Uneven Land: Nature and Agriculture in American Writing by Stephanie L. Sarver

Abstract

WAL 37.1 SPRING 2002 on two different coasts, the pressure of movements for suffrage and labor, the economic transition to what the nineteenth century called “speculation.” (118) Tracing fractures and fissures at once denaturalizes the linear divisions of civ­ ilization moving west from the eastern seaboard, multiplies lines of regional and racial differences beyond the Mason-Dixon line and implicitly argues for the centrality of the West in the literature and culture of the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Goldman’s readings of seemingly unlikely pairings (Gertrude Atherton and Pauline Hopkins, Willa Cather and Owen Wister) force readers to consider the interconnectedness between regions. She argues particularly for the influence of the Southwest, the Mexican War, and the Gold Rush in the national imaginary, tracing out novels that draw on, substi­ tute, cross-dress, and otherwise play out national tensions on the Southwest territory, the land taken from Mexico in 1848. This focus on the Southwest is by no means reductive: she demonstrates how this landscape, its history and inhabitants, impact African Americans, Jews, Anglo-Europeans, as well as Native Americans and Mexican Americans. Ultimately, Goldman puts forth a compelling and complex argument that models the kind of scholarship that it calls for: interregional studies enriched in both scope and content through metaphors of mobility (tourism, Mexican War, train travel, migration, Gold Rush, forced removals, immigration), each ofwhich has its own regional, racial, gendered, and class dynamics. Continental Divides is an invitation to American studies and western scholars to examine relationships and interconnectedness in the way one studies a coastline: forever Assuring, jagged, rough, devoid of straight and smooth lines to contrast and differentiate. Uneven Land: N ature and Agriculture in American Writing. By Stephanie L. Sarver. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. 207 pages, $40.00. Reviewed by A lan Brew Northland College, Ashland, Wisconsin “The most difficult problem that an agricultural writer faces,” Gene Logsdon writes in The Contrary Fanner (1994), “is convincing readers that farming is very much a part of the whole societal structure” (225). In Uneven Land: Nature and Agriculture in American Writing, Stephanie L. Sarver addresses this problem by opening with a tour of the Shields Library at the University of California at Davis. The tour, which winds from floor to floor and from wing to wing, traces the path that students must follow to achieve a thorough under­ standing of agriculture. Clearly, it demonstrates, farming is “an activity entan­ gled in manifold aspects of American life and thought” (2). B o o k r e v i e w s 119 The specific focus of Uneven Land is the period between 1850 and 1920, when western immigration, diminishing availability of arable land, and tech­ nical innovations in transportation and irrigation transformed the practices of American farmers. The authors in Sarver’s study—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frank Norris, William Ellsworth Smythe, Hamlin Garland, and Liberty Hyde Bailey—responded to this transformation by “embracing new agricultural real­ ities while resisting and sometimes mourning the loss of an earlier agrarian way that allowed for a more intimate experience of nature” (4). Sarver, who is particularly interested in how her authors’ discussions of agriculture reflect attitudes about the human relationship with nature, finds that the writers who experienced agriculture in the Northeast or Midwest (Emerson, Garland, and Bailey) continue to “recognize farming as a means of realizing a deeper connection to nonhuman nature,” while the authors whose focus is western agriculture (Norris and Smythe) show through their writing how “farming increasingly disassociates from an awareness of terrestrial nature as it becomes entangled in human dramas” (16-17). In an 1858 address titled “Farming,” for instance, Emerson opens and closes with images of the farmer as an individual whose patient work in the earth leads to a reverent bond with nature (30, 34). Norris, on the other hand, alters geographical details of the San Joaquin Valley for his novel The Octopus and “looks to the land exclusively as the set on which he unfolds his epic” (78). Similarly, Smythe, who published The Conquest of Arid America in 1900, promotes irrigation agriculture by sug­ gesting that features of the land are not “part of a vital and...