Xref: murdoch uva.engl.amstdsma:94 Newsgroups: uva.engl.amstdsma Path: murdoch!darwin.clas.Virginia.EDU!abh9h From: abh9h@darwin.clas.Virginia.EDU (Alan B. Howard) Subject: BUELL Message-ID: Sender: usenet@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU Organization: uva Date: Thu, 15 Sep 1994 22:20:40 GMT American Pastoral Ideology Reappraised1 Lawrence Buell Ever since an American literary canon began to crystallize, American literature has been thought of as markedly "pastoral" in the loose sense of being preoccupied with nature and rurality as setting, theme, and value in contradistinction from society and the urban. Systematic attempts to explain this preoccupation in terms of a general theory of American culture are almost as long-standing; they effectively begin with the first thesis book about American literature to endure, D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature ( 1923), and they still flourish. Their best results have been impressive. Yet we have not yet arrived at a sufficiently intricate and cosmopolitan model for understanding American pastoral. After a short review of some of the more important previous studies, I shall try to sketch such a model. 1. A Retrospect of Pastoral Scholarship Lawrence first popularized the image of American writing as a deviant pursuit by a psychohistorical explanation of the American (male) writer as an escapee from civilization (i.e., Europe). Although Lawrence himself often relished the literary results, like Cooper's lyrical nature descriptions and the thrill of the chase in Moby-Dick, his critical judgment was that nature-quest narratives represented an immature stage of cultural development. In the work of Leslie Fiedler, this diagnosis was both elaborated and transposed. Elaborated, in the sense that Fiedler exposed more intricately than Lawrence how the wilderness in American writing serves as a liminal site for male self-fulfillment in recoil from adult responsibility associated with female-dominated culture in the settlements. Transposed, in that Fiedler's contrast between these two domains clearly makes the former seem even more resonant and inviting than it did for Lawrence. Fiedler thus can justly be seen as the most im portant architect, albeit not the originator, of the hypothesisthat the mainstream tradition in American narrative is romance rather than novel.2 Meanwhile, American Studies scholarship had been exploring in a sociohistorical rather than psychohistorical fashion the impact of Jeffersonianism upon the American literary imagination. The landmark works were Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land (1950) and, in particular, Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America ( 1964). Marx elegantly demonstrated how the European settler's dream of America as arcadia achieved its early national culmination in the agrarian vision of Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, ironically on the eve of industrial revolution, and how major American writers from the Transcendentalists through Fitzgerald dramatized as a tragic losing struggle the conflict between that ideal and the emergent technocracy sponsored by middle America. The result of these and other achievements of the 1950s and 1960s was to reaffirm the concept of nature as one of the preeminently formative influences in traditional, if not contemporary, American writing, an influence seen on balance as a positive cultural value notwithstanding the pathological aspects descried by Lawrence and Fiedler. Those writers judged to have written most powerfully and searchingly about the pastoral experience assumed, indeed, the status of social prophets: critics of corruption in the name of a purer American vision of a society founded on the order of nature. During the past decade, this reading of American pastoralism as social conscience has been strongly challenged, as the same body of writing has been reread as a form of hegemony rather than as a serious attempt at social redirection. Nina Baym and Annette Kolodny have shown that to identify the wilderness quest narrative from Cooper to Melville to Twain as the core of the American novelistic tradition marginalizes women's fic- tion and women's history, and that the traditional analysis of nonfictional narratives of frontier experience maintains the male perspective to the occlusion of the female. Kolodny demonstrates that nineteenth-century women who came to the frontier dreamed their own version of the male arcadian dream--"the mid-nineteenth-century American Adam and Eve, turning wilderness or prairie into a communal garden of domesticity" (The Land Before Her 226)--but that the actual hardships wom- en faced drove many of them to see frontier experience more in terrns of captivity narrative. Their arcadian dream, in any case, was not of a natural paradise but of nature civilized; it remained nostalgic fantasy until that social transformation was well under way.3 In this respect, their values seem much closer than those of the classic literary works treated by Fiedler and Marx to the all-male spectrum which Marx saw as representing the consensual American attitude toward techno-social devel- opment: an embracement of that process, notwithstanding reservations, using arcadian imagery for romantic and polemical heightening. With regard to the select group of literary pastoralists whom Marx saw as disaffected by that process, Kenneth Lynn and Bernard Rosenthal have argued that they too should be seen more as mainstream than as dissident voices, more receptive than Marx thought to the romance of national development. Finally, Myra Jehlen has diagnosed the American idealization of nature itself as a hegemonic formation, drawing a direct link between Emerson's vision of the promise of the individual's mystical relation to nature and the middle-class myth of social contract as a compact of freeholders in a land of plenty.4 Hence the image of American pastoral as social conscience has come increasingly to look like an archaic exclusionary construct. Not that the revisionist challenges I have summarized add up to a united front. Neither the feminist critique nor the critique of male pastoral imagination as social criticism is internally monolithic, and they part company from each other at some points; for instance, they differ between and among them- selves as to how far to press the distinction between major male writers and male writers generally. But the various revisionisms do add up to a diagnosis that the pastoralism of the American authors traditionally regarded as major ought to be looked at as conservative and hegemonic, rather than as a form of dissent from an urbanizing social mainstream; and this in itself is extremely significant in at least two ways that transcend the specific point at issue. First, it bespeaks a shift from the hermeneutics of empathy that by and large marks older-style new critical and myth-symbol Americanist scholarship to a hermeneutics of skepticism that appraises texts more in terms of what their ideological formations exclude (e.g. female and minority testimony) or suppress (e.g. the dependence of nature discourse on the apparatus of institutional civilization). Second, and closely related, the newer scholarship stresses more than the older scholarship did nature's function in pastoral as an ideological theater for acting out desires that have very little to do with any bonding to nature as such and that subtly or not so subtly valorize its unrepresented opposite (complex society) as the direction in which the pastoralist's dreams really tend (Lynn, Rosenthal), as the provider of necessary legal protection and communal support (Kolodny), as the institutional grid in terms of which the "natural" is seen (Jehlen). How the older pastoral scholarship should have led to these versions that diverge from it can be seen through a glimpse at Marx's justly influential The Machine in the Garden. Marx stresses as American pastoral's most distinctive trait, relative to the European version, the identification of America, from the Renaissance onward, as a place where arcadia could be literalized. In this he is certainly right, although the same could be said of European imaging of other colonies as well. But Marx's pursuit of his thesis creates an impossible test for the pastoral imagination's power to legitimate itself, when he represents America's actual social history as boiling down to a story of steady urban and industrial development. Thus, sympathetic though he would like to be to the cultural force of the pastoral imagination, Marx has no