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American Literature 75.2 (2003) 431-433



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The American Aeneas: Classical Origins of the American Self. By John C. Shields. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press. 2001. xlv, 432 pp. $45.00

John Shields's book is a provocative challenge to the venerable Adamic myth so exhaustively deployed in examinations of early American literature and in American studies. Moreover, The American Aeneas builds wonderfully on Shields's considerable work on Phillis Wheatley. Shields expands his examination of classical influences on Wheatley's poetry to encompass the work of other American authors, including Edward Taylor, Cotton Mather, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.

Seeking to recover "a heretofore lost key which unlocks the American self" (ix) and to reenergize the field of American studies, Shields argues that both the haunting sense of American pastlessness and our inability to explain an underlying national secularity derive in large part from our elision of Vergil's Aeneid and its resonance in the New World conquest and the founding of the nation, which some early Americans called a new Rome. Crossing the Atlantic with the Adamic myth in translatio cultus (3), the legend of Aeneas not only penetrated the national literary imagination with its own Vergilian power but also mingled with the Adamic myth. This produced a classically [End Page 431] inflected voice in the writings and sermons of some of the most celebrated early American writers. Shields's meticulous study of Edward Taylor's classicism in both poetry and the Christographia sermons reveals the wealth of allusions and outright appropriation that often underpinned early American theological writings. His treatment of Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana and Manuductio ad Ministerium further exposes the complex relationship between the Adam and Aeneas myths in early American culture.

Shields's application of the Aeneas myth to the colonial rationale and rationalization of Native conquest is both enlightening and disturbing. His investigation of the epic visions of early America, especially literary accounts of King Philip's War, demonstrates how convenient the story of the Trojan conquest of native Italians was to colonists seeking to explicate their wars with Native Americans. Additionally, he points out how contemporary scholars have overlooked the presence and implications of classical themes in accounts of Native conflicts.

The American Aeneas's nine chapters also address the Vergilian myth's role in the development of an American "political, social, and cultural identity tinctured with a secular spirituality wholly compatible with deism and the Age of Reason" (75). The pastoral mode, present in the Aeneid and Vergil's Eclogues, provided additional literary space for American writers to exercise this developing identity, display literary independence from England, celebrate distinctly American heroes and values, and "express their own ‘cultural assumptions'" (100). Shields suggests that Phillis Wheatley and other African American writers also received this pastoral inheritance. Along with the epic and pastoral, Shields identifies other genres informed by the classics and contributing to the development of American identity in the era (100). In a particularly interesting thread, Shields examines the crucial development of the American version of pietas, secular and built upon "civic devotion" (94), and how it defined the nature of the national hero and the American citizen. Marking the American popularity of Joseph Addison's play Cato (1713), he offers an intriguing account of how "the American Way (God, Mother, and Country) came into being" (175). Shields demonstrates how American pietas developed from the classical Aeneid, Mather's Christian Magnalia, and the more commonly accessible Cato, and found its quintessentially American heroic model in George Washington.

Even while chronicling the decline of the Aeneas myth and the political and anti-intellectual forces elevating the Adamic vision, Shields is careful to note the continued sightings of the classical in U.S. literary waters. In chapters on Hawthorne and Melville, he demonstrates how the Aeneas myth is entwined in "My Kinsman, Major Molineaux" and shapes the idea of the heroic in Melville's Billy Budd.

Shields calculates the cost of our long rejection of the Aeneas myth as the impoverishment of American studies as a discipline, the marginalization of...

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