Abstract
Looking at Gilbert Imlay’s frontier romance The Emigrants (1793), this chapter draws two insights regarding the link between United States and utopia. First, in accordance with colonial and revolutionary imageries, the novel maintains that utopia is supposed to be established, or is certain to be established, somewhere in America. Putting plans into reality is made out to be an ‘American’ trait, while it is ‘European’ to discuss and draw up complex regulations of little avail. This is stated outright as well as underlined in debates on the rights of women, specifically their right to divorce. The Emigrants also reflects these convictions via its form by skillfully employing metafictional commentary. Second, while the freshly seceded United States provide the inspiration for the emigrants’ utopian practice, the novel also reflects that the Declaration of Independence posed a risk for the stability of nationhood as such. While the utopianism of the novel may seem to foreshadow the US American frontier discourse of the nineteenth century, this chapter argues that the novel lacks the national trajectory of the frontier myth.
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Notes
- 1.
Dates according to Verhoeven and Gilroy (1998, 299). Descriptions in the novel are not always quite accurate. For example, Imlay understates the duration it would take settlers to venture to the west (Verhoeven and Gilroy 1998, 267), downplays the risk of Native American attacks (Verhoeven and Gilroy 1998, 269), and is overly optimistic regarding the price and availability of land (Verhoeven and Gilroy 1998, 282). He also omits that some of the back-settlements that the emigrants pass through (e.g., Louisville) were far from developed at the time that the novel plays (Verhoeven and Gilroy 1998, 288–289) and he never hints that Kentucky, by the time that the novel was published, had become a state of the United States. Other references to contemporary political events, institutions, or personae in the United States and Great Britain are likewise strikingly absent.
- 2.
Formerly a county of Virginia, Kentucky was divided into three Virginian counties at the time that The Emigrants takes place; Imlay, however, omits any references to the era being an already more or less organized part of the United States.
- 3.
The federal government lacked sufficient funds to repay those who had served in the French and Indian War (1754–1763) and the Revolutionary War (1775–1783) and granted officers land at the western frontier as remuneration.
- 4.
- 5.
Expressed also, for example, by George Washington in a letter to Benjamin Harrison on October 10, 1784 (Kelleter 2002, 519), and by J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur in a letter to the Comte de la Luzerne on May 16, 1788 (Kelleter 2002, 547). On these grounds, Frank Kelleter observes that “regarding the West, the natural right to political independence thus became a ‘boogeyman’” (in the original German: “Im Hinblick auf den Westen wird das naturrechtliche Konzept politischer Unabhängigkeit somit zum Schreckgespenst”; Kelleter 2002, 519).
- 6.
Arl—ton’s description of the government in the area as “not organized” (3:129) is somewhat misleading, as it was part of Virginia at the time.
- 7.
In the original German: “In seiner ‘Third Annual Message’ (1803) erklärt Jefferson, die Durchsetzung einer naturrechtlichen Vernunftpraxis in den USA – ‘bringing collisions of interest to the umpirage of reason rather than of force – verdanke sich vor allem Amerikas Nachbarlosigkeit, d.h. den, singular blessings of the position in which nature has placed us, the opportunity she has endowed us with of pursuing, at a distance from foreign contentions, the paths of industry, peace, and happiness.’ Es ist, als wolle Amerika sich nicht nur als neue, sondern auch als isolierte Welt betrachten” (Kelleter 2002, 521).
- 8.
This, of course, can also be observed in North America’s early colonial settlements: The issue of discontented inhabitants leaving established settlements dates all the way back to the Puritans, as William Bradford suggests in Of Plimoth Plantation (ca. 1650). See also Richard Hogan’s considerations regarding perimeter settlements in “The Frontier as Social Control” (1985).
- 9.
In the original German: “Obgleich sich die angloamerikanischen und die indianischen Bewohner der frontier also als erbitterte Feinde gegenüberstehen, stellen sie aus Sicht der Zentralregierung identische Gefahren dar, nämlich die Gefahren der Gesetzesfeme, der außerstaatlichen Eigentumsansprüche und der isolierten, undurchdringlichen Gemeinschaftlichkeit” (Kelleter 2002, 643).
- 10.
For an introductory overview of General James Wilkinson’s involvement in the Spanish Conspiracy (1778–1788), the Spanish Intrigue (1794–1795), and the Burr Conspiracy (1804–1806), see Verhoeven (2008, 105–115, 204–205).
- 11.
The entire petition was also given, verbatim, in Imlay’s A Topographical Description (1792).
- 12.
While William Godwin and Gilbert Imlay were both in London in the early 1790s, moved in the same circles, and while there are parallels in their thought and in their writing (Andrews 1997; Verhoeven 2008, 117, 124), there is to my knowledge no record of them having had any direct contact. Imlay is never once mentioned in Godwin’s dairies. The closest feasible connection thus seems to be Godwin’s treatment of Imlay in his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), which solely focuses on the relationship of Mary Wollstonecraft and Imlay.
- 13.
Nonetheless, James Arl—ton explicitly condemns warfare as an “indelible grace” (3:128).
- 14.
Wil Verhoeven and Amanda Gilroy note that “Imlay is presumably referring to a once thriving Indian tribe; however, no tribe of this name has been identified” (1998: 299). Maybe Pacaic is a variation of Passaic, and thus refers to the Passaic River (in today’s New Jersey) and the Lenape people of these lands. The Lenape were forced off their lands in the 1750s.
- 15.
In the original French: « Dès le début chaque personnage a une fonction symbolique » (Beranger 1986, 23).
- 16.
- 17.
In the original German: “Im sentimentalen Roman ist ungezügelte Leidenschaft immer verderblich; das natürliche Gefühl bedarf der Zurückhaltung durch die Vernunft” (Breinig and Opfermann 2010, 56). See also Kelleter 2002, 717; Wollstonecraft’s advice on the matter in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792); and William Godwin’s condemnation of sexual pleasure in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793).
- 18.
In the original French: « Cette esquisse – muette sur les droits politiques des femmes » (Beranger 1986, 32). As Piep (2004, 3) points out, it is also evasive on vindicating female education, and occupation. P. P. merely at one point argues, after having disputed guidelines for the education of young men: “I will say nothing of the education of girls, for the amendment of the one, would naturally lead to the amelioration of the other” (2:28). This vagueness on an issue dear to Mary Wollstonecraft provides another argument against her secret authorship.
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Adamik, V. (2020). ‘Idle Speculation’ and Utopian Practice: Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants (1793). In: In Search of the Utopian States of America. Palgrave Studies in Utopianism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60279-6_3
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