SOURCE: “The ‘Progressive Steps’ of the Narrator in Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer,” in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 18, No. 2, Autumn, 1990, pp. 145-58.

[In the following essay, Arch challenges the common critical assessment of Letters as an American romance, suggesting instead that it is a work of fiction designed to expose the dangers of revolution.]

Throughout J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters From An American Farmer, James, the narrator, is interested in the concept of “progress,” especially the “progressive” acculturation of Europeans who have immigrated to America. “All I wish to delineate,” he says concerning his short “History of Andrew, the Hebridean,” in Letter III, “is the progressive steps of a poor man, advancing from indigence to ease, from oppression to freedom, from obscurity and contumely to some degree of consequence.”¹ James' fascination with progress is ironic, since he begins his correspondence with Mr. F. B. as a curiously static personality leading a pleasant but static existence. Letter II reveals that James' farm was left to him by his father, that he has done nothing to improve it, and that, having once considered selling it, he immediately retreated from such a potential alteration in lifestyle, fearing that in a “world so wide … there would be no room for [him]” (p. 52). James himself ingenuously admits that his life is an imitation of his father's: “I have but to tread his paths to be happy and a good man like him” (p. 53). Willingly constrained by this narrow life, James initially presents a striking contrast to Andrew the Hebridean, whose history is a record of his progression from oppressed European to free American.²

However, James, too, undergoes a “great metamorphosis” in Letters and is dislodged from his “narrow circles” (p. 65). His progress is closely linked to the epistolary form and dialogic structure of Letters. Many critics have argued that the letters and the dialogue are simply rhetorical devices that have no relevance to the work as a whole; they have argued that the letters are essentially separate documents that produce a loose structure for the whole³ or that, perhaps, the tenor and subject matter of each letter simply reveal the extent to which Crèvecoeur's own hand can be seen “pointing to the importance of some moral issue by manipulating his protagonist.”⁴ Thomas Philbrick has gone a bit further, arguing that the “epistolary form … is far more than a strategem by which Crèvecoeur excuses his violations of logical organization; by serving as the vehicle of characterization and narration, it spins its own strands of coherence.”⁵ In other words, due to its epistolary form, Letters might even be considered a “prototypical” or “germinal” American romance.⁶ However, these critics take away as much as they mean to give; they praise Crèvecoeur's work as much for what comes later (the “real” American romance) as for what it did, or what it tried to do, in 1782. In fact, the epistolary form and dialogic structure of Letters are much more than mere ornament. Letters is not a romance that simply and inconclusively juxtaposes opposing sets of terms (the idyllic and the demonic,⁷ idealism and realism,⁸ romanticism and skepticism), it is a philosophical work of fiction that comments on the dangers of revolution and on the inadequacies of man's fictions about himself.⁹

Letters begins with James, his wife, and his minister discussing Mr. F. B.'s request that James become his American correspondent. James is undecided: he is afraid that, with his “limited power of mind” and undeveloped writing skills, he will not make a good correspondent (pp. 39-40). His wife is even more reluctant, fearing both that Mr. F. B. is too sophisticated and that James' own local reputation might suffer from his being called a writer. It is the minister who convinces James to write to Mr. F. B. He points out that Mr. F. B., in his first letter to James, asserted “that writing letters is nothing more than talking on paper” and indicated that he wants “nothing of [James] but what lies within the reach of [his] experience and knowledge” (p. 41). The minister agrees with this dialogic notion of writing: “What we speak out among ourselves we call conversation,” he tells James, “and a letter is only conversation put down in black and white” (p. 44). This argument convinces James to go ahead with the project, and the record of this debate becomes Letter I. James closes with a final admonition to Mr. F. B. not to forget his limitations: “Remember, you are to give me my subjects, and on no other shall I write, lest you should blame me for an injudicious choice. … [And I will record] the spontaneous impressions which each subject may inspire” (pp. 49-50).

