The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland by William Barillas: Book Reviews

The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland William Barillas. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006. It is a commonplace belief that the Midwest has always had a strong claim on our attention because of the notion that it is the most "American" part of the United States. William Barillas has now published a capacious analysis of the ideologies, traditions, and personalities of the Midwestern pastoral. Barillas deftly explores the relationship between literature and place in this region, examining some of the key themes and rhetorical strategies of five Midwestern writers in as many chapters and showing us the many and varied cultural influences on their work. In the opening chapter, "Midwestern Pastoralism," Barillas reminds us of the long pedigree of pastoral writing (classical progenitors include Virgil and Theocritus) and shows the context of literary history in the social and cultural history of the region, setting the tone of the book with a thoughtful discussion of the ideas and public policy of Thomas Jefferson, who implemented plans for land survey and settlement to benefit small landowners in the American interior. In time, these settlers developed a cultural vocabulary for themselves that embraced faith in education, industriousness, and organization. They established farms, towns, businesses, schools, and local governments. Some of them developed an appreciation for the environment, though it took a keen eye to appreciate that sublimity did not require mountains or the ocean, but could occur in the most prosaic of landscapes. But there is a shadow on the landscape as well; Barillas reminds us too that the Jeffersonian ideal was problematic from the start, its "happy-yeoman farmer" a construct predicated on the displacement of the American Indian. Chapter two, "Willa Gather," presents her Nebraska stories and novels as prototypes of the Midwestern pastoral. Although Willa Gather was born in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, her family took her to Nebraska when she was ten years old, and she spent the rest of her childhood in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Known for their depictions of prairie life, her novels became both popular and critical successes. Perhaps the most loved of Gather's works is the novel My Antonia. Undoubtedly, it is the one that has received the most critical attention. Red Cloud was the model for Black Hawk in that novel, a place Barillas describes as "marked by boredom, snobbishness, and materialism; it was a town full of Babbitts." The people of Black Hawk exercise extreme caution in speech and action. Although Gather had a deep love of the land, she was highly critical of what she saw as its inhabitants' penchant for materialism and conformity. Chapter three, "Aldo Leopold," focuses on his seminal work A Sand County Almanac (1949), a classic of American nature writing noted for its thesis that people need to consider in a thoughtful way their relation to the land, including its plants and animals. Aldo Leopold was born and raised in Burlington, Iowa, where he grew up in contact with the outdoors. At the Yale University School of Forestry, Leopold earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in forestry, going on to serve for nineteen years in the US Forest Service, fifteen of them in the American Southwest. In 1933, he was appointed as professor in a new Department of Game Management at the University of Wisconsin, a position which provided him with a base to carry out his research and to disseminate his philosophy. Leopold was appalled by what Barillas terms "the commodification and abuse of the Midwestern landscape," exacerbated during the Great Depression when counties had seized, and then neglected, property whose owners were in default on real estate and drainage taxes. Leopold's hand-on response was to buy an abandoned farm in 1935, and slowly he began to fix it up. In other words, he practiced what he preached, and his book, A Sand County Almanac, argues for land stewardship. …