on Appalachian Pastoral

Jack Love (JL): All right, so first question for you, how did you arrive at the project of Appalachian Pastoral?

Michael Martin (MM): Thank you both for having me today. I very much appreciate this discussion. Appalachian Pastoral was not my dissertation. I had worked on a different topic, and my first faculty position was at a teaching university called the University of Charleston in West Virginia. I'm from Virginia, and it is Appalachian, but it didn't feel as self-consciously Appalachian as when I was in West Virginia at my first faculty position. I listened to my students. I tried to soak up as much of the culture as I could and realized that this is a rich area for a 19th century-ist to make an intervention. At that point, I started attending Appalachian Studies conferences. I highly recommend them, Appalachian Studies Association conferences—there was just one at Marshall, and I was able to go—and basically, I started soaking it in. That was number one, just listening to my students, listening to their cultural needs.

Number two, I started searching for material online, and I realized there's a wonderful double-edged sword. I use archive.org so much. I presume that maybe you all do as well. I found out-of-print books about Appalachia from the antebellum period, and they were rich with details. Some of them were extremely high quality, like Charles Lanman's Letters from the Alleghenies. They were well-written, and anyone with a general knowledge of how an open-ended epistle from the British tradition or the continental tradition would know what's being written in these Appalachian travel logs. So, I started looking them up.

I realized that scholars, general lay readers don't have access to this material, but it's accessible via the internet. And I just started searching and searching and searching. I guess the only other thing I'd say is I just started speaking with other scholars, and I realized that Appalachian studies was largely a 20th-century field.

They think that Appalachian study starts with Mary Murphree, who published under a pseudonym in the late 19th century in Tennessee. But I started looking and finding cultural indicators for Appalachia in early literature. For example, two texts that you both know would be William Bartram’s Travels Through North and South Carolina and Georgia (1791), and then you get William Byrd's History of the Dividing Line (1728). Those two texts seem to me to be Appalachian. They are about the mountains. They are about Cherokee culture. They describe going into a particular ecosystem. And so, I started seeing a genealogy for what could be an early Appalachian history in American literature. I just started putting all these pieces together and sat in my basement and asked my wife to help watch the kids when I needed to write, or they took a nap and just made time to write and kept writing and kept writing.

But it basically came about through talking with my students, soaking in Appalachian culture, going online, and going to Appalachian studies conferences, and then basically allotting an amount of time for this writing and this endeavor.

JL: Who are the scholars who influenced your thinking, both in the past and also currently, maybe even right now?

MM: I found that early on in grad school or just right out of grad school, I read Lawrence Buell's work a lot, both the literary histories of New England as well as his theories of toxic discourse. I guess his method really stood out to me. I remember reading something of his where he was so excited that he found a lost Timothy Dwight manuscript from, I think, Connecticut. I was really immersed in his work because he approaches literature from an historicist vantage, but a theoretical one at the same time. I wish those two poles wouldn't be so exclusive. I went to Isley in England many years ago, and I got to hear the work of a scholar named Terry Gifford. That helped me rethink my idea of the pastoral, because the pastoral is usually thought of as passive, out of time, elitist, disconnected. “It's just someone's fantasy after all,” goes the dominant thinking. But he had something called the post-pastoral. He basically argued that there's a dialectic between the self and the environment. He used King Lear on the Moors as his example. That really influenced me. I used him in the book. By the time I got the book finished and everything, I'd say he's a new scholar, but his work came out in the 90s. So, it's less new, but it's still essential.

This one scholar that I really worked with, because many of my book’s ideas deal with fantasy and the environment was Annette Kolodny. I don't really like saying that one's encounter with the environment is purely an ideological function, because I don't think it is. It was one of those grad school seminars that you have to take and then you study like F.O. Matthiessen, Annette Kolodny, and all these 19th century and 20th century American studies folks. Her theory of sex and the environment, sexualized versions of the environment, male fantasies. I know that errs more towards the fantasy element, but she really influenced me.

