Myth Making: Appropriation of Pocahontas in Hart Crane's The Bridge
Genevieve Wachutka, University of Minnesota
[1] Hart Crane faced an enormous challenge when he attempted to retell the American experience through his epic poem, The Bridge, published in 1930. He asks his reader to travel with him through eight different sections, from "Ave Maria" to "Atlantis," with each section composed of several short poems. This compilation forms a pattern of speaking through American myths to recreate a journey through America's past. Crane's sophisticated word play and punning creates thematic strings, weaving these sections together and demonstrating in the pattern the connectivity of all things, past, present, and future. To follow the connectivity through the separate sections of The Bridge, it is imperative to understand Hart Crane's view of life as a cyclical process, with opposing forces that create duality within unity, and his convictions that the constructs of time and space are arbitrary. Collectively, these poems represent Crane's view of the human "experience" as a unified, cyclical process, free from the limits of time and space. The entirety of the poem functions as a bridge across differing experiences to portray the continuity of a distinctive American spirit. Thus, Hart Crane weaves American myths into a cyclical representation of experience.
[2] In the second section of the eight sections comprising The Bridge, Crane borrows the familiar story of Pocahontas, calling her "Powhatan's Daughter," and manipulates it through a sequential series of short poems he calls "Harbor Dawn," "Van Winkle," "The River," "The Dance," and "Indiana." In general, this sequence of lyric poems recalls the westward movement of American settlers moving out from the east coast into the heart of the nation. Common to all the poems in this sequence is the presence of Pocahontas, figured neither as the daring rescuer of John Smith nor the Princess Bride of John Rolfe, but as the American earth itself, the landscape across which the white settlers marched. From the outset, from the first contact with the Europeans on the continents of the Americas, Crane proposes, Nature gave way to control and exploitation just as the world of the Indian was to give way to control and exploitation, and in these poems that connection between the fates of Nature and of "the Indian" is figured in the female: the American land is rendered as female, as a body to be used, and the female who embodies that idea for Crane is the most famous Indian woman, Pocahontas, present at the outset, a character in the American imagination since the first words about Jamestown were written.
[3] In his essentially "American" myth, Crane's inspiration draws from T. S. Eliot, distinguishing The Bridge as an American response to "the threnody of sterility and doom" presented in The Waste Land (Cambon 122). Eliot pronounces the despair and decay of post World War I Europe. Crane, while respecting Eliot's accomplishment, believes that his story would not work for the American myth-maker. As Emerson had admonished American writers in the nineteenth century to turn away from British models, Crane kept the challenge alive in the twentieth century. In Crane's view, American writers needed to create their own legacy and break from the bonds of Europe. To him, Eliot offered "a desert to cross [rather] than a road to follow," but Americans needed to establish a notion of the American experience as distinctive from that of Britain (Cambon 121). While The Waste Land affirms "London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down," [1] Crane explores instead the "land of opportunity" and turns to the great American artifact, the Brooklyn Bridge, as a unifying structure, a road to follow in navigating American mythology.
[4] The structure of The Bridge has been criticized as lacking in unity between the different poems in each section, and between the sections themselves. Instead of viewing The Bridge as a cohesive unit, critics judge the individual poems separate from the context of the whole. In Crane's governing conception, however, the romantic visions of America in each individual poem follow thematic strings through his use of puns, repetition, and allusions to weave throughout The Bridge connections across time and space. The apparent disunity between the separate poems, tied together by invisible strings, lays out history as a rebirthing cycle where an endless succession of identities is seen from a collective point of view. Themes and experiences are reborn and continue. Everything remains, but in altered forms. We can trace Crane's view of cyclical time to Russian mathematician and mystic P. D. Ouspensky, "whose Tertium Organum Crane reported to Allen Tate that he was reading on 15 February 1923" (Giles 19). Tertium Organum, translated and published in 1922, redefined reality "dismiss[ing] scientific positivism's obsession with the concrete world and historical progress, arguing that Man's apparently three-dimensional universe was no more than an optical illusion arising out of our bovine inability to perceive ulterior spheres," Ouspensky described time as functioning in a cyclical manner: "we think time is passing because we are passing it, whereas actually past time does not disappear any more than a station ceases to exist once we have left it behind" (Giles 19). Under this influence Crane constructs The Bridge as a road linking relative truths of the American experience throughout space and time.
