Navigating the site:

Are you in my class?

Analysis

Authors

Articles

Autonomy

Bibliography

Biodiversity

Briefings

Capacity

Concepts

CORE acronym

Courses

Ecology

Eco-design

Exchange

Facts

Genes

Inquiry

Methods

New

Office

Photos

Presentations

Recent material

Research

Reviews

Science

Science subjects

Site Map

Sources

Technology time-line

Tragedy

Vita

Vocabulary

WEAL acronym

Writing

World view

Z-A contents of this site

return to top of the page

The Machine in the Garden
landscape art leitmotif
Title	"The Lackawanna Valley," 1855	"American Landscape," 1930
The landscape painter	by George Inness	by Charles Sheeler
"The machine's sudden entrance into the garden presents a problem that ultimately belongs not to art but to politics." p. 365.
machine-in-garden motif mixes	"doctrines of perfectibility and progress." p. 88.

annotation | contents | Outline | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Epilogue | Fear | vocabulary

Leo Marx explores the American literary and political imagination as it reflects simple and complex–yet unresolved–attitudes about nature as both a source of the good and a unrecoverable ideal starting with Shakespeare's play The Tempest, written in 1610-1611, through Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Clemens' Huckleberry Finn (1884), and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925).

1. Sleepy Hollow
2. Shakespeare's American Fable
3. The Garden
4. The Machine
5. Two Kingdoms of Force
6. Epilogue

language

"Moby Dick is neither good nor evil,"

p. 317.

"a fully articulated pastoral idea of America did not emerge until the end of the eighteenth. The story of its emergence illustrates the turning of an essentially literary device to ideological or (using the word in its extended sense) political uses."

p. 73.

"Artists are the antennae of the race."

Ezra Pound

p. 371.

"Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine."

Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849.

Sleepy Hollow

On July 27, 1844, Nathaniel Hawthorne that morning went into a small coppice by way of some pastures near in Concord, Massachusetts, for "chiefly literary purposes." He was inclined to write about, (as he put it) "such little events as may happen."

11.

About Nathaniel Hawthorne's "trope" of disturbance. Leo Marx writes:

"He is describing a state of being in which there is no tension either within the self or between the self and the environment."

But the pattern Marx sees in Hawthorne's eight pages of notes focuses on a disturbance in the otherwise tranquil scenes of broken "solitude and silence."

12.

of Hawthorne in Sleepy Hollow, 1844, Marx.

"Soon the dream of a retreat to an oasis of harmony and joy was removed from its traditional literary context. . . Embodied in various utopian schemes...in essence political-the ideal has figured in the American view of life..." (p.3)

1. the sentimental or simple pastoral retreat (5) is but an escapist, infantilism.
2. "such little events as may happen." Nathaniel Hawthorne in "Sleepy Hollow" (11)
3. commentary " the decisive part played by the machine image. . . .Now tension replaces repose:" (16)
4. "By design I refer to the larger structure of thought and feeling of which the ideal is a part." (24)

"the delicate interlacing of sounds that seem to unify society, landscape and mind."

"citizens from the hot street."

"it brings the noisy world into the midst of our slumberous peace."

Hawthorne quoted on p. 13

Sleepy Hollow: "intruding- crude masculine aggressiveness vs. tender submissive feminine landscape."

p. 29.

Emerson makes the point this way: the serious artist, he says, 'must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow-men.' Ideas and emotions linked to industrialization provide Hawthorne with just such an enlargement of meaning."

..."an integral part of the metaphor."

p. 29.

"the symbolic power of the motif: it brings the political and the psychic dissonance associated with the onset of industrialism into a single pattern of meaning."

p. 30.

Shakespeare's American Fable

"on whose nature

Nurture can never stick."

65

"a highly civilized European who finds himself living in a prehistoric wilderness." (35)

Prospero

"His recognition of inherent and perhaps irremediable aggressiveness in man saves Prospero's utopian bent from sentimentality. But neither does he go to the opposite extreme. That he has reservations about the cultivated man, about power, intellect, and art, is implied by his final act of renunciation. In the end he abjures the potent art that distinguishes him from ordinary men. As if distrusting the uses of power, he vows to bury his staff and drown his book."

p.65.

1. "visual images of a virgin land" (36)
2. "the effort to reconcile conflicting attitudes toward the New World." (46-47)
3. "we still must cope with what now seems a paradox:...[a paradise isle far away from MIlan, Italy and the Renaissance that setting implied.]
   "how lush and lusty the grass looked" how green!"(57-59)

Marx on Shakespeare's ultimate vision

"Between the The Tempest and America. The first connection is genetic."

p. 66.

"the artificial is but a special human category of the natural (Polixenes here is a portrait of Greek-Aristotelian ideas)

"Mind and Nature are in essence one. Nature is all. This conviction underlies the seriousness with which Shakespeare, in The Tempest treats the pastoral ideal."

p. 67

The Garden

"Is the English tree in America almost dead?"

D. H. Lawrence, 1916.

"the idea that the American continent may become the site of a new golden age could be taken seriously in politics." (74)

1. Robert Beverley's Virginia where "America as nature's garden, a new paradise of abundance." (75)
2. by 1785 the transformation of pastoral retreat from literary trope to political ideal mixing the primitive with the "doctrines of perfectibility and progress." (88)
3. "an American rural scheme....How could rural America possibly hold off the forces already transforming the economy of Europe?" (116-117)

"it is necessary to insist upon the vital distinction between the "pastoral ideal and the pastoral design."

pp. 73-74.

Why is the "pastoral ideal" distinguished from "the pastoral design?"

Perhaps to serve as "a guide to social policy."

"it has been capable of carrying an immense burden of hope."

74

"investing the ancient ideal with new vitality."

75.

"Then during the eighteenth century the situation changed. The great revolution in science and technology we associate with Sir Isaac Newton was followed by a massive shift in prevailing ideas about man's relations to nature. An effort was made to rescue the pastoral–formal literary mode–from the confines of decadent convention, but it failed.

Pp. 74-75.

"In the record of Western culture there is nothing to compare with the vogue for landscape that arose in the period. . . .only during the Renaissance."

Pp. 88-89.

"None of the obvious devices of the old pastoral could be detected in the farmer's plausible argument for an American rural scheme.

...manifested itself in the static, antihistorical quality of the whole conception...."

pp. 116-117

"the intensity of his belief in the land, as a locus of both economic and moral value,..." 

Jefferson  *

The Machine

"technology somehow is a match for the power of intellect implies a progressive idea of history." (146)

"technology somehow is a match for the power of intellect implies a progressive idea of history." (146)

1. "Jefferson's passion for utilitarian improvement, gadgets, and labor saving devices of all kinds...." led him to say of the steam engine "it is 'simple, great, and likely to have extensive consequences.' . . . so as to supersede the use of water ponds.' . . . and in America fuel is abundant'." (146-47)
2. Tench Coxe "a capable spokesman of the nascent manufacturing interests" 1792 Report on Manufactures (150-51). He was Alexander Hamilton's assistant from Philadelphia.
3. "It came out of Germany by way of England...Schiller's "degeneration of contemporary culture." (169)
4. by 1829 "a profitable factory system was firmly established in New England; new roads canals and cities were transforming the landscape," thirteen miles of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad "were under construction." (180)
5. "The image of the machine had become a major symbol of value." between 1786 and 1831(190)
   1. As a sample of the rhetoric of progress (193) The machine and nature
   2. The machine and history -- more or less a record of continual progress (197)
   3. The machine and mind -- "steam power. . .will upset the moral economy of the world." (199)
   4. The machine and America -- telegraph lines "lands now traversed in perfect security by these frail wires." (203)
6. Daniel Webster and Northern railroad dedication:"one way of neutralizing the conflict between the machine and the rural ideal." (209)

"There was not any effective opposition to industrialization."

p. 180.

"The official American ideology of industrialism."

181.

"To the proposition that the new industrial order defiles the soul, Walker in effect is asking: whose soul, whose moral nature will be defiled?"

p. 189.

Timothy Walker, attorney-at-law, 1831 Cincinnati, Ohio.

Defence of Mechanization

"He expounds the doctrine of unlimited economic development ...pervasive attitudes toward the new machine power."

Pp. 181-182.

Two Kingdoms of Force

"a regeneration in the New World. They become new, better, happier . . . "

(228)

1. Emerson's "The Young American, (2-7-1844) "sense of the land as an economic and political force with a transcendental theory of mind, he expounds . . . the philosophy of romantic American pastoralism." (229-230)
2. "Walden begins with the hero's withdrawal from society in the direction of nature . . . .that the experiment has been a success. (242-43)
3. Hawthorne and Melville match the machine-in-garden motif to a darker view of life than Thoreau's. . . conveys a sense of the widening gap between the facts and ideals of American life, but the implications are more onerous." (265)
4. "No book confirms the relevance of the pastoral design to American experience as vividly as the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) . . . the sudden incursion of the new power has the effect of shattering childhood trauma...a pattern of contradiction so nearly absolute that the promised resolution of comedy is unconvincing." (319)
5. "about the contradictions said to embody what is most distinctive in American thought."
   "Culture . . .the form of its existence is struggle, or at least debate--it is nothing if not a dialectic." (341-42)

"Although Emerson attaches more importance to the part played by the new technology, he adopts the Jeffersonian view that it will be redeemed by contact with the virgin land: a 'sanative and Americanizing influence, which promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come.' "

p. 238

"Ahab. He is the perverted, monomaniac incarnation of the Age of Machinery as he himself had admitted earlier: 'all my means are sane,my motive and my object mad."

p. 318

For Europeans find "a regeneration in the New World. They become new, better, happier . . . " (228)

Henry Adams fear as expressed in a letter to his brother.

Epilogue: The Garden of Ashes

James Gatz

"that strange compound of sentiment and criminal aggressiveness in Gatsby"

"Nick's vision discloses the past melting away into the inessential present."

"the curious state of modern American consciousness. It reveals Gatsby's uncommon 'gift for hope' was born in that transitory, enchanted moment when Europeans first came into the presence of the 'fresh, green breast of the New World.' "

"It was at that moment that Jay Gatsby sprang, like a son of God, from his Platonic conception of himself."

In service of "a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty."

pp. 360-361.

"images of mankind in the grip of uncontrollable forces."

Charles Sheeler (1930) "No trace of untouched nature remains. Not a tree or a blade of grass is in view." (353)

1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby Nick says "There was something gorgeous about him." (356-359)

"The difference between Gatsby's point of view and Nick's illustrates the the distinction, with which I began between sentimental and complex pastoralism . . . . a symbolic repository of meaning and value." (363)

"Like Melville's Starbuck, Gatsby would let faith oust fact."

"the industrial Naturmensch who is blind to the complexity of modern civilization." He seldom "learns how destructive they (felicitous pristine images) are when cherished in lieu of reality."

"destroyed by his inability to distinguish between dreams and facts" in that " the fantasy of pleasure is checked by the facts of history." (363)

American writers seldom, if ever, have designed satisfactory resolutions for their pastoral fables. (364)

"But the inability of our writers to create a surrogate for the ideal of the middle landscape can hardly be accounted artistic failure"

"the root conflict of our culture."

"To change the situation we require new symbols of possibility, and although the creation of those symbols is . . .in greater measure the responsibility of society." (365)

Afterword

Crucial Terminology and Schema

dates

Lewis Mumford

 

Science Index | Site Analysis | Population Index | Global Warming Index | Nature Index | Ecological ideas