| Chapter 1: | Romantic Antiquarian Literature |
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This mentality is articulated precisely in an anecdote related by R. Tripp Evans. American travel writer John Lloyd Stephens and British illustrator Frederick Catherwood toured Central America documenting prehistoric ruins; their collaboration resulted in the popular Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (1841) and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843). In addition to producing lucrative books, Stephens had another scheme to turn antiquities into dollars. Unethically using his credentials as a U.S. diplomat for coercive purposes when dealing with Mexican officials, he attempted for a pittance to buy vast tracts of land where Mayan cities were located. Stephens wanted to disassemble the structures and transport them to New York City where he planned to rebuild them and open what we could consider a theme park (54–55). If his dream had been realized, a visitor today could wander among Mayan ruins and then, only a matter of minutes later, tour the New York Stock Exchange and the ruins of the World Trade Center.
A psychoanalytic perspective further illuminates the complex ideological motivation behind the antiquarian phenomenon. Gesa Mackenthun, having examined cultural representations and political rhetoric associated with Andrew Jackson’s removal policies, identifies the displacement and the corresponding attempted extermination of Indians as a collective trauma in the American psyche, producing distinct cultural manifestations that have persisted to the present moment: “The symbolic and ‘scientific’ preoccupation with Indian graves and remains suggests that the Indian exodus had produced a greater psychological instability within U.S. society than is generally assumed” (97). Based on the concept of occlusion originally articulated by Freud and adapted to broader cultural models by later authors, Mackenthun traces the persistence and permutations of this trauma in America’s dominant and marginal cultural productions.
No reader seeking to understand Euro-Native American relations should overlook the fact that the consequences of aggressive expansion caused a crisis, still unresolved, that manifests itself culturally through seemingly disjunctive occurrences of imagery and obsessions that, at root, involve repressed guilt, rage, and profound ambivalence.