Clio 45:1 2015
14 Vico and His Patron Sain t
sinners, an age of reflection which is also an age of decline. Again,
though, Vico has applied Augustin e's understanding of sacred
history to the secular world. For Vico, this narrative is the
universal story of all thin gs hum an, while what is divine simply
continues as it is.
Nancy du Bois Marcus has identified the point at which the
two views most explicitly diverge: ''Wh ereas Augustin e agrees
with Paul, that as adults we should put away childish thin gs, Vico
gives the childhood of the hum an race a much more important
role." 22 This is the crucial parting of the ways. In Augustine's
sacred history, the corso is overcome and transcended by the ricorso.
The Mosaic law, for instance, is a stepping-stone; the pious
Christian embraces it only insofar as Christ is prefigured in it ( CG,
20.28.1034-35). The only value or meaning in the corso is given by
the ricorso, by Christ's incarnation. Vico is not so quick to discard
the wisdom of the past. There is meaning and truth in every age;
the earliest theological poets. do not speak with the analytical
reason of René -Descartes, but they nonetheless speak truths.
Poetic wisdom is always more trustworthy than reflective
wisdom, because "barbarism ... for lack of reflection does not
know how to feign" (NS, 1817). Vichian providence is always at
work, but it does not move toward an ultimate telos; nor does it,
as Augustine would have it, increasingly make clear the meanings
in the cycles of history.
Vico tells us that he accepts the role of God's providence, and
there is no reason to disbelieve this. However, like Socrates, he is
not willing to claim to have knowledge of divine things. All that
he can speak of are human things, and so sacred history can never
be his object of focus. The Hebrews are there in the background,
and God has his plan for them, but Vico is too prudent to speak
fully on the matter. His history concerns the gentiles, the pagans,
the creators of human things and earthly polities. Nonetheless, it
is his "particular protector," Augustine, who, in speaking of divine
things, points Vico in the proper direction. Just as Aeneas, the first
Roman, guides Dante Alighieri through the Inferno (c. 1320),
Augustine, the last Roman, is there to steer Vico to safety.
Emory Unioersity
Atlanta, Georgia
NICHOLAS CARR
Francis Park.man's Dialectic of
Environment
Francis Parkman was a sophomore when he conceived the
plan that would occupy his life: a history of the struggle between
France and Britain in America "or, in other words, the history
of the American forest; for this was the light in which I regarded
it. ... I was haunted with wilderness images day and night."? That
view has (·been matched by the interest of posterity, for if
Parkman's eight volumes of history continue to garner a modi-
cum of interest, he is best known as a writer of the frontier. The
Oregon Trail (1849) narrates a research trip that he took in
preparation for nis historical labors, and it offers a concentrated
dose of his great themes-Indians, manhood, the drama of the
self, and the wilderness. As Parkman's best-known work, it has
shaped most scholarly assessments of his vision of nature. 2
1. Parkman to Martin Brimmer, 1886, in Letters of Francis Parkman, ed. Wilbur R.
Jacobs (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1960), 1:184n4. All letters cited are from this
edition.
2. Works that discuss Parkman and the environment primarily with reference to
The Oregon Trail include: Edward Halsey Foster, The Civilized Wilderness: Backgrr11111ds to
American Romantic Literature, 1817-1860 (New York: Free Press, 1975), 41--44; Philip G.
Terrie, "The Other Within: Indianization on the Oregon Trail," Nen/ E11gla11d Quarter!J
64.3 (1991): 376-92; Harold Beaver, "Parkman's Crack-Up: A Bostonian on the
Oregon Trail," Neu/ England Quarter!J 48.1 (1975): 84-103; Ken Egan Jr., "Poetic
Travellers: Figuring the Wild in Parkman, Fuller, and Kirkland," Western American
Literature 44.1 (2009): 49-62; Frank M. Meola, "A Passage Through 'Indians':
Masculinity and Violence in Francis Parkman's The Orego11 Trail," American
Transcendental Q11arter!J 13.1 (1999): 5-25 (hereafter cited as Meola); L. Hugh Moore,
"Francis Parkman on the Oregon Trail: A Study in Cultural Prejudice," Western
American Literature 12.3 (1977): 185-97; Joseph L. Tribble, "The Paradise of the
Imagination: The Journeys of The Oregon Trail," Nen/ E11gla11d Q11arter!J 46.4 (1973):
523-42; and Daniel Aaron, "Two Boston Fugitives: Dana and Parkman," in American
Î ,;fo,r,-,fu-ro Îulf.,,.,.o ,u1Ä TAnn/nrr,r• Hrr,,.ur .., "Alf,..,..,,,....,., ,.,( T-J,.,,,_.., 1\T,.,,.f~ \~,,..;,-/,, c.rl Ro~,,.. .. ),...,, l)
16 Francis Parkm an's Dialectic of Environm ent
But The Oregon Trait-the tale of a man drawn obsessively to
the wilderness, only to be repulsed by most of what he finds
there-is riven by dualities, and these have carried over into the
reception of Parkman's work. His response to the environment
has been called that of a backward "Brahmin among Untouch-
ables," a view largely guided by reliance on his early works. 3
Perhaps understandably, his most recent biographer, Wilbur R.
Jacobs, has offered a counter-reading that draws on a wider
range of Parkman's output to describe him as a "Naturalist-
Environmental Savant.':" This essay attempts to build on Jacobs's
work and to further balance narrow assessments of Parkman by
drawing on the full extent of his writing about nature. However,
unlike Jacobs, this is not an attempt to promote a new view of
Parkman as protoenvironmentalist. Rather, the reading offered
here attempts to reconcile opposing interpretations by accepting
the stark duality running through Parkman's thought. The result
is neither a picture of a pioneering ecologist, nor one of a
regressive elitist, although he was, at times, each of these.
However, the relationship between them was not a matter of
static contradiction but of dialectic. The savant and the
conservative drove each other, and if Parkman felt an especial
attraction to the' wilderness, it was in part because he also had a
powerful urge to destroy it.
His work pushed its way to the extremes of the binary
categories that it deployed and, through a series of dualistic
tropes, narrated the historical passage to modernity. In this
transition, feudalism, France, wilderness, and Indians yielded to
what he saw as the essential markers of American nationality:
liberty and commerce, British heritage, and a tamed landscape.
The central duality, of which these were all elaborations, was
that of nature and civilization. This arrangement of themes,
moreover, found its aesthetic counterpart in the division
Voloshin (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 115-32.
3. Francis Jennings, "Francis Parkman: A Brahmin among Untouchables," William
and Mary Q11arter/y 42.3 (1985): 305-28. In addition to Jennings, works that discuss
Parkman and the environment primarily with reference to The Co11spirary of Pontiac (1851)
include: Stephen P. Knadler, "Francis Parkman's Ethnography of the Brahrnin Caste
and The History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac," American Literature 65.2 (1993): 215-
38; and Robert Shulman, "Parkman's Indians and American Violence," The Massachusetts
Retnen: 12.2 (1971): 221-39. Both Pontiac and The Oregon Trail were completed when
Parkman was in his twenties and were seen by him as works of apprenticeship.
4. Wilbur R. Jacobs, "Francis Parkman: Naturalist-Environmental Savant," Pacific
,n ... : .... /..1 ., 11n n ..., \. 'lA1 c/.. rr
TJ ~_ .. _ _: __ c._
cc (' ;.__..J __
,. ,,
Nicholas Carr 17
between "romance" and the real. Yet Parkman's partiality
toward the former is well-known, and it carried over into a
complicated sympathy for most of his premodern categories,
none more so than nature itself. The imperative of civilization
was to conquer nature, and yet the ongoing realization of that
goal drove a strengthening desire for its own antidote in
romance and wilderness. That very polarization, however, only
reinforced the instrumental divide between the modern self and
an othered nature. If Parkman's environmental thought went to
the extremes that are so characteristic of him, it was, in the end,
located within the confines of the American nineteenth-century
market, even if that is also exactly what he was trying to escape
by going out into the wilderness.
