The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland

Chapter One. Midwestern Pastoralism

one Midwestern Pastoralism We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations, the important thing is not to achieve, but to strive. —Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac The five writers who concern me emerge not only from literary tradition , but also from a specific geography and history that shaped their ideas about the human estate in nature. This chapter examines the significance of the Midwest in American culture and the long-standing association of the region with pastoral values and imagery. Pastoralism in midwestern arts, sciences, and politics is the context in which I read the literary pastoral of Cather, Leopold, Roethke,Wright, and Harrison. This is by no means a straightforward proposition, given the problematic history of “pastoral,” “regional,” and “midwestern” as descriptive terms in critical and popular discourses. I begin therefore by commenting on these concepts as they have been understood (or misunderstood) by critics of midwestern writers. In defining pastoralism, I refer to the controversy in recent American studies scholarship over its political significance .The suspicion with which revisionist critics view pastoral correlates with older prejudices against regionalism and ideas about a “sense of place.” I also connect this critical background to the perceptual instability of midwestern cultural identity.Persistent stereotypes of the Midwest  You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. as American (representing an essentialized U.S. national identity), the Midwest as provincial,and the Midwest as flat and undifferentiated should be addressed before I offer an affirmative definition of the region and its unique cultural traditions. Pastoral Theory, Regionalism, and Midwestern Literature Pastoral writing has deep historical roots.Ancient poets,among them the Greek Theocritus and the Roman Virgil, established many of the conventions still associated with pastoral, which first implies the characterization of intelligent and resourceful farmers, shepherds, and other country people, and description of landscapes, plants, animals, and natural phenomena such as weather and seasonal changes. Pastoral often entails a contrast between urban and rural life, usually but not exclusively in favor of rurality, to which special virtue is attributed; and a tone of nostalgia or “regret over the loss of an idyllic condition: childhood, a perfect love, an idealized farm, a promised land, the innocence of Eden” (Cooley, ).While this nostalgic tendency can lend itself to sentimentality and a false idealization of life in nature, the best pastoral writing acknowledges social complexities and conflicts inherent in the individual’s striving for a meaningful life. Virgil,for example,portrayed in the first of his Eclogues a dialogue between two shepherds,one who has happily retained his land and another who has been dispossessed by the government in Rome. In The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx cites this eclogue as an example of “complex pastoral ,”which tends to“qualify,or call into question,or bring irony to bear against the illusion of peace and harmony in a green pasture,” rather than oversimplify rural life ().American writers of complex pastoral in Marx’s estimation includeThoreau,Frost,and other canonical figures who emphasize the tenuousness of rustic felicity in an industrialized society. Through the self-conscious use and modification of pastoral conventions, writers of complex pastoral depict the experience of nature in a manner that emphasizes social forces such as war, technology, and urbanization as well the vagaries of love and loss in the lives of individuals. Literary critics, as I note in the introduction, have recently subjected pastoral to extensive reevaluation. Some deliver sweeping indictments, as when Sara Farris concludes her essay on Cather’s O Pioneers! and two  The Midwestern Pastoral You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. contemporary novels by asserting that “conquest will always make pastoral a destructive, even self-destructive endeavor” (). While I reserve commentary on Cather for the next chapter, and on Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (), Farris’s third text, for the last, it is worthwhile to point out the absolutism of “always.” The implication that narratives of people in nature can be signifiers only of hegemony of humans over nature , rich...