[5] The poem begins in New York, with the "Proem," its now famous apostrophe to the Brooklyn Bridge, and then, after considering the impact in "Ave Maria" of Columbus and the European world on American origins, it proceeds from the present to the past by way of pioneers striking out across the continent from the east to the west. While the first section of The Bridge, "Ave Maria," tells the pioneering tale of Columbus, "Powhatan's Daughter" deals specifically with the pioneer experience across the colossal continent of America. "Powhatan's Daughter" signifies the impact of settlement on what American mythology has traditionally defined as "virgin land." Crane is not alone, of course, in characterizing the young American landscape as feminine. In The Great Gatsby, Crane's contemporary F. Scott Fitzgerald echoed the femininity of the American landscape as Nick Carraway reflects on the island as it was encountered by the first Dutch sailors' as "a fresh, green breast of the new world" (180). Crane likewise uses Pocahontas to personify this contact point between the land and the pioneers.
[6] Underneath this romantic notion of the American spirit springing forth from the fertile loins of the fresh, green landscape, Crane's creative wordplay indicates ideas of how both the land and Pocahontas were sought after for their economic value. He stated in an interview published in the Akron Sunday Times of December 1919 that "living as we do in an age of the most violent commercialism the world has ever known, the artist cannot remain aloof from the welters without losing the essential, imminent vitality of his vision" (Giles 30). To keep the "vitality of his vision," Crane must acknowledge the role of capitalism in America, as his poetic creation is a product of the era of "the most violent commercialism the world has ever known." As Crane retells these myths by pulling strings from the past through his mid-twentieth-century reality, he can do several things at once: he can portray the mythical history of America while still representing the present moment, thus indicating the connectivity of all things and the cyclical nature of time. The myth of Pocahontas is useful in this endeavor because she can be de-personified as the land and stretched out across Harbor Dawn, Van Winkle, The River, The Dance, and Indiana as a common thread representing the object of America's consumerism.
[7] The Pocahontas myth gave Crane's poem a physical framework, for he makes the landscape appropriate and incorporate Pocahontas's spirit. Throughout the "Powhatan's Daughter" sequence, Crane emphasizes Pocahontas's character as Mother Earth by depicting a series of pastoral experiences across the American landscape. She embodies the wild American landscape, the ground itself, the point of contact between American pioneers and nature. Not only, however, does she become for Crane the American earth, the tangible land on which the history of the country occurs. He also positions Pocahontas, as a Native American, as a Spirit of nature.
[8] He opens the "Powhatan's Daughter" section with an excerpt from William Carlos William's essay "The May-pole of Merry Mount." Williams, borrowing from William Strachey's 1612 history of his travels in Virginia, introduces Pocahontas as a young girl who would "get the boyes forth with her into the market place, and make them wheele, falling on their hands, turning their heels upwards, whom she would followe, and wheele so herself, naked as she was, all the fort over" (Weber 53). Crane, echoing Williams -- who echoes Strachey -- also introduces Pocahontas as an element akin to the wind. Naked, she leads the boys to cartwheel, creating the imagery of pinwheels spinning from the force of the wind. The simile establishes her ties to the natural world and reinforces the cyclical imagery with the series of cartwheels representing the end-over-end repetition of human experience.
