Letters from an American Farmer: Metaphors 8 key examples

In order to know what James can write, James must first be familiar with his constituent parts—those ingredients from which he can "dish up" his letters. James picks up on this metaphor and continues it a few moments later:

My letters shall not be sent, nor will I receive any, without reading them to you and my wife; women are curious, they love to know their husband's secrets; it will not be the first thing which I have submitted to your joint opinions. Whenever you come to dine with us, these shall be the last dish on the table.

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Like an actual dish of food, these letters will await the trio to discuss when their shared meals have drawn to a close. This treatment of James's intellectual "dish" fits neatly in line with a strain of literary devices throughout Letters from an American Farmer, in which de Crèveceour compares writing or other intellectual pursuits with the food, plants, and other agricultural products. Working one's mind, these devices suggest, is not so different from working one's land.

It is the smell of a freshly tilled field that so influences James's son, and the effect that this smell has on the child is apparently like to a "blooming" plant. This metaphor is implied rather than explicit, but it is nonetheless an important comparison that establishes how James prefers to convey his vision of his family—and his world—in terms of agriculture and agricultural language. Like a plant, his son begins to develop and thrive when he interacts with fresh soil. 

This passage connects with two larger themes in the novel: James's love of nature and his connection with the land gained from farming, and his abiding respect for hard work—a respect James hopes to impart on his son, as he himself once learned from his father. "May God enable him to live," James adds, "that he may perform the same operations for the same purposes when I am worn out and old!"

The frontier settlers have a mind of their own, in James's experience—an attitude that has been developed by a crazed lifestyle on the very age of early American civilization. In this particular agricultural metaphor, he uses the process of grafting—in which two plants are joined together—to characterize how the particularities of frontier life add an entirely new set of behaviors to the American colonial landscape.

In each town James visits, there is an established legal practice run by some detestable lawyer. In this metaphor, de Crèvecoeur continues the strain of agricultural comparisons that runs throughout his novel to describe lawyers as though they are a fast-growing weed that chokes out a farmer's vegetables in a field. If the American colonies are a thriving family farm, then lawyers are an unstoppable invasive species that threatens to ruin the entire operation.

In James's view, lawyers are an unnecessary and extractive complication to the idyllic nature of early American life—causing trouble, overcomplicating everything, and leveraging their formal education over the relative ignorance of the populace. In that respect, James's disdain for lawyers is consistent with his core values: lawyers do not belong in the agrarian ideal of James's America, where success is earned through hard physical work.

James hopes that the metaphorical legal "wings" of America's ambitious lawyers might be clipped just as those of the clergy were over the course of the Protestant Reformation. That reformation halted the relentless expansion of the Catholic Church, which threatened the livelihoods of European commoners with an indulgent system that asked believers to pay in order to find their sins forgiven. In the same way that the Protestant Reformation rejected such practices, James hopes that the lawyers might be reigned in once and for all in America. To James, the lawyer represents the antithesis of the farmer: the former is a well-educated bureaucrat who thrives on manipulating the uninformed, while the latter is an honest, hard-working laborer who makes a livelihood out of an intimate relationship with the land itself. 

This hyperbolic and metaphorical language paints slaveholders—"masters"—as gods in their own right—to the divine will of "that god," he observes, even Nature herself must "give way." The power of slaveholders over the people that they owned was absolute to the point that they behaved as though they were godlike. Indeed, quite a few slaveholders believed that the right to own slaves was divinely ordained. James considers this attitude to be an abomination as he encounters it in Charles Town, but it is left unclear to the reader exactly what he thinks of the practice as a whole (after all, he refers to children of the enslaved as "creatures," rather than children). Notably, James goes to some length to excuse the practice of slavery in the northern colonies, which he sees as a lesser evil.

Wild animals, when threatened and attacked, will viciously defend themselves with as much violence as necessary. With this metaphor, James demands to know why anyone could expect any different from humankind. This is the terrible situation in which the American colonists have found themselves. With American and English aggressors stirring up conflict, anyone caught in the middle—like James himself—has no choice but to abandon their loyalties and turn their backs on former allegiances in order to ensure the safety of their family. Ultimately, James holds himself accountable only to his wife and children.

Life, James writes with no small amount of nihilism, might appear to be a "gift," but it's nothing more than an accident—and therefore entirely meaningless. This is James at his lowest, struck by the suffering of so many people in the American colonies and the difficulty of living in what was, not so long ago, total wilderness. 

By the end of the novel, James has relayed a much more ambivalent vision of colonial life than the positive, even joyful tone of the first few letters might suggest. The arrival of full-scale war to the colonies presents an existential threat to the exciting new agrarian paradise that James describes in the beginning of the book. And yet, this violent turn also helps bring the reader back to reality and to the complexity of a colonization process that has, ultimately, relied on violence to function. There is violence between settlers and the indigenous populations of the area; the Engilsh have violently reshaped the North American wilderness to suit their agrarian ideals; and the institution of slavery has inflicted deep, structural violence that enables much of the colonies' prosperity.