The first subject provided by Mr. F. B. is American husbandry, a subject on which he has apparently “conversed” at some length in his second letter to James, comparing American farming methods to those practiced in England, Russia, and Hungary. In Letter II James responds to this subject by recounting some of the “spontaneous impressions” he has experienced while working in his fields. True to his insistence that he is “neither a philosopher, politician, divine, or naturalist” (p. 49), James does not overtly discuss politics, science, or other “public” matters. Letter II is a short autobiography revealing that James owns a well-developed farm (inherited from his father), has an excellent wife and healthy children, possesses faithful and industrious Negroes, and is not troubled by unfriendly Indians. James describes an idyllic if static existence on his Pennsylvania farm.

Yet the idyllic scenes of Letter II are not quite apolitical. James links them to current issues at several points. Where, he asks rhetorically, “is that station which can confer a more substantial system of felicity than that of an American farmer possessing freedom of action, freedom of thoughts, ruled by a mode of government which requires but little from us?” (p. 52). His pleasant farm, he remarks a little later, “has established all our [i.e. his family's] rights … our rank, our freedom, our power as citizens. … This is what may be called the true and the only philosophy of an American farmer” (p. 54). The incursion of such talk into the midst of these “spontaneous impressions” could, of course, be explained by the loose organization of Letters; if the individual letters possess no necessary internal relationship to one another, a comment in Letter I need not be consistent with the method in Letter II. However, perfectly consistent with the fictional realism established in Letter I, with the psychology of a rustic such as James writing to someone he perceives as his superior, Crèvecoeur has James try to impress Mr. F. B. in this second letter. James' self-conscious asides about his own inferiority support this reading.¹⁰ So do his political views, for it seems clear that he is merely parroting the minister's arguments, indeed, the minister's vision of America, as the minister expressed them during the debate in Letter I. Here in America, the minister had told James that “‘[we] are strangers to those feudal institutions which have enslaved so many. … Misguided religion, tyranny, and absurd laws everywhere depress and afflict mankind. Here we have in some measure regained the ancient dignity of our species: our laws are simple and just …’” (pp. 42-43). James is unlearned and unlettered; in trying to shoot at something beyond his “limited abilities” in Letter II, he falls back on attitudes and ideas he has heard before. At this point, James' vision of the American dream is as much the minister's as his own.

The imagery James develops in Letter II emphasizes his unquestioning acceptance of the minister's attitudes, specifically his dichotomy between old world oppression and new world freedom. Responding to Mr. F. B.'s description of the “good and evil … to be found in all societies” (p. 51), James tells of a selfish wren that fearlessly stole the nest of a larger swallow on James' porch. The wren possesses a “spirit of injustice” that seems almost human; the swallow calls up the image of a “passive Quaker.” It seems that all of nature, including man, is in constant conflict. But not on James' farm. A peaceful and benevolent despot, James carries the wren's box to another part of the house to prevent the incident from happening again. Similarly, James describes a swarm of bees that attacks a malicious king-bird; when they quit “their military array,” the bees are snapped up one by one and eaten by the impudent bird. It is a bird-eat-bee world out there, James suggests, except that he, whose “indulgence had been carried too far,” kills the king-bird, opens his craw, and watches in surprise as many of the bees return to life (p. 56). The existence of a “Russian boor or an Hungarian peasant” may be wretched, and men around the world may be warring (as Mr. F. B.'s second letter apparently argued), but the American farmer as described by James in Letter II lives in peace and harmony in his own “narrow circles,” a lawgiver above and beyond the reach of any authority but his own. And here in America, James observes with satisfaction, “the law is to us precisely what I am in my barnyard, a bridle and check to prevent the strong and greedy from oppressing the timid and weak” (p. 57). James' world (and, by extension, his America) may not exactly be one in which the lion lies down with the lamb, but it is one in which “a curious republic of industrious hornets” can live peaceably with James' family, catching flies “even on the eyelids of [his] children” (p. 63). As described by James in Letter II, it is a buzzing garden.

In Letter III James again responds to a subject provided by Mr. F. B.'s ruminations. James' famous question, “What, then, is the American, this new man?” (p. 69), suggests that Mr. F. B. has asked him to expand upon his observations in Letter II concerning the “substantial system of felicity” enjoyed by Americans. In response, James first theorizes about the “new man,” then narrates the history of one. Theoretically, the American is a man psychologically and morally remade by his exposure to a new and expansive land. Freed from the religious, political, and spatial constraints of the old world, he is “resurrected”; he undergoes a “great metamorphosis … [that] extinguishes all his European prejudices [and allows him to forget] that mechanism of subordination, that servility of disposition which poverty had taught him” (p. 83). The American is a “regenerated” human being.

