building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

The “middle landscape”
Close mediation with the world of nature enabled the construction of the American
industrial landscape to develop culturally. This process to define ideas made the
theoretical processing of the sensorial stimuli from the landscape extremely
complex. The boundless areas of wilderness, together with technological progress,
placed contrasting spheres of perception in contact with each other, which
American culture had, nevertheless, always endeavoured to process together.
In his analysis of the years of American Independence and the following decades of
the nineteenth century, Leo Marx, author of the book The Machine in the Garden
(1964), paid close attention to these relationships between the natural landscape
and industrial progress. In fact, Leo Marx demonstrated how the idea in America of
economic development, which consisted mainly of manufacturing in the new era,
referred back to the symbolic universe of an earthly paradise, of the
uncontaminated garden.
“The pastoral ideal has been used to define the meaning of America ever since the
age of discovery, and it has not yet lost its old upon the native imagination”. 147 The
book by Leo Marx opens with a quotation by Washington Irving, taken from The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820), to clarify the emotional impact of contact with an
unexplored, uncontaminated landscape. Leo Marx believed that this pastoral trend
was rooted in radical feelings (e.g. the intellectual fantasy of “flight from the city”)
as well as popular ideas, such as the agrarian myth and rural values described in the
preceding chapters. In order to introduce the topic of the “machine” and to create a
connection with the idyll of the garden, he paused to reflect on an incident which
happened to Nathanial Hawthorne on the morning of the 27th July 1844 in a wood
near Concord, Massachusetts, known in the area as “Sleepy Hollow”.
By highlighting the similarity between the place name and Irving’s book title, Leo
Marx takes a look at and describes some of Hawthorne’s notes in his diary: “[...] a
shallow space scooped out among the woods [...] is like the lap of bounteous
147 MARX, Leo, The Machine in the Garden, Technology and Pastoral Ideal in America, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1979 [first ed. 1964], p. 3 (Italian translation by Eva Kampmann La macchina nel
giardino : tecnologia e ideale pastorale in America, Rome, Lavoro, 1987, p. 9)
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