The Ethnic Garden in Portuguese‐American Writing

Abstract

Writing about the garden in American literature has a long tradition, but this does not apply to emergent contemporary American literatures, especially the Portuguese-American one. In my exploration of this issue, I will briefly outline the scholarly work on the American garden -ranging from contemporary ecocriticism (Lawrence Buell), to the pastoral ideal (Leo Marx), and finally, to the georgic mode (William Conlogue) to understand the essence and importance of the garden in Portuguese-American writing, especially in the fiction of Katherine Vaz (1955-) and Frank Caspar (1946-), and in the poetry of the latter. While I aim at focusing on these PortugueseAmerican voices, I will also contrast canonical, mainstream representations of the garden to argue that Edith Wharton (1862-1937), George Washington Cable (1844-1925), and Jack London (1876-1916) viewed the garden as a pleasure, leisure ground. In contrast, in contemporary Portuguese-American fiction, the garden is a place where one can grow vegetables and flowers; a place for preserving one's ethnic identity and ancestral rural way of life; or a retreat from the alienating conditions imposed by the factory, commercial fishing, the whaling or dairy industries, and intensive farming - activities in which the first generations of Portuguese immigrants excelled in the three traditional areas of settlement in the United States: New England, California, and Hawaii. While the first two mainstream writers, Wharton and Cable, were fascinated by the refinement and social status entailed in owning a garden, in The Valley of the Moon (1913), London's character Billy Roberts ridicules the Portuguese agrarian ways and mentality. With this novel as a case in point, my goal is to focus on the garden as emblematic of the gulf between the American mainstream and some of its peripheral minority voices, and how it highlights conflicting responses toward culture and life. While assessing some of these notions in Portuguese-American writings, I will also note, in passing, how the garden is a forceful presence in Italian-American writing as well. Since the nation's inception -that is, with Jeffersonian and Jacksonian agrarianism-the garden and the machine have been at the heart of the American experience, and these realities have galvanized American scholars and writers. Contemporary ecocriticism scholars such as Lawrence Buell (in Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond) have called our attention to the dangers of pollution on the American landscape and its physical environment. However, in his attempt to distinguish between green and brown landscapes -that is, the landscapes of exurbia and industrialization (7) - this framework is not applicable to Portuguese-American writings. In the Californian landscapes and gardens of Katherine Vaz's fiction, and those from Massachusetts in the fiction and poetry of Frank Caspar, Buell's discourse does not find a congenial home. References to the ethnic garden abound m the fiction of Katherine Vaz, especially in Saudade (1994), and in Frank Caspar's novel Leaving Pico (1999), as well as his three volumes of poems, The Holyoke (1988), Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death (1995), and A Field Guide to the Heavens (1999). The gardens in these writings are not polluted with toxic waste or invaded by the ominous sound of civilization as represented in, for example, the emblematic whistle of the train in Thoreau's Walden (1854). My contention is that in Portuguese-American writing, these matters are nowhere to be seen. Instead, the gardens in Portuguese-American literature bring to the fore aspects that are quintessentially marked by immigrant experience. Surrounded by the hustle and bustle of public, mainstream life, the gardens in some of these writings reflect aspects inherent in the private, intimate side of the Portuguese ethnic experience in the United States.1 In addition, these gardens are depicted as oases of tranquility, providing cultural and spiritual sustenance. …