The Frontier, the Dreamer and the Dream: Crane, Roth and the Urgencies of American Nationhood

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Philip Roth and World Literature: Transatlantic Perspectives and Uneasy Passages. Ed.

Velichka Ivanova. Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2014: 67-102.

The Frontier, the Dreamer and the Dream: Crane, Roth and the Urgencies of American

Nationhood

In 1898, Stephen Crane wrote the “The Blue Hotel,” a short story which is considered

by Crane specialists as one of the most mature and complex creations of the writer’s brief but

prolific career. In it, a character identified only as “the Swede” is doomed to failure in the

New World as a result of his lack of understanding of the frontier code of behavior and ethnic

prejudice. With the close of the frontier and the weaning of the possibility of abundant

economic and geographic expansion, the immigrant’s presence was often regarded as

threatening the coherence of national identity and jeopardizing the domestic unity of the

American nation. In this respect, the prevalence of ethnic stereotyping in “The Blue Hotel”

underscores issues of immigration and assimilation that have troubled the national psyche and

were particularly widespread in the middle to late nineteenth century. Crane’s short story

reflects this anxiety and ambivalence about the cultural and political ideologies that were in

the process of shaping American nationhood, and the exclusionary practices by which the

dominant, older American stock would define themselves.

A hundred years later, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997) revolves around a

Jewish character also called the “Swede” who tries everything in his power to embrace the

“benign national myth” and to achieve “his version of paradise.” Yet, in the end, Roth’s

Swede also fails to inhabit “the longed-for American pastoral,” not because of cultural

prejudices or lack of assimilationist impulse on his part, as was the case of his predecessor,

but because of the implosion of the dream itself. It is no more the ethnic subject’s inadequacy

to acculturation, insufficient Americanization or ethnic hostility that would thwart his ability

to succeed. Rather it is Roth’s Swede’s idealistic confidence and unmitigated belief in the

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American nation which in the 1960s still drew from many of the same enduring themes of the

frontier myth that contributes to his defeat in the end. By foregrounding the Swede’s naïve

assumption of individual and national certainty, Roth challenges the idea of the American

nation as a continuous narrative of national progress and exposes the ground of hierarchy and

violence committed in the fulfillment of this nationhood.

In this essay, I am interested in showing how –through their textual strategies– both

writers address American nationhood as an imaginative social construct by attempting to

uncover the common discourses of territorial expansion and Americanization that framed

nationalist imaginings in the 1890s and the 1960s, respectively. Though different in their

narrative approach and ideological underpinnings, both texts share a preoccupation with the

cultural problematics of nationality as it was formed and/or performed during the respective

historical periods. What was once, for Crane, the urge to question the essential terms of

Americanism and cohesiveness of its social connections in the 1890s becomes, with Roth, an

opportunity to subvert the collective fantasy of national unity in the 1960s and to expose the

nation’s contradictory gravitations toward exclusion and inclusion. I advance this argument in

two stages: first, by examining Crane’s governing ambivalence toward the immigrant’s role in

westward expansion and national self-understanding and, second, by exploring Roth’s

unraveling of the inconsistencies and contradictions underlying the 1960s rhetoric of hope for

new frontiers that would enhance American national coherence at the same time that it

endorsed US imperialist policies. Throughout the text, I am interested in analysing the formal

and thematic intersections of the two texts that have not received critical cross-treatment

before: Crane’s “The Blue Hotel” and Roth’s The American Pastoral. Such an analysis

however does not intend to assert an influence of Crane on Roth or to provide a development

narrative that moves from anti-immigration claims in the end of the nineteenth century to

assimilationist indoctrination until the 1960s, but rather to use these two texts as a means of

opening up the greater contextual urgencies of nationhood that animate the work of both

writers and historical eras. In addition, though it may exceed the scope of this article, a

rethinking of the two texts separately but also in terms of each other may result in revitalizing

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American national thinking in the 21st century by examining the ideologies that shaped (and

still do) the definition of American identity.

Stephen Crane’s western tale “The Blue Hotel” both endorses and confronts the

cohesive, assimilatory force of emerging mainstream American nationhood as it is

encapsulated in the myth of the frontier and, in particular, in Frederick Jackson Turner’s

“frontier hypothesis” and Theodore Roosevelt’s epic work The Winning of the West.1 In his

1893 seminal lecture “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,”2 Turner argued

that American history, culture, and political institutions were significantly influenced by their

continuous confrontation with the western frontier. He believed that the force of westward

expansion forged the American character and, in his own words, “frontier” was defined as

“the line of most rapid and effective Americanization” (Ch. I). It came therefore as no

surprise that Theodore Roosevelt congratulated Turner for having “put into shape a great deal

of thought that has been floating around rather loosely.”3 With his own multivolume The

Winning of the West (1885-1894) in the final stages of publication, Roosevelt considered that

Turner’s “frontier thesis” supplemented his own work. Indeed, as Richard Slotkin points out,

“they saw themselves as sharing the most important assumptions: the belief that the frontier

had been the most significant force in shaping national institutions and that mystical entity

they both called ‘national character’; and the belief that it was necessary for Americans to

appreciate the frontier past in order to meet the crisis of democracy in the 1890s” (“Nostalgia

and Progress” 608). In addition to acknowledging the transformative power of the western

frontier, Roosevelt portrayed the immigrant as the archetypal hero of American history. The

frontier crucible, Roosevelt noted (1889) “was enough to weld together into one people the

representatives of these numerous and widely different races” (Ch. V). While Turner located

the source of a distinctive American national character in the unique historical experience of

the moving frontier, Roosevelt valorized immigrants who would accept assimilation to

become full-fledged Americans. In their effort to promote the distinctive nature of the

American national character, both Turner and Roosevelt crafted visions of American

nationhood that were steeped in the mythology of the frontier while at the same time they

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ignored or suppressed the contradictory and conflicting strands within the national identity

they labored so hard to create.

A contemporary of both men and a friend of Roosevelt,4 Stephen Crane was keenly

aware of the issues surrounding race and ethnicity and the urgency to mold a national identity

at a time when continental expansion had moved to formal colonial annexation and imperial

expansion.5 Whether Crane was a racist or aligned himself with imperialism are contested

issues among critics and, to some extent, they bear little relevance to the argument of this

article.6 It is my contention, that, irrespective of his personal views, Crane’s representations of

the racial and ethnic minorities reproduce his deep-seated ambivalence about the legitimacy

of Americans’ developing sense of national identity at work during this period. This view is

supported by John Carlos Rowe for whom Crane was one of those writers who found

themselves “deeply divided between obligations to a certain national consensus and their

outrage at specific failures of US democracy”(x). In the remaining first part of this paper, I

will show how “The Blue Hotel” reflects the ideological conflicts generated by the myth of

the frontier as imparting social cohesion at home and extending republican ideals abroad

through economic might and military conquest.7

When the “shaky and quick-eyed” Swede sets foot at Fort Romper, Nebraska he is

met by Pat Scully, “an eager little Irishman” who is the proprietor of the blue hotel. An

officiously attentive hotel-keeper that he is, Scully also “perform[s] the marvel of catching”

two more men at the train station: a “tall bronzed” cowboy and a “little silent man from the