alternative but to see its history in America as a record of quixotism, belated awak- ening, and self-conflicted anguish in the face of inevitable progress. Indeed, the effect of his analysis is to stress above all the irony of the gap between pastoral as ideological construct and pastoral as social program. The latter was defeated even before being expressed in mature form by Jefferson; the former achieved a hermetic albeit limited-term apotheosis in classic American literature. Another way Marx invited a debunking interpretation of American pastoral was through the selectivity of his roster of pastoral ideologues. Although Marx saw American pastoral vision as antioligarchical in spirit, from the same bibliography it could also be argued that American pastoral continued, as in the Old World, to be the elegant recreation of the elite: southern planters and canonized authors. Here The Machine in the Garden played into the reading of classic American pastoral as a patriarchal reflex.5 I would raise two questions about the directional movement in American pastoral studies just described, without denying its corrective value. First, I would question the marginalization of literal rurality presumed by the ascription of the American pastoral imagination to the emergence or presence of cosmopolitan social institutions. To be sure, such reference is always implicit in pastoral art, insofar as it portrays a less complex state of existence than the writer's own. The problem comes when that insight is pushed to the extreme of de-realizing the represented green world into nothing more than projective fantasy or social allegory, a problem aggravated when, say in a descriptive poem by Frost (not to mention a descriptive nar ration by William Bartram), the mimetic level is earthier and a literal referent more specified than in, say, an eclogue by Virgilor Spenser. An instructive case from British literary studies of the problem I have in mind is the tendency in Romanticist criticism following Geoffrey Hartman for typing Wordsworthian nature as a via naturaliter negativa, a symbolic opposing other that it was the poet's business to sublate.6 This is a brilliantly penetrating yet also dehydrated analysis, reminiscent of earlier formalist readings of Walden representing it as merely a symbolic poem. Although neither of these projects seem to have influenced the other or the newer ideological criticism of American pastoral, all may be compared as results of a metropolitan-based enterprise of academic criticism for which literature about nature will likely seem much more germane to present-day concerns for its ideological rather than for its experiential or representational aspects. A culture which recognizes texts like Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and Pynchon's Gravity 's Rainbow as its avant-garde will have trouble convincing itself of the historical importance, let alone the continuing viability, of pastoral experience and of pastoral representation as such. Yet both continue to be important even today, owing partly to the inertia of tradition and partly to the physiographical fact of the openness of American space, not only as perceived by the first explorers but as it still remains today over much of the continent. Raymond Williams's observation about British rural literature applies with even greater force to the American pastoral tradition: neither its literature nor its criticism can avoid criticism if it fails to reckon with the existence of country as literal fact and cultural force.7 What follows, however, will concentrate rather on anotner concern, having to do with American pastoral's ideological dimension itself. I want to reexamine the question of the conservatism vs. the liberalism or radicalism of American pastoral. Using Thoreauvian nature writing as my principal test case, I shall begin by discussing mainstream male writers, but then proceed to relate their work to other versions of American pastoral, including women's writing and minority writing in my overview. Given recent scholarship, I shall start from the premise that Thoreauvian pastoral ought to be deconstructible as the artifact of a male-dominated status quo; and I shall agree that there is considerable justice to this charge. But I shall ultimately conclude that American pastoral's ideological valence is not so easily specified, that American pastoralism is best understood in terms of a set of ideological motifs too complex to permit monolithic categorization of most texts either as consensual or nexus for interrelating American literary practice in terms fruitful not only to American pastoral, but also to seeing it in its larger context: that of the new national literatures of the developing world.8 2. Pastoral Regression What is ideologically troublesome about classic American pastoral can be well illustrated by the conclusion of Thoreau's "Slavery in Massachusetts" (1854), a lecture delivered at the height of the controversy surrounding the case of the last escaped slave to be returned to slavery from that state. The final section constitutes what genre critic Andrew Ettin would call a "pastoral inset" within an otherwise directly political discourse (75-95). "Slavery in Massachusetts" is indeed one of Thoreau's most incendiary performances, and its last section is one of its most provocative parts, not because of any overt political radicalism, but rather because of its abrupt-seeming swerve from that. The late events in Boston, declares Thoreau, seem to have permanently shaken our peaceful lives: "Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle? The remembrance of my country spoils my walk. My thoughts are murder to the State, and involuntarily go plotting against her." "But," he adds, recovering himself, it chanced the other day that I scented a white water-lily, and a season I had waited for had arrived. It is the emblem of purity . . . extracted from the slime and muck of earth. I think I have plucked the first one that has opened for a mile. What confirmation of our hopes is in the fragrance of this flower! I shall not so soon despair of the world for it, notwithstanding slavery, and the cowardice and want of principle of Northern men. (Reform Papers 108-09) After working through this metaphor for another twenty lines or so, Thoreau ends his lecture on the same sardonic but hopeful note. Thoreau's denouement poses the same rhetorical question Shakespeare posed in his great 65th sonnet: Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea But sad mortality o'er-sways their power How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea Whose action is no stronger than a flower? The inset's scenario replicates this sonnet's answer: beauty is threatened by a harsh reality that somehow beauty may miraculously contain at last. Yet beauty's victory may be a Pyrrhic one, in Thoreau if not in Shakespeare. In an Elizabethan sonnet, graceful idealization is the generic norm. But in a political jeremiad, the retort pastoral is much more vulnerable. "The remembrance of my country spoils my walk"--what sort of plea is that? My righteous indignation seems to dissolve into a sulk. Now, there's no possibility that pitting the lily flower against the law was an isolated infelicitous mistake. Thoreau had done the same thing before at the end of"Resistance to Civil Government," which stresses that his first action upon release from jail, after completing his interrupted in-town errand, was to join "a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct" (84). And only a month after "Slavery in Massachusetts," Thoreau published another work where the same gesture occurs at least twice more: Walden, where he ends his critique of institutionalized reform at the end of "Economy" by displacing it with an image of freedom within nature; and later on, when he retells the story of his imprisonment and release in miniature. What is disturbing about these incidents is of course the seeming insouciance with which the persona turns away from social confrontation for the sake of immersion in a simplified green world. That was one of the points about Thoreau that especially irritated the Brahmin establishment and that bothered even his mentor, Emerson. The now infamous passage in Emerson's funeral address chiding Thoreau for being content to "be captain of a huckleberry party" when he might have been "engineering for all America" may have been prompted by that passage from "Resistance to Civil Government" (53). In the still common 1960s parlor game of praising Thoreau at Emerson's expense, this passage is one of the proof