2.3 (July 2002): 289-292
© 2002 National Communication Association

Foregrounding Landscape in Questions of Identity

Kathi L. Groenendyk

Wendy Joy Darby.  Landscape and Identity: Geographies of Nation and Class in England.  Oxford: Berg, 2000.  xx + 330 pages.  Appendix, Bibliography, Index.  $65.00 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).

In 1866, Sanford Robinson Gifford painted “Hunter Mountain, Twilight,” a somber depiction of a forested landscape that had been clearcut.  Gifford, a painter of the Hudson River School, captured the devastation humans had brought upon the Catskills.  Yet the painting no longer represents the area: “How the land in the Northeast recovered—from the scarred moonscape that Gifford painted in 1866, to the dense and verdant blanket that envelops Hunter Valley now—is a tale of nature, technological change and conscious human intervention” (Johnson 1).  Gifford’s painting and others from the Hudson River School helped spur the recovery.  Kirk Johnson argues, “Pictures helped shape and inform much of the debate—still very much alive in the Catskills today—about how the wilderness was to be treated” (1).

The story of “Hunter Mountain, Twilight” is only one instance of how art has formed individual and national consciousness.  In the United States, art helped the establishment of national parks, creating them as a “subject of national pride and preservation “(Crandell 4).  Yet much of the United States national identity was formed from European, particularly English, landscapes.  Gina Crandell argues, “Today when we think of nature we too often conjure up images borrowed from eighteenth-century England” (8).  These eighteenth-century English images were also influenced by the arts and, in addition to influencing citizens of the United States, have influenced–and continue to influence–citizens of Great Britain.

Wendy Joy Darby explores how British landscape and its portrayal in literature and paintings have fundamentally shaped British citizens’ engagement with nature, their national identity, and experiences of community.  Darby’s historical and ethnographic approach offers insight into how people learn to value land and, in turn, which people are allowed to experience certain landscapes.  Darby’s work reveals insights into how people assign meanings to landscapes, the political contention over those meanings and access to nature, and the historical nature of current environmental dilemmas.

Darby’s approach is a mixture of aesthetics, history, and ethnography.  In the first section (chapters 1 through 3), Darby charts the historical influence of landscape art (painting, theater, and literature) in training an educated elite in ways of viewing nature.  In addition, Darby explains how the Lake District in northern England became valued because of art’s influence, and how many viewers tried to alter the landscape to correspond to artistic depictions.  Darby continues her historical overview by examining how the Lake District assumed national mythic significance during the industrial revolution and English Romantic movement. 

In the second section (chapters 4 through 6), Darby examines the political-economic debate surrounding access to the Peak District, which is a prime grouse hunting spot, and the Lake District, with its rugged, remote beauty.  Estate owners in the Peak District wished to preserve the grouse for their own hunting so they limited rights of access through private property.  Locals and walkers from the surrounding industrial towns, however, argued that they had a claim to the ancient rights of way.  In the Lake District, artists and other elites attempted to keep the area as pristine as possible, fighting proposed railways and mining ventures.  Yet the effort to limit the number of visitors to the Lake District discriminated against working class tourists.  The debate over preservation lead to the enactment of ten national parks between 1951 and 1957, which lead to more debate about rights of access. 

The third section (chapters 7 and 8) draws on interviews with numerous participants of English walking clubs.  These interviews reveal how walking—physically experiencing nature—helped shape identity and build communities.  However, the interviews also reveal that access to and participation in landscape can be restricted along gender and class lines.

Darby’s effort to understand the interrelationship between identity and landscape serves as a fine resource for many topics related to the cultural study of landscape.  She consolidates previous work on the picturesque, aesthetics, and landscape use, offering clear definitions of the picturesque and the sublime while linking the concepts to ideology.  Darby argues that examining English landscape is necessary because it “is a point of view from which can be seen larger issues of domination, incorporation, and contestation” (107).  However, in her discussion of painting’s influence on people’s perceptions of landscape, she fails to incorporate the insights of Gina Crandell’s work.  Crandell’s Nature Pictorialized examines the historical development of landscape and how the picturesque vision of landscape has been fostered.  Crandell argues that we have protected landscapes that have been the most beautiful, which has really meant those scenes that are the “most pictorially satisfying” (3).  Darby’s work would be richer by incorporating Crandell’s research.

Yet Landscape and Identity forces readers to carefully consider the political and symbolic impact of the arts on environmental attitudes and actions.  Darby does not allow readers to sit comfortably admiring the pastoral English paintings or Wordsworth’s poetry; rather, she confronts the reader with the environmental implications of the artistic depiction of landscape.  For example, early landscape paintings were unpeopled, and when, in the eighteenth century, estate owners re-landscaped their grounds to mirror the picturesque images, the workers, villagers, and peasants needed to be removed or hidden. 

An additional benefit to Darby’s book is the new perspective it provides on current environmental debates.  The dilemma for the United States national parks is how to protect the land yet allow for the people to enjoy it.  “Loving the land to death” is not new to our national parks; rather, Darby shows how this was, and continues to be, a problem for the wilderness area of the Lake District.  Ruskin and other elites of the time proposed that the beautiful areas be reserved for those who could appreciate the aesthetic value—those who had been trained in painting.  Reading Darby’s account of the Lake District, one wonders how much of the current environmental debate over national park access reflects class interests or discriminates against those from lower classes.

For those interested in cultural studies of nature and subjects about England, Darby’s book is informative, thought-provoking, and, at times, amusing.  The broad perspective offers various lenses to examine the environmental debates.  However, a reader not well acquainted with English customs or their art could find the book overwhelming in the sections devoted to an almost insider-style discussion of England.  Finally, although Darby claims to study the environmental rhetoric used in the access debates, she does not offer close readings of the rhetoric used.  She does, however, offer brief analysis of posters, advertisements, and key terms used by the various parties.  Rhetoricians may also find the extended interviews insightful, seeing how the three women interviewed describe their different interactions with nature.

Darby’s Landscape and Identity offers many insights into past and present environmental disputes, both in England and abroad.  Darby clearly shows how many of our environmental problems are tied to earlier artistic depictions of landscape: Darby links aesthetics to the political.

Kathi L. Groenendyk is an assistant professor of communication arts and science at Calvin College.

Works Cited

Crandell, Gina.  Nature Pictorialized: “The View” in Landscape History.  Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins UP, 1993.

Johnson, Kirk.  “Hunter Mountain Paintings Spurred Recovery of Land.”  The New York Times  7 June 2001: 1.  New York Times on the Web.  Online.  8 June 2001.