These tensions gave layers to Parkman's image of nature, and
appreciating those layers requires a consideration of the full
range of his oeuvre and the context in which it was formed. The
first of seven volumes of his masterwork, France and England in
North America, did not appear until 1865, when he was in his
forties. Preceding that was a period of exhaustive research, of
family life (three children, two of whom survived) and death (his
son in 1857, his wife in 1858), and of efforts by Parkman to get
a novel and à terrible nervous ailment out of his system. The
former was, at- least technically, a success (Vassall Morton was
published in 1856); the latter was, famously, an ongoing failure.
"The enemy," as he dubbed his crippling psychosomatic
upsets, dogged him throughout his life. As Jacobs (among
others) has emphasized, Parkman's illness provides one way into
a reading of his work, including its treatment of the environ-
ment. 5 Parkman himself acknowledged that a "vehement liking"
for outdoor pursuits "far oftener indicates a bodily defect" than
anything else, and even as he struggled with his nerves, "his
thoughts were always in the forests . . . filling him with vague
cravings impossible to satisfy." Still, try to satisfy them he did by
pushing himself to ever-greater feats of hardihood. To a "mind
over-strained" he added a "body over-taxed" until, out on the
5. Wilbur R. Jacobs, Francis Parema», Historian as Hero: The Formative Years (Austin:
U of Texas P, 1991). Others who place much reliance on Parkman's illness for their
readings include Meola, 13; Kirn Townsend, "Francis Parkman and the Male Tradition,"
.American Q11arter/y 38.1 (1986): 97-113; and David Wall, "Francis Parkman's
Grotesque Body: Disease, Disgust and Desire in The Orego11 Trail," Europea» foumai of
.Amencan C11/t11re 27.1 (2008): 29-42. On what "the enemy" involved, see Parkman to
Georee E. Ellis. 1864. 1:17S-84.

18 Francis Parkman's Dialectic of Environment
Oregon Trail, they both broke down.6 Parkman had to dictate
his travelogue while taking a spa cure, for his nerves could not
support the attempt to write. The rest of his life would be a
highly managed regimen. Sparing the use of his eyes, he often
had source materials read aloud and dictated his text. When able
to write, he used a wire device to guide his pen across the page,
for he had to work in darkened rooms. A good day might
involve two hours' work, but he required frequent intermissions
of rest, sometimes lasting for years, during which he resorted to
therapeutic gardening. Parts of The Conspiracy of Pontiac were
written at the rate of six lines per day.7 In other words, Park-
man's formative experience of nature was as something to be
overcome, both out on the frontier and within himself.
Yet, partly because of that experience, he was ineluctably
drawn to the forest, and behind this attraction lay an idea of
romance that expressed Parkrnan's lifelong cultural concerns:
"no romance of warlike achievernent-c-all peace and utilitar-
ianism.... Matter of fact, universally prevalent. The traveller's
attempt to find a hero. Abandons America in despair.... The
traveller in Europe. Art, nat:u,re, history combine .... America's
remaining beauty. 'Her wildness."8 To read Parkman's wilderness
through the prism of romance is to do no more than take him at
his word. He emphatically connected romance with an upper-
case Nature, and linked both with a campaign against the
modern world. Lamenting his "enlightened age," he valued the
"halo of romance and poetry" that still adorned Europe. There,
Nature was "polished by the hand of art, and invested with a
thousand associations by the fancies and the deeds of ages."
But, in America, art had "done her best to ruin, not to adorn,
the face of Nature. She has torn down the forests, and blasted
the mountains into fragments; dammed up the streams, and
drained the lakes, and threatens to leave the whole continent
bare and raw."9
The link between environment and romance meant that
Parkman's attitude to the wilderness would be marked by duality.
6. Parkman to Ellis, 1864, 1:177.
7. Parkman to Ellis, 1864, 1:180-83.
8. Francis Parkman, The Journals of Francis Parkman, ed. Mason Wade (New York:
Harper and Bros, 1947), 1 :277. Hereafter cited as journals.
9. Wilbur R. Jacobs, "Francis Park.man's Oration 'Romance in America,"' American
r'Y""\ r..,,,,., ,,..,,-,.
.,.. ,.., "" , .. I"\-.r. /A/ l"\""'J TT
Nicholas Carr 19
Romance insisted on a bifurcation between mere externals-
"the scenes of Nature," "the rough features of Nature," "the
face of Nature"-and the "associations" that needed to be
"invested" in them by "fancies," "the hand of art," and "the
halo of romance and poetry" ("Romance in America," 696-97).
This division between outward matter and inner spirit was funda-
mental to Parkman's thought. He admired James Fenimore
Cooper's evocations of forest scenery, but he stressed that
Cooper's real gift was his going beneath the "mere rendering of
material forms" to find the "very spirit of the wilderness.t""
Nature to Parkman was less a physical phenomenon than a
metaphysical one-"life," "spirit," "poetry"-that could be
divined within it. This was elevated to a basic principle of
ontology for his own work: "Faithfulness to the truth of history
involves far more than a research, however patient and
scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with
the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a
whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to
imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time."!'
If Parkman's writing was ultimately a history of the forest, it
is because that forest was central to the romance through which
he found mèaning in America's past. In the beginning,
America-the domain of nature-was "sepulchral," "waste,"
"solitude": in short, a land outside or beyond history.12 It is only
with Samuel de Champlain that "life" comes to the continent,
because only the "banded powers" ("indomitable soldiers and
devoted priests") of France combine both a spiritual ideal and
material force (Pioneers, 1:13, 241). The "mighty task of con-
quering this rich wilderness for civilization" was the te/os of
Parkman's history, as it was of so many others', for since at least
Cotton Mather, America has often been about the light arising
13
from darkness. Accordingly, when France allied itself with the
10. Francis Parkman, "The Works of James Fenimore Cooper," North American
Revie11174 (1852): 147-61, 155-56.
11. Francis Parkman, Pioneers of France in the Ne111 World, in France and England in
North America (1865-92; repr., New York: Library of America, 1983), 1:16. Hereafter
cited as Pioneers and France and England, respectively.
12. Francis Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War ofter the Conquest of
Canada, in The Oregon Trail,· The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851; repr., New York: Library of
America, 1991), 359; and Pioneers, 1:244.
13. Francis Parkman, preface to Historical Account of Bouquet's Expedition against the
Ohio Indians in 1764, by Henry Bouguet (1765; repr., Cincinnati, OH: Robert Clarke,
1868) xi.

20 Francis Parkman's Dialectic of Environment
wilderness and the Indians, Parkman's focus and sympathy-
indeed the cause of civilization itself-switched to Britain.14 For
all of his fascination with the inscrutable forest, it was, in his
terms, the antithesis of progress, and it came to stand for a sort
of metaphysical danger in the twin dramas of civilized selfhood
and collective nationhood that he depicted. Both entailed, as
Parkman knew, the destruction of nature. The natural world was
from the start marked for "final doom," and his prose teemed
with macabre imagery-trees were "skeletons," their branches
emerging "like bones of drowned mammoths . . . above the
sullen water."15 Always more than just a physical space, the
"wild primeval world" of nature, where mountains were
"lonely" and pines "funereal," was marked by a deathly spirit.16
Such associations are familiar to the romance narrative, in
which nature often figures as a descent into the trials of experi-
ence. The forest is an archetypal "threshold symbol" through
which heroes passen route to a new reality where the expansion
of their individual consciousness (by coming to terms with what
is found in nature) heralds the eventual remaking of the social
sphere as well.17 In other romantic histories, like those of
George Bancroft or ·William. H. Prescott, the encounter with
nature is where· the hero finds, loses, and reîains a promised
land, an Eden where history begins anew.1 But Parkman's
natural world is where history ends (or at least does not exist); it
is a realm of death instead of life. Where Bancroft's colonists
can work with nature, and are blessed by it, and where Prescott's
Cortés is aided by a miraculous environment, Parkman's
14. Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, in France and Engla11d, 2:1296; hereafter cited as
Montcals: See also Knadler, "Francis Parkrnan's Ethnography," 224-25.
