31 - Imagining the frontier

Summary

When Wallace Stegner writes of Susan Burling Ward, the heroine of his magisterial Western novel, Angle of Repose (1971), “she knew it was a deficiency in herself that her imagination was so controlled by things,” he offers a key insight into frontier aesthetics. Like Susan, who “was often unable to get expressiveness and individuality into figures and faces” until she placed them in some setting, writers of the frontier tend to derive character, or even the category of the human, from landscape and spatial metaphor. Defined as “the line of most rapid and effective Americanization” by Frederick Jackson Turner, the frontier has functioned as a grand spatial metaphor, the line between civilization and so-called savagery, Old World and New. In the collective imaginings of the United States, the frontier has also functioned to separate the USA from global imperial history, marking it as an exceptional national experiment.

In the heyday of Euro-American Manifest Destiny, Henry David Thoreau defined the frontier as wherever we front a fact. While Thoreau appreciates the non-human aspects of the environment, including what we might call things, his gloss upon the frontier considers it as a problem of human imagination and cognition. Thoreau writes in Walden (1854) that to “stand right fronting and face to face with a fact” would be the equivalent of the sacrifice of the self to fact's “sweet edge”; fact is so radically unlike the self, in other words, that truly to comprehend a fact amounts to selfnegation. Such confrontations with non-identity dramatize the frontier experience.