Manifest and Other Destinies: Territorial Fictions of the Nineteenth-Century United States

by Stephanie LeMenager

Manifest and Other Destinies critiques Manifest Destiny’s exclusive claim as an explanatory national story in order to rethink the meaning and boundaries of the West and of the United States’ national identity. Stephanie LeMenager considers the American West before it became a trusted symbol of U.S. national character or a distinct literary region in the later nineteenth century, back when the West was undeniably many wests , defined by international economic networks linking diverse territories and peoples from the Caribbean to the Pacific coast. Many nineteenth-century novelists, explorers, ideologues, and humorists imagined the United States’ destiny in what now seem unfamiliar terms, conceiving of geopolitical configurations or possible worlds at odds with the land hunger and “providential” mission most clearly associated with Manifest Destiny. Manifest and Other Destinies draws from an archive of this literature and rhetoric to offer a creative rereading of national and regional borders. LeMenager addresses both canonical and lesser-known U.S. writers who shared an interest in western environments that resisted settlement, including deserts, rivers, and oceans, and who used these challenging places to invent a postwestern cultural criticism in the nineteenth century. Le Menager highlights the doubts and self-reckonings that developed alongside expansionist fervor and predicted contemporary concerns about the loss of cultural and human values to an emerging global order. In Manifest and Other Destinies , the American West offers the United States its first encounter with worlds at once local and international, worlds that, as time has proven, could never be entirely subordinated to the nation’s imperial desire.

286 pages, Hardcover

First published January 9, 2004

Reviews

[Gary Reger · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Manifest and Other Destinies Stephanie LeMenager ranges widely over nineteenth-century American literature and history in a critique and investigation of "manifest destiny"--the claim that the young US was destined to control the whole continent from ocean to ocean. As a ruling conceit, manifest destiny helped shape our self-perception and provided justification for brutal eliminationist policies against Indigenous peoples and the fashioning of notions about the West as landscape and crucial component to national identity.

The big figures LeMenager treats include James Fennimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain. She interweaves her discussion of their works with dozens of lesser-known novelists, travel writers, memoirists, polemicists, and pamphleteers to draw a dazzling picture of the currents driving literature and imagination across the century. One unifying topic is the question of "whiteness:" its development, defense, and fragility in the face of immigration and especially slavery. Her reading of Twain's unpublished and unfinished novella Tom Swayer's Conspiracy is especially revelatory of the contradictions created by whiteness, slavery, and freedom.,

LeMenegar is well versed in the secondary literature on her topics--immense, naturally--and makes good use of her predecessors' work, generously acknowledging their efforts even when she disagrees, and she has avoided the common academic disease of windy reviews of previous literature. Instead she treats briefly what others have written at the point where it becomes relevant to her argument.

Understanding how national identity, claims of the privilege of whiteness, and the West as an emblematic territory in our national imagination developed is all the more urgent today, as these questions have presented an increasing salience in the troubles of our times. LeMenegar's book is a worthy contribution to that understanding.