“I, Also, Am in Michigan”: Pastoralism of Mind in Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River”

Abstract

This article examines “Big Two-Hearted River” in terms of Leo Marx’s “machine in the garden” theory of American pastoralism. Nick’s reaction to the swamp appears, paradoxically, to position it as the “machine,” or counterforce to the pastoral ideal and the illusion of escape—in Nick’s case, from war. The essay argues that Nick’s own psyche serves as this “machine” because he projects his buried anxieties onto the swamp. The mind as “machine” thus recalls the cyborg theory of Donna Haraway and the mind as “swamp” the ecopoetics of Gary Snyder. Ultimately, the metaphorical conflation of mind, machine, wilderness, and war (the source of Nick’s anxiety), further unsettles the civilization-nature binary that ecocriticism itself seeks to escape.

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