The New Adam And Eve

The New Adam and Eve is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s allegorical short stories, originally published in his 1846 collection Mosses from an Old Manse. The premise is one of his most directly speculative. After some unspecified catastrophe has wiped out humanity, a new Adam and Eve are created and find themselves walking through a Boston that has been emptied of its previous inhabitants but where all of the buildings, possessions, and material culture of the vanished population remain intact.

Hawthorne uses the speculative premise to develop a long meditation on what the various artifacts of nineteenth century American civilization actually represent and what they would look like to someone encountering them without any of the cultural context that gives them their meaning to the original users. The new Adam and Eve walk through churches, banks, libraries, mansions, prisons, and various other institutions of the vanished society, with the narrator’s reflective commentary providing the wider intellectual content that gives the story its weight.

The story has been read in various ways. As a critique of the wider materialism of nineteenth century American society. As a meditation on what would actually be necessary to human life if the cumulative weight of civilization were stripped away. As a religious reflection on the original Adam and Eve story and its implications for understanding contemporary humanity. The various readings reflect the kind of layered allegorical structure that Hawthorne’s best shorter pieces reliably support.

For readers coming to Hawthorne through The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, The New Adam and Eve shows him at his most directly speculative. For students of nineteenth century American literature or of the long tradition of post apocalyptic and speculative fiction, the story is an interesting early example of the kind of imagination that the wider speculative tradition would later develop.