This paper examines how the tension between civilization and the wilderness functions as a recurring literary binary in four works of early American fiction: Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Roger Malvin's Burial," James Fenimore Cooper's "The Pioneers," Catharine Maria Sedgwick's "Hope Leslie," and Charles Brockden Brown's "Edgar Huntly." The paper argues that while all four works engage the man-versus-nature conflict, each author deploys the binary in distinctly different ways — through themes of guilt, gender equality, frontier freedom, and nocturnal mystery. It also considers why this binary persists across literary history and whether attitudes toward civilization and wilderness evolved across the fifty-year span the novels cover.
The collision of civilization against the wilderness in the early stages of America's development was a theme visited often in early American literature. As "civilization" arrived in the New World and immediately encroached upon the natural world and the Native Americans who thrived there, stories emerged to reflect the conflicts and relationships that resulted. This paper explores the dynamics of the civilization vs. wilderness binary as expressed in four works: Nathaniel Hawthorne's Roger Malvin's Burial, James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers, Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, and Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly.
In a general way, civilization and the wilderness do signify the same thing across all four works. Regardless of the different themes, settings, characters, and conflicts presented, the man-versus-nature conflict is always either lurking in the background or pulsing at the center of the story. After all, as the American nation pressed westward, it encountered countless situations in which nature held the upper hand — yet humans were bound and determined to conquer nature no matter the odds. That said, a more specific answer to the question might be "no," because in each setting there are unique personalities and circumstances; consequently, the conflict between civilization and the wilderness does not signify precisely the same thing in each work.
In Hope Leslie, it is not hard to find themes beyond man vs. nature. In fact, an overriding concern in this novel is equality — though nature and man are woven into that theme. The novel pushes back against the American idealism of a society that should exhibit equality among humans. After all, the novel suggests, there appears to be a sense of harmony in nature — so why shouldn't there be harmony between the genders? If all humans living in America stand in awe of God and nature, shouldn't both genders share equally in that understanding, and hence be equals in their humility? These are questions the novel raises. Of course, men's and women's standing in society at that time (1842) were nowhere near equal. Nor were the Indians equal to the white settlers; an important theme of this novel relates to the removal of Indians, which Sedgwick supports, even though she also paints a positive and sympathetic portrait of Native Americans alongside accounts of Indian massacres of whites. When the Pequot princess Magawisca departs at the end of the novel, that departure effectively represents civilization's victory over the wilderness — represented by the Indians. The theme cannot be ignored in this novel.
The civilization vs. wilderness theme is perhaps more powerful in James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers than in any of the other three works. The character Natty Bumppo — nicknamed Leather-Stocking — personifies the wilderness, a world he feels wholly comfortable in because he has lived alone within it for some forty years. He dresses in deerskins, cannot read or write, is a superb hunter, and grows restless when confined indoors among other Caucasians. His character therefore embodies the conflict between man and nature. This is a different approach to the binary than Hope Leslie: in this story, civilization has "wicked and wasty ways," as Natty puts it. When Natty leaves at the end — whistling for his hound — he departs because civilization has driven him away; he would rather live in the wilderness than accept the values of the society around him. Natty represents the freedom that comes from living in the natural world, and juxtaposed with the responsibilities and obligations of civilization, his world looks like a refreshing place to be.
Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly is so vastly different from the other three works that it might be said the Huntly story is night while the others are day. And yet the natural world is there to be confronted and, in the end, conquered. Huntly prefers to wander through caves and other natural spaces at night, which adds nocturnal imagery to the reader's imagination. Although the story is filled with wildly erratic behavior, reason — associated with man — tends to operate in daylight, while fantasy — associated with the wilderness — is presented mainly in the dark. While Huntly is tracking Edny's path (Edny being presumed to be the criminal), his effort leads through "a maze, circuitous, upward and downward," as Brown writes (p. 23). It was necessary to "pierce into the deepest thickets, to plunge into the darkest cavities, to ascend the most difficult heights" — all of which are barriers to feeling comfortable in the wilderness (p. 23).
