American Identity
Hunter Flynn, June 14, 2017
I’ve long been interested in what exactly makes America unique—especially as it manifests in the arts. This claim is incredibly controversial, but I’ve always thought that the distinct nature of the American mind didn’t really begin to emerge until well into the 19th Century. I think of people like Emerson—whose writing, however derivative it may be of its European forbears, is nevertheless steeped in the American soil on which it was written. I think of writers like Melville and even (although I hate to admit it) Poe, who did much to legitimize the forms of the novel and short story, respectively. But perhaps the uniquely American psyche didn’t really begin to settle, or solidify, until the early 20th.
My portion of the minutes of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore picks up in 1910. The nature of the discussion here isn’t always the most intellectual. Club member Emily Paret Atwater reads one of her own literary efforts, entitled “The International Spooks Company, Limited.” It’s about as bad as it sounds. Its protagonist, Tom, real estate agent, wants to “furnish his profession with an element of mystery” in order to impress his love interest, Rosa. The solution? He and a business partner form the International Spooks Company, whose end is to capture ghosts in Europe and bring them back to America—all of this for “the benefit of those people who had no spooks roosting in their family trees.”
But I think Atwater’s story raises an interesting point: young America has no ghosts. Its history is too recent. Its identity is still inchoate.
The women of the Club seem interested in this very problem, and in 1910 much of their activities pertain to the recognition of America’s artistic giants. On November 2nd, All Saint’s Day, they decorate the graves of Maryland authors and artists with flowers. I’d love to see the list of graves, but the only one they explicitly mention is that of Poe, in Westminster Churchyard. In one of the more amusing episodes present in the minutes, they describe having to coerce a young boy to climb the fence for them. They’re elated to discover that the boy and his friends (whose ages are not specified) are familiar with Poe and his work.
At the 693rd meeting of the Club, presided over by the Committee on Foreign Languages, member Lillie Schnauffer reads a translation of German writer Karl Knortz’ History of American Literature. Her translation provides a glance into the European viewpoint. Knortz dwells at first on the Revolutionary and Colonial periods, during which, the Recording Secretary writes, “the use of the axe and the hoe . . . left little leisure for good work of the pen.” He goes onto recognize the writings of William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Edgar Allan Poe (whose reputation has always been held in higher esteem abroad—especially in France—than in America, anyway). He mentions the Baltimorean George Henry Calvert, a “man of letters” in the truest sense of the phrase. But what’s most interesting to me is his appreciation of Sidney Lanier. Lanier, who eventually settled as a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins University (there’s a monument to him just south of the corner of Charles and University Parkway). Significantly, Lanier is perhaps most remembered for his use of exaggerated American vernacular in his poetry.
But the women of the Club are not only interested in uniquely American literature; they’re also interested in painting. Club President Wrenshall Markland gives a presentation on the overwhelmingly positive reception of American artists at the 1910 Salon in Paris. She even brings to the meeting a series of beautiful illustrations printed by the American press she had collected throughout the years, highlighting the advances made in printing at the time period, and by extension pushing the boundaries of what has traditionally qualified as art. But it doesn’t stop there; she praises the work of artists of all sorts: miniaturists, sculptors, landscapists, portrait artists, handicrafts. She concludes, regarding America’s progress in Art, that the nation’s artists “had developed a sense of feeling, an appreciation, a power to express himself, and a bravery to condemn as well as to praise.”
What’s most interesting to me, though, is that she chooses to conclude on the promise of the camera. The camera isn’t an American invention. But you can make a pretty strong argument that film was invented in New Jersey, at Edison’s Black Maria studio—film being one of the mediums by which America came to define its cultural identity, and to market and ship it the world over. It seems to me that Wrenshall’s mention of the camera points to the changing nature of art itself—those alternative means by which America will define itself. I don’t mean to imply that the more traditional arts didn’t play an equally important role. Not at all. But maybe America found itself in the alternative.
This content was migrated from the The WLCB log: Documenting the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore 1890-1941