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Moral Geography: Maps, Missions, and the American Frontier by Amy DeRogatis Columbia Univ. Press, 2003 256 pp., $26, paper |
Adjectival geography is flourishing. Even a casual perusal of recent works by geographers discloses an imaginative array of modifiers appended to the noun. To take a random sample, geographies are variously "hybrid," "malevolent," "phobic," "consuming," "embodied," "virtual," "sensuous," "extraordinary," "dissident," and "lost."1 Literary critics, cultural historians, cognitive psychologists, poets, and many more are likewise attracted by the newfound fertility of the geographical lexicon. So in recent years we have been introduced to geographies that are "tender," "cosmopolitan," "fabulous," "neural," "romantic," "distracted," "imperfect," and "Gothic."2 It's all a long way from physical, or regional, or economic geography. Yet however much some of it may smack of postmodern faddism, the recent work that has been done to elucidate the geographies of identity, or genetics, or art, or writing has raised new and important questions about the role of space and place in human life.3
Now we have an exploration of 19th-century Protestant missionary expansionism along the American frontier couched in the language of yet another species of adjectival geography—"moral geography," a suite of related ideas already well-established in the modern geographical vernacular whose history discloses a number of distinct threads. For some the rubric of this novel discourse is largely derived from the interventions of Michel Foucault, for whom surveillance, discipline, and punishment are inherently spatial projects. In Foucault's telling, such venues as asylums and clinics, prisons and hospitals, confessionals and courtrooms give spatial expression to the moral management of society, and it is for this reason that he insisted that the analysis of power is the analysis of spaces.
There is certainly much to this diagnosis. Medical, legal, and ecclesiastical venues have the power to draw boundary lines between the sick and the well, the mad and the sane, the innocent and the guilty, the saved and the lost. In another key, moral geography describes how various spaces on both local and global scales have been depicted in the language of pathology. Tropical climates, for example, have routinely been staged as zones of moral and mental peril where European colonists had to be on their guard against the inflammation of the passions and other climatically induced evils, and were commanded to practice abstemiousness and circumspection.
Genealogies of this sort serve to call attention to only a very few of the ways in which the moral and the geographical have been sewn together. Here, the quarry is Ohio's Western Reserve and the 19th-century projects of Protestant home missionaries. The establishment of moral orderliness through the management of spatial arrangements is the motif that snakes its way through the compelling narrative that Amy DeRogatis has pieced together from society records, personal journals, private letters, and published texts. The result is an engaging tale in which the fundamental impulse of frontier missionaries is revealed as the desire to shape space, to curb immorality through spatial ordering, and to recreate the ideal of Puritan village life on the western margins. DeRogatis' analyses are rich in detail and move from the early designs of the Connecticut Missionary Society and its models of piety along the frontier, to interdenominational rivalries, the moralistic tincture of early American geographical and travel literature, and the spatial stratagems of the Oberlin Colony and Institute.
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