texts cited against the guru. Yet it is understandable, under the circumstances, that Emerson should have been moved to say it. Indeed, not just quasi-pastoralists, like Emerson, but also full-fledged ones, have been hard put to deal with the Peter Pan-like side of themselves even at the very point of indulgence. A telling moment of this sort comes in the Civil War-time diary of one of Thoreau's most important successors in the next generation of literary naturalists, John Burroughs. In a passage that makes an arresting complement to Thoreau's, Burroughs reports a springtime visit with a friend to the woods outside the city of Washington. It was a superb day without a cloud, with a soft wind-one of those strong, positive days--a he-day--impregnating the earth with the generative principle of sunshine. Just as we were about to enter one of those deep wooded nooks on Piney Branch, eager and expectant, we saw two soldiers just ahead of us. I felt vexed and as if they had no business there. Had I possessed the authority, I should have ordered them back, for I could not get over the feeling that they would drive away something I was after, some influence, some wood spirit or kindly genie that needed to be ap- proached as gently and devoutly as possible ... though habitually I respect and love these Bluecoats above all men. So we were obliged to lie down on the leaves and wait till the pollution of their presence had passed off, and the privacy of the woods restored--the coy nymphs all back again. (Journals 36-37) Unfortunately, Burroughs's troubles are compounded when he finds that the soldiers are out there for target practice. Here, then, is a very concrete example of one's walk being spoiled by the state. In relaying it, Burroughs discloses even more than Thoreau. Most conspicuously, Burroughs, being a dutiful Treasury Department bureaucrat and a pro-rather than antigovernment man, is acutely, embarrassedly aware of his duplicity: of how his pursuit of nature's charms pulls against his role as good citizen. So his passage openly confesses to retreat from the arena, as Thoreau's does not. On a less conscious level, the passage bears all the telltale marks of the discourse of natureas-elite-androcentric-preserve: the generative metaphor so re- dolent of Burroughs's friend Whitman (the "he-day--impregnating the earth"), the Fiedleresque ritual of male bonding in the woods, the obvious class difference between the meditative and military recreations of white collar and bluecoat. All of which can easily be read back into Thoreau the Harvard-educated and genteelly subsidized misogynist nature lover. That is certainly one legitimate image of him, though not the only one. The reading of the pastoral turn in Thoreau and Burroughs as reflex regression, silently protected by the privileges of class and gender, is strengthened by some salient episodes in the history of Thoreau's rise to canonization during the fifty years after his death. We find here a telltale schism. Thoreau's growing appeal to American readers was based much more on the domesticated image of him as literary naturalist than the image of him as economic/political radical. That too became crucial in time, but initially it was the foundation of his fame in Britain and Europe, not here. Not until Thoreau's American fame was secure can we find an American discussion, academic or popular, that thinks "Resistance to Civil Government" just as important as Walden: John Macy's The Spirit of American Literature ( 191 3), which by no coincidence also happens to be the first full-scale reading of the American literary tradition in terms of the now commonplace theme that the great American writers ought to be defined in terms of their antiestablishmentarianism.9 Until then, it seemed, to quote one of the two avid birdwatchers who coedited Thoreau's Journals (1906), that the American public had agreed to see Thoreau not as the preacher of nonconformity, but as the interpreter of nature: For those who have settled down to take things as they are, having knocked under and gone with the stream, in Thoreau's language, it is pleasanter to read of beds of waterlilies flashing open at sunrise [again that fateful water-lily image] or of a squirrel's pranks upon a bough, than of daily aspiration after an ideal excellence. Whatever the reason, Thoreau is to the many the man who lived out of doors, and wrote of outdoor things. (Torrey 100) The same went for the editor, Bradford Torrey, despite his insinuation to the contrary. Torrey did also relish Thoreau's cantankerousness, even to the point of taking up solitary cabinliving in later life, but he was drawn to Thoreau in the first instance as amateur botanist and nature lover. In this he joined most of Thoreau's other prominent American endorsers by choosing--whether sincerely or tactically or both--to put less emphasis on Thoreau's iconoclasm than on the more consensual image of Thoreau as the keen observer of nature's secrets, thereby bearing out in advance D. H. Lawrence's adage that "absolutely the safest thing to get your emotional reactions over is NATURE" (33). 3. Pastoral's Multiple Frames But is that always so? Can American masculinist pastoral be so easily typed? Let us look again at those two passages from Thoreau and Burroughs. There's another important difference between them than the one noted before, a difference that cuts the opposite way. The Burroughs passage does indeed present a scene of interrupted innocence thereby exposed as willful: the speaker shook the dust of civilization from his feet, but then civilization broke back in, revealing his capacity for doublethink. The Thoreau passage speaks directly from the start to the difficulty of shaking civilization off--the state invades even so private a sector as the state of nature. However much the lily flower is an agent of escape on the narrative level, rhetor- ically it is a bomb thrown at the state. In fact, given the lily's figural status as an indictment of the slime of the mundane, only in a limited sense does it usher us away from the original context and into a natural scene at all, although Thoreau tells us that he met with it on an actual walk. Whereas on the level of the action, the passage seems to support the notion of nature as a refuge from complexity, on the rhetorical level the flower is arguably not so much a mystification as a self-conscious device for exposing public consensus as repressive and arbitrary. Although Thoreau tells a story of having escaped from politics in life, by reinventing that experience as political allegory Thoreau puts it in an entirely different category from the naive escapism with which Burroughs's sortie began. Perhaps I have tried too hard to exonerate Thoreau here, but at least my rereading should have shown that the job of setting a pastoral moment in an appropriate ideological frame is trickier than it might seem, indeed that the same decoding process may not suffice for reading lyrical celebrations of nature's beauty even in cases as ostensibly similar as these two authors. Two more examples will help to develop this point, the first from a latter-day Thoreauvian, the second from Thoreau himself. Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac (1949) is a classic of modern environmental writing although not usually included in American literature syllabi. For those interested in artful prose about nature from the early natural historians to the present, Leopold occupies what might be called a kind of"enclave canon" status comparable to, say, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Jean Toomer in black American writing or Catharine Sedgwick and Charlotte Perkins Gilman in American women's writing--meaning that these are now pivotal figures within their respective discourses, yet still not figures that general surveycourse pedagogues and literary historians feel obliged to treat more than in passing, if that. Perhaps one day they will. In any event, Sand County Almanac clusters a series of essays in an arresting three-part structure: first, a seasonally arranged serles of prose poems and anecdotes set at Leopold's woodsy Wisconsin weekend retreat; second, topical essays inspired by different places elsewhere around the country; and third, a series of longer, more issue-oriented essays like "The Biotic Community" and "The Land Ethic" that press points of ecological doctrine. The aim is to create a symbiosis of art and polemic, such that environmental representation and lyricism exist for their own sake, yet also, in addition, ex post facto, as a means to make the reader more