Pastoral Process: Spenser, Marvel!, Milton.

Susan Snyder. Pastoral Process: Spenser, Marvel!, Milton.

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. xi + 241 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-8047-3106-3.

After distinguishing between two types of pastoral -- spatial or "Arcadian" pastoral, which focuses on an idyllic retreat from the complexities of everyday life, and temporal pastoral, which focuses on a Golden Age gone by -- Susan Snyder declares her interest in "pastoral process." She explains her title as follows: "'Process' implies the temporal, something altering over time. In this context it has to do with paradise once possessed and then lost, with an original pastoral perfection that later transmutes into its opposite, time and change creating a gulf between idyllic then and blighted alienated now" (3). Using Polixenes' "twin lambs" speech from The Winter's Tale (1.2.62-75) as a starting point, she analyzes pastoral as motivated by a nostalgia for a childhood that seems (at least in retrospect) idyllic, and as charting a passage from that innocence into an adulthood marked by difference, by disruption, and above all, by sexuality.

To readers of Friederich Schiller's On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795-1796) -- or of Paul Alpers's critique of its assumptions in his articles and recent book, What Is Pastoral? -- this will seem like familiar rerritory. As she acknowledges in a note, Snyder's approach is fundamentally Schillerian, and her theoretical framework would have seemed stronger if she had directly confronted Alpers' criticisms, rather than simply quoting him on Schiller's Importance. Nevertheless, her emphasis on the temporal is a welcome change from the orientation towards landscape that dominates many similarly inflected studies. Snyder also differs from most Schillerian critics in that she constructs a model of pastoral that is not completely idyllic: "Pastoral postulates the ideal, then, but derives its power from including, or being predicated upon, antipastoral elements: time, death, conflict, civilization, frustrated desire" (3). Her sensitivity to pastoral's creative oppositions allows her to produce complex, finely nua nced readings of her three exemplary texts: Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, Marvell's Mower poems, and Milton's Lycidas.

After examining these texts in derail, Snyder attempts to produce an "archeology" of pastoral (13). In her second chapter, she considers what she views as the "master myth" (78) behind pastoral -- the fall of Eden: she examines the various traditions surrounding Genesis and looks briefly at some (non-pastoral) classical analogues. She then analyzes "the psychological wishes and regrets" that "propel... both myth and poetry" (112-13), drawing eclectically upon Freud, Lacan, Jung, and object-relations psychology. Finally, she returns to early modern England to explore the historical and personal circumstances that made pastoral an attractive option for her chosen poets.

There is much that is interesting and informative here: the chapter on Genesis is particularly fascinating. But there are also many troubling omissions and assumptions. Any theory of pastoral that is founded on Polixenes' nostalgic speech is going to be partial at best, and Snyder begins by admitting this fact. She slides easily, however, into assertions of universality, so that we are told both that "the myth of Eden and its loss underlies all pastoral poetry," and that Milton's Paradise Lost is "not really pastoral" because "his Adam and Eve are not lambs frisking in the sun, pre-sexual and undifferentiated the one from another" (12). Snyder's archeological model further emphasizes her universalizing tendencies: one discourse is repeatedly discovered as the truth "underneath" another (12 ff.), and disparate modes of thought are brought together in ways that elide their particular differences. This approach can result in some very disconcerting suggestions, as when the movement from same-sex attachment to h eterosexual pairing that marks a number of Renaissance texts is presented as a universal pattern of sexual maturing.

Some of these difficulties could have been corrected if Snyder had examined classical pastoral in more detail. Admittedly, we can't all do everything, but Snyder's lack of a diachronic perspective is particularly surprising considering the temporal focus of her work: typically, the relation between "then" and "now" that exists within pastoral poems reflects the relationship these poems are establishing with earlier texts, and a consideration of the network of allusions behind the major images in her study would have deepened Snyder's analysis. Some more engagement with the different approaches of recent critics would also have been helpful: in addition to Alpers, Louis Montrose and Annabel Patterson (who are never mentioned by name) deserve more attention.

These are, of course, mostly problems in definition and framing -- and as anyone who has worked on the self-evident yet slippery mode of pastoral can attest, establishing an adequate framework is the hardest thing to do. Despite its limitations, Susan Snyder's book is an intelligent and useful piece of pastoral criticism.