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Region and the Imagination
In The Dogs of March (1979), perhaps the best novel ever written about New Hampshire, Ernest Hebert relates the story of a transplanted Midwesterner. As a young girl living in Kansas City, Zoe Cutter discovered a picture of an idyllic New Hampshire town in National Geographic magazine: "forested hills, fields that rode the lower slopes, a tidy stone wall bordering a country lane, white birches in the foreground like two angels, white church steeple just showing behind maples in the background." For thirty years Cutter accepts National Geographic's image of the "real" New England as if it were "a page from the Bible." As she enters middle age, her mental postcard of life in New England inspires her to relocate. She purchases the "Swett Place" in the fictional town of Darby. Cutter sets out to tidy up her property—to straighten the stone walls, prune forested fields, and "open a country boutique in the barn."[1] In other words, Cutter uses an old magazine image to transform the Swett Place and to bring the real New England of her imagination into existence.
Through Zoe Cutter, a major character in his New Hampshire novel, Hebert suggests how regions are real locations but also imagined places. Visual images accumulated over time distill the perceived cultural essence that defines regional identity and distinctiveness. In turn, as territories on the ground and countries of the imagination, regions bring geographic and cultural order to the sprawling continental United States. Regions help make America geographically comprehensible.
Regions are not only concrete geographic domains but also conceptual places. Humans define regions; they are not geographic entities that define themselves. Regional identity is not simply an organic outcome of human interaction with the physical environment—the geology and climate, for example—of a particular place. Regions are real places but also historical artifacts whose cultural boundaries shift over time.
New England, however, seems like such a "natural" region. Huddled in the nation's Northeastern corner, New England endures as America's smallest region. On a map, size tends to bestow on New England a natural coherence and wholeness that eludes other, more geographically and imaginatively unwieldy regions. The expansive South, Midwest, and West are often divided into subregions, but the more proportioned New England seems to abide intact. "We have so much country that we have no country at all," Nathaniel Hawthorne complained. "New England is as large a lump of earth as my heart can readily take in."[2] This "natural" region stands as a habitable place where life is lived on a human scale. New England embraces the Union's smallest state. New England is a region of towns hived off from larger towns whose boundary signs announce the date of their birth and help create not only a sense of history but also a terrain dense with border crossings. The region's urban landscape is dotted with small to midsize cities. In New England, distances pose few obstacles to tourists bent on exploring seacoast and mountains or to urban-based owners of ski chalets or vacation homes. If one eliminates Maine's Aroostook County, the kind of far-flung, thinly populated district that one finds in other sections of America, even New England's largest state more closely resembles the region's geopolitical norm.
If its six states do not actually comprise a natural region, the scale of life in most of New England suggests that it is a cultural region—a place where people have etched distinctive patterns into the landscape. But to describe New England as a cultural region does not resolve the problem of its distinctiveness; it only offers a basis for examining New England's history and identity. Culture, after all, far from being fixed and holistic, is dynamic, continually changing, and historically contingent. The same is true of regional identities. In fact, for more than three centuries New Englanders have responded to changes like the nineteenth-century ethnic, urban, and industrial transformation of the region's Southern states by revising explanations of regional distinctiveness. Such efforts typically singled out certain cultural patterns and geographic locations and excluded others in the construction of regional identity. Though they did not use the term, the historical architects of regional identity endeavored not only to define but also to delimit and stabilize New England as a cultural region.
Yet much of New England originated and developed as a cultural outpost of a powerful Puritan religious movement. Moreover, as Hawthorne's mid-nineteenth-century stories and novels suggest, Puritanism's imprint on the region persisted long after the collapse of New England's church-state alliance and the demise of Calvinist orthodoxy. Still, the Puritan era too often has functioned as a New England ur-civilization, invoked across time to explain everything from the region's low homicide rate to the fatalism of its Boston Red Sox fans. A scholarly monument enshrines Puritanism as the most studied subject of the American past. And highly trained scholars of Puritanism have not been known for caution in their claims.
In Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989), David Hackett Fischer offers the most sweeping and controversial interpretation of how Puritanism forever stamped New England's cultural DNA. Influential Puritan founders from East Anglia reproduced in New England the folkways of the world they had left behind. From speech and dress to work, politics, and diet East Anglian founders transferred their religiously informed folkways to the New World. In Fischer's "genetic" history, Puritan folkways not only defined the distinctive culture of colonial New England; they have endured as the shaping elements of regional life down to the present. Similarly, settlers from other parts of Britain carried their folkways to the Delaware Valley, Virginia, and the colonial backcountry, giving birth to what remain historically determined cultural regions that have spread outward from their original hearths.[3]
Fischer's monumental interpretation of the historical origins and persistence of regionalism in American life was greeted with a mixture of praise and criticism. Albion's Seed is best understood as a product of the revival of regionalism that gained momentum in the 1980s, a movement that benefited from a new skepticism directed at narratives of a monolithic American identity that Cold War cultural nationalism had generated. America now seemed to be a nation of many stories. American history was miniaturized by the 1980s. Microstudies of communities and particular groups proliferated. A multicultural past was born.
Albion's Seed was a response both to the state of American historical writing and to the renewal of regional studies. If no overarching national narratives could explain America, then a limited number of regional narratives might stave off the "pulverization of the past," the reduction of American history to particles of human experience that comprise no whole.[4] Regional history offered an interpretive middle ground between exclusionary national narratives and endless local stories. Fischer's genetic approach to American cultural regions also coincided with and lent historical support to the revival of regionalism, manifested, for example, in the growth of regional studies centers at academic institutions across the country. Albion's Seed repudiated declension models of regional change: the idea that coherent cultural regions may have existed in the past but that they have been in decline for decades as modern and postmodern alterations of American life homogenized the nation.[5]
In Albion's Seed, the cultural holism once imputed to the nation is transferred to region. "America" may be destabilized but "New England" persists as a concrete, seemingly static, almost transhistorical cultural whole.[6] Albion's Seed ignores differences within regions in the course of emphasizing differences between them. If regional cultures and identities have persisted through time, they have not done so in quite the genetic ways that Albion's Seed suggests. Fischer's regional cultures extend across space and time but do not seem to undergo major change within their borders. New England may be older and more conceptually stable than America has been, but it has clearly evolved as a dynamic, constantly changing place. Moreover, new interpretive needs have arisen from social, economic, and political changes that have required continuing revision of New England regional identity. Both persistence and change compel the historian of regional life to ground New England identity and cultural distinctiveness on shifting earth.[7]