15. Parkman, Pontiac, 347; Mo11tcalm, 2:1065.
16. Parkman, Montcalm, 2:986. This theme began early: Francis Parkman, "The
Scalp-Hunter," Knickerbocker Magazine, April 1845, 297-303.
17. Northrop Frye, A St11rfy of English Romanticism (New York: Random House,
1968), 37. Readings of Parkman as romancer include Martin Green, The Great
American .Aduentare (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 109; and Daniel James Sundahl,
"Cunning Corridors: Parkrnan's LaSalle as Quest-Romance," Coll!)! Library Q11arterfy
25.2 (1989): 109-24.
18. George Bancroft, History ef the United States, from the Discovery ef the American
Continent (Boston: Little Brown, 1834-74), 1:249-51; Cecilia Tichi, Nel/I World, Nel/I
Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), 187-
205; William I-I. Prescott, History ef the Conquest ifMexico (1843; repr., London: George
Allen and U nwin, 1949), 254-55; and Donald A. Ringe, "The Function of Landscape
- • ,,..., .....-, H .,._ T T"" I I /'\ , I r- / ,t
Nicholas Carr 21
Europeans must struggle against it. The civilized human
condition is one of alienation from nature, and the two are
locked in hostility. Through a landscape "buried in dense and
heavy forest, choked with bushes and the carcasses of fallen
trees," characters bearing light and civilization had to fight every
step of their way (Montcalm, 2:991). It was Parkman's intense
desire to escape nineteenth-century "Peace-society" and "she-
philosophers" that sent him to the forest and its romantic
possibilities.19 But it was telling that what he found there, as the
alternative to modernity, was death.
The Oregon Trail has been read as the sort of allegory of self-
hood that often permeates the romance, wherein the frontier is
both the setting and a character in its own right in the confron-
tation between self and other: the human and nonhuman, the
civilized and wild, the conscious and unconscious.i" This was
writ large in Parkman's history, a narrative that found its te/os in
European modernity and, therefore, cast nature as a reversion to
the premodern. That could be inscribed as new world innocence,
as it was in Bancroft, where nature was benevolent or at worst
merely useless, and therefore always reconcilable. His settlers
move from the vice-ridden cities of the old world to the healing
and revivifying' landscape of the new (just as Bancroft himself
turned from the .cold Whigs of Boston to the rising democracy).
This American Eden, where nature was both agent and object in
the quest for unity with the non-self, was a mythos of
beginnings that fit well with the narrative of modernization. Its
heroes break free from the inherited burdens of history, and
their passage from innocence to experience culminates in a
happy sociality. They construct new J erusalems-cities on the
hill, republics of virtue-on the principles of harmony that they
found on their sojourn through nature.
But Parkman was skeptical of new worlds and, in many
respects, of the New World: ''We are a paruen« nation with the
faults and follies of a paroenu. . . . A too exclusive pursuit of
material success has notoriously cramped and vitiated our
growth."21 To a nostalgic mind, the sort of America that Bancroft
19. "Romance in America," 696;]01m1als, 1:256.
20. Beaver, "Parkman's Crack-Up," 93; Terrie, "The Other Within," 379; and
Tribble, "The Paradise of the Imagination"; see also Richard Slotkin, Regeneration
throttgh Violence: The Mythology ef the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown:
Wesleyan UP, 1973), 302.
,,. l"\/"""t\ r- ,rr,. -, -, 19-,,t 21. Parkman to Boston Daily Advertiser, September 4, 186L 1:143. emohasis in orizinal.
22 Francis Parkman's Dialectic of Environment
celebrated-all renewal and endless possibility-could also be
read as a place of anxiety and oblivion. Not alone among
American romancers, Parkman worried about the snake lurking
within a "ruined Eden." If there was a quest for freedom here, it
was freedom from an oppressive wilderness. 22 And if there was
innocence, it was that of the civilized Redcoats assailed by a
malevolent forest (Montcalm, 2:1262). Parkman's American
Adam was thrown into a postlapsarian nature, and both his
individual and his national selfhood were to be forged in battle
against it. The challenge was not to grow, change, or reconcile
but to remain steadfastly unchanged: civilized. And victory
could only be marked by imposing himself on nature."
Admittedly nature could at times present a benign face, and
the spectacle that charmed Bancroft's or Prescott's pioneers was
not unknown to Parkman's. But whenever it appeared, the veil
of benignity was soon tom off to reveal a reality of solitude and
terror. A kind wildèmess could never be more than an "agree-
able but delusive assurance."24 Thus, in addition to its other
evils, nature was a zone of shifting appearances where surfaces
masked the truth beneath: "a leafy maze, a mystery of shade, a
universal hiding-place;' where .murder might lurk unseen at its
victim's side." The Indians and (eventually) the French, in their
attacks on the British, are concealed by a conniving forest, with
its "walls of verdure, silent as death, yet haunted everywhere
with ambushed danger" (Montcalm, 2:1074 and 1066).
Parkman's nature, then, became the object of those anxieties
of conspiracy that plagued the American romance-with its
intermixture of true and false, real and unreal. Henry James
characterized America by its lack of the accepted marks of
civilization, and these absences drew American writers toward
romance as a form disconnected from "the way things
happen."25 The romance dealt with "experience disengaged,
22. Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., Old Mo11ry: The Mythology of America's Upper Class (New
York: Vintage, 1989), 54. On the "ruined Eden," see Virgil L. Lokke, "The Critic in
the Context of His Time," in Ruined Eden of the Present: Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe:
Critical Essoys in Honor of Dami Abel, ed. G. R. Thompson and Virgil L. Lokke (West
Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1981), 15-26, 22.
23. Egan, "Poetic Travellers," 52. Compare with Moore, "Francis Parkman on the
Oregon Trail," 185-97; and Meola, 6.
24. Francis Parkman, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, in France and
England, 1:769.
2S. F--Tenrv lames. preface to The American, in Literary Criticism, ed. Leon Edel (New
Nicholas Carr 23
disembroiled, disencumbered" and cut the cable that linked
inner imagination with outer world.26 The bad conscience of this
sacrifice of relation was the fear of a too-tenuous correspon-
dence, or no correspondence at all, between mind and world-
fears that were paralleled by doubts about the nation's reality
matching its promise.27
But deceit was supposed to be a vice of the city. Confidence
men, painted women, and most other objects of nineteenth-
century American paranoia-immigrants, Masons, Catholics,
banks, monopolies, corporations-were typically urban phenom-
ena." And at the heart of their falsity usually lay artifice.
Nature-natural laws, natural sincerity, the natural man-was
supposed to be the cure for these problems, which were often
ascribed to hyper- or perverted civilization.29 Parkman, too, had
his scheming traders and politicians, but it was his wilderness
(and its denizens, the Indians) that dominated and that bore the
violent brunt of this metaphysical problem. Nature, the sanctu-
ary of many romantics, became for Parkman the very thing that
subverted romanticism's faith in matter as a manifestation of
spirit." Contrary to what Ralph Waldo Emerson had said,
natural facts were not symbols of spiritual facts. They were lies.