In Letter II James' “spontaneous impressions” led him to recount his personal history; in Letter III James' response to Mr. F. B. leads him beyond “impressions” (and vague politicizing) to reflection. His theory of the “new man” in America leads him, for example, to group Americans into three “separate and distinct” classes (pp. 71-73). He has gone beyond mere “feelings” to assumptions, reasons, and facts. Just so, his “History of Andrew, the Hebridean,” represents another, more extensive act of reflection: he assumes the historian's task of collecting, digesting, and arranging the events of the past. After first protesting the commonplace nature of his history, James defines his methodology: “All I wish to delineate is the progressive steps of a poor man, advancing from indigence to ease, from oppression to freedom, from obscurity and contumely to some degree of consequence … by the gradual operation of sobriety, honesty, and emigration” (p. 90). James' history of Andrew is rosy: the merchants who deal with Andrew are honest and faithful; the Indians are kind, though slightly mischievous; the neighbors display warmth and friendship; Andrew's lands and possessions prove to be fertile and flourishing. Andrew is a perfect example of the new man in America, his history a perfect “epitome” (p. 86) of the “progressive” transformation that results in that man. For the first time, James rests content with his effort in a letter, concluding that he is more content with his history of Andrew than is the “historiographer of some great prince or general [who has brought] his hero victorious to the end of a successful campaign” (p. 104). Moving from loose autobiography in Letter II to methodologically-defined biography in Letter III, James “discovers” a world outside his own narrow circles, discovers a prospect that is more “entertaining and instructive” (p. 91) than his own in its view of America and the new American man. It is still highly optimistic.

In the next five letters James, though still responding to Mr. F. B.'s earlier query concerning the precise nature of the “American,” takes it upon himself to frame the subject matter of the “conversation.” “Sensible how unable I am to lead you through so vast a maze [as America],” he writes, “let us look attentively for some small unnoticed corner” (p. 107), Nantucket Island, which can be analyzed in depth. James has come a long way from the simple farmer afraid of choosing an “injudicious” subject in Letter I. He begins his narrative of Nantucket Island with a comment on his historiographic method:

You have, no doubt, read several histories of this continent, yet there are a thousand facts, a thousand explanations, overlooked. Authors will certainly convey to you a geographical knowledge of this country; they will acquaint you with the eras of the several settlements, the foundations of our towns, the spirit of our different characters, etc., yet they do not sufficiently disclose the genius of the people. … I want not to record the annals of the island of Nantucket; its inhabitants have no annals, for they are not a race of warriors. My simple wish is to trace them throughout their progressive steps from their arrival here to this present hour; to inquire by what means they have raised themselves from the most humble, the most insignificant beginnings, to the ease and the wealth they now possess …

(pp. 107-08)

James asserts that he is a historian of America, operating not by “epitome” (as in Andrew's history) but by synecdoche. Nantucket is merely a type of America; “numberless settlements,” James says, “each distinguished by some peculiarities, present themselves [to the historian] on every side; all … realize the most sanguine wishes that a good man could form for the happiness of his race” (p. 107). Here, too, James conceives history to be the “delineation” of the “progressive steps” from poverty to wealth. But in this movement from biographer to national historian, James displays a new awareness of his task and, hence, his abilities. He has learned, quite clearly, that history can be written according to any number of methods; he has chosen, in his attempt to “disclose [America's] genius,” to examine one small area of the larger whole. This purpose explains why James devotes five letters to Nantucket Island and Martha's Vineyard, and it reflects the growing role that James' powers of reasoning play in his “conversation” with Mr. F. B.

James finds Nantucket a “happy settlement.” The Islanders enjoy “a system of rational laws founded on perfect freedom” (p. 109); their society is free from “idleness and poverty, the causes of so many crimes” elsewhere (p. 125); many people enjoy great prosperity, all “an easy subsistence” (p. 143); and slavery is not tolerated. Nantucket, it seems, is a restored Eden, a rocky island made into a garden by the “genius” and “industry” of its settlers; and, James insists, “what has happened here has and will happen everywhere else” in America (p. 110). It is, after all, only one singular scene of happiness amid the great “diffusive scene of happiness reaching from the sea-shores to the last settlements on the borders of the wilderness” (p. 154).

