American Adam, American Cain: Johnny Tremain, Octavian Nothing, and the Fantasy of American Exceptionalism

Each summer, during Boston’s annual Harborfest, tourists and native Bostonians alike can take a guided tour of key historical sites that figure prominently in Esther Forbes’s award-winning children’s novel, Johnny Tremain (1943). The purpose of the tour, according to the Harborfest brochure, is to allow sightseers the opportunity to walk “the steps of Johnny”—the novel’s eponymous protagonist—in order to learn the “larger tale of America’s fight for freedom.” In preparation for the tour, participants are encouraged to read (or reread) Forbes’s novel, so that they may better appreciate the historical significance of such sites as Copps Burial Ground, Paul Revere’s home, and Old North Church—and so they might most fully relive a beloved childhood classic. Participants can take this excursion in tandem with other similarly literary-themed tours, such as those based on the lives and works of Louisa May Alcott and Henry James, or alongside other Revolutionary War-based tours on Boston’s “Freedom Trail.”¹

The primary purpose of the Johnny Tremain theme tour is didactic, intended to instruct school children (and their nostalgic guardians) in Revolutionary War history. Ironically, however, Johnny Tremain is not, strictly speaking, a Revolutionary War narrative. Indeed, as Eric Tribunella has noted, Forbes’s novel is frequently misread as a story “‘about’ a boy who fights in the Revolution, something Johnny never actually does” (88). Although the novel concludes with Johnny’s decision to take arms against the British, the bulk of its narrative is concerned with his moral development and his maturing political consciousness. Moreover, while the novel is frequently praised for its rich depiction of colonial-era history²—Forbes was a historian who also published a biography of Paul Revere—its enduring appeal may derive, paradoxically, from the way in which it positions its protagonist outside history. As an orphan who effectively cuts all remaining ties from his British lineage and heroically refashions himself within the colonial Boston, Johnny personifies what R. W. B. Lewis has called the “American Adam.” Like many of his literary forebears, such as the narrator of Thoreau’s Walden and the speaker of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Johnny is—in Lewis’s words—“happily bereft” of a contaminating, European past: he does not so much live within history as he creates it, by dint of his quick wit, ingenuity, and appealing stubbornness (5). Thus, Johnny Tremain’s place on Boston’s Freedom Trail may well demonstrate the way in which Johnny, as an Adamic figure, has come to personify an ingenuous and exceptional nation free from the burdens of the past and uncorrupted by a desiccated European culture.

If Forbes’s protagonist has a formidable counterpart in contemporary American literature for young people, it may be the eponymous hero of M.T. Anderson’s two-volume novel, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing (2006, 2008). At first glance, Anderson’s Octavian bears an uncanny resemblance to the protagonist of Johnny Tremain: like Forbes’s Johnny, Anderson’s Octavian is an orphan who flees his subaltern position to join the Continental Army and thus secure for himself freedom and relative prosperity. Moreover, like Johnny, Octavian appears to conform to the familiar American Adamic archetype: indeed, his chosen surname, “Nothing,” gives the impression that he has no genealogical or cultural roots, and thus that he lives apart from history in the “Year Zero” of a new nation. However, Octavian differs from Johnny in one, very important, respect: unlike the indentured servant, Johnny, Octavian is an African slave whose explicit racial identity consistently serves as an obstacle to the privileges Johnny comes to enjoy.

Insofar as it depicts the adventures of an enslaved African hero—rather than a free white protagonist—Octavian Nothing might be read as a revision or critical reworking of Johnny Tremain. Unlike Forbes’s novel, which reaffirms the conventional interpretation of the American Revolution as a decisive break in the course of world history by employing a rootless and ingenuous hero, Octavian Nothing challenges traditional master narratives (so to speak) of American...