Technology and the pastoral ideal in Frederick Philip Grove

Technology and the pastoral ideal in Frederick Philip Grove KENNETH C. DEWAR The literary vision of Frederick Philip Grove is dominated by two images in tension with one another: an image of pastoral society, characterized by harmony and wholeness, and an image of modern technology, characterized by dissonance and alienation. The tension between them remains unresolved throughout his work. Grove tends, however, to judge their relative value and his pastoral images verge at times on the sentimental. The tension is not, then, between two equal concepts of society, but between an ideal of pastoral and the reality of the triumph of technology. An analysis of these images suggests the existence of a garden myth in Canadian culture; certainly such a myth is to be found in Grove's work, in both his Ontario and his prairie writings. The conflict appears in its least subtle form in Two Generations (1939), a novel set in southern Ontario and concerned with the development of a rural family, the Pattersons. One of the two family farms belongs to Mrs. Patterson and is situated in particularly beautiful natural surroundings. Its name, significantly, is Sleepy Hollow. It is presented as a sheltered paradise, a haven from the vicissitudes both of nature and of human life. The reader's first glimpse of it is indeed idyllic: the entrance lane is lined with trees, the grass heavy with the dew of early dusk. "Under the westering sun the whole place, sunk in the hills, had an air of breathless and uncanny quietude." A sense of natural harmony pervades the scene. Inhabited only intermittently, the farm has become "a veritable sanctuary of wild life," and numbers of birds and small animals are all about. The boys arriving from the home farm are affected by a sensation which is central to Grove's writing: "Now something of the essential isolation of all human beings came home to·Journal of Canadian Studies them." 1 In this bucolic setting, one of the boys goes off to fetch the mower in order to cut the long grass. The activities of the others in the farmhouse are described in a tone continuous with the above. Suddenly, "as with a profanation, the hollow in the hills vibrated with the clatter of the mowing machine." The harmony of the pastoral landscape is destroyed by an instrument of the mechanical age. This is of particular significance since nature holds a mysterious force for Grove, with which man must come to terms, a force which is knowable only if one achieves harmony with it. For two of the young Pattersons, Philip and Alice, Sleepy Hollow represents freedom and innocence, and an escape, moreover, from their father's oppression. Its essence is silence, "a pocket of silence in the roaring traffic of this socalled modern world." Here they contemplate the meaning of life; Philip quotes some anonymous lines of poetry: Far in a western brookland That bred me long ago The poplars stand and tremble By pools I used to know. There, in the windless night-time The wanderer, marvelling why, Halts on the bridge to hearken How soft the poplars sigh. 2 The machine is alien to this setting and this contemplation - a "profanation." The conflict here dramatized is of course a conventional one in art and literature. Its role in the literature of the United States, for example, has been traced and analyzed by Leo Marx, who argues that there has been a unique American version of the conflict and that an understanding of it is key to an understanding of the American character.3 Yet one is struck by the similarity between Grove's Sleepy Hollow and the Sleepy Hollow of Nathaniel Hawthorne, which Marx uses as an introductory motif for his work. 19 Marx's concepts appear to have a usefulness beyond the boundaries of his particular study; it is proposed here to employ his conceptual tools in analyzing the work of Frederick Philip Grove. Marx describes the conflict between the pastoral and the technological as one between "two cardinal images of value": One usually is an image of landscape, either wild or, if cultivated, rural; the other is an image of industrial technology. Sometimes...