Andrew DeStaebler

I found the section “The Sacred Silent Language” within Mitchell’s essay, Imperial Landscape, to be the most interesting and thought provoking part of the essay. I didn’t really understand his point that landscape is used as a “medium of exchange” until his example using the value of real estate. Placing a monetary value on every desirable piece of land perverts the “ideal landscape” when considering how people consume landscape. This emphasis of valuing landscape in monetary terms brings up the idea that our current societal structure has more or less made landscape its most valuable commodity. Mitchell points out that we can exhaust every natural resource within a given landscape, but still place a numerical value on it. In this sense, it seems logical that empires past and present have used the acquisition of land as a means of expressing power. The quote, “Empires move outward in space as a way of moving forward in time,” is relevant to our class and our discussions on how space and time are linked together (Mitchell, 170). People use the concept of inhabiting a space to enhance one’s sense of self, but Mitchell goes a step further and says that people also use space and landscape to gather wealth and express it to others. It is this that affirms the idea that, as Emerson says, viewing landscape is never really free, and is inextricably linked to “economic considerations” (Mitchell, 169).

I thought that the pairing of the two readings, Betsy Wyeth’s World is an Island in Maine and Introduction: iconography and landscape, offered up a lot to think about regarding the island’s “natural” and “unnatural” landscape. When reading about the construction of buildings on the island and how Betsy saw the landscape as a “blank canvas,” it made me think of our in class conversations on authenticity. Although we never really defined the exact nature of authenticity, it is still interesting to see how much of the islands current image was constructed by the Wyeths. I think there are a lot of similarities between Allen Island and the national park example that Daniels and Cosgrove bring up in regards to the island’s “authenticity.” The two write, “The quintessential modern experience of this new ‘book of nature’ is the stroll through the scenic wonders of a national park with a plastic earphone that responds to electronic triggers embedded at strategic locations along the path” (Daniels and Cosgrove, 6). The unnatural being placed within the natural realm takes away from how natural a space is, but I wonder whether or not this is important to feeling in touch with a particular landscape. As they state earlier in the essay, “The ‘higher landscape’ depended upon a humble submission of men to nature… and the application of the greatest skill and imagination in its representation” (Daniels and Cosgrove, 5). While the Wyeths didn’t necessarily submit to the powers of nature, they did use their creative skills and imagination to create their place, a powerful and meaningful thing to construct. After reading the two pieces, Allen Island seems to represent the blending of the natural world with people’s ability to creatively change landscape, and because they were effective in this “blending,” questioning the authenticity of the island is less important.

When reading Harley’s Deconstructing the Map, I was most intrigued by the third section of his essay, the argument on maps and the exercise of power. While reading, I actually found myself disagreeing with, or at least questioning, a lot of what he was saying. For example, on page 12 Harley argues that maps encourage the normalization and standardization of sense of place, but I think that maps normalize a more general geographic space. While I agree that maps do simplify the Earth’s geography to its most basic form, I question Harley’s claim that they “invite no exploration” (13). This seems to contradict what he says about the rhetoric produced by different symbols, lines, and decorations on maps. By saying that these “anonymized maps” contribute to conformity throughout the world, is Harley encouraging cartographers to interpret space for people? If so, that is the exact problem that he cites early in his essay, that cartographers intentionally (or unintentionally) use their positions of power to influence their audience. It’s a fine line that he straddles, and an issue that I don’t know has an answer. Again, I agree with Harley that maps are very basic in their nature and provide little information on the character of certain spaces, but on the other hand I would argue that this affords individuals the opportunity to discover the meaning of those spaces for themselves. That being said, the authoritarian nature that Deconstructing the Map explains at the very end of the essay is yet another factor to consider when looking at a map’s effect on space and place. While Harley makes a compelling argument on a map’s influence on the conformity of space, I think the issue is much more two sided than what he writes.

In “The Reach,” King continually revisits the theme of the separation of the island and the mainland. He uses Stella to show how isolated an islander, and in many cases “islandness” in general, can be from the rest of the world. Stella, who is very much rooted in her own place, never experiences anything outside of what she already knows. That being said, she has witnessed the “shrinking” of the Reach, or, as I understood it, space-time compression. Still, she was able to hold true to her self (until the end of the story) and not leave the island. She never interacted with other people or places, and also never really changed her lifestyle. She was very much rooted in the island, and the distinctions between space, place, and time more or less evaporated because she never even inhabited another space. She in a sense avoided the changes happening in the world around her, molding her entire life around one, singular space. This also obviously has broad implications on the role of Goat Island in all of this. Its actual geographic location on the map can account for nearly all of Stella’s life experiences. Without inhabiting Goat Island’s space, she never would have been able to make it her place. This may sound obvious, but it is important not to downplay the role that islands can have in a person’s experience. They act as a vehicle in facilitating one’s experiences, and, in the case of Stella, can be instrumental in the avoidance of space-time compression.

While reading the background on Eric Hudson, I was immediately struck by a quote written by art critic Royal Cortissoz following Hudson’s death. It read, “When he died last year this staunch New Englander, acquainted with the old masters but saturated by a sturdy Americanism, left behind some of the most admirable pictures of the sea that our art has produced” (9). It was not so much the praise that he received that caught my attention, but rather the term “sturdy Americanism.” In saying that Hudson was the embodiment of Americanism, Cortissoz seems to be implying that a “real American” is one that models Hudson as well as the lobstermen and landscapes that he photographed. This is fascinating to me, as America has for decades been synonymous with development and industrialization, yet Cortissoz reverses this script and says that true Americanism is a lifestyle rooted in nature, or, as Earle Shuttleworth puts it, “rugged beauty” (12). If this is the case, then would Cortissoz look at people who view landscape as wealth as true Americans? As D.W. Meinig describes in The Beholding Eye, some people believe that “‘development’ is normally thought of as ‘improvement’” (41). The concept of constraining the ideals of Americanism to one definition is obviously incredibly complex and far-fetched, but landscape most definitely plays a crucial part in whatever that definition may be, especially when regarding “development.” Is development synonymous with improvement, or is natural beauty meant to be looked at as a sacred and wholly American? Personally, I would tend to side with Hudson, as it seems like Americans are constantly idealizing the wilderness and the people who inhabit it, but it can easily be argued that the progressive taming of nature is what has inherently defined our society.