Consideration of Thomas Jefferson alongside literature of the nineteenth century is not a new idea. Scholars such as Leo Marx and William R. Taylor did just that decades ago, and more contemporary scholars will occasionally still draw the two together. It is not my intention here to tread that familiar ground. Nor is it to explain again that pastoral could be manipulated to suit political ends, or that Southern literature was deployed as a weapon by slavery’s apologists. Rather, the purpose of this book is to examine the malleability of pastoral in writings of the American South from the conclusion of the Revolutionary War until the later nineteenth century, in order to track and evaluate its shifting political values alongside those of the great Southern political icon. Put another way, the goal here is a consideration not of what happens, since this has been covered, but how it happens. As the region reacted initially to increasing hostility with the North, through the period of Civil War, through Reconstruction and the ‘New South’, ideas of the region and its pastoral underpinnings necessarily must accommodate the changing political situation. Having such a sturdy and well-researched landmark as the Jefferson image gives us a strong reference point from which to analyse the specific pressures that are placed on the Southern pastoral in the nineteenth century, and how thought processes and storytelling strategies themselves are forced to adapt to changing political landscapes that alter not only the relative value of the Jefferson figure itself but the place of the pastoral in the American Democratic ideal. Also, although the values of the time are rather different to our own, and any study of politics in literature must accommodate that fact, it is not my intention to approach the texts in a prosecutorial manner. It is not the role of the critic to lay in hiding, waiting to leap out and catch the author in the act. Consequently, when I say that a writer invokes an element of pastoral to certain ends, it should be inferred that I suggest no nefarious misdoings: rather, that what each author believes contribute to strong characterisation and intriguing narrative incident can teach us specific things about the multiple ways in which the authors saw the changing world around them.
First though, since we will be forced to confront some critical terms that are themselves rather nebulous, it is important that we begin with a couple of definitions. As a starting point, it makes sense to take the mode that is perhaps the most generally associated with Southern narrative: romance. There are of course many different iterations of romance (and, indeed, Romance), and the version that the reader encounters here will likely be rather different from what they are used to if they are familiar with how it normally appears in the American literary canon. In one of the most important documents in the formation of the American canon, D.H. Lawrence argued that Nathaniel Hawthorne was a writer of romance, but that rather than composing ‘nice little tales’, he claimed that Hawthorne was a writer of fables with hellish undertones, and said that ‘you must look through the surface of American art, and see the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning. Otherwise it is all mere childishness.’1 This attitude would be crucial in deciding which nineteenth-century books would be valued in twentieth-century America, and can be seen in the importance assigned to the dark romance found in Northern writers such as Hawthorne and Herman Melville, but also in others such as Edgar Allan Poe. The dominant forms of romance in the South, meanwhile, developed from the school of Sir Walter Scott and did not find anything diabolical beneath the surface of American life. As. V.L. Parrington would say in Main Currents in American Thought (1927), ‘the Virginia romantic had no need to seek the picturesque in England and Spain, as Irving had done. He had only to pick and choose from the familiar stuff lying all around him, emphasizing the agreeable, overlooking the unpleasant, fashioning his figures and action to suit the ideal of a golden age of plantation society.’2
Though there will be instances in the coming pages in which there is a need to consider other romantic variations, in general here we will be thinking of romance in a specifically Southern context, perhaps best summarised by Harnett T. Kane’s suggestion that many have beheld in the region ‘a warming beauty, a fragrant panorama and a mood ranging from the gently amiable to the beguiling’.3 Unless otherwise signalled, this sentimental or idealised understanding of the antebellum South, its people, and cultural attitudes is what is meant by the term ‘romantic’. Given that the mode we are interested in here is pastoral, I think we might also draw on Fredric Jameson’s observations that ‘[r]omance now and again seems to offer the possibility of sensing other historical rhythms’, and that romance is a generically heterogeneous space free from the politically oppressive constraint of realism, since the Southern romantic fictions of the period do seem either to confuse time or at the very least to exist in a curious mixture of both highly specific and vague temporalities in order to exist outside of a Northern model.4
