Pastoral Histories: Utopia, Conquest, and the Wife of Bath's Tale

The idea of the country is the idea of childhood: not only of local memories, or the ideally shared communal memory, but the feel of childhood: of delighted absorption in our own world. . . . Great confusion is caused if the real childhood memory is projected, unqualified as history. Yet what we have finally to say is that we live in a world in which the dominant mode of production and social relationships teaches, impresses, offers to make normal and even rigid, modes of detached, separated, external perception and action: modes of using and consuming rather than accepting and enjoying people and things.

--Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (297-98) ¹

In The Country and the City Raymond Williams offers a moving critique of the ideology of the pastoral mode. Reading the material history embedded in the use of images of country and city, Williams tells a powerful story of the capture of land, people, and things for capitalism, and of the alienation that results. In so doing Williams poignantly reminds us that commodification and consumption are neither the only nor the most satisfying desires and ambitions that we might have for the world.

Williams's critique has been enormously influential, with the result that today representations of an idealized pastoral space, whether in the genre of the literary pastoral or in romantic histories of past times, tend to be viewed with suspicion for the material conditions they occlude. Annabel Patterson, for example, has shown us the ideological force of the "pastoral" in the early modern period, a genre that engages with, and attempts to obscure, relations of agrarian capitalism. ² With Patterson's work in mind, medievalist Kathleen Biddick has recently read sentimentalized images of the rural medieval peasant (traditionally popular in Marxist histories of the middle ages) as historiographic "pastoral moves." ³ Engaging with theories of postcolonial cultural studies, Biddick reads images of the idealized British peasant in nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories as a disavowal of the conflicts of later British spaces, specifically the spaces and places in which the historians of British peasant studies (and the editors of the journal Past and Present) worked and wrote.

Biddick's postcolonial critique, like Patterson's materialist analysis, might be said to contribute to a critical trajectory established by Raymond Williams. Yet there is another aspect to Williams's analysis, one that can usefully extend Biddick's "postcolonial" reading for a different postcolonial engagement with the "pastoral mode" in medieval studies. Following his detailed history of pastoral ideologies, Williams turns to consider the utopian power of pastoral's emotive claim on the real. Linking fondness for a rural past now gone with an "ideally shared communal memory," "the feel of childhood," and "a delighted absorption in our own world," Williams raises the evocative fantasy of a remembered time of intimate belonging, an experience he describes in the attitude of "accepting and enjoying" rather than "consuming and using" people and things. Conjuring this imagined past, Williams himself deploys a pastoral image of our own lost days to mount a critique of the monumental and psychic losses wrought by capitalist social relations. It is the force of such intimate recollections that makes his critique of capitalist alienation so touchingly effective and emotionally powerful.

Like Raymond Williams, Geoffrey Chaucer's Wife of Bath harkens back to a time of delighted absorption in the world. Her Arthurian tale (Chaucer's only venture into the genre) famously begins by alluding to a time, now gone, and to Britain once filled with faerie pleasures:

In th'olde dayes of the Kyng Arthour
Of which that Britons speken greet honour
All was this land fulfild of fayerye.
The Elf-Queene and hir joly compaignee
Full ofte daunced in many a grene mede.
This was the olde opinioun as I rede.
I speke of many hundrede yeres ago
But now can no man see...