A New Frontier?: Postwar Suburban Sprawl and Contradictions in American Pastoralism

Abstract

This paper aims at reconsidering Leo Marx`s The Machine in the Garden (1964) through the lens of the suburban sprawl in the post-World War era in America. While it captures a key tension in American culture between nature/civilization and primitivism/progress-the "contradiction" between rural myth and veneration of technology, I turn the tables on the book by tackling what is missing from Marx`s comprehensive vision of American pastoralism-the examination of the suburban sprawl in the post-World War II era. Given that the image of a cultivated "garden" or a "middle landscape" envisioned in "a countryside that men have acted upon" meshes well with that of postwar suburbia as a place exposing a number of contradictory cultural elements of American pastoralism, Marx`s inattention to or negligence of postwar suburbia is surprising. It is particularly so, given that the suburban sprawl was already dominating the American landscape at the time of the publication of The Machine in the Garden. This paper argues that such an oversight is symptomatic and determining of the very reason Marx was compelled to retreat into the literary consciousness rather than provide a kind of "post-pastoral" vision in American culture. In other words, as "complex" pastoralism he favors over "sentimental" pastoralism has overtones of technological determinism, retreat to the literary consciousness and an imagined landscape would be the best recourse available to him. Finally, I work through both the limitation and promise of Marx`s pastoral visions by intervening critically in contemporary American ecological consciousness that compartmentalizes nature and civilization. Such a tendency points to the internal contradiction between rural life and technological progress that Marx sees in American pastoralism`s attempt to solve the problem by having it both ways-embracing rural ideals while pursuing technological advancement. With nature turned into a pristine space that should be preserved far beyond daily life, environmentalists may forget their dependence on the biosphere and abandon any sense of ecological responsibility. All that remains of the middle is an empty symbolism of rural life and ersatz rusticity of the suburb. In this sense, Marx`s The Machine in the Garden is still to serve as a conduit for an American sensibility that can inspire a constructive ecological imagination by reconceptualizing the notion of middle landscape-uniting urban, wilderness, and rural landscape and bridging the divide between civilization and nature.