Paradise or Wilderness? Conflicting Perceptions of American Geography in Early Colonial Times
Keywords:
American geography, colonial writings, Virginia, New England, Early Colonial TimesAbstract
This paper is primarily concerned with the early colonial reaction to the American geography that both the early trans-Atlantic English explorers and also the early colonizers of Virginia and New England represented in their writings. While, on the one hand, the American geography was mythologized as a utopia in terms of the myth of the classical golden age and Arcadian pastoral otium (carefree life) as well as idealized as an earthly paradise with reference to the Christian myth of the Garden of Eden, on the other hand it was described in dytopian terms as “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men” (Bradford 62), with hardly bearable climactic conditions. Therefore, the early colonizers’ ambivalent or, more aptly, conflicting perceptions of the American geography as such, which became a recurrent discourse in their writings, will be analyzed and discussed in the paper on the basis of primary sources.
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