American Literature: Romanticism research assignment Student Research Submissions 2013 research essay

Kristine Vermillion

      The abundance of the American wilderness in the literature of the American Renaissance is fascinating. It is obviously the by-product of the actual landscape of the country and the dynamic and complicated expansion of the territory during its development. This aspect of the topic is relevant and cannot be underestimated. A book by Leonard Lutwack titled The Role of Place in Literature offers a great discussion of just how important this aspect is in the general development of a nation and its literature: "For all its adaptability to symbolical ends, place imagery is more tenacious of concreteness and more impervious to attenuation than any other imagistic materials. The most elemental orientation of a reader to a narrative text is through its evocation of place" (Lutwack 37).  We cannot underestimate the sheer importance of the American landscape on the minds of the American people.

      The abundance of wilderness imagery in American literature is also the result of the general religion and ideology that was fueling the minds and imaginations of these same people. The Christian tradition in all its multitudinous branches is compelled by the meta-narrative of the redemption of the mankind. The story can be told in many ways, one of which uses typology. This approach links natural symbols with Biblical symbols to tell the story of redemption. The story can be told in many different ways, i.e. themes and types, throughout the entirety of the Bible.  It can be told through the theme of Shepherdry; from the Good Shepherd to the Lamb of God. It can also be told through the theme of Jurisprudence; from the perfect Law of a righteous God to the One who fulfilled the law on humanity's behalf. The meta-narrative can also be told through the set. It begins in the Garden, and it ends in the perfect New Jerusalem; the perfected city of man with all the original elements of the Garden enhanced well beyond their initial glory. In between these paradise destinations is a lot of wilderness. The wilderness theme of the Scriptures seems to correspond deeply with the Calvinist branches of Christianity and the subsequent writings of this particular period of literature. This is why Jonathan Edwards, who was a major preacher in the beginning stages of this country's development "heard God's voice still sounding in nature, in human history, and in the flow of contemporary events" (Knight 532). This is why he used typology to preach and teach. He heard and felt God's voice and power in nature, and he claimed that nature itself was telling the story. The following quote from David R. Williams’ book Wilderness Lost, which was an invaluable resource in my study, connects the ideas of the literal wilderness and the wilderness imagery in Christianity.   

The howling wilderness into which the New England saints were called was a wilderness of fact, of type, of the world, and of the mind. It was a dense and dangerous forest; it was a parallel type of wilderness through which God's Israel of old had to pass before entering Canaan; it was the world itself in which the faith of God's people constantly had to be tried; and, by no means least, it was the wilderness of human consciousness, the howling chaos in the depths of the mind into which every sinner was called to be crucified before there could be any hope of salvation." (23)

With these ideas in mind, I observed that the wilderness theme functions in four distinct ways. First, the wilderness is identified as enemy territory. Secondly, the presence in the wilderness constitutes the loss of one's home. Thirdly, it represents man's struggle with his sin nature, and lastly, it is the place where God sustains, trains and speaks.  Ultimately, via this interpretive method, the wilderness is the holding place for all until the final home in the eternal Paradise is reached.  All four of these themes are very present in the American Renaissance writings.   To better understand how the writers of the American Renaissance used this motif, it is helpful to understand the wilderness theme in the Christian tradition.  I quote Williams again to prove the worth of this investigation. “In uncovering the symbolic ‘meaning’ of our language, we uncover the layers of mythological conditioning in which our very thoughts and beliefs are clothed” (24).  

      The Christian Scriptures are replete with the thematic motif of "the Wilderness." It is the antithesis to the thematic motif of "the Home." The true Home, of course, was the Garden of Eden whose innocent inhabitants walked in perfect relationship with God.  Paradise was lost when they succumbed to the Tempter.  The identification of the Tempter is of extreme importance to the wilderness theme because the wilderness is enemy territory. In a curious passage in Isaiah, which many believe to be a description of the actual fall of Satan, is a prophecy of his coming defeat: "Nevertheless, you will be thrust down to Sheol, to the recesses of the pit. Those who see you will gaze at you, They will ponder over you, saying, 'Is this the one who made the earth tremble, Who shook kingdoms, Who made the world like a wilderness and overthrew its cities, who did not allow his prisoners to go home?" (Isaiah 14:15-17). In the story, the arch-villain is Satan, the serpent, and his home and work are revealed. His work is to keep people from their true home and incarcerated in the wilderness, which is his domain. The motive behind all of his action is pride and hate towards the supreme God. He wants the power for himself. Thus one of the main components of the wilderness motif of Scripture is that of the enemy in the wilderness, tempting and holding sinners captive. In the Garden of Eden story, Satan, guised as a serpent, tempts Adam and Eve, and as a result of their sin they were cursed and expelled from the Garden.  The land was also cursed. Instead of being productive, it would now produce thorns and thistles, and man’s working of the land would now be tedious. This is how the world became a wilderness. Upon their departure the entry to the Garden of Eden was literally locked and guarded by the Seraphim, which signified a type of permanent incarceration outside the walls.  Thus all their children, i.e. all of humanity, become prisoners in the wilderness dungeon because of their inherited sin nature, as evidenced in their immediate progeny.  Satan is next seen at work tempting Cain to rebel against God. When Cain later received his punishment from God for murdering his brother, he was sent further away from the walls of the Garden to be a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth, and he remained in the wilderness. In the genealogy given of Cain’s descendents, the record indicates that the further they got away from the Garden, the more depraved they became. It is through this strain of thought that the wilderness becomes the wilderness of sin: “In the Old Testament the wilderness is not ‘primarily a locality,’ but ‘a theme full of theological implications” (Williams 26). 

      Thus Satan in the wilderness idea is very evident in the earlier writings of the American Renaissance, especially in The Last of the Mohicians by James Fenimore Cooper. The wilderness in Cooper’s narrative is a complex place.  In one way, it is the frontier: the place of freedom, discovery, adventure and romance. This is characterized by Hawkeye’s life there. It is a place of large sweeping grandeur and beauty as evidenced by the descriptions given of the terrain. Yet it is also the place of horror, brutality and death. It is the home of the enemy.  Magua is a strong parallel to Satan for they share a similar plot line. Magua also hates the father figure, Munro, takes captive his daughters, imprisons them in the wilderness and refuses to let them go home.  The descriptions of Magua also evoke this theme of the wilderness as enemy territory: “The colors of the war-paint blended in dark confusion about his fierce countenance, and rendered his swarthy lineaments till more savage and repulsive than if art had attempted an effect which had been thus produced by chance. His eye, alone, which glistened like a fiery star amid lowering clouds, was to be seen in its state of native wildness” (Cooper 1.17).  Later, when he and his men are preparing to attack, their presence is described “as if the demons of hell had possessed themselves of the air about them, and were venting their savage humors in barbarous sounds” (Cooper 7.26). In reply Gamut exclaims, “Whence comes this discord! Has hell broke loose, that man should utter sounds like these” (Cooper 7.27)!  There are several descriptions given throughout the narrative that describe Magua this way. Magua’s death scene also resembles the prophesied death of Satan in the prophetic passage above. He too falls. “His dark person was seen cutting the air with its head downward … in its rapid flight to destruction” (Cooper 32.77).  If his smashed, bloody and broken body could have been found, the observers would have undoubtedly, with amazement said something like this: “Is this the one who caused such havoc for us?” In Cooper’s story, the enemy ultimately dies and there is some form of victory for good, but it ends at the funeral of two of the most important characters in the novel, Cora and Uncas. In their loss, a potential romance in this world is thwarted, leaving us with the vision of their union and happiness elsewhere in an eternal paradise.  This idea of romantic union and happiness being a sort of paradise is the next place we turn to in our walk through the American wilderness.  