Then maybe one or two more. There's a scholar that's in Appalachian Studies named Kevin O'Donnell, and he published a book called Seekers of Scenery (2004). He had written an introduction, and then he'd introduce all these writers like Joel Chandler Harris or someone like that. But his introduction about tourism got me really thinking, and his introduction about people going into Appalachia, both at the beginning of the 19th century and the postbellum period, really influenced my thinking. I've still been in touch with him.

I'm working on a Cherokee project right now. I'm trying to get a book published with mixed success. But just listening to Cherokee scholars and early Native American cultural memory transmitted through oral history has been fascinating. I guess one more that I've been working with, I was lucky enough to be featured in a collection called Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place (2023) edited by Jessica Cory. Her work has influenced me. But there was a scholar in there named Stewart Plein, and she recently passed away. She was a head librarian at the West Virginia WVU collection. Her argument in the collection was that you don't look at early Appalachian literature, or Appalachian Studies, and just look for the stereotype of the White Hillbilly, as is the cultural norm. She said, the cultural thing you should look for would be a rhododendron, or plants that give an affiliative bond to the region. That's influenced my thinking now. I just wrote a chapter on Susan Fenimore Cooper, an article that came out in Appalachian Journal. Stewart Plein's work influenced my thinking. But I genuinely think those cultural markers are there. So those are some scholars.

I also used Kate Soper in the book, What is Nature: Culture, Politics, and the Non-Human (1995). I got in a book called the Green Studies Reader (2000), which you just kind of latch on to. It's like, “Oh, here's this scholar. Oh, here's what they're arguing.” It's a very nice way to enter into this field of green studies.

So those are some of the things that influenced my thinking.

Leah Olson (LO): It's so wonderful to hear the sort of lineage that you're engaging with, and how intimately you're still familiar with their work and their names. Thank you. That was really beautiful.

MM: Oh, of course. I mean, you have rapport with them, too. I'm sure you've read some of them, but their ideas resonate. The things you study, as I studied as a graduate student, I then could tap into, I knew about them, and then could go into them deeper for the book. So, the grad school seminars were helpful, believe it or not.

LO: Yeah, absolutely.

JL: That's good to keep in mind, because sometimes, you know, I feel like we're all kind of like, are they that helpful? So that's great to know down the line.

LO: This question is interested in some of the methodologies and focus of the book. You note your study focuses on Appalachian literature due to a tendency towards historic over determinism in America and American and Appalachian studies. How has your diagnosis of these fields been received? And what presented the most difficulty in writing and researching and advancing this literature first approach in your study?

MM: Thank you for your question, difficult though it might be. I like it. The idea of just studying literature first, it's somewhat of the new critics. What they would suggest is just look at the text, you look at the ideas, you disconnect from history. That's not really what I try to do. John Alexander Williams has this chapter called “In the Ocean of Mountains, 1790 - 1870” in his authoritative history of the region, and it's one of the very few ones that I found that actually referenced pre-20th century or antebellum period in Appalachian studies. I used him. I thought he was someone that was useful and his idea of aestheticizing the environment that he argues in his chapter. So, I didn't want to create a false dichotomy between historical studies and literary studies. I just didn't want history to define the field and just say they're agriculturalist or they did this. I felt like that's mainly who's written on early Appalachian studies.

It's a new field. Not many people have written on it. Once you enter into it, people have been asking me to do projects and things like that. So, it's been kind of nice. I have not been featured in many historical journals. As far as I know, what I have been featured in would be, and it's an honor, eco-critical journals like ISLE. Terry Gifford wrote a review of my book, and it was an honor. He found things that needed to be improved, things that he liked, which is always nerve wracking. But I would say to answer your question, it would be nice if historical studies would consider that literature first methods work. don't mean to stereotype them. I think they're very nuanced and they do stuff with historiography, but I think that's still unfolding. I would hope that my book resonates a bit more in historical studies. But at the same time, most of the interventions, most of the things that have been occurring have been in eco-criticism, including something in Appalachian Journal that was published.

