The opinion of the wilderness for the puritans, specifically from Mary Rowlandson’s account, and the fiction writers Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper are in opposition to one another. The puritans view the wilderness as evil. Civilization and the creation of the “City on the Hill” are viewed by the puritans as essential for achieving salvation. For puritans, the wilderness is a savage and hostel place watched over by the devil, and anybody that resides within the wilderness are the devil’s people. The whole point of civilization is to reject the devil, by creating a prefect community.
The fiction writers we read this week present the opposite side of the wilderness. They present the wilderness as an escape from civilization. Place to be revered and a place that could sustain life. The two authors approach their admiration for the wilderness with different tactics. Cooper is blunt in his presentation, following Natty Turner through the wilderness and placing as the central topic of discussion while doing so. Irving approach is more subtle. In Rip Van Winkle, he presents the wilderness as an essential part of Rip’s survival, as well as his safe haven. Wilderness commentaries in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow aren’t floating on the surface as they are in Rip’s tale, but they are there.
In Sleepy Hollow one could force out a lesson of respect for the wilderness.
I’ll start with Irving’s presentations, since they seem less obvious; plus, I enjoyed them more. The wilderness for Rip was his livelihood. He was a miserable farmer with “an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labor.” He would “fish all day without a murmur” or spend all day in the woods to “to shoot a few squirrels or wild pigeons.” This leads me to believe that most of the food his family ate came from game hunt rather than his crops, meaning he lived off the wilderness even though he didn’t live in it. In addition, the conflict in the story happened after “Poor Rip was at last 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.” Meaning that along with the wilderness being a source of food, for Rip it was also the “Edenic escape” Dr. McCay mentioned . Neither, of Rip’s use of the wilderness parallel puritanical teaching.
To pull a wilderness discussion out of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, one would probably have to focus on the topic of respect for the wilderness. One of the messages, Sleepy Hollow presents is that even though the wilderness is beautiful you never know what’s out there. There could be a headless horseman. Because of that, the wilderness should be treated with respect.
In cooper’s The Pioneers, he presents similar views toward the wilderness as Irving. The wilderness can serve as a necessity for living, but must be treated with respect. During Chapter 22, Natty is teaching his company how to hunt in the wood properly “It’s much better to kill only such as you want, without wasting your powder and lead, than to be firing into God’s creatures in this wicked manner…” The love Cooper has for his character Natty, leads me to believe that Natty’s views of the woods mirror his own. That the wilderness is a sacred place, it must be used properly, but when used properly one can live off it
There is also the Judge in Chapter 1, who seems more than any other character to portray similar ideas to the puritans. They don’t coincide directly, but his hunting law provide a similar idea in that he is trying to civilize the woods, just as the puritans are. Although, the change isn’t as radical as the puritan’s “City on the Hill”, and he doesn’t believe the wilderness is evil.
Cooper and Irving represent America's transition to Romanticism-- a period of time in which nature is regarded as the sublime. The aesthetics found in nature bring about a sense of appreciation and an intrinsically pure beauty in us as readers. By the early nineteenth century, America was a young nation still working out the kinks and trying to establish a national identity that everyone could participate in. An important point to understand for this week’s readings is the time in which Cooper and Irving are writing these short stories. At this point in time, much of America had not been discovered still, and wilderness/nature surrounded most, if not, all the American settlers. A transition from the Puritans’ devilish conception of nature needed to take place in order for the settlers to have some common ground in the new country they were to call home. Cooper and Irving bring about that transition and make Americans feel good about the world around them. Nature essentially could be anything you wanted it to be--- a means of escape, a place of pure beauty, an exciting adventure, or even a mystery to be solved. That was the spirit of America— the “land” of the (intellectually, artistically, and spiritually) free.
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