Apple Trees in the Archive: Thoreau, Milton, and the Melancholy of American History

In book 10 of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan, recently returned to hell after his exploits in Eden, brags to his infernal cronies that his seduction of Adam and Eve was wondrously simple. He has lured them away from God with only an “apple” (PL 10.485–87). But Satan’s claims for the simplicity of the fruit of the tree of knowledge are reductive. In fact, the fruit is only an apple according to Satan; no other speaker in Paradise Lost names it so.1 Elsewhere, Milton makes the fruit intentionally ambiguous — as “Ruddie and Gold” as an apple at one moment, as “downie” and “ambrosial” as a peach at another — but never finally classified one way or the other (PL 9.578, 851–52).2 In keeping the fruit of the Fall generic, Milton keeps its effects implicitly tied to both Nature’s general fecundity and Eve’s “fruitful Womb,” reminding readers of the full span of biblical history, from God’s predetermination of “each / Plant” and “every Herb” even “before it grew” in Genesis, through the possibility of humankind’s redemption through Eve’s descendants — Christ, and his followers (PL 5.388–90, 7.334–36). When Satan introduces the “goodly” tree’s “apples” to Eve as “fair,” he seeks to