But I guess I'd say one of the things I would hope is that I also worked with or studied lithographs for this book. There's a version of history that looks at the historical study of material artifacts and art. The idea would be that my book dovetails with that. Let's study the history of lithographs and the way they were received and printed with the study of first person or critical writing. I would hope that the text encourages material artifacts, studies in art history and maybe doesn't see a dichotomy as much as I've set it up as a dichotomy between history and literature. But those are some of my initial ideas.

Kit Bauserman (KB): You mentioned that many of the authors you choose to study work to represent Appalachia for Northern audiences, but you also highlight a great degree of work from the Northern ends of Appalachia. How do you see these exchanges not only happening between the North and South of the US, but also Northern and Southern Appalachia itself?

MM: I first start off by saying that one of the arguments of the book is that an idea of Appalachia was being created and disseminated for a Northern audience in terms of circulation, money, ideas. But there's a degree of realism embedded within it that you actually go out into the Virginia mountains, and you test the sublime and see whether it works. According to the writers I found, it did. But to answer your question, I unconsciously and self-consciously use Central Appalachia rather than Northern.

I think there's still a history about Pennsylvania and New York that's waiting to be written about early Appalachian narratives and early studies from the region, just as I think Mississippi, South Carolina, and Northern Alabama are not represented much in Appalachian studies and early Appalachian material that I found. The dialectic is between the North and the South. Both are pretty much the same in what I found. Whether it's Caroline Gilman describing her sojourns into what is now West Virginia or it's Charles Lanman going into the Allegheny Mountains or the Blackwater Falls, they use the same ideas. They say, “I'm going to presume that it's already developed, that you can get there. You can imagine putting your hotels there and let me put fairies and pastoral ideas embedded within the landscape”.

What I found, and I did try to find Southern texts, is that the few you'd find would be on Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, or somewhere like that that. It would be very, very hard to travel to in the 19th century. There's actually a rich history there. Mammoth Cave is one of the few Southern parts of the book that I established. It was held by free Blacks who would give tours. Even for that, when I wrote about it, I found that you couldn't get to the region. They would imagine these routes for pleasure travelers to get to the region, but it's not like you're traveling to the hot springs in Western Virginia. There are just the horses, the footpaths. They'd imagine sites of tourism before there were actual physical sites that you could travel to get there. People could get there, but it's difficult. So, the South was more impregnable in the cultural imaginary.

The central part of Appalachia, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, was much more heavily traversed. People could go from Raleigh into the Black Mountains, if you have money, if you're middle class. So, there's a sense that my book only goes a little bit down the South. It's mainly central. North is still waiting to be established, but the same ideology and same ideas permeate in their depictions of both regions.

JL: Even thinking about the different regions of Appalachia is very interesting and how they're represented or not super well represented even today. I think that's a really good point. We don't really think of the deep South, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama in that region at all, even though part of it is considered that.

LO: This question is inspired largely by your very first chapter, which I was very intrigued by. I'm wondering how you see the tensions between how you describe the sort of limitations of these travel writers during the period, informing or working with your own efforts to expand a sort of limited literary scholarly framework about Appalachian pastorals. How do those things inform one another? How are they interacting? I think that's an interesting relationship between those two modes of writing.

MM: Sure, sure. You mean limitations in terms of their ability to travel, what they can write about, the frames they have to use?

LO: Yeah, period limitations that they're experiencing, whether that's access to publishing, travel, forms that they know that they can use. And now, in this other form, literary scholarship, that you're engaging with in attempting to expand a sort of limited framework as well.

MM: For the book, the way you just framed it now helps me to see. I tried to find minority writers. I was lucky to find women writers going into the region, simply because that material access, stereotypes of gender and race at the time, severely limited writers. The idea would be Caroline Gilman would be traveling from the North. Many of them traveled from the North. Susan Fenimore Cooper was one of the few that was actually storied and in the region, writing about it, which I value particularly. But basically, if Gilman didn't sell papers, she couldn't get more money to go on her travels and sojourns. For a female writer, a female journalist, you're perilously close to financial challenges, to put it mildly. The limitations of those writers are that they had to write for a market. They had to use this market. They had to create this idea. The artist that I reference the most is David Hunter Strother, who did illustrations of Blackwater Falls. If he doesn't produce beautiful drawings, he will no longer be the most eminent artist of the American landscape as he was in the 1850s. I think the market heavily limited what they could do.

