‘The Blindness of the Seeing Eye’: Literature, Ideology and the Unconscious

Abstract

For the past several decades the images and symbols of the myth of America have tended to dominate critical discourse within American literary scholarship and American culture studies. This discussion generally accepts the hegemony of the myth of America as a promised land of regeneration. On the one hand are those who have interpreted the myth as the basic theme in shaping America’s consciousness of itself. According to this school of thought America was envisioned by Europe as the unspoiled Virgin Land, a pastoral New World Garden inhabited by the American Adam, a heroic figure who begins human history all over again. On the other hand, those critics who use the myth as a standard or ideal from which to attack the so-called realities of American culture and history also accept the myth’s terms. They assume that the images and symbols of the myth of regeneration reflect genuine beliefs and lasting values that have been violated and defiled throughout our history.¹ In many of these works that deal with the myth of America, the subject of ideology receives minimal attention. Accordingly, in an eloquent and touching essay, Henry Nash Smith confesses to failing to perceive the importance of ideology to his study in Virgin Land of the symbol and myth of the West. Thinking about the cost to the environment and to Native Americans of the ideology of progress, civilization and free enterprise, Smith admits to not acknowledging ‘the guilt intrinsic to the national errand into the wilderness. Like my teachers and academic colleagues, I had in this fashion lost the capacity for facing up to the tragic dimensions of the Westward movement’.²