Abstract
In the early summer of 1630, the Arbella and eleven other ships arrived in Massachusetts Bay carrying the seeds of New England’s religious and political culture. As one thousand men, women, and children disembarked down the gangplanks or heaved themselves out of small shallops at Salem Harbor, they stepped into a new home where the sense of possibility was commingled with dread. Ten years earlier, pilgrims arriving at Plymouth in the midst of winter had looked upon the “weatherbeaten” landscape of their new home and seen what their leader William Bradford later recollected as “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.” Kindred misgivings about the New World’s hospitableness must have affected the later group of non-Separating Puritans as they were greeted at the shore by the bedraggled survivors of earlier colonization attempts, worn thin by years of disease, deprivation, and warfare.3 The hard prospects advertised by the gaunt features and dilapidated hovels of these Salem and Plymouth colonists, however, would have been softened by the evident mildness and beauty of the natural world environing them. The vegetative explosion of the Massachusetts spring and early summer broke up the intimidating endless green of the coniferous forests and boded well for the new settlers’ plans to establish a New Eden—or at least a New Canaan—on American shores.
When that the World was new, its Chiefe Delight One Paradise alone Contain’de: The Bridle of Mans Appetite The Appletree refrain’de.1
—Edward Taylor
Paradise is of the option. Whosoever will Own in Eden notwithstanding Adam and Repeal.2
—Emily Dickinson
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Notes
Edward Taylor, “Gods Determinations,” The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Donald E. Stanford (1960; Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989), 296.
Emily Dickinson, #1069, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company). In the Variorum edition, this poem is immediately preceded by a “Canticle,” or anti-hymn to a distant autumnal Nature.
William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation Book I, chapter IX. For an overview of Puritan attitudes to wilderness, see Alan Heimert, “Puritanism, the Wilderness, and the Frontier,” The New England Quarterly 26 (1953): 361–82; Peter Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629–1700 (New York: Columbia UP, 1969).
The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, abridged ed. Richard S. Dunn and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996), June 8, 1630.
U.P. Hedrick, A History of Horticulture in America to 1860 (New York: Oxford UP, 1950), 30–31. For more about the spread of apple trees in New England, see Albert Emerson Benson’s History of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society (Norwood, Mass.: Printed for the Society, 1929), 14–16, and especially Howard S. Russell, A Long, Deep Furrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England (Hanover: U of New England P, 1976), passim.
On the importance of the apple, cider, vinegar, applesauce, and apple butter in the early New England diet, see Vrest Orton’s The American Cider Book (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995). Apples were also an important source of winter fodder for the settlers’ swine and dairy herds.
The precise identity of the forbidden fruit is actually unspecified in Genesis, but there are at least four things that help explain the tenacious Western assumption that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was in fact an apple tree. The Hebrew word in Genesis for the fruit, peri, is similar to Pyrus, the name of the family encompassing both pears and apples until the nineteenth century. The Latin word for evil, malum, is very close to the term for apple, mālum (also the general word for fruit; cf. Greek melon), a pun capitalized upon in Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible. Third, the development of Genesis 2–3 that is found in the Song of Songs involves a tree that is explicitly an apple. Fourth, early Christian legends from the third century frequently include apples as evidence of divinity: Dorothea converts Theophilus by sending him a basket of perfect apples from beyond the grave. As for the possibility that the Tree of Life, mentioned in Genesis and again in Revelation, might also be an apple tree, we need look no further than the writings of a later New England Puritan, Jonathan Edwards, who argues that Adam and Eve were prohibited from eating from the Tree of Life because its fruit was literally not yet ripe; i.e., that in Eden fruits ripened in sequence to provide the human inhabitants with continuous sustenance, and the Tree of Life bore a late season fruit (hence, the apple). See Jonathan Edwards, Notes on Scripture, ed. Stephen J. Stein (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998), 392–95, 561–62. The broader association of the apple with divinity is longstanding. J. Rendel Harris argues from philological evidence that Apollo, the great god of the Greeks, is actually derived from the Nordic figure Baldur, the god of apples. As Apollo (or Phoebus) inspired descriptions of the Christian God and Christ, Christians may still in some attenuated way worship an apple god. “Origin and Meaning of Apple Cults,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 5 (1918–19): 29–74. The apple is also associated with Aphrodite in Greek myth (the Apples of Discord and the story of Atalanta), as well as with Dionysus. The antiquity of the apple as a potent Indo-European cultural symbol is evident from the historical linguistic work of Paul Friedrich, which uses paleobotanical data about the succession of tree species to help pinpoint the geographic homeland of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) mother tongue in the fourth millennium BCE; Proto-Indo-European Trees: The Arboreal System of a Prehistoric People (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970), 57–64. The first 140 pages of Robert Palter’s compendium of literary references to fruit, The Duchess of Malfi’s Apricots, and Other Literary Fruits (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2002), are dedicated to the apple, and he briefly discusses Edward Taylor, the Song of Songs, and the book of Genesis on pages 37–45.
