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Literary Devices
Definition of Allusion
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals, historical events, or philosophical ideas... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to... read full definition
Letter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Nature's Bounty:
Letters from an American Farmer is not only a semi-biographical account of the agricultural experience of American colonial settlers—it is also a seminal work of American myth-making. As should be expected for such a novel, St. John de Crèvecoeur is prone to the occasional rhetorical flourish that raises his narrative to the grandiosity of myth. In Letter 1, he uses personification and allusion to do just this:
Here Nature opens her broad lap to receive the perpetual accession of newcomers and to supply them with food. I am sure I cannot be called a partial American when I say that the spectacle afforded by these pleasing scenes must be more entertaining and more philosophical than that which arises from beholding the musty ruins of Rome.
In this passage, de Crèvecoeur personifies the land itself as Nature, a living deity in the manner of classical bucolic poetry. He describes how well the land can take care of the settlers in terms of Nature generously opening her "broad lap" to grant her bounty.
He then invokes Ancient Rome and alludes to the prevailing obsession with classical civilization among the educated elite of England. Surely, in James's opinion, what is happening in the American colonies—the birth of a new civilization—must be infinitely more exciting and important than the prevailing European obsession with the detritus and ruin of Rome.
De Crèvecoeur's writing style draws unmistakable influence from georgic literature, a loose genre of pastoral writing pioneered by the Roman poet Virgil in the Georgics, who himself drew heavily on the Idylls of the Greek poet Theocritus. Nonetheless, he dismisses the idle worship of classical culture and civilization that was a hallmark of Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe. Instead, this personification of Nature hints at James's belief in the powers of nature and of human agency rather than those of some omnipotent divine being. De Crèvecoeur's deism is extremely influential on his vision of the American colonial relationship between settlers and their newly claimed land.
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Letter 4
Explanation and Analysis—Classical Government:
In Letter 4, James whisks the reader to the island of Nantucket to describe how its settlers have been able to build a prosperous society built on a booming whaling industry. Through allusion, he explains the unusual conditions under which the island's community was founded:
This happy settlement was not founded on intrusion, forcible entries, or blood, as so many others have been; [...] Neither political nor religious broils, neither disputes with the natives, nor any other contentions, have in the least agitated or disturbed its detached society. Yet the first founders knew nothing either of Lycurgus or Solon, for this settlement has not been the work of eminent men or powerful legislators forcing nature by the accumulated labours of art.
Lycurgus and Solon were famous statesmen of ancient Greece. Lycurgus was a Spartan who transitioned the city-state into its legendary, militaristic societal structure, while Solon was an Athenian famous for his role as a lawmaker. James's point, in making this allusion, is that the European political elite's expectations are hopelessly outdated. Namely, he rejects the idea that in order to create and run a government, one must adhere to a classically derived model or at least have a formal classical education. Nantucket, in James's view, flies in the face of this assumption: it is a thriving society under ideal political conditions, founded and run by people who have no knowledge of classical law or its elitist history in Europe.
Eventually, of course, the language of the Founding Fathers would be steeped in classicism—and the ideals of Ancient Greek democracy had a major influence on the establishment of the United States' constitutional republic. But at the moment, Nantucket loomed large in de Crèvecoeur's mind as an example of how an ideal (and ideally limited) government could spring out of the otherwise adverse conditions of colonial life.
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Explanation and Analysis—The Stream and the Tree:
In Letter 4, James describes Nantucket and the thriving community of American colonists who have settled on the island. Using a combination of simile and allusion, he expounds on the conditions in which he believes humanity can best flourish—conditions he believes he has found on Nantucket:
Give mankind the full rewards of their industry, allow them to enjoy the fruit of their labour under the peaceable shade of their vines and fig-trees, leave their native activity unshackled and free, like a fair stream without dams or other obstacles; the first will fertilize the very sand on which they tread, the other exhibit a navigable river, spreading plenty and cheerfulness wherever the declivity of the ground leads it.
The "vine and fig tree" is an allusion to a recurring image in Hebrew scripture and a favorite image of George Washington himself. The farmer basking in the shade of their own tree became a symbol of the American ideal—and this passage is James's explanation of that very ideal, packaged in a larger simile: let a river run its own course (give the American people the freedom to do what they will), and it will fertilize the ground on its own terms and grow into a wonderful unimpeded river that runs throughout the land (the American people will grow this new country, unimpeded, fueled by the "fruits of their labour." Even the cliché phrase "fruits of their labour" is perfect for James's larger argument in Letters: everything is good in a society based on small farms run by local farmers, when the fruits of labor are literally fruit or other crops.
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Letter 7
Explanation and Analysis—Legal Reformation:
As James explores colonial America, the reader gradually becomes aware that the idyllic conditions of this young country are at risk as the colonial leadership bristles against the British, settlers fight for expansion on the frontier, and cities grow wealthy and cosmopolitan despite the agrarian model of the country's original English settlements. One threat to this agrarian ideal, James makes clear, is that posed by lawyers. In Letter 7, he makes an allusion to Europe's Protestant Reformation and also uses a metaphor to express his wish for a reformation against lawyers in America:
In some provinces where every inhabitant is constantly employed in tilling and cultivating the earth, they are the only members of society who have any knowledge; let these provinces attest what iniquitous use they have made of that knowledge. They are here what the clergy were in past centuries with you; the reformation which clipped the clerical wings is the boast of that age, and the happiest event that could possible happen; a reformation equally useful is now wanted to relieve us from the shameful shackles and the oppressive burthen under which we groan...
James hopes that the metaphorical legal "wings" of America's ambitious lawyers might be clipped just as those of the clergy were over the course of the Protestant Reformation. That reformation halted the relentless expansion of the Catholic Church, which threatened the livelihoods of European commoners with an indulgent system that asked believers to pay in order to find their sins forgiven. In the same way that the Protestant Reformation rejected such practices, James hopes that the lawyers might be reigned in once and for all in America. To James, the lawyer represents the antithesis of the farmer: the former is a well-educated bureaucrat who thrives on manipulating the uninformed, while the latter is an honest, hard-working laborer who makes a livelihood out of an intimate relationship with the land itself.
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Letter 9
Explanation and Analysis—Classical Slavery:
In Letter 9, James contemplates the practice of slavery in the American colonies. In one passage, he makes an allusion to the slave states of the classical world, which have historically been used as justification for modern slavery:
We are told, it is true, that slavery cannot be so repugnant to human nature as we at first imagine because it has been practised in all ages and in all nations; the Lacedaemonians themselves, those great asserters of liberty, conquered the Helotes with the design of making them their slaves; the Romans, whom we consider as our masters in civil and military policy, lived in the exercise of the most horrid oppression; they conquered to plunder and to enslave. What a hideous aspect the face of the earth must then have exhibited!
Here, James references Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome: Lacedaemonia is another name for Sparta, a Greek city-state where enslaved people (who made up the majority of the population) were referred to as "helots." Throughout American history, slaveholders looked to classical civilizations that practiced slavery, namely Greece and Rome, in order to find historical precedent that justified continuing chattel slavery in the colonies (a practice that continued in the United States). James reverses that thread here, declaring that not only is slavery not justifiable by any sort of historical argument but, in fact, that the supposedly benevolent practices of slavery in classical civilization must have been cruel and brutal in themselves. How "hideous" society must have been in ancient Sparta and Rome, James thinks, if this was an integral part of Greek and Roman society.
In this passage, James seems more keenly aware of the tendency throughout history to excuse atrocity when it is convenient to do so—despite the fact that he himself has just done much the same thing, glossing over the practice of slavery in the North as a benevolent counterpart of the American South's brutal plantation society.
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