What is Pastoral?

Comparative Literature, Spring 1998 by Cheney, Donald

He also argues against the largely unexamined current view that pastoral, like epic, has ceased to be central to art in recent times. Here, his emphasis on the necessity of taking simple people seriously and sympathetically is more problematic, at least for this reader. Whereas Empson's ironic lens allowed him to discuss proletarian literature as a version of pastoral that was no more false, artistically, than earlier pastorals, Alpers's attempt to argue, for example, that the characterization of simple folk in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs is as true and valuable, artistically, as the achievements of Renaissance pastoral is not totally convincing. Since the Renaissance, two roads seem to have diverged in the pastoral tradition, and although the one that Frost took continues to have some of the bumpy textual interest that characterized the earlier tradition, the one that leads from Wordsworth and Hardy to Jewett seems too often to smooth out sentiment into sentimentality.

It is possible, and useful, to see Jewett as pastoral, but if we do so, we should look (as does Empson) at all the other works and genres of works that share with her a concern to write sympathetically about real people in a different and seemingly simpler, more traditional place or time, What Alpers has to say about Jewett could be said interestingly (I think) about the genres of travel writing, or crime fiction, or sports biography Alpers has chosen to limit his subject to texts that seem self-evidently pastoral, but by carrying his story into recent centuries he has somewhat compromised that self-imposed limitation. Perhaps his conversation with Empson may have led him down a pathway he never intended.

DONALD CHENEY

University of Massachusetts, Amherst