This serious distinction, between the hearty and homegrown apple eaters and the effete and corrupt vinophiles, was replayed as farce by partisans of William Henry Harrison in his 1840 presidential election campaign, the promotional materials of which featured—as a jab at wine-sipping incumbent Martin Van Buren and beer-swilling German immigrants alike—a conspicuous barrel of apple cider. See Boria Sax, “Apples,” Rooted in America: Foodlore of Popular Fruits and Vegetables, ed. David Scofield Wilson and Angus K. Gillespie (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1999), 11. This campaign song is found in the Harrison Almanac of 1841: No ruffled shirt, no silken hose, No airs does Tip display; But like “the pith of worth,” he goes In homespun “hoddin-grey.” Upon his board there ne’er appear’d The costly “sparkling wine,” But plain “Hard-cider! ” such as cheered In days of old lang syne.
Cecilia Tichi, New World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Whitman (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979).
Charles J. Taylor, History of Great Barrington (Great Barrington: Clark W. Bryan & Co., 1882), 52. On Eliot’s role, see Russell, 90. George Fenwick’s letter to Governor John Winthrop, May 6, 1641, is reprinted in the Massachusetts Historical Society Collection, Fourth Series, VI: 368.
Reverend Danforth records the harvest of “Blackstone’s Apples” on August 12 of 1646. James M. Usher, History of Medford (Boston: Rand, Avery, & Co. 1886), 19. Archaeological evidence suggests that trade had been established before 1620 between natives in Massachusetts and French-Canadian Jesuit missionaries, who are also known to have spread apple cultivation in Canada. While there is no evidence that native tribes along Massachusetts Bay established apple orchards before the arrival of the English, the possibility cannot be ruled out. For an overview of the colonization attempts headed by Sir Ferdinando Gorges, his brother Robert, and the Council for New England (the precursor to the Massachusetts Bay Company), see Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, volume I: The Settlements (New Haven: Yale UP, 1934), I:338–43. On Blackstone and the other two important emigrants from the Gorges expedition, Samuel Maverick of Noddles Island and Thomas Walford of Charlestown, see Charles Knowles Bolton, The Real Founders of New England: Stories of Their Life along the Coast, 1602–1628 (Boston: F.W. Faxon Company, 1929), 62–64. The biographical details here are drawn from Paul F. Eno’s monograph in the Library of the Rhode Island Historical Society (1985).
Ralph Austen, A treatise of Fruit trees shewing the manner of planting, grafting, pruning, and ordering of them in all respects according to the rules of experience gathered in the space of thirty seven years, third ed. (1653; Oxford: printed by William Hall for Amos Curteyne, 1665). For more on Blackstone’s background, see the Dictionary of National Biography, 732–33. Another Protestant figure, Samuel Hartlib, published pomological (A Designe for Plentie, 1652) and millenarian (Clavis Apocalyptica, 1651) manuals in quick succession around the same time. The great significance of the apple to English Protestants— Milton in particular—is discussed in two pieces by Robert Appelbaum: “Eve’s and Adam’s ‘Apple’: Horticulture, Taste, and the Flesh of the Forbidden Fruit in Paradise Lost,” Milton Quarterly 36:2 (December 2002), 2212–39 and Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food among the Early Moderns (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006), 192–200.
Ralph Austen, Observations Upon Some Part of Sr Francis Bacon’s Naturall history as it concernes fruit-trees, fruits, and flowers, especially the fifth, sixth, and seaventh [sic] centuries, improving the experiments mentioned, to the best advantage (Oxford: Printed by Henry Hall for Thomas Robinson, 1658; rev. ed. 1665).