This brings us to the second critical term which we need to define, which is ‘pastoral’. Once we move beyond the initial stages of traditional pastoral poetry, actually pinning down a precise meaning of pastoral is a rather difficult task. As Paul Alpers has identified:
Due to this study being concerned with a period where the novel, rather than poetry, is the dominant literary form, this passage is of particular relevance. We need to focus on pastoral’s survivals in fiction and other prose. However, in practice it means we must move away from the clearest definition of pastoral available, thereby exposing us to some scholarly disagreements as to what characteristics actually mark pastoral. William Empson describes pastoral rather poetically as ‘putting the complex into the simple’, which is a suggestive phrase but does not go nearly far enough in defining the mode.6 However, getting critics who do proffer a more thorough definition to agree is difficult. Frank Kermode, for example, writes that ‘the tension between town and country seems to be productive of the special kind of literature we call Pastoral’, positioning pastoral as a retreat from the city that is somehow still in tension with urban experience.7 Alternatively, Roger Sales reminds us that all pastoral need not be situated in the country, and that ‘it is thus perfectly possible to have urban, and indeed suburban, versions of pastoral’.8 Critics also differ on the subject of the pastoral’s instrumentality or agency. Renato Poggioli writes that ‘the bucolic dream has no other reality than that of imagination and art’, while for Harry Levin, ‘Nostalgia for a happier day would be a sterile emotion, if it merely sighed for what was not; encouraged by the rotation of the seasons, it is transfigured into a hope for recurrence’.9 It quickly becomes clear, then, that critics even disagree on the extent to which writers in a pastoral mode conceive of their work as being connected to the real world. There is no one, simple pastoral; it appears in many guises, in places we might least expect it.Since the novel is the characteristic form of the epoch in which the literary system ceased to be expressed by clearly defined and related genres, it seems neither useful nor plausible to claim for the pastoral novel the literary motivation or generic coherence of older forms. Rather, a piece of fiction can be called pastoral when its author—for whatever reason, with whatever awareness, and concerned with whatever subject or theme—has recourse to usages which are characteristic of older pastorals and which in turn make a tale or novel pastoral in mode.5
Considering these factors, then, pastoral can be seen operating on a number of levels. The first of these is as an ideologically charged representation of a managed natural landscape, as opposed to a truly uncultivated, primitivist one. Terry Gifford has argued that ‘American Arcadias are usually set, not in a garden, but in a wilderness’, yet existing scholarship shows that this is not the case with Southern writing.10 Second, the pastoral of the American South will, following Raymond Williams’s observations on this literary mode, be positioned ‘between the pleasures of rural settlement and the threat of loss and eviction’.11 The threat of loss emerges as a consequence of the great social upheaval that was promised by, and finally a result of, the Civil War. Lastly, I shall be considering pastoral with particular regard to the work of Gifford, who has identified three ways in which a text can be called pastoral: the first relating to its parallels with the ancient literary form; the second covering content and ‘any literature that describes the country with an implicit or explicit contrast with the urban’; and finally, a third, derogatory sense in which pastoral is seen as an idealisation that obscures social and economic reality.12 These final two understandings of pastoral will be particularly important in this context. Lastly, one point that is of particular importance for Southern pastoral is that, temporally, pastoral mythology has two competing strains of thought. W.H. Auden suggests that ‘our dream pictures of the Happy Place where suffering and evil are unknown are of two kinds, the Edens and the New Jerusalems’.13 Over the course of the nineteenth century, the pastoral ideal in the Southern US necessarily mutated from being one of New Jerusalem to one more Edenic in nature. This book analyses how the consciousness of the American South begins to reflect Auden’s theory that ‘the psychological difference between the Utopian dreamer and the Arcadian dreamer is that the backward-looking Arcadian knows that his expulsion from Eden is an irrevocable fact and that his dream, therefore, is a wish-dream which cannot become real’.14 These competing temporalities become tied to the political values of Southern pastoral, particularly in the antebellum period.
Jefferson and the Politics of American Landscape
If we are to understand the politics that underlie Southern literature of the nineteenth century and the importance of the pastoral in this context, it is essential that we study Thomas Jefferson. However, it would be a mistake to simply begin at the time of the Revolution. The roots of Jefferson’s thought can be traced back through the ...