James' account of Nantucket Island and its inhabitants is not completely optimistic, however. Darker elements intrude. James admits that the happiness of Americans might not be as unspoiled as he had thought. It is interrupted by individual folly and by “our spirit of litigiousness” (p. 154). He also finds that the history of Nantucket and, since Nantucket functions as synecdoche, of America is tainted by the corruption which European settlers brought to the Indians in the form of smallpox and rum. Even as he writes, James points out, the descendants of those abused Indians are being annihilated. Finally, James' analysis of the history of Nantucket leads to his discovery that some of the Islanders had recently moved inland to establish a community in North Carolina named, hopefully, New Garden. But, though it is located in a much more fertile region than Nantucket, New Garden does not create the new, regenerated man of America: “It does not breed men equally hardy [to Nantucket Islanders]. … It leads too much to idleness and effeminacy” (p. 147). In his peripheral vision, James can see reasons for refuting the romantic vision of America he expressed so confidently in Letter III. He quickly tries to turn away from them.

Essentially, the five Nantucket letters comprise one unit of letters, an integrated history in which, by digging straight down into the history of one region of America instead of “cheerfully … skipping from bush to bush” along the ground (p. 90), James is made to confront realities gilded by the rhetoric of his and the minister's romantic notions. In Letter IX, then, James chooses his own subject for the first time, a sign that he has achieved a certain independence of mind. Charles Town, North Carolina, he writes to Mr. F. B., is one great scene of “joy, festivity and happiness” (p. 168). Now, however, James finds it impossible to ignore the evils that lurk behind that facade of happiness: the climate, which “renders excesses of all kinds very dangerous”; the lawyers, who slowly rob the people of their patrimony; and, crucially, the institution of slavery.

James' subject matter in Letter IX is generated, ironically, by a “spontaneous impression”: on his way to visit a planter, he comes upon a black slave suspended in a cage and left to expire of thirst, of pain, or at the beaks of birds of prey. The slave had killed the overseer of the plantation, James learns, and had been tortured and left to die by what the planter refers to as “the laws of self-preservation” (p. 179), that is, as an example to the other slaves. This scene, James somberly tells Mr. F. B., accounts for my “melancholy reflections and … for the gloomy thoughts with which I [fill] this letter” (p. 177). The scene accounts, too, for the tremendous leap James makes from the history of Nantucket in Letters IV-VIII to the “history of the earth” (p. 173) that he begins to analyze in Letter IX. Elaborating the intimations of evil he felt upon seeing the slave, James insists that the history of the world, including America, presents nothing “but crimes of the most heinous nature, committed from one end of the world to the other” (p. 173). “What, then, is man?” (p. 170), James asks, echoing his earlier, more famous question. Having moved from a history of the self, to a history of an other, to a history of a people, and now to the history of mankind, James' expanding consciousness arrives at a more basic question. Its answer is not “goodness.” Human nature is perverse (p. 174), and God has abandoned it “to all the errors, the follies, and the miseries, which [man's] most frantic rage and [his] most dangerous vices and passions can produce” (p. 173).

This letter, which James calls a “general review of human nature” (p. 177), moves from his discussion of the institution of slavery to his recognition that man is by nature wretched, his principles “poisoned in their most essential parts” (pp. 173-74). James concludes by asking whether he, having realized the true nature of man, should prefer a “primitive” life in the woods to a “civilized” life in society. The question at first seems moot: “Evil preponderates in both” states. But evil, James argues, is “more scarce, more supportable, and less enormous” in the woods than it is in “advanced” society. So, clearly, man should be happier, or less unhappy, in the pastoral state. Yet this “fact” is complicated by man's innate desire and need to people the earth. The dilemma and, more significantly, James' ambivalence are indicative of his state of mind in Letter IX as he approaches the “gloomy” scene at the end. It is as if his realization of the “true” nature of mankind, though the gradual product of his dialogue with Mr. F. B., were still too sudden and too shocking to allow any answers, any firm statements about reality. The ground has shifted beneath him.

