New England Perspectives
Early this fall, two of the three full-time faculty in American
and New England Studies, Professor Joseph Conforti and Associate
Professor Kent Ryden, almost simultaneously published well-received
books that reinterpret New England’s regional identity.
Conforti’s “Imagining New England: Explorations
of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth
Century,” published by the University of North Carolina
Press, traces the development of New England’s cultural
identity across the centuries from Pilgrims to Yankee Magazine.
In doing so, Conforti demonstrates that “Regions are
not only concrete geographic domains but also conceptual places.”
In ”Landscape with Figures: Nature and Culture in New
England,” published by the University of Iowa Press,
Ryden combines cultural geography, folklore, regional literature,
such as Thoreau’s “The Maine Woods” and some
of the coastal fiction of New England, to explore landmarks
and landscapes.
Both Conforti and Ryden look at New England not only as a
physical, geographic region, but as a cultural artifact, an
invention of the mind and heart that is passed through generations.
Looking at the books together, it is clear that their interaction
with each other and other department faculty has helped to
shape their scholarly approaches. Certainly the interdisciplinary
curriculum of the ANES program has provided the ground for
the richness of their ideas about regional study.
Conforti’s book grows out of his own life experience,
as he acknowledges in the book’s preface. Conforti says
that the image of New England that he understood from books
and school was very different from the New England life he
saw around him as he grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts,
went to college in Springfield, MA, and later taught in Rhode
Island. He lived and worked in an urbanized landscape populated
by working class immigrant families and their descendants
that had little to do with the popular images of New England.
"Imagining New England" explores the cultural invention
of New England as a region of the mind, describing a process
of social construction in which certain core concepts of the
regional identity became reinforced over time, often in the
face of a contrasting reality. A powerful collective identity
was developed by the generations that succeeded the Puritans,
and this identity helped the region resist change. The icons
that represent New England to most Americans and to many foreigners
as well, are in Conforti's view, cultural artifacts that obscure
the historical reality of the region.
Although a lifelong resident of New England, “much of
my own experience as a New Englander has defied the dominant
narratives of regional identity,” he says. “Fabled
Plymouth” was only 45 minutes away from the gritty urban
life of Fall River, but, “The real New England seemed
at once geographically proximate and culturally remote.”
In Conforti’s reading of history, “New England
has been a posted territory, where certain people, places,
and historical experiences have been excluded or relegated
to the cultural margins.” As southern parts of New England
became more diversified by waves of immigration and more industrialized,
that reality, he says, simply forced the heartland of the
“imagined” New England north. The more homogeneous
populations and rural character of Maine, New Hampshire and
Vermont made them the “true” New England. His chapter
on Robert Frost illustrates the point. Frost, he says, “made
a career as a popular poet-performer of New England Yankeeness.”
When Frost, born in California and schooled in the Massachusetts
milltown of Lawrence, retreated to Derry, New Hampshire to
write about the New England countryside, he situated himself
geographically midway between two of the largest milltowns
in New England, Lawrence, MA and Manchester, NH. But, as Conforti
points out, Frost deleted that urban, ethnic New England from
his poetry. In doing so, Frost reinforced rather than challenged
the dominant narrative.
Conforti, the founding director of the ANES program, has
often been quoted on aspects of New England culture by newspapers
across the country and serves as president of the New England
Historical Association. His previous books include “Jonathan
Edwards, Religious Tradition and American Culture” and
“Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity: Calvinism, the
Congregational Ministry and Reform in New England between
the Great Awakenings.” He also has been a recipient of
the Richard Beale Davis Prize from the MLA in 1991 for the
best article in the journal Early American Literature.
Ryden’s Landscapes
Ryden says his approach in “Landscape with Figures,”
“combines the interpretation of selected literary texts
and specific New England landscapes to come to some understanding
of the ways that natural places and cultural processes have
intertwined to shape the region both on the ground and in
the mind.”
From childhood, we learn, he says, “that nature is strictly
separated from culture, both spatially and conceptually.”
We have the idea, he suggests, that nature is something exotic
to our everyday lives: “We travel far from our homes
to visit national parks...We watch televised nature programming
that focuses on the lives of exotic animals....” But
he argues against a distinction he sees as false between culture
and nature, the exotic and the humanized landscapes.
He easily makes this case for heavily-lived-in New England,
where so much forest is second growth: “...far from being
exempted from culture and history, the wooded landscape was
saturated with culture and history, with past land-use practices
and attitudes about appropriate behaviors toward the environment.”
Ryden also takes the reader beyond New England: “I doubt
that a single inch of [the earth’s] surface does not
somehow bear human toolmarks either directly or indirectly”
from pollution and global climate change, he says, if not
cut, burned, flooded, grazed, mined or in some other way directly
used. In his view, the earth’s landscapes, even in our
wildernesses, are “landscapes with figures.” He
hopes his argument “that ‘wilderness’ is an
invented idea, and that there is no such thing any more as
virgin land that has never been altered by human activity”
does not defeat us but will “make us more attentive to
our impact on every inch of the planet.”
Ryden’s meditations on nature start in his backyard
in Maine, take in both the ordinary and the celebrated landscapes
of New England, and reach beyond to the Pine Barrens in NJ,
the western prairies, the Grand Canyon. Reviewer Lawrence
Buell, professor of English at Harvard, says of Ryden’s
book, that it “is both a significant work of literary
and cultural-historical scholarship and a significant act
of environmental citizenship.” The book was recently
reviewed in the Boston Globe.
Ryden, who came to USM in 1994, is the author of a previous
book, “Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing,
and the Sense of Place.” In 1991 Ryden received the Ralph
Henry Gabriel Prize for the best dissertation in American
Studies in the country, awarded by the American Studies Association.
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