Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability. By Abby L. Goode

Abstract

Parthenogenesis. Agrotopian vision. Gothic fertility. Abby L. Goode transposes these terms into a new context in Agrotopias: An American Literary History, using them to explore sustainability rhetoric from the Revolution era to the early twentieth-century and giving an alternate, historical valence to them along the way. A strength of this book’s method is that it combines these fertility and environmental ideas within the framework of larger cultural movements, including the nineteenth-century phrenology movement, which saw bodily forms as being biologically predetermining, and the twentieth-century Country Life movement, which called for a return to rural farmsteads. Goode’s book is firmly entrenched in nineteenth-century American culture, though the origin thesis she establishes harkens back to Thomas Jefferson and his eighteenth-century agrarian vision. Two features of Agrotopias are especially unique: Goode’s critique of seemingly innocent environmental rhetoric, in particular Jeffersonian agrarianism, through the ages; and her use of little-read, but important, nineteenth-century source material. For the former, she finds instances of writing in which environmental sustainability rhetoric appears nearly side-by-side with nationalist eugenics. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 Herland, for instance, balances “a careful cultivation [of] nearly every account of agriculture” in this imaginary land with “eugenic-conservationist notions of racial and environmental regeneration and maintenance” (169). Agrotopias also highlights the striking ways that organizations such as the Sierra Club or even personages such as Michelle Obama, in writing about the White House Kitchen Garden, deploy disturbing, if latent, nation-building and reproductive language in tandem with “back to the soil” environmental rhetoric (2, 190). The cultural movements referenced, and literary works included in each chapter, are rich and unorthodox, ranging from New York newspapers in the 1840s (Albany Freeholder and Young America) to the Texas-based Colored Farmers’ National Alliance in the 1880s and 1890s (109). Goode also finds lesser-known, but important, works by Whitman (a 1928 farming tract, “The Eighteenth Presidency!”), Gilman (a 1909 editorial in Good Housekeeping), and others to complement her thesis regarding sustainability rhetoric and its pernicious coupling with eugenics.