Variations on the Rural Idyll

Introduction

My aim in this chapter is to take a long, hard look at the rural idyll. I am interested in where it comes from, and in the cultural work that we ask it to do for us. To do this, it is my intention to explore the ways in which the rural idyll is produced and those things its production denies or excludes. Let me begin with some questions: What is the rural idyll? Where can we go to find it? What does it look like? What do we do with it? And what do we want it for? I began pondering these and other questions in the summer of 2001, while participating in my own bit of idyll-catching, on holiday in Catalonia, staying in a converted farmhouse. This setting certainly conforms to the term ‘idyll’, but also brought into view many of the ambivalences that mark the experience of the rural as idyllic. The farm is isolated, remote; the landscape wild (or at least ‘managed wild’, since much of it is farmland). The life there is ‘simple’, rustic; farming is the dominant economic activity (though tourism is rapidly catching up). There are animals (wild and farmed), fine vistas, peace and quiet, traditional foods at the market, workers in the fields. Kids can roam free, climb trees, watch cows. Rural pastimes — walking, bird-spotting, sight-seeing — are abundantly available. This is the rural idyll in its current (Western, or Euro-American?) holiday packaging.1

But what has to be hidden, or denied, to make this idyll? And what things threaten to disturb it? While we were there holidaying, for example, there were countless signs of protest at a proposed new road on display. In the protesters' eyes, the road would open up the area to more incomers and thereby ‘spoil’ the tranquillity and cut through the landscape. Equally evident, however, were banners demanding that the road be built — as an economic improvement to the region. The tourists who seek out the idyll therefore also threaten it a paradox common to tourist sites (Rojek and Urry, 1997). They threaten it in other ways, too, for example by demanding the kind of idyll they want — for the idyll is imagined in the minds of the tourist as an entitlement. The business of living in the region, and of making a living there, can threaten idyll-disturbance, therefore: farm machinery is noisy, some of the agribusiness practices do not sit squarely with the idyllized view of farming (the intensive pig pens, the electric fences, the pesticides), the locals drive their cars too fast. The nearby town has supermarkets full of ready meals and shops selling Nike sportswear. The cows make too much noise especially after their calves have been taken away from them. The wildlife includes mosquitoes. And as for those bloody

...