         After the expulsion from the garden, the development of God’s people takes place in the wilderness. The main thrust of the storyline begins with the calling of Abraham to leave his home in Ur and go to an unknown land, the Promised Land of Canaan. God makes a covenant with Abraham, promising him all the land that he can see and descendants as numerous as the stars. Abraham doesn’t receive the land promised him during his lifetime, but the promise becomes part of the heritage of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Later when the family, which has become a nation of slaves in Egypt, escapes in the story of the Exodus, the covenant made between God and Abraham hundreds of years earlier is ratified and expanded. In the desert wilderness, under the leadership of Moses, God enters into a covenant relationship with the people and gives them the law. It is here that “God and Israel were said to have been covenanted together in the wilderness in marriage” (Williams 28). Thus, God’s people are led into the wilderness, which is enemy territory, yet it is here that God unites with them in a type of marriage relationship. This was marriage on a grand, theological scale and is the basis of the book of “Hosea,” whose marriage to a harlot is an allegory of God’s love. The idea of marriage in the wilderness also functions Biblically on the personal plane as well.   

The closest thing to the original home that man can have here in this dispensation between gardens is in a good wife in a good home, as the wisest man ever to live deduced.  "Enjoy life with the woman whom you love all the days of your fleeting life which He has given to you under the sun; for this is your reward in life and in your toil in which you have labored under the sun" (Eccl. 9:9).  This statement and others like it in the same book show that the best thing in this life in the wilderness is a wife and a home. Solomon also refers to the bride as a locked garden for him to enter into to enjoy in the “Song of Songs.” It is this place that the groom, coming down from the wilderness, enters into upon marriage (Song. 3:6-7; 4:15- 5:1).  Whether consciously done or not, there is a very strong link to this idea in Poe's Ligeia.

In the Song of Songs written by Solomon, there is great emphasis on the body and beauty of the woman. The groom focuses on and makes a metaphor out of every part of the bride’s body from head to foot and then back up again. Most of the imagery is agrarian and cultural, so much so that it is hard for modern readers to understand, but the main point is the focus on the body and the life a man finds there. Her eyes are like doves, her hair like a flock of goats, her teeth like clean, white lambs, and her breasts are like twin fawns. She is altogether beautiful and without blemish. Her name is not known, nor is the name of her family. The emphasis is on her body. The description Poe gives of Ligeia is quite similar. The narrator does not know her family or her family name. All that is important seems to be her physical beauty, which he takes great pains to describe. Her forehead is faultless, her skin of the purest ivory, her hair is raven-black and glossy with luxuriant tresses, and he compares her nose to “the graceful medallions of the Hebrews” where he had “beheld similar perfection.” (Poe 4).   He goes on to describe her nostrils, her mouth, her dimples, teeth and chin. From there he moves onto her eyes. Her eyes were “far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race. They were even fuller than the fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of the valley of Nourjahad” (Poe 5). She is referred to as the Greek ideal, and she is attributed with some of the mysterious, spiritual manners of the sensuous Orient. She had obviously become an object of worship and the narrator’s ultimate home. He also speaks of her learning, her rarity and her supremacy over him. They studied metaphysics together as well as transcendental thought, and with her he was in the realm of sublime worship. When he loses her to death, he is irreparably broken.

The poem at the approach of the death of Ligeia is significant, for it alludes to the drama unfolding in the celestial sphere that all are believed to be part of. Whether the crawling and writhing shape of the fourth stanza be the worm that consumes the human body after death, it is eerily referent to the blasted Serpent that presides over death, hence the reference in the previous stanza of madness, sin and the horror of the soul.  The play, Man, is a tragedy, and the conqueror is the Worm. Ligeia’s last words are spoken to God, questioning him: “O God! O Divine Father!—shall these things be undeviatingly so?—shall this Conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel in Thee” (Poe 12)? Ligeia then dies, and we are left to see the outworking of this drama in the life of the narrator.