receptive to environmental advocacy. This approach makes apparent pictorialism seem increasingly less innocuous, roughly the obverse of Thoreau's approach in Walden, which opens with the doctrine of economy and later moves to something closer to description and narration. Leopold's tactic is first to lull the reader into an idyllic mood, then broach the more controversial critique and solution needed to preserve the experience of beauty and intimacy with nature that has previously been dramatized. Beauty thus does in a sense become a form of action, as Shakespeare's sonnet promises. Leopold's reversal of Thoreauvian procedure illuminates both writers in the way it intertwines art and activism. Leopold, like Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter in the field of photography, shows as his book moves through its various sections how the ostensibly self-contained and idealized artifact can serve the role of change agent through strategic reframing: in their case, as Sierra Club books, calendars, promotional pieces, and the like; in Leopold's case, as the experiential dimension of an emerging rhetorical appeal. We find a version of this also in an especlally luminous passage in Thoreau's "Where I Lived and What I Lived For," in which with charming mock-innocence the speaker ruminates on the farm he almost bought instead of building his cabin. The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were; its complete retirement, being about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field; its bounding on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, though that was nothing to me; the gray color and ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences, which put such an interval between me and the last occupant; the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, gnawed by rabbits, showing what kind of neigh- bors I should have; but above all, the recollection I had of it Irom my earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, through which I heard the house-dog bark. (Walden 83) This passage aims both to mesmerize with nostalgic charm and to affront readerly allegiances. It is lyricized to the point of narcissism (with the retreat to childhood fantasy at the end), but lyrical regression is not indulged so much as transposed into sly satire. I chose this farm, the passage says, deliberately for the wrong reasons. I liked how inconvenient it was from the market center. I liked its dilapidation. Its one practical advantage (protection from fogs) didn't matter. My notion of use value is the opposite of yours, which is based on exchange--so there. Pastoral hedonism becomes an indictment of the deadening pragmatism of agrarian economy. Altogether, Thoreau's strategy here resembles what the domestic fiction of his day did when it challenged readers to take seriously the Victorian idealization of women's moral sensibility. Without exactly repu- diating the status quo, agrarian rather than patriarchal in this case, Thoreau prods readers to consider how wide is the gap between scrabbling actuality and picturesque Jeffersonian ideal, according to which the ethos of farming empowers, not frustrates, the pursuit of culture.' Here and elsewhere in pastoral, beauty never functions only as instrument of critique; always at some level there is the chance that the text will tempt the reader to see all sugar and no pill and that even hard thrusts will get deflected into petty excursions. American texts are particularly susceptible to this because of the ease with which dissent can get co-opted as an aspect of consensus. As David Shi shows in his history of the dream of The Simple Life in America--a book bearing directly on pastoral art although not about aesthetics as such--the dream of a disencumbered, stripped down life has the potential to become a socially disruptive force, but also, given its historic sponsorship by hegemonic groups (like the Puritan fathers and the Founders) to become an ultrarespectable plank in American civil religion, and thus as much of a placebo as e pluribus unum. Conversely, however, the dream of the simple life and the pastoral aesthetic can assume radical form in proportion to the degree the establishment seems arrayed against them. A powerful motif in black American writing, emanating from slave narrative, is the denial to blacks of the bounty masters enjoy at their expense. Frederick Douglass's Narrative crystallizes this beautifully in the image of the master tarring his garden fence so that any fruit-snatching slave will be found out and whipped (33). Through this image, Douglass both undermines planta- tion-style pastoral (by contrasting the aesthetic level of the rich slaveholder~s pride in his well-kept manse with the very practical, urgent hunger that his tidy order imposes on his slaves) and makes that order a standard of appeal: surely the slave, too, is entitled to the same benefits that the planter--and the average well-intentioned Yankee reader of slave narratives-takes for granted. Richard Wright's "Big Boy Leaves Home" reinvents the classic American male-bonding-in-nature story in protest against the excision of blacks from the American arcadia. Ignoring a local farmer's proscription against blacks in his swimming hole, Big Boy and his friends enjoy a moment of innocence and release--interrupted by a spiral of violence: murder, lynching, and Big Boy's expulsion from the South.l2 Here too, white injustice is dramatized by the scene of exclusion from pastoral fulfillment. Native American writing at times shows even greater pastoral radicalism than this, when instead of presenting merely a scene of exclusion from a familiar arcadia, it redefines the terms of that arcadia in the process. The route, for instance, by which the protagonist in Leslie Silko's Ceremony ( 1977) is transformed from broken-down GI to tribal savior is through a retreat to nature that reorients him by putting him in touch with primal power, expressed through a symbolic geography grounded in an intricately culture-specific sense of place accessible to mainstream readers only through scholarly mediations, and resting on a communalistic land ethic alien to American assumptions about property rights.l3 Pastoral radicalism can also be seen in writers closer to the mainstream. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring ( 1964), a landmark expos‚ of the environmental impact of pesticides that also merits scrutiny as creative writing, starts out with an elegiac, Thornton Wilderesque fantasy of the death of a typical our town. It is a pastoral inset that trades very strongly on the old dream of the simple life that Shi describes, but hardly a mere nostalgia piece, since it was designed and was perceived to be a direct challenge to the chemical industry. To read it as regressive fantasy is to read it the same way the industry's defenders sought to make us read it. A similar claim can be made on behalf of Wendell Berry's revival of Jeffersonian agrarianism as a weapon against agribusiness and what Berry sees as the myopic cosmopolitanism of the average American today. Clearly that agrarian vision has a different political valence for Berry than for Jefferson. For Jefferson it would have seemed something like the status quo; for Berry it is deliberately anticonsensual, an insurgency of the disempowered.l4 This scattergram of examples should suffice to demonstrate that American pastoral representation cannot be linked to a single ideological position. Even at its ostensibly most culpable moment--the moment of willful retreat from social and political responsibility--it may actually be more strategized than mystified. As a final and more extended example of this, I want now to examine in more detail the particular case of woman's pastoral, given that the literary pursuit of nature has so generally been reckoned a male domain by traditional and revisionist critics alike. 