It is not by chance, then, that Mr. F. B. initiates the discussion in Letter X, asking James to say something about snakes. Though Mr. F. B.'s choice of subject matter is more than slightly ironic, James certainly needs direction. And his recognition of the snake's presence in the new world is a painful but necessary extension of Letter IX. Shocked by his conclusions there, James wishes to turn his face away from the sight of evil: “Why would you prescribe this task?” (p. 180), he asks. James soon finds that the rattlesnake, though “perfectly inoffensive” if not touched and capable even of being tamed, is more likely to kill than not to offend. He narrates the story of a father and son who were killed by pulling on a boot that had two rattlesnake fangs lodged in it. Evil, though not seen, not suspected, preponderates. Once he first notices evil, James finds it everywhere. Retreating to a “simple grove” to watch the humming-bird, “the most beautiful of [birds],” James notes that

sometimes, from what motive I know about, it will tear and lacerate flowers into a hundred pieces, for, strange to tell, they are the most irascible of the feathered tribe. Where do passions find room in so diminutive a body? They often fight with the fury of lions until one of the combatants falls a sacrifice and dies. … [The hummingbird] is a miniature work of our Great Parent …

(p. 184)

Evil “preponderates” in man, in Nature, in every work of God, from His most “miniature work” to His most complex.

This second incident marks James' development. In Letter II he had displayed his conviction of the all-powerful nature of man by moving the box of the greedy wren to another part of the house and by shooting the rapacious king-bird that destroyed his bee population. Now, however, a bird provides the very image of passions run amok; James' “grove” is tainted by evil, and he has no power over that evil. His state of mind following this realization is imaged by an “uncommon and beautiful” battle between a black snake and a water snake described at the end of Letter X. James is puzzled by the battle, for the “vindictive rage” expressed by each combatant appears to be unfounded. “Strange was this to behold,” he writes. Like the evil he has come to recognize in these later letters versus his own natural good feelings expressed in the early letters, the black snake (the “aggressor”) and the water snake struggle, the former solely out of hate, the latter in an attempt to reach “its natural element” (p. 185). The black snake gains control at the end:

… The black snake seemed to retain its wonted superiority, for its head was exactly fixed above that of the other, which it incessantly pressed down under the water, until it was stifled and sunk. The victor no sooner perceived its enemy incapable of further resistance than, abandoning it to the current, it returned on shore and disappeared.

(p. 186)

The exit of the black snake is a metaphor for James' disappearance in Letter XI; he, too, is “stifled and sunk.” Letter XI is written by a European traveller named Iw-n Al-z who describes a visit he made to John Bartram, the famous botanist. Iw-n echoes the optimism of James' early letters: “Examine [Pennsylvania] in whatever light you will,” Iw-n begins the letter that James sends on to Mr. F. B., “the eyes as well as the mind … are equally delighted because a diffusive happiness appears in every part, happiness which is established on the broadest basis” (p. 187). Iw-n's words recall James' statement that America is “one diffusive scene of happiness”; Iw-n's optimism, however, is justified by what he finds at Bartram's farm. Emancipating their slaves, who become “new … beings” (thus fulfilling the definition of the American in Letter III), and living peacefully and peaceably themselves, Bartram and his Quaker neighbors follow the “doctrines of Jesus Christ in that simplicity with which they were delivered; a happier system could not have been devised for the use of mankind” (p. 199). Here is a “New Garden.” And its juxtaposition with James' gloomy view of the world in Letters IX and X indicates that, for Crèvecoeur, the American “dream” of Letter III is possible. He insists, however, that a just and happy society like the one Bartram has created is not an automatic effect of man's arrival on the American continent: the “new man” can more easily become a slave-owning man than he can an Adam.