      In the wake of her death he says he was “crushed into the very dust with sorrow” (Poe 14), which metaphorically alludes to the death that also occurred in him. As a result, he relocates to “an abbey … in one of the wildest and least frequented portions of fair England … a remote and unsocial region of the country” (Poe 14).  This place is gothic in every way, shape and form. The building had a “gloomy and dreary grandeur” that had “the almost savage aspect.” On the outside it was decked with “verdant decay.” On the inside it was filled with Oriental objects that haunt through the clouds of his opium abuse. For some reason, he remarries.  His new bride’s room is in the shape of a pentagon and has a ceiling “elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of a semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device” (Poe 15). While the descriptions of the place go on and on, the point is already evident. He had lost his true home, a type of paradise, in Ligeia, and he has subsequently relocated himself into the wilderness, in a correspondent act to the state of his soul. “It became the symbol of a place located in the mind, a black hole of unknowing around which orbit all the temporary illusions of human self-confidence” (Williams 26). It is here that death and terror reign, and because he worshipped Ligeia, and the object of his worship is dead (or is she?), he is stuck in a psychological wilderness, a prisoner to his desire and loss.  The end of the story is disturbing. Could the rising again of Ligeia be anything but satanic in such a place? Regardless, the wilderness domain in this story correlates wonderfully with the idea of the wilderness being the place of expulsion and confinement after the loss of one’s true home, which is in some ways bound up with the loss of a good wife according to Solomon’s logic.

The writings of Solomon also contain an antithesis to the idea of a wife and home being the best thing a man can have during his brief stint on earth. Two particular proverbs speak about the sorry state of a man who is cursed with a bad wife. The first says that “It is better to live in a corner of a roof than in a house shared with a contentious woman” (Prov. 21:9). The second is like it: “It is better to live in a desert land than with a contentious and vexing woman” (Prov. 21:19).  A paraphrase of the second proverb above could be “it is better to live in a wilderness land than in a nice home with an angry woman.” This twist in the good wife and good home thesis is found in Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, for in this story, Rip escapes to the wilderness to find relief from such a home. He is literally described as “an obedient hen-pecked husband” (Irving 3). He is described as being liked abroad because he was disciplined by a shrew at home. “Their (men disciplined in such a way) tempers, doubtless, are rendered pliant and malleable in the fiery furnace of domestic tribulation; and a curtain lecture is worth all the sermons in the world for teaching the virtues of patience and long suffering. A termagant wife may, therefore, in some respects, be considered a tolerable blessing; and if so, Rip Van Winkle was thrice blessed” (Irving 3). Yet, while much might be blamed on the wife, there is more to the story.

Rip is also described as being a man who had an “aversion to all kinds of profitable labor” (Irving 5). He in essence sat around doing nothing for his own house and family, but he made himself available to help others in the neighborhood.  “Rip was ready to attend to anybody’s business but his own; but as to doing family duty, and keeping his farm in order, he found it impossible” (Irving 5).  His land is described as “the most pestilent little piece of ground in the whole country; everything about it went wrong, and would go wrong, in spite of him” (Irving 6).  His children are also described. They were “as ragged and wild as if they belonged to nobody” (Irving 7). In this situation he lived. In this situation his family lived. The blame for the sad state of affairs seems to be laid on Rip’s wife in the story and in the discussion, but Rip seems to be the problem. He neglects everything under his responsibility, and then when it is too overwhelming, “when times grew worse and worse with Rip Van Winkle as years of matrimony rolled on” (Irving 10), when there was nowhere else to escape from the tongue of his wife and the consequences of his laziness, he disappears into the wilderness. “Poor Rip was at least reduced almost to despair; and his only alternative, to escape from the labor of the farm and clamor of his wife, was to take gun in hand and stroll away into the woods” (Irving 13). The home that Rip left was a wilderness because he wouldn’t work it. He went to the actual wilderness, because at least there, he could be at peace in his laziness. In every way, Rip’s life signifies the futility of life in the wilderness.