4. Women on Nature The recent gains of feminist revisionism, in making the important points that American wilderness romance is a male tradition and that women's frontier experience sharply differed from men's, should not block us from seeing how American pastoral modes have also historically functioned as a vehicle of empowerment for women writers. While researching literary nature writing from Thoreau's day to ours, I was surprised to discover the degree of interdependence between the "major" male figures and the work and commentary of women writers less well known. Roughly half the nature essays contributed to the Atlantic Monthly during the late nineteenth century--when the nature essay became a recognized genre--were by female authors.'5 Among early appraisals of Thoreau, I found, to my surprise, given the predominant notion of Thoreau as appealing more to men than women, that commentaries by women were much more likely to be favorable than those by men. The first book, to my knowledge, published by an outsider to the Transcendentalist circle that celebrates nature as a refuge from hypercivilization, with explicit invocation of Thoreau as model and precursor, was written by a woman. The first Thoreau Society was founded by a group of young women in 1891; the first doctoral dissertation on Thoreau was written by a woman (1898).16 John Burroughs presents an even more conspicuous case of a literary naturalist with a large female following. Burroughs believed his most sympathetic readers were women; and his literary executrix, in her biography, stresses that appeal, explaining that turn-of-the-century women looked upon nature excursions as a means of liberation from the parlor.'7 This is borne out by the records of what seems to have been our oldest national botanical society, the Torrey Botanical Club (organized shortly after the Civil War). The club included women almost from the first who regularly contributed to its bulletin and sometimes organized themselves in local groups. Of the first, thirtytwo Syracuse women who joined forces to specialize in ferns, the Bulletin sagely noted: "This organization is admirable, and might profitably be imitated, where practicable" (330). It would therefore seem that patriarchy considered nature observation safe for women as well as for men but also that women were ready to use this consensus assertively as a base of operation. That makes good historical sense. To begin with, the prototypes for nineteenth-century representation of men and women's experience vis-…-vis nature are not so discrepant as is sometimes assumed. Writers of both sexes commonly picture the early childhood stage of both sexes as a state of natural piety: the first books of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetic bildungsroman Aurora Le¨gh resemble those of The Prelude in this respect; the child-seer of the nineteenth-century literary fountainhead of Anglo-American natural piety, Wordsworth's Immortality Ode, is virtually sexless, or androgynous; and in American writing influenced by its vision the child is more often female than male (Trensky 389-413). In adolescence, female protagonists become socialized away from nature, while the male continues to enjoy freer mobility and the option of questing and conquest within nature that is frequently and revealingly symbolized as female. Beginning well before Thoreau, male narratives of self-reliant cabin-dwelling isolators are common, whereas the commonest counterpart narrative of women's experience is the story of the "female hermit" who has not risen above society but fallen below it as a result of a disastrous love affair, usually extralegal, that has left her with a child, who usually dies. For cases like Joanna, the hermit of Shell-heap Island in Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs, nature is where you go if you have no place to go. Yet the personal bond to nature can also retain a more positive value for the mature woman protagonist, who as Annis Pratt and Barbara White put it, may "look back to moments of naturistic epiphany as touchstones in a quest for her lost selfhood" (17). This is precisely how Thoreau pictures himself when confessing that one of his earliest childhood memories was of being taken to Walden Pond, so that by his return to live there "I have at length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams.''l8 A similar reenactment process is evident in the work of the early female Thoreauvian mentioned above. Having been cosmopolitanizea after an Allegneny girlhood and a purgatorial stint of pioneering in Illinois, Elizabeth Wright returns with a group of friends for a holiday in the woods of northwestern Pennsylvania. Self-conscious though she is about the element of playacting ("like overgrown children"), she considers herself a good woodswoman and longs "for the cool pure liberty of their hidden depths" ( 1 1). To those of her companions overbaggaged with "civilized rubbish" ( 16), Wright quotes Thoreau on simplification, from which ensues a pungent running commentary on how nature gives the lie to civilized distinctions and in particular the niceties of conduct that hem tenderfoot women in: "I wondered then, more than ever, where people ever get the absurd notion of talking about 'refined' and 'vulgar,' or 'masculine' and 'feminine' employments. It sounds as ridiculous as the French way of calling knives masculine and forks feminine. My knives are no more masculine than my forks. Elvira's shooting was as feminine as her curls, and the Professor's cooking as manly as his beard" (51). The keyed-up jauntiness of the rhetoric here reassures the more conventional reader that despite appearances this is not going to be a revolutionary manifesto, only a temporary caInivalesque inversion of the proprieties. But it is an inversion: a sustained exercise in limitbumping whereby nature empowers mid-Victorian woman to level the social distinctions that gall her. Along the way, Wright also sets herself against other female appropriations of nature, such as the "satiny, perfumed" nature rhetoric in gift books or the "twaddle" of botany textbooks written for young women (29-30). In the work of the less outspoken of the nineteenth-century female naturists, such distinctions are more subtle, though not invisible. A case in point would be the significant literary season book that stands closest in time to Thoreau's Walden--though the fact is rarely noted: Susan Cooper's Rural Hours (1850, revised 1887). This is a calendar of natural and cultural history observations that shows a Dorothy Wordsworth-like keenness of minute perception combined with an expressive gift. It is enlightening to think for a moment of this text as a center of meditation on classic American nature writing instead of, say, the forest romances of her father James Fenimore. At first sight, Susan Cooper seems sedately entrenched within the sphere of decorous floral observation. Unlike her litigious father, she does not confront head-on the burning contemporary sociopolitical issues any more than Dorothy Wordsworth does, and in this and several other respects, Rural Hours exhibits the characteristic differences of style we have been taught to find in precontemporary women's narrative as opposed to men's: the figure of the experiencer is played down relative to the object described; the setting is more local, within the circuit of the writer's own daily excursions; and the mimetic level is less romanticized. Cooper's low-key matter-of-factness, however, paradoxically allows her to press beyond her father's conservatism in some areas. In place of his romantic savagism, which sees Indians as a doomed archaic race because the twain can never meet, she argues for an integrationism whereby "men of Indian blood may be numbered among the wise and the good, laboring in behalf of our common country" ( 123). Whereas her father has Natty Bumppo elegize over the "wasty ways" of the settlers in The Pioneers and The Prairie, she makes a specific recommendation about the conservation of trees, a decade before Thoreau did (153). Although in no sense ready to go so far as Thoreau or even her father in praising the wild above the good, Cooper does show a projective empathy for nature's rhythms as a corrective to the human-built: it is more than fortuitous that her narrative structure implicitly asserts the necessity for the human order to accommodate itself to the natural one as well as vice versa. As the previous examples suggest, Cooper's instinct, unlike Wright's, is to valorize the natural by incorporating it into a vision of society brought closer to nature, not to set society and individual free expression at odds. The latter is present only as a latency in Rural Hours, as for instance in Cooper's most detailed set piece of wildlife description, on the hummingbird, concerning which these two interesting points emerge: that its cute dainty diminutiveness is deceptive (hummingbirds are actually bold and confident), and that a major threat to its existence is its tendency to fly indoors and get trapped there. "We have repeatedly known them found dead in rooms little used," Cooper writes (81). Clearly, Rural Hours cannot be read as "The Yellow Wallpaper," but I would suggest that the prevailing sedateness of the