Barbara Rose
AMERICA AS PARADISE
11 n'y a de vieux en Amerique que les bois.
---Chateaubriand,
Voyage en Amerique, 1836
Writing
to
Ferdinand and Isabella during his third voyage to
America in 1498, Columbus reported he believed he had found that fabled
terrestrial paradise lost to man since biblical days. He had by this time come
to the conclusion that the world was not flat but pear-shaped like a woman's
breast; in this case, the earthly paradise, source of the four rivers of Eden,
would be located at a spot roughly corresponding to the nipple. Columbus
...
himself did not dare enter the sacred garden, but he was confident he had
located nothing less than paradise on earth .
Given the historical context within which America was discovered,
Columbus was compelled to interpret his voyages as a religious mission. For
only a millenarian interpretation of the identity of the new world was grand
enough
to
serve as counter-propaganda against the thundering of the old
world reformist preachers already beginning to predict a coming
apocalypse. From the moment of its discovery, the innocence and promise
of America were linked conceptually with the exhaustion and corruption of
Europe . In Mircea Eliade's words, America was "born under the sign of
eschatology." Thus it was inevitable that millenial prophecies and fantasies
of redemption should provide the content of the original imagery chosen to
represent the unknown hemisphere
to
the West. Beginning with Colum–
bus, successive generations of writers, painters, philosophers and theolo–
gians on both sides of the Atlantic imagined America as the fulfillment of
the biblical prophecy of an earthly paradise, where regenerate humanity
would be born again into a state of unperturbed innocence, a recreation of
the happy infancy man enjoyed as part of unconscious nature, before he had
tasted the forbidden fruit of knowledge. Such comforting milennial fan-
tasies did not fade easily; they had and continue to have vast repercussions
for American civilization.
By the nineteenth century , collective fantasies of a new Eden focused
themselves on the idea of the American wilderness as a vast, if not infinite,