East” (287). While all three travelers are introduced by ethnically or occupationally connoted

names, only the Swede remains unnamed until the end of the story: while the men have not

been previously acquainted and no introductions are made in the narrative, the cowboy

becomes “Bill” in the course of the story, while the Easterner is later called “Mr. Blanc.” In

addition, Crane sets “the Swede” further apart by associating him with the “shining cheap

valise” he is carrying with him, a signal marker for the state of immigration. In

contradistinction to the other two visitors who effortlessly interact with Scully and his son,

Johnnie, the Swede is placed outside this newly formed community of men. The text

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elaborates upon the Swede’s “aloofness,” which is the result of his lack of language that,

according to Richard D. Beard, amounts to no more than a “nervous gibberish” (330), and

cultural misunderstanding of the West.8 Although he had lived in New York for ten years

where he had worked as a tailor (a particularly immigrant occupation) and, as he claims, he is

no “tenderfoot” (290), the Swede has great trouble integrating himself in the community. In

Crane’s handling, even though he belongs to an ethnic group considered hierarchically

superior, the Swede still represents ethnic otherness as a result of his cultural difference, a fact

that exposes the illusory cohesion of American national identity, in addition to uncovering the

social construction of ethnic hierarchies and self-identification. As Milne Holton argues, to be

assimilated “into a community…[a]dequate apprehension and clear understanding are critical,

and the Swede has neither” (235). Similarly, Sue Kimball notes that the Swede is “the only

one of Scully’s newly arrived guests who is immediately excluded from the brotherhood of

man [and] never becomes a true member of the group” (426). In spite of Turner’s and

Roosevelt’s intentions to adapt national identity to the historical developments of the last

quarter of the nineteenth century, the American nation still remained an undefined

construction of belonging and exclusion. Crane complicates the lack of a coherent national

narrative in the way the Swede’s separation and alienation from the community seem to

contain more than they actually reveal.

Right from the start, then, the Swede is depicted as markedly different from the rest

of men, caught in the process of otherization because of the real or imaginary deficiencies that

estrange him from the others. While they accept the series of small ceremonies offered to

them by Scully, he instead approaches them with fear and trepidation. When the other men

watch the game of cards with interest, he remains “near the window, aloof, but with

countenance that showed signs of an inexplicable excitement” (289). Time and again, he

breaks the “discreet silence of all the other men” with his “strange” and “loud” laugh. Later,

during the game of High-Five in which he too participates, he suspects them of plotting to

commit violence and treachery against him. “Crazy,” a “nut,” the “wildest loon,” “gone

daffy,” are the expressions used to describe him. In all cases, his ethnic origin and attitude

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render him to the eyes of the observers, representative of a tantalizing –yet dangerous– ethnic

other. Critical approaches to the Swede have attributed his “strange” attitude to his exposure

to lowly dime novels with himself assuming the role of the “hero in a western romance.”9

Indeed, emphasis on the Swede’s imposed fictionality takes on added significance as it

attracts attention to the constructed nature of social relations, based as they are not in “facts”

but in projection and mediation. Thus, I read the Swede’s erratic and maladjusted

performance as a symptom of his otherness that occasions negative stereotyping, but which

also enables the rest of the men to fantasize themselves forming a collective identity. In other

words, by presenting his Swedish character as “solitary, non- communicative… and close to

madness, if nor mad,” a portrayal that according to Beard reflects an “enactment of cultural

prejudice” (330) toward the ethnic immigrants, Crane puts to a test the conditional and

indeterminate effects of Turner’s and Roosevelt’s theses of the assimilationist force of

westward expansion.

By rejecting the romanticizing image of the immigrant hero’s frontier experience and

positing the Swede as a mediating site of fictional construction, that is, a madman or

maladjusted solitary (McKnight 115), Crane explicitly destabilizes Turner’s and Roosevelt’s

vision of Americanization as inextricably linked to the process of western colonization: “[i]n

the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a

mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics...”(Turner, Ch. I). In his

Winning of the West, Roosevelt in particular foregrounds his “myth of origins” according to

which the strife of races on the frontier worked to produce a “distinctive and intensely

American stock” who were “the vanguard of the army of fighting settlers” and were

characterized by individual heroism and moral vigor. Although Roosevelt’s set of narratives

recounted the struggle for westward expansion and settlement on the North American

continent from 1763 to 1803, it was intended to “derive a paradigm of interpretation and a

model of social behavior that would be useful to America as a restorative of endangered

values” and would, later, serve as a “rationalization of imperialism” (Slotkin, “Nostalgia and

Progress” 610, 634). Nevertheless, as most scholars agree, Roosevelt deliberately racialized

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the heroic qualities of the frontiersmen, placing the white Anglo-Saxon race, which he

regarded as the long reimmersion of the Germanic/British race, at the pinnacle of the

evolutionary process while insisting on the inferiority of all other races (including blacks,

Asians, other nonwhites and “new” immigrants from eastern and southern Europe).10

In light

of this “race history,” Crane’s Swede belonged to the “dominant strain” and would therefore

seem perfectly qualified to victoriously enact Roosevelt’s notion of racial conflict in the

wilderness.11

Yet, despite his ethnic heritage, or to paraphrase Roosevelt, despite his “right”

bloodline, the Swede cannot adapt to the demands of the “microcosmic community of men”

(Kimball 426) and is excluded by them.12

At a crucial juncture in the story, the Swede’s

northwestern European identity is underscored by the cowboy who insists that the “stranger”

is “some kind of a Dutchman,” a remark followed by the narrator’s comment on “a venerable

custom of the country to entitle as Swedes all light-haired men who spoke with a heavy

tongue” (296). In a clever turn, Crane uses ethnic stereotyping to advance his own critique of

Roosevelt’s nationalist mythology that fostered national unity through exclusion, and to a

large extent has underwritten the consolidation and expansion of US nationhood.

However, to claim that race or ethnic heritage automatically elevated Roosevelt’s

immigrant hero to a heroic status would not do justice to the logic of his narrative of the

frontier. Such elevated status is granted to those ethnic immigrants who would bravely

undergo an initiation process. They had to venture into the wilderness to battle the “most

formidable savage foes ever encountered by colonists of European stock,” the Indians. (Ch. I).

Such rites of passage would perfect the racial character of the settlers and would consolidate

national consciousness.13

Crane’s Swede, however, fails all conditions on which the Turner

and Roosevelt theses are based. He lacks the resilience, courageous nobility and rugged

masculinity that would conform to Turner’s and Roosevelt’s individualistic model. He tries to

prove his manhood only after getting drunk, whereupon he is victoriously engaged in a feast

fight with Johnnie, Scully’s son, as a result of an unresolved game of cards. However, instead

of asserting his superiority, this fight clearly marks the Swede as an outcast: “There was a

splendour of isolation in his situation at this time which the Easterner felt once when, lifting

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his eyes from the man on the ground, he beheld that mysterious and lonely figure, waiting”

(307), the narrative voice tells us with increasing irony. From there on the Swede wanders

into a saloon, where his drunken boasting gets him killed. He is actually knifed in the back in

a saloon brawl by a gambler who is reputed to be “so judicious in his choice of victims” that

he has won the trust and admiration of the townspeople (312). The narrative irony that

surrounds the Swede’s death is amplified by the following comment: “this citadel of virtue,

wisdom, power, was pierced as easily as if it had been a melon” (315). The presentation of the

Swede’s virility and masculine prowess is deflated as abruptly as he is defeated by the

smallest man in the saloon.14

What Crane accomplishes with this final twist is to show that

violence in the frontier –born out of disconnectedness and maladjustment– was not

reinvigorating, as Roosevelt would have it, but threatened national identity and damaged

social cohesion.