      Perhaps the most forceful sermon on the state of man’s soul and person between the two gardens and in the afterlife without the mercy of “the mediator of grace” is Jonathan Edwards’ titled, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Edwards expounds man’s just incarceration in the wilderness and the future confines of the lake of fire. The just punishment for sin and death is death and fire: “…the axe is in an extraordinary manner laid at the root of the trees, that every tree which brings not forth good fruit, may be hewn down and cast into the fire” (Edwards 37).  The Law, which was given to the people of God in the wilderness, is that which condemns men. No one could keep it. The only way of escape is through the mediator between God and men, i.e. Jesus, who alone kept the Law perfectly. Edwards “emphasized the need for the unregenerate self to become aware of the horror of its complete and utter corruption in order that it might accept judgment, reject itself, and turn instead to God. This was what the sojourn in the wilderness was about” (Williams 33). There are several different ways that people could respond to this truth. They could stay in the wilderness, part and parcel with the enemy, or they could ‘believe’ in Christ and hope for entry into the future eternal garden. In the interim they could benefit from His help and comfort during their stay in the wilderness until that time. “The most important use of wilderness imagery continued to be as a symbol in the process of conversion. There was always the wilderness of the world and the wilderness as a place of refuge, but there was also an inner wilderness through which the baptized elect had to pass even after being saved from the wilderness of the world” (Williams 28). In Calvinist thought there is the idea that there is a “need for the unregenerate self to become aware of the horror of its complete and utter corruption in order that it might accept judgment, reject itself and turn instead to God. This was what the sojourn in the wilderness was about (Williams 33). Nathaniel Hawthorne’s characters deal with the theological idea of human depravity and the inner wilderness of man's mind. “Nathaniel Hawthorne managed to make use of both his ancestors’ fear of the ‘unconverted wilderness’ and his romantic contemporaries' esteem of the woods. His characters are imperiled in the forest not so much because it is evil but because they project upon it their own bad conscience” (Lutwack 167).  In The Minister’s Black Veil, Mr. Hooper donned the black veil to symbolize his fallen state, and the visual reality of a common predicament was quite troublesome to all who saw it. Here we have a man that truly sees his depravity and is grieved and irrevocably changed by it.  The motive behind Mr. Hooper’s actions is questionable, and he offers no words of explanation. The veil could simply serve as a life-long teaching tool to bring to light the utter depravity of man, or it could have been due to some hidden sin or some guilt that he couldn’t shake. Mr. Hooper seems to be made stagnant and debilitated by his knowledge.  The same is true of the protagonist in the story Young Goodman Brown. Mr. Brown comes face to face with the same reality in his obligatory midnight venture into the wilderness.  We do not know why he is so intent on going. It is as if he has an appointment, which is perhaps the result of the Puritan demand “that sinners enter into and suffer the annihilating terrors of the wilderness of the soul” (Williams 44). Such an experience would ultimately test his faith. His journey into the wilderness was terrifying.

The road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil. The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds—the creaking of the trees, the howling of the beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveler, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.” (Hawthorns 51)

 In the wilderness he sees the fallen state of everyone else, and he recognizes it in himself. Under the doctrine of depraved humanity, all people become the savages in enemy territory. The following passage, presumably spoken by Satan, reveals this.

“There,” resumed the sable form, “are all whom ye have reverenced from youth. Ye deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness and prayerful aspirations heavenward. Yet here are they all in my worshipping assembly. This night it shall be granted you to know their secret deeds: how hoary-bearded elders of the church have whispered wanton words to the young maids of their households; how many a woman, eager for widows’ weeds, has given her husband a drink at bedtime and let him sleep his last in her bosom; how beardless youths have made haste to inherit their father’ wealth; and how fair damsels—blush not, sweet ones—have dug little graves in the garden and bidden me, the sole guest to an infant’s funeral. By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places—whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest—where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot. Far more than this. It shall be yours to penetrate, in ever bosom, the deep mystery of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and which inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than human power—than my power at its utmost—can make manifest in deeds. And now, my children, look upon each other.” (Hawthorne 63)

In Hawthorne’s wilderness, the enemy and his savage hoard are revealed to be not the dreaded “other” but the people of one’s own house and community. “Young Goodman Brown’s walk through the woods is an objectification of the inner doubts he is having about the religious professions of his neighbors” (Lutwack 72). This is a Calvinist teaching on the wilderness of the soul. The wilderness for him signifies the enemy within as opposed to the enemy without, and like the Reverend Hooper, Young Goodman Brown is also debilitated by his exposure to the enemy in the wilderness. He is haunted by it in every relationship for the rest of his gloomy life. Within this theological framework, there is no safe haven from the enemy, for the enemy resides within. There is no safe refuge or escape from its reach, not even within the refuge of marriage within the walls of the home.  What is starkly absent in this view is the power of God in the sanctification of His people.

