No "Rural Bowl of Milk": Demographic Agrarianism and Unsustainability in Pierre

In the summer of 1850, Herman Melville volunteered to ghost-write an agricultural report that would turn heads. A favor to his less-educated cousin Robert, chair of the Agricultural Committee in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, Melville's little-known report is an experimental georgic, a pastiche of early American farm writing. Echoing the mythic, utopian vision of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782), he lauds Berkshire farmers' "efforts to…increase the quantity of…food which nourished our great progenitors in the Garden of Eden."¹ He celebrates the county's fertility, its "various kinds of fruit," and its "numerous, extensive and well cultivated fields of Corn," portraying an "exuberant" landscape rich in foodstuffs, ever-improving with the labor of farmer-citizens.² Drawing on agrarian ideals of small farming and democratic citizenship, Melville imagines a timeless, unadulterated utopia in the heart of New England.

Melville's agricultural report displays a lineage between American agrarianism and the notion of sustainability. It mingles idyllic, rural imagery with emerging concerns about "exhaustion of the soil" and "drain[s] upon the land."³ Descriptions of the landscape's beauty and productivity appear alongside endorsements of composting and soil enrichment—of "saving every ingredient…which renovates exhausted lands, and returns to the earth those particles which have been drawn from it…enabling nature to reinvest herself."⁴ Envisioning a renewal of agricultural resources, Melville's report presents sustainability, well before the term officially appears, in a Crèvecoeurian context of utopian agrarianism. In so doing, it calls attention to an unexamined American literary genealogy of sustainability. Scholars currently understand sustainability as a global and contemporary concept, officially defined in the UN's 1987 Brundtland Report as development that "meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."⁵ Yet as Melville's report suggests, sustainability emerges in part from the mythic ideal of agrarian utopia: a New World fantasy of demographic growth and agricultural abundance rooted in Jeffersonian agrarian principles of democratic farming and land-owning. Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, and Annette Kolodny have analyzed versions of this ideal in American literary history, using phrases such as "the Garden of the World," "virgin continent" and "provider of sustenance."⁶ Imagining a utopia of renewable resources that "meet[] the needs" of present and future generations, Melville's report gestures towards the integral role of this agrarian ideal and, more broadly, American literature in the development of sustainability discourses—a possible explanation for why the UN Brundtland Report reads as so oddly Jeffersonian.⁷

While Melville's report promotes agrarian principles and farming practices that we today associate with sustainability, his novel Pierre (1852), published the following year, inverts this agrarian ideal, depicting an unsustainable population through images of racial and sexual degeneracy.⁸ In an 1852 letter to Sophia Hawthorne, Melville described his then-forthcoming novel with a fitting agricultural metaphor: "The next chalice I shall commend, will be a rural bowl of milk."⁹ But rather than directly capture this small farming scene, Pierre portrays its very opposites, the two realms that Crèvecoeur and Thomas Jefferson condemn as wasteful and unproductive: an aristocratic estate and a densely-packed city, both of which are home to a dwindling and largely starving population, with no "rural bowl of milk" to sustain it. This inversion uncovers the racial and reproductive connotations of agrarian rhetoric more broadly. In the novel, the estate's diminishing agricultural fertility and the city's overpopulation emerge through interrelated images of racial mottling, sexual excess, and sterility. Portraying demographic and agricultural decline, Pierre articulates an unexamined reproductive subtext of the agrarian ideal: the idea that sexual disorder and racial intermingling enfeeble the fertility, vigor, and agricultural productivity of the American population.

Set in New York City and the Hudson Valley in the 1840s, Pierre dramatizes the fears of mid-century advocates of agrarianism—land reformers, labor radicals, and nativists who promoted the agrarian ideal as an alternative to what they saw as an increasingly unsustainable society...