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Book Review
| Working in the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture. By William Conlogue. Studies in Rural Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. ix + 230 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $39.95, paper $18.95.
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| Many who work in environmental and agrarian history got their first taste of a rural imaginary when reading The Grapes of Wrath (1939) in high school. This bleak story of the Joad family, dispossessed migrant laborers trying to make their way in a bitter agricultural landscape, captured the dark underside of an emerging industrial agricultural system. Yet how many realized the historical reality behind the book—for example, the dispute between Steinbeck and Ruth Comfort Mitchell, whose Of Human Kindness (1940) was a vigorous defense of the industrial farming system that, she felt, Steinbeck had characterized unfairly? This public disagreement is but one of the historical referents William Conlogue employs in demonstrating the reciprocal relationship between farm crises and farm novels. |
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Conlogue is interested in moving the discussion of environmental and rural literature away from the pastoral, which he feels is "concerned too much with the contemplation of nature rather than with its transformation, with leisure rather than work, with the past rather than the present and future, with idyllic stasis rather than change" (p. 10). He argues that many writers are taking a position as both critics and supporters of industrial agriculture, using their stories to play out the dangers and opportunities offered by the new agriculture. Further, Conlogue wants to emphasize the role of those who work in nature, primarily farmers and other rural people, and to explore how working in nature has been changed by technology and ideology. |
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The book is divided into five chapters, three of which explore a theme running through the literature. Following a brief introduction to late nineteenth century industrial agriculture, Conlogue considers the role of women in the new agriculture as portrayed in Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (Houghton Mifflin, 1913) and Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground (Doubleday, 1925). He uses Steinbeck and Mitchell to examine class in the following chapter, and, in the most original section, he explores racism and agriculture through Ernest Gaines's A Gathering of Old Men (Knopf, 1983) and the "Actos" created by Teatro Campesino during the 1960s California farm worker strikes. The last comparison, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (Knopf, 1991) and Wendell Berry's "The Farm," circles back to the earlier discussion of the two different agricultural paradigms—here called conventional and alternative—using these books to explore both the concrete and the abstract dimensions of contemporary rural life. Conlogue ends the book with a short meditation on his own relation to the land. |
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This is a thought-provoking book, although not entirely without flaws. Conlogue relies upon a rather limited base of historical treatments of rural change, which may restrict his analysis somewhat. And as the book develops, he sometimes falls preys to a too-close-for-comfort collapsing of the novels and the historical circumstances they try to represent. Nonetheless, Conlogue does a nice job of bringing out the connections between fact and fiction, and provides us with an excellent guide for teaching "the rural imaginary." |
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Reviewed by Deborah Fitzgerald, professor of the history of technology at MIT and author of Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (Yale, 2003). |
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