Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance by Jan Bakker (review)

Studies in American Fiction245 leads to some rigidity and repetitions, but she makes good and extended use of relevant scholarship and can take issue with critics and accepted opinions with firmness and grace. Most of Fitzgerald's short stories reflect or project an autobiographical experience, and so do his changes of approach and attitude. Yet one may feel that that biographical background intrudes too much in Petry's early analyses and is too often referred to in her discussion of Taps at Reveille, where one of Fitzgerald's achievements was precisely the way in which he projected and "objectified" as much as possible personal concerns. I believe that the growth of Fitzgerald as an artist was not concurrent with but rather preceded (or, indeed, eluded) his maturity as a man: the former was much greater than the latter, and the fascinating thing about Fitzgerald is precisely that he did not suffer, as an artist, under the limitations he had as a man. My criticism, in this respect, is perhaps only a question of emphasis. There are occasional lapses in Petry's book (e.g., her reference to Emily Dickinson's poetic achievement being "largely meaningless" without an awareness of her feelings for the Rev. Wadsworth on p. 4; chaise lounge instead of chaise longue [ p. 72]), but a student of Fitzgerald would benefit from reading her book. University of VeniceSergio Perosa Bakker, Jan. Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1989. 107 pp. Cloth: $20.00. Pastoralism in Southern fiction is no new subject; Jan Bakker's treatment, however , is refreshing and illuminating. In a time when American women authors have been gaining increasing attention, Bakker's location of preeminently Southern pastoralism in writings by male romancers may initially startle many, but his thesis is reasonably argued. Bakker's work should also hold out enticements for those engaged in canon shifts; excepting Paulding, Kennedy, and Simms, the writers he includes have not been repeatedly sought by critics. Bakker's thesis is that pastoral substance simultaneously suggests an alluring, idyllic retreat—a locus amoenus—from cares and pressures emanating from forces of urbanization, technology, and industry, and the certainty of the overwhelming of that edenic paradise by the very forces it may seem to evade. From the earliest explorers and settlers in the South, this "duality of human experience and dreams" is apparent, producing what, according to Richard Chase, makes "a genuine, enduring fiction" (p. 1). Static idyll contrasts with change in the mundane world. The standard figure in such works, a sojourner or frontiersman-shepherd, always ready to be the—oblique—critic, presents a perspective of distancing or irony toward pastoralism (p. 24). Bakker uses this working definition of Southern pastoralism to supplement the works of Hinton Helper, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and Lucinda H. MacKethan. The chapters in Pastoralism, in fairly chronological order, address representative works by John Davis; Isaac E. Holmes, Henry Ruffner, and James Kirke Paulding; John Pendleton Kennedy; William Alexander Caruthers; William Gilmore Simms; and John Esten Cooke. Bakker's explications of pastoral elements point up sophisticated art in what, even at this point in time, often remain unfamiliar, and just as often unfairly dismissed (with scorn, no less), Southern fictions. The recurrent motifs of outside disturbances to idyllic peace and plenty, as exemplified in serpents, birds of prey, city dissemblers (e.g., the seducer Stevens in Simms' Charlemont), the ape, girdled trees, or the railroad, bond in intricate relationships the writers considered by Bakker. 246Reviews Seeking literary themes in their own surroundings, these antebellum authors prefigure the ethos in I'll Take My Stand. Faulkner, too, comes repeatedly to mind as one reads these pages, even though he is mentioned but twice (pp. 3, 4). The reluctance to change, coupled with mismanagement of the land and moral unsoundness, as Bakker depicts them in Paulding's Westward Ho!, Kennedy's Swallow Barn, and Caruthers' Knights of the Golden Horse-Shoe, pave the way to The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and the Snopes trilogy. So much, then, for the carping critics who would have it that there was no actual Southern literature before the twentieth century, carpers who are recognizable kindred...