As a matter of fact, the Swede’s death is precipitated by his own confusion and

aggression as a result of his violent exclusion from the blue hotel. On a deeper layer, his

demise underwrites the arbitrary and fictitious assumptions on which the frontier myth was

based. In fact, the apparently unifying concept of the frontier had arbitrary, often self-serving

limits that excluded more than they contained. Thus, with no Indians to occupy the space of

the other on America’s western front (as they had already been routed by the early 1890s),

hostility becomes misplaced and redirected toward an expanding series of alien others, in this

case the “strange” Swede. Instead of regeneration or self-recreation in the West, instead of

evolving from “savagery” to “civilization,” as Turner would have it, violence –in need of

release– erupts into domestic places. Unless the surplus of energy attendant upon the close of

the frontier “could be relieved by opening new frontiers abroad” (Kaplan 102) or, to quote

Turner, would extend to “outlying islands and adjoining countries,”15

the threat of social

unrest seemed imminent. Roosevelt, too, expressed his yearning for territorial expansion to

provide a new frontier where the analogy between “Filipinos or Orientals and Indian

‘savages’” (Slotkin, “Nostalgia and Progress” 633) would automatically be established, and

imperial struggle would replace race strife.16

But such easy dichotomies between “natives”

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and foreigners, and longings of nationalist consolidation are not unequivocally shared by

Crane. The domestic violence that occurs in “The Blue Hotel” reflects a national anxiety

about the dangers of immigration and colonialism toward the quest for American national

identity as the geographical frontier closed and imperial interests abroad expanded.17

The

Swede’s anti-climactic death symbolizes the crises in individual and national imaginings at

the time when otherness, inside and outside the nation, had become blurred. If for all his

credentials the Swede proves unfit for Americanization, then what peril to the American

character would constitute the influx of new immigrants? Even more so, if in order for

violence to be contained, American imperial expansion was deemed necessary, how

damaging would the absorption of “alien races” be to American national identity? As Amy

Kaplan succinctly demonstrates in The Anarchy of the Empire, “underlying the dream of

continental expansion is the nightmare of its own success, a nightmare in which movement

outward in the world threatens to incorporate the foreign and dismantle the domestic sphere

of the nation” (12). In conjuring these two national phenomena, immigration and the

settlement of the West, Crane’s story voices the increasing sense of discomfort and anxiety in

front of the unresolved ambiguities and growing contradictions of a nation in the process of

its identity formation.

Without attempting to show the improbable, that American Pastoral is “influenced”

by Crane’s western tale, however influential Crane’s writings in fact turned out to be in the

twentieth century, I nonetheless want to suggest that, like Crane, Roth is equally concerned

with fundamental assumptions of individual and national self-definition.18

In suggesting a

narrative affiliation between these two texts, I do not wish to deny their specific historicities,

but rather to underline what Homi Bhabha calls the “temporality of representation” in the

cultural construction of nationhood. In other words, rather than seeking to identify the

“transparent linear equivalent” of the frontier or assimilation from the late nineteenth century

to the late 1960s, I analyze the “metaphoric displacements,” the “continual slippage into

analogous” versions of these narratives, that “continually overlap in the act of writing the

nation” (292, 293). One might rightly argue, then, that in the late 1960s –the present time of

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Roth’s novel– the US was far from being a political-territorial entity seeking to forge or create

a national identity. 19

Nevertheless, despite the time that had elapsed, the discourses of both

the “frontier” and “assimilation” were becoming increasingly salient, albeit altered in form.

In the period following World War II, the vision of American national identity as based on

cross-ethnic amalgamation, spatial and class mobility had become a key premise of the

American Dream, especially after the historic passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 which

marked the beginning of the latest era of mass immigration to the United States and reversed

decades of exclusion and restrictive immigration. Yet, ironically the view of assimilation as

linear progress explicitly linked to socioeconomic success, painfully coincided with the

denouement of the concept itself in the late 1960s. Put another way, “[W]hen the notion of an

Anglo-American core collapsed amid the turmoil of the 1960s, assimilation lost its allure"

(Kazal 437). Despite growing civil unrest and increasing cultural contestation, mainstream

culture continued to exert its influence toward total assimilation of minorities into common

founding Anglo-Saxon culture. American Pastoral tells the story of such a straightforward

process of a third generation Jewish American, Seymor Swede Levov, who embraces an

identity as an unhyphenated American following the prescribed stages of acculturation

process20

and, to a large extent, seeks to enact a nineteenth century conception of the frontier,

but whose adjustment to American life is shuttered under the explosive political and social

upheavals of the 1960s, as a result of the nation’s failure to live up to its ideal. More

precisely, the Swede’s demise is caused by his compulsive identification with a representative

all American man, a self-imposed fantasy that does not allow any space for slippages and

ambiguities from the dominant narrative of American national self. As Derek Parker Royal

observes, the Swede is unable to admit “the ambiguity underlying the American project”

(“Pastoral Dreams” 202).

Historians and theorists of social science tend to agree that the apogee of the concept

of assimilation occurred in the 1950s and early 1960s (Kazal 437), as reflecting the need

generated by World War II for national unity and the postwar tendency to see American

history as a narrative of consensus rather than conflict. Moreover, US victory in World War II

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appeared to mark the triumph of democratic ideals at home and encouraged the expansion of

American institutions and values to other parts of the world. The dramatic changes in

demographic composition and socio-economic status as well as America’s changing global

role had led to the need for a reconfiguration and a re-articulation of the hegemonic American

national identity in the post-war context. Thus, Turner’s and Roosevelt’s frontier thesis

extolling the benefits of horizontal mobility and economic opportunity was revived in post-

World War II America but was now translated as vertical mobility that enabled people of

different nationalities, ethnicities and cultural backgrounds to Americanize.21

By extending

the frontiers of culture to include more “inconceivable aliens” (to use Henry James’s phrase

from The American Scene), more immigrants were now welcome to join the national body. In

addition, cold war anxieties and an endangered sense of democracy made the resurgence of

the frontier spirit and the myth of territorial expansion all the more influential. The legacy of

the frontier served once again as a narrative context for America’s military mobilization

abroad and acts of imperial violence in Vietnam and elsewhere.22

As a matter of fact, the frontier rhetoric was powerfully reintroduced by J. F.

Kennedy with his speech delivered on the occasion of accepting the nomination as the

Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, setting the tone and the pace of “the challenging

and revolutionary” decade, as Kennedy described the Sixties (Bernstein 5). In his speech

tellingly titled “New Frontier,” the future president was asking Americans to perform their

duty of defeating “enemies that threatened from without and within.”23

The “New Frontier”

speech involved not only an escalating cold war, but also a burgeoning civil rights movement

at home. Even “the uncharted areas of science and space” were reterritorialised as an

American frontier. This permutability of the frontier idea reveals the extent to which by the

1960s it had become a metaphor and “a perpetual state of mind” (Spanos 47), supplying

Americans with an “overarching sense of unity” amid internal and external conflict. Turner

himself must have envisioned this development when, along with the announcement of the

closing of first period of American history as a result of the closing of the geographical

frontier, he also prophesized its expansion, beyond the western boundary of the United States.

