America

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Introduction

From its earliest days, the new nation of the United States committed itself to a lofty destiny when, in the Declaration of Independence, the founding fathers invoked 'the laws of nature and of nature's God'. In this elevation of nature we may detect echoes of the myths of innocence and renewal which impelled the migration of Europeans from Columbus onwards to a New World where it would be possible to begin again with the hope of creating a new and better world (Lewis, 1955, 1-10; Allen, 1970, 13). This was not a once and for all process, but a continuing possibility for self-renewal, as the Declaration goes on to state: '. whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it'. Just as the earliest Americans had created a nation in a place where there had not been one before, so they enshrined the 'unalienable right' to go on repeating this process of creation and recreation in the future Kazin, 1988, 7). In American literature, although the sense of identity is closely tied to a sense of place, this is not a static notion, but one in which there seems to be an endless possibility for reinvention of the self through geographical movement. In this essay, I intend to explore some examples of how American identities are determined by geographical place and by movement from one place to another, yet how these identities are often portrayed as essentially illusory and ultimately destined for disillusionment.

At the end of Huckleberry Finn we find one of the most famous examples of aspiration towards liberty which finds its expression in a geographical form when Huck ends his narrative with the words: 'But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before' (Twain, 1985, 369). Huck and Jim's journey down the Mississippi has been a pursuit of liberty and Huck is not content to return to the place where he has been before, or the identity that was previous ascribed to him. Instead, he longs to move further West, where he will be 'ahead of the rest' and where he will be unencumbered by the restrictions of family and past.

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald describes the sense of the possibility that is embodied in an unpeopled land as 'a fresh green breast of the new world' (Fitzgerald, 1983, 187). In stretching out his arms to the green light at the end of the dock (27-8) Gatsby expresses his desire for the fulfilment of his dream to win Daisy and the culmination of his process of reinventing his own identity. However, the inaccessibility of this desire is symbolised by the stretch of water between East Egg, whose 'white palaces . glittered along the water' and West Egg, where the houses are rented and where Gatsby's mansion is a fake version of a French town hall. Although Huck's rejection of 'sivilization' seems to be free and simple, in The Great Gatsby, the relation between East and West is much more complicated because there is something rotten at the heart of Gatsby's longing. The innocence of his boyhood efforts in the west to remake himself by a schedule for self-improvement and a list of resolves (180) are in contrast to the criminal pursuits to which he has resorted in the east in order to gain his wealth. Daisy, too, has been corrupted since her western girlhood and in the Buchanans' restless movements around Europe and New York we detect their dissatisfaction and cynicism. The myth of new beginnings and recreations that Gatsby seems to embrace is illusory and Gatsby's assertion that it is possible to repeat the past is undercut by his action: 'He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand' (117). Even in this, his most abstract and inaccessible desire, Gatsby searches in vain for a place in which this desire might find its fulfilment and might become concrete enough to be touched. Gatsby's fate is finally determined not by the green breast of the new world, but by and in a place which Nick Carraway describes as a wasteland, 'a valley of ashes' (29) and it is upon this disenchanted landscape that God looks down. 'God sees everything', Wilson comments on the picture of T.J. Eckleburg (166).

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