In Hawthorne's Roger Malvin's Burial, the natural world is introduced through two powerful symbols at the story's opening: an oak tree and a large granite rock. It is significant that Reuben Bourne promises to return to the wilderness to bury his friend Roger Malvin, then fails to do so — in effect, allowing the wilderness rather than human hands to dispose of Malvin's body. Years later, however, he does return to the wilderness to hunt for food and accidentally, and ironically, kills his own son — born to his wife, who is Malvin's daughter. Perhaps Bourne is the oak tree, still living, while Malvin is the granite rock. The wilderness themes in this story are quite distinct from those in the other works. Both Malvin and Bourne were attacked and gravely injured by Indians — representatives of the wilderness. One of the story's central themes is guilt: Bourne first experiences it for abandoning his friend to die in the wilderness, and then for killing his own son near the same spot. The deeper implication may be that white society should — or does — experience guilt for what it has done to the wilderness and, by inference, to Native Americans. This constitutes a very different kind of nature-versus-man theme, yet the binary is powerfully present nonetheless.
In the early nineteenth century, there was no industrial revolution with its machines, factories, and attendant social dynamics to serve as a literary backdrop; there was only the beginning of an advanced society, and for the most part America was a place where pioneer families struggled to survive against long odds. Sedgwick expresses this quite well on pages 105–06 as she illuminates why the Pilgrims originally came to the New World:
"…When they came to the wilderness, they said, truly…they did virtually renounce all dependence on earthly supports; they left the land of their birth, of their homes, of their father's sepulchers; they sacrificed ease and preferment, and delights of sense — and for what? To open for themselves an earthly paradise? To dress their bowers of pleasure, and rejoice with their wives and children? No: they came not for themselves, they lived not for themselves. An exiled and suffering people, they came forth in the dignity of the chosen servants of the Lord, to open the forests to the sunbeam…to restore man oppressed and trampled by his fellow…to replace the creatures of God on their natural level; to bring down the hills, and make smooth the rough places…[and they saw] a multitude of people where the solitary savage roamed the forest…the forest vanished…the consecrated church planted on the rock of heathen sacrifice…" (Sedgwick, 1842).
While that passage does point to the juxtaposition and conflict between wilderness and civilization, it does not fully explain why man vs. nature has remained such a consistent theme in literature over time. Yet it surely has persisted: in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, in Melville's Moby-Dick, and in films such as The Perfect Storm, nature is presented with such fierce dramatic force that it surpasses man vs. man in its potential for tension. Man vs. man is predictable and usually associated with war or psychological struggle; man vs. nature is far less predictable, and therefore makes for more compelling drama. Man vs. technology emerged as a theme later in American literary history, and the modern world offers ample examples — most recently the tsunami in Japan that caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster, in which man's greatest technological creation was overwhelmed by the natural world. And yet, civilization vs. wilderness remains a theme that writers return to repeatedly, because virtually every reader can relate to it.
Even as society advanced far beyond the conditions of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the theme continued to play out across those hundreds of years. It endured because the wilderness harbored beasts capable of overcoming civilization's attempts to tame them, and because the Native Americans — often regarded by settlers as part of that wilderness — challenged civilization's moral and physical right to occupy the land. Furthermore, the natural world has always held the upper hand when it comes to fire, terrible storms, floods, raging winds that flatten towns, bitter cold that causes frostbite, and torrid heat that saps human strength.
There has not really been an "evolution" in attitudes when the binary is in use, but there has been an evolution in how the binary is positioned within the context of themes and characters over the years. It does seem that the wilderness in Edgar Huntly (1803) is darker, more mysterious, and more sinister than in Hope Leslie, written thirty-nine years later. Hope Leslie presents the binary in strong terms, but in Edgar Huntly there are twisted scenes and descriptive human actions leading up to that binary that are more psychologically complicated. That said, the savage Indian raids in Hope Leslie are as bloodthirsty and hideously violent as the criminal spree Huntly embarks upon. The viciousness with which Huntly opens the chest is so jarring in its description that it is almost as though he has crushed a human ribcage.
"Presentation evolves but core binary remains unchanged"
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Roger Malvin's Burial. Selected Stories. Ed. Brenda Wineapple. Boston, MA: University Press, 2011.
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. Hope Leslie: Or, Early Times in the Massachusetts, Volume 1. Harper & Brothers, 1842.
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