ABSTRACT
The movement for American independence was another of D. H. Lawrence's American literary negatives. In its most coherent form, it is a remarkable and predictable fiction, and that form was given to it by Thomas Paine. The antagonists of Common Sense and the Crisis papers are, on the one hand, a new version of the true and good man, henceforth to be known as the American, and, on the other, the provincial or the man of prejudice. The American's antagonist is the man of prejudice, but he is redeemably evil—in keeping with Revolutionary metaphor which had relocated evil from the center to the periphery of human nature, there to find its cause in history or some other tangential principle. Paine has many metaphors for evil, but it is most commonly identified through terms like narrowness, bias, or prejudice, terms that refer to a crook or a warp in what was designed to be straight.
