The Catabasis of Mattie Ross in the Coens' True Grit
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The Catabasis of Mattie Ross in the Coens’ True Grit Judith Fletcher Classical World, Volume 107, Number 2, Winter 2014, pp. 237-254 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/clw.2013.0125 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/538872 Access provided by St Bonaventure University (19 Sep 2018 10:33 GMT) The Catabasis of Mattie Ross in the Coens’ True Grit JUDITH Fletcher ABSTRACT: This paper argues that the Coen Brothers’ 2010 version of True Grit makes innovations to the original novel by Charles Por- tis that evoke the Greek myth of the descent to the underworld, or catabasis. Mattie Ross, a fourteen-year-old girl on mission to fi nd her father’s murderer, embarks on a quest that ends with her falling into a snake pit after she kills the culprit. The experience can be likened to a heroic quest, especially in the context of coming-of- age myth and ritual. I submit that this mytheme is combined with echoes of the abduction of Persephone by Hades, a very particular version of the catabatic mythology that is frequently associated with girls’ puberty and marriage. I. Introduction It is winter, 1870, and a fourteen-year-old girl named Mattie Ross has left her mother behind in Yell County, Arkansas. Accompanied by an older man, she journeys to an uncolonized territory outside state jurisdiction, the Choctaw nation (modern Oklahoma). The journey ends with the girl falling into a deep cavern that she shares with a snake-fi lled corpse. She is led back to the light by the man, but from that point on her childhood is over. This is a very bare outline of Charles Portis’ classic American novel, True Grit, published in 1968 and immediately adapted by Henry Hathaway into a Hollywood Western (1969), starring John Wayne and Kim Darby. Shortly after the novel’s release, R. Baird Shuman identifi ed True Grit as a rite-of-passage narrative that constructs Mattie’s initiation into maturity as a series of trials.1 It is a theme that clearly appealed to Joel and Ethan Coen, who revisited the novel in a much grittier fi lmic 1 C. Portis, True Grit (New York 1968); R. Baird Shuman, “Portis’ True Grit: Ad- venture Story or Entwicklungsroman?” English Journal 59 (1970) 367–70. Classical World, vol. 107, no. 2 (2013) Pp.237–254 238 Classical World version of Mattie’s coming-of-age (True Grit 2010) which resonates more deeply with the mythologies of transitions to adulthood than either of its predecessors. Readers may recognize elements of one of the most ancient stories of a girl’s transition to adulthood in my brief introductory summary. It is my intention to examine the Coens’ fi lm by employing the story of Perse- phone’s descent into the underworld as a heuristic template for Mattie’s experience in that late-nineteenth-century winter. While the fi lm does not cite the Hymn to Demeter overtly, the analogy of a young woman’s marriage to death and an understanding of Greco-Roman eschatological symbols bring the mythic contours of Mattie’s experience into sharper focus. Like many other Westerns, True Grit has a discernibly mytholog- ical structure. As a nostalgic evocation of a nation’s past that is more imaginary than historical, the genre bears similarities with Greek epic poetry, as several scholars have recognized, and it employs archetypal characters and structures whose origins are deeply buried in antiquity.2 True Grit (in all its manifestations) is a version of the quest-journey motif recognizable to us from the Odyssey, for example, but also from the Hymn to Demeter. Some of the most acclaimed Westerns use the archetypal elements of the quest. Thus, James J. Clauss employs Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk Literature in his analysis of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) to evince its deep mythic structure. Like True Grit, this fi lm also evokes the catabasis, or descent into hell, a sub- category of the quest motif.3 Ford’s