female, season-book norm warrants our being brought up short by the implicit vehemence of such passages, and that consequently we should also see such a passage as embedding a more substantial challenge to status quo perceptions, both about hummingbirds and the power or vulnerability of diminutive creatures in general than we would ascribe to a passage of the same decibel level in Thoreau. To take another example, Thoreau risked nothing when he praised Walt Whitman, flanked as Thoreau was by sympathetic Transcendental brethren; but for a female Atlantic contributor, Edith Thomas, to begin a mid-1880s nature essay on "Grass" with an epigraph from Whitman, a few years after Leaves of Grass was banned in Boston, was a courageous act of self-assertion, chaste though the ensuing discourse was by comparison (Thomas 73). This undertone surfaces in Mary Austin's turn-of-the-century books and stories about the California desert, starting with Land of Little Rain (1903). Unlike Thoreau, Austin rarely parades the "I," and, in keeping with the predominant tradition in women's rural writing, she ends Little Rain with a vision of community: an idyllic Chicano village. But the narrative, typically for Austin, conspicuously deploys a prickly, authoritative, aggressive persona. She disorients, for instance, by refusing to draw a clear map of her territory for the tenderfoot and by often insisting on using the Indian place name rather than the one on the map; this becomes part of a strategy, despite disclaimers of ignorance on various points, of stressing insider's nature knowledge (as well as culture knowledge, Indian and Chicano) and thereby pulling the whole territory away from prior Anglo claims to it--both legal and interpretative--into a domain of which she alone is the interpreter. One small sign of her imaginative conquest is a fondness for peremptory declaratives: "This is the nature of that country," "Mesa trails were meant to be traveled on horseback," etc.'9 In the process, Austin is careful to discredit masculine romance about the west … la Bret Harte, sketching her version of a remote frontier town in an anthropological, realist retort to "The Luck of Roaring Camp." Ultimately, the Austin persona beats Harte's narrator in realism, in toughness, and in bonding to the environment. To align Wright, Cooper, and especially Austin with Thoreau is to form a picture of"men's" and "women's" representation of wildness blending into each other to the point that distinctions begin to seem very porous. Walden executes the antisocial, individualistic flight from the settlements featured in masculine wilderness romance, but the break is not total, the woods are not too dark and deep, the experience becomes do- mesticated as the lifestyle is expatiated and the protagonist's lococentrism is stressed, and the persona remains always in dialogue with--and always to that extent a member of--the community whose norms he rejects. (All this may help account for the positive reaction toward Thoreau I have found among his early female readers.)20 Little Rain tells no such story of the writer's repudiation of community and indeed barely allows the persona to exist as an independent character; but the persona speaks from the position of being in the wilderness, and in personal confrontation with the complacencies of settlement culture, alienated from these both in space and in soul. Altogether, it would seem that premodern women's nature writing was, like the Thoreauvian counterpart, capable of serving in various degrees as a vehicle for questioning social consensus and the claims of individual self-realization against social constraint, and that the pressure of that dissent, owing to differential gender expectations, ought to be reckoned as greater than at first it seems. 5. Conclusions We have seen that the ideological valence of pastoral writing cannot be determined without putting the text in a contextual frame. As Houston Baker has said about how ostensibly similar motifs are handled in white and black American writing, ostensibly similar terms bear quite different iconic significances depending on context.21 The retreat to nature can be a form of willed amnesia, as in the Burroughs passage; but it means some- thing different when held up self-consciously, as in Thoreau, to appeal to an alternative set of values over and against the baleful dominant one. It means something still different, when that alternative framework is employed, as in Elizabeth Wright, for whom that framework is not as socially predictable and acceptable a vocabulary as it was for a literary man. And it means something different from that when the alternative vocabulary is itself less conventionalized than it is in either Thoreau or Wright, both of whom are, after all, appealing to notions of the romantic and the picturesque that had strong imaginative currency for middlebrow readers of the age, when found in their "proper" setting, e.g. Wordsworthian poetry or, for that matter, a Shakespearean sonnet. In effect, at the end of "Slavery in Massachusetts" Thoreau produces the "unacceptable" by imposing a very stereotypical image from another context. By contrast to this should be distinguished Wendell Berry's appeal to an agrarian ideal of a nuts-and-bolts literalism that was nor- mative in nineteenth-century thought but that today is far more alien to the average book reader than Thoreau's idiom. And from this might be distinguished still more revolutionary pastoralisms that never did have mainstream status to begin with, like the lesbian-ecofeminist vision of Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978). But an "ideological grammar" of American pastoral cannot stop at trying to make distinctions among different categories of work.22 It must also recognize the crosscurrents that keep any one example from seeming pure: on the one hand, the centripetal pull of consensualism that always more or less threatens to draw the radical text over into the sleepy safe domain of nature's nationism, the ho-hum pieties of American civil religion; and, on the other, the centrifugal impulse always latent, though usually contained within modest limits, for pastoral to form itself in opposition to social institutions of whatever sort. This duality was built into American pastoral thinking from the start, for it was conceived as a dream both hostile to the standing order of civilization (decadent Europe, later hypercivilizing America) yet at the same time a model for the civilization in the process of being built. So American pastoral was always both counterinstitutional and institutionally sponsored. This is a troublesome dichotomy. It is very hard to keep one's eye steady on a target moving in two directions at once; but if, as Fitzgerald said, the test of a first-rate intelligence is to hold contradictory ideas in the mind and still maintain the ability to function, the professors of America ought to be equal to the task. But how pressing an issue will it continue to be? Given our present degree of industrialization, isn't pastoral likely to become increasingly obsolete as a literary and cultural force? Probably not, for two reasons. One is that environmental holocaust now seems not only the consequence of holocaust via bomb but at least as imminent a peril in its own right. Owing to this and other social disaffections, as Leo Marx has recently pointed out, we have been faced, since the 1960s, with the novel phenomenon of a "left-leaning ideology not based on a progressive world view" ("Pastoralism" 66) that challenges us to reexamine our most obstinate myth of historical development. Hitherto, contemporary intellectuals have been accustomed to thinking of rusticity rather as they think of God: surely both are myths that effectively died out in the nineteenth century. Urbanization, even more tenaciously than secularization, is one of those larger myths in whose existence intellectuals continue to believe even after they disavow the doctrine of history's linear movement. The "age of ecology," as environmental historian Donald Worster labels the present era, may not lead to more than a marginal change in social attitudes or public policy toward further technological buildup; but even if it doesn't, indeed perhaps especially if it doesn't, pastoralism is sure to remain a luminous ideal and to take on increasingly radical forms for some time to come. One mark of this is the contemporary tradition of environmental apocalypse literature: Carson's Silent Spring, John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth. The forgettable, ephemeral quality of most