Land, Exploitation, and the American Pastoral Theme Analysis

Throughout A Mercy, Morrison plays with the idea of the pastoral, or the use in literature of motifs and themes of idealized country and agricultural life. Pastorals recur throughout the English literary tradition, often to convey themes of innocence and romanticized views of hard labor.

Morrison connects her novel to the pastoral through her beautiful and striking descriptions of the early American landscape. Take, for example, Jacob’s ride through the Virginian wilderness to Maryland to meet D’Ortega. Jacob describes the landscape of North America, taking in the “forests untouched since Noah, shorelines beautiful enough to bring tears, wild food for the taking.” This is only one of many instances in which the American land is glorified and idealized in A Mercy.

Jacob and Rebekka, enchanted by the American landscape, dream of creating a livelihood by farming their small plot of land. Soon, however, Morrison troubles the idea of the romantic American Pastoral that Jacob and Rebekka dream of by connecting it to the slaughter of native people and to the slave trade. Just before expounding on the land’s beauty, Jacob thinks of Bacon’s Rebellion and the ongoing native genocide, connecting the land with the New World’s thriving slave trade. Then, after his statement about the beauty of the landscape, Jacob goes on to discuss how the land is continually changing hands and being fought over, possessed by Europe kings and rich aristocrats. In doing so, Jacob highlights the European understanding of land as property to be bought and sold. By narrating Jacob’s thoughts on slavery and the commodification of land in the space of minutes, the narrator seems to compare making land into property to commodifying people, suggesting that both are wrong.

Both theoretically and in practice, land and the agriculture business in the 17th century were deeply intertwined with slavery, as southern plantations relied heavily on slave labor to make their enormous profits. And not only is the American agricultural industry based on slavery, it is also later shown to be based on the deaths of native people as well. Later in the book, during Lina’s narrative, Morrison shows that being a white European landowner is only possible through the deaths of native people, who originally lived on the land. Lina remembers colonialists burning her village after a smallpox outbreak (a disease brought to America by Europeans), leaving her with lifelong trauma. This suggests that land-owning by European colonists was essentially the result of pillage and theft.

Morrison effectively shows that the beautiful land of North America and the agriculture businesses flourishing there are far from the innocent pastoral ideal, and instead are plagued by cruelty, violence, and exploitation. As the book continues and it becomes clear that the pastoral dream is linked to violence, Jacob’s pastoral dreams of a small farm die out. Jacob’s crops fail because he does not know how to handle the weather in North America, and while Lina teaches him what she knows about local farming, he does not always listen to her advice. Ultimately, the farm does not succeed in making a profit, forcing Jacob to turn to trading. As a result, Jacob profits from the slave trade that he detests, first more indirectly through men like D’Ortega, and then more directly as he becomes increasingly interested in obtaining wealth for a house. Jacob’s pastoral dream turns out to be untenable, one that concedes to the harsh realities of farm life and to the draw of wealth from the slave trade. The pastoral life that Jacob dreamed of is thus exposed as an American fiction, as, in an agricultural industry that is built on a system of forced labor, Jacob’s small family farm cannot compete. Morrison uses Jacob to mock the image of the American pastoral, suggesting that any romantic image of American agricultural life is a façade distracting from the reality, which is one of mass production made possible through slave labor and land stolen from native people.