The redemption of humanity is the main idea perpetuated through the Christian Scriptures. Though stuck in the wilderness and the clutches of sin, God in essence meets his people there.  It is in the wilderness that God stooped to meet, sustain, train and strengthen His people. He provided water and a ram for Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness. He provided manna and water from the rock for the Nation of Israel while they were in the desert. He met the needs of David who took refuge there while being unlawfully hunted by a renegade king, and He fed, nurtured and ministered to the prophet Elijah in the wilderness. Essential to this view is that though the world is a wilderness, and man is utterly wicked, God still reigns and is moving all eternity towards its Paradisal end. He provides for and ministers to those whom He has called. This is the same kind of help we see Mary Rowlandson attributing to God during her captivity narrative.

      Mary Rowlandson’s story is a traumatic story of the loss of her home and her family at the hands of the “savages” during a brutal, retaliatory attack on her small community. She is taken captive with her small daughter, who is wounded during the attack, and has to travel deep into the forest wild. It is there that her daughter dies. “There I left that child in the wilderness, and must commit it, and myself also in this wilderness condition, to Him who is above all” (Rowlandson 3.2b). After watching her child die a slow, agonizing death, she fights starvation, hypothermia, exhaustion and innumerable difficulties. I would add to the list both the shock from trauma and culture shock as well. Yet through it all, Rowlandson records that she was calling upon the Lord and finding her strength in Him throughout the entire ordeal.  “But the Lord renewed my strength still, and carried me along, that I might see more of His power; yea, so much that I could never have thought of, had I not experienced it” (Rowlandson 2.1b).  After receiving a Bible, which she considers to be the greatest of gifts, she takes comfort in the Psalms. She later states her purpose for writing her captivity narrative.  

And here I may take occasion to mention one principal ground of my setting for these lines: even as the psalmist says, to declare the words of the Lord, and His wonderful power in carrying us along, preserving us in the wilderness, while under the enemy’s hand, and returning of us in safety again. And His goodness in bringing to my hand so many comfortable and suitable scriptures in my distress. (Rowlandson 8.1.b)

Through it all, she finds comfort, hope and strength to persevere in God alone. She, like the fictional character David Gamut, found hope in the Psalms of David and relied steadfastly on God’s Word. Thus she ends her narrative, “I have learned to look beyond present and smaller troubles, and to be quieted under them. As Moses said, ‘Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord’ (Exodus 14.13) (Rowlandson 20.10c). She lived the “redeemed” position and depended on her God. This process of training and sustaining is also the main idea behind Susan B. Warner’s novel, The Wide, Wide World.

      In Warner’s story we have the pilgrimage of a little girl through the world. The set of her growth begins in the city, moves to the country and involves walking in the wilderness and meetings on the mountain top with God and his people. Ellen Montgomery’s story is one of conversion from the wilderness of sin to a relationship with God. It is the story of sanctification, and in it, with the right view of sin, self and God, the wilderness—and all of God’s creation—speaks of his glory, purpose and plan.

      Part of the Christian story is that God became a man, infiltrated the wilderness, was tempted by Satan there and was triumphant. He, in the midst of all the trials and suffering, lived perfectly and thus His death on behalf of mankind was a triumphant victory over Satan, sin and death—everything in the wilderness realm. Therefore, the Church, indwelt by his Spirit, is empowered to also live victoriously in the wilderness amidst temptation as they await his return. This is the foundation of Ellen’s story. In the story she comes to faith in her Savior, and as a result she matures in her walk with God and her view of the world. She progressively goes through trials and temptations, and her character is refined. This is evidenced in one of the greatest trials she experienced, the death of her mentor and sister, Alice Humphries.