The logical American heir of both Blackstone and Austen is Jared Eliot, grandson of the Puritan missionary John Eliot, whose Essay Upon Field-Husbandry in New-England as It Is or May Be Ordered (1748) is a watershed publication in the history of georgic American agriculture. An excellent discussion of Eliot’s social and scientific significance can be found in Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999), 190–229.
Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979).
In a later work, Bradstreet expresses the fortunate fall’s curious mixture of pleasure and pain in the terms of an orchard. “We see in orchards, some trees soe fruitfull, that the waight of their Burden, is the breaking of their limbes….” “Meditations Divine and Morall,” The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Joseph McElrath and Allan Robb (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), 205.
Moses Coit Tyler was the first to praise “Contemplations” in this fashion, calling it “the very best of her poems,” “a genuine expression of poetic feeling in the presence of nature; not a laborious transfusion into metre of leaden historical terms”; A History of American Literature, 1607–1765 (1878; Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1949), 247. Tyler himself saw Bradstreet’s achievement as ultimately marred by her dogmatism, as did Perry Miller and Samuel Eliot Morison. Jeffrey Hammond’s more recent Sinful Self, Saintly Self The Puritan Experience of Poetry (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1993) views “Contemplations” as a strategic experiment in self-discipline, an admirable hair-shirt of poesy. Ann Stanford admits the dogmatic cast of much of Bradstreet’s work, though she gives a more forgiving assessment of it and sees more subversion in it than had the earlier commentators; Anne Bradstreet: The Worldly Puritan (New York: Burt Franklin, 1974). More recent feminist interpreters of Bradstreet have emphasized sensuality over Stanford’s “worldliness.” A useful overview of this turn in Bradstreet studies can be found in Rosamond Rosenmeier, Anne Bradstreet Revisited (Boston : Twayne Publishers, 1991); Robert D. Richardson, Jr., “The Puritan Poetry of Ann Bradstreet,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 9 (1967): 330; William Irvin, “Allegory and Typology ‘Imbrace and Greet’: Anne Bradstreet’s ‘Contemplations,”’ Early American Literature 10 (1975): 30–46. For more on the way the poem is structured according to the garden and emblem tradition, see Ann Stanford’s “Anne Bradstreet’s Emblematic Garden,” Critical Essays on Anne Bradstreet, ed. Pattie Cowell and Ann Stanford (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1983), 238–54.
The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Jeannine Hensley (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967), 204.
Donald R. Foster, Thoreau Country: Journey through a Transformed Landscape (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999), 136. Andover was an agricultural settlement on the site of Cochichewick, where natives had long cultivated corn and squash in fields carved out of the woodlands. See White, 221–30.
It is unlikely that the only comparable Native American night-singing bird, the Mockingbird, would be present and singing in Massachusetts in mid-autumn. Ludlow Griscom and Dorothy Snyder, Birds of Massachusetts: An Annotated and Revised Check List (Salem: Peabody Museum, 1955), 174. That Bradstreet is relying on European convention is also suggested by what seems to be an apostrophic reference to another Old World bird, the skylark: “The dawning morn with songs thou dost prevent….”
This transition is ensconced at the literal head of American letters. In the New England Primer, the letter “A” was illustrated by the phrase “In Adam’s fall we sinned all.” Eventually, this was replaced by the more familiar “A is for Apple” convention, which can be understood as a compromise between the Puritan focus on human depravity and the modern tone of cheerful consumption in the age of mass literacy. See Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from the New England Primer to the Scarlet Letter (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000).
Ursula Brumm, “Edward Taylor and the Poetic Use of Religious Imagery,” Typology and American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1972), 191–206; Michael Colacurcio, “Gods Determinations Concerning Half-Way Membership: Occasion and Audience in Edward Taylor,” Early American Literature 39 (November 1967): 298–314; Donald Stanford, preface to The Poems of Edward Taylor (1960; Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989), ix–x.
From his library, it is evident that Edward Taylor was also interested in scientific discoveries and explanations. See The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor, ed. Thomas M. Johnson (New York: Rockland Editions, 1939); and Lawrence Lan Sluder’s consideration of the fragmentary poem “The Great Bones of Claverack” in “God in the Background: Edward Taylor as Naturalist,” Early American Literature 7:3 (Winter 1973): 265–71.