But to get to the other part of your question about the pastorals, I would think that what they were trying to do was show a landscape through a medium they already knew, and that would be the landscape aesthetic tradition that comes from the British and continental Europe, that well-heeled readers would know. They'd use these tropes, they'd use these symbols. The pastoral was there in terms of a pre-existing a priori idea that would then be tested in a landscape. Honestly, my research suggests that David Hunter Strother, at least for Virginia Illustrated: Containing a Visit to the Virginian Canaan (1857), did travel into the region. He did experience these things, and he just uses rhetorical flourishes at times of seeing fairy nymphs like Anine in the region.

So, what's interesting is that it's not just pure fantasy. It's a pastoral enacted—some of it is sexualized, some of it is the female body being idealized into the landscape—but they really did travel there. If you've ever seen Blackwater Falls, that's what it looks like. If you've ever seen Harper's Ferry, it does look like something beautiful, though not quite as beautiful as Thomas Jefferson describes it. I think their writings are real experiences. I think the pastoral is just a frame. It's not fictive. There's that limitation that they're actually in the landscape.

Someone like Susan Fenimore Cooper, who actually lives there, has fewer limitations despite issues of sex and gender because she knows the topography of the region. She knows the flora and fauna, and she goes into intense detail. As long as you're storied, as long as you're in the region, whether it's Native American or later on Susan Fenimore Cooper, you can write with some degree of authority on it. If you're pivoting towards the market and your journal is not something private, you’d have to hawk material and try to get people to come. Therefore, you could say, “I'm the one who did this. You can reference it by my work. And let me tell you about some hotels along the way that may or may not exist.”

It's this fragile back and forth between limitations that they have, physical and ideological, and creating a fantasy or creating this idea that they can enact into the landscape if more people travel there.

JL: They've been great questions and great answers, for sure. And the last one is mine. And this comes partially because I have also lived in Appalachia for three years, Knoxville region. This question is asking you to think about what your book might say about what we're still seeing in Appalachia today in terms of ecotourism. My question is, how does 19th century interest in Appalachia and the natural world of this region serve as a precursor for American ecotourism today, especially stuff like the National Park Service, which extends beyond, obviously, the Appalachian region?

MM: I didn't know you lived in Knoxville. It’s very pretty, Knoxville, on the river. It's very lovely.

At first, go backwards in time to talk about the way that national parks existed, something that surprised me. If you think about the places, the sites that are ones you want to go to, like Trenton Falls, New York, or the Blackwater Falls, or Harper's Ferry, or the Black Mountains, or when the president of Washington and Lee would go past Lexington and go into the mountains there. What really surprised me is that many of the things that are now state parks, like Blackwater Falls as a state park, existed in the cultural imaginary in oral form before it became written. I found that there's this rich oral tradition. People in Appalachian studies talk abo in terms of genealogy, that a lot of the white folks from the region are Scottish-Irish or Scots Irish. I found there was a circulation of oral folklore there. I know that's not exactly what you're asking me, but that circulation of oral elements also existed for these sites. When Gilman went to Trenton Falls, she references seeing it before. I don't know what print media existed. Oral circulation gives a rich area to understand how print media may be circulated outside of what is known in scholarship, antebellum American literary scholarship.

But in terms of these sites, I'm really interested in space and place theory. My current project on Cherokee oral history goes into how cultural memory is perpetuated through naming places. And what I've found, or what I'm thinking of, is that just these naming of places helped create a cultural idea of the importance of the sites that people can then co-visit. I guess the term I'd use is geocaching. I think that's what's happening in the modern park system when these places are named, that you're supposed to go, that you're supposed to see them. This is part of the American experience.