The early sun filled the valley with patches of light and shade. The sides and tops of the hills looking towards the east were bright with the cool brightness of the morning; beyond and between them deep shadows lay… Now, the air was fresh with the dew and sweet from hayfield and meadow; and the birds were singing like mad all around. There was no answering echo in the little human heart that looked and listened. Ellen loved all things too well not to notice them even now; she felt their full beauty; but she felt it sadly. “She will look at it no more!” she said to herself. But instantly came an answer to her thought: --“Behold I create new heaves, and a new earth; and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind. Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw itself; for the Lord shall be thing everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended.” [42.10]    

In one of her greatest trials, she is sustained by the future promise of reconciliation and glory.

      The same type of comfort in the wilderness is evidenced in the life of Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The sinfulness of others progressively takes Tom further and further away from his home and deep into the south into the sadistic hands of his new owner, Simon Legree. The wilderness is where many slaves literally escape to, yet it is also the symbol of wicked humanity. If we follow the theme of the wilderness as being the antithesis to home, what other institution other than slavery can be argued to have destroyed as many homes and families of a people? Regardless, Tom’s is the story, similar to Ellen’s, of a convert trusting unwaveringly upon God in the midst of temptation and trial while in captivity. He faces his accuser, and though he loses his life, he is comforted by the hope of a true home with the One who saved him.

The savage words none of them reached that ear!—a higher voice was saying, “Fear not them that kill the body, and, after that, have no more that they can do.” Nerve and bone of that poor man’s body vibrated to those words, as if touched by the finger of God; and he felt the strength of a thousand souls in one. As he passed along, the trees and bushes, the huts of his servitude, the whole scene of his degradation, seemed to whirl by him as the landscape by the rushing ear. His soul throbbed,--his home was in sight,--and the hour of release seemed at hand. (Stowe 40.31)

In his trials, he is comforted and strengthened by the vision and promise of an eternal home—a release from the wretchedness of life in the wilderness of slavery. There was hope. There was strength. There was an ultimate destination to be believed in. The promise of a future was a way for him to endure all the suffering.

      The wilderness motif is abundant within the writings of this time, and an understanding of how the theme is at work in the Christian tradition and scriptures is very helpful to gain an understanding of how it was used by the authors writing in the American Renaissance. The purpose of this essay is not to make an argument for the theology or to argue that any of the writers were Christian. Nor is the purpose to unveil a linear progression of the theme, though one can do so. This essay is a mere discussion of the prevalence of the theme in these stories and how it is works in tandem with Christian teachings. So much more could be said, and I have in no way done the wilderness theme justice, but I have brought the observations I made throughout the semester to the forefront of the discussion, and it has been an invaluable exercise.

Some questions and observations this discussion has left me with include:

1. The female authors seem to be more attuned to writing along the Biblical narrative, staying true to its teachings, while the male authors are more privy to turning them upside down and every which way to test and challenge their boundaries.  Why is this?
2. I also have a desire to see how the wilderness theme progresses in the collective unconscious in the “modern” period of literature.  It is still there, but it exhibits different characteristics.  (Thinking on Faulkner and Frost, etc.)

The Bible. New American Standard Version.

Cooper, James Fenimore. "The Last of the Mohicans." Ed. Craig White.

Edwards, Jonathan. "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "Young Goodman Brown." Seminar in American Literature:    Romanticism, ed. Craig White. 2013 Spring Semester, University of Houston Clear Lake

      <http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/hsh/whitec/litr/5431rom>.

---. "Young Goodman Brown." ed. Craig White, Spring 2013.

Irving, Washington. "Rip Van Winkle." Ed. Craig White. Spring 2013.

Knight, Janice. "Learning the Language of God: Jonathan Edwards and the Typology of Nature." The Williams and Mary Quarterly. Third Series, Vol. 48, No. 4. Oct. 1991: 531-551.

Lutwack, Leonard. The Role of Place in Literature. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1984.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "Ligeia." Seminar in American Literature: Romanticism, ed. Craig White. Spring 2013.

Rowlandson, Mary. "Narrative of the Captivity & Restoration of Mary Rowlandson." ed. Craig White. Spring 2013.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Ed. Craig White. Spring 2013.

Williams, David R. Wilderness Lost: The Religious Origins of the American Mind. London: Associated UP, 1987.

Not quoted but influential titles:

Baym, Nina. Woman's Fiction. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.