Reading Human and Natural Landscape in Gaines’s Catherine Carmier and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons

Abstract

Ernest J. Gaines’ affirmation that Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862) was “as a Bible when I was writing Catherine Carmier” (1964) is the starting point for a comparative analysis of the two novels and the literary mode of the pastoral they deploy. Given that in the United States the Southern Pastoral was employed by the authors of the plantation tradition as a means to conceal the reality of slavery under a façade of idyll, African American authors like Gaines followed example set by the 19th-century Russian author, and through their narratives reconnected to the natural landscape without sentimentalizing the sometimes hard experience of ordinary people. Serfdom in Russia and slavery in the US provide a common ground to address philosophical questions concerning man’s relation to nature and to humanity as a whole. My thesis focuses in particular on the theme of death in an Arcadian world and on the influence of Schopenhauer’s thought in the two texts.