Nostalgic Time, Space, and Community:

This section analyzes the ways in which a major writer in Depression-era America employed arcadian themes to reconstruct the social experience of his readers. Informed by elements of Bormann's Fantasy Theme Analysis, I wish to explore the cyclical rhythm of time, the pastoral experience of space, and the organic nature of community in Henry Seidel Canby's (1934) The Age of Confidence. This initial analysis provides context for a long term project that seeks to evaluate ways in which nostalgia is enacted and commodified in Disney's planned community, Celebration.

Nostalgia for small-town America rests upon a careful balance of insight and ignorance. Its use in the critique of the modern, antiseptic social structure depends on the willful suspension of memory and perspective. The goal is not to change one's contemporary situation, so much as to transcend it -- to escape it. In his eclectic review of the small town myth, Lingeman (1980) provides Henry Seidel Canby's (1934) The Age of Confidence as an exemplar of literature which lifts the reader from one era and transports to another. Lingeman recalls how Canby enacted his rhetorical slight-of-time through a textual interplay between the garden and the dynamo that created an internal coherence all its own. It was timelessness that Canby sought to recall, with his soft rendering of cyclical time and pastoral space that constituted a lost America.
Canby claimed that The Age of Confidence was simply a memoir of his recollections of growing up in Wilmington, Delaware during the 1880s and 1890s. It is structured thematically, with chapters dedicated to aspects of his small-town upbringing, including education, religion, sexuality, and homelife. This section argues that Canby's text can be understood in a much richer context than his self-defined limitations - from within the cultural context of the Great Depression. The underlying claim asserts that The Age of Confidence supports a rhetorical vision of Small-town America that was timeless, pastoral, and organic in direct response to a modern age that was immediate, mechanical, and specialized. While I approach Canby's work as an arcadian response to the mechanized dangers of the 1930s, it is important to emphasize that Canby (1934) himself didn't share this perspective. Indeed, he claimed specifically that his memoir depicted "no Utopia" (p. 37) and hardly a "boys' Arcadia" (p. 42). You, of course, are invited to decide for yourself.
The three most prevalent themes which emerge from Canby's Age of Confidence might be defined as faith in cyclical time, freedom in pastoral space, and identification in organic community. As will be described further below, these themes constitute a rhetorical vision of small-town America in which everyone knew their place. In such a vision, the individual character was shaped by natural forces only to the degree that she or he could be freed to enjoy a sense -- naive as it was -- of freedom. Indeed, as will become apparent, these forces carried critical contradictions recognized both by Canby and his mythical small-town inhabitants. The strategic construction of these contradictions into a seamless whole motivates the formation of these themes into the arcadian vision.

Faith in Cyclical Time

In an America struggling to reconcile itself to the changes wrought be the emergence of industrialism after the Civil War, Canby's recollection of Wilmington, Delaware emphasized an agrarian trust in the cyclical nature of time. During this time when even bank presidents and captains of industry could remember the feel of corn in their hands, before 'hiking' had formalized the walk in the woods, the timeless connection to natural cycles is a key theme in Canby's fantasy. Readers were invited to consider the impact of their contemporary construction of time in relation to that past age. Before the machinery of psychology threatened to twist one's sense of self like so many gears, individuals were free to rest: "Time moved slowly while your personality twisted and doubled on its course. The town waited for you. It was going to be there when you were ready for it" (1934, p. 31). Certainly such patience carried a price. With time's circular nature preceding the arrow of progress, the small town offered little to the adventuresome spirit but perpetual dullness. As Canby remembers, "[w]e were afraid, as youths, and after youth, of nothing either metaphysical or tangible, but rather with that most primitive of all fears, an instinctive dread of a broken habit" (1934, p. 134). These habits, after all, constituted the rhythms that guided all human interaction in the small town arcadian vision.
The liberating and constraining nature of time sheds light upon a deeper aspect of Canby's selection of themes. Each one carried a dialectic of tension -- a subtle, hidden knowledge of inevitable collapse as the machine threatened the garden. For a while, the green barrier of nature and the sure walls of home offered some protection. Indeed, '[w]e left home or its immediate environment chiefly to work, and neither radio nor phonograph brought the outer world into its precincts. Time moved more slowly there, as it always does when there is a familiar routine with a deep background of memory" (1934, pp. 51-52). But the arrow of mechanistic time, epitomized by radio and phonograph, found its way into the heart of the small town. Eventually, inevitably, what Canby referred to as the Static Age was transformed into the transience which felled it, becoming a mere "illusion of permanence which the twentieth century was to see fly twittering down the gale of war and innovation" (1934, p. 94). As such, the cycle of time carried the seeds of its own destruction with its inability to foresee that which had only just been invented. Yet, Canby's deeper point was to re-create the social construction of time in Wilmington which carefully ignored such considerations.

