NOVEL AND AMERICA
45
Madame Bovary
is a novel about adultery with the adultery off–
stage; and the child who is its product is so elfin and ethereal
that it is hard to believe her engendered in the usual way. For
the rest, there are
Moby Dick
and
Huckleberry Finn, The
Last
of the Mohicans, The Red Badge of Courage,
the stories of
Edgar Allan Poe-books that turn from society to nature or
nightmare out of a desperate need to avoid the facts of wooing,
marriage, and child-bearing.
The figure of
Rip
Van Winkle presides over the birth of
the American imagination; and it is fitting that our first success–
ful homegrown legend should memorialize, however playfully,
the flight of the dreamer from the shrew-into the mountains
and out of time, away from the drab duties of home and town
toward the good companions and the magic keg of beer. Ever
since, the typical male protagonist of our fiction has been a man
on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river
or into combat-anywhere to avoid "civilization," which is to
say, the confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the
fall to sex, marriage, and responsibility. One of the factors that
determine theme and form in our great books is this strategy of
evasion, this retreat to nature and childhood which makes our
literature (and life!) so charmingly and infuriatingly "boyish."
The child's world is not only asexual, it is terrible: a world
of fear and loneliness, a haunted world; and the American novel
is pre-eminently a novel of terror. To "light out for the territory"
or seek refuge in the forest seems easy and tempting from the
vantage point of a chafing and restrictive home; but civilization
once disavowed and Christianity disowned, the bulwark of
woman left behind, the wanderer feels himself without protec–
tion, more motherless child than free man. To be sure, there is a
substitute for wife or mother presumably waiting in the green
heart of nature: the natural man, the good companion, pagan
and unashamed-Queequeg or Chingachgook or Nigger Jim.
