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The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America

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Marx's book is roughly 50 years old now, but it still sparkles with insight into the myth and symbol discourse surrounding America's fulfillment of the 18th century idea of the "Garden of the World," a new Eden that would redeem mankind. Starting with "The Tempest" as reflective of the West's view of the geographic discovery of "primitive" and "unspoiled" lands, and moving through Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Twain, to Fitzgerald "The Great Gatsby" as an exemplification of how the simple"pastoralism" of the Enlightenment (based on the Virgillian pastoral form), Marx shows how the American artists and writers slowly came to grips with the penetration of the machine into the garden. He talks about the idea of the "middle landscape" a notion poised halfway between primitivism and progressivism, about the apparent perversity of "lazy" early settlers who, in the view of some commentators like Jefferson, never cultivated their own gardens, unlike the English aristocracy. The section on Melville's rewriting of the pastoral ideal in "Moby Dick" is a masterful excursion into the imagination and motives of Melville, as he questions the boosterism for industrialism which has infected even Emerson, who apostrophizes about how industry will forge a newer, better millenialist garden.

At some point before the industrial "take-off" there was hope that technology would extend and even democratize the garden. Stunning inventions one after the other -- the railroad, the telegraph, the industrial weaving machies -- and their introduction so soon after the American revolution portended a great unemcubered American future. But still Emerson noticed the change when he wrote in the 1840s that "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind," and Thoreau pointed out that men had become tools of their tools -- focused on the means but not on the ends, and instrumentalist view without ideals.

James in his notes on trip he took to America in his later career was struck by the "acquiesence to monotony" in the small New England towns. The railroad crossing had made them all the same. Thomas Carlyle had warned America about the insidious effects of industrialization on the spirit. So did Blake and Wordsworth and other Romantics. However, many Americans like Emerson, believed the degradation of the "dark satanic mills" would never happen in America. None could believe that the apple-cheeked farm-girls of New England working in the first mills would ever fall so low as the wretches in London. The "Garden" would not permit it to happen that way.

Some other highlights: his keystone use of a Hawthorne essay in the Virgillian mode penetrated by a railroad whistle. The mixture of Thoreau's hard-headed "empirical" approach to pastoralism, Melville's skillful metaphors, particularly the skeleton of the whale on an island of natives which looks half like a hanging garden and half like an industrial loom. Twain's pastoral America in Huck Finn, Twain's recognition that the pilot (as he was) had an entirely instrumental view of a sunset on the river (with its hidden dangers that required constant attention), while the passenger could actually enjoy the sunset. Finally, although short, Marx's retelling of Gatsby whose "Country House" on Long Island is founded of the spoils gained by factory workers a little bit up the railroad line, is compelling too.

Science fiction writers have exploited the machine in the paradox ever since the genre began. Indeed the genre began with Mary Shelley's whose monster was a creature of technology. And also, the myth is everywhere apparent in the suburbs of America -- the middle landscape between the country and the city. The myth and symbol approach of Marx and Nast was attached by the next generation of historians, but now that the dust has cleared we can see how influential a book this really is. Great stuff!

In writing this review I am attempting not to duplicate the excellent review by panopticonman below. Thus, I would refer all readers of this review to that review.

Marx's thesis, roughly stated, is that: Americans applied idea's developed about landscape in the old world to the landscape they discovered in the new world. In doing so, the landscape became a "repository of value" (value meaning economic, spiritual, etc.). The main idea about the landscape that travelled with them from Europe was the idea of "pastoralism".

Pastorialism, roughly expressed, represents the yearning by civilised man to occupy the space in between "art" and "nature". Marx does an excellent job of explaining the pre-modern understanding of "art" (which is different then our modern understanding of the word). Marx also distinguishes the a "simple" conception of pastoralism with a "complex" conception. Using the writings of Jefferson, Marx argues that Americans were more comfortable with the idea of a "complex" pastoralism that acknowledged the conflict inherent in the occupation of a "middle landscape" between art and nature.
Marx then attaches the concept of pastoralism to the symbol of the "garden" as representing a mediating space between art and nature (apply "arts" to "nature" and produce a garden).

After a further differentiation between the idea of the garden-as-continent vs. garden-as-garden, Marx moves on to the idea of the "machine".

What Marx means by the "machine" of the title is a relationship between culture and industry that was irrevocably altered by the industrial revolution. He details the attempts by writers to deal with the looming conflict between pastoralism and industrialization. Perhaps the most interesting portion of the book comes when Marx discusses the period when many saw NO conflict between the "machine" and the "garden".

However, the tour de force comes when Marx analyzes this conflict as it appears in the works of Emerson, Thoureau, Hawthorne, Melville and Fitzgerald.

Personally, I thought the analysis of Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand" was first rate.

