Rural America in Film and Literature

Abstract

Americans-including American students-are fascinated with the idea of country. People everywhere try to look country-blue jeans, plaid shirts, leather boots. We're sold country cookbooks and magazines about country living; we decorate our kitchens in calico and country style, save up for homes in the country, eat Bob Evans down on the farm sausage, and feel compelled to plant tomatoes and herbs in our yards. In the small town where I live, we have local stores called Country Corner, Country Store, Country Artisan, and Country Furnishings. As Ann Hulbert knew in her recent September 2, 1985 New Republic article, Rural Chic, it's the yuppies and suburban folk who've largely been responsible for this decade's sentimental idealization of country life. But as she also knew, Americans have always been sentimental about rural America. She quoted Richard Hofstadter in Age of Reform, The American mind was raised upon a sentimental attachment to rural living. Although this sentimental yearning for ponds, vegetable gardens, and old houses set deeply in the woods seems relatively harmless, it frequently prevents us from recognizing and understanding the hard realities of our rural population: financial difficulties of the farmers, unemployment of miners and loggers, boredom and confusion of youth living in small country towns. It was to look honestly at rural America that I developed a minicourse on the literature and films of rural Amer-