For the contemporary orthodox Puritan position on the status of the Creation, see William Ames, The Marrow of Theology, trans. John Dykstra Eusden (1629; Durham: The Labyrinth P, 1968). William Scheick puts it well: The image of grace which nature bears is, of course, less perfect and less discernible than that manifested in Christ’s works and words; His “Words are bellisht all /With Brighter Beams, than e’re the Sun let fall” (1.24.11–12)....Nevertheless, neither his faithful dependence on Holy Writ nor the fact that postlapsarian nature obscurely reveals God’s will discouraged Taylor from using nature imagery. (The Will and the Word: The Poetry of Edward Taylor [Athens: U of Georgia P, 1975], 137–40)
With Calvin, Taylor believed that Christ was spiritually—though not, as in the Catholic tradition, corporeally—present to the elect during the Lord’s Supper. Taylor’s anti-Stoddardean sermons on the Eucharist are collected by Norman S. Grabo as Edward Taylor’s Treatise Concerning the Lord’s Supper (Kalamazoo: Michigan State UP, 1966), which also contains an informative introduction on the controversy. For a very brief consideration of Taylor’s orthodoxy in matters of the church membership, see Donald E. Stanford, “Edward Taylor and the Lord’s Supper,” American Literature 27 (1955): 172–78. In The Word Made Flesh Made Word: The Failure and Redemption of Metaphor in Edward Taylor’s Christographia (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 1995), David G. Miller argues that the Incarnation rather than the Lord’s Supper was for Taylor “the exemplary foundational metaphor.” Unless one is determined to strip the Puritans of any vestigial high church ritual, however, there is little need to promote one over the other, and in fact Taylor’s major Christological text amply demonstrates that he was inclined to think of the Incarnation and Lord’s Supper in terms of one another. See Norman S. Grabo (ed.), Edward Taylor’s Christographia (1701–03; New Haven: Yale UP, 1962).
A later stanza makes the identity of the fruit explicit: Who is the Object of this Love? And in Whose mouth doth fall the Apple of this tree? Is’t Man? A Sinner? Such a Wormhol’d thing? “Preparatory Meditation II.33,” The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Donald E. Stanford, 138–40. This meditation is occasioned by John 15.13 “Greater Love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his Life for his Friend.” Taylor bristled with opinions about the exact nature of the Christ’s mixed divinity and humanity, as evidenced by his series of fourteen sacrament-day sermons. See Christographia.
The case for Canticles (Song of Songs) as a redeeming counterpart of Genesis 2.3—and for the central place of the apple tree therein—is made with great erudition and subtlety in Francis Landy’s Paradoxes of Paradise: Identity and Difference in the Song of Songs (Sheffield: The Almond P, 1983), 183–219.
See also Preparatory Meditations II.144 (September 1718).
The authorities to which Austen appeals are Lord Bacon and Romans 1:20. Ralph Austen, The Spiritual Use of an Orchard (Oxford: printed for Thomas Robinson, 1653). The book was republished in 1656 in augmented (quintupled) form, the number of observations rising from twenty to hundred. The fourth and last of Austen’s pomological books is A dialogue (or familiar discourse) and conference between the husbandman and fruit-trees in his nurseries, orchards, and gardens wherein are discovered many use full and profitable observations and experriments in nature, in the ordering fruit-trees for temporall profitt (Oxford: printed by Henry Hall for Thomas Bowman, 1676).
The details of Austen’s set of correspondences range from predictable general statements— God tends his subjects as a gardener tends his garden—to the more finely focused concerns of his milieu: Fruit-trees are not to be permitted to grow old in Nurseries, but being ingrafted and prepared (in certaine yeares) for Orchards, and fields, ought to be transplanted…. This shadowes out unto us: That University men ought (in convenient time) to goe forth into the service of the Church, & Commonwealthe.… (28)
John Smith, Harry Stout, and Kenneth Minkema (eds.), A Jonathan Edwards Reader (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995), 16.
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© 2008 Thomas Hallock, Ivo Kamps, and Karen L. Raber
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Ziser, M. (2008). The Pomology of Eden: Apple Culture and Early New England Poetry. In: Hallock, T., Kamps, I., Raber, K.L. (eds) Early Modern Ecostudies. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617940_12
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