of this writing does not rule out the possibility of a long-range literary impact.23 Second, and of more specifically literary concern, pastoral ideologY is a powerful lens through which to see our literary culture, not only within but also across cultural boundaries. American pastoralism is ultimately not so much a mark of American exceptionalism as one means by which we may overcome the parochialism of American literary studies and understand American literary history as part of its larger reference group of postcolonial literatures in European languages. In closing, I should like briefly to develop this theme. Historically, pastoralism afforded one of the constituent images of America and other "new found lands" as colonies and subsequently as new nations. It has expressed the colonizer's dream and the colonist's sense of emerging reality. It has expressed nationalism's pride in the new world's cultural difference and its recoil against imperial dominance. It has been turned to more ironic uses in expressing the provincial's sense of being outposted from cultural centers abroad, the sense of betrayal of national ideals by industrialization and political corruption, and--in versions of the theme of the women's narratives of the frontier studied by Kolodny--the sense of betrayal by pastoral fantasy itself: in the outback and the arctic, for instance. In the English-speaking world, Nigeria, Australia, Canada, and South Africa all have particularly distinctive and distinguished traditions of pastoral discourse in which these motifs figure variously and in ways that Americanists should find mutually illuminating as a basis for comparative study. This is by no means to say that all the isotopes of (post)colonial pastoralism are the same; for openers, one would want to make a basic distinction between "settlers' " pastoral and "indigenes' " pastoral, the latter originally having imaginative access to a precolonial land-based tradition destabilized by colonialism, the former originally seeing land and its indigenes as an undifferentiated terra incognita. However these and other differences are ramified, it remains that America's apparent exceptionalism, as a site where the pastoral imagination might not simply engage in ludic utopianism or satire but might model social reality, proves rather to be the first of a series of mutually illuminating cases extending from the seventeenth century to the present. For present purposes, the main point I would stress about the value of placing American pastoral in postcolonial context is that it corroborates and further illuminates American pastoral's ideological multivalence. The one comparative example novel to be acclaimed a national and indeed world classic: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. This novel, which traces the precolonial phase of a turn-of-the-century Ibo village through the early stages of British conquest, is both a radical and a conservative document. In its radical aspect it counters the discourse of colonialism and its continuing dominance in standard literary history (Heart of Darkness being Achebe's special bete blanche) by representing the kind of primitive society to which Conrad gave no voice. The novel is in this sense an antiimperial text on two levels: as an insurrectionary act on the part of its author, and as the portrayal of a premodern civilization equivalent in complexity to that of the colonizer: complex not just in the sense of being culturally rich but in the sense of containing internal contradictions and competing interests that make it both vulnerable to decay and capable of self-transformation by turning the instruments of colonization to its own account. In short, Achebe's Umuofia is neither the Eden of the romantic colonizer nor a negritudinist idyll. Yet the novel's plot is nonetheless susceptible of being read as a loss of innocence narrative, as an elegy for a vanished age of archaic, albeit barbarian, grandeur that carried with it a degree of traditionary richness and cultural holism no longer available to the modern age. In its aspect as radical pastoral, the novel rewrites the received version of history codified in Euro-American canonical literature and contributes to critical analysis of the historical class and role structures of its own society during its premodern phase. In its aspect as conservative pastoral, the book taps into the familiar Western plot paradigms of historical novel (the heroic feudal or tribal age displaced by the pragmatic bourgeois era) and heroic tragedy (the rise and fall of the great but flawed warrior, Okonkwo). These elements of stylistic and visionary conservatism have undoubtedly helped speed the novel's rise to canonization.24 In American literature, this particular kind of doubleness is visible especially in minority writing. For example, Leslie Silko's Ceremony, mentioned earlier, uses the motif of the protagonist's return to nature both in a radical way (it purges Tayo of the mental illness that has been caused by the abuses emanating from white society and thereby helps restore spiritual, social, and economic vigor to the pueblo) and also in an accommodationist way: it takes him through an ennobling questand-return process that can be experienced as universal myth, especially by the many mainstream readers who respond to nature as a spiritual solace--above all when personified, as here, by a beautiful and mysterious young woman. But a similar dualitY can also be seen in classic writers like Thoreau. The move to Walden is both a divisive critique of mainstream values like the Protestant work ethic and a ritual reenactment of the pioneer experience, New England style, with which the average reader can vicariously identify.25 It is a mistake to resolve either image into the other. In each of the three texts Just noted, pastoral becomes a means of expressing alienation, yet also, on another level, a means by which alienation is mediated. It invites normalization to the extent that it permits the reader to experience it as an archetypal story of lost innocence or green world immersion. It resists co-optation and becomes an oppositional act to the extent that it pursues an indictment of social pathology and oppression. Which dimension gets stressed depends partly on who is reading, partly--as we saw earlier--on the different locations of the individual texts along the ideological spectrum from radical to recessive.26 In any case, these two faces are the Tityrus and Meliboeus of postcolonial pastoral: the happy, coopted shepherd and the dispossessed, alienated shepherd of Virgil's first Eclogue, where the preexisting convention of pastoral debate was first self-consciously ideologized. Today, the specific terms have altered, but the debate continues. NOTES The research and writing of this paper were assisted by the generous support of the Guggenheim Foundation and Oberlin College. Earlier versions were given as lectures at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; I am grateful for those oppor- tunities and for the comments I received. For particular suggestions that helped me at different points in this essay, I want to thank Houston Baker Donna Gerstenberger, Philip Gura, Biodun Jeyifo, and Sandra Zagarell-- stressing that they are in no way to be held responsible for my sins of critical myopla. 1. "Ideology" in this paper's usage refers to the literary text or mode's implicit theory of the social-political system, and in particular to the text or mode's position of dissent from or consent to the prevailing system. "Pastoral" is used in an extended sense, familiar to Americanists, to refer not to the specific set of obsolescent conventions of the eclogue tradition, but to all literature--poetry or prose, fiction or nonfiction--that celebrates the ethos of nature/rurality over against the ethos of the town or city. This domain includes for present purposes all degrees of rusticity from farm to wilderness. ul~ rlt;ul~ n~u propounaea me romance nypothesls; and the way for Chase had been suggested by Lionel Trilling's "Reality in America." 3. See Baym; Kolodny, The Lay of the Land; and Kolodny, The Land Before Her, especially books 2-3 of the latter. 