[This review originally appeared in Geographical Review, 42, 4 (1994): 479-81].
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Patrick McGreevy, 1994. Imagining Niagara: The Meaning and Making of Niagara Falls. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. |
When nineteenth century artists and writers visited Niagara Falls, they inevitably referred to a sublime environmental experience --a sense of spellbound uplift and exhilaration fostered by some extraordinary thing in nature.
Patrick McGreevy's book seeks to decipher Niagara's lasting enthrallment by investigating written descriptions provided by visitors, entrepreneurs, and creative writers who used the site in some way in their work. "One cannot help but be struck," he writes, "by the sheer amount of human attention the falls has attracted" (p. 2).
McGreevy uses the term "accumulations" to identify the various meanings that help to understand the falls' continuing attraction and the unusual set of landscapes--horror museums and that have sprung up in the the surroundings.
Though recognizing that one can never provide the one ultimately "correct" set of accumulations, he wants somehow to organize the thousands of written works that deal with Niagara Falls: travelers' sketches, poetry, novels, film scripts‑-even comic strips. He arrives at four "interpretive and suggestive" themes to clarify Niagara's attraction: geographical remoteness, death, nature, and the future. McGreevy emphasizes that they are all related in that "each presents a realm that contrasts with the ordinary here-and-now of daily life" (p. 5).
McGreevy lays out his plan of argument in the book's first chapter and then devotes a chapter to each of the four themes. Chapter 2, "The Distant Niagara," explores the falls as it was imagined as a fantastical, overwhelming place set apart from the mundane realm of ordinary experience. McGreevy charts the European fascination with faraway lands and examines how the falls' maintained an image of fascination and transcendence continued even after the 1820s, when they were no longer remote geographically.
We learn that the first written account of the falls in the West was produced in 1669 by a man who never even saw the falls but heard of them through questioning the Seneca inhabitants of the region. We learn that the apogee of written descriptions of the falls was between the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the Civil War. During this time especially, the falls were imagined as a pilgrimage destination‑-"a center out there where one could hope to transcend, at least temporarily, the boundaries of the routine world."
In chapter 3, "Death at Niagara," McGreevy explores the sense of danger and threat that Niagara regularly evoked, particularly because its very geography‑-endless water falling violently‑-provided a ready metaphor for death. As background, McGreevy examines the meaning of dying in the Victorian period, which allowed for "a remarkable degree of latitude in imaginative speculation" (p. 42).
We learn of the remarkable regularity at which people have died at Niagara‑-some accidentally, others through death-defying stunts that failed, th most through suicides‑-at least one person every month. If, however, Niagara is literally associated with death, there is also, McGreevy argues, the unremitting movement of the water itself, which becomes a readily-appropriated symbol for inevitable death: "Down this predestined course," wrote one nineteenth-century visitor, "ton follows ton as remorselessly as human generations speed to the great Unknown" (p. 44).
In chapter 4,"The Nature of Niagara," McGreevy considers how the falls came to be seen in the nineteenth century as the ultimate expression of the natural world, "a living embodiment of [nature's] utmost power" (p. 71). McGreevy argues that the mystery and otherness of Niagara allowed it to be imagined with qualities beyond everyday life. He identifies several pairs of contrasting images through which this quality of otherness was depicted in considerably different and, often, contradictory ways.
For example, in some written descriptions of Niagara, nature is interpreted as a mystery with a hidden past that was beautiful (the falls compared to a lost Eden) or terrible (an association with humankind's fall and the Biblical flood). Other writers looked at Niagara Falls, not so much to understand nature itself, as to penetrate human nature, thus the falls was seen to represent a pristine soul and spirit or, in contrast, the violent passions and instinctive, animal part of human nature.
The book's last interpretive chapter, "The Future of Niagara," emphasizes that the falls had regularly related to time in the sense that the falling water suggested a temporal break‑-"a threshold no one could see beyond" (101). It was not until the development of hydroelectric power in the 1890s, however, that the falls became a context around which to speculate on various futures, some optimistic and utopian and others more cynical and fatalistic.
To examine the link between Niagara and the future, McGreeley first reviews the optimistic visions of the future propagated in the last quarter of the nineteenth century through such writers as Jules Verne and Edward Bellamy. McGreeley then reviews the practical implications for Niagara arising from the progressive belief that the falls, long seen to be other-worldly and beyond human control, could actually be harnessed for human purposes.
