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Book Review
| The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland. By William Barillas. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006. xviii + 258 pp. Notes, bibliography and index. Cloth $39.95
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| My mother lived most of her adult life in northern Wisconsin. Despite the pain of its cold winters, she never wavered in her belief that it was God's country. I'm sure people of every region appreciate the charms and beauties of their countryside, but the people of the upper-Midwest, perhaps because of the harsh winters, seem especially fond of their landscape. |
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William Barillas has looked at the writers of the region—from Willa Cather to Jim Harrison—to explore the relationship between midwestern pastoral writers and the lands of the north central part of the nation. Barillas begins by offering a vision of what is the Midwest. He sees in the Northwest Land Ordinance Jefferson's attempt to formalize his republican ideal of small landholding, independent farmers. This ideal incorporated both a romantic ideal of man tied to the land and the utilitarian belief in the uses of nature's resources for progress. Those who traveled west to settle confronted both an idealized landscape surveyed and measured into regular sections and devoid of people and a reality on the ground of Native Americans contesting for land and a topography whose variability denied the abstractions of the survey grid. They came in search of land, resources and opportunity that demanded their ingenuity and resourcefulness to succeed. Once there many also came to appreciate the land, not as an ideal abstraction but as a place of beauty and variability. |
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Barillas finds the tension between the romantic ideal and utilitarian progress among the midwestern pastoral writers. This seems to me an interesting means of investigating midwestern regional writers. As an environmental historian I look to pastoral writers for insights into how cultures or individuals see and understand their surroundings and how that may have changed over time. I look for what values toward the natural world are reflected in the texts. |
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Barillas touches on these elements especially in his chapters on Leopold and Harrison, and in his concluding chapter, and when he does I find the work most interesting. Yet much of the time, especially his work on the poets where Barillas is addressing the concerns of those in the field of literature, the relationship between his authors and traditions of poetry and literature, their friendships and personal psychology are what occupy his attention. The detailed investigation of the person and culture's relationship to the physical world plays a minor role when the concern is the exploration of symbols and language. |
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In the last chapter Barillas comes back to questions of land, place, and the tension between romanticism and utilitarianism among midwestern writers. Here as in the introduction Barillas touches on concerns that rouse the interest of the environmental historian. I think he has something to say on midwesterners who write within the Pastoral tradition and their understanding of this tension, in, for example his discussion of Jane Smiley's, A Thousand Acres (Knopf, 1991). But I am at a loss to why he singled out the writers he did. Like my mother, most of these writers studied in this work have a special connection to the Midwest, but I would have greater appreciated this work if more attention were devoted to the relationship of the writers and the land, rather than the relationship of the writers to their discipline and artistic traditions. |
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John T. Cumbler is professor of history at the University of Louisville and the author of Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State, New England 1790–1930 (Oxford, 2004). |
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