Many commentators have pointed out a recurrent theme or motif in the American literature of the United States: the hero who withdraws from civil society to live in nature. Where previous critics have described this as a reflection of adolescent escapism, the historical experience of settling the frontier, deep-running cultural contradictions, or the Puritanic origins of the republic, I shall argue that American novelists have used this motif in reflecting on the state of nature philosophy on which this nation was explicitly founded.1
In these novels, the departure of the hero clearly signals his dissatisfaction with established society; but the implicit, if not explicit, criticism is not simply negative.2 Once heroes like Natty Bumppo and Huck Finn find themselves free from the constraints of conventional society, they almost immediately establish new kinds of social relations. In depicting their protagonists return to the state of nature, the authors of novels like Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick not only dramatize a fictional rebellion against established laws and customs. They are also seeking the grounds on which a just community might be founded.
The withdrawal from civil society portrayed by these authors is not merely a celebration of the freedom that human beings enjoy in the absence of conventional restraints. In fact, no canonical American author has presented life in the state of nature as completely satisfying or simply desirable. On the contrary, these authors have seen that, with the veneer of civilization removed, the state of nature can represent a setting in which certain truths about human beings become evident-truths that readers of the books could use to order their own more civilized lives.3
By portraying their protagonists withdrawal to nature and then subsequent return to civil society, classic American novelists havein effect-been exploring the central issue of political philosophy: the question of the relation between nature and convention.4 And read in light of that question, these novels provide reflections on the philosophic basis of American political institutions-otherwise lacking in the canon of American political thought.
