Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Página 30

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Popular Culture Review

behold the sweet glory of God in these things . . .
(qtd. in Baym et al. 304).
Note that Edwards’ twofold sense of being-in-the-world-ofr\ature is preserved even as a) nature is p>erceived as a reflection of the
Almighty, and b) Edwards celebrates beauty-in-nature, thus offering
a paean which is in vivid contrast to Rowlandson's and Byrd's
descriptions of danger-in-nature. From the "sweet glory" of Edwards’
blue skies to the "broken and stony" land of William Byrd, nature
swells the progress of early American writing with a multiplicity of
half-lives. Whether p>erceived as beautiful or dangerous, however,
its Otherness is always interpreted as wholly sovereign.
The second major stage in the evolution of an American
metaphysics is unabashedly secular and coincides with the gradual
breakdown of Calvinism and its myriad progeny, and the more rapid
waning of transcendentalism and its related quasi-philosophical
spin-off movements in the nineteenth century. The appearance of this
second stage coincides with three parallel and interrelated
phenomena in Western culture: the rise of science, the rise of
capitalism, and the increasing donunance of a new imago hominis of
W estern man as a denizen of urban environments far from
Wordsworthian dells and pastures—i.e., an excommunicate from
eighteenth century Rousseauesque cults of nature. This urban
expression of the second, or what I choose to call the "ambiguous
Other" stage in American secular life, is characterized by the
familiar categories of loneliness and alienation which began to
emerge in the mid-nineteenth century as watermarks of the American
urban experience. The sense of drift, of the blurring of a clearly
defined line between self and Other, is expressed by Theodore Dreiser
in the famous in\age (1900) of Sister Carrie's rocking chair going
nowhere. Half a century before the publication of Sister Carrie,
however, an even sharper literary image of the ambiguous equipoise
between self and Other may be found in Herman Melville's classic
parable of American urban life, "Bartleby the Scrivener," which was
first published in 1853 in Putnam's Magazine.
In "Bartleby," the story of a strange, intransigent fellow who
comes to work as a law-copyist in a Wall Street firm, and who
"prefers not to" do most of the tasks which the puzzled, exasperated
narrator-employer demands of him, Melville paints a picture of