North Woods

North Woods brims with references to apples, Adam and Eve, and Eden; one of the novel’s central themes is Paradise Lost. The reason this is so prominent concerns the cultural perception of the US as the new Eden. This idea is deeply ingrained in European consciousness, going back as far as the Renaissance and carrying through in American arts and letters well into the present.

European artists and writers of the 16th century were fond of depicting an ideal pastoral setting, which they called Arcadia. This derives from the ancient Greek region of the same name that held an association with simple rural life. Elizabethan literature is full of references to unspoiled nature and Arcadia. A century later, Marie Antoinette retreated to a fabricated rural village on the grounds of Versailles known as The Queen’s Hamlet.

As the US was actively being settled in the 1600s, the Puritans came to Massachusetts with the intention of creating a pure theocracy untainted by the corruption of old-world religion. While they were deeply suspicious of nature in its wild form, their descendants were not. These conflicting attitudes play out through the persecuted lovers in the novel’s initial chapter.

At the beginning of the 19th century, Romanticism displaced the sense of dread toward nature that dominated the minds of the Puritans. This idealistic attitude was especially strong in the northeastern US and Massachusetts in particular. Ralph Waldo Emerson and other transcendentalists of the 1840s helped spur the Second Great Awakening, which led to the establishment of utopian spiritual communities throughout New England. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) articulates the romantic yearning for immersion in pure nature, and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) expresses the American yearning for freedom. In the novel, Charles Osgood’s pursuit of the perfect apple expresses this visionary quest for salvation through nature.

The enslaved people of the South looked to the northeast as a source of salvation. The Underground Railroad ran straight through this region and operated from the late 18th century until the Civil War. In the novel, Esther flees to the north woods on her way to Canada in her personal search for safety and freedom.

In the visual arts, the Hudson River School of painting (1825-1875) was a movement that focused on depicting idealized pastoral landscapes. In the novel, the fictional artist Teale is obviously a product of this artistic movement as he seeks to render the north woods in its pristine glory.

After the Civil War, the US landscape was still perceived as a new Eden, but for commercial rather than aesthetic reasons. In the novel, Farnsworth embodies the attitude of real robber barons like Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller, who were just as keen to exploit the land’s oil and coal reserves as Farnsworth is to exploit the wildlife of the north woods for his own financial gain.

By the late 20th century, these commercial excesses were recognized as destructive, and environmental activists sought to preserve the land before all its resources were depleted. The novel demonstrates this effort through Robert’s “stitching” walks to “sew” the earth back together and in Nora’s botanical discoveries of the treasures that the north woods still hold. While the novel depicts the folly of those who try to cling to the American Eden and then mourn their lost paradise when they can’t, it also suggests that the most constructive way to view the cycles of history is simply as a process of ongoing change.