Pastoral Tradition In Hurston

In choosing a pastoral retreat into the thinly populated Florida scrub, Hurston undertakes a critical revision in the novel of the traditional pastoral mode itself, replacing the garden of the cultivated pastoral with a wilderness exhibiting values of interdependence, cooperation, and egalitarianism. In the Southern pastoral tradition, the land inside the boundaries of the plantation is figured as the ideal middle state, a balance between the howling wilderness and the effete city that provides a firm and still refuge from the commotion of time and the outside world. The act of fencing, mainly in the pastoral tradition, helps man to characteristically domesticate land and nature by delineating boundaries and imposing a sense of order on formerly
‘wild’ terrain. It is usually assumed that in the pastoral literary genre celebration of rural provides a structural framework for exploring further binaries. Hurston, however, repetitively shows us the dual nature of fencing: fences disrupt an existing order while signaling the creation of a new order that threatens the wildness of the scrub, as well as the communal values of its inhabitants. The fences symbolize the modern society that Hurston seeks to leave, and their violation into the virtually uninhabited scrub region of north central Florida, involves in her observation, the danger of repression for nature and women in the same way.