Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (review)

Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities, by Roberto M. Dainotto; pp. viii + 178. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2000, $35.00, £26.50.

With the end of the Cold War and the subsequent (if not consequent) rise in ethnic and regional challenges to national authority around the world, Roberto M. Dainotto's reassessment of regionalism offers not only an important critique of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literary regionalism, but a timely commentary on the epochal geopolitical shifts of the late-twentieth century. The aim of Place in Literature is to challenge the all-too-familiar assessment of regionalism as a radical and anti-authoritarian alternative to the evils of nationalism. Instead, Dainotto argues, the ideology of regionalism is inevitably complicit with the most insidious forms of nationalism. The danger of regionalism begins with its displacement of historical subjects in favor of an organic and fixed identification with place. As an interpretive mode, regionalism offers "a figural reading of a literary text, interpreted as if it were the expression of a sensibility bounded to the local, and therefore set free from historical and political impositions" (11). Far from offering any meaningful challenge to nationalism, the "region" is made to signify the de-historicized and therefore uncontestable material of national identity.

In what is perhaps the most solid chapter of this book, Dainotto revisits the well-trodden ground of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855) and its commentary on the relationship between industrialization and rural life--a pairing whose values he traces from Montesquieu and Madame de Staël through Rousseau and Ferdinand Tönnies. In this context, Gaskell's "opposition between the topos of 'north' and that of 'south'" appears as another, albeit innovative, move in "an endless rhetorical battle between civilization and culture, industry and nature, mechanism and organicism, invented society and immediate community, historical progress and origin, city and country, organization and kinship" (95). Yet, in spite of the novel's seemingly political thrust, the fundamental categories of identity are neither political nor historical (class differences are ultimately subordinated to an Arnoldian common interest), but regional: the northern versus the southern temperament. While Gaskell rejects the Romantic valorization of nature, organicism, and so forth, Dainotto argues that she nevertheless retains "the topos of the south" and indeed the dualistic framework itself "as a compensatory topos of the present" (96).

Thomas Hardy has probably had a greater hand than any other English writer in defining regionalism with what he called the "partly-real partly-dream country" of Wessex, and thus it is here that Dainotto actually begins his argument. Denying what he takes to be the dominant reading of Hardy's Wessex as a regionalist alternative to the homogenizing tendency of nationalism and modernity, Dainotto's reading of The Return of the Native (1878) plumbs the depth of complicity between regionalism and nationalism. Paradoxically, but also paradigmatically, Egdon Heath comes to signify "a general British 'regionhood,' or, in the end, a general Britishness uncorrupted by the fashions and glitters of the continental world" (47-48). According to Dainotto, however, it is not Hardy, but his readers, who are responsible for the regionalist misappropriation of Hardy's landscape: "[a]s Clym misreads Egdon, and remaps its territory according to the commonplace of 'the country,' so, it seems to me, do regionalist readings. These sorts of readings, which are perhaps dominant today in the scholarship of Hardy, manage not only to rewrite The Return of the Native as a novel of regional Dorset but also to rewrite its story to make it fit to the commonplace of a picturesque region" (69). Such a caricature of contemporary scholarship may diminish the force of Dainotto's argument, but he makes an important contribution to that scholarship by mapping Hardy's text as a site of conflict between Hardy's own anti-regionalism and the pressure of editors, readers, reviewers, and critics determined to reduce the text to "a thesaurus of regionalist expectations" (72) like those...