Kris Choe

Dr. Leslie Bruce

English 307

28 March 2013

Pastoral Literature:

The Gateway from Innocence to Corruption

There is perhaps nothing more peaceful and inviting than a plentiful garden under the

rays of warm sunlight. Beyond the garden, there are valleys and hills. They are lush, green, and

overflowing with sweet-smelling flowers. Even further beyond these valleys and hills loom

majestic, isolated, and beautiful mountains. In the middle of this rural setting stands a lone

shepherd, watching over his sheep as they graze. Beside him, a young girl comes running and the

two embrace in a love so innocent, it seems almost too good to be true. Pastoral literature, during

its earliest conception, featured a scene much like this one. When thinking of pastoral literature,

the typical definition is “a literary work portraying rural life or the life of shepherds, esp. in an

idealized or romantic form” (OED). But pastoral literature has transcended its benign beginnings.

As time progressed, it has been used as a tool to illuminate the world’s corruption by

highlighting its innocence.

The word “pastoral” can be applied to many disciplines. Among them are art, music,

religion, and of course, literature. Even within literature, the pastoral is broken down into more

specific modes of writing, like poetry, prose, and plays. Its exact origins in the literary field are

unknown, but the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) tells us that it comes from the classical Latin

word “pastoralis”, meaning “relating to the tending of livestock” (OED). It can be traced back to

various forms of ancient and medieval writing, especially the ancient Roman type of poetry

called eclogues, which featured a conversation between shepherds. Italian writers like Dante

Alighieri, author of Dante’s Inferno, wrote eclogues in Latin. Eventually, other writers adopted

the eclogue form and produced such poetry in Italian. Written in the vernacular, eclogue poetry

became more accessible and was widespread in Europe, finding a loving and engaging audience.

Soon, eclogues transformed into the modern pastoral (OED). Notable authors who use the

pastoral in their literature include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Milton, William Shakespeare,

and the Romantic writers (Lindenberger). According to the Gale Virtual Reference Library’s

(Gale) entry on “pastoral”, the word’s use as social commentary began during the Renaissance:

“Pastoral's rural setting, far removed from the customs of city life, made it an ideal form for

social [and] political experimentation” (“Pastoral”). Writers and artists created works in order to

get away from nefarious court life, finding a safe haven in the perfect countryside. Mary

Shelley’s iconic novel, Frankenstein, is no exception to this definition.

Frankenstein’s author, Mary Shelley, was a Romantic writer in the midst of an Industrial

Revolution. Because Shelley was an avid supporter of Nature and its beauty, her novel is thought

to be a criticism on the rapid and destructive progress of science. But Frankenstein does not

outright begin as a socio-political commentary. Rather, it starts by staying relatively

conventional, following the OED’s definition and serving as a perfect example of the pastoral, its

backdrops full of green landscapes and towering mountains. The novel’s rural settings are an

excellent rendition of the pastoral, where “the waters were placid; all around was calm; and the

snowy mountains, 'the palaces of nature,' were not changed” (74). Shelley continues to adhere to

OED’s definition of the pastoral as a shepherd’s love story set in a rural area by describing

Frankenstein’s family home’s location. Found in Geneva, it sits on “a champagne on Belrive, the

eastern shore of the lake, at the distance of rather more than a league from the city… the lives of

[Frankenstein's] parents were passed in considerable seclusion” (44).  Though Frankenstein’s

father is not actually a shepherd, he acts as a guide in Frankenstein’s life, thus making his role

shepherd-like. Further more, his initially happy life with a wife and family in a country setting is

in perfect accord with the most basic definition of a pastoral tale. By the halfway mark in her

novel, Shelley has fulfilled the two definitions OED gives us of the pastoral: it is set in a

predominantly rural area and tells the story of a (symbolic) shepherd and his innocent love story.

This shepherd tale of innocent love is transferred to Frankenstein and his own wife,

Elizabeth Lavenza. As David Cottom points out in “Frankenstein and the Monster of

Representation”, “Their life together is [brief but] idyllic” (61). The words idyllic and pastoral

are interchangeable here and also in many other cases. Both represent a suspended world of

perfection, where no harm can come along and life is happy and forgiving. Herbert Lindenberger

in his essay “The Idyllic Moment: On Pastoral and Romantisicm” expands on this

idyllic/pastoral lifestyle by saying, “The idyllic moment [is] a particular stage of reality which

achieves its meanings through its relationship to and its tension with other stages”

(Lindenberger). Lindenberger accurately pinpoints the complexities found in pastoral literature.

The pastoral has certain elements in it that make it come across as a utopian tale. But pastoral

literature is not just about those periods of bliss. Rather, how the pastoral interacts with the rest

of the story is what makes its use in literature so powerful. For instance, in Frankenstein,

Frankenstein’s misery and sorrow become increasingly poignant as the novel progresses

precisely because the audience is aware of how happy he once was and how happy he could have

been. Each stage in Frankenstein’s life holds a part of the pastoral. Everywhere he goes he is

surrounded by Nature. As a child, he is innocent, the son of a symbolic shepherd, and later

becomes a sort of shepherd himself, who obsesses over ushering humanity into a new era of

science. Then, his innocence is shattered, his license to shepherd others is taken, and everyone he

lived with in the untainted countryside dies following his journey to the city.