In the allegorical terms of romance, therefore, the conquering
of nature-as the realm of falsity and deceit-marked the
Macmillan, 1879), 42-44; and Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance: St11dies in
Broceden Bro111n, Cooper, Hanabome, and Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 6-11.
26. James, preface to The American, 2:1064-65.
27. Michael Davitt Bell, The Development of the .American Romance: The Sacrifice of
Relation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980).
28. John Higham, Strangers i11 the Land: Patterns of American Natioism, 1860-1925
(New York: Atheneum, 1978); and Karen Halttunen, Coifiden» Men and Painted Wome11:
A St11rfy ofMiddle-Class Ct1lt11re in Atnerica, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982).
29. David Levin, History as Ramastic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motlry, and Parkman
(Stanford: Stanford UP, 1959), 52-53; Kevin Hutchings, Romantic Ecologies and Colonial
Crt!t11res in the British Atla11tic World, 1770-1850 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 2009),
156-57; and Meola, 8. On Parkman's skepticism of "natural man," see Stephen
Tonsor, "The Conservative as Historian: Francis Parkman," Modem Age 27.3 (1983):
246-55, 249-50.
30. Evan Carton, The Rhetoric of .Amenca» Romance: Dialectic and lde11ti(y i11 Emerson,
Diceinson, Poe, and Hauabome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985), 1; and Harry
Levin, The Po111er of Blaceness: Hauabome, Poe, Melville (London: Faber and Faber, 1958),
25. For others, nineteenth-century anxieties spurred efforts to preserve the wilder-
ness, or at least the memory of it: Lee Clark Mitchell, Wit11esses to a Vanishing America:
The Nineteet1th-Ce11tt1ry Response (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981), 28-35.

24 Francis Parkm an's Dialectic of Environm ent
attainm ent of knowledge and the object of the quest. Britain's
war was conducted again st both France and its unholy ally, the
wilderness, and the clim actic attack on Quebec became a
microcosm of the entire narrative, for not only was it the capital
of New France, it was also blessed with all the advantages that a
sympathetic natural world could bestow: "Quebec sat perched
upon her rock. . . . Quebec was a natural fortress" (Montcalm,
2:1340-41). In attacking it, the Redcoats were assaulting not
only the French but nature itself, and their improbable scaling
of its heights marked not only a victory of Britain over France,
but equally, a triumph of the human, of history, over the natural,
and of knowledge over ignorance. While he wished to use
romance against the "cool reason" of his age, Parkman's vision
of nature actually did the opposite. The link between mastery of
the wilderness and the ~ossibility of truth was the very picture
of instrumental thought. 1
'•
Nature, as a-limit on knowledge and action, and as a region of
darkness and death, was the. only place where the essential moral
struggle of romanc~ could occur.32 Parkman's frontier was the
locus of a "grim romance" that enacted in microcosm his whole
philosophy oflife, which held the struggle with disorder to be
the test of selfhoÓd.33 As in Joseph Conrad later, the point was
not only to face up to the brooding natural world but to main-
tain, against all its chaos, an "idea of Fidelity."34 Parkman,
however, knew fidelity to the self only as a mastery of the non-
self. As a limit, therefore, the frontier existed as something "to
cross, to push back, to go beyond."35 Set apart as an other-
worldly space, it could serve as the site of the transgressive
3 L On instrumental reason, see Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York:
Continuum, 1974), 3-57.
32. Fredric Jameson, "Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre," New Literary History
7.1 (1975): 135-63, 140; and Jonathan M. Smith, "Moral Maps and Moral Places in
the Work of Francis Parkman," in Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies, ed.
Steven D. Hoelscher, Paul C. Adams, and Karen E. Till (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota
P, 2001), 300-16, 312.
33. See Parkman's preface to the fourth edition (1872) of The Oregon Trail in The
Oregon Trail: The Conspiracy of Pontiac (New York: Library of America, 1991), 938.
34. Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record (New York: Doubleday, 1925), xxi.
35. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, "On the Superiority of Anglo-American
Literature," in Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara I-labberjam (London:
- _,...,.. ~ ....
Nicholas Carr 25
"regeneration through violence" that his romance entailed. 36
That sort of regeneration was as much the product of the
romantic fall into self-consciousness as the back-to-nature
idealism of William Wordsworth or Henry David Thoreau. And
while the same subject-object relation to nature lay behind both,
it is the latter, conciliatory version that sits more comfortably
with the vision of romanticism as expressing an early ecologism
that valued the "unimproved" natural world.
It has been argued that Parkman evinces this anti.modern
environmental consciousness, and often he seems to have seen
it that way himself. The irritable older man reinforced his
youthful laments of America's obsession with the "rational and
profitable," and it was through expressions of affinity for nature
that Parkman found his most effective and socially acceptable
way of raging against the vulgarity and commercialism of his
country.37 His travels were often driven by a desire "to see the
wilderness where it was as yet uninvaded by the hand of man,"
and he fulminated against the railways, the roads, and the
"despicable manufacturing place[s]" that did the invading
(journals, 1':~1, 43, 205, 60).
I should beglad to have the big hotel and, above all, the railroad
swept out of existence-from which, I suppose, you will conclude
that I am a had American,-which is true in as much as I do not
pin my faith on railroads and steam engines .... When I first knew
Lake George, the islands of the Narrows were thickly covered by
pine, spruce, and fir-trees .... The nouveau ricbe, who is one of the
pests of this country, has now got possession of the lake and its
islands. For my part, I would gladly destroy all his works and restore
Lake George to its native savagery.38
Notwithstanding the defining insistence of the burgeoning
ecocritical literature-that sometimes a forest really is a forest-
it is also essential to understand Parkman's use of nature as a
form of anti.urbanism. His affirmation of the wilderness cannot
be separated from his rejection of the mélange of vices that he
saw emanating from the modern city.39 In a new preface to The
36. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 269.
37. "Romance in America," 697; Meola, 19-21; and Knacller, "Francis Parkman's
Ethnography," 220-23.
38. Parkman to Abbé Henri-Raymond Casgrain, September 30 and October 5,
1892, 2:264-65.
39. Leo Marx, "The Puzzle of Anti-Urbanism in Classic American Literature," in
T 1,,,,,,.,,.,f1J't"/J ,n,A thD .,d.,.no-rir,,.,n TT..,../~,.," -,:::;~,..,.;,. ... ,,.,.. Hrr.-,r "'"'' .,.,~,, r.:.J., , -·~"' r ~·,,.,, __ ,.,_,, . . . ...l
26 Francis Parkman's Dialectic of Environment
Oregon Trail in 1872, he reflected on the "melancholy'' prospect
of the wild plains being tamed: by "Commerce and Gold"; by
"the disenchanting shriek of the locomotive"; by "woman's
rights"; in short, by the "triumphant commonplace. We were no
prophets to foresee all this; and, had we foreseen it, perhaps
some perverse regrets might have tempered the ardor of our
rejoicing.?" The lament for a nature that once had been was
inextricable from the lament of the culture that now was.