Marx concludes by congratulating the authors he uses for "clarifying" the situation of Americans and noting that the ultimate resolution of the problem of the machine in the garden is not for writer's but for politicans.

In this way, the book is significantly more political then one might expect. It really belongs to the genre of "American Studies", even though my 1970's edition refers to it as belonging to "Literature".

Marx achieves greatness by tenaciously explpicating the troubled relationship between America and its technology. Although written in 1964, this book retains great relevance.

I highly recommend "The Machine in the Garden".

The pastoral image is alive and well, certainly in my mind anyway!

As an airline pilot observing the land below I often mused, sometimes in conversation with my fellow crewmembers, what it would be like to fly over the landscape as it existed in an earlier time. Of course, I would still want to be comfortably ensconced in my aluminum cocoon, able to zip thither and yon for whatever my allotted time. Today Hawthorne's peace in "Sleepy Hollow" is more likely to be disrupted by the "long shriek, harsh, above all other harshness...[that] the space of a mile cannot mollify it into harmony" of a jet engine than the whistle of a locomotive.

Leo Marx very capably traces the origin of the literary ideal of the "garden" and pinpoints its contradictory meanings through the literary creations of some of America's greatest writers. At its core is the contrast between two worlds, that of rural peace and simplicity or urban sophistication and power. The shriek of the locomotive whistle is a metaphor for industrial power.

Shakespeare's "The Tempast," provides a recurring theme "of a redemptive journey away from society in the direction of nature," but the pastoral design circumscribes the pastoral ideal, and is therefore out of reach. Nonetheless the image of a pastoral retreat is so believable that it almost seems a possibility. Marx goes on to explains how the pastoral ideal is modified by American writers to New World circumstances.

But, Robert Beverley in the "History and Present State of Virginia" confuses the two meanings of "garden." One results from man's improvements, the bounty of the land; the other is the language of myth.

This relationship between nature and man is evident in Jefferson's agrarian ideal in "Notes on Virginia." But Marx highlights Jefferson's paradoxical view toward industry. To Jefferson the machine was a "token of the liberation of the human spirit."(150) His vision of the machine was while it was at work, blending in harmoniously with the countryside, not the factory system which became the manifestation of technological progress. Jefferson's quandary, as Marx observes, was that "to put the pastoral theory of America into effect it would be necessary at some point...to legislate against the creation of a system of manufactures. But to curb economic development in turn would require precisely the kind of government power Jefferson detested."(134)

Opposing Jefferson's rural agrarian ideal, Alexander Hamilton was "an undisguised advocate of continuing economic development."(167) The "Report on the Subject of Manufactures," which Hamilton presented to Congress, articulated a different attitude toward manufactures. Marx, understandably, does not spend much space discussing Hamilton, since his ideas were so much at odds with Marx's thesis of pastoral idealism.

Marx concludes the machine's increasing dominance precludes the possibility of pastoral redemption and a new "symbol of possibility" is needed. Until then the machine remains in the garden, except as an image in my mind, of a land that no longer exists!

Subtitle: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Leo Marx traces the pastoral ideal and its conflict with the reality of western civilization in Virgil's Eclogues and Shakespeare's The Tempest, then, in the third and fourth chapters of the book, in 18th Century American thought: in Robert Beverly's, 1705, History and Present State of Virginia; in Thomas Jefferson's, 1785, Notes on Virginia, and in his later writings; and in Tench Coxe's economic ideas of 1787. Marx continues chapter four with the 1829 critique of the mechanistic, both literal and metaphorical, by the Englishman Thomas Carlyle in his essay "Signs of the Times", and with an American response in Timothy Walker's "Defence [sic] of Mechanical Philosophy", of 1831. Daniel Webster speaking in praise of the railroad and steam power in 1847 is also discussed.

Chapter five covers Emerson's "The Young American" and Nature, Thoreau's Walden Pond, Hawthorne's short story "Ethan Brand", Melville's novels Typee and Moby Dick, and Twain's novel Huckleberry Finn, with shorter mention of Henry Adams' The Education of Henry Adams, and Henry James' The American Scene. The final chapter is an epilogue with references to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

It is easy to imagine the subject being presented with more depth, clarity, purpose, and comprehension. The book was composed in part from previously published essays in literary criticism, and it shows. The section on Melville's Moby Dick is over-long (tediously so) and incongruous with the pace of the rest of the book before it. Twain's Huckleberry Finn is treated likewise to a (mercifully shorter) plodding translation of metaphors. The chapter on Shakespeare's The Tempest also appears patched into the text. The best parts of the book are chapters three and four and the sections on Emerson and Thoreau in chapter five, where the texts discussed are not metaphorical fictions, but presentations of discursive thought. This nearly two-hundred-page core of the book (pp. 75-265) was, I suspect, written to add context and substance to the previously published essays, which occur as (to my mind, incongruous) wrappers to this far more interesting core.