By Kevin Cooney
New England is a frigid and haunted place. Summers glorious, but brief. Winters, pendulums of kindness or cruelty. January and February, the coldest and snow-filled months, traditionally separate New England’s heartiest from the rest. That is why December, from Connecticut to Maine, is winter’s romanticized simulacrum. Product of 19th-century commercialization, today’s cultural Christmas imbues a sense of generous purposefulness that bulwarks the body against the coming months of persistent frigidity. Winter is a period of land gone dormant, foliage stripped of vitality to reveal a skeletal landscape shaped and haunted by a constant melancholy force other than the calendar. New England ghosts aren’t haunts of Christmas past, rather of those who called the Northeast home, the Abenaki, Micmac, and Wampanoag. The slumbering landscape of New England, postcard and print idyllic of holiday cheer, was shaped by the presence and absence of indigenous communities. For all its austere beauty, New England at Christmas is one of haunting and pain. Painter George Inness captured this dichotomy in his work, Winter Moonlight (Christmas Eve). Stretched across the canvas, in gothic daubs of black, rust, and white is the detritus of a war fought two centuries before and helped create America’s Gothicism.
Inness depicts a typical Northeast December, snow dusting an open field split by a ubiquitous New England fieldstone wall, with a distant forest edge stripped bare by the season. It is perceived as an American land during winter, but Inness’ painting is haunted by the shaping hands and spirits of the Indigenous Peoples killed, enslaved, or sickened by those seeking a New Jerusalem in New England. Europe’s ghosts ply the ancient castles, abbeys, and mansions. America’s ghosts inhabit nature. Life-long New Englander, Emily Dickinson, in a letter to Thomas Higginson, wrote, “Nature is a Haunted House – but Art is a House that tries to be haunted.” Nature is haunted by those who came before, with the fields and forests of New England echoing with cries that pierce Inness’ accomplished painting and sever the ties to the commercial communitas of Christmas. Through art, Inness walks into America’s pastoral graveyard at Christmas, while his contemporaries, like printmakers Currier & Ives, plowed over nature in pursuit of mythmaking.
Instead of fleeing reality, Teresa Goddu writes of American Gothicism, “the gothic registers its culture’s contradictions, presenting a distorted, not a disengaged version of reality.” Goddu’s observation allows us to approach Inness’ 1866 as an expression of gothic horror, the haunting of nature. Quintessential and cold New England Winter Moonlight (Christmas Eve) is a stone wall, low field, and distant stand of trees centered on a hunched figure. It’s fitting that Inness painting is a solemn, lonely walk through New England’s countryside. Inness’ solitary figure negotiates a gloomy landscape forces the viewer into a similar darker, introspective space. During the same period, New York-based printmakers Currier & Ives reached peak Christmas romanticism with the profitable image of idyllic America, particularly the snowy Northeast. If Currier & Ives prints were Goddu’s fleeing reality, then Inness painting was culture’s contradiction.
Knowing the history of New England, its landscape, and Indigenous Peoples demands the viewer of Winter Moonlight (Christmas Eve) address the contradictions in the American story of empty lands full of promise. As Renée Berglund wrote in The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects, spectralization of Native Americans, “claims the physical landscape as American territory and simultaneously transforms the interior landscape into American territory.” To see New England’s landscape as an invention of Europe devalues and decentralizes the Native Peoples, aiding the mythization and diminishment of them. Currier & Ives expunge the native peoples from their representation of the countryside, and while Inness’ does not directly paint Indigenous Peoples into Winter Moonlight (Christmas Eve), there is a spectral quality squirming in the mental shadows.
Inness’ eerie work is devoid of life, a fitting representation of a post-colonial land wrung sterile. The national myth of empty lands and primitive people perpetuates the colonial abuse identified in Jorge Canizares-Esquerra’s Puritan Conquistadors, “Since the British colonists did not find traces of ‘labor’ in the New World, they considered the lands of the natives empty and ripe for the picking.” The plowable fields and navigable forests were not the terraforming feats of retreating glaciers, but of humanity’s touch and generations of labor. New England’s landscape, like the one portrayed by Inness, was reshaped by Indigenous Peoples and their practices. The clear fields leading up to forests were no accidents, but the production of Native Peoples clearing land enabling herbage, fruit, and grain crops to grow with vigor. The forests beyond were not choked by undergrowth or fallen trees precisely because native people’s carefully orchestrated burns to encourage certain species over others, enabling broader biodiversity of game animals like deer and beaver while facilitating easier routes of travel. For their centuries of labor, their shaping land into something hospitable for European and Native alike, the Indigenous People were physically and psychologically wiped from the landscape, and in Winter Moonlight (Christmas Eve), we see the end result.
America’s gothic tradition is born through European violence against the Indigenous Peoples of North America as the recent arrivals sought to purify a land they newly coveted. This national gothic story, short and sharp, cannot be mellowed by Currier & Ives, yet it is addressed by the melancholic moonlit walk of Winter Moonlight (Christmas Eve). The commercialized portrayal of Christmas is a balm to sooth America’s birth scars and Winter Moonlight (Christmas Eve) Inness cautiously, hauntedly, walks into the wonder and horror left behind.
An independent scholar of Human Ecology and Ecocriticism with a BA in environmental studies from Harvard University, Kevin Cooney is a freelance writer driven to communicate solutions and ideas that realize environmental equity. A student of place and estrangement in science fiction and Folk Horror, and a devotion to the aesthetic of Simon Stålenhag and Nigel Kneale, Kevin can be found on Twitter @bostonwookiee.