Heartless Immensity: Literature, Culture, and Geography in Antebellum America

by Anne Baker

As the size of the United States more than doubled during the first half of the nineteenth century, a powerful current of anxiety ran alongside the well-documented optimism about national expansion. Heartless Immensity tells the story of how Americans made sense of their country’s constantly fluctuating borders and its annexation of vast new territories. Anne Baker looks at a variety of sources, including letters, speeches, newspaper editorials, schoolbooks, as well as visual and literary works of art. These cultural artifacts suggest that the country’s anxiety was fueled primarily by two concerns: fears about the size of the nation as a threat to democracy, and about the incorporation of nonwhite, non-Protestant regions. These fears had a consistent and influential presence until after the Civil War, functioning as vital catalysts for the explosion of literary creativity known as the “American Renaissance,” including the work of Melville, Thoreau, and Fuller, among others.
 
Building on extensive archival research as well as insights from cultural geographers and theorists of nationhood, Heartless Immensity demonstrates that national expansion had a far more complicated, multifaceted impact on antebellum American culture than has previously been recognized. Baker shows that Americans developed a variety of linguistic strategies for imagining the form of the United States and its position in relation to other geopolitical entities. Comparisons
to European empires, biblical allusions, body politic metaphors, and metaphors derived from science all reflected—and often attempted to assuage—fears that the nation was becoming either monstrously large or else misshapen in ways that threatened cherished beliefs and national self-images. 
 
Heartless Immensity argues that, in order to understand the nation’s shift from republic to empire and to understand American culture in a global context, it is first necessary to pay close attention to the processes by which the physical entity known as the United States came into being. This impressively thorough study will make a valuable contribution to the fields of American studies and literary studies.

Anne Baker is Assistant Professor of English at North Carolina State University.

184 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[sdw · Rating 4 out of 5]

“When I hear George Bush express his desire to make ‘our borders something more than lines on a map,’ I have a hard time not thinking of William Ellery Channing’s fear [in 1844] that the boundaries of Texas and Mexico will become ‘little more than lines on the sand of the seashore.’ . . . Both urgently want the nation's boundaries to be something more than lines on a map. But isn't that what national boundaries are?"

"The texts I have analyzed here remind us that the categories by means of which we make space meaningful – nation, border, latitude, parallel, meridian, and so on- are products of the human imagination. We make them rather than find them, just as we create metaphors such as the body politics. . . These texts also remind us, however, that human beings have a deep investment in seeing those categories as natural.” - Anne Baker, Heartless Immensity

I picked up this book because Anne Baker directed my undergraduate thesis. I was excited to discover that her examination of the relationship among national identity, national borders, and geography overlapped closely with the questions at the heart of my own project.

Anne Baker’s book examines nineteenth-century American anxiety about the shape and form of the nation. She examines a large set of texts, newspapers, images, and textbooks to make her case that the nation was concerned about its loss of clear form. The title of her work becomes immediately clear in the context of the quote she opens with from Moby-Dick: “The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! Who can tell it? Mark, how when the sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea – mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.”

Baker is concerned not only with the context of such anxiety (which forces a re-reading of many statements) but the way this anxiety shapes narrative form. She reads Melville’s Moby Dick and Typee, Thoreau’s Walden (and elegant re-reading of his surveying the pond) and Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes. She is clearly conversant with the ideas of American empire as they relate to mapping and surveying. The range of evidence she draws on, truly proving “representative” was impressive.

Her chapter on panoramas was enjoyable – particularly as I have an obsession with panoramas. I really want to see one some day. They were unrolled in front of an audience, moving through both time and space. They were like 19th century cinema.

Issues of race were dealt with most specifically in the final chapter, which beautifully traced the change in depictions of race in 19th century school geography textbooks. Race became a key category in the texts in the 1820s and 1830s corresponding with a pedagogical shift towards teaching with visual images that also linked with the new ability to cheaply print some images. The book would have been more compelling for me if the questions about race and geography seemed even more central. Even if Baker is not explicitly discussing race, a conversation with ethnic studies emerges through her application of textual readings of empire (such as Mary Louise Pratt’s work). And I know for many of the texts she uses race has been very thoroughly discussed by other literary critics. Yet, I felt that if I were retelling the story she convincingly constructs, I would make race a more explicit category from page one of the book.