His history, however, never wavered from the inevitability of
such progress, even if it is better known for the symbolic
centrality of its premoderns: French knights (spiritual or
temporal), Indians, and wilderness.41 Parkman's habit of dwelling
luridly or eloquently on these actors has led some to perceive a
"defecting symgathy" toward the victims of enlightenment's
onward march. And there is, after all, a sense in which he did
not simply doubt "civilization," he rejected it-whatever its
inevitability.43 Despite his intemperance toward the Other, it was
also the Other of nineteenth-century civilization, and he could
therefore confess to a "burning desire to get among fevers and
volcanoes, niggers, Indians and other outcasts of humanity.Y"
He prized his Lakota-relics and, late in the piece 886), even p ulterior good, and he attacks the great redwood forests of the
made a rather out-of-character plea for the Indians.4
That has not been enough to rehabilitate Parkman's racial
thought.46 But a similar volte face on the other "doom" of his
Michael C. Jaye and Ann Chalmers Watts (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1981), 63-
80, 64. Compare with Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral
Ideal i11 America (New York: Oxford UP, 1964), 264.
40. Parkman, Oregon Trail, 938.
41. On the symbolically central and its juxtaposition with the "socially peripheral,"
see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London:
Methuen, 1986), 5. In this I am following Wall, "Francis Parkman's Grotesque Body,"
35-36.
42. Knadler, "Francis Parkman's Ethnography," 217. See also Egan, "Poetic
Travellers," 54; Terrie, "The Other Within," 378.
43. Francis Parkman, "A Convent at Rome," Harper's Magazine 81 (Aug 1890):
448-54, 450; Parkman to Casgrain, May 9, 1875, 2:82.
44. Parkman to Ephraim George Squier, 2 April 1850, 1:68.
45. Francis Parkman, "Francis Parkman on the Indians," The Critic 124 (May
1886): 248.
46. Francis Jennings, "A Vanishing Indian: Francis Parkman Versus His Sources,"
Pennsyluania Magazineof History and Biograpf?y 87.3 (1963): 306--23; and Jennings,
"Brahmin among Untouchables." A rejoinder is given by David Levin in "Modern
Nicholas Carr 27
history, the forest, has seen him called an environmentalist
savant. One could supplement Jacobs's case there by pressing
Parkman's credentials in the terms of the ecocritical literature.
To take a basic starting point, it is plain that his history, dwelling
as it does on-and not just in-the forest, contains an
abundance of material fulfilling three of Lawrence Buell's four
criteria for an environmentally aware text. There is not just a
suggestion but an emphatic theme that human history is
implicated in natural history. The human interest is certainly not
understood as the only interest. And there is a more than
implicit sense that the environment is not a constant but a
47
process. However, the simplest basis for a claim of incipient
environmentalism is Parkman's late writing on forest policy.
Reviewing Charles Sprague Sargent's 1884 report on the forests,
he criticized America's "reckless improvidence": "The early
settler regarded the forest as an enemy to be overcome by any
means, fair or foul, as the fust condition of his prosperity and
safety; and his descendants do not yet comprehend how com-
pletely the conditions are changed .... A selfish love of gain, the
personal interest of the hour, overbears every consideration of
coasts with a rapacious vigor."48
However, Parkman was not ejecting Mammon from the
wilderness. His defense of the forests was based on "the
immense value of their marketable products" ("Forests," 835).
He reckoned that value in dollar terms and focused on
commercial timber species. His concern was to secure from the
forests "a permanent source of wealth" by "living on the
income" rather than "squandering the capital" ("Forests," 836).
His plea was for better forest exploitation rather than less of it,
and even his noneconomic arguments were based on human
utility ("Forests," 838). Having set up the wilderness as a haven
Studies 13 (1983): 145-58.
47. Lawrence Buell, The E11viro11111e11tal Imagination: Tboreau, Nature Writing, and the
Formation of American C11lt11re (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1995), 7-8. Of course, these
criteria are not definitive of the still fluid and dynamic body of ecocritical thought.
Buell, and ecocriticism, have continued to develop ever more sophisticated (and less
prescriptive) approaches to their material. See Lawrence Buell, The F11t11re of Environ-
mental Criticism: Emsrasmenta! Crisis and Literary Imagination (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2005), 25, 51. But that does not change the usefulness of Euell's earlier formulation as
a basic ecocritical yardstick.
48. Francis Parkman, "The Forests and the Census," Atlantic Month!J, June 1885,
835-39, 835-37. Hereafter cited as "Forests."
28 Francis Parkman's Dialectic of Environment
from utilitarianism and business, Parkman here remained
entangled with them, for nature was being valued not as an
alternative to commerce but as an aspect of it. The same could
be said of his case for the "more conservative, and, in the end,
the more profitable management" of the New Hampshire
lumber trade so that it could be combined with "vastly greater
income" from tourism.49 Describing the White Mountains as "a
piece of real estate" and "a most productive piece of property,"
he revealed that possession and profit remained important,
perhaps even central in the nexus between humanity and
nature. 50 If there was a devious synthesis of the nature-culture
divide here, it was taking place under the aegis of the market.
Accordingly, the extent to which these writings recognize
nature's "tremendous value in itself" is debatable ("Savant," 347;
emphasis mine). Indeed, Parkman's resort to the anthropo-
centrism of money and utility brings us to Euell's fourth marker
of the environmentally aware text: a sense of human account-
ability to nature. At one level Parkman seems to have inverted
that ethical framework by requiring the forest to be accountable
to us.51 Indeed, a certain lack of human responsibility was one of
nature's great. attractions, for wilderness to Parkman meant
"reckless independence" and "irresponsible freedom." If not
being used for cash, the forest-a "stage" or "theatre" in his
words-was to be used as the proving ground of selfhood. 52
That entailed the Boston gentleman's escape from the usual
norms of accountability in order to throw himself into
regeneration through violence. The fact that ordinary social
rules were discarded as one crossed the frontier is exactly what
made men of those who went there, and their manhood was
attested by their unregulated, destructive activity: killing Indians,
hunting animals, felling forests. 53 The environment was
49. Francis Parkman, "The Forests of the White Mountains," Garden and Forest 1.1
(1888): 2.
50. Parkman, "The Forests of the White Mountains," 2. Parkrnan's approach to
forest management was of a piece with both his mugwump politics and a significant
body of conservationist opinion in his time: Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel
of EJ!icie111:y: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (1959; rep r., Pittsburgh: U
of Pittsburgh P, 1999), 2-4, 27-28.
51. Buell, The Environmental Imagi11atio11, 7-8.
52. Parkman, Pontiac, 790; Parkman to Brimmer, 1886, 1 :184n4; and "Romance in
America," 696.
C? T--·-=·--- "TI __ t, __ :_ ----- Tl_._ L-Ll--" ?1.1.' 10
Nicholas Carr 29
implicated in the solipsism of a philosophy that, like a lot of
other romanticisms, saw nature as "a human potential for experi-
ence and practice."54 According to his assistant and biographer,
what Parkman valued was less the wilderness itself than the
"adventures" that it could provide for him. 55 Even when he
expressed regret about its fate, he was eager to avoid that regret
being "misconstrued," and he trusted the correct understanding
of it to those who were fond of rifles, knives, and pistols. 56 After
all, Parkman's idea of affirming or being tested by the wilderness
was to hunt; even when crossing the Atlantic Ocean he could
not bear to see a porpoise without trying to shoot it (journals,
1:108).57 As responses to nature, such self-reliance and human
empowerment would have sat comfortably with homo economicus. 58
Yet there is a sense, too, in which we can see in Parkman the
end of "irresponsible freedom." If the defense of nature in
market terms contradicted his earlier stance, it also underscored
a shift from the metaphysics of his history, in which the forest
was to be feared and therefore destroyed (compare with
"Savant," 347). Indeed, Parkman's late case for prudent
management of the forests, like his letter advocating much the
same for the Indians, indicated a transition from waging war on
the Other to managing a victorious peace over it. No doubt
management, even conservationist management, is still a form
of domination.: But it is premised on the understanding that
without some restraint on the part of the self, the Other will be
destroyed. And this in turn accepts, however implicitly and
precariously, their ongoing coexistence.
