earticle

영어

This paper argues that the rural landscape, the values of agriculture, and the nature of farmers which Hamlin Garland describes in his Main-Travelled Roads sharply contradict what Thomas Jefferson suggested in his agrarianism. In Garland's short stories, the visitors of the country tend to see the farming villages as a place incorporated with the beauty of nature, the pleasure of farm work, and the simple life of farmers. By contrast, the actual farmers are disposed to perceive their own place as that of poverty, painful labor, and enslavement. As a result, the two contradictory landscapes are painted in Main-Travelled Roads: one, peaceful pastoral scenes seen through the eyes of sentimental visitors, and the other, scenes of dejected farm life viewed by the farmers themselves. The discrepancy between the actual life of Western farmers described in Main- travelled Roads and the pastoral vision suggested by Jefferson in his agrarianism derives from the incompatibility of the two writers' views of both human desire and pastoral virtues. The Western farmers in Garland's stories no longer live a simple but satisfactory life in harmony with nature. Those farmers basically have the same kind of social and material desire as city-dwellers have. The prairie farming villages are not an environment for pastoral poets to praise, but it is a place in which farmers struggle to make a living through drudgery against land. In Garland's stories, most of the farmers wish to escape from the country and the severe agricultural labor. Despite their desire for cultural life and material affluence, however, they feel frustrated by the limitations of their harsh reality.