4. See Lynn; Rose¤thal; Jehlen. I have found Jehlen's critique particularly searching and suggestive. Another significant revisionary project is Richard Slotkin's thesis that the frontier experience afforded a catharsis for the violent impulses of American civilization: see his Regenerat¨on through Violence and The Fatal Environment. It should be emphasized also that important scholarship pursuing the older view of America's spokespersons for nature as social critics continues to appear. See especially the three editions of Nash's Wilderness, and Lee Clark Mitchell's Witness to a VanishingAmerica, both of which demonstrate that in art, politics, and social theory gentry-class nostalgia for America's vanishing wilderness has had a demonstrable reformist impact. Nash in particular valuably supplements Marx's presentation of American social history in The Machine in the Garden, which, as noted below, implicitly presumes that the battle against rampant industrialism was decided in the early nineteenth century. Their characterization of the social and intellectual relationships between the spokespersons for wilderness and the American establishment seems to me, however, in keeping with Marx's model of pastoral ideology; and so I have used Marx as my central example in this brief introduction. 5. For an important epilogue to Machine, indicating that he would have framed his argument differently if he were writing today, see Marx's "Pas- toralism in America." In the same collection with this article is a retrospect by Smith on his Virgin Land (21-35)  cknowledging the desirability of being more critical of the hegemonic character of westward expansionism. But Marx argues, and I believe rightly so, that American social history of the past two decades strengthens the case for seeing pastoralism as having a radical aspect whose vitality still continues. I shall return to his essay toward the end of this PaPer. 6. See Hartman 31-69 for his seminal interpretation; the culmination of the formalist tradition in Walden criticism is Anderson. The shortcoming I have diagnosed is exemplified by Hartman's summation: "Nature and Poetry matter only as they quicken regeneration" (68). The "only" too relentlessly dematerializes and thereby oversimplifies the poet-nature re- lationship. 7. See Williams, especially the final chapter. 8. In this respect, American literary studies would do well to follow scholarship on European pastoral, which has shown itself capable of making finer ideological discriminations than we. See in particular Patterson, which examines the history of the repossession of Virgil's Eclogues--the greatest pretext of Western pastoral--through imitations and commentaries from the early middle ages to the near-present. Patterson shows that pastoral's ideological valence has oscillated astonishingly over these two millennia, according to the writer's historical position: some using it as an instrument Of Oppositional critique, others as a means of dramatizing competing positionS, still others desiring to purge pastoral of political reference and completely aestheticize it--to re-Theocritize it, as it were. Patterson shows both the historical logic of these dissonant outcomes and their limits of plausibilitY by stressing, following Alpers, that they are built upon the interplay of positions represented in Eclogue 1 by the unhappy shepherd Meliboeus, dispossessed by Augustus, and the happy shepherd Tityrus, exempted by Augustus's special favor. 9. Among the various studies of Thoreau's reputation, see especially Timpe, and Hendrick and Oehlschlaeger 12-24. 10. Thoreau's relation to the farmers of Concord is more complex than can be fully explored here. See especially the two Gross articles. l l. Shi's conclusion is that "though a failure as a societal ethic, simplicity has nevertheless exercised a powerful influence on the complex patterns of American culture," serving as "the nation's conscience" in such a way as to entitle us to expect it "will persist both as an enduring myth and as an actual way of living" (278-79). These formulations appropriately straddle the issue of its orthodoxy, typing the simple life as both consensual and deviant. 12. Richard Wright 18-49. The point about Afro-American pastoral could be ramified further by taking into account a case like Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, whose protagonist's adventures begin with rebellion against her confinement in the farmer's wife role to which her grandmother consigns her for the sake of protection and security. Janie's subsequent move into an increasingly unsocialized and increasingly natural environment oddly--and I would suppose fortuitously--echoes the social secessions depicted by Cooper and Thoreau and Twain. At any rate, Hur- ston's protagonist exposes the restrictiveness of the pastoral life as institutionalized by black males who have been able to overcome the barriers against which Douglass and Wright rage, thereby implying that the radicalism in their narratives is ultimately less a protest against mainstream life rhythms than a protest against being excluded from those. 13. For insight into Silko's cultural matrix, I am especially indebted to the research of my colleague Edith Swan, who has written several important papers on Silko. See esp. "Laguna Symbolic Geography in Silko's Ceremony. 14. See especially Berry. 15. The more important female contributors of such work include Sarah Orne Jewett, Celia Thaxter, Edith Thomas, Olive Thorne Miller, and Sophia Kirk. 16. For bibliographical guidance to late nineteenth-century Thoreau crit- lcism, see Borst. The early Thoreauvian book is Elizabeth Wright's, dis- cussed in more detail below. For the early society see Harding. The early dissertation~ since lost, was by Ella A. Knapp; see Borst 133-34. 1/. D~l-l-U~ urrougns was unaou~te~ly mIluenced in part by the very enthusiastic receptions he received at Vassar and Smith. 18. Walden 156. From my previous discussion of Thoreau's Hollowell farm passage, I hope it is clear that neither this passage nor the formation described by Pratt and White should be thought of as innocently "regresslve. 19. Austin 9,83. For an excellent appraisal and a bibliography of criticism of this much neglected author, see Pryse's introduction. 20. See for example the most ambitious early appraisal of Thoreau by a woman writer, Marble, which strongly emphasizes Thoreau's normality as son, brother, and Concord resident and argues that his idiosyncrasies have been much overstated. 21. Baker, e.g. 11-12, 24, 66-67 (on railroads, jeremiads, and "America" as si~n). 22. I borrow the phrase from Jehlen 21. 23. Quotation from Worster 340 49. For a recent literary study that makes a thoughtful case for the philosophical convergence of contemporary poetry and environmental consciousness~ see Elder. 24. For Achebe's indictment of Conrad, see "An Image of Africa"; for a discerning reappraisal of Heart of Darkness in light of the ensuing critical controversy, see Brantlinger. In characterizing Things Fall Apart as a pastoral tragedy, I would certainly differentiate his Umuofia from, say, the negritudinist Eden in Camara Laye's L 'Enfant Noir (1954), a pastoral work that stands in relation to Achebe's as the Burroughs passage discussed earlier does to the conclusion to Thoreau's "Slavery in Massachusetts." Achebe is careful, as Raymond Williams notes, to dramatize "the internal tensions of the society, so that we can understand the modes of penetration which would in any case, with its process of expansion, have come" (286). My point is that there are strains of both critical realism and cultural nationalism in the novel. For a critical discussion of the novel that deploys this contrast but argues that the former triumphs over the latter, see Ngara 110-12. 25. For the suggestion that Walden replicates the settlement of Concord, see Cavell ~-1() 26. This hasty formulation cannot do justice to the fine distinctions among the three texts just discussed. Walden spells out a serious antiestablishment program in most explicit detail; Ceremony dramatizes the antithesis between white and Laguna realms most extensively and bitterly while acknowledging at a more philosophical level (through Tayo's mentor Betonie) the need for Indian culture selectively to appropriate white knowledge rather than just repudiate it; Things Fall Apart dramatizes an instance of even starker opposition between cultures, but also goes much further than Silko with respect to acknowledging how the colonizer's ideology provides in some ways an instrument for critiquing the archaic Ibo world as well as vice versa: e.g. the latter's rigid treatment of outcasts, "unmanly" behavior, and the like. In Achebe, that is, the greater degree of separation between the pastoral and the modern realms does not incite a more thoroughgoing valorization of pastoralism as a viable social alternative. Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa." 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