New England Landscape History in American Poetry: A Lacanian Vie ...

threshold between nature and the symbolic in the context of historical shifts in New England farming. These speakers tend to move so close to the béance that they begin to envision themselves speaking in the New England region as if for the first time. In their romantic experience of decaying New England farmland, they represent Lacan’s theory of signification, which conceives of meaning as the intersection between the culturally defined symbolic father and feminized nature. Like Dickinson’s speakers before them, Frost’s speakers rhetorically delineate—through chiasmus, antimetabole, and thematic inversions—a particular historical development in the landscape that threatens to erase the past and in turn marks their voices with distinctive tension (another reflection of Emerson’s visual presence through his attempt at erasure). The rhetorical functioning of many Frost poems involves attempts at revivifying the power of language to communicate the experience of landscape with renewed vision as if seeing it for the first time. For the speakers, the law of the symbolic—or what Lacan called the symbolic father, derived from the “symbolic distance” between the mother and child in the Oedipus Complex (Le Séminaire. Livre IV 161)—forms along the lines of natural decay and human renewal in the landscape. The speakers’ return to an original division between culture and nature extends to the figurative positions of men and women in the domestic sphere, leading to an analysis that follows the language of the poetry by closely identifying Lacan’s conception of the symbolic with its metaphorical paternal functioning.

A historical understanding of the New England region as well as Lacan’s theory of signification shows how the poetry plays upon the tension resulting from a primal conflict between farm and wilderness. David Foster’s historical analysis of the region, gleaned in large part from his examination of Henry David Thoreau’s observations of the New England wilderness, helps locate a recurring cycle of cultivation, abandonment, and subsequent re-growth of the region. The speakers effectively use this cycle to see themselves in the landscape as if for the first time, cultivating an original division between nature and farmland. Though several critics have already offered general surveys of Frost’s figuration of the farm and his use of tension between men and women,