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Activities: Context Activities Swamps, Dismal and Otherwise  Back to Context Activities
According to David C. Miller in his book Dark Eden, the idea of the swamp underwent an important change in the mid-nineteenth century. The swamp, he says, had long been full of theological and folk loric implications: "It was the domain of sin, death, and decay; the stage for witchcraft; the habitat of weird and ferocious creatures." But the Romanticism of Emerson and Thoreau in the first part of the century had changed how nature was viewed. For many, nature was neither an impediment to be overcome by rational social progress nor a howling "wilderness" to be cultivated by Christian piety. Rather, nature became an object of human experience, a field of signs in which the apprehending consciousness could see analogies to his or her (usually "his") truest "nature." So the swamp, too, began to exhibit shifting associations as it became a screen on which the observer could project his or her own fears or desires. It was potentially threatening and consuming, but also potentially generative, creative, and thrilling. One could get lost and swallowed up in the swamp (could get, that is, "swamped"), or one could find a new source of energy and power. This shift was associated with socio-cultural issues, as Miller observes: first, with "the erosion of patriarchal patterns of culture, motivated by an urge to control or suppress a 'female' nature as the source of heretical and potentially anarchic meaning"; second, with the South's power, conceived either as thrillingly resilient (as the South is assaulted by the North for its practices) or as cruelly inhuman (insofar as it practices slavery). The swamp, then, acts during this time as a figure for a variety of social and philosophical issues. And insofar as it tends to blend the threatening and the thrilling, it can be associated with gothic themes in general. Swamps are part of the symbolism of slavery's suffocating evil in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Dred, A Tale of the Dismal Swamp. Swamps can also be seen as symbolic of the problems of knowledge and repression in Herman Melville's Pierre and The Confidence-Man. According to Miller, however, swamps are most prominent as a symbol for, depending on the text, either the best or worst of southern society. They figure prominently in the work of southern writer William Gilmore Simms, for whom, in such novels as The Forayers, The Scout, and Woodcraft, the swamp stands for the conflicting connotations of the South. On the one hand, we have slavery and defeat, with their associations of stagnation, infirmity, self-pity, and lassitude. On the other hand, we have stalwart and fraternal community, with its associations of vigor, power, fecundity, and renewal. In the alternation between these two poles much of the gothic springs forth: When does comfort become stagnation? When does vigor become violence? Questions
[1876] François Regis Gignoux, View, Dismal Swamp, North Carolina (1850), courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Copyright 2002 Musem of Fine Arts, Boston, François Regis Gignoux; American (born in France), 1816-1882. View, Dismal Swamp, North Carolina, 1850; Oil on canvas; 78.74 x 120.01 cm. (31 x 47 1/4 in.). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Henry Herbert Edes, 1923, 23.184. Oil on canvas; southern swamp at sunset. As notions of nature changed in the mid-nineteenth century, the swamp began to be associated with the human potential to effect change on social problems. [2719] Alfred Rudolph Waud, Pictures of the South--Negro Quarters on Jefferson Davis's Plantation (1866), courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-116582]. Sketch of slave quarters and slaves on the plantation of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. [2767] H. L. Stevens, In the Swamp (1863), courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZC4-2522]. The swamp could be a refuge, especially for escaped slaves, displaced Native Americans, and exiled white communities such as the Acadians. [3356] War Department, Overseer Artayou Carrier whipped me. I was two months in bed sore from the whipping. My master come after I was whipped; He discharged the overseer. The very words of Poor Peter, Taken as he sat for his picture. Baton Rouge, Louisiana (1863), courtesy of the Still Picture Branch, National Archive and Records Administration. For slaves, escape became increasingly difficult over the course of the nineteenth century because of the rigid laws enacted in response to abolitionist activity. [5931] Worthington Whittredge, The Old Hunting Grounds (1864), courtesy of Reynolda House, Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The decaying Indian canoe among birch trees symbolizes the death of the Native American culture sentimentalized in Cooper's work and other frontier literature. [8095] Alfred R. Waud, Cyprus Swamp on the Opelousas Railroad, Louisiana (1866), courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-108302]. The image of the swamp--dark, mysterious, and potentially dangerous--provides an apt allegory for many social and philosophical issues faced by the United States during the nineteenth century. |
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