Freedom in Pastoral Space

In a time in which the American frontier was said to have been 'closed,' the space to breathe was held at a premium. Borrowing from the myth of the American-Eden, Canby employs a theme of small-town as a garden which is distant from the machinery, smoke, and dehumanization of the cities. It is important to recall that the dynamos of those distant cities weren't so distant as to be inaccessible. Rather, the machinery that filled those landscapes with metal were safely over the horizon. In the small towns of Canby's recollection, "there was always space for solitude -- trees, and hidden corners" (1934, p. 36). Such space was a psychological freedom balanced by social constraints described earlier. One always had the space to grow, so long as the vine didn't ignore the root. The relationship between the two was continuous, given that, "[t]he country began in those days before the town stopped and we could have both worlds for a little walking with no untidy fringe of suburb and gas stations in between" (1934, p. 212). To readers who tired of that conflicting middle ground, this theme offered the wide open space of simple possibility.
Again, however, Canby's strategy is made most clear by considering the hidden contradiction it faced. The expanse of landscape celebrated in the Age of Confidence was becoming bounded by highways that bypassed the small towns, strangling their economies (A Village Trustee, 1934). During this time, "progress had brought restlessness even in those neighborhoods, and Henry Ford was just over the horizon" (Canby, 1934, p. 100). To be sure, Canby's vision still promised abundant pastures, but his theme reflected an attitude of retrenchment felt by his Depression-era readers who marvelled at the technology that closed some distances and expanded others: "We can put our children on wheels to see the world, but we cannot give them the kind of home that any town provided in the nineties, not at any price" (1934, p. 258). In this theme, the small town -- bypassed and forgotten by youth -- still held the promise of an age when "[e]vening seemed spacious" (1934, p. 52). The sky, of course, was the same; it was the earth that had changed. However, for readers of his text, it could regain its natural geography and rhythm through the acceptance of Canby's arcadian vision.

Identification in Organic Community

The small town was visualized as provencal and safe -- an interconnected structure of edifice, tradition, and daily ritual which served to reinforce a sense of interrelationship. This organic small-town connected the individual to higher levels of organization as many in the larger cities feared social dissolution from labor unionist strikes and bomb throwing anarchists. As Canby (1934) writes, Wilmington represented an era in which "there was a pause, and everyone, at least in my town, knew what it was meant to be an American" (p. 24). This knowledge emerged from other themes of rhythmic time and consistent place. Indeed, knowing one's place was essential for the maintenance of Victorian community. "[W]e were part of a society with an instinct for what ought to be, which is so much more powerful than any rationalization and so much deeper than self-consciousness" (1934, p. 44).
This lack of consciousness, and corresponding hegemony of community, manifested itself most clearly in issues of sexuality and family relations. While Canby emphasizes that Victorian-era American youth were just as knowledgeable about their sexual options as their Depression-era children, he recalls an invisible web of societal constraints that worked to reconnect the potentially wayward youth with community standards: "Our emotions had sped uninhibited along the friendly plane of companionship, but tradition, our elders, our own taboos self-imposed, and conventions unthinkingly accepted, warned us back whenever we tried to think for ourselves" (1934, p. 182). Naturally, this theme was enacted first and foremost in the center of 1890s small-town American culture: the family. Before the cacophony of cars, radios, commuting, and the like, Canby recalls an age in which individuals worked to 'get along' at home, when divorce was not the relatively easy option enjoyed just after the jazz age. In a closely concentric circle, schools were thought to represent extensions of the moral training found in the home. More importantly, they were attached to the wider community at the cellular level. As Canby recalls, "[w]e were in organic relation to the town and reflected it in everything except the pliability of youth" (1934, p. 108). Such pliability was necessary, however, for the inevitable selection of place in which one would seize upon a role of service as part of the greater good. Such a good extended beyond the individual, through the family, to the community and beyond -- to an arcadian vision of simplicity, stability, and security. Such a vision, constraining as it most certainly was, offered certain comfort to those Americans caught in the grip of the Great Depression.

Conclusion

The purpose which motivated Canby's writing, ultimately, slips past the author's own explanation. More than merely a memoir of one person's recollections of life in Wilmington, Delaware in the 1880s and 1890s, The Age of Confidence provided a coping mechanism for people who felt dislocated by the technological advances and economic costs of modern America in the depths of the Great Depression when, as Canby recalls, "we [were] shivering before technological unemployment and the incapacity of man to adapt himself to the age of the machine" (1934, p. 116). In short, the text reflected an arcadian vision of America sought by women and men and who felt that the present had passed them by. Sifton (1934) notes that such a sentiment was shared by Americans feared the future. Calkins (1934) argues that this sentiment was felt by people who were homesick for "the manner of bygone days" (p. 426). Both would agree that millions of Americans longed for a time and place before the Depression, before the Great War, before the modern confusion of values and meanings.
This arcadian vision -- built upon a conception of cyclical time, pastoral space, and organic community -- constituted a nostalgic memory of small-town America in which everyone knew and had a place. This vision was certainly sought by Americans who could remember a time that was similar to, if not exactly drawn from, Canby's image. Their children (as do the children of all generations, it seems), subscribed to a radically different set of social mores and cultural expectations. Their connections to community were tried by the disintegrating webs of government, education, and theology. In an age which feared technological unemployment, The Age of Confidence provided a powerful vision which reconstructed the past as a destination -- an answer. The social reality entered as one visited that sense of time, space, and community suggested certain attitudes and behaviors that challenged modern assumptions of the value of efficiency and mechanism. As such, Canby's text offers an arcadian response to the misery of the Great Depression -- a response which might serve as an exemplar for future analysis of the ways in which nostalgia is used for social purposes.
References
A village trustee. (1934). Are small towns doomed? The American Mercury, 32, 74-79.
Canby, H.S. (1934). The age of confidence: Life in the nineties. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.
Lingeman, R. (1980). Small town America: A narrative history, 1620-the present. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.
Sifton, P. (1934). Escape to yesterday. Scribner's Magazine, 95, 199-201.

---

Your comments and suggestions are appreciated.

Return to essays.