I have touched on the intricacies found in the pastoral. Now, in order to explore these

intricacies, I want to look deeper into the statement the Gale Virtual Reference Library made

earlier: pastoral literature was often used since the Renaissance as a method to explore societal

and political topics (“Pastoral”). When examining Shelley’s use of the pastoral in order to make

socio-political commentary, we must ask ourselves this question: in a novel where science is so

prominent, why is there no mention of the bustling city life and why do we not get the creation

scene that dominates popular culture’s imagining of the Creature? English and Comparative

Literature Professor Warren Montag gives us a plausible explanation in his essay “The

Workshop of ‘Filthy Creation’: A Marxist Reading of Frankenstein”. According to Montag, “The

process of production is evoked but never described, effectively presenting us a world of effects

without causes… [Frankenstein] resembles the movement of the text itself, which “turns away”

at certain key points, omitting every description of [technology]” (392). Montag’s claim

complies with how Renaissance writers used the pastoral; Shelley purposefully leaves out the

industrial scene from her novel because she wants her audience to focus on things she considers

to be more important, like Nature and interaction with human beings. After his studies in

Ingolstadt, where he was immersed in science, Frankenstein feels more alone than ever. Even

Nature, whose pastoral scene gave him such comfort, seems foreboding when he returns to

Geneva:

My country, my beloved country! Who but a native can tell the delight I took in again

beholding thy streams, they mountains, and, more than all, thy lovely lake! Yet, as I 

drew nearer home, grief and fear again overcame me… The picture appeared a vast and

dim scene of evil, and I foresaw obscurely that I as destined to become the most wretched

of human beings. (74-75)

In illustrating the streams, mountains, and lake, this quotation succinctly captures the

essence of pastoral literature. From far away, they remind Frankenstein of home and the bliss he

knew before his travels to Ingolstadt. However, up close, he sees the idyllic scenery as a “scene

of evil,” because it reminds him of the atrocities he has committed. 

After this passage, Frankenstein continues by going outside in the raging storm. As he

watches Nature and walks, a sense of tranquility washes over him, but it is broken abruptly by a

flash of lightning that illuminates the very Creature he ran away from. For Frankenstein, Nature

has always acted as a refuge to the horrible realities in his life. He runs away from Ingolstadt to

Geneva’s countryside in order to forget the Creature he left behind. Now, however, as Paulo

Giacomoni states in “Mountain Landscapes and the Aesthetics of the Sublime in Romantic

Narration”, “[T]he landscape clearly symbolizes Frankenstein’s ambivalence, his thirst for

knowledge and his hubris, which diffuses the impetus in the deformed and monstrous” (120).

Nature begins to reject Frankenstein’s search for peace by showing him the manifestation of his

trespasses. Obsessed with creating life, he went against Nature and poured his heart and soul into

his creation in the name of science. But what was born was not a perfect man, but a miserable

monstrosity. Frankenstein should have been content with everything that he had in Nature; he

had a home, a family, and friends who loved him to the moon and back. Frankenstein's greedy

heart and insatiable desires ultimately gained him nothing but pain and loss. His arrogance in

believing he could make Nature "better" resulted in his inevitable fall from grace. Though the

pastoral seems to create an ideal world, Shelley borrows from Renaissance writers and uses it in

order to bring out the ugliness and corruption of Frankenstein’s reality. 

With such vague beginnings and archaic uses, there may be some who believe that the

pastoral has lived past its prime within literature. We have certainly “evolved” technologically

beyond the Greeks, Romans, the Renaissance, and the Romantics. With computers, cell phones,

voyages into space, and people predicting Armageddon, much of literature has strayed away

from portrayals of Nature to descriptions of dystopian life and inevitable human destruction.

However, due to its rich history and the impressive number of texts (Milton’s Paradise Lost,

many of Shakespeare’s plays, Shelley’s Frankenstein) that fall under the pastoral, I do not think

it will be going anywhere, anytime soon. Pastoral literature may have started out as a simple feel-

good story about a shepherd and his beloved, but it has undergone immense change. It has been

used as an effective tool for criticism and storytelling. Pastoral literature survived the fall of the

Roman Empire, the burning of Athens, the wave of innovation in the Renaissance, the artistic

outpour of the Romantic Period, and it will certainly withstand the Age of Technology we are in

today. 

Works Cited

Cottom, Daniel. "Frankenstein and the Monster of Representation." SubStance. 9.3 (1980): 60

71. Web. 5 Mar. 2013.

Giacomoni, Paulo. "Mountain Landscapes and the Aesthetics of the Sublime in Romantic

Narration." Trans. Array The Romantic Prose Fiction. Amsterdam: 2008. 107-121. Print.

Lindenberger, Herbert. "The Idyllic Moment: On Pastoral and Romanticism." College English.

34.3 (1972): 335-351. Web. 5 Mar. 2013.

Montag, Warren. “The Workshop of ‘Filthy Creation’: A Marxist Reading of Frankenstein."

Frankenstein. 2nd ed. Johanna Smith. Boston: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. 384-95. Print.

"pastoral, n. and adj.". OED Online. December 2012. Oxford University Press. Web. 5 March

2013.

"Pastoral." Renaissance: An Encyclopedia for Students. Ed. Paul F. Grendler. Vol. 3. New York:

Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004. 146. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 5 Mar. 2013.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000. Print.

Works Consulted

Proietti, Salvatore. “Frederick Philip Grove's Version of Pastoral Utopianism.” Science Fiction

Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Nov., 1992), pp. 361-377. Web. 5 Mar. 2013