A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture (review)

Spring, summer, autumn, and winter are nature-made periodizations with which people have long understood changes in their environments and lives. In A Time to Every Purpose, Michael Kammen examines how the seasons have inspired American cultural development. He moves through overlapping periods to study representations of the seasons, primarily in painting, popular illustration, poetry, and prose, but also in sculpture, glass, and media such as song, film, and advertising. Kammen argues that American investment in and modification of this nearly universal perspective have time and time again invigorated the nation's culture and memory.

Kammen maintains that producing art and ideas about the seasons were among the ways that Americans reworked and moved beyond European traditions. Packed into the baggage that colonial Americans transported to the New World was Europe's centuries-old four seasons motif. There was nothing exceptional about the seasons supporting a national culture. Like landscape painting, four seasons art promoted cultural nationalism in the first half of the nineteenth century. During the mid-nineteenth century, cultural pioneers, most notably Henry David Thoreau, worked to establish the nation's seasons as exceptional. Kammen acknowledges that celebrating the seasonal beauty of the nation's wilder lands rather than fields and ornamental gardens was distinctive. Americans further distinguished their seasons from European seasons by emphasizing splendid fall colors and characterizing winter as both calm and a period of intellectual and spiritual growth.

Industrialization and urbanization provoked Americans to think about their seasons in anew. Better housing, heating and food distanced more Americans from daily toil in nature. According to Kammen, rural and urban America shared a seasonal rhythm circa 1850, which once lost, became a memory often conveyed in seasonal sentiments. These nostalgic interpretations became more typical as the twentieth century approached. Nor did they lose vigor. Kammen devotes almost one-half of the book to the enduring significance of the seasons in the twentieth century as expressed through nature writing, modern painting, Norman Rockwell calendars, 1960s folk-rock music, and contemporary poetry. With the increasing popularity of the seasons, the divergence between nuanced interpretations and simplistic mass-market nostalgia expanded. Sensitive observers prized the unrelenting uniqueness of the seasons within the seasons, while more pedestrian, often urban, Americans saw the seasons as predictable. Kammen is successful in showing the cultural ubiquity of the seasons. He offers historians another theme to advance the study of continuity and change in American life. American's attachment to the seasons, for example, might help explain why Rachel Carson's 1962 Silent Spring transformed the environmental movement.¹

Kammen implies a cyclical dynamic characterizes the seasons in American culture. As the seasons became less rigorous aspects of everyday life, cultural appreciation of them intensified and flourished. Although the seasonal motif deteriorated into cliché in commercial exploits, during the mid-twentieth century, sophisticated thinking about seasons in nature writing and painting became more widespread. Kammen concludes by surveying recent scientific research into how the seasons influence human bodies and feelings. He suggests that these inquiries may demonstrate that a biological, seasonal awareness runs counter to the "'flattening'" (27, 238) efficiencies of air conditioning, frozen foods and snow plows that allow Americans to race forward no matter the time of year.

The breadth of knowledge in this book flows from Kammen's effort to apply and to synthesize arguments advanced in his recent works to a topic that has interested him over the past quarter century. The seeds of this project can be found in his late-1970s scholarship on the life cycle as well as his writings on American art and landscapes during the 1990s. His tremendous insights into American culture and memory also inform this interpretation of the seasons. Kammen's archival research draws on the correspondence of nature writers Henry Beston, Hal Borland, John Burroughs, Rachel Carson, John Muir, and Edwin Teale as well as responses to their writings from critics...