New Agrarianism and American Children's Literature

234 Pages·2015·1.1 MB·English

by  Emily C. Cormier

University of Connecticut
OpenCommons@UConn
Doctoral Dissertations University of Connecticut Graduate School
4-3-2015
New Agrarianism and American Children’s
Literature
Emily C. Cormier
University of Connecticut - Storrs, [email protected]
Follow this and additional works at:https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations
Recommended Citation
Cormier, Emily C., "New Agrarianism and American Children’s Literature" (2015).Doctoral Dissertations. 684.
https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/684
New Agrarianism and American Children’s Literature
Emily Cardinali Cormier, Ph.D.
University of Connecticut, 2015

This dissertation explores the ways in which New Agrarian theory opens new
interpretations of the child’s farm novel in both American Literature and Children’s
Literature. It examines both large-scale relationships—such as between culture and
agriculture—as well as intimate relationships—between members of a family and the
land upon which they live—contending that there is a direct relationship between the
health of a community and the health of its soil. The farm novel in Children’s Literature
is a rich site of inquiry for New Agrarians because it works on both scales: intimately
depicting the workings of farm families, while fitting such families into larger national
narratives about rural community.
This dissertation intervenes productively in Ecocriticism and New Agrarianism, where
works for children have often been slighted by scholarship, as well as in Children’s
Literature, where ecocriticism has excluded the working farm child, and the relationship
between farm life and nostalgia has yet to be critically addressed. This project also
intervenes in New Agrarianism by questioning the assumptions of white privilege and
heteropatriarchy upon which some of this theory is built. Additionally, this work adds a
necessary perspective to both African-American Children’s Literature (which has often
focused on the urban) and Black Agrarianism (which has not yet considered works for
children). Fundamental to this analysis is considering to what extent nostalgia or an
attachment to the Pastoral has shaped farm novels for children.
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New Agrarianism and American Children’s Literature

Emily Cardinali Cormier

B.A., Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, 2000
M.A., University of Connecticut, 2014

A Dissertation
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
at the
University of Connecticut

2015
iii

Copyright by
Emily Cardinali Cormier, Ph.D.

2015
iv

APPROVAL PAGE

Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation

New Agrarianism and American Children’s Literature

Presented by
Emily Cardinali Cormier, B.A., M.A.

Major Advisor
___________________________________________________________________
Katharine Capshaw, Ph.D.

Associate Advisor
___________________________________________________________________
Margaret R. Higonnet, Ph.D.

Associate Advisor
___________________________________________________________________
William H. Major, Ph.D.

University of Connecticut
2015
v
For Ken, Theo, and Charles
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Acknowledgements

My deepest appreciation goes to Kate Capshaw. Thank you for your unfailing support,
and for working so closely with me on this project over the years. I am so grateful to have
had an opportunity to work with you.

Many thanks to Margaret Higonnet, whose ideas and questions keep me thinking. Thank
you for insights and for making me a better writer.

Bill Major, I’m so grateful for your willingness to join my committee at a crucial
moment. And also, thanks for Grounded Vision; it inspired me to pursue New
Agrarianism in the first place.

My thanks to the dedicated professors at Saint Mary’s College between 1996 and 2000:
Ted Billy, Tom Bonnell, Ros Clark, Laura Haigwood, the late Sr. Jean Klene, Ann Loux,
Max Westler, and Doris Watt.

I’d also like to thank my friends in the Quinnipiac University English Department, who
generously allowed me to haunt the halls of CAS-1 while I was writing. Thank you
especially to Kim O’Neill, who was more than kind in sharing her office space.

I would like to thank a number of friends, professors, and helpers along the way: Doreen
Bell, Luba Bugbee, Nicole and Danny Casbarro, Lynette Cormier, Michelle Cormier,
Andrea D’Addio, Anna-Mae Duane, Jennie-Rebecca Falcetta, Annika Fisher, Wayne
Franklin, Ellen Frueh, John Gatta, Kate Jauch, Liz Kalbfleisch, Clare Costley King’oo,
Rachael Lynch, Charles Mahoney, Jean Marsden, Marilyn Nelson, Penelope Pelizzon,
Jerry Philips, Maxi Polihronakis Richmond, Greg Semenza, Victoria Ford Smith, Krissa
Skogen, and Mary Udal.

