It was alfred frankenstein, I believe, who first observed that the characteristic subjects of painters like William Sidney Mount and George Caleb Bingham were visual counterparts of that “American Adam in Eden” theme, which many historians of literature had identified as “the central myth in the American novel since 1830”. Man unspoiled, in a new relationship to nature, is their common concern. As David W. Noble has written in The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden:The American novelist then, beginning with James Fenimore Cooper, cannot write within the traditional conventions of his European contemporaries. He is precluded by his nation's romantic self-image from being an analyst of social and individual comedy or tragedy. Our novelist must be a metaphysician and theologian. He must always begin with the question: is it possible that Americans are exempt from the human condition? Is it possible that men in the new world have escaped from the need to live within community, within a framework of institutions and traditions—have escaped even from the need to live within a mortal body, or a soul that is divided against itself? Can nature indeed redeem man, heal his spiritual division, and lift him above the constraints of social class?
