In her 1934 autobiography A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton proposes that the “world is a welter and has always been one.” Apprehending the “world” as little more than a mass of sensations, opinions and beliefs reminds us of Nietzsche's famous conception of advanced industrial “modernity,” its white noise, bewildering complexities and civic pathologies in The Will to Power. For Nietzsche, the sheer “abundance of disparate impressions” is “greater than ever […] The tempo of this influx prestissimo.” Does Wharton find relief from, or even a partial panacea for this “welter”—Nietzsche describes it as a hectic “flood of impressions”—in the improved, idyllic or pristine forms of nature synonymous with pastoral? Could this literary, social and cultural phenomenon be viewed as a storehouse of utopian ideas, at a time when many cultural commentators saw the “frontier” ending, cities expanding and rural communities dwindling? Might the pastoral illuminate alternative values to an audience grown weary of the mantras and watchwords synonymous with an American expansionist agenda: ceaseless and explosive growth, “development, size (bigness), and—by extension—change, novelty, innovation, wealth, and power.” These questions are not only central to my book but acquire greater urgency given Lawrence Buell's recent claim that pastoral is a type of “cultural equipment that Western thought has for more than two millennia been unable to do without.”

My research situates Wharton as an author who is acutely responsive to pastoral tropes and terrain, among other species of spaces. She addresses the affective and geographical resonances of such sites, especially sparsely populated localities, and landforms—voguish mountain resorts, private ornamental gardens, lush public parks, monumental and “sham” ruins—which offered pampered American socialites a brief escape from the “welter.” In a letter to Anna Bahlmann from May 3, 1893, Wharton recounts her travels through Brittany, France:

The beauty of this “pastoral landscape” is mirrored and enacted in mellifluous and witty effects of rhyme (“château […] plateau”) and alliteration.