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America’s “contribution to the history of the human spirit,” Turner writes, “has been due to

this nation’s peculiar experience in extending its type of frontier into new regions” (Turner,

Preface). Aware of the “closed frontier,” Turner nevertheless emphasizes the significance of

the frontier experience to the American national identity, when he foresees a second, more

vigorous era of American history: “He would be a rash prophet,” Turner concludes, “who

would assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased.

Movement has been its dominant fact, and unless this training has no effect upon people, the

American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise” (Turner, Ch. I).

Taking into consideration that “[a]t the time of the presidential election of 1960, the political

and cultural exponents of the dominant culture were afflicted by a deep anxiety over the

health of the American body politic,” Kennedy’s identification of his administration as “the

New Frontier” was intended, as William Spanos argues, to “capitalize on the persuasive

power of the American exceptionalist myth of the frontier” (48). As in the case with his

predecessors, Kennedy’s summoning was “ideologically strategic,” designed to underscore

the “crucial significance of the frontier spirit to the American national identity,” and the

confidence and self-renewing expansion the frontier enables (Spanos 47). Following President

Theodore Roosevelt’s lead, Kennedy energized the nation with his concept of the “New

Frontier” by appealing to “one of the country’s premier sacred stories –the Frontier Myth”

(Dorsey, “Myth of War” 44).24

To be sure, throughout his recent oeuvre, Roth has been a forceful critic of such

nationalist ideological strategies.25

As I will demonstrate, in his American Pastoral, Roth

unmasks underlying “ethnocentric pretensions” (Rumbaut 172) of assimilation which conflate

the demand for “Anglo-conformity” with the pioneer ideals of radical individualism, self-

reliance, and equality of opportunity that comprise the myth of the frontier. By delineating the

rise and fall of the Swede, his straightforward all-American hero, Roth exposes the dangers

when the ideal and the ideological get wrapped up in cultural and national discourses. Though

critics have explored American Pastoral in relation to the identity of the nation (situating the

novel in a number of historical contexts and in particular the sixties) as well as the

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protagonist’s assimilationist impulse (in forsaking his ethnic identity), they have not focused

on the highly symbolic “onomastic geography” of the book (Masiero 157) which provides a

privileged perspective to address issues of nationhood right when the notion of a seamless and

coherent, unchanging American national identity collapsed and identity politics were

beginning amid the turmoil of the 1960s. In the concluding section of this essay, I will

demonstrate how assimilation and the frontier, these two mutually constitutive discourses,

intertwine in Roth’s novel and provide the author with the opportunity to explore the myths

that define Americanness and to challenge its fabricated national imaginings.

American Pastoral opens by identifying the protagonist through his nickname –“the

Swede”– a nickname “intrinsically” American, as Masiero rightly points out– because “it

adumbrates the historical dynamics of American cultural and national development” (158).

The persistent reference to this “old American nickname” (280) –with the protagonist’s “real”

name, Seymour Levov, coming only in the last sentence of the first paragraph– indicates its

“absolute dominance” which might be said to represent, according to Masiero, “the force of

the protagonist’s American claim” (157). Like Crane’s Swede, Roth’s Swede earns such an

appellative because of his physical appearance: his fair complexion, blue eyes and blond hair,

his “insentient Viking mask” (3), in short his Gentile-like characteristics set him apart from

his peers and pave the way of his ethnic whitening. This “household Apollo” (4), as the

narrator calls him, wears his “Jewishness so lightly” (20) that he has freed himself from all

the “striving,” “ambivalence” and “doubleness” (Glaser 52) which have preoccupied

generations of Jewish Americans, and has thus achieved “an unconscious oneness with

America” (20). But unlike Crane’s Swede whose self is othered in the image of a “true

American,” Roth’s Swede is portrayed as “the assimilated Jew who has successfully

integrated into the American mainstream” (Royal 51). Assimilationist capacity, in the

Swede’s case, derives from the specifically visual means by which ethnic/racial identity is

registered in the US. Blond haired and blue eyed, as Velichka Ivanova among others has

observed, the Swede “stood out among the typically dark-haired local Jew” of Newark (242).

His “misleading” appearance or, to use Zuckerman’s terminology, his “isomorphism” (89) to

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WASP America, provides him easy access to whiteness, removing at once all future social

obstacles and cultural prejudices that might befall him if he identified as Jew.26

Indeed, the

narrator muses, the Swede “lived in America the way he lived inside his own skin” (213), he

“[l]oved being an American” (206). His aspiration toward assimilation may inform his

unconditional embrace of everything that is America but at the same time it is motivated by

his experience of his “Jewishness as a pathology of sorts” (Glaser 51-52). For example, the

Swede feels uncomfortable inside a synagogue, believing it to be “foreign” and “unhealthy”

(315). His marriage to the Gentile beauty queen Dawn Dwyer and his decision to live in the

Old Rimrock house provide further evidence of his desire to become an unhyphenated

American, or to achieve “identificational assimilation” (M. Gordon) which includes

intermarriage and adoption of American values. “‘Why shouldn’t I be where I want to be?

Why shouldn’t I be with who I want to be?... That’s what being an American is –isn’t it?’”

(315), asks the Swede. What reverberates in the protagonist’s vehement disavowal of Jewish

identity is Teddy Roosevelt’s uncompromising standard of monoculturalism: “There can be

no 50-50 Americanism in this country,” he stated. “There is room here for only 100 percent

Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.” 27

As a corollary to

Roosevelt’s calling for Americanization was his belief that the frontier experience delivered

the common man the chance to break with “the bondage of the past,” be it ethnic, racial or

religious. Similarly, Turner argued for the frontier’s contribution to the production of a

“composite nationality for the American people.” In his words: “In the crucible of the frontier

the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race” (Turner, Ch. I).

Although American Pastoral was published exactly a century after the frontier’s

closure, the myth of the frontier, I submit, is a key facet of Roth’s text. The importance of the

frontier myth and its concomitant tropes (rugged individualism, strenuous masculinity,

limitless possibilities of the American Dream, expansion of American values) as a subtext to

the novel cannot be overstated.28

Indeed, the heroic status attributed to the Swede by

Zuckerman, the ritualistic fashion with which he acquires his nickname, his prodigious

athleticism, his enthusiastic enlistment in World War II, his self-confident conquest of the

15

sub-urban frontier and finally his anticlimactic end can be seen as Roth’s complex revisioning

of the frontier myth, described by Slotkin as “the most important archetype underlying

American mythology” (Regeneration 10). In many ways, then, Roth’s American Pastoral can

be read as a trenchant critique of the latent ideological power that discourses of ethnic

assimilation and the frontier continue to have in shaping national collective imaginings. To

begin with, Derek Parker Royal is right to contend that critical “unremitting emphasis” on the

story of the Swede to the exclusion of the novel’s narrator “neglects the exercise of

fictionalizing that Roth, through Zuckerman, attempts to foreground” (49). Not only the

novel gains in narrative complexity when the Swede’s life is seen as fiction crafted by