I found some of these were related to the Grand Tour. You would go on the Grand Tour to Niagara, and that's roughly part of Appalachia, but then you go into the Falls a little lower, and there's spaces you're supposed to find. Yes, I think these sites were part of the national park system in consciousness before. As much as I kind of talked about fantasy during our discussion, I also think there's a highly embedded environmental ethos. I mean, there's a sense of preserving the environment. So that tension and that idea of, “Yes, I'm going to use the continental theory to familiarize myself with continental landscape aesthetics, to familiarize the reader with the landscape,” would also be connected to, “Let's preserve this area so people could go trout fishing 100 years from now in the Blackwater River, and the Blackwater Falls,” and the idea of getting lost in all of that. In one of my book’s chapters, there’s an offshoot of this that I talk about getting lost in the Blackwater Chronicle (1853) that I published in the Journal of Appalachian Studies. Its real-world topography. You’d have to know a ridge, which way the ridge is, the water is flowing, or you are on the wrong side. This travel writing is not this pure fantasy. There’s an environmental ethos, there’s a sense of visiting the topography of the landscape. Many of these sites became, if they aren’t actual state parks in the system, they are local parks that people go to and preserve. You don’t mess with it. You don’t litter. You preserve it. There’s no development. It’s kind of like Walden. And so, there’s that kind of idea that I think is being furthered in their depiction.

JL: I really liked the geocaching comment, these places that we’ve kind of turned into almost monuments that you need to see. Just thinking of the big ones from the big national parks: Old Faithful, El Capitan, Niagara, stuff like that. All the way down to like the local parks that are being preserved by local people in Appalachia and beyond. I think that is very true.

MM: The local is embedded within it. Good restatement, good way of framing it.

LO: I was really interested in the element of leisure that is embedded in travel writing in general and how you engage with it in your introduction as a sort of framing. I think even the last line of your introduction was a sort of invitation for us as readers to engage in a kick back and enjoy the reading of this text. I am wondering how leisure informed both the research side of this and the writing side of this. What is the relationship between leisure in the writings you are looking at and in the process of this study?

MM: Sure. Oh, I mean, you as have much recourse as I in the developing field of leisure studies, and I will speak to it as much as I can. The idea would be, when you get to the western side of Eastern Continental Divide, those places are harder to get to. You could imagine sites of pleasure, of leisure. And social class comes into play, race comes into play, that only certain people could have access to it. I think leisure was being sold, and I think that one way to think of it was most of the stories I discuss in my book are written to would be travelers. There is someone addressed in these letters. You don’t know who it is. It’s this unknown person. It’s even the same way with Susan Fenimore Cooper’s journal, her diary. It’s like, who is the addressee? We are their addressees on this occasion. But in the rhetorical gesture is this direct open invitation to experience the mountains vicariously through the book. Henry Colton references a hotel you could stay in if you were traveling from Raleigh. It’s only accessible via coach, so you need to ride your horse for much of the way. But as I was traveling and writing the book in Western Virginia, I came across something called Hot Spring. I was traveling a side road, and I didn’t know there was such a place. It’s a leisure resort. It’s purely rural. There was nothing around it, maybe a couple horse farms. And it’s isolated and it’s preserved. I would hope that all of us, despite social class could enjoy nature, but a lot of the leisure that is being perpetuated in the book is for upper middle class, well-heeled, well-read people. David Hunter Strother was the foremost illustrator at the time. His illustrations were still being disseminated to the masses, not just to the upper class, not just the middle class, not just males despite it being written. A lot of these being written by males for males. I think leisure would have been disseminated as a category. It had distinct boundaries. But it went beyond those boundaries. I still think that even today—Asheville. Go to Asheville. It’s this beautiful North Carolina mountain city. Or, the eastern part of Tennessee where a lot of people in Louisiana where I live go for its sense of leisure in the mountains. It’s pleasure. You can enjoy it.  I think part of that pleasure is related to activities like fishing or staying by hot springs and preserving it for posterity. There’s a lot that goes on there in terms of leisure and the way that leisure is framed.