“Or Round the Pictured Orb Instructive Trace”: Sarah Wentworth Morton’s Lady Harriet Ackland
Like Bradstreet, Sarah Wentworth Morton foregrounds scholarly citation and judgment in an ambitious engagement with world history and global space that we risk overlooking if we chiefly associate either her episodic approach to epic or the “various imperfections” for which she apologizes (1790, p. viii) with gendered marginalization. Morton published three long poems in the 1790s, Ouâbi, or The Virtues of Nature (1790), Beacon Hill. A Local Poem (1797), and The Virtues of Society. A Tale Founded on Fact (1799), which offer different glimpses of poetic ambition as expressed through poems that engage world history. All three are framed as “American” and situated with respect to both a European present and a classical past. As she entreats in her introduction to the first of these works, Ouâbi, or The Virtues of Nature (1790), “I am induced to hope, that the attempting a subject wholly American will in some respect entitle me to the partial eye of the patriot” (p. viii). In each of these poems, Morton recenters world history in the United States, generally through the yoking of European cultural achievements with North American vitality. This vitality is figured through rugged and sublime natural prospects, racial heterogeneity, and the transportable ideals of post-revolutionary Liberty. It is also evident in a thoroughgoing Eurocentrism that in Ouâbi, for instance, fuels the Vanishing Indian motif that was so prevalent in later US literature. Here I focus on Morton’s final long poem of the 1790s, The Virtues of Society (1799), which treats the heroism of Lady Harriet Ackland, who traveled with her husband to Canada and then to upstate New York, nursing him when he was struck down during the Battle of Saratoga.7
Morton makes frequent use of “prospects” in her long poems in passages that look both down on the landscape and into the future. This is, as Christopher N. Phillips explains, “a familiar gesture that could be used to make arguments about the meaning of landscape, the trajectory of the nation, or even the nature of knowledge” (2011, p. 17). Beacon Hill most obviously depends on this strategy, concluding, appropriately, with the United States figured as a beacon that shines out over the globe: “Till the full ray of equal Freedom shine,/And like the sun this genial globe entwine” (Morton 1797, p. 52). But it is a key feature in her representation of American exceptionalism in other long poems as well. The Virtues of Society stresses westward movement both through the revivification of classical exempla in America and the movement of its heroine, Lady Harriet Ackland, from England to upstate New York. This movement from east to west is then rendered through a number of North American prospects that are explicitly set against the picturesque qualities “Of peaceful Albion’s bliss-encircled isle” (Morton 1799, p. 9). Harriet’s decision to follow her husband to “the thunder of the plains” leads to a sea voyage in which the waves create delusions of English landscape that are then swept away with wind and wave, such that, “To the fond view the painted prospects die,/And flowers, and flocks, and trees, in blotted ruin lie” (Morton 1799, p. 11). In “Canadia,” Harriet finds instead a country of seasonal extremes that is nonetheless home to many peoples. Indeed, this portion of the poem depends both upon the oxymoron of a “brineless sea” and the warmth and glow of people who thrive in a location that is first represented as “sullen woods, that mock the solar ray,” but are then recharacterized as warm and bright because “there the varying, mingling colors join” (Morton 1799, p. 12):
Yet on these shores a numerous race reside—
Here the red warrior towers in painted pride—
And there the blood of Gallia’s captured race
Warms the brisk limbs, and tints the shaded face—
Here white-brow’d Albion’s blooming offspring shine—
And there the varying, mingling colors join;—
Yet her own Lawrence rolls his fertile tide
Through villas, smiling on his pastoral side
(Morton 1799, p.12)
This introduction to the frigid north then gives way to the Hudson River as the site of the Battle of Saratoga:
The voice of death the shivering forest fills,
And Hudson echoes from his hundred hills.—
Hudson! The lord of many a fateful hour,
With wild, impetuous, desolating power,
To the loud battle joins his clamorous flood,
And feeds his myriads with immortal blood.
(Morton 1799, p. 16)
Morton uses this movement through successive prospects to teach Euro-centric readers to value both the sublime aspects of the North American wilds and the mixed community that emerges there.
Phillips locates Morton’s “radical” rethinking of epic tradition in the prospects, proto-Romantic fragments, and intertexual connectedness working across her three long poems, all characteristics he identifies in other American epics of the period as well (2011, pp. 60–62). These characteristics help recenter the epic in local spaces and with respect to recent events while also drawing on and developing a greater use of fragments that “evokes and creates contexts if used deliberately” (Jung 2009, p. 16), in Morton’s case the reach and significance of the United States through episodes in its history. Just as importantly, Morton marks the difference between the unreliable histories of classical bards and her accounts of the present “Founded on Fact,” as the title page of The Virtues of Society proudly declares, by characterizing herself as a truth-telling “minstrel.” This is another engagement of folk traditions that, Phillips argues, modernizes epic while anticipating the authorial self-fashioning of Romantic poets (2011, p. 60). He continues, “The modern solution to the problem of rendering contemporary events epic, according to Morton, is to frame the telling of those events as more virtuous than the Iliad because they are more truthful” (Phillips 2011, p. 60).
Morton’s insistence that she recounts “living efforts…Beyond the storied page of fabling fame” (1799, p. 5) recalls Bradstreet’s concern with lying Greeks; here too it signals a literary ambition that even a reader as astute as Phillips undervalues. While aligning Morton’s experiments with broad trends in the early American epic, Phillips hypothesizes that the intertextual experimentation of Morton and Phillis Wheatley suggests that “conceiving of the epic in pieces may be a particularly useful entry into the tradition for marginalized writers” (2011, p. 59). There may be some truth in this familiar consideration of the material conditions shaping a marginalized writer’s literary endeavors. It is a consideration invited by both Bradstreet and Morton themselves, as when Bradstreet adds to the end of her fourth monarchy, “No more I’le do sith I have suffer’d wrack,/Although my Monarchies their legs do lack” (Bradstreet 1678, p. 191), and Morton begs her readers to make allowances “from a consideration of my sex and situation” while hoping for “the partial eye of the patriot” (1790, p. viii). But too much emphasis on marginalization, particularly marginalization from formal education, may keep us from attending to the scholarly ambitions of these poems.
Just as Bradstreet follows Ralegh in stitching together a portrait of world history from the Assyrians to the Romans, Morton draws from similar works of history, as well as ethnography, art, and contemporary accounts of the American Revolution. Indeed, her early allusion in The Virtues of Society to Artemisia, “whom asian realms adored” (1799, p. 5), includes a footnote to An Universal History, from the earliest account of time (1747–1768), a massive, 65-volume attempt at totalizing history. Phillips attributes the use of “prospect” in early American epics not only to the influence of Paradise Lost but just as importantly to their frequent origins as commencement poems, which “tended