Entering into the Green: Philip Roth and the Pastoral Impulse

ABSTRACT:This essay, informed by Annette Kolodny's research on the "pastoral impulse," re-examines Philip Roth's subversion of myth in American Pastoral (1997), illuminating the ways Roth exposes and critiques the gendered chasms within America's national narratives. The article connects Roth's novel to John Milton's Paradise Lost as a way of re-considering how the Swede valorizes Dawn as an Eve-like figure of perfection. I focus on how Roth, via Zuckerman, positions Merry and Rita as a hybridized Miltonic serpent who seeks to bring about Seymour and Dawn's fall from the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. By doing so, I argue Roth's problematic representation of women in American Pastoral works to deconstruct the gendered patriarchal narrative that underlies America's "pastoral impulse."