Eighteenth-Century Studies

The contestatory terrain of queer studies and cultural production has long been the urban metropolis. Although the conceived peripheries and historical contact zones of empire are beginning to be studied as the torrid zones of metropolitan fantasy as well as the sites of sexual practices disavowed at “home,” ¹ the metropolitan farms, the “heartlands” of nation, have remained comparatively untouched by the probing questions of queer theorization and histories of sexuality. ² I propose that “farm” as discursive and material formation be treated like “sex,” that is, as equally a site of construction and invention. Not only are “farm” and “sex” not antipodes but queer studies has an important stake in contesting the farm as the historical grounding for heterosexuality as the useful, the (re)productive, and the natural. Rather than start with a site that would signify “pure” farm, I take up in this essay the historic example of the farm gone bad, Marie-Antoinette’s ornamented farm, the Hameau at Versailles. It is the contention of this essay that mucking around in messy, hybrid sites like this one—both central and peripheral, privately enclosed and publicly advertised, artificially constructed and real-ly functioning, combining utility and pleasure, maternity and desire between women—may not only tell us more about the construction of nature, family, and sexuality but give us more opportunity to queer them. ³

Marie-Antoinette’s Hameau designed by the architect Richard Mique was begun in 1783 and substantially completed by 1786. Consisting of a Norman-style rustic hamlet and a farm, the Hameau was considered a type of ferme ornée or ornamented farm which combined agricultural production or utility with pleasures for the eyes and other bodily senses. ⁴ Farms like these which served both as spectacle and scenario, both as visually entertaining follies within larger garden landscapes and as functioning agricultural plantations in their own right, participated in the scripting and re-scripting of georgic. ⁵ Georgic, I argue, may be understood not merely as a genre but more importantly as discursive and material practices. These practices are fundamentally [End Page 304] concerned with articulating relations between “man” and nature and between work and leisure, the rights of property, the founding of nations and empires, and cultivation or farming as a metaphor for civilization but also with the sexual division of labor, patriarchal lineage, and heterosexual reproduction. ⁶ Georgic in its conventional forms does not merely advocate different roles for men and women. It justifies and glorifies patriarchally-organized and controlled agricultural production and heterosexual reproduction as the necessary bases for family and for national stability, peace, and prosperity. The patriarchal and heterosexual model of the good state stemming from the good family produced and reproduced by the good farm is reinforced by the traditional terms of georgic discourse: metaphors of sexual difference and of heterosexual reproduction permeate its textual and visual rhetoric. ⁷

Ornamented farms both reiterated such concepts in material terms and complicated—threatening to overturn—them through the admixture of pleasure, unabashed artifice, and decoration. Thus, balance, the cornerstone of eighteenth-century texts of garden theory, was the requisite basis for the conjoining or “reunion” of utility and pleasure. Antoine-Nicolas Duchesne’s Sur la formation des jardins (1775) claims the ornamented farm as evidence of Frenchmen’s “desire to restore in the midst of luxury the rustic life of our virtuous ancestors by copying at least their dwellings.” ⁸ Jean-Marie Morel’s Théorie des jardins (1776) characterizes the ideal ornamented farm as one that would have as its principal object economy and utility and would “announce itself by its country air, careless and without pretension; like a naive shepherdess without guile whose simplicity would be her only ornament.” ⁹ These texts describe the ornamented farm as composed of views or scenic tableaux. However, these gardening projects of what Duchesne calls “studied ornamentation” should also work. Ornamented farms should not only thematize and display the fruits of labor, but also produce them. As Morel prescribes, the ornamented farm’s “principal tableau should be formed of different aspects of agriculture . . . The roads and...