Zuckerman but, also, the protagonist’s fictive centrality foregrounds Zuckerman’s efforts to

explore collective formations arising through his elusive central character. As was the case

with Crane’s protagonist, the fictive barriers that surround Roth’s Swede take on added

significance when they are related to the writerly role of Nathan Zuckerman and his attempts

to script a coherent narrative of the nation. To the extent that the Swede is a fictional

recreation, whose subjectivity the writer of the “realistic chronicle” fails to grasp and whose

“interior life” is “unknown and unknowable” (80), a cohesive and comprehensive national

identity cannot be supported on a sociocultural level either. Paradoxically but appropriately,

the causes and effects of the Swede’s tragedy are invested with indeterminacy, with

Zuckerman insistently underlying the provisionality of his narrative using qualifiers such as

“perhaps” and “maybe” (80). Nevertheless, the Swede remains the site at which Zuckerman

attempts to assemble narratives of American national continuity.29

The rhetoric of assimilation, the frontier and national destiny are questioned by Roth,

in yet another way: plotting the Swede’s extraordinary athlete’s body and talent as an

imaginative template for the culture’s national imaginings of American exceptionalism and

imperialism. In an 1899 speech, Teddy Roosevelt advocated the doctrine of “the strenuous

life,” by which he meant a return to “manly” virtues of the nation’s frontier past in order to

confront the forces threatening to overwhelm America. As Dorsey and Harlow claim, “[t]o his

readers, the message was simple: embrace immigration and remember the lessons of the

16

frontier experience that so shaped settlers of early America” (58). As we have seen, in “The

Blue Hotel” Crane explores the tensions generated by the “strenuous” performance of

masculinity and its centrality to the rhetoric of national purpose. More than half a century

later Americans still labored under a surprisingly similar anxiety. The model of masculine

behavior which gave emphasis to physically vigorous and principled life proved to be a

longstanding, recurring feature of the discourse of the nation and is frequently articulated at

the level of the cultural unconscious, in literature, popular culture as well as the public

arena.30

Richard Slotkin and Leroy Dorsey, among others, have pointed out the enduring

influence of the mythic frontier and its heroic frontiersmen to American political culture. It

has been argued that Roosevelt’s mythic framing of national manhood greatly affected not

only late nineteenth century U.S. foreign policy but the nation’s contemporary domestic and

international policy, as well.31

Similarly, scholars document a resurgent preoccupation with

masculinity during the early Cold War period, which adapted to the imperatives of the period

and eventually led to an intensified involvement in Vietnam.32

For his part, in his handling of

the Swede Roth explores the parameters of the doctrine of “the strenuous life” and its relation

to a national manhood metaphor in several ways: first, he grants his protagonist athletic skills

(he excels at football, baseball, and basketball) to bring him as close to a “trademark

American” (Hobbs 76) as possible. As David Brauner argues Seymour’s sporting prowess

“conforms to a Jewish stereotype of WASP values” at the same time as it “defies the anti-

Semitic stereotype of the Jew as physically frail and cowardly” (“American Anti-Pastoral”

70). Second, Debra Shostak seems right in her assertion that the Swede’s heroic status is

implicitly juxtaposed and aims to distract his elders from what was happening to Jews in

Europe.33

Setting the Swede as a paradigm of national manhood reinforces national ideology,

much in need in historical times of uncertainty. And finally, but more importantly for the

purposes of this article, the Swede’s athleticism invokes the legacy of the pioneer

frontiersman as it was touted by Roosevelt. Leroy Dorsey reminds us that the frontier myth

basically “features violent action between stalwart heroes and untamed forces as the means to

achieve progress” (“Myth of War” 46). Dorsey, citing Slotkin, tells us how Roosevelt was a

17

proponent of the benefits of athleticism, feeling it built character. In an effort to overcome

the all-consuming late-nineteenth century preoccupation with physical virility that ensued

from the loss of the frontier and the days of diminished wilderness, and when not promoting

imperialist expansion, Roosevelt tried to extend the doctrine of “the strenuous life” to manly

out -of-door sports (“Strenuous Life” 3-6).34

Roth appropriates the overarching violence

associated with the frontier myth by insistently having Seymour’s athletic achievements

compared with descriptions of wartime engagements. A volunteer with the Marine Corps,

Seymour resembles the frontiersmen in their physical endeavors, heroism and their

willingness to sacrifice. Though he is never engaged in actual combat, Seymour nevertheless

becomes “the embodiment of the strength, the resolve, the emboldened valor that would

prevail to return our high school’s servicemen home unscathed…” (5). If athletic endeavors

serve as a surrogate for wilderness warfare, it is no accident, then, that the “old American

nickname” is “proclaimed by a gym teacher” and “bequeathed” to him in a gym. Like a

warrior caught “in action,” Seymour impresses Doc Ward with his ability to score baskets. It

is that moment that the gym teacher “christene[s]” him “Swede Levov.” The gym, then,

becomes the threshold he must cross in order to be initiated into American life, into which,

like a frontiersman, the Swede will have to be “wandering deeper and deeper” from then on.

This new name which he carries “like an invisible passport,” however, also affects his notion

of the right way to evolve into “a large, smooth optimistic American” (207). The Swede’s

youthful “aloofness, his seeming passivity” turns into a “golden gift of responsibility” (5) in

adulthood. Assuming the responsibilities of an all-American man, exhibiting a “mature-

seeming sobriety” (4), is what his brother, Jerry, considers his fatal attraction. Yet, for the

Swede who wishes to become the model WASP citizen and never to shrink from his

obligations, it is imperative to follow not what his heart desires but what he believes is a

proper and manly conduct “right in the American grain” (31).

Furthermore, the Swede’s comparison to Kennedy is apt on several ways. First, there

is the similarity of crossing the boundaries of religious identity, thus pointing to the fact that

“assimilation in America is national rather than religious” (Benn Michaels 25). Second, it

18

underlines the resonance and power of the vision of masculinity that Kennedy personified.

The style of Kennedy and his New Frontiersmen –of which the Swede aspires to be a perfect

model– was “distinctly and resolutely masculine” (Cuordileone 169). According to Winfried

Fluck, it is Kennedy’s successful production of his public image as an embodiment of manly

vigor and heroic courage, his combination of “youthfulness,” “forceful masculinity” and

“unselfish idealism,” that have captured the cultural imaginary (287). Finally, if the Swede’s

body –through Kennedy– relates to a symbolic national body, then much of the Swede’s

appeal to his community lay in invoking the promise Kennedy had given “that he could

remake the nation, and by extension the nation’s men, in his own potent self-image”

(Cuordileone 170). Adulation and reverence for the Swede was based on the community’s

presumption of their hero’s power to shape the self-image not only of their community but of

the nation as a whole. Later, the Swede’s physical decline and eventual death from prostate

cancer is linked metaphorically to the national body ravaged by domestic social disorder and

fragmented by the Vietnam War (Basu 80).

Once the “decidedly un-Jewish ‘Swed-ish’ identity” his name invokes (Glaser 53) is

assigned to him, the Swede commits himself to achieving authentic Americanness, to living

out the seamless unfolding of the cherished national narrative of “wholesale self-reinvention”

(Shostak, Philip Roth. American Pastoral 3). In this regard, the Swede’s celebration of such

pioneer figures as Johnny Appleseed, “a hero of endurance” and creative action, prefigures

his unswerving decision to take up his father’s glove factory. “[S]trong as an ox” and

determined to succeed, he takes charge of the family business whose harsh beginnings

coincided with the “closing” of the frontier in the 1890s and the influx of immigrant laborers

and entrepreneurs in the city instead of living off the land.35

One important goal the Swede sets out to achieve is to purchase a hundred-acre farm

in Morris County with an eighteenth century old house built in it. Many critics have pointed

out to the capacity of the house “to convey class mobility and national identity” (Glaser 55).

