"Pastoral Process" draws a basic distinction between two aspects of
the pastoral ideal: the Arcadian pastoral, which locates the
unspoiled paradise in space, apart from the complexities of city
and court, and finds it accessible for limited periods of
recuperation and reorientation; and the Golden Age mode, which
locates the ideal pastoral life in time gone by, always already
lost as soon as it is apprehended as paradise.
The author's central aim is an archaeology of the nostalgia-based
pastoral of the vanished Golden Age. On the surface level, her
close readings of certain Renaissance poems and
sequences--Spenser's "Shepheardes Calender, " Marvell's Mower
poems, and Milton's "Lycidas--"clarify "pastoral process": the
dislocating transition from innocence to experience, from secure
centeredness in a comfortable, self-mirroring world to a new
condition of division, displacement, and alienation. The advent of
individuation and sexual desire, and the internalization of
undirectional time and universal death, transform the pastoral
paradise into a wasteland or leave the newly self-conscious
protagonist outside his former idyll, looking in.
Excavation beneath these initial readings uncovers the master myth
of Eden that informs them, as well as parallel narratives of loss
such as the various accounts of the Golden Age or the tale in
Plato's "Symposium" of beings fallen from original wholeness into
fragmentation and lack. Ramifications of the master myth include
Christian and Jewish commentaries that helped shape traditional
understandings of the story, and especially the subversive
tradition that persisted, against the strong tide of orthodox
interpretation, in reading the Fall of Man in terms of childhood
wholeness breaking down in the wake of sexual knowledge and the
burden of full, separated consciousness.
Below the poetic utterances and the shaping myths lies the deeper
archaeological stratum of the unconscious and the mechanisms that
construct, always retrospectively and often counterfactually, a
blissful childhood. Beyond Freud's own theories, later offshoots
and reworkings of his psychology are invoked to explore
psychological experiences and needs that inform both myths and
poems: Jung, the developmental psychologists, and especially Lacan.
The study concludes by returning to the surface to consider the
pastoral impulse in historical terms, as a defining moment in the
careers of Spenser, Marvell, and Milton and as a special urgency in
the early modern times they inhabited.
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