James, however, continues to retreat in fear from his new perception of evil in the world. Letter I and Letter XI are dominated by voices other than James': the minister and James' wife in Letter I, Iw-n Al-z and John Bartram in Letter XI. Each is followed by a letter in which James' feelings erupt. In Letter II those passionate “feelings” (p. 53) were the result of James' memory of the fear he had experienced when he considered selling his father's farm. Afraid of his own insignificance, James rejected the larger world of experience and remained on his father's farm. Lacking experience, James' letters could only retreat to feelings and impressions, responses conditioned by the thoughts and language of the people James respected: his father, the minister, Mr. F. B. In Letter XII James again retreats to feelings: “Distresses of a Frontier Man.” Plagued by the “remembrance of dreadful scenes,” not simply the tortured slave, but the battles of the Revolution, James again faces and retreats from his own smallness: “What can an insignificant man do in the midst of these jarring contradictory parties, equally hostile to persons situated as I am?” (p. 205). The ability to reason, which he has discovered in the course of Letters, provides no answers, only more questions. “What, then, is life?” he asks, rewriting his most famous question once again. At bottom, he decides, it is “self-preservation” (p. 210). James retreats west, fleeing a world that has lost its senses.

James moves from innocence to experience, from a naive acceptance of the way of life inherited from his father and taught by his minister to a critical awareness of his own need to think, to act, and to create his own future. His progression through the literary genres of autobiography, biography, local history, national history, and epic history is merely an analogue of his intellectual and moral growth. His final step in this progression toward self-knowledge is a painful one, for what he learns to do late in his conversation with Mr. F. B. is to defictionalize his world, to dismantle the many claims colonial and revolutionary America made on behalf of rational, “objective” truth. Letters II and III reveal James' unquestioning acceptance of his father's life and of the minister's romantic version of the American dream. By the time he ends Letter IV, James makes note of the fact that the success of the Nantucket Islanders is due in part to their simplicity: “I saw neither governors nor any pageantry of state, neither ostentatious magistrates nor any individuals clothed with useless dignity: no artificial phantoms subsist here, either civil or religious” (p. 125). Those who bring their “luxurious” manners to Nantucket, James observes with satisfaction, “could not exist a month; they would be obliged to emigrate” (p. 125). Nantucket Island, in other words, like America itself, had done away with the “artificial phantoms” that oppressed man in Europe. The “false” had been discarded in favor of the “true,” the “real.”

This first suspicion of the “artificiality” of religion and government is not all-inclusive, of course. James merely extends the minister's romantic condemnation of the old world (pp. 42-44) to include its manners, government, and religion; he praises Nantucket for reducing class distinctions (pp. 125-26), establishing a government “which demands but little for its protection” (p. 109), and practicing a religion “disencumbered … from useless ceremonies and trifling forms” (p. 153). One can find a similar sort of rhetoric in many works after 1765 in America. John Adams, for one, argued that, ideally, “government [is] a plain, simple, intelligible thing, founded in nature and reason, and quite comprehensible by common sense.” America, Adams went on to say, had thrown off the “arbitrary,” artificial tyranny of the old world's canon and feudal law.¹¹ James, however, soon begins to sense that Nantucket, though it may have simplified life in some ways, has merely replaced one fiction for another. The women of the island, for example, take a dose of opium every morning: “It is hard to conceive how a people always happy and healthy … [and] never oppressed with the vapours of idleness, yet should want the fictitious effects of opium to preserve that cheerfulness to which their temperance, their climate, their happy situation, so justly entitle them” (p. 160). Even in this simplified society, mankind willingly chooses fictions, chooses oppressions. In addition, James notices that the law, which he earlier trumpeted as “a bridle and check to prevent the strong and greedy from oppressing the timid and weak” (p. 57), is actually an instrument of oppression. In Nantucket lawyers are an “oppressive burthen under which we groan” (p. 152). The situation is even worse in Charles Town. There, society has become “slaves” to the society of lawyers. James sees that mankind will have its fictions, be its situation never so simple, free, and happy.

