Grizzly @ Adams

American Studies. If you ask me, Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Circumstance” (1860) is a nifty little story. It suspensefully describes a young frontier woman who endures a terrifying night in the clutches of a cougar and survives by singing to the animal, keeping it preoccupied until her husband arrives at dawn to shoot the big cat. When the couple returns home they find their cabin has been burnt down by Indians, which calamity, I would argue, is framed in the language of the Fortunate Fall:

There is no home there. The log-house, the barns, the neighboring farms, the fences, are all blotted out and mingled in one smoking ruin. Desolation and death were indeed there, and beneficence and life in the forest. Tomahawk and scalping-knife, descending during that night, had left behind them only this work of their accomplished hatred and one subtle foot-print in the snow.

For the rest, — the world was all before them, where to choose. (704)

Thus do the couple and their infant child end up collectively as R.W.B. Lewis’s American Adam, standing at the beginning of a new history, set free from Eden by the work of Satan and liberated into an unknown but potentially limitless future. The Fortunate Fall theme is quietly underscored by Spofford’s use of the word “subtle” — an allusion to the Bible’s reference to the serpent as the subtlest of all the animals — and by the much more obvious plagiarism of Paradise Lost (1667).

Here are the relevant lines, from the end of Milton’s great poem, when Adam and Eve are forced to leave Eden:

They looking back, all th’ Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
Wav’d over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng’d and fierie Armes:
Som natural tears they drop’d, but wip’d them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through EDEN took thir solitarie way.

The American Adam theme is deepened by Spofford’s depiction of the American frontier landscape in postlapsarian terms:

The green depths were utterly cold and silent and stern. These beautiful haunts that all summer were hers and rejoiced to share with her their bounty, these heavens that had yielded their largess, these stems that had thrust their blossoms into her hands, all these friends of three moons ago forgot her now and knew her no longer. (699-700)

Once edenic, nature now withholds the bounty it once gave away freely.

Okay, so Spofford’s story draws heavily on Milton and the Bible. But it doesn’t mechanically reproduce either; as with any retelling, it changes the originals. What are some of the significant ways it does so? What does it add to and what does it take away from Paradise Lost and the Garden of Eden story?

Update. Here are some of the key passages in which R.W.B. Lewis outlines his classic theory (in his extremely influential book The American Adam). According to Lewis,

the American myth saw life as just beginning. It described the world as starting up again under fresh initiative, in a divinely granted second chance for the human race, after the first chance had been so disastrously fumbled in the darkening Old World. It introduced a new kind of hero, the heroic embodiment of a new set of ideal human attributes. America, it was said insistently from the 1820s onward, was not the end-product of a long historical process...it was something entirely new. “Our national birth,” declaimed the Democratic Review in 1839, “was the beginning of a new history...which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only.” “American glory begins at the dawn,” announced Noah Webster in 1825. Edward Everett found an acceptable prescription for national health in the simple italicized phrase, separation from Europe — separation from its history and its habits.

The new habits to be engendered on the new American scene were suggested by the image of a radically new personality, the hero of the new adventure: an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources. It was not surprising, in a Bible-reading generation, that the new hero (in praise or disapproval) was most easily identified with Adam before the Fall. Adam was the first, and archetypal, man. His moral position was prior to experience, and in his very newness he was fundamentally innocent.... All this and more were contained in the image of the American as Adam. (4)

Lewis points out that not all early American writers concurred in this Adamic conception of the American. Those who did concur he terms the “party of Hope”; the dissenters he terms the “party of Memory”:

As an index of the “hopeful” strand on national morality, I cite the editorial (of 1839) which hailed the birth in America of “a clear conscience unsullied by the past.” The national and hence the individual conscience was clear just because it was unsullied by the past — America, in the hopeful creed, had no past, but only a present and a future. The key term in the moral vocabulary of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and their followers and imitators consequently was “innocence.” To the “nostalgic” — that is, to the party devoted to Memory — the sinfulness of man seemed never so patent as currently in America. As the hopeful expressed their mounting contempt for the doctrine of inherited sin, the nostalgic intoned on Sundays the fixed legacy of corruption in ever more emphatic accents. (7)

As Lewis says, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman exemplify the party of Hope; key members of the Party of Memory are Jonathan Edwards and Edgar Allan Poe.

Lewis also identifies a third category, an “ironic temperament” that

was characterized by a tragic optimism: by a sense of the tragic collisions to which innocence was liable (something unthinkable among the hopeful), and equally by an awareness of the heightened perception and humanity which suffering made possible (something unthinkable among the nostalgic) (7-8).

Perhaps the supreme example of this ironic temperament in an early American writer is Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose great creation Hester Prynne is not allowed to partake in the American myth of innocence yet whose humanity expands through her suffering.

One goal in this class is to examine what role, if any, this myth of the American Adam plays in shaping American environmentalism.