The Farm: Working the Land in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature

Abstract

While our primary eco-literature is written by and about walkers, poets, and landscape artists, in the nineteenth century most people were viewing the land not from a hilltop, but instead from the level of the soil. In my dissertation, “The Farm,” I claim that the farm, as both a space and an occupation, forces what is usually background in literature – weather, animals, the landscape – into the center of poetry and fiction. While we have critical readings of the pastoral and the wild, few scholars of ecocriticism or nineteenth-century studies consider the backbreaking, repetitive, deeply intimate work of the common farmer and the intimacy with the nonhuman world that, I argue, this labor creates. My dissertation is structured around five different moments in the nineteenth century where the cyclical labor of farming came to the forefront of the cultural and literary conversation. The first chapter argues that John Clare’s poetics was shaped in large part by his role as a subsistence scavenger. In the second chapter I read J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur and James Fenimore Cooper’s odes to American small farms alongside William Apess’ personal narrative of the land he and his family lost to these same farms. In the third chapter I turn my attention to women’s work in the dairy and house and argue that the domestic fiction of the mid-nineteenth century was shaped by their often-invisible agricultural labor. In the fourth chapter, I ask what happens when, as in Thomas Hardy’s novels, the house disappears and women and men must work the land without a domestic space to return to. In the final chapter, I investigate the relationship between enslaved people’s knowledge of the land and their ability to escape as depicted in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave and Hannah Craft’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative. In a brief coda I turn to Frank Norris’s bleak depiction of the factory farm in The Octopus and consider the final image in contrast to the haptic relationship to the earth that is built through the repetitive, small-scale work of edgeland farming.