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

In Beyond the Fruited Plain Kathryn Dolan argues that literary critiques of increasingly commercial nineteenth-century American agriculture coupled with western expansion (what she terms agri-expansion) presaged modern worries about industrial agriculture: “[T]he current level of interest in food and agriculture is hardly a new development in U.S. literature and culture.” She finds evidence for this argument in the work of five writers: Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and Frank Norris. All of these authors envisioned alternate—and in their minds better—versions of American farming, though they were not in accord as to what these alternatives were. In their various critiques, Beyond the Fruited Plain argues, we might find the seeds of modern food system alternatives.

Each of the book’s chapters explores the agricultural writing of a single author and move in roughly chronological order. Melville, who spent much of his life on a Massachusetts farm, wrote extensively about efforts to remake imperial landscapes overseas, though his work was more critical of the unequal distribution of the fruits of agri-expansion than its hazards for landscapes or diets. In works such as Pierre and the essay “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” Melville expressed concerns about the effects of a booming nation on a rural working class tied to the land. Dolan argues that Thoreau, in both Walden and the collected essays of Wild Fruits, rejected the increasing privatization of land for market agriculture and advocated local foodways in the face of declining rural New England prospects.

Dolan’s reading of Stowe is subtler, finding in Palmetto Leaves in particular a belief that shared foodways might reunite a nation devastated by sectional politics and war. Stowe’s attempt to raise oranges in north Florida during Reconstruction, and her account of the effort, envisioned agriculture as a potentially unifying force, if one replete with challenges. The fourth chapter examines Twain’s analysis of sugar production through his letters as a journalist visiting Hawaii and his later international travels, recounted in Following the Equator. Twain became increasingly convinced of the hazards of American imperialism and drew much of his evidence from the labor conditions in U.S. and British sugar colonies, which he equated to the slave labor he encountered as a child in the antebellum South.

The final chapter, on Frank Norris’s wheat cycle (The Octopus, The Pit, and his projected work The Wolf), will be of greatest interest to students of American literary naturalism. As Dolan notes, “Many of Norris’s themes and structures in his epic of the wheat are explainable through the genre of literary naturalism. His naturalism, though, is ultimately centered in nature itself—and the wheat becomes his master symbol, one aspect of the fortune of U.S. agricultural dominance in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War.” In Norris’s works wheat is a stand-in for nature as a whole (even if, as Dolan acknowledges, wheat is a hybrid entity, made by humans and nature working in conjunction) and is imbued with its own active agency. Wheat was a beneficiary of American agri-expansion, colonizing millions of acres as the nation pushed westward and sent economic tentacles across the globe. But wheat also worked as a limiting force when people pushed nature too far. Nature, in the form of wheat, acted as a corrective to human hubris.

An epilogue briefly looks at three modern works—Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s Friction, Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy, and Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation—as contemporary elaborations upon earlier agricultural critics. The reasoning for the selection of these three among many modern food writers is less than clear, as none show an especial reliance on the nineteenth-century authors who are the focus of Dolan’s study.

More attention to the regional perspectives of these authors...