James' first question—“What, then, is the American, this new man?”—is followed by his realization that the American is not so different from the old man. Both are oppressed; both create fictions which complicate an otherwise natural existence. Thus his next question—“What, then, is man?”—collapses the new world-old world dichotomy. There is no “American,” no “European”; there is man. Traditionally, of course, man had been defined as a fallen creature, capable of regeneration only by the saving grace of Christ. Crèvecoeur plays with the notion of regeneration in Letters: the black slave in the cage is a Christ-figure, covered as he is by a swarm of insects “eager to feed on his mangled flesh and to drink his blood” (p. 178); the “old man” (the European) is “regenerated” (p. 68) and “resurrected” (p. 82), reborn as a “new man” (the American); the Nantucket Islanders found a settlement they name “New Garden.” But as James is exposed to the horror and the enormity of evil, he comes to realize that any notion of man's goodness is false. Man is not good. “The history of the earth!” James exclaims. “doth it present anything but crimes of the most heinous nature, committed from one end of the world to the other?” (p. 193) Men “are always at war” (p. 174); human nature is perverse; existence is but so “many errors … crimes … diseases, wants, and sufferings” (p. 177). The myths of Eden and of man's regeneration are not true: man could never have been, nor can he be, good.

James' third question—“What, then, is life?”—indicates that he has continued to strip away layers of enlightenment and romantic belief, rejecting the primacy of human culture and of man in favor of a more elemental subject, experience shorn of its fictions, its appearances. His immediate answer to the question is pessimistic, almost nihilistic: “Life appears to be a mere accident, and of the worst kind: we are born to be victims of diseases and passions, of mischance and death; better not to be than to be miserable” (p. 210). James no longer has faith in his culture and his culture's fictions. The “centre is tumbled down” (p. 211), he says in reference to his beliefs. Unable to believe in “the fictitious society in which [he] lives” (p. 214), James spends most of Letter XII justifying his decision to emigrate to an Indian village somewhere west of Pennsylvania. “Self-preservation,” he concludes, “is above all political precepts and rules, and even superior to the dearest opinions of our minds” (p. 210).

One wonders at the phrasing here: “self-preservation.” That is the phrase the slave-owner used to defend his murder of the slave in Letter IX (p. 179): language has become malleable and fluid in James' world; it does not signify. Nor, in the end, does James' romantic vision of Indian society. Though he begins to describe it in the same idealistic manner he had described America in Letter III (pp. 213-14), James steps back from that vision with an abrupt realization that he is creating a fiction: “Perhaps my imagination gilds too strongly this distant prospect …” (p. 225). There is no answer to his third question, except in the actual act of his choosing to be left, at the end, where so many later American heroes, also stripped of their illusions, of their naive fictions concerning the world around them, will be left: in a liminal space out of which they may, perhaps, project themselves anew in some extra-novelistic future.¹²

James' crisis at the end is Crèvecoeur's imaginative projection of the very real crisis experienced by many Americans during the Revolution. Donald Weber has convincingly shown, for example, how Revolutionary ministers, responding to the bewildering events of the 1760s and 1770s, attempted “to arrest [their] metaphysical fall into interpretive contingency, the hermeneutic void of utter disconnectedness,” by articulating a sermon rhetoric that was at first fragmented, disjointed, anti-narrative. “Language itself,” Weber writes, “became unmoored from traditional contexts, referents, and canons of style and form” during the Revolution.¹³ Myths, of course, are stories a culture invents to confer identity, to achieve and maintain consensus; and they are, as Richard Slotkin has shown, stories in which “the logic of myth” literally flows from “the logic of … [its] narrative.”¹⁴ In moments of ideological crisis, such as the American Revolution, those myths are challenged, disrupted, and overturned. They do not adequately explain. “New stories are required when the old no longer resonate with explanatory power.”¹⁵ The ministers Weber discusses eventually managed to accommodate “their pulpits to the secular American world of the 1790s,”¹⁶ and to invent a rhetoric and accompanying myth that accounted for changed cultural values and their own relation to those values. Their sermons became coherent and dependent on narrative once again.

Like those ministers, James experiences a “metaphysical fall into interpretive contingency.” He awakens from his unquestioning acceptance of the world of his fathers into a world in which meanings, values, and language itself are “unmoored from [their] traditional contexts.” “I had never before these calamitous times formed any such ideas” about America, about mankind, about life itself, James mourns; “I lived on, laboured and prospered, without having ever studied on what the security of my life and the foundation of my prosperity were established; I perceived them just as they left me” (p. 201). James' predicament is that, having rejected society's fictions, he has none to replace them; having descended into uncertainty, he cannot find solid ground. He has only fragments that cannot cohere into meaning, fragments from which no consensus could possibly be achieved. Seen this way, Letters provides a glimpse into that moment at which America stood poised in cultural uncertainty, having severed its ties with the old world and opted for a future the founding fathers, no more than anyone else, could yet imagine. It was that uncertainty, Robert Ferguson has written, “the possibility of collapse through internal dissension, [which] continue[d] to haunt both political considerations and the literary imagination for generations.”¹⁷ James' story itself epitomizes the “haunting” which marked American literature in the years subsequent to 1776.