At the same time, the description of the house and Dawn’s farm evoke images of settlers

establishing homesteads and farms through their own hard labor and determination,

19

conquering the wilderness for the advancement of progress: “But the Swede, rather like some

frontiersman of old, would not be turned back…. What was Mars to his father was America to

him…. Out in Old Rimrock all of America lay at their door” (310). Besides depicting the

American landscape as moored in the heroic past (with references to Washington and

revolutionary New Jersey), the Swede literally enacts the frontier expectation that access to

land would advance the immigrants’ integration process and would affect their attainment of

American ideals. Obviously, the Swede’s frontier describes an ideal, embodied in the

landscape, recalling in this manner historical periods when the nation could count upon the

abundance of western land and unlimited opportunity. As a matter of fact, as Sandra

Kumamoto Stanley argues, Roth “highlights the role of Old Rimrock as not only a private but

also a national ideal, for the Swede is an entrepreneurial pioneer on a New World errand”(9).

“His journey,” the critic goes on to say, reflects “a basic tenet of American exceptionalist

teleology—to expand ‘westward,’ laying claim to land as part of manifest destiny and a

national mission” (10). In a way, then, the Swede’s pastoral domesticity relies on declaring

his feeling “at home” in the nation and affirming possession of the national “homeland”

without addressing the long and problematic history of the nation’s violent interventions

abroad. His coherent assimilationist vision of America, fixed as it is upon a dominant, unified

representation of American society, fails to acknowledge the conflicts and tensions inherent in

the societal structure that violently invade the national text.36

For example, Roth’s Swede

treats his beloved daughter’s stuttering as a pathological rupture in normative speech which

needs to be cured. Likewise, hard as he tries, he is unable to decipher the mystery of Merry’s

blowing up the Old Rimrock post office: He wonders, “What could have wounded Merry?”

(2). His answers include self-incrimination and the trauma of watching the Vietnamese

monk’s televised self-immolation. Yet, “his search for the etiology of the wound,” as Stanley

would have it, doesn’t go deep enough to interrogate the dominant assumption that flourished

in U.S. national narrative in the sixties –namely, that the sixties ushered in the culmination of

the ideology of U.S. exceptionalism and its providentially ordained mission to fight the evil

empire in the name of the free world. If President McKinley’s “benevolent assimilation”

20

proclamation and subsequent annexation of the Philippines (also referred to as the first

Vietnam War, 1899-1902) could be said to signal the advent of the nation’s imperialist

ambitions,37

six decades later, Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon Johnson, sought to

capitalize on the frontier rhetoric by implementing the domestic and foreign programs of the

“New Frontier,” which aimed to answer to the equally daunting international and domestic

crises of the period. But the Swede seems unwilling or unable to resist essentialist

conceptualizations of “Americanness,” even at a time when the specific prototype of

American identity was under attack. If he is a prisoner to anything, then, it is to his blind

adherence to the triumphalist postwar national narrative which left uncontested every

antagonistic presence (like Merry) and rendered meaningless every competing claim or

narrative of dissent.38

Thus, by subscribing uncritically to a single-stranded ideological

narrative, the Swede is incapable of understanding what turned his ideal America “into the

indigenous American berserk” (86). Viewed from this perspective, American Pastoral

explores the discursive formation of American national identity, arising in the collision of the

overlapping narratives of assimilation and the frontier, and challenges the processes by which

it sustains its hegemonic force. As Stanley succinctly puts it, Roth demonstrates that “the

American mythos is not a self-contained artifact, able to legitimize its hegemonic status by

self-written rules” but “an ideological construct” (5) that attempts to wipe off alternative

constituencies of nationhood.

As I hope to have shown, Crane’s and Roth’s texts not only register the dominant

narrative of American nationhood or express anxieties about it, but also uncover it as an

imaginative social construct. Like the 1890s, the 1960s was a period of unheard of dissent and

social unrest which the official national culture strove to contain and control by attempting to

impose an assimilationist mentality at home and promote the frontier ethos abroad. The

emphasis given by both Crane and Roth to the discourses of assimilation and the frontier

raises in relief the historical “crises” of the national psyche in the 1890s and 1960s. However,

by viewing these two historical periods recursively, I do not mean to equate them but rather to

disclose the links between apparently separate but structurally similar historical conjunctures.

21

To invoke William Spanos, a crucial difference separates the sixties from the earlier period. I

shall quote him at length, because his rich ability to show the correlation between the rhetoric

of the frontier, foreign practice, and national identity sheds light to what I have attempted to

explore:

Whereas the benignity of the exceptionalist errand was rarely questioned in the past, no

doubt because the logic of exceptionalism was in process but unfulfilled, the errand in

the Vietnam wilderness inadvertently produced a counterhistory. In the face of an

enemy that refused to be answerable to the military imperatives of the American

narrative, America, confident in the righteousness of its transcendentally ordained

global errand, pursued the inexorable logical economy of exceptionalism to its self-

destructive fulfillment… . In undertaking this ruthless intervention in precisely the

terms of the discourse and practice of the frontier, it also bore witness to the historical

continuity of the murderous violence informing the logic of America’s mission from

the Puritan errand in the New England wilderness to the American errand in the

wilderness of Vietnam.

What is postulated here is that American expansionism, wrapped in the discourses of the

frontier and assimilation and their embedded promise of a new life, has solidified into a

national mythology, and seems firmly entrenched in the national psyche. Writing at different

times and under different circumstances, Crane and Roth have provided a pointed critique of

America’s powerful exceptionalist self-image that has become central to the formation of the

nation and, during times of transformation and crisis, comes to the surface as a complacent

nationalism and an aggressive foreign policy. One can readily concur with these writers and

maintain with Richard Slotkin that “myths [of exceptionalism] reach out of the past to cripple,

incapacitate, or strike down the living” (5). Or, agree with Winfried Fluck that, in the final

analysis, what still holds American society together, its “essential glue, still largely

untarnished, is the idea of American exceptionalism” (“Interview”).

1 I here focus on Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West because on one hand it is

contemporaneous with Crane’s composition of “The Blue Hotel,” and on the other it had a

strong impact on American political and cultural discourse of its age and continues to

resonate even today. In it, Roosevelt identified the historical origins of the American race and

traced how it became the greatest English-speaking race. For a discussion of Roosevelt’s

nation-building efforts and the difficulties in reconciling the civic tradition that welcomed all

people irrespective of their nationality, race and religion and the racial tradition that

advocated racial supremacy, see Gary Gerstle. See also Richard Slotkin’s concise analysis of

Roosevelt’s Myth of the Frontier in his article “Nostalgia and Progress” and Leroy Dorsey

and Rachel Harlow’s insightful argument on Roosevelt’s lingering influence in national

character building in “We Want Americans.”

22

2 Turner delivered his paper to a meeting of the American Historical Association in

Chicago. Since its publication, it has become one of the most influential essays of American

history.

