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Falling for Niagara

After considering three centuries of paintings and travel narratives, both literary and scientific, Dr. Linda Revie has discovered a common reaction to tourists’ responses at Niagara Falls. She writes that a trip to Niagara has always been much more than a walk in the park; it has been often an occasion to reflect and pontificate. Her study reveals that visiting artists and writers generally move from anticipation to disappointment to a kind of recovery, and sometimes fear.

Dr. Revie’s recent article, “On Being ‘Anti-Sublimed’: Early Tales of Fear and Glory at Niagara Falls” published in the International Journal of Canadian Studies (Winter 2009), focuses on the crucial work of early nineteenth century travel writers at the cataracts. Having previously considered how the notion of wildness and tameness may appear in different guises—but often as a struggle against nature, both internal and external—in a book, a short story and several articles, she now theorizes in “On Being ‘Anti-Sublimed’” that the Niagara experience is split along gender lines.

Travel narratives from the 1790s-1840s reveal that the social / historical context for female writers is different from that of male writers. Revie notes that the women at Niagara became emotionally disturbed, especially if they elected to go “Behind the Sheet” of the Horseshoe Falls. Some of those affected, such as Frances Trollope, Harriet Martineau and Caroline Gilman, rely on the language of the sublime to talk about their responses to the falls (they speak of being weak, giddy, breathless or paralyzed). These reactions are rooted in Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). In this text Burke offered a psychological explanation to the effects of nature by suggesting the sublime evokes in the mind awe, terror and a “dark, uncertain and confused horror.” In short, according to Burke, sublime places like Niagara have the compelling power to delight and destroy us. The fear and glory so vividly described in these early sublime tales about Niagara actually encouraged more travelers to experience its astonishing horrors and kick-started the tourist industry that grew around the Falls at the end of the nineteenth century.

The male view is different, according to the article. Men writers, such as Charles Dickens, Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne, represented Niagara as more challenging, dangerous even, and then they tended to bring the fearsome elements under control—in the same way that various tourist industries, or landscape development, did. By using another aesthetic framework, these masculine adventurers negotiated the act of “being sublimed” differently, refusing to entertain the “womanly” feelings of weakness and hysteria aligned with Burke’s theorizing. Instead, in their writing, they often adapted a rational approach to exploring the wilder elements of Niagara. Relying on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) which sees the sublime as a concept belonging to reason, not emotion, they created a fearfulness “without being afraid of” Niagara. For manly travellers, both nature and fear come together in the tension between naturalness and emotion. The concerns they express suggest the power of “the repressed.” Humans need to manage the thing that elicits fear, whether it be scary nature or overpowering emotions. According to Revie’s essay, it is this notion of control and repression that has shaped the history of visual and written responses to Niagara.

This is still felt today, Revie asserts, among disappointed tourists who fear the river has been spoiled forever. She attributes to them a longing to see, for a fleeting second, the once-pure, true nature that they believe existed prior to the state of contamination brought on by centuries of tourism, industry and commerce.  For Revie, it is this search for the “real” Niagara, or for an authentic reaction to it, that connects us to three centuries of responses, and affirms people’s desire to fall for Niagara, regardless of any possible, later, re-evaluation of it as not-so-sublime.

Dr. Revie’s other studies on the iconic destination:

• The book: The Niagara Companion: Explorers, Artists and Writers at the Falls, from Discovery through the Twentieth Century (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003),
• The short story: “The Honeymoon Capital,” published in 2001 in the Canadian literary journal Descant, and
• A pictorial features article published in The Beaver, Canada’s history magazine in 1999.