Here lay the possibility of reconciling the nature-culture
contradiction. Parkman's sense of the destructive power of
modernity came with the upshot that humans were fated to
dominate nature. Nineteenth-century civilization created cravings
for "reckless independence," but they were cravings that we
could no longer afford to indulge, for continued recklessness
54. Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Ev,pire and the C11lt11re of Modemiry
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 52, emphasis mine.
55. Charles Haight Farnham, A Life of Francis Pareman (Boston: Little Brown,
1901), 198.
56. Parkman, preface to the third edition (1852) of The Orego11 Trail, 937.
57. On hunting, see "Savant," 349; and Moore, "Francis Parkman on the Oregon
Trail," 196-97.
58. See Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Emdronment: The Myth of the Frontier i11 the Age of
I11d11strializatio11, 1800-1890 (New York: Athenaeurn, 1985), 33, 96.

30 Francis Parkm an's Dialectic of Environm ent
would soon mean the end of the forests-and of the
independence and hardihood that could only be experienced in
them. With this dialectical turn, however, the forces generated
by the nature-civilization binary were now destabilizing it. The
possibility of an untouched wilderness was gone. Civiliz ation
had the power to affect all of nature in radically transformative
ways and, therefore, had to reach a responsible modus vivendi with
it. That meant overcoming the dualism that Parkman had set up.
But the commercial rationale for conservation developed this
contradiction into the more ominous vision of an inescapable
marketplace. The human predicament has always been located
within nature, and that meant that forests were inextricable from
human use. As William Cronon has argued, nature as the space
beyond civilization has never existed except in the civilized
imagination. Moreover, it is an idea that rests on the same perni-
cious dualism of humanity and nature that gave us utilitarianism
and commerce.-. To hold out nature as the solution to the
problem of civilization, then, was actually to become even more
enmeshed in that problem. 59 The frightening truth was that
whether it expressed commercial values or militantly anti.com-
mercial ones, the ·wildern~ss was profoundly implicated in
modernity. Thus Parkman had groped his way toward a notion
of environment that went beyond either-or propositions to
constitute a space both natural and used. But with that insight
came tragedy, for it meant that the idea of nature as a romantic
alternative to modernity was a dead end. The very contradiction
between them was played out on the shared ground of the
market. A managed wilderness was no wilderness at all, and any
"freedom" experienced there would require inverted commas.
Indeed, Parkman gets us to within a glimpse of the ersatz
wilderness familiar today-a space available as day trips,
package tours, and other commodified experiences. Nature
could not escape civilization, and with the collapse of that
dualism went the imagination's effort to escape the unsatisfying
real world. In the end, then, the doom of which Parkman wrote
was not just that of the American forest but of the romantic
project itself.
59. William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the
Wrong Nature," in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William
Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 69-90. The argument of this paragraph
....,..,,c.C" m,,..-h t-.-.. t-h.o .-.,~,..._n,.,..,........; ..... ...,. ,....ÇT"'\~~r;..:I
Nicholas Carr 31
Parkman sometimes registered this tragedy by identifying his
own fate with the natural world:
Not one infant tree in a thousand lives to maturity; yet these
survivors form an innumerable host, pressed together in struggling
confusion, squeezed out of symmetry and robbed of normal
development, as men are said to be in the level sameness of
democratic society .... A generation ago one might find here and
there the rugged trunk of some great pine lifting its verdant spire
above the undistinguished myriads of the forest. The woods of
Maine had their aristocracy; but the axe of the woodman has laid
them low, and these lords of the wilderness are seen no more. 60
Here was a projection of the Brahmin lament, wilderness-as-
metaphor for what Parkman saw as his class fate. "Civilization
has a destroying as well as a creating power," he warned, and its
victims included the Leatherstocking types and his own ruling
elite, categories that overlapped in the natural and (usually) offi-
cial aristocrats that he celebrated: Champlain; Louis de Buade,
count de Palluau et de Frontenac; Saint Jean de Brébeuf; and
René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de LaSalle.61 Parkman's keenest sense
of tragedy came from this projection of the human onto the
natural, for, to him, the lords of humanity, like the lords of the
Maine forests, were being laid low by the modern world. ''Who
are the best?" lie asked. "They are gone; their race is died out."62
The more usual way for him to read his political lessons from
nature was not in the wilderness but its opposite, the highly
confected world of floriculture. A fine rose was only produced
by "rigid systems of selection and rejection" maintained through
generations. It thus stood as a vindication of patrician elitism:
"The art of horticulture is no leveller .... The good cultivator
propagates no plants but the best." This "judicious and per-
severing culture" involved in flower breeding was the version of
nature that sat most comfortably with Parkman.63 It was that to
which he turned, sometimes for years, when the enem7-a
hostile and uncontrollable form of nature-felled him.6 He
60. Francis Parkman,A Half-Century ojC011jlict, 2:359-60.
61. Parkman, "Works of James Fenimore Cooper," 151.
62. Parkman to the Boston Dai!J Advertiser, July 4, 1863, 1:162. See also Aaron,
"Two Boston Fugitives," 130. Compare with Shulman, "Parkman's Indians and
American Violence," 237-38.
63. Francis Parkman, The Book ojRoses (Boston: Tilton, 1866), 95-96.
l\,f,..,,..,_,_ ~ ........ L .... - T -- ,.__c..1 64. Parkman to Ellis. 1864. 1 :181 .
32 Francis Parkman's Dialectic of Environment
published a book and numerous articles, and became an authority
on roses and lilies. He won over three hundred awards and
eventually served as President of the Massachusetts Horticultural
Society. By importing rare breeds and experimenting with cross-
pollination, he created a much-admired new hybrid, the I.ilium
Parkmanni. Harvard College's Bussey Institute held the
distinction of supplying the only job that Parkman ever had, a
one-year stint as Professor of Horticulture in 1871. 65
As with nature's other faces in his work, this one involved
human mastery. Indeed that was the point, for such ideal
gardening inculcated an ideology of refinement and breeding
that reinforced the worldview of those gentlemen who had the
leisure necessary for its pursuit.66 Here was another sort of
romance-perhaps the only one in which a Brahmin could
win-whereby the gardener helped nature "in the daily miracle
by which she works beauty out of foulness and life out of
corruption."67 Yet'here, too, Parkman not only encountered but
embraced the market. His intense involvement in floriculture
turned him, by his own admission, into "a man of business."68
He went into partnership with a London nurseryman and, among
other things, sold his ti!ium Parkmanni for a thousand dollars.69
Edward Halsëy Foster has found in the background of
American romanticism a mindset that valued nature only if it
"were made to conform to ideal patterns." Original wilderness
was tamed by civilization to create a garden that "average[d] out
toward the middle," thereby synthesizing self and other in its via
media between over-refinement and savagery.70 Such compro-
mises came hard to Parkman, if they came at all.71 His history
rejected the French precisely at the point that they made
65. Walter Muir Whitehill, "Francis Parkman as Horticulturist," Arno/dia 33.3
(1973): 169-83. See also Jacobs, Historian as Hero, 149-50; and Howard Doughty,
Francis Parkman (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962), 286-87.
66. Tamara Plakins Thornton, Cultivating Gentlemen: The Meaning of Country Lift
among the Boston Elite, 1785-1860 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989), 162; see also 148,
207-10.
67. Francis Parkman, "Address of President Francis Parkman," in Transactions
Massachusetts Hortiadtural Society (Boston: Tolman and White, 1875), 5-8, 6.