3 Theodore Roosevelt to Frederick Jackson Turner, Feb. 10. 1894, quoted in Ray Allen

Billington, The Genesis of the Frontier Thesis, 173.

4 “One night in September 1896, [Crane] interviewed several chorus girls for a series of

articles about New York City. After leaving a restaurant at two in the morning, Crane and his

party were stopped by a policeman named Charles Becker, who two decades later would be

the principal figure in a much more notorious affair. Becker arrested Dora Clark, one of the

women with Crane, on a charge of soliciting. Crane vigorously asserted her innocence in the

matter and appeared in court to denounce the arresting officer.… Whatever Crane’s motives

may have been, the affair was a highly stressful one for him and took a great toll, costing him,

among much else, the friendship of then New York City Police Commissioner Theodore

Roosevelt” (Kennedy and Gioia).

5 Crane served as war correspondent covering the Greco-Turkish conflict (1897). In 1898-

1899 he also covered the Spanish-Cuban-American war. Previously he had written on

Mexican American relations. For Crane’s implication in the romancing of the empire, see

James Berkey’s “Empire’s Mastheads,” in particular endnote 4. See also Kaplan, and Rowe’s

Literary Culture on Crane’s racism in his wartime journalism.

6 In his “Unraveling the Humanist,” Stanley Wertheim argues against previous critics, such

as Joseph Katz, who claimed that “Crane confronted his ethnic biases through self-reflective

irony” (65). In Wertheim’s view, Crane not only failed to rise above the quotidian prejudices

of the 1890s, but he put them to imaginative use through his journalism and creative works.

Also, in his Reader’s Guide, Michael Schaefer attempts a categorization of the critical

responses to Crane’s depiction of race, distinguishing three different critical approaches:

those who see race as a minor motif subservient to the text’s interest in “human

responsibility” (250), those who see Crane’s views as implicated in his culture, and those who

accuse him of furthering the most pernicious racial stereotypes. For Crane’s implication

within imperialism, see John Carlos Rowe’s chapter on Crane. Crane’s writings and in

particular The Red Badge of Courage are analyzed in relation to his journalism which, Rowe

maintains, tends to echo US foreign policy of the period.

7 For Roosevelt’s views on American identity which is ideally suited for democracy and

conquest, see Taubenfeld’s Rough Writing 62-63. Roosevelt’s notion of the “True American”

required giving up all other national and cultural ties while assimilating entirely into the

nationalist “spirit, conviction and purpose” of America.

8 Similarly in his essay “The Problem of Knowledge in ‘The Open Boat’ and ‘The Blue

Hotel’,” Thomas Kent maintains that “The Blue Hotel” is organized by the characters’

“uncertain perception about proper codes of behavior” (264).

9 Holton 235, 237; see also Cady 155 and Church 99. These critical responses are

supported by the Easterner’s remark: “[I]t seems to me this man has been reading dime

novels, and he thinks he’s right out in the middle of it – the shootin’ and stabbin’ and all,” the

Easterner observes (Crane 297).

10

“The backwoodsmen, according to Roosevelt, were primarily the descendants of two

British races-the Scotch-Irish and the English-but included in their ranks significant numbers

of Germans, Huguenots, ‘Hollanders,’ and Swedes” (1284), argues Gary Gerstle in his article

on Roosevelt’s contradictory commitment to racial conquest and racial mixing. See also

Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation 189-92.

11

Roosevelt only too often retorts to a definition of American nationhood that harbored

racial ideologies. As Slotkin explains, in “Roosevelt’s West the ‘stages of civilization’ of

liberal historiography were recapitulated by the developmental process that replaced primitive

forms of settlement and economic production with more advanced ones” (616). Elsewhere

Slotkin mentions that Roosevelt “used the history of the West to illustrate first the succession

23

of savage by civilized races, and then the succession of different classes or subdivisions of the

white or Anglo-Saxon race, which represented progressively higher forms of socioeconomic

organization and morality” (“Nostalgia and Progress” 615).

12

In his lucidly written study of American realism, Michael Davitt Bell maintains that, as a

“naturalist,” Crane challenges the prevalent image of the writer as a “real” man rather than an

effeminate “artist.” While Bell foregrounds Crane’s style and use of language in order to

highlight the writer’s anti-manliness aesthetic, in his dissertation entitled “Alternative

Constructions of Masculinity in American Literary Naturalism,” Ryan D. Stryffeler focuses

on Crane’s character depiction which sardonically defies “the will to be a man.” He argues

persuasively that Roosevelt’s discourse on strenuous masculinity was so influential that is

responsible for the misconception of Naturalist authors “as hypermasculine acolytes of

strident masculinity” (4). In a chapter devoted to Crane, the Swede is depicted as “a man

whose personal identity has been constructed around the myth of the strenuous masculinity”

(143).

13

Turner too had seen the frontier as the source of American national consciousness,

although he placed more emphasis on the material opportunity and social mobility of the

frontier than the dynamics of race conquest.

14

Interestingly, the lines between the victim and the victimizer, the hero and the aggressor,

become less discernible, since the Swede, who initiated the provocation, is the one to bear its

consequences in the end.

15

Turner, “The Problem of the West.”

16

As Roosevelt declared in 1897: “No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme

triumph of war.” An explosion of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor served as the excuse

of the Spanish-American war. In the Cuban campaign, Roosevelt brought to life the mythic

past that he had invented in The Winning of the West. He played a starring role as lieutenant

of one regiment he himself had recruited, that was later known as the Rough Riders. As war

reporter, Crane had weld “a romantic cultural imaginary to the popular imperial ethos at the

turn of the century,” casting the Spanish-American war “as a romantic rescue mission for the

domestic audience back home” (Berkey).

17

Significantly, Crane was on his way to Mexico when he visited Omaha Nebraska in the

spring of 1895, where he was interviewed by Willa Cather. For his attitude toward Mexico

and colonialism, see Leigh Johnson’s “Foreign Incursions.” See, also, Rowe’s Literary

Culture, for a discussion of the relationship between internal colonization of ethnic minorities

and native people, and US colonial ventures in foreign countries.

18

There is however a direct reference to Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, when, during the

45th high school reunion, the novelist-narrator is told by one of his old classmates that he had

written her a term paper on Crane’s famous novella. More interesting is the fact, that

Zuckerman (and by extension Roth himself), as if suppressing an overwhelming anxiety of

his predecessor’s possible influence in his writing a “realistic chronicle” of the Swede’s life,

adamantly refuses having produced such a paper, and even denies having read it until college

(53).

19 In fact, the Swede’s story is an imaginary narrative embedded in Zuckerman’s own

narrative, which is based in the narrator’s memories of his childhood idol. Roth has

Zuckerman write down the Swede’s life-story in the mid-nineties, thus, attempting a re-

assessment of the sixties from the perspective of the nineties.

20

There are remarkable similarities between Levov’s process of acculturation and the

assimilation sequence as described by Milton Gordon in Assimilation in American Life

(1964), of which “identificational assimilation”—i.e., a self-image as an unhyphenated

American—was the end point of a process that began with cultural assimilation, proceeded

through structural assimilation and intermarriage, and was accompanied by an absence of

prejudice and discrimination in the “core society” (qtd in Rumbaut).

