Beyond the Fruited Plain: Food and Agriculture in U.S. Literature, 1850–1905 by Kathryn Cornell Dolan (review)

The growth of US global power in the nineteenth century was simultaneous with a rapid expansion of territory and national economy. Kathryn Dolan’s well- researched Beyond the Fruited Plain looks at how literature from 1850 to 1905 reflected and criticized that expansion as manifested in agricultural changes. Food and farming, she rightly notes, are as much defining traits of a national culture as is literature. On this basis, she draws on a social history of US agriculture to argue that major literary figures have long been critical of industrial agriculture.

Dolan focuses on five well- known American authors she calls “literary agri- reformers”: Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and Frank Norris (213). She sees them as yoking discourses of nationalism, science, and reform to farm narratives as a means to resist the accelerating globalization of agriculture. Beginning with Melville’s Pierre, she shows its affinity to the New York farmers’ antirent movement. The novel is a proto– environmental justice text, critiquing what Melville calls “povertiesque” depictions of the rural poor. She then gathers together Thoreau’s complex relationships to woodchucks, his bean field, and wild fruit, reading both Walden and his later writings as strongly reformist. Thoreau has long been understood to criticize capital- driven farming, but for Dolan, Thoreau’s championing of wild apples and huckleberries in Wild Fruits sows the inchoate seeds of a more sustainable and democratic agriculture.

The next three chapters are especially engaging, and seem to benefit from a method influenced by the recent “materialist turn.” In each chapter Dolan looks at a single author and a single agricultural commodity. Doing so binds the intricacies of agricultural production, distribution, and consumption in the late nineteenth century with literary production (though less with literary distribution or consumption). She links Harriet Beecher Stowe with oranges, showing how the orange— as a Southern plantation crop— had both real and allegorical connections to the slaveholding South of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her careful analysis of oranges in the novel shows the surprising ways these “golden apples” are involved with key scenes and characters. In fact after the Civil War Stowe actually purchased an orange plantation in hopes of helping to regrafit the North and South; she even used her famous name as a brand to sell her oranges in New York.

The last two chapters will be of most appeal to readers interested in western literature. The large grain farms of the West are an important absent force behind the earlier agricultural crisis and its literary responses— such as Melville’s and Thoreau’s. Yet those western grain farms are largely a neglected, negative player, both in literature and Dolan’s analysis. In her final chapters, however, she turns her focus on western literature. First, she shows Mark Twain’s slow shift from promoter of westering expansion in his newspaper journalism to critic of US imperialism. After touring the globe and witnessing sugar plantations in Hawai’i and Mauritius, he understood the coolie system as a masked continuation of the oppression of American slavery. The scope of this chapter is global, but it centers on the Pacific world of Hawai’i and America’s late nineteenth-century Pacific imperialism.

Finally, Dolan examines how Frank Norris portrays wheat as a corrective force of nature with its own agency: the main character of his unfinished trilogy. Drawing on manuscript changes, the history of Chicago grain elevators, and grammatical analysis of Norris’s sentences, Dolan provides convincing evidence that wheat is the agent of morality in both The Octopus and The Pit.

This is a strong book but does not exhaust the questions Dolan raises. Her study is primarily based on reading the texts and biographies of her authors in the context of agriculture. Questions concerning good work, right relationship to the world, and the cultural value of agriculture remain (perhaps necessarily) open...