{ Epilogue }

The discourse of the picturesque reshaped how Americans understood their landscape, but it largely ended in the mid-1870s. The decline of the picturesque can be illustrated in two emblematic works: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s 1872 short story “In Search of the Picturesque” and William Cullen Bryant’s enormous 1874 scenery book Picturesque America. Woolson’s fictional story is a satire of travel in which a young urban woman accompanies her grandfather to the countryside “in search of the picturesque” and instead only finds development. This story signals the shift in literary interest in rural subjects toward regionalism. Regionalism disavowed the earlier focus on picturesque landscapes, instead featuring distinctive regional dialects and cultural practices that reflected the newly created social sciences. Bryant’s Picturesque America was a Reconstruction-era project aimed at reconnecting the divided nation through a nonhierarchical unification under the sign of “picturesque.” Adding not only the West but also the South to the compendium of American scenery, Picturesque America imagined the entire nation as picturesque. In this formulation, the picturesque became synonymous with landscape in general. Although the picturesque lost its appeal as an authoritative discourse for shaping the American landscape in the latter third of the nineteenth century, this book demonstrates that the spaces that dominated American life in the twentieth century and beyond are owed almost entirely to the transformative project of the mid-nineteenth-century picturesque.

The City Sketch

Although the picturesque sketch genre is primarily associated with rural subjects, it was also applied to city life during the mid-nineteenth century, when urban populations were undergoing unprecedented growth. Chapter 2 argues that the newly popular picturesque city sketch helped the emergent middle class to establish its identity as it attained a distinctive position between the wealthy and the working classes. Walking the streets, the middle-class picturesque city sketcher turned the class-divided city into picturesque tableaux that were far less antagonistic to city life than the sensationalist characterizations that were central to the dominant mode of city writing in midcentury. The chapter examines city sketches and fiction derived from the genre, written by Edgar Allan Poe, Lydia Maria Child, George “Gaslight” Foster, Margaret Fuller, Cornelius Mathews, and others. Although city sketchers helped articulate a middle-class identity, the picturesque at times tended to give way to a sublime mode in which the city crowd threatened to absorb the middle class into its undifferentiated mass.

The Country Book

Picturesque aesthetics and an increased focus on men’s domestic life shaped the rapid growth of the suburbs in the mid-nineteenth century, one of the most consequential reconfigurations of American understandings of national space. This suburban development had its own popular literary genre in the period, the country book. Although the country book is now largely forgotten and many of its more prominent examples have lapsed into obscurity, canonical writers such as Herman Melville wrote in the genre, and Thoreau’s Walden can also be understood in the context of this genre. The country book’s vision of the suburbs as a site of picturesque male domesticity that allowed for both privacy and homosocial intimacy countered a dominant vision of urban masculinity as public, individualistic, and competitive. Although the country book in general offers an idealized vision of male suburban life, individual texts also often feature deferrals, debility, and even death that threaten both male privacy and intimacy. The country book promoted the imaginative investments in suburban development at the same time that it hinted at the contradictions at the heart of middle-class masculine identity that foreclosed on that dream. In this way, as with the park movement texts discussed in Chapter 3, the country books that supported mid-nineteenth-century suburban development expressed both the social aspirations and fears of bourgeois men.

The Park Movement Picturesque rus in urb

In the mid-nineteenth century, the urban bourgeoisie sought to respond to challenges of city life through the creation of public urban parks in a wide-scale project that has been termed the “park movement.” The park movement involved not only the design and development of parks, but also extensive writings starting in 1840s that depicted the social benefits to be gained by building picturesque rus in urbe (“country in the city”) spaces. The writings of the park movement, dominated by the topic of New York’s Central Park but also encompassing comparisons between European and American public spaces and the broader possibilities of U.S. urban parks, included work by Andrew Jackson Downing, Frederick Law Olmsted, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and even a novel by Sylvester Judd that centered on public park design. This chapter argues that although the park was ostensibly envisioned as an egalitarian instrument of social reform, bringing together the genders and classes in an idealized intimate public sphere, ultimately the literature of the park movement most fully addressed the anxieties of bourgeois men about their authority over female-dominated domestic spaces, as well as seeking to reclaim moral order against working-class men’s domination of the city streets.

The New England Village Novel and Picturesque Reform

This chapter focuses on the New England village novel, a prestigious subgenre that figured in many of the midcentury’s critical assessments of what constituted “American literature” but that is now largely forgotten. Once important novels like Sylvester Judd’s Margaret (1845), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Kavanagh (1849), Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Elsie Venner (1861), and Henry Ward Beecher’s Norwood (1869) tell us about middle-class social values and their investment in reform in their depictions of New England village life during this period of time. This chapter explores some of the contradictions inherent in locating idealized theological and social change within the residual space of the New England village. As a consequence of these contradictions, the utopia of the New England village novel becomes literally “no place,” frozen between nostalgia for a unified national community that never existed and hope that through reform the village could fulfill utopian possibilities for the nation. This genre also maps out the transformation of attitudes toward social reform from the picturesque utopianism of Judd’s Margaret to a much narrower vision of the transformative possibilities of the picturesque in Beecher’s post-Civil War novel, Norwood, a quarter of a century later. This transformation reveals the importance of the picturesque to an alternative history of the mid-nineteenth-century American novel and explores the rise and decline of middle-class use of the picturesque as an authoritative discourse to reshape spaces and enact social change in American life.

The Travel Sketch

Focusing on the early work of three well-known American Romantic authors who are not best known as travel writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau, the first chapter examines the midcentury rise in popularity of the picturesque travel sketch genre. Writers engaged in this genre used the picturesque to consider the effects of history on the landscape and meditate on America’s past and future. Although modern scholarship has typically dismissed the picturesque travel sketch as superficial, this chapter demonstrates that writers used the spatiotemporal protocols of the picturesque to think through American exceptionalism, particularly the view that the frontier landscape helps to make the nation unique. This topic is filtered through the travelers’ views of picturesque scenery that touch upon the relationship of human to natural time (“deep time”), the resonances of the national past on the present (particularly in the residual presence of Native Americans and the colonial past), and the future effects of spatial expansion and new people (particularly immigrants) on the American landscape.

{ Introduction }

Introducing the book as a whole, this chapter argues that the rise in popularity of the picturesque in mid-nineteenth-century America was a discipline of transforming landscapes to serve bourgeois ideological purposes, not simply a vogue in landscape aesthetics. Centering on the work of Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852), whose influential writings and designs shaped the creation of the suburbs, new urban parks, and reconfigured domestic spaces, the Introduction traces the social meanings of the picturesque in late eighteenth-century England and its popularization in the United States in scenery books, aesthetic treatises, and design books in the 1830s and 1840s. Literary landscape genres had a role in popularizing the picturesque and helping middle-class Americans to imagine a new national landscape. In theorizing this role, the Introduction also recovers a literary tradition that has been largely excluded from the dominant narratives about nineteenth-century American literature.