long before the publication of Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), the American Captain John Cleves Symmes introduced the theory of a Hollow Earth containing concentric spheres accessible via large openings (1,400 miles across) at both poles. Symmes’s theory inspired the anonymous science fiction novel Symzonia: Voyage of Discovery (1820), in which the narrator, after gaining access to the inner surface of the earth at the South Pole, discovered a utopian society living deep inside the earth. The Hollow Earth fantasy of finding a parallel universe containing advanced albeit subterranean civilizations quickly became a staple of American popular fiction. Besides influencing Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) and purportedly also Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), the Hollow Earth story had perhaps its greatest following in John Uri Lloyd’s science fiction and fantasy novel Etidorhpa, or, The End of Earth (1895), in which the narrator, on receiving instructions from an underground inhabitant and with map in hand, entered the earth’s interior continents through a cave in Kentucky. American authors embraced Symmes’s theory well into the twentieth century, but none offered as explicit a map as did William Reed’s illustrated study of polar expeditions, The Phantom of the Poles (1906), showing the “Hollow Earth” (figure 13.11).
Figure 13.11. William Reed, The Phantom of the Poles (1906). Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.
The final prominent genre containing the occasional map consists of “road” fiction and biographies that involved traveling long distances across the United States by car and more recently also by motorcycle, bicycle, and even on foot. Since the advent of the mass-produced car, the American media, and in particular car advertisements, have coined the “road trip” as a fantasy of unfettered geographic and social mobility. Fiction writers, many of whom were working freelance for movie and advertising companies, developed the theme of road travel into a productive metaphor, plot device, agent of action, even character—think Ian Fleming’s Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car (1964) or Stephen King’s horror novel Christine (1983)—to convey life in a fast-paced America that was always on the move.
Classic twentieth-century narratives—from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1924) and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1938) to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977)—created elaborate literary maps exploring the exigencies of modern travel in American society. But while these novels omitted physical maps, autobiographical writings of authors ranging from John Steinbeck to William Least Heat-Moon purposefully included maps as part of the literary experience. The endpapers of Steinbeck’s travelogue, Travels with Charley (1962), depicted a road trip around the periphery of the United States with the goal of finding some answers to the question “What are Americans like today?” Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways (1982), whose title came from the cartographic convention of drawing secondary roads in the color blue (figure 13.12), recounted the author’s adventures and soul-searching meditations compiled during a 13,000-mile journey across America and through mostly forgotten small towns.
When seeking to reconcile the absence of map inserts with the widespread presence of verbal mappings in American literature, readers of fiction will quickly discover an impasse formulated best by Henri Lefebvre’s assertion that “any search for space in literary texts will find it everywhere and in every guise.”32 But when Lefebvre asks the question “How many maps, in the descriptive or geographic sense, might be needed to deal exhaustively with a given space, to code and decode all its meanings and contents?,” the answer for readers of American literature would have to be “many.”33 Inspired by spatial theories like Lefebvre’s, recent approaches to American literature tend to be informed by critical methodologies whose discussion of maps and mapping has provided new perspectives and energy to literary criticism. Studies invested in “literary cartography” frequently call on terms and protocols developed by critics working on the margins of literary criticism—for example, by Michel de Certeau (maps are “a memorandum prescribing actions”), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (“the map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious”), or Jean Baudrillard (“the map precedes the territory”).34 As the discourse on maps increasingly pervaded discussions of literary form and the tools of literary analysis, it was only a short leap to imbue established critical terms with a mapping function, from the classical rhetorical “topos,” to the early modern neologism of “plot,” to poststructural uses of “survey” and “metonymy.” Moreover, after recognizing the representational power of maps, literary scholars now speculate about how maps have affected literary culture in America more broadly. If we consider Benedict Anderson’s critique of nationalism in relation to the history of the novel and Edward Said’s exploration of culture and imperialism, not to mention more recent discussions of transnational literature and identity, the discourse on maps and the language of mapping offer both a corrective lens and a constructive idiom for addressing a broad range of American literatures across time and space.35
That maps hold a unique sway over the way we conduct American literary studies can perhaps best be seen in debates over the configuration of American literary history in which maps have continually shaped our perspective on authors, genres, and the canon. Between the 1920s and 1950s (thus during the founding decades of American literary history as a scholarly field), wall posters titled the “Booklovers Map of America: A Chart of Certain Landmarks of Literary Geography” (1926) or “A Pictorial Map Depicting the Literary Development of the United States” (1952) offered snapshots of a map-based conception of literary production and consumption that plotted out book titles, iconic images, and author names across the surface of the national map (figure 13.13).
Recent editions of The Norton Anthology of American Literature or The Heath Anthology of American Literature still include maps in the endpapers—“North America to 1700” in front and “The United States: A Literary View” in back—thus suggestively turning the map into the graphic and material container of literary history.36 Indeed, if we accept Franco Moretti’s approaches to the novel, the conceptual tools of literary cartography emerge as a productive critical device because only by mapping the text (and Moretti really wants us to use graphic maps) will we “bring … to light relations that would otherwise remain hidden.”37 With the aid of the computational powers of “literary GIS” applications, new methodological models are now able to recover map-based and map-producing approaches to and interpretations of American literature. Through digitization, both the rare map insert and the ubiquitous word map are easily transformed into mappable metadata, so that any given text now can be equipped with a map discourse function capable of bridging the gap separating textual and cartographic representations of spaces that over time we have come to consider as real as they were understood to be imaginary.
Notes
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