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Book Review
| A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture. By Michael Kammen. University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 336 pages, illustrations, notes, index. $39.95.
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| The seasons, Michael Kammen notes, "have always been with us, but with variable meanings for diverse people at different times in human history" (p.11). A Time to Every Purpose imaginatively and insightfully examines human fascination with seasonal cycle from Antiquity in western Europe to post-industrial America in the late twentieth century. Kammen's primary interest, and the bulk of the book, addresses the issue of "what the historical evolution of the four seasons motif can reveal about American culture" (p. 6). The author draws upon a wide range of published and unpublished materials. Indeed, it is the blending of diverse textural sources with depictions of the seasons in sculpture, art, crafts, and a range of other material objects that adds such depth and richness and texture to Kammen's analysis. |
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In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as the seasonal motif made a sea change from western Europe to the United States, it was infused with two major concerns: nationalism and nostalgia. For citizens who were struggling to define the meaning of America, nature served as a way to distinguish the New World from the Old. Nature in the United States was more beautiful, more bountiful, wilder, and more sublime than that found in older, decadent Europe. Part of the continuing American fascination with the seasons can be accounted for by the fact that until the mid-nineteenth century, most people struggled to survive in direct contact with the vicissitudes of nature. By the twentieth century, as more and more Americans became urban and suburban dwellers and lost direct contact with nature, nostalgia became ever more important in shaping the cultural meaning of the seasons for Americans. Even as Americans gained greater control over nature and insulated themselves from direct contact with the natural world, interest in the seasons not only persisted but flourished. |
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The Preface, Introduction, and initial chapter set the stage for a roughly chronological examination of the interplay between the four seasons motif and American culture. Chapter 1, "From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century in Europe," offers an overview of the genesis and development of the seasonal motifs. What, happened to the genre," Kammen asks, at the end of the chapter, "especially its British protocols and manifestations, when they were transported to Britain's colonies overseas?" (p.71) The balance of the volume follows that suggested line of analysis across two centuries of the development and evolution of American culture. Chapters 3 and 4 cover the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Kammen notes a relative paucity of seasonal writing before the middle of the nineteenth century, largely because most Americans still were engaged in the business of taming and controlling nature. In the second half of the nineteenth century, as the nation industrialized and urbanized and as agriculture mechanized, literature and art with seasonal themes grew in volume. Chapters 4 to 7 span the twentieth century. Chapter titles provide windows into the subtle and layered analysis of the four seasons and American culture: "American Transitions: The Seasonal Sense of Place, Time, and Imagery," "Nature Writers, Reader Response, and the Ambivalence of Urban America," "The Four Seasons and American Popular Culture: Calendars and Consumerism," and "The Four Seasons in Contemporary American Art and Poetry." Kammen concludes that looking at the interplay between nature and human life "reveals the varied ways that we have pictured and considered our very being in relation to seasonal change," not only in terms of our material existence , but also as "a metaphor through which we come to terms with our spiritual and corporeal existence" (p.279). |
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A Time to Every Purpose does what a really good historical analysis should do: it creatively and imaginatively uses a range of surviving sources to engage its readers, to add to what we know, to encourage conversation, and to stimulate debate. The book is well written and handsomely illustrated; and the illustrations work well with the analysis in the text. Given the author's attention to the export of the seasonal motif from Europe and its transformation and incorporation into American culture, some readers might reach the concluding chapter and ask: What impact did the Americanized version of the seasonal motif have on other peoples and nations with the aggressive export of American culture in the second half of the twentieth century? Even so, environmental historians, along with scholars and students of American social and cultural history more generally, will find A Time to Every Purpose a delightful, useful, and insightful examination of the shifting cultural meaning of the seasons over time. |
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Philip V. Scarpino is chair of the department of history at Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis, with areas of specialization in public and environmental history. He recently published Public History and the Environment (Krieger, 2004), co-edited with Martin Melosi. |
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