This essay is accompanied by the New Atlantis critical edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The New Adam and Eve.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The New Adam and Eve” (1843) is an account of two just-created innocents wandering through Boston and its environs the day after the entire human race has disappeared, instantly and entirely. This “half sportive and half thoughtful” effort to untangle the role of artifice and nature in shaping human life presents the unwary reader (if there are any unwary readers of Hawthorne) with a temptingly simple lesson that is almost certainly not the author’s last word on the subject. Nature is “bountiful and wholesome,” while art is a “crafty” (what else?) stepmother. We might readily associate art, then, with the “perverted mind and heart of man” and the “iron fetters” that chain us to “the world’s artificial system.”
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