E3W Literature | University of Texas

Gretchen Murphy
Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire
Duke University Press, 2005
195 pages
ISBN: 0822334968
$21.95

Reviewed by Alberto Varon

Gretchen Murphy’s Hemispheric Imaginings takes as it starting place James Monroe’s1832 Presidential Message to Congress, later known as the Monroe Doctrine. Murphy examines the discourses surrounding the Monroe Doctrine that gave shape to its premise of hemispheric authority and non-interference with European powers and that enabled the Doctrine to shape foreign policy throughout much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Murphy argues that the Monroe Doctrine spatially constructed the Americas in such a way that allowed paradoxically for both U.S. expansionism and isolationism by opening up a discursive space in which the tension between these two opposing ideas enabled U.S. construction of nation and empire. By publicly declaring the western hemisphere off limits for European colonialism, the Monroe Doctrine demarcates the Americas as under U.S. protection, a cloaked imperialism balanced by Monroe’s claim that the U.S. would not interfere with other nations’ struggle for democracy.

Murphy argues that while “the Monroe Doctrine acts as a map in that in uses spatial constructs to build a worldview,” she is more interested “in pursuing this connection not through cartography but through the cultural narratives and rhetorical constructs that sustained the worldview of the Monroe Doctrine.” Murphy crosses between politics and culture to trace how the Monroe Doctrine was both revealing and constitutive of public sentiment regarding the role of America in the global sphere. She claims that a cultural analysis of the texts surrounding the doctrine is essential to understanding how national identity was formulated by romance novels, journalism, and popular culture.
Murphy “shows not only that both literary and political discourse constructed imagined traditions of national isolation and anticolonialism, but that at times these discourses intersected by responding to and influencing each other.” Only a comparison between cultural artifacts and political documents can explain the impact each sphere of public domain had on the other; it was the slippage between them that allows her to “trace the development of the Monroe Doctrine as a cultural ideology rather than as strictly foreign policy.” By delimiting the western hemisphere under U.S. dominion, the Monroe Doctrine expressed the “USAmericans” right to expand its democracy across the continent and unofficially enabled an ideology of Manifest Destiny. By invoking the term “USAmericans,” Murphy points out how even the U.S. appropriation of the term American to signify a national consciousness implicitly situates the U.S. authority over the hemisphere.

The United States endows itself with the authority to support the process of “democratization” that is native to Americas soil both by ignoring its development and by protecting its own economic interests. Continental expansion becomes a domestic concern where territorial acquisition is only the institutionalization of self-sovereignty. Similarly, expansionism affirms the U.S. assertion that European authorities can exercise no power over the west. Overall, the Monroe Doctrine, for Murphy, enables a dialectical ideology that allows the country to rationalize its expansionism and maintain its isolation from European conflict by reconciling contradiction.

Murphy begins her work by juxtaposing John Quincy Adams’s Fourth of July speech with Lydia Maria Child’s novel Hobomok to assert that both texts “use common images and ideas to reconcile ‘anticolonialism’ with national expansion,” creating a “parallelism” between literary and political tracts. The similarities point to the Monroe Doctrine’s concern with cultural identity. Both texts employ the rhetoric of domesticity to break from the fraternal understanding of a transatlantic European brotherhood.
By employing a trope of romance, Murphy argues, Child uses familial and domestic drama to “enact the identificatory processes that helped transform Adam’s and Monroe’s ideas into a persuasive cultural ideology.” In both texts, the case of Amerindians is one of “domestic dependent nations” modeled in the form of parental relations. By explicating the nation as a family, the U.S. asserts its ability to use its collective judgment in the best interests of its citizen (or non-citizen) children. The familial model displays the Monroe’s Doctrine balance between isolation and imperialism.

Ironically, the Monroe Doctrine provided the terms for expansion into the Pacific through its call for isolation within America’s own hemisphere. The conspicuous absence of Asia from its hemispheric partitioning left the Pacific and its trade routes open to U.S. commercial concerns. Murphy continues her comparative method by linking Frances Lister Hawks’s official account of Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s expedition to Japan with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, through biographical evidence and through their use of minstrelsy. While the collocation of the two seems a little uncertain, the argument functions in the texts’ opposition of imperial progress and “an imaginary return to insularity,” illuminating the debate over the United State’s role in a global community. Notably, her treatment of how the “racialized commodity … erects a mythic structure to house a national identity in denial of its own racial heterogeneity, porous borders, and conflicted imperial mobility” effectively situates nineteenth century racial debates within her analytic framework.

Murphy uses texts by José Martí and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton to mobilize a critique of the contradictions inherent in Monroe Doctrine foreign policy. Martí’s pan-Latin America and Ruiz de Burton’s “transatlantic cosmopolitanism” both challenge the U.S. self-proclaimed charge as agents of hemispheric progress and “demonstrate that U.S., not European, empire was the greater threat.” Discourse surrounding the Monroe Doctrine posited the U.S. as the moral authority over state formation. Ruiz de Burton’s novel offers “alternatives to any assumption of geographic morality emanating from the concept of ‘America’” as it “derealizes the Old/New World binary in favor of a transatlantic community of learned, well-mannered, and white elites.” While at times she glosses over the racial complexities in Ruiz de Burton’s novels, she aptly reads Ruiz de Burton as a critique of U.S. imperialism permitted by the Monroe Doctrine that enabled the U.S. to waver between its attempts at promoting democracy in the Americas and its desire for economic control over Mexican material resources. By placing the texts, and Lew Wallace’s works, against the Monroe Doctrine, Murphy exposes how the Monroe Doctrine employed and subsumed contradictions in racial identification to justify U.S. policy.

The critique nicely sets up her subsequent discussion of how democratic and capitalist drives worked together to privilege supposed U.S. racial superiority as a defense of economic or political domination. By appealing to a national “whiteness,” the U.S. was portrayed as fulfilling its moral obligation of spreading its democratic message across South and Central America. As the U.S. empire threatened to spread across the ocean late in the nineteenth century, the Monroe Doctrine becomes fetishized as a way of confirming an exceptional national history, one of American homogeneity, non-interference, and model democracy. Novels exhibit a cultural willingness for empire that led to Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Document, justifying interventions regardless of European action.

Perhaps more work could have been done on how the various international conflicts of the period, such as the U.S.-Mexico War or the Civil War impacted the debate around national identity as imagined by the Monroe Doctrine. However, Hemispheric Imaginings brilliantly reads novels and other creative writings alongside political rhetoric to elucidate the Monroe Doctrine’s ambiguous flexibility that functioned in dialectical relation between individual and national identity. In doing so, she provides a valuable model through which to elicit the influences between nineteenth-century American culture and politics. Though at times Murphy’s argument can get bogged down in very close readings without sufficient space given to the connections between political and cultural texts, Hemispheric Imaginings nonetheless is an outstanding consideration of how the Monroe Doctrine “provided the terms through which questions of global power were posed and answered in the spheres of politics and literature.”