Another important study of Americans' conceptions of the wilderness as reflected in literature is Bernard Rosenthal's City of Nature. Rosenthal's study focuses on Cooper's predecessors and contemporaries, and concludes that two ideas of nature emerge in the writings of the American Romantics. He locates one idea of nature in the conception of wilderness as the space to be assumed by the emerging American city. The second idea of nature concerns the "new religious myth," an individual journey into nature for the purpose of establishing what Rosenthal terms "the city of the self" (27). Put another way, "two irreconcilable connotations emerged as the most important definitions of the word nature": one in which "nature represented commodity being transformed into civilization," and one in which "nature became the metaphor for a new spiritual mythology" for the nineteenth-century individual (Rosenthal 31).6 Rosenthal suggests that, during the nineteenth century, the majority of Americans conceived of nature in this first way, and that most of the American Romantic writers worked within the second understanding of nature (71).7
These two conceptions of nature largely inform our readings of nineteenth-century texts that center, in some way, around the natural world. We have been taught not only to conceive of the natural world as a metaphor for our own society, but also to read texts that depict the natural world in terms of what they impart regarding the individual human spirit.8 We therefore approach texts that describe the natural world and that share personal reflections regarding the landscape with the expectation that they will either consider "the transformation of nature into its purest form, civilization," or that they will explore nature "as spiritual place," as the site of "an interior journey to a private place" in the spirit (Rosenthal 18), or that the author will attempt both visions of nature.9 As readers we are taught that while purely descriptive prose may be poetically beautiful, it is boring, contains no metaphor or symbolism, and therefore lacks importance because it does not pertain to individual spiritual growth. In the words of a colleague, "We skim over the flowers and birds and pretty things and look for what really happens." However, what "really happens" often happens within the descriptive prose that we overlook. In relying on metaphor for our readings of such texts -- either the metaphor of nature as civilization or nature as self -- we fail to investigate the implications of capturing nature in language or the process by which a writer envisions elements of nature and transforms that vision into linguistic representation. We fail, finally, to ask how this investigation into the natural world functions not only for the individual or for society, but for the natural world itself.