In the 1890s, for example, the distinguished scientist Lord Kelvin, proclaimed that Niagara's being completely harnessed by machinery would do much greater good than the falls as it was a splendid thing of nature: "I do not hope," he wrote, "that our children's children will ever see the Niagara cataract" (p. 115).
The falls' growing association with a future of technological progress led to a series of visionary schemes for Niagara and its region, of which McGreeley describes three: William T. Love's 1893 "Model City," King Camp Gillette's 1894 "Metropolis," and Leonard Henkle's 1895 "Great Dynamic Place and International Hall." The last, for example, was to be a lavish, palace a mile long and some forty-six stories high spanning the Niagara River just above the crest of the falls.
Like Love and Gillette, Henkle envisioned a controllable future grounded in technological and economic order. He saw his vision not only as a place of technological and economic order but as a kind of United Nations where people would learn that there is only "one humanity, one country, one religion and one destiny for man" (p. 135).
McGreely also considers more ambiguous or bleaker pictures of Niagara's future as presented in Thomas Carlyle's Shooting Niagara (1867), Jules Vernes' Master of the World (1905), H. G. Wells' War in the Air (1908), and one episode of Philip Nowland and Dick Calkins'comic strip Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century (1929).
There is much about McGreeley's book that makes it a pleasure: the writing is lucid and entertaining and the themes are well thought through and convincingly argued through appropriate examples that are often intriguing or amusing. The chapter on death is particularly fascinating, and one learns of such unbelievable stories as the man who, pretending to throw a young child into the falls, lost his grip with the result that both she and he, trying to save her, were swept over the falls.
Perhaps the single most striking part of the book is a section described as "a sort of geography of Niagara's metaphor of death," in which McGreely explains how the various physical parts of the falls‑-the brink, plunge, abyss, mist, and rainbow‑-provided a ready set of symbols around which one could imaginatively consider death. For example, McGreeley describes the plunge: "If the brink... is the final moment of life, then the plunge is a fall from life, a fall into death. Some visitors have called it an endless fall, a fall into eternity" (p. 54).
On the other hand, the intense interest that McGreeley's effective writing generates in the reader leads to one problem with the book: the reader wants more. The book is short, some 160 pages, and there are so many topics and issues that McGreeley mentions in passing but which seem to deserve greater discussion. We learn, for example, about the many suicides committed each year at the falls and want to know more about who these people are and for what reasons they chose Niagara for their deaths.
Or we learn of the Album of the Table Rock, a kind of open guest book kept near the edge of the falls in the 1830s and 1840s. McGreeley regularly draws on the Album as it provides accounts that illustrate aspects of his four themes, but he provides no integrated picture of the kinds of meanings suggested in the document, which is critically important since it provides a sense of what the falls meant for visitors whose comments would otherwise be unknown.
The book's brevity and frequent lack of detailed discussion makes one feel that McGreeley's major aim was to demonstrate evidence that would corroborate his four major themes. There is nothing wrong with this aim, except that sometimes the reader feels that the magic and mystery of Niagara is put in second place to overarching conceptual structure.
There is also some awkwardness in the way that this conceptual structure is presented. Early on, McGreeley suggests that Niagara "had no sacred history" until Europeans visited the site. Similarly, he suggests that, as a place in its own right, Niagara is of little significance today: "This leviathan did not escape; only its mask survives" (p. 15). Both of these claims are troublesome because, surely, for Native-American peoples of the region, Niagara had great sacred power and, today, surely the falls continue to have tremendous enticement, since some fifteen million visitors travel to the site every year.
McGreeley justifies his emphasis on European and American eighteenth- and nineteenth century accounts of Niagara because this is the period that produced the most lucid and thorough written descriptions. But one would like to know if the four themes adequately account for earlier Native-American understandings of Niagara and what meanings keep Niagara alive today.
It is also difficult to accept McGreeley's conclusion that only a mask of Niagara exists today. A few years ago I grudgingly agreed to visit the falls but was filled with astonishment and wonderment when I actually saw them. In his preface, McGreeley himself describes his own midnight visit to the falls in which "I was filled awe" (p. xi).
It might well be that Niagara continues to hold potential meaning for its visitors and that it might someday again be understood in its full power and majesty. In this regard, one wonders what Niagara might become through the conceptual lenses of cutting-edge environmental philosophies like deep ecology or Goethean science or environmental phenomenology.
McGreeley's account of Niagara is excellent as far as it goes, but one wishes he would have probed its pre-Western meanings in greater depth and had the confidence in his own experience to trust that Niagara may yet offer powerful new meanings for the future.