Gallagher Dissertation
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GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, GOOD HOMESTEADING: WENDELL BERRY’S DOMESTIC-PASTORAL IDEOLOGY AND LITERARY AESTHETIC by PATRICK J. GALLAGHER (Under the Direction of Major Professor Hubert McAlexander, Jr.) The adventurous and domestic muses are the warp and woof of the fabric of American culture, and these two worldviews have competed for preeminence from the beginning of American history. Being a family man and a farmer as well as a writer, it is not surprising that Wendell Berry espouses domestic ideology and sees himself as a defender of the domestic tradition in America. As such, his fiction is inspired by the domestic muse and shares similarities with the domestic-pastoral literary tradition. I begin this study by tracing the history of the domestic tradition in America from John Winthrop’s sermon “A Modell of Christian Charity” through the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity and into the twentieth century. I show that Berry’s fiction is best discussed and understood using the terms and conventions of the domestic-pastoral literary tradition: his plots are driven by concerns related to marriage, home, and farm; his characters are presented as relatively good or bad according to how well they conform to the standards of success as defined by domestic-pastoral ideology; and all of the important themes concern relationships to family members, neighbors, and home. Chapter Two shows how Berry started to idealize home and farm life in his fiction after moving back to Kentucky in the mid 1960s. The influence of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on Berry as a writer is also discussed. Berry’s entire corpus can be seen as a response to the ideological battle between adventurousness and domesticity being played out in Twain’s masterpiece. Chapter Three addresses the ways in which Berry domesticates the humor of the Old Southwest tradition in his short story cycle Watch with Me. The manner in which all of Berry’s fiction is not only ideologically but also formally domestic is also considered. Chapter Four explains how Berry espouses a domestic economic ideology that is both communitarian and local. Chapter Five addresses the contrary nature of Berry’s domesticity and explains how his domestic ideology is paradoxically adventurous and revolutionary. That chapter also places Berry’s work in an international context by pointing out the similarities between his fiction and contemporary post-colonial writing. INDEX WORDS: Wendell Berry, Cult of domesticity, Domestic fiction, Pastoral, Humor of the Old Southwest. GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, GOOD HOMESTEADING: WENDELL BERRY’S DOMESTIC-PASTORAL IDEOLOGY AND LITERARY AESTHETIC by PATRICK J. GALLAGHER B.A., Saint Louis University, 1992 M.A., The University of British Columbia, Canada, 1994 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2003 © 2003 Patrick J. Gallagher All Rights Reserved GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, GOOD HOMESTEADING: WENDELL BERRY’S DOMESTIC-PASTORAL IDEOLOGY AND LITERARY AESTHETIC by PATRICK J. GALLAGHER Major Professor: Hubert McAlexander, Jr. Committee: Michael Moran Hugh Ruppersburg Electronic Version Approved Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2003 iv DEDICATION To my parents, Jane and Jim Gallagher, and in memory of my brother Jimmy. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to Dr. Hubert McAlexander for keeping the faith and helping me see this project through. The time and the energy he spent reading the manuscript are much appreciated and his insights made it a damn sight better. Patti Renda helped tighten up the prose in the first three chapters. I thank Evelyn John for formatting my dissertation because those niggling details would have been the straw that broke this camel’s back. Without my sister Anne’s sage advice concerning fashion and relationships, I don’t know where I’d be—perhaps better dressed and married. I can’t thank my brother Pete enough for carrying the load at work while I spent many an afternoon toiling away, putting commas in, taking commas out. To my parents I owe a debt of gratitude that goes far beyond this project. As the old saying goes and in the spirit of themes addressed in this dissertation, they gave me roots and wings. And for that I am grateful. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... v INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER 1 THE DOMESTIC TRADITIONS ............................................................. 8 2WENDELL BERRY’S DOMESTIC-PASTORAL FICTION ................. 43 3 BERRY’S DOMESTIC AESTHETIC AND THE TAMING OF THE HUMOR OF THE OLD SOUTHWEST ........................................ 97 4 BERRY’S DOMESTIC ECONOMIC IDEOLOGY ............................. 143 5ADVENTUROUS DOMESTICITY...................................................... 173 EPILOGUE ............................................................................................................... 188 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................ 191 INTRODUCTION In The Adventurous Muse: The Poetics of American Fiction, 1789-1900, William Spengemann argues that American literature is characterized by the adventurous muse that inspired the New World narratives of exploration and travel and which encourages the “individualistic values of change, discontent, daring, aspiration, curiosity, eccentricity, and self-justification” (69). Unquestionably, America is energized by the adventurous impulse; the United States is, after all, a nation founded by religious rebels who braved a dangerous passage across the Atlantic Ocean to forge a new society in a new land. Within two hundred years, the colonists boldly broke with their parent nation—a metaphoric parricide—and created a new country. Inspired by the impulses of discontent, daring, and self-justification, the signers of the Declaration of Independence were committing an act of treason, and had they lost the war and been captured, they would have been hanged and drawn and quartered. In the following decades, adventurous Americans pushed the frontier ever westward towards the Pacific Ocean, expanding the national border in the name of Manifest Destiny. Frederick Jackson Turner was the first to argue that the frontier defines America as a nation. In an 1893 essay entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner put forth his frontier hypothesis, which holds that “the novel attitudes and institutions produced by the frontier, especially through its encouragement of democracy, had been more significant than the imported European heritage in shaping American society” (Smith 292).1 According to his frontier hypothesis, the values required 1 See Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, pp. 291-305. Smith follows Turner in believing that the frontier both as geographical, historical reality and as myth has shaped and defined American literature. His study shows how the West as an idea inspired politicians’ rhetoric and novelists’ imaginations in nineteenth-century America. He quotes Turner writing in 1903: the American frontier, Turner maintained, was “free 2 to explore and settle the frontier—self-reliance, individualism, restless energy, mobility, materialism, and optimism—have become American values. The frontier, Wilson O. Clough writes, was the source of the strongest of emotions, and put its mark upon all America. It represented asylum from law, domesticity, bankruptcy, and poverty, from boredom, routine, and parental rigidity. It called to the adventurous, the hardy, the rebellious, the less successful within established communities, the economically ambitious, the entrepreneur, the uprooted, the solitary seeker. (36) Thus the frontier attracted adventurous Americans and is believed to have engendered a culture of adventurous, self-reliant individuals. Going hand in hand with the myth of the frontier is the myth of the American Adam, a young innocent without family or social history most at home in the New Eden of the American wilderness. R. W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century presents the Adamic myth—with its central image of “the authentic American as a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new history” (1)—as the paradigmatic American metanarrative. “The American myth,” he writes saw life and history as just beginning. It described the world as starting up again under fresh initiative, in a divinely granted second chance for the human race, after the first chance had been so disastrously fumbled in the darkening Old World. It introduced a new kind of hero, . the hero of the new adventure: an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual from the influence of European ideas and institutions. The men of the ‘Western World’ turned their backs upon the Atlantic Ocean, and with a grim energy and self-reliance, began to build up a society free from the dominance of ancient forms” (304). Later in his career, Turner gave an address in which he claimed that “American democracy was born of no theorist’s dream; it was not carried in the Susan Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth.