I learned to write nice as hell . Pa’s gonna be mad when he sees me do that. He don’t like no fancy stuff like that . Kinda scares ’im, I guess. Ever’ time Pa seen writin’, somebody took somepin away from ’im. (John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 56-57) University of Alberta The Smallholder Project by Cody James McCarroll A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English and Film Studies ©Cody James McCarroll Fall 2011 Edmonton, Alberta Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission. Abstract This dissertation examines the ideological force of the smallholder trope in various discourses, from classical political economy to early Canadian poetry and agribusiness advertising. The project investigates the increasing elision of smallholders from the socio-economic landscape in Canada by tracing the discursive means of their erasure. I theorize smallholders as ideological tools for reifying industrial culture by focusing on the rhetorical strategies of their deployment. Smallholders emerge in this interdisciplinary analysis as liminal figures enunciated through two motifs: the nature-culture binary and the savage-civilized binary. Through these familiar formulations, smallholders perform ideological tasks in the texts under discussion. These texts, from the political economy of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx to contemporary Canadian fiction by Mary Lawson, deploy smallholders to explain production in processes which are prefigured by rhetorical forms; thus smallholders are at once productive of discourse and figures for discursive production. The dissertation focuses less on “what is” and more on “what is said,” as the figures emergent in these discourses have less to do with flesh and blood smallholders than with rhetorical strategies and attendant ideological effects. Smallholders are then allegories for the manner in which discourses perform political work. The comparative analysis of western European literature, political economy, and early Canadian literature, as well as the recent documentary film Food, Inc. and various pop-cultural texts, reveals that smallholders are marshalled as liminal figures. They hover at the limit between pre-capitalist and capitalist socio-economic forms and between primitive and civilized worlds. Smallholders are mobilized to naturalize and thereby moralize forms of capitalist production, as this form of production does the ideological work of expropriating smallholders. In discourse, smallholders are the naturally good labourers that perform the political tasks of explaining capitalist production while reifying it. Smallholders, because they retain traces of their primitive, pre-capitalist past, may also be denigrated and relegated to extinction. Acknowledgements Thank you to my supervisor, Dr. Christopher Bracken, for his tireless efforts in helping to bring this project to fruition first in graduate seminars and finally through numerous drafts. Dr. Karyn Ball and Dr. Catherine Kellogg, who served as members of my doctoral committee, provided incisive critique of the dissertation. Their teaching also served as sources of inspiration. I would also like to thank Dr. Roger Epp, in whose undergraduate class the idea for this project began to take shape. I gratefully acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for their financial support, along with the University of Alberta for its funding through the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship and a Dissertation Fellowship. Finally, thank you to my partner, Trina McCarroll, for her unfailing dedication to this project and support for me throughout. Table of Contents Introduction: The Smallholder Project Hypothesis on Smallholders’ Discursive Force ............................ 1 - 4 Genealogy of an Orange Juice ...................................................... 4 - 25 Reading Smallholders: Myth......................................................... 25 - 35 The Farm ....................................................................................... 35 - 41 Chapter Breakdowns ..................................................................... 41 - 45 Notes ............................................................................................. 46 - 48 Chapter One: Liminal Smallholders Smallholders: Allegories of Discursive Production...................... 49 - 55 Natural (Agri)Culture.................................................................... 55 - 66 The Labour Theory of Value and the Nature-Culture Binary....... 66 - 81 The Four Stages Theory and the Primitive-Civilized Binary........ 81 - 90 Notes ............................................................................................. 91 - 94 Chapter Two: Three Ironies: History, Genre, and Political Economy in Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” Synopsis of “The Deserted Village” ............................................. 95 - 98 Three Ironies ................................................................................. 98 - 100 Triptych ......................................................................................... 100 - 106 Smallholding and Political Economy: Two Types of Production. 106 - 114 “Those miseries real”: A History of Enclosure............................. 114 - 122 The Politics of Genre .................................................................... 122 - 132 The New World............................................................................. 132 - 133 Notes ............................................................................................. 134 Chapter Three: Troping Smallholders: Anamnesis, Metalepsis, and Prolepsis in Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Rising Village” Synopsis of the Rising Village...................................................... 135 - 140 Natural Law-Making Violence ..................................................... 140 - 146 Natural Law: Misremembering and Misappropriating ................. 146 - 160 Albert and Flora: Property as Metalepsis...................................... 160 - 169 The Return of the Savage: Prolepsis ............................................. 169 - 181 Sundown........................................................................................ 181 - 182 Notes ............................................................................................. 183 - 187 Chapter Four: Naturalization and Reification in Joseph Howe’s “Acadia” Synopsis of “Acadia” .................................................................... 188 - 193 Liminality, Naturalization, Reification ......................................... 193 - 195 Second Nature and Reification...................................................... 195 - 207 Cross-Section of Criticism ............................................................ 207 - 216 Repetition ...................................................................................... 216 - 228 Fishing for Sublation..................................................................... 228 - 233 Notes ............................................................................................. 234 - 236 Conclusion: “It’s the spinning of this pastoral fantasy”: The (Revolutionary?) Smallholders of Food, Inc. ....................................... 237 - 251 Restatement of Purpose of The Smallholder Project .................... 252 My Intervention in the Archive under Investigation..................... 252 - 253 Limits of the Study and Future Directions for Research............... 253 - 255 Works Cited............................................................................................. 256 - 265 List of Figures Figure 1. Sunterra Orange Juice Bottle..................................................... 16 Figure 2. United Farmers of Alberta Advertisement ................................ 27 McCarroll 1 Introduction: The Smallholder Project Hypothesis on Smallholders’ Discursive Force Ann Bermingham’s study of English rustic painting discovers a striking phenomenon: there was a dramatic rise in pastoral works after the countryside they depict had drastically changed. Bermingham points out that rustic painting’s “emergence . as a major genre . at the end of the eighteenth century coincided with the accelerated enclosure of the English countryside” (1). Rural depopulation, increasing urbanization, and the ensuing Industrial Revolution concentrated land ownership into fewer hands. Farms became larger, more mechanized, and more productive, while the peasantry vastly decreased in numbers. Paradoxically, the “period of accelerated enclosure (roughly 1750- 1815)” (Bermingham 1) was rapidly erasing the rural England that was being increasingly inscribed in rustic painting. Bermingham unravels the paradox by arguing that the countryside took on an ideal form and