[9] In addition, Pocahontas's characterization as the wind aligns her with unceasing motion, tying her to the theme of progress, evidenced as the driving force behind America's appropriation and exploitation of the landscape. Annette Kolodny's now classic book The Lay of the Land exposes abusive patterns of male domination acted upon the "virgin land." The punning title positions the land like a woman – to be used, exploited, and discarded by generations of American men. Pocahontas's story reflects this legacy of exploitation, especially when considering the circumstances surrounding her marriage to John Rolfe. Kolodny suggests the "marriage served, in some symbolic sense, as a kind of objective correlative for the possibility of Europeans' actually possessing the charms inherent in the virgin continent" (5). The untainted landscape attracted the European explorers, predominantly male, into "America's oldest and most cherished fantasy: a daily reality of harmony between man and nature based on an experience of the land as an essentially feminine—that is, not simply the land as mother, but the land as woman, the total female principle of gratification" (4). Crane depicts this American fantasy with Pocahontas playing the role of the woman and the land. She hovers nearby in Harbor Dawn, Van Winkle, and The River through Crane's poetic pieces of marginal commentary printed next to the verses of "Powhatan's Daughter."
[10] This unique poetic commentary in "Powhatan's Daughter" runs along the margins of the poems, describing Americans' alienation from the land they've claimed through Pocahontas's legacy. It begins at Harbor Dawn with a reference to the first contact between Native Americans and the European pioneers, "400 years and more…or is it from the soundless shore of sleep that time / recalls you to your love, there in a waking dream to merge your seed" (Weber 55). This commentary alongside the Harbor Dawn section precedes the introduction of Pocahontas, and it establishes the European need for conquest, as Europeans are called to the shore to "merge [their] seed." The reality of the past is described as a "waking dream," and past times, like myths, exist in a dream-like state; they both become memories. There is no concrete reality, but only remembered moments of consciousness. Still, the land of America is seen at dawn through a foggy lens, not yet quite materialized for the pioneers. The imagery of fog prevails in the first stanza of Harbor Dawn, mentioning both "fog-insulated noises" and "far strum of fog horns . . . signals dispersed in veils" (Weber 54). The woman and the land are just beyond introduction; they are not yet tangible. They are veiled still, and the marginal commentary at the end of Harbor Dawn asks the question "-with whom?/ Who is the woman with us in the dawn?...whose is the flesh our feet have moved upon?" (Weber 57).Already Crane personifies the land as a woman, but her identity remains concealed. Crane thus ignites a conscious search for the myth, for the representation of Pocahontas as the Earth Mother, for the answer to the great question: "whose is the flesh our feet have moved upon?"
[11] Sleep steals through Harbor Dawn in phrases such as "pillowed bay," "under the mistletoe of dreams, a star," and "waking west and goes to sleep," denoting the semi-unconscious state at the beginning of "Powhatan's Daughter" (Weber 54-56). The idea of sleep is pronounced, for the next section of "Powhatan's Daughter" is Van Winkle, appropriating the myth of the American story of Rip Van Winkle, who fell asleep for twenty years and awoke to bafflement at the changes in the new, post-revolutionary America. In this section, the myths rise to the surface. The third stanza begins with "There was Priscilla's cheek close in the wind," referencing Priscilla Mullen, a character from Longfellow's narrative poem "The Courtship of Miles Standish" (Weber 58). "Priscilla's cheek close in the wind" makes a reference to the Puritan colony forming near Plymouth rock. Through this reference, Crane acknowledges the opposing myths of America's founding story, with the Puritans at Plymouth Rock in the North, and Virginia's story of John Smith, Pocahontas, and Jamestown in the South. The rivalry between the American North and South over recognition as the "original" colony in the New World takes place as a battle over the myth-making process. The narrative building of Virginia's history relies on John Smith as a heroic character. The description of John Smith as "all beard and certainty" draws attention to his physical manliness and the reliability of his myth (Weber 58). Using the word "certainty" to describe John Smith strongly asserts blind-support for Virginia's side of the historical argument, because the narratives created by Smith have provided a great amount of uncertainty for detractors of Virginia's legacy as the foundation of America.
[12] The inconsistencies between Smith's Generall Historie and True Relation in reference to Pocahontas support accusations affronting Smith's reliability. The dramatic scene in which Pocahontas saves John Smith from an execution at the hands of her father appears for the first time in 1624, in Smith's The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, published seven years after Pocahontas' death. This scene fuels the romance story created by John Davis in the 1805 publication of John Smith and the Princess Pocahontas and in his Travels (1803). Davis romantically links John Smith and Pocahontas for the first time, and this romance myth was a prevalent story by the 1920s, when Crane composed The Bridge. Its references to John Smith as "beard" and "certainty" position him as the masculine hero of Pocahontas's story, and Crane evokes the 1920s cultural memory of the Pocahontas myth by supporting the romantic tradition of John Smith's character.
[13] Memory becomes the topic of the marginal commentary running alongside the Van Winkle section, "Like Memory, she is time's truant, shall take you by the hand…" (Weber 59). This commentary situates memory, myth, and time as relatable factors. Memory moves myths through time. Pocahontas relates to memory; her myth flows through time in the public consciousness. Not only does the myth of Pocahontas move through time in the commentary, but the experience of Rip Van Winkle in Van Winkle shares the capacity to move through time, but then this movement is negated as time is wrapped into a cyclical form, so that there is no "here and there" but only "everywhere" (Weber 60). This stationary experience of the subject is demonstrated through one of the two stanzas of Van Winkle where the narrator explains Rip's experience, and the second exposition reinforces the cyclical nature of time and the connectivity of all things,
And Rip was slowly made awareThrough the fuzzy realm of memory and cyclical time, all things exist but in altered forms. Van Winkle is moving, but he is already everywhere at once without realizing it. He must move to the unconscious realm of sleep to realize this interconnectivity. From Harbor Dawn to Van Winkle the reader is reaching back into this public memory of myths towards the initial moment of contact; reaching back towards the Mother of America meeting the European pioneers who have come to "merge [their] seed" through their experience with the land. Van Winkle suggests they are already there, but they need a road to follow to reach that realization.
that he, Van Winkle, was not here
nor there. He woke and swore he'd seen Broadway
a Catskill daisy chain in May—
[14] Crane provides that road with The River, carrying the reader across the train-sprawled continent, backwards through time towards The Dance. The dense lyrical stanzas of The River carefully regulate the flow of sound, demonstrating Crane's poetic genius, constructing lyrics in time with a jazz-tinted meter. The movement of the river emerges in snake imagery, crawling through the verse like the flow of the meter, trains, and river moving along. The presence of the snake colors the relationship between the masculine pioneers and feminine landscape. The sexualized landscape submits to the progressive flow. The seductive movement across time and space encroaches upon the landscape in the following stanza:
And past the circuit of the lamp's thin flameThe "lamp's thin flame" flickers like a snake's tongue, and "time" moves like a "serpent down her shoulder" to accost "her body bare" landscape. Again, Pocahontas is figured as the wind; she carries the cry of the papooses on her "long mane." Her body is exposed, but her spirit remains allusive and elusive, whispering the "dead echoes" of the forgotten "redskin dynasties."
(O Nights that brought me to her body bare!)
Have dreamed beyond the print that bound her name.
Trains sounding the long blizzards out—I heard
Papooses crying on the wind's long mane
Screamed redskin dynasties that fled the brain,
—Dead echoes! But I knew her body there,
Time like a serpent down her shoulder, dark,
And space, an eaglet's wing, laid on her hair
[15] The marginal commentary in The River also leads the reader back through time, ". . . and past the din and slogans of the year—/ to those whose addresses are never near / but who have touched her, knowing her without name / nor the myths of her fathers…"(Weber 63-67). With the movement towards the "myths of her fathers," the reader witnesses the pioneer experience of America, although recognition of Pocahontas remains obscured, creating a disconnection and unfamiliarity between the old spirit of the land and the new pioneers. The River rushes like a train moving west across the rail lines. The vagabonds of the American frontier feature prominently as "rail-squatters ranged in nomad raillery," and their stanzas correspond with the marginal commentary "to those whose addresses are never near" as though these American hobos have touched the land, they know her, but they do not know her name (Weber 64-65). Crane highlights this "uniquely American pastoral vocabulary" as a "yearning to know and to respond to the landscape as feminine"; however, they do not know whose "flesh [their] feet have moved upon" (Kolodny 8). They are not aware of the land's spirit. They have not yet met Pocahontas.
[16] As Pocahontas represents the initial introduction between the pioneers and the female landscape, Crane keeps her always in the background as the progression of "Powhatan's Daughter" moves back in time. His vision, like the river, flows backwards towards the innocent state of the "virgin land." This backwards movement towards the initial contact point was explicitly acknowledged by Crane when he sent The River to Yvor Winters on July 1, 1927, and he mentioned his "long struggle with an attempt to tell the pioneer achievement backward" (Giles 54). The original pioneer experience in the American consciousness occurred when the Europeans built their fort in Jamestown, and Pocahontas, the young native girl, became a figure of merging cultures. The progression of Western civilization required this female agent, because of its composition as a "patriarchal social organization within which separate male-centered families compete, all movement into unsettled areas inevitably implies conquest and mastery" (Kolodny 133). Pocahontas is the personified frontier. She is the receptive feminine agent for the masculine pioneers. She is the land to be explored, tamed, and domesticated.
[17] Arriving at The Dance, Pocahontas's identity as the elusive female agent of memory and myth answers the question raised by Harbor Dawn's marginal commentary. The title of the second section of The Bridge, "Powhatan's Daughter," refers to Pocahontas, but by naming her through her relation to her father, Crane conceals her identity and positions her from the start as an object of male dominance. In this way she is prepared to be an object dominated by the pioneers through her representation as the American landscape. The marginal commentary at the beginning of The Dance revives the notion of a first encounter, a synthesis between blood and land, earth and flesh: "Then you shall see her truly—your blood remembering its first invasion of her secrecy, its first encounters with her kin, her chieftain lover … his shade that haunts the lakes and hills" (Weber 71).
[18] The commentary describes the memory of innocence, pulling Pocahontas across the 400-year span of time, denoting the "invasion" of the land as the pioneers came into contact with the original inhabitants. The Dance depicts the dark, violent, and tumultuous sphere of contact. The title, "the dance," characterizes a rhythmic mingling between the masculine pioneers and the feminine earth -- a reference to the sex act of "merging [their] seed." They court her shores; they enter with violence, clashing, to plant the seed. The first stanza establishes the fading Native American way of life: "she sprouted arms; she rose with maize—to die" (Weber 70). Here Pocahontas rises from the ground; she is born from the earth, her mother. Foreshadowing the fall from innocence, ideals of progress and development rampage the natural landscape and the people living in balance, connected to the Earth Mother. She brings corn to the fort at Jamestown, providing themselves with food to survive in an unfamiliar land. Discarded and used, like the corn she must die.
[19] The formidable tone of impending destruction continues as the poem progresses. The demolition of trees, "A birch kneels. All her whistling fingers fly. The oak grove circles in a crash of leaves" ending the stanza with "Pocahontas grieves. . ." (Weber 73). As the pioneers sought to tame the land they exploited the Native American population, objectifying them in the same manner as they used women and the land. They forgot the "legends of her fathers." The people populating the shores of America lost the continuity of a relationship with the land. They forgot Pocahontas, and they could no longer recognize her, like the hobos who do not know whose "flesh [their] feet have moved upon." As the pioneers move west, they encounter her everywhere. She is the land:
"West, west and south! winds over CumberlandAs her body is made into the physical landscape, she continues to provide sustenance for the pioneers entering her land. "Her breasts are fanned . . . into bloom" as though her feminine aspect of creation is the life force feeding America. Recalling her characterization as the wind in the opening excerpt to "Powhatan's Daughter," she is a force of nature.
And winds across the llano grass resume
Her hair's warm sibilance. Her breasts are fanned
O stream by slope and vineyard—into bloom!"
[20] The final section of "Powhatan's Daughter," Indiana, depicts the fallen state of nature, the fallen woman, the discarded and used victim of the pioneers. Pocahontas fades into memory as the "original state of innocence," replaced in Indiana by the fallen woman, "a homeless squaw." Indiana follows the Eldorado myth of the California gold rush. The disillusioned pioneer woman narrates her empty-handed return and crosses paths with the westward bound "homeless squaw" carrying her "half breed" child. This native woman with "eyes . . . sharp with pain," experienced the domination (Weber 78). Recalling Pocahontas's marriage to John Rolfe and their "half breed" child, this "homeless squaw" represents the continuous conquest of women. The two women, disillusioned and used, share a bond "lit with love shine," and through their gaze the pioneer woman claims, "I held you up [ . . . ] knew that mere words could not have brought us nearer" (Weber 78). Now, in the last section of "Powhatan's Daughter" Crane offers a glimpse of hope, unlike Eliot in The Waste Land, against the destructive forces of conquest. After the journey through time towards The Dance, Indiana looks into the future, relying on the connection between these two women for atonement. They form a bond through their gaze; "there's where the stubborn years gleam and atone, –Where gold is true!" (Weber 79). Here we see a moment of resistance against the oppressor, the uniting of the oppressed. Crane's focus on united women as the buoy of hope for redeeming their objectified status becomes extremely pertinent to his own era of woman's suffrage. [2]
[21] Pocahontas provides Crane with the tool to capture America's loss of innocence, a necessary element in the vitality of his vision, because America's pure "virgin" state remains in the collective memory. Muffled and obscured, this memory simmers as collective notions of regret and anxiety over America's fall from innocence remains obscured. Crane weaves his mythological narrative with strings of American idealism while incorporating critical strings of realism, exposing America's capitalistic, progress-driven oppression. The anxiety of exploitation must be dealt with, because "only in America has the entire process remained within historical memory, giving Americans the unique ability to see themselves as the willful exploiters of the very land that had once promised an escape from such necessities" (Kolodny 8). Americans remember their fall from Eden, their own loss of innocence. This memory, however, nearly suffocates under the weight of America's glorified legacy. The cries of the feminine, the Earth Mother, and the other objects of the progress-driven capitalist enterprise are dwarfed in public memory by the loud proclamations of America's glory: Land of The Free, Home of the Brave, Sweet Land of Liberty.
[22] The idealistic elements of America's mythology are essential to Crane's construction of The Bridge; however, Crane cannot compose the American Myth, accurately capturing the essence of America, without incorporating the obscured and forgotten. Myths, as the storage space for public memory, tend to record the constructed ideals. Myths tend to join in the chorus of cheer, singing the praises of a heroic history. As Crane constructs The Bridge, however, he knows he must find a way to bring along the muted cries. He appropriates America's golden myths and destabilizes them, through allegory and puns, weaving in threads of America's anxieties. Pocahontas's myth serves Crane's purpose well, representing the conquest of the "virgin" land and the oppression of race and gender. The value of Crane's mythic composition emerges with the perception of time's cyclical flow, where all things remain in slightly altered forms. The result of his mythical construction, then, is the articulation of moments and perceptions, connecting truths across the vast sea of American experience. It is the balance of chaos and order; everything is always moving and changing yet it all remains. The crux of The Bridge lies in its ability to make connections. As Crane composed his epic poem from an apartment overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge,[3] he would have recognized the architectural feat of the massive suspension bridge also relied on its ability to make connections. The lace lattice pattern of the shimmering steel cables creates a visual effect of motion, a distortion of vision. Through his own connections across The Bridge, Crane wraps the past, present, and future around a spinning wheel, and as you look into the blurred blades you can share his vision of unity.
Notes
[1] The Waste Land line 426
[2] The women's suffrage movement was moving full force with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 and the years to follow.
[3] Crane rented precisely the same apartment, 110 Columbia Heights, as the one from which engineers Washington Roebling and Emily, his wife, supervised the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Works Cited
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