68. Parkman to Mary Dwight Parkman, April 4, 1862, 1:146. See also Parkman to
Anthony Waterer,January 15, 1876, 2:87-88.
69. Whitehill, "Francis Parkman as Horticulturist," 179.
70. Foster, The Civilized Wilderness, 66, and chapter 3, more generally.
ï1 C'L .. 1--- e<n __ l., ,_ T_.J: .J ,\ : 'tT'._l_. " ........I\
Nicholas Carr 33
concessions to the Indians and the wilderness. His life was lived
in a precarious alternation of quiet order and visitations by the
wild "enemy" that lurked beneath it. With the partial and hardly
comforting exception of his forestry articles, Parkman's writing
maintained a dichotomy between nature-as-wilderness-an
unredeemable evil marked for human domination-and nature-
as-artifice (flower breeding) marked ry human domination.
These categories formed the extremes of the linear path of
modernization that was inscribed in all of Parkman's work. As
he wrote from the beginning, the forest was doomed. It was
premodern, which is to say not yet modern, and therefore
destined to be modern. The wilderness was, in the end, merely
passed through on the way to the city-even the youthful
imaginings of "Romance in America" can picture no better fate
for the "blasted" mountains, "torn down" forests, "dammed"
streams, and "drained" lakes than a future of gardens and
palaces ("Romance in America," 696). Any synthesis with an
othered nature only pointed toward the unity on which both
poles of the binary converged. The enlightened age that
Parkman lamented posited human fulfillment in society, and
romance's reading of nature as something to be overcome
similarly affirmed the city as the locus of order and settled
selfhood. This return to the city was a myth that resounded with
a nation that was pushing out its frontiers to "civilize" a
continent.72
Yet Parkman's city, despite its inevitability, offered no
redemptive end point. To him, the dangerous vulgarity of the
frontiersman and the urban alderman were one and the same. 73
He recoiled from most of what he found in Boston: "pallid and
emasculate" scholars, suffragettes, immigrants, and the "ignorant
proletariat" and "half-taught plutocracy" of his nightmares.74
And, unable to find their lost god in the wilderness, the heroes
of his history return to find chaos in the city too. The urban
pursuits of commerce and politics were forces of corruption,
and it is no surprise that some of his lions-LaSalle, William
of the 72. Frye, A Sturfy of English Romanticism, 37-38; Bernard Rosenthal, City of Nature:
[oumeys to Nature in the Age of American Romanticism (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1980),
27; and Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 71.
73. Francis Parkman, "Exploring the Magalloway," Harper's Magazine, November
1864, 735-41, 735.
74. Parkman to Ellis, 1864, 1:177; and Francis Parkman, "The Failure of Universal
Suffrage," North .American Revie/1) 127 (1878): 1-20, 4.
 34 Francis Patkman's Dialectic of Environment
Pitt-were defined by their antagonism toward traders and
politicians, though it brought them down in the end. His heroes
found no sanctuary on earth, no place of belonging, and their
turn toward the haven of the self marked their slide into tragedy.
Alexis de Tocqueville was onto something when he predicted
that the American marketplace would foster a literature dwelling
on "man himself, not tied to time or place, but face to face with
nature and with God."75
As the allegory of selfhood, romance had an affinity for
nature because of its ability to bring out this isolation of the
individual. Parkman's own sally into the wilderness was, after all,
both a romance adventure and a metaphysical lesson: "one
season on the prairies will teach a man more than half a dozen
in the settlements. There is no place on earth where he is
thrown more completely on his own resources."76 The wilder-
ness offered "superior barbarism, superior solitude, and the
potent charm of. the unknown.Y" In stark contrast with the
utilitarianism and commerce of society, one went to nature
"because there is nothing to be got by going there."78 Yet every
time Parkman went there, it was to get something-a challenge,
a flower, a profit. He found it impossible to frame a defense of
nature that was not instrumental. Just as the idea of an
untouched environment betrayed the bad conscience of a
modernity that could and did touch everything, so the assertion
of individualism was given the lie by the revenge of the social.
For all of their resources of self, Parkman's isolated heroes were
brought down by collective others. LaSalle's common hands
murder him and an anonymous soldiery shoot down Wolfe; Pitt
is defeated on the floor of the House of Commons; and the
Iroquois ceremonially torture Brébeuf to death. Indeed the
authenticity that writers like Tocqueville and Parkman found in
the individual registered their perception of the society. If
poetry was about man alone, real life in nineteenth-century
America was about the marketplace, with age, country, nature,
god, and all the rest taking the hindmost. Parkman understood
that-"Business here absorbs everything"; "Material interests
75. Alex.is de Tocqueville, Democrary i11 America, trans. George Lawrence (New
York: HarperCollins, 1988), 487.
76. Parkman to his father, Reverend F. Parkman, September 26, 1846, 1:48; see
also [oumals, 2:421.
77. Parkman, "Exploring the Magalloway," 735.
7P. P~rk-m,:an "l=ï'vnlr. .. ~ .... ,.... t-h.,,. 1\,.f,...........,11 ......... ,. .. " 7'2C
Nicholas Carr 35
[have] ruled us"-but he knew that his elitist vision required the
assertion of something beyond the leveler that was the universal
market.79
Nature, designated as antimodern, was therefore freighted
with the additional cachet of "universal inequality": "To level
the outward world would turn it into barrenness, and to level
human minds to one stature would make them barren as well."80
At a time of universal male suffrage and robber baron capital-
ism, Parkman's interest was to assert the qualitative against
abstract signifiers like votes and dollars. As his tirades against
the nouveau riche made clear, money alone was not enough. The
patrician ideal, rather, like the romantic one, called in aid the
imagination, this time to differentiate a ruling class from a
merely rich one.81 To Parkman, a genuine elite was embedded in
family, in culture, in history itself, and was deeply entwined with
institutions. It was a function of inheritance and continuity
rather than the market alone, and it was charged with
responsibilities and obligations. "Let the best serve," he argued,
the distinction being not only between the best and worst, but
between serving and ruling.82 This applied not just between
Brahmins and others, but between men and women, whites and
Indians, humans -and forests.
The best were not serving, and Parkman-an heir and an
invalid-was hardly going to break the mold of passivity. Clearly
he had both personal and political reasons for insisting so
strongly on the imagination. But whichever way it was turned,
imagination, like the fiction of untouched wilderness, was the
problem as much as the solution.83 To prioritize the imagination
was also to insist, as Parkman did from "Romance in America"
onward, that the real was not enough. If it was, there would
79. [ournals, 1:290; Parkman to the Boston Dai{yAdvertiser, October 17, 1862, 1:156.
80. Parkman, "Failure of Universal Suffrage," 5. His hostility toward female suffrage
was based in part on the "order of Nature" in "The Woman Question," North
American Revie111 129 (1879): 303-21, 304-10. Compare with the egalitarian use of
nature surveyed by Anne Marie Todd in Comm1111icati1,g Emironmenta! Patriotism: A
Rhetorical History of the American Esoironsusta! Movement (Abingdon, VA: Routledge,
2013), 34-41.
81. Aldrich, Old Monry, 64; see also 106.
82. Parkman to the Boston Dai{yAdvertiser,July 4, 1863, 1:162.
83. M. l-1. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic
Literature (New York: W. W. Norton. 1971)_ 217.

