The Creation Groans with You: An Image of America
One might use pigeons to summarize the American view of nature. They are compelling and revolting birds. They live where Americans live. No matter how urbanized or cultivated an American city is, it remains a natural habitat for pigeons. On the same square where fake owls and offensive smells have been introduced specifically to make these birds stay away, vendors sell seeds to those who wish to feed them. Even as their feces corrode American monuments, pigeons are an essential characteristic of monuments. Pigeons summarize the mythology of nature by which American thinkers have viewed the themes of cultivation and wildness. Early European settlers of America brought ideas with them about the wilderness and The Garden of Eden. These ideas created a tension between respect for the wilderness and hostility towards it. The wilderness was either an awful desert or a glorious paradise. As Bruce Ballenger put it, “We struggle, as we always have, with the sense that we are both a part of and apart from other species on the planet.”[1]
That tension between being apart from and a part of nature, originated with the creation narrative found in Genesis. Genesis begins by telling us the order and manner in which the principle elements of the cosmos came into being. The sun, the moon, the stars, the water, the land, and eventually the animals are all created, “and God saw that it was good.”[2] Early settlers in America knew this creation story by heart. It was the sacred text by which they structured their lives and worldviews. Many thought of The New World as a sort of Eden given to them by God in which they could thrive. It is interesting to note, however, that when God said “it was good,” He was not referring to Eden. Eden has not even come up in the first chapter of Genesis. Genesis in fact has two creation narratives, and they lay down the Judeo-Christian dichotomy regarding nature. In the first narrative God creates the earth and creates both male and female at the same time, “in his own image.”[3] Both male and female are given the whole earth, not just a garden in the earth, and are told to, “multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion.”[4] Mankind is given the earth and everything in it. The anthropocentric act of commanding mankind to dominate and subdue the earth, therefore, did not derive entirely from the notion that the earth was fallen and corrupted. From the beginning nature was below humanity. The wilderness was a subject of man’s. God saw all of this and placed humanity in command of the creation, “and, behold, it was very good.”[5]
Another theme arises, however, after Eden is introduced. In Chapter 2 of Genesis we have a second creation narrative. In this one God created the earth, formed man, then created woman out of the rib of the man. This couple is placed “eastward in Eden.”[6] In Eden everything is already cultivated. It is not a wilderness, it is a garden. It is here alone that the man Adam and the woman Eve are commanded to “dress and keep” the garden, and “to till the ground.”[7] Eden is not as anthropocentric, it is dominated by God. Eden is not given to Adam and Eve as a dominion. Here there are rules and order. It was by breaking the rules, specifically the rule: “Of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it,” that Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden.[8] Upon returning to the greater world and encountering uncultivated nature Adam and Eve were, “as the gods,” and restored to dominion over the earth, albeit a corrupted earth. Thus Genesis placed two opposing images about nature into the minds of the early settlers of America.
The image that was most widely accepted at first was the wild image of nature. To the Puritans especially nature was a great desert. It was the inheritance of The Fall of Adam and Eve and it was only useful as it was cultivated. Humans, especially males, were within their rights as they subdued the wilderness and dominated nature. William Bradford, first governor of Plymouth, Massachusetts, certainly had that view. Upon arriving in The New World he viewed it as, “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.”[9] Far from an eco-system into which they might be introduced and in which they might thrive, he saw it as desolate of the means of survival. Survival meant, “friends to welcome them . . . inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies . . . houses or . . . towns to repair to, to seek for succor.”[10] To Bradford the land was habitable only as far as it was cultivated to his European standard. This became a psychological problem for the Puritans. If the wilderness was not fruitful for them it was because they were not worthy of God’s providence. If they were unable to till the earth successfully they could not claim that God had given them dominion over it. Holding nature in subjugation to the will of humanity was not only permissible, it was an essential evidence of their salvation.
Jonathan Edwards demonstrated this thought process best. In his sermon, “Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God,” Edwards discoursed on why nature is hostile. To his thinking God was good and so his creation, the earth, must be good also. If the earth was hostile to an individual it was not because the earth was bad, it was because that individual was sinful. “God’s creatures are good, and were made for men to serve God with, and do not willingly subserve to any other purpose, and groan when they are abused to purposes so directly contrary to their nature and end.”[11] Edwards may not be asserting that bad crops are the result of sinful hands, but he is certainly proceeding under an assumption that nature is hostile because man is corrupt. What Puritan could avoid the temptation to claim that if nature was benevolent to any individual, that individual must not be corrupt? Edwards even hints at this, “the world would spew you out, were it not for the sovereign hand of Him who hath subjected it in hope.”[12] That hope is God’s favor, which Puritans saw evidence of in successful cultivation.
As other Christian traditions mixed with Puritan traditions, images of America as a wilderness or garden became more nuanced. Other traditions saw God as the gardener of the wilderness. America was not a desert, it was Eden. These viewed the American wilderness as pristine and worthy of protection. To cultivate the land was to destroy it. The Puritans thought they were entering into an already fallen wasteland and set out to improve it. Those who held the Edenic vision of the wilderness viewed themselves as bringing the wasteland with them. They were the source of corruption, not the wilderness. As Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney put it,
He entereth boldly into the solemn groves
On whose green altar tops, since time was young
The winged birds have poured their incense . . .[13]
For Sigourney the forest is a sacred place, a temple or Eden. It is ancient and venerable and dominant. Far from subduing and improving uncultivated nature, “Man’s warfare on the trees is terrible.”[14] Henry David Thoreau takes this further. He sets out, “to make an extreme and emphatic statement,”[15] that, “in wildness is the preservation of the world.”[16] For Thoreau the notion of the wilderness being a desert that must be cultivated into a garden is reversed. Far from improving the land: “Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.”[17]
Both images fall short, and one has to reconsider the pigeons to see it. Does either view help us out of the problem with the pigeons? If the wilderness is a desert, what then? Kill the pigeons. No one will be able to feed them any longer. They will not add their substance and weird beauty to our monuments, but there will be no mess either. What if the wilderness is and Eden? Preserve the pigeons at all costs. We cannot build monuments. We cannot expand. We cannot build at all if we are to respect the pigeon’s domain, but there will be pigeons. Both scenarios leave something wanting. James Fennimore Cooper expressed the proper middle ground. He has an indictment for the ruthless slaughter of pigeons: “the Lord won’t see the waste of his creaters for nothing, and right will be done to the pigeons . . . by-and-by.”[18] Yet he has something to say to those who view the wilderness as Eden as well. When Cooper’s protagonist, Leather-stocking, wants to kill a pigeon, “I go into the woods till I find one to my liking, and then I shoot him off the branches.”[19] Cooper advocates a pragmatic, restrained, outlook on the wilderness. Humans are animals that must survive, but must afford that right to all creatures.
Bibliography
Ballenger, Bruce. The Bothersome Beauty of Pigeons. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1996.
Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation. Vol. A: Beginnings to 1820, in Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Nina Baym, 121-156. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2012.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Slaughter of the Pigeons. Vols. B: 1820-1865, in Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Nina Baym, 72-79. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2012.
Edwards, Jonathan. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Vol. A: Beginnings to 1820, in Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Nina Baym, 430-441. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2012.
Sigourney, Lydia Howard Huntley. Fallen Forests. Vol. A: Beginnings to 1820, in Norton Anthology of America Literature, edited by Nina Baym, 118-119. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2012.
The Holy Bible. Authorized King James Version. Salt Lake City, Utah: Intellectual Reserve, 1979.
Thoreau, Henry David. "Walking."
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