SOURCE: Bakker, Jan. “Some Other Versions of Pastoral: The Disturbed Landscape in Tales of the Antebellum South.” In No Fairer Land: Studies in Southern Literature Before 1900, edited by J. Lasley Dameron and James W. Mathews, pp. 67-86. Troy, NY: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1986.

In the following essay, Bakker traces the pattern of pastoral and anti-pastoral impulses in four narrative romances of the Old South.

                              They will bring Forbidden sounds into the silent brake,           And banish thence the birds, and blight                     the spring. … 

William Gilmore Simms, “The Widow of the Chief” (1839)

In both early and late pre-Civil War Southern romances, there appears one unvarying motif. In pausing to put regional and national experience into fiction, writers of the Old South created in their works an inevitable idyllic, nostalgic counterpoint, in the form of a powerfully suggestive juxtaposition, which can be described in the phrase “pastoral and anti-pastoral.” This motif...