Yes it’s a word. Perhaps urban folks have idealized the rural life ever since Hector was a pup. During the Romantic era, poets and musicians and artists of all kinds wrote and sang and painted the pure and sweet rural lands and country folk. Highborn ladies liked to play-act the shepherding life. And of course, pastoralism is the ism of pastoral, from L. pastor, a shepherd. Modern pastors a shepherds of the soul, according to Sister Estelle, who was Adriel’s principal at St. Ann’s school.
In the ancient Greek world, stressed-out urbanites longed for the restful world of rural Arcadia. Arcadia became the idyllic dream of Renaissance and, later, Romance Period poets and artists. In the New World, the yeoman farmer became the staunch hero figure of the emerging West. The backbone of America. Even while settlers and ranchers drove away the indigenous people they still idolized the “noble savage” living off the land.
And yet there is always the patronizing of rural dwellers that speaks in romantic tones of rural life while dismissing the rural population as provincial idiots, but wise idiots. Hayseeds. This contrast is inherent in the many stories and jokes about the local yokel outsmarting the city-slicker.
In the book by Sarah Smarsh, Heartland, A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke on Earth, she tries to show the reality of rural life. Families working hard but staying poor, lack of health insurance, the dignity and relentless hope of rural families who are both adulated and scorned by urban sophisticates. Unlike some memoirs of mountain people and poor family upbringing, she does not revel in a delusional self-made success story. In fact, she credits librarians and teachers and her own parents for her success as a social scientist, professor, and writer. And importantly, Smarsh blames the poverty of rural folk, especially the women, on a failed economic system that discounts the work of women and laborers. And I might add that this cruel political and economic system not only exploits rural women and men, but also falsely praises them as bedrock Americans.
When Adriel and Paula moved to Paint Lick, Kentucky (don’t you love that place name?) one of the locals at Jeanette Todd’s general store told me that he knew I had been to college by my speech. “You talk educated.” Paint Lick was our pastoralism sojourn that last about 12 years and 2 births. I think everybody intuitively understands that speech is a give-away of background and status. Linguists study prestige dialects and levels of dialects in sociolinguistics. When I hear Sara Smarsh speak, I hear only a faint echo of here Oklahoma farm childhood. The rural dialects always are less prestigious in any country. One of my linguistics profs spoke of the Bostonian elite or Kennedy-esque tones as being the highest prestige dialect. While any rural “twang” carries a low-prestige dismissal of the speaker, there is also the pastoralism-chic of South Carolina landed gentry speech. I once read of a couple who met at an Eastern Ivy-League college who drove to the South on a meet-the-parents trip. The young girl complained that the further southward they drove her boyfriend’s speech also sounded more southern. I think she began to wonder if she was going to “marry down.”
The romantic notion of the pastoral life in all its natural beauty and solid characters is like a sort of rural slumming. Rural people are both admired and disdained, loved and despised. The rural/urban divide was in stark contrast during the Trump debacle. The urban, educated voters openly despised the rural less educated and the hatred was returned in full. Each side expressed great pride in their own values. In Kentucky, there is a fierce Appalachian pride and any hint, joke, or criticism of mountain culture is resented. When it was revealed that an acting school in Prestonsburg was teaching the young students the measured tones of the Standard American English dialect, proud intellectuals in Kentucky waxed livid in their defense of the mountain kids and claimed there was a kind of cultural killing going on in the acting school. Of course, this was nonsense. Actors more than anyone need to well, act. To speak like the the character they must portray. Personally I love to hear a mountain born friend talk. But there is also an understanding that Eastern Kentucky dialect is not a prestige dialect.
We do love the shepherd tending his flocks, maybe playing a quiet country tune on an old guitar. But the farmer is equally loved, taken for granted, and resented.
Two Strikes 