Come Live With Me and Feed My Sheep: Invitation, Ownership, and Belonging in Early Modern Pastoral Literature

Abstract

Come Live With Me and Feed My Sheep: Invitation, Ownership, and Belonging in Early Modern Pastoral Literature Kimberly Huth The pastoral has most often been understood as a literature of place, of community, or of ethos. Critics such as Paul Alpers and Nancy Lindheim have revised the traditional view of pastoral as characterized mainly by the tensions between the court and the country landscape to emphasize instead the community of shepherds interacting in this rural setting and the ethos of those characters.1 However, pastoral texts, along with their settings and characters, are conveyed to us through language, and a closer examination of the patterns of language that construct the pastoral is needed. One such pattern in particular affords readers the opportunity to see how pastoral connects the materials of the rural landscape with the social life of its resident communities and their ethos: the speech act of invitation. The role of this speech act in pastoral literature has not received enough critical attention, though it is a constitutive element of the pastoral world. In pastoral works, an invitation accomplishes a number of things by calling attention to both material items and social relationships. The invitation demonstrates that the pastoral landscape has something to offer, whether it is a rustic feast, country entertainments, or simply a homely cottage in which to rest for the night. And as it is extended from one person to another, the invitation highlights the community of pastoral that exists amidst the material aspects of rural life. [End Page 44] It acts as the first step in extending that community to others who may be passing through the pastoral world by offering to visitors not only a comfortable place to rest but also fellowship and belonging. The pastoral landscape is often imagined as an ideal world of respite from the corruption of the court or city, but it is actually the invitation that creates the ideality of that world, which is only recognizable through interactions with other people in the landscape. A consideration of invitation as a speech act in connection with the pastoral yields a new understanding of what lies at the heart of this mode of literature. Tzvetan Todorov has argued that the origins of all genres lie in everyday human speech acts,2 a theory of genre that underscores the social and discursive nature of literary forms. Genres, he maintains, are nothing more than a “codification of discourse,” an institutionalization of the way that people interact with one another; in acting as institutions, genres “reveal the constitutive traits of the society to which they belong.” Genres not only depict community but also comment on it, for genres codify and institutionalize the most important and valued speech acts in the discourse of any given society. Those speech acts undergo a series of transformations that create the genres that we as literary critics recognize.3 Though pastoral is not a genre but a mode that can appear in any genre from lyric to drama, Todorov’s theory is still applicable, I argue, because it emphasizes not literary types in themselves but the cultural and ideological formation of those types. His claim reminds us that all literary forms are themselves parts of discourse. Todorov’s theory is, in fact, especially useful in studying pastoral literature because it calls attention to the active or performative potential of language in social contexts. By drawing on speech act theory as developed by J. L. Austin and John R. Searle, Todorov posits that genres begin as types of speech that perform actions as they are spoken rather than as what Austin terms “constative” or descriptive utterances.4 This [End Page 45] distinction enables us to see the work that invitation does for pastoral that cannot be accomplished by other linguistic patterns such as song, complaint, and praise. Though these forms of speech are all prominent elements in pastoral, none of them accomplishes the same things as the speech act invitation in terms of performing the role of the generous shepherd, displaying hospitality and organizing and structuring human relationships around available material goods and resources. The proffering and accepting of invitations enable pastoral characters to enact relationships between different social groups...

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