Wasteland: A History by Vittoria Di Palma (review)

From present-day descriptions of nuclear disposal sites to T. S. Eliot’s paragon of Modernist verse, the term “wasteland” evokes real and imagined scenes of devastation wholly resonant with the modern age. This enduring cultural trope is a product of the Enlightenment era, when physical landscapes were first categorized as “waste” and their “improvement” proposed. Vittoria Di Palma’s book charts the history of the concept of “wasteland” as it was developed in seventeenth- through eighteenth-century England, Scotland, and Wales. Wasteland: A History is a major achievement: meticulously researched, theoretically nuanced, and written in lucid, sensitive prose.

The book’s first two chapters set forth a general history of wasteland, focusing on its seventeenth-century genesis, while the three following chapters provide case studies of specific wasteland typologies in the long eighteenth century. Throughout the book, Di Palma locates wasteland at the intersection of two discourses: theories of land use and the aesthetics of disgust. The seventeenth century witnessed an increasing tendency to value land according to its agricultural utility, an outlook symptomatic of the burgeoning enclosure movement and Enlightenment thought espoused by Francis Bacon and John Locke. This led to the designation of land as “waste” if it was unused, unusable, or “incorrectly” used (for proponents of enclosure, this last category included unenclosed or common land). Yet agricultural reform is only one piece of wasteland’s history. Equally crucial to its definition was the period sense of disgust, the idea that certain terrains were inherently repulsive to the senses: noxious, misshapen, or putrid, for example. Building on the work of several authors who have analyzed disgust—including, to name but a few, Mary Douglas, Aurel Kolnai, and Winfried Menninghaus—Di Palma reveals disgust to be a social and moral concept as much as an aesthetic one. The dovetailing of these two discourses is deftly portrayed in each of Di Palma’s case studies, in which specific landscapes are identified as both useless and disgusting. This nuanced framing of wasteland’s definition accounts for one of the book’s major strengths: it offers a fully interdisciplinary account of its subject that unites political, scientific, and economic history with the history of aesthetics, art, architecture, and landscape design.

The first chapter traces the early modern sense of the term “wasteland” to the 1611 King James Bible, where it signified land made barren through an act of God’s wrath. Redemption could be found through the cultivation of this wasteland, thus establishing an enduring set of cultural associations “between wasteland and the moral cycle of condemnation, devastation, atonement, and redemption” (19). Mythic wasteland would come to find real-world correlatives beginning in the later seventeenth century: for example, in John Bunyan’s influential The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Bunyan’s protagonist, the pilgrim Christian, journeys through an ominous landscape, navigating such biblical wastelands as “The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” and other terrains demanding physical and moral fortitude, including “The Slough of Despond” and “The Hill of Difficulty.” Yet Christian’s allegorical journey was in fact modeled on the actual route from Bedford south to London, containing many allusions to familiar territory. The Pilgrim’s Progress thus helped to popularize the notion that wasteland existed within England’s own physical landscape.

Defining and “improving” such real-world wastelands became a preoccupying cultural imperative. The notion of attaining salvation through the cultivation of land would become bound up with worldly demands for material productivity. John Locke’s defense of private property in his Two Treatises of Government (1690) offers a representative case of the confounding of religious ideas with economic interests in agricultural production—including the call for land enclosure—common to discussions of wasteland. For Locke, unenclosed (common) land left in its natural state constituted “waste,” as did improperly cultivated enclosed land. Only through proper agricultural labor could a landowner acquire both wealth and spiritual salvation. According to Di Palma, Locke’s understanding of land in its natural state as “waste,” and agricultural labor as the divinely sanctioned...