city and town and country and wilds

[marycatelli]

Settings can contrast each other as character foils do,   One thing that can contrast is how settled they are.  And the fun part is that each one can look settled and civilized in contrast to the next.

It's not so common to contrast the country to the wilds, nowadays, but The Hobbit has the Arcadian Shire next to the wilds that Bilbo and the dwarves set out in.  The Wind in the Willows has the bucolic River and the Wild Woods.  Used to be a much commoner trope.  In the early 19th century, a landscape was beautiful only if fields or pasture, perhaps with a village or town or even city in sight.  Wild land could be picaresque, or sublime, but never beautiful.  When the first tourists headed toward America, they scuttled from city to city to see the buildings and institutions there; the only rivers they might travel down were the Connecticut and the Hudson, both of which had heavily farmed banks.  When that's the contrast, you tend to get the law-abiding shepherds and farmers, versus the desperate outlaws of the greenwood -- Toad and Rat and Mole vs. the weasels and stouts.  But often it's the uninhabited nature of it -- the wasteland.  (If you find it incomprehensible that they would really regard it as a waste, think of the arguments that there must be intelligent life elsewhere, or so much of the space in the universe would be wasted.)

The outlaw vs the law-abiding is much more common when the wild's contrasted with the town and city, which are lumped together for that contrast.  Especially if they feature the royal court.  To be sure, it can be the brave, stout outlaw fleeing corrupt law and injustice and praising the wilds for its freedom.  The Duke in As You Like It, for instance.  (And there the country is assimilated to the wild; Rosalind buys some sheep pastures for her refuge.)  On the other hand, it can be the law-abiding, orderly life of city and court versus the brutality of the outlaws.  Taran runs into vicious outlaws in The Chronicles of Prydain.  If, on the other hand, it's not outlaws but those who live in the wild, you may get into the barbarian virtues, the toughness, the courage, the hardiness to live in the wild.  Or they can just be barbaric.  Conan the Barbarian once fought against the barbaric Picts on behalf of civilization, though his speech at the end says that civilization is ephemeral and barbarism the fall back.

The contrast between country and town, or city, gives you the pleasant green rolling hills, bedecked with trees and flowers against the overdecorated and choked town.  Or perhaps the dreary, falling down houses on a monotonous landscape in contrast to the pleasantness and decoration of the city.  This leads into the simple, hard-working, honest, loyal country folk and the deceitful, intriguing, fickle city folk.  Or, conversely the educated, courteous city folk versus the narrow-minded, dull, incurious country folk who believe a bride from the next village is a furreiner.  The former trope is the common one nowadays, probably because urban living is so commonplace.  It was less common when there were fewer cities, but not unknown -- probably because writers were more likely to live in them, even then.  That's where court was, after all.  You get both the Shire and Gondor in The Lord of the Rings, and while both come off well, there is an element of the hobbits having fewer manners and more frankness than those of the city.  Jane Austen touches on the contrast in Pride and Prejudice, when the smallness of the neighborhood is touched on, compared to any city.  In Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, even though part of both novels take place in Bath, there is only some, but there is some:  Catherine finds much to turn her head with frivolity in Bath, and Anne is grieved that Elizabeth is so proud of her small home, where she spends her life in entertainment, and that the Admiral and his wife, having taken the hall, are no doubt looking after its poor as well or better than Elizabeth ever did.

Part of bittercon

Comments

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

" When the first tourists headed toward America, they scuttled from city to city to see the buildings and institutions there; the only rivers they might travel down were the Connecticut and the Hudson, both of which had heavily farmed banks."

Foreign visitors also traveled in the South, which was very different from New England and New York, and did it already in the early decades of the Republic.

By Thomas Jefferson's own design and desire, and those who followed him, Virginia in particular didn't have roads or urbanity because he and his party believed in the yeoman myth. Cities were places of rebellion (and incidentally places where runaway slaves could hide from their owners and contribute to unrest). Travel was by boat. Even today you see this and more of the Jefferson system (as opposed to say, Henry Clay's American System that believed in transportation and communications development) dominating the Virginia landscape.

There are discussions of this in Alexis de Tocqueville and his companions publications of what they encountered, among others from abroad, who were not touristing so much as investigating this new country. And they certainly traveled the Mississippi, up to the wilds of Michigan. His companion wrote a novel set there, that has extensive descriptions of the beauties of the wilderness.

In Africa the concept (in English language) 'the pale' carries even spiritual weight. Thresholds of every kind matter, from that which separates the sacred space from the domestic within the household compound, to which separates the village from the fields, and then the fields from the wild.

Love, C.

[marycatelli]

The South was also heavily agricultural.

It was not only Thomas Jefferson who thought that the agragian life was much healthier for the republic. Not only did it breed the country virtues, not only did it allow for a frugal indepedence -- people were still arguing in the late 19th century that wage laborers could not really be independent -- but it avoided the noisome pleasures and unhealthy conditions.

The attitude toward the wilds was changing in the 19th century. In full swing by the Romantic era. Washington Irving, after all, invented the Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip van Winkle to lend romance to the Catskills, but by the time of Niagara, you could stand on pure sublimity.

Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century by John F. Sears is good on the topic. You can read my review here

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Yeomanry = small family farms = agriculture.

Except the best lands were in the possession of the wealthy power elite of the planter class. And this consolidated, the consolidation accelerating through the middle of the Civil War.

There were local variations, such as in South Carolina, in which the most wealthy lived mostly in Charleston, due to the malarial death rates on the rice plantations that made this class the wealthiest in the country -- and who by-and-large, with the elite of the then wealthiest state in the country, Mississippi, forced secession and the Civil War.

[marycatelli]

Yeah, the reason why country life rises in the scales when urban life predominates is that you don't have to dilute the vision with reality.

[danielmedic.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the reason why country life rises in the scales when urban life predominates is that you don't have to dilute the vision with reality.

This. So very much, this.

[marycatelli]

Well, there is the element of escapism.

[danielmedic.livejournal.com]

Oh, I get why it happens: it's the same reason battles are glorious and heroic, and life in the mob is full of snappy dialog and zany adventures. I don't have to like it, though.

[marycatelli]

I still remember the dinner when my father, two sisters, and I were all tearing apart a book we had all read. Owing to differing interests, we all had something to complain about in unreality.