36 Francis Parkman's Dialectic of Environment
have been no need to crave "associations" and romance. But, at
the same time, modernity had already (and, according to the
historians, inevitably) won-which was why Parkman had to fall
back on imagining his way out of the "cool-blooded, reasoning"
nineteenth century ("Romance in America," 696). He could
assert the need for spirit to animate the bare facts, but for all the
grandeur of his neofeudal heroes, they were tragic heroes
because none of them was a match for the real forces of thrift,
industry, commerce, and the rest that Parkman hated. Romance
was no alternative to reality but was dependent upon it-
"associations," after all, have to feed off some real thing. Both
conceptually and practically, the ideal was subordinated to the
real, so if the premodern wilderness carried a note of requiem, it
was a requiem for the spirit and romance that dwelled there. For
both the individual in search of authentic selfhood and for the
nation in search of progress, the forest was needed-as an antag-
onist, as a proving ground--only in order to be destroyed. 84
Saree Makdisi has found the very definition of romanticism
to lie in this "uneasy combination of a fascinated attraction to a
space of otherness . . . with a dawning realization that such
spaces are inevitably doomed by the encroaching world of
modernizatión." That was the history that Parkman wrote, and
we can read his conflicted, variable treatment of nature as the
product of a mind "at once seeing what the world would
become, and hoping without hope that it might be different."85
He lived through a condensed version of his own historical
narrative, the otherness of nature being both its attraction and
its doom. By the end of his life, the adventures of The Oregon
Trail were no longer possible, for the "sons of civilization,
drawn by the fascinations of a fresher and bolder life, [had]
thronged to the western wilds in multitudes which blighted the
charm that had lured them."86 As ever, it was not the wilderness
itself that he mourned but its charm, like those "associations"
that had worried him as an undergraduate.
84. Wil Verhoeven, "Ecology as Requiem: Nature, Nationhood and History in
Francis Park.man's 'History of the American Forest,": in Configuri11g Romantiasm, ed.
Theo D'haen, Peter Liebregis, and Wim Tigges (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 137-52.
85. Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism, 184-85; see also Walter Benjamin, "Theses on
the Philosophy of History," in Illumi11atio11s, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico,
1999), 248.
o,. n_._._ c ... _ ,_1__ :11 ._ __ ,__.J _.J:~-- 110,v"'I\ _err,__ n
Nicholas Carr 37
In other words, nature, too, was never enough. Yet whether it
was through being "invested" with romance, or through his plea
for the forests, Parkman found himself asserting nature's mean-
ing in the metaphors of the market.87 And it was because nature
was, at some level, his alternative to commerce, that it expressed
the tension between imaginative resistance and real "inevitability"
that characterized his attitude to the market. ''What is the spirit
of man but a field of war [?]" Vassall Morton asked. "How to
escape such strife! There is no escape."88 If this was a romance
to resist the passivity of invalids and patricians, it also embodied
a very modern flux. "Action, action, action!-all in all! ... The
chase is all; the prize nothing .... Human activity!-to pursue a
security which is never reached, a contentment which eludes the
grasp ... to seize the prize, to taste it, to fling it away, and reach
after another!"89 This was the everlasting uncertainty of a
dynamic market society. Similarly, nature as frontier-a limit
made to be defied-sat well with the expansion of a nation-
cum-empire that was not content within its bounds. This was all
both tragic and inevitable; indeed, it was tragic because it was
inevitable. When the idealistic Miss Leslie is moved to reflect,
during a pleasant country stroll, that they might be "a hundred
miles away from railroads, factories, and all abominations of the
kind," Vassail Morton cuts her short. "They will follow soon,"
he snaps, "they are not far off. There is no sanctuary from
American enterprise.T"
The dialectic ran even deeper than enterprise. It was tied up
with reason itself, for Parkman's use of nature showed that the
price of knowledge was domination. His history was not only a
tale of enlightenment, it was also an exercise in it. Historicism's
self-understanding could draw heavily on the imagery of
colonization-the "Conquest of the Historical World" by
reason.91 And to Parkman himself, historiography seemed to
embody modern bustle rather than some romantic refuge from
87. For "invested", see "Romance in America", 696 (first quoted above at n9).
88. Francis Parkman, Vossall Morion (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1856), 216-17.
89. Parkman, Vassall Morton, 208-9.
90. Parkman, Vassall Morton, 84.
91. The title and argument of Ernst Cassirer's chapter 5, in The Philosophy of the
Enlighte11ment, trans. Fritz C.A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1951), 197-233; see also Hans-Georg Gadamer, Tmth and Method, trans. Joel
Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd ed., rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1989),
rr ... :t n?n 275.
38 Francis Earkm an's Dialectic of Envirorun ent Nicholas Carr 39

it. "The field of history," he wrote, "was uncultured and of things."?" He was being uncharacteristically enigmatic, but
unreclaim ed, and the labor that awaited me was like that of the there is a sense that he may have suspected some dialectic at
border settler, who, before he builds his rugged dwelling, must play-that romance, rather than being an alternative to moder-
fell the forest-trees, burn the undergrowth, clear the ground, and nity, was deviously complicit with it. "Principles may be true or
hew the fallen trunks to due proportion." 92 The task of false; but even the best and truest can not safely be pushed too
intellectual order required even Parkman to enlist in the ranks of far, or in the wrong direction. The principle of truth itself may
an enlightened age. be carried into absurdity. The saying is old that truth should not
The literary and philosophical subtext of his writing, then, be spoken at all times."95 He had insisted that the ideals and
was actually the defeat of romance. The fate of every knightly associations of romance were essential not just to meaning but
hero in it was proof that reality was stronger than imagination, to truth. However, when romance sent him out into the forest,
and the triumph of reason over the unknown rendered moral all he found was evil and lies. Nature was supposed to counter
grandeur extinct. Nature, which had served as a fertile nineteenth-century civilization, but whatever he did with the
metaphysical symbol-the .domain of spirit-was, in the end, frontier or the wilderness, they always ended up reinforcing it.
made over in the image of sober Yankee farms. Indeed, the very link between nature and romance, and the
insistence that both placed on spirit and imagination, served to
New England was pre-eminently the land of material progress. Here highlight that they were, along with Parkman himself, trapped
the prize was within every man's reach; patient industry need never within the all-powerful reality of the market. The environ-
doubt its reward; nay, in defiance of the four Gospels, assiduity in
mentalist savant sought to reach out beyond it, as did the elitist
pursuit of gain was promoted to the rank of a duty, and thrift and
godliness were linked in equivocal wedlock. ... The growth of New
Brahmin, but in the end both efforts failed to grasp anything
England was a result of the aggregate efforts of a busy multitude, beyond the "triumphant commonplace" of their society.
each in his narrowcircle toiling for himself, to gather competence
or wealth. (Pioneers, 1:14-15) University ofQueensland
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
This was not the stuff of romance, as Parkman took pains to
point out, but it had won. The wilderness ("This, too, shall pass
away") was consigned to memory, and America had "become a
nation that may defy every foe but that most dangerous of all
foes, herself."93 The young man, troubled by the want of
romance, had gone to the Oregon Trail, and he noted signs of
decay as he returned back east. The old historian, closing his
life's work, was left to utter vain warnings against the very
society that he had shown was inevitable--one intent on
"material progress and the game of party politics" rather than
"energetic and vitalizing" ideas, and less interested in what was
"lofty and strong" than in "the race for gold and the delirium of
prosperity" (Montcalm, 2:1478-79).
"Well is it said that extremes meet," Parkman once wrote,
elsewhere referring to the nineteenth century as "denouncing
medievalism and borrowing its rusty tools to build a new order
94. Parkman to the Boston Dai!J Advertiser, October 17, 1862, 1: 156; Parkman, "The
92. Parkman, preface to Pontiac, 348-49. Woman Question," 303.

93. Parkman, preface to the third edition (1852) of The Orego11 Trail, 936; Mo11tcalm, 95. Francis Parkman, "The Woman Question Again," North .America» Review 130
,"\.1 A'ï O (1880): 16-30_ 29_