21

The revival I am referring to relates to the social applications of the frontier and not to

academic scholarship which in mid twentieth century “was becoming, if not a ruin, then

24

certainly a relic of an earlier age” (Nobles 9). See also, Deborah Madsen’s “The West and

Manifest Destiny.”

22

Richard Slotkin argues in his Gunfighter Nation that in its mid twentieth century

versions, the frontier myth also helped lead America to the Vietnam War. In John F.

Kennedy’s “Turnerian” view of new frontiers, the 1960s hope for endless growth replaced

Turner’s vision. Kennedy’s vision of a “new frontier” helped him get elected because it was

part of a whole 1960s-era discourse about frontiers. Slotkin offers a thoughtful close reading

of movies and the way those fictions functioned in a dialogue with people in Vietnam.

23

Kennedy evoked the frontier myth in his acceptance of the Democratic nomination, in

Los Angeles,: “I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands

that stretch three thousand miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their

comfort and sometimes their own lives to build a new world here in the West….They were

determined to make that new world strong and free, to overcome its hazards and its hardships,

to conquer the enemies that threatened from without and within.”

24

Dorsey refers in particular to Kennedy’s peace volunteers, the Peace Corps which he

portrayed as “the reincarnation of America’s martial pioneers who now braved a new world

of dangers in the pursuit of global welfare” (“Myth of War” 44).

25

I am referring in particular to Roth’s American Trilogy: American Pastoral, I Married a

Communist, and The Human Stain. See also Royal’s “Pastoral Dreams and National Identity.”

26

See Roy Goldblatt on the whitening of Roth’s Jews. Also, Roth’s The Human Stain

makes a strong case of the socio-economic concerns that motivate racial passing in the US.

27 In fact, the quotation comes from a speech made by Roosevelt as an attack upon what he

considered a half-hearted conduct of the then-administration led by President Woodrow Wilson, during

the war in Europe (WWI). “Speed up the war and take thought for after the war.” Speech at the Maine

convention, March 28th, 1918.

28

Sandra Kumamoto Stanley has pointed out Roth’s use of the key archetypal images of

Henry Nash Smith’s myth of the garden of the world (Virgin Land, 1950), R. W. B. Lewis’s

American Adam falling from innocence into experience (The American Adam, 1955), and

Leo Marx’s pastoral landscape vying against the threat of the industrial machine (The

Machine and the Garden, 1964). However, what is not mentioned in this analysis is the

overarching image of the frontier which, as this article wishes to demonstrate, has shaped the

rhetoric of American identity and is consistently invoked in American Pastoral.

29

See Ansu Louis and G. Neelekantan, for an analysis of the Swede’s indeterminacy as

reflecting a challenge of the conventions of literary realism.

30 In his seminal book Manhood in America, Kimmel explores the meaning of manhood in

American history, tracing the evolution from the Self-Made man of the late eighteenth and

early nineteenth century to confirmations of manhood in the arenas of sport and leisure in the

first decades of the twentieth century to the “contemporary crisis of masculinity.” American

manhood, he claims, is deeply entangled within American history. It registers the changes in

American society at the same time that it promotes an ideal which is, by definition,

unattainable. As Kimmel explains, the history of the American manhood is “less about what

boys and men actually did than about what they were told they were supposed to do, feel, and

think and what happened in response to those prescriptions” (10).

31

In his article “Theodore Roosevelt, ‘The Strenuous Life’,” Dorsey maintains that by

“invoking romanticized accounts of the pioneers’ strength and virtuous personal character,”

Roosevelt responded to his concerns about the domestication of the Western frontier, mass

immigration, growing materialism and foreign aggression (1). Kaplan, too, in her Anarchy of

Empire, analyses how the fate of American masculinity paralleled national culture’s imperial

turn during the 1890s.

32

See K. A. Cuordileone's Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War.

Although Cuordileone points to the uniqueness of the “cold war cult of masculine toughness”

and cautions readers not to make “easy comparisons to other eras, past or present,” the

characteristics the critic signals out as comprising “the fixation on manhood,” that is

“masculine virility, courage, will, and individuality” (238), echo Roosevelt’s “The Strenuous

25

Life.” More importantly, the critic makes numerous comparisons between Kennedy and

Roosevelt and their respective endorsement of masculinist and nationalist ideology. She states

f. ex. that “like Roosevelt, Kennedy sought to overcome physical ailment and placed

uncommon emphasis on physical fitness, vigor, heroism and virility throughout his career.

Kennedy echoed the Rough Rider president’s glorification of the strenuous life, adapting it to

the imperatives of a cold war world” (202). John Michael, also, examines how Kennedy’s

public representation (particularly in his political memoir, Profiles in Courage) “addressed

anxieties about manly courage and national union in a moment of terrifying global

challenges” (424).

33

Shostak suggests that the Swede “gives American Jews license to repress their

knowledge of what was happening to the European Jews. If they can forget themselves as

Jews, they can forget the image of docile, feminized Jewish man who, in failing to resist

gentile oppression, troubles their own self-image” (Philip Roth – Countertexts, Counterlives

101).

34

See Dorsey, “The Strenuous Life;” Slotkin, “Nostalgia and Progress.” Of course, the

“crisis of masculinity” fin-de-siècle that men experienced is the result of many more changes

in American society, among which are women’s organized entrance into the public sphere

and the loss of economic independence occasioned by the rise of corporations and the new

working class that included large numbers of immigrants. Theodore Roosevelt, however,

explicitly molded his public image to virile huntsman to take advantage of this all-consuming

preoccupation with vitality and virility.

35

Characteristically, the harsh conditions of the glove business are reminiscent of the

equally harsh conditions of the frontier, while descriptions of the workingmen invoke the

frontier’s backwoodsmen: “thousands and thousands of hanging skins raised the temperature

in the low-ceilinged dry room to a hundred and twenty degrees…. Where brutish

workingmen, heavily aproned armed with hooks and staves, dragging and pushing overloaded

wagons, wringing and hanging waterlogged skins, were driven like animals through the

laborious storm that was a twelve-hour shift” (11-12).

36

Though Stanley quite rightly notes that Roth challenges the literary language of the

myth and symbol school, it is not so much the literary tradition that is the author’s target but

the societal structures themselves. Roth’s criticism involves the society’s need to construct a

coherent national ideology during the apogee of US Cold War hegemony, an embodiment of

which is the Swede.

37

The decision by U.S. policymakers to annex the Philippines was not without domestic

controversy. As vice president (1900) under William McKinley and later as President (1901),

Roosevelt had played a crucial role in the war against the Philippines and its annexation.

While he believed the nation’s expansionist policies to be a test of America’s honor, national

unity, and strength, Roosevelt attacked his opponents as weak, unpatriotic, and unwilling to

perform America’s “manly” duties.

38

In his blind effort to construe a coherent vision of society, the Swede is guilty of the

privilege of ignorance of “how the other half lives,” until Merry forces him to see it. Debra

Shostak’s remark that, before settling on American Pastoral, Roth was contemplating on

using Jacob Riis’s title as his own seems very interesting if one takes into consideration that it

was Theodore Roosevelt who joined Riis’s lone battle on tenement conditions, child labor and

other abuses of lower-class urban life. Riis’s work inspired his contemporary, Stephen Crane

who had possibly read Riis's book How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of

New York (1890) before writing Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893).

26

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