Eden's Inmates The Inverted American Adam and Inevitable Entrapment in Rachel Kushner's the Mars Room

In this essay, I argue that Rachel Kushner explicitly invokes the American Adam in ​The Mars Room ​ to demonstrate the trope’s incongruities through a contemporary, female, urban protagonist: a subject who experiences an inverted reality of this idealized figure. Largely, ​The Mars Room​ explores American approaches to agency, individualism, and the intertwined state of nature and technology to explicate the country’s foundations, which are themselves inspired by a maintained idealism . The novel charts the ways in which this national idealism steers individual narratives and the process in which a disillusioned protagonist becomes forced to subscribe to this thinking (thus operating in a network of institutions influenced by the nationwide trope). By employing a character who avoids conventions and who is then forced to work within those previously rejected conventions, Kushner captures what nonfiction works cannot so easily demonstrate the impossibility of an American Adam fantasy and, nonetheless, its influence on the construction of society, which reaches across technology, institutions, nature, and gender and class expectations.