It is as much a distortion of Letters to read it as a disjointed series of sketches as it is to read it as a myth of national creation or even a plea for consensus. James is no Rip Van Winkle who awakens to find consensus both in the world around him (Washington's picture as it is painted over King George's) and in his own story (which every “man, woman, [and] child in the neighborhood … knew … by heart”). He is that still-dazed Rip whose “senses [are] overpowered”¹⁸ not by liquor but by a world gone mad and by his own internalization of that madness through his recognition of the inadequacies of man's fictions about himself. And James' creator, a conservative in politics as well as in morals, is a critic of the psychological, social, and imaginative dangers of revolution, not the exuberant expansiveness of the American dream.

Notes

1. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters From An American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America (New York: Penguin American Library, 1981), p. 90. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically in the text. For other references to “progress,” see p. 76 (on the regression of farmers into hunters), p. 108 (on James' desire to “to trace [the Nantucket Islanders] throughout their progressive steps from their arrival here to this present hour”), p. 130 (on “the progress of [the Nantucket Islanders'] maritime schemes”), and p. 196 (on the Quakers' gradual realization that black slaves are human beings).

2. On James' conservatism and his physical and psychic isolation, see A. W. Plumstead, “Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur,” in American Literature 1764-1789; The Revolutionary Years, ed. Everett Emerson (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1977), pp. 216-17; Mary E. Rucker, “Crèvecoeur's Letters and Enlightenment Doctrine,” EAL [Early American Literature], 13 (1978), 193-96; and Robert P. Winston, “‘Strange Order of Things!’: The Journey to Chaos in Letters From An American Farmer,” EAL, 19 (1985), 249-54.

3. See, for example, Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), p. 108; Russell Nye, “Michel-Guillaume St. Jean de Crèvecoeur: Letters From An American Farmer,” in Landmarks of American Writing, ed. Hennig Cohen (New York: Basic Books, 1969), p. 35; and Plumstead, “Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur,” pp. 214-15.

4. See Winston, p. 251.

5. Thomas Philbrick, St. John de Crèvecoeur (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970), p. 75.

6. See Albert Stone, “Introduction,” in Letters From An American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America (New York: Penguin American Library, 1981), p. 18; Winston, p. 249; and Philbrick, p. 74.

7. See Winston.

8. See Rucker.

9. Jean Beranger discusses the concept of dialogue sensitively in “The Desire of Communication: Narrator and Narratee in Letters From An American Farmer,” EAL, 12 (1977), 73-85. I agree with him that Letters “has a structure and is more coherent than appears at first sight” (p. 85), and that it is dialogue which provides that coherence; but my emphasis is less on the “internal” dialogue (the “desire” to communicate which manifests itself in each character's conversations) than on the narrator's progress as he engages in the primary “conversation,” the letters to and from Mr. F. B.

10. See, for example, p. 64: “These [observations] may appear insignificant trifles to a person who has travelled through Europe and America. …”

11. John Adams, “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” in The Life and Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1856), III, 454-55.

12. I think here of Huck Finn, Lambert Strether, Nick Carraway, Professor St. Peter, and Tyrone Slothrop, all of whom experience a “de-fictionalizing” of their world. They are left, at the end, in symbolically liminal spaces—the Mississippi, the Atlantic Ocean, the Midwest, the Professor's study, the Zone—that might represent either pure potentiality or death.

13. Donald Weber, Rhetoric and History in Revolutionary New England (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 152, 154; cf. Robert Ferguson, “‘We Hold These Truths’: Strategies of Control in the Literature of the Founders,” in Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 1-6.

14. Quoted in Weber, p. 6.

15. Weber, p. 154.

16. Weber, p. 135.

17. Ferguson, p. 4.

18. Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., ed. Haskell Springer (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), pp. 41, 35.