Classical Goddesses in American Short Fiction
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CLASSICAL GODDESSES IN AMERICAN SHORT FICTION ABOUT THE VIETNAM WAR by ANDREA DEAN FONTENOT, B.S., M.F.A. A DISSERTATION IN ENGLISH Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approv94? August, 1998 Ac cop' '^ Copyright 1998 by Andrea Dean Fontenot ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my gratitude to Dr. Wendell Aycock for his support, patience, and guidance during the preparation for this work. I want to extend my appreciation to Dr. Bryce Conrad and Dr. Michael Schoenecke who, along with Dr. Aycock, allowed me the opportunity to explore a subject that interests me and who gave me insightflil and conscientious direction during the revision process. I want to extend my gratitude to Dr. William Marcy, Dean of the College of Engineering, for allowing me to take much needed time away from my position in order to complete this degree, and for the unending support that he and the College of Engineering have extended to me. I want to thank John Chandler for his support. Finally, I want to thank my family, especially my mother Ruby McDowell for always reminding me that it is never too late to learn and never too late to accomplish seemingly impossible tasks. And I want to especially thank Ron Fontenot for his many years of support and encouragement. 11 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION 1 n PERSEPHONE: THE MAIDEN AND INNOCENCE 29 m DEMETER: THE MOTHER AND EXPERIENCE 64 IV HECATE: THE WISE CRONE AND RECONSTRUCTION 99 V. AFTERMATH: GOING TO WAR AND BACK AGAIN 128 VI CONCLUSION 164 BIBLIOGRAPHY 176 m CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION American literature about the Vietnam War is a not a luxury but a necessity, something we vitally need for the present and future. —H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam War in American Stories, Songs, and Poems, 1 When people make war, the war makes them. The war did not make us anything we had not been before. —^Milton J. Bates, The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling, 259 The scars of the Vietnam War are slow to heal on our national psyche. The war is imprinted on our remembrance, a milestone from which we mark everything that follows. As Tobey Herzog points out, in The Vietnam War: Innocence Lost, "Vietnam ended American innocence about the politics of war, the role of political dissent, the effectiveness of technology, and battlefield brutality. Media myths about war and Hollywood's early view of Vietnam in TJte Green Berets proved false." Herzog also notes that "after the war ended, much of the country rejected the war and, most tragically, rejected the combatants. Postponed was the country's final step in confronting the Vietnam experience" (214). Art, particularly literature and films, provides a window for us to look back and examine the ways in which Vietnam changed us. In exposing their own demons, writers of Vietnam War literature give us an opportunity to confront the demons from Vietnam that have troubled us as a nation. Historically, war has been a male pursuit. Stories of war, going back as far as the Iliad and the Ocfyssey, are recounted as a journey taken by the warrior. This journey motif has traditionally relied on such masculine images as innocent boy, experienced young man, and sagacious mature man to mark the stages of the warrior's passage through the war journey. Paul Fussell recounts the journey of British soldiers in World War I in The Great War and Modem Memory. Herzog uses Fussell's "tripartite pattern of innocence, experience, and consideration," to develop his own pattern in his analysis of Vietnam War stories Herzog in Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (Herzog 14). Mythology offers us female archetypes in the Persephone/Demeter/Hecate myth that parallel the tripartite stages of the war journey. While war traditionally has been viewed as "men's work," the telling of war is not necessarily the purview of men. Moreover, even though the men that went to Vietnam outnumbered the women by a ratio of seventy to one, all carried women with them in their memories of home. For these reasons, an examination of the literature of the Vietnam War filtered through the lens of the Persephone/Demeter/Hecate myth can add another dimension of understanding to the reading of this literature, because the female archetypes are present not just in the female characters in this literature but also in the minds and hearts of the male characters. Mythology carries within it our cultural heritage and our belief structures. It allows us a common experience for understanding the human condition, and often it gives us the means to explain aspects of our existence that are otherwise unexplainable. Most of us are probably introduced to mythology through the fairy tales we are told as children. Just as Persephone/Demeter/Hecate archetypes offer a means to extract another layer of meaning from the literature of the Vietnam War, fairy tales provide another powerflil lens through which to view the works. In this dissertation I will examine selected works from Vietnam War literature filtered through the lenses of both the Persephone/Demeter/Hecate myths and through the lens of fairy tales. My objective is to develop a methodology that will allow the reader to discern layers of meaning not always apparent through other approaches to this literature. * * * This brief overview of the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War will cover from 1965 to 1975.^ On March 8, 1965, the first combat troops to be committed to the conflict in Indochina stormed ashore at Da Nang. On April 30, 1975, during the fall of Saigon, crowds stormed the U.S. embassy in order to be airlifted out. At midday on April 30, 1975, communist forces entered Saigon. The U. S. interest in Vietnam seemed, as early as 1965, to be straightforward— successive presidents believed that there was a worldwide communist threat and it was their job to resist it. In 1960, President John F. Kennedy saw Southeast Asia as under imminent threat, and increased aid to South Vietnam. It was this commitment that Lyndon Johnson inherited in November 1963, after Kennedy's assassination. He declared that he would not let South Vietnam go the way of China: "So the U.S. became intimately involved in the internal politics of the South—a murky, secretive business. U.S. Special Forces in the Central Highland found they were fighting the government in order to protect their Montagnard forces. On November 2, 1963, a group of ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) officers overthrew and then murdered the corrupt leader, President Ngo Dinh Diem, with the permission of the U.S. Ambassador" {Nam, 6). What was hoped to be a quick end to the U.S. involvement and occupation in Vietnam came to a hah in 1966 with a deadlock between the North Vietnamese and the U.S. By April of 1966, strategic bombers were "joining the assault on the NVA supply routes for the first time, as the North Vietnamese stepped up their resistance with the help of Soviet-made MiG jet fighters" {Nam 614). By January of 1967, there were 380,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam. But it was the Tet Offensive in 1968 that set the U.S. back on its heels. Prior to Tet, the illusion had been that North Vietnam was a beaten enemy. During the Asian holiday of celebrating the New Year, Tet, "The Viet Cong and the NVA attacked in 36 of the 44 provincial capitals, 64 of the 242 district capitals and five of the six autonomous cities. Television pictures beamed into U.S. homes told a story of U.S. failure and communist success" {Nam 631). Even though it appeared, militarily, that the victory belonged to the U.S. and ARVN, politically "Tet was a disaster for the U.S. Not only were the communists shown to be full of fight, but the destruction involved in crushing the offensive and the unsavory methods of the Saigon regime shocked U.S. audiences and called into question the morality of the war" {Nam 631). In 1969 Richard Nixon became president and Ho Chi Minh died. Both events changed the length and probably the outcome of the War. In 1970 Nixon "drastically expanded the conflict in Southeast Asia" {Nam 638). Nixon wanted the U.S. troops in Vietnam to be able to leave Southeast Asia with honor. At home, the split between the supporters of Nixon and the War and those who opposed our continued involvement in the war was growing wider and more violent. In 1970 armed National Guardsmen fired on students at Kent State University who were protesting the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. An increasing number of young men were going to Canada in order to avoid the draft and, for the most part, to avoid being involved in a conflict that they did not believe the United State should be involved in. The 1970s witnessed the phasing out of America's commitment to the war and a phasing in of Vietnamization. Vietnamization was the effort to allow the ARVN to fight their own war. The number of US combat deaths went down, while the number ARVN deaths remained about the same. Between 1969 and 1971, the strength of the ARVN rose in numbers, but their training with the technology was lacking, and the US military was hesitant about turning high-tech military equipment over to them (Nam 417-48). At the same time, at home in America, protests against the war were escalating.