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