This essay argues for applying new historicism—a literary theory that examines texts in historical context rather than in isolation—to analyze Natasha Trethewey's poem "Theories of Time and Space." The poem merges philosophical reflection on identity with concrete references to American locations, particularly Mississippi highways and the Gulf Coast. By treating the poem as a historical document embedded in 1960s American culture, the analysis reveals how Trethewey uses automobile travel, photography, and homecoming as metaphors for the impossibility of returning to the past and the restless nature of American identity. New historicism proves particularly effective for understanding how Trethewey locates personal emotional concerns within specific historical moments and places.
"Theories of Time and Space" by Natasha Trethewey is a poem that merges philosophical ruminations about the poet's identity with highly specific, concrete references into a single work. The poem reflects the preoccupations of the 1960s when it was written, particularly in its stress upon motion, traveling, being "on the road," and finding one's self in America. The elusive nature of travel mirrors the divides within the poet's soul. This essay argues for the value of using the literary theory of new historicism to analyze Trethewey's poem. The poem embodies the notion of the centrality of being "on the road" in American literature, specifically traveling by car and the emotional reflections spawned by the ability to travel. As one scholar notes, "Americans are a restless people, imbued with a kind of nervous energy that manifests itself culturally through the mediums of literature, film, and music. Indeed, the 'road' genre is a microcosm of America itself" (Ireland 474).
The poem begins with a statement about the title: "You can get there from here, though/there's no going home." In other words, it is possible to move back in space, but not in time. Things change whether one wishes them to or not—a reflection of the profound shifts in American values when Trethewey wrote the poem. New historicism was developed "largely in reaction to the text-only approach pursued by formalist New Critics and the critics who challenged the New Criticism in the 1970s. New historicists, like formalists and their critics, acknowledge the importance of the literary text, but they also analyze the text with an eye to history" (Murfin & Ray, "Definitions"). This approach seems particularly apt given that Trethewey makes specific references to actual places in the United States rather than simply discussing her emotional, subjective state. She locates her concerns in a very specific place—Mississippi—a place that does not seem to change even though she witnesses changes that have taken place within herself moment-by-moment. The central image is the change in the poet's self before and after getting on a boat, as symbolized in a photograph. This temporal and spatial specificity demands a historicist reading.
Trethewey first uses the metaphor of traveling down an American highway: "try this: / head south on Mississippi 49, one—by—one mile markers ticking off / another minute of your life. Follow this / to its natural conclusion—dead end." Heading homeward, specifically to Mississippi, is the perfect embodiment of a "dead end" to Trethewey: the "you" of the poem is unable to leave home, yet also unable to resist progress. She uses the metaphor of "mile markers" on a highway, underlining the increasing importance of the automobile in American life at the time she was writing. Her image harkens back to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, which stresses the desire of Americans to find freedom and motion—and also the quixotic nature of this quest, given that happiness or truth can never really be found in a physical place.
The narrator of the poem is specifically attempting to go home, rather than leave home, although finding home as a physical location is ultimately elusive. Unlike the open-ended wandering in Kerouac's novel, Trethewey's journey has a predetermined destination—one that paradoxically offers no resolution. The searching, restless narrator of Trethewey's poem similarly never finds "home" in any physical place. Instead, the act of travel itself becomes the primary experience, with each mile marker representing not progress toward reunion but rather the inexorable passage of time and the accumulation of distance—both physical and emotional—from what "home" once was.
The poem also engages with the sense of internal disconnection regarding identity and the narrator's perceptions of herself that is created by modern photography. The poem concludes with the poet going to Gulfport and visiting the "manmade" beach. "Bring only / what you must carry—tome of memory / its random blank pages. On the dock / where you board the boat for Ship Island, / someone will take your picture: / the photograph—who you were— / will be waiting when you return." The poet suggests that every experience and every event creates a new self, and there is a separation between the self of the past and present, no matter how squarely one is located in an old and timeless place, like the poet's home of Mississippi or participating in the traditional life of the men on the docks.
Every time there is an attempt to recreate past experience, there is always a reminder that this is impossible. The medium of a photograph is a reminder of this fact. Technology is used to embody the idea of "not being able to go home again" and also the simultaneous restlessness of the narrator—most of the poem takes place in a state of motion—and a desire to return somewhere that no longer exists. The photograph freezes a moment that can never be recaptured, making it a perfect symbol of the poem's central meditation on temporal irreversibility.
"New historicists remind us that it is treacherous to reconstruct the past as it really was—rather than as we have been conditioned by our own place and time to believe that it was" (Murfin & Ray, "Definitions"). Trethewey's poem, however, does counsel an American reader to make careful consideration of the extent to which the image of the road and travel is a particularly American preoccupation and the extent to which travel is the central source of revelation for the poet. Traveling home and even traveling within her home state, and the lack of a sense of connection to the past, frames the preoccupation of the narrator.
The 19th-century American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "there is no truth but in transit." Trethewey is dismayed at the lack of "truth" or "home" she finds even when traveling at great speeds by car or boat (Ireland 474). What new historicism allows us to see is how this dismay is not merely personal but deeply rooted in the historical moment of the 1960s—a period marked by rapid social change, geographic mobility, and a growing anxiety about the stability of American identity and institutions. By reading the poem through a new historicist lens, we understand Trethewey's meditation on home and travel not as timeless philosophical musings but as historically specific responses to the cultural preoccupations of her era.
This essay has argued that new historicism provides an essential interpretive framework for understanding Natasha Trethewey's "Theories of Time and Space." By treating the poem as a historical document embedded in 1960s American culture rather than as a decontextualized aesthetic object, new historicism reveals how Trethewey uses the metaphors of highway travel, automobile technology, and photography to express anxieties about temporal displacement and the impossibility of authentic return. The poem's specific geographical references to Mississippi and the Gulf Coast, combined with its meditation on motion and restlessness, become legible as responses to the particular historical moment in which they were written. New historicism thus illuminates what formalist approaches alone might miss: the intricate connection between personal identity and historical context, between the subjective experience of travel and the objective conditions of American modernity.
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