Disaster Tourism: Racialized Violence in Fuller's Summer on the Lakes

Margaret Fuller’s influence on Thoreau gets discussed primarily through her editorship of his articles published in the Dial.  This paper takes up a further debt, one of emulation, analyzing closely the haunting... [ view full abstract ]

Margaret Fuller’s influence on Thoreau gets discussed primarily through her editorship of his articles published in the Dial.  This paper takes up a further debt, one of emulation, analyzing closely the haunting assemblages in Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes and their contribution to what I have termed the “hauntological sublime” in Thoreau’s posthumously published Cape Cod. Both texts are unusual travel narratives, self-consciously deconstructing their own genre. Both adopt detached journalistic realism to counter the easy sentimentality of conventional portraits of death. Drawing upon Jane Bennett’s concept of “geoaffect,” I examine the haunting affect projected onto the landscape in both works, tracing complex vectors of racialized violence, subordination, disgust, loss, and death as they appear in the assemblages of rocks, bones, trees, beaches, and trinkets. Like the “assemblage of thoughts, feelings, cultural intertexts and indeological inscriptions” Jeffrey Steele terms “the textual sublime,” the hauntological sublime “embeds perception in an intertextual matrix.”  But the hauntological sublime that Cape Cod borrows from Fuller goes further in actively haunting the reader with a sense of what has gone missing from the conventional sublime. Despite the cheery, upbeat descriptions Fuller deploys to counter sentimentalized notions of the Vanishing Indian, Fuller haunts the reader with a mournful textual mood, and describes a landscape supercharged with negative affect. Where death is the order of the day, persons accommodating to this fact appear as affect defects, unnaturally deficient of emotion and incapable of responding to disaster.