Special thanks to Lee Reiber Adams for being an extraordinarily good listener. And to
Kathy Lee, for neighborliness and good cheer. My special thanks, too, to Abbye Meyer,
for being a loyal dissertation-buddy.

My thanks to the many other family, friends, and colleagues who have helped during my
graduate school years.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my parents, Lauri and Hank Cardinali for their
tremendous support. And, of course, to my siblings, Sarah, Katie, and David—thanks for
your encouragement and love.

Thanks to Theo and Charles for keeping things real. I love you both.

I will never be able to thank Ken Cormier enough for his steadfast love and belief in me.
Thanks for being the kind of husband who kept the show running so that I could write.
You are the one who understood me every step of the way, and I love you.
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Table of Contents

1. Introduction 1
Myth-making and the American Farm Novel for Children

2. Farmer Boy and Phebe Fairchild, Her Book 27
Pre-Industrial American Farm Life

3. Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie 83
Frontier Mythology and Nostalgia

4. The Land 127
Recovering Black Agrarianism

5. Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea 165
Female Identity and Agrarianism

Conclusion 201

Notes 206

Works Cited 217
1. Introduction: Myth-making and the American Farm Novel for Children

There are few images so evocative of a virtuous and healthy upbringing as that of the
happy, capable farm child, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and chewing on a stalk of long
green grass in the sun. Despite the fact that history tells a different story, radically
different if one considers race, gender, and class, the farm maintains its position in
American culture as an ideal place for child-rearing. Emerson suggests so much in his
1858 essay entitled “Farming” where, posing as a disillusioned city-dweller, he muses:
“Well, my children, whom I have injured, shall go back to the land, to be recruited and
cured by that which should have been my nursery, and now shall be their hospital”
(Emerson 134). In this, Emerson suggests that those who are deprived of a nursery in the
country, and instead raised with “town life and town vices” will be rendered ill, only to
be cured by a return to the farm. In such moments we see an oft-repeated ideological
handshake, as it were, between glorification of the farm and belief in such a thing as an
ideal childhood. One cultural artifact of such a confluence is the child’s farm novel.
The child’s farm novel opens surprising new avenues into understanding the
intersections between nostalgia, personal history, gender studies, and national mythology
when located within the emerging field of New Agrarianism. Critics use New Agrarian
cultural theory to understand and articulate the relationship between farming and human
community. This theoretical framework considers farming practices, technologies, and
land management not as a backdrop to human communities, but as the primary (but often
unrecognized) way we can understand human relationships, both intimate and large-scale.
Children’s literature that emerges from an agricultural community (or is written about
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historic farming communities) is uniquely suited to New Agrarian analysis in part
because children’s worlds are circumscribed by the home and the nuclear family. The
literature that emerges is consequently packed with details about how a family works
together, and how that family fits into the larger agrarian society of which it is a part. I
have selected works for this project that showcase a variety of agricultural scenarios, in
order to investigate how family and community relationships develop according to
changes in farming practices.
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s early works account for a large portion of my study, as there is
no author who even approximates her influence on perceptions of American farm life for
children. Wilder, along with Montgomery, are hugely popular, perhaps because they bear
witness to historical change and thereby gain an adult audience. Wilder’s first three
novels, Little House in the Big Woods, Farmer Boy, and Little House on the Prairie, also
offer three disparate farming situations where readers have an opportunity to directly
witness how changes in agricultural practice also signal shifts in family and community
relationships. I argue that Wilder’s works—at once memoir, fiction, and national
mythology—demonstrate the losses sustained, both personal and national, as an older
agrarian order faded away. In my analysis of Mildred Taylor’s work, I underscore the
problematic assumptions of white privilege associated with the agricultural imperative in
the United States. In her novel, The Land, Taylor refuses to participate in nostalgia for a
time of vicious iniquity, but concurrently suggests that black experience on the soil
cannot be defined solely by the history of enslavement. This project also situates L.M.
Montgomery in her specific agricultural moment—one of transition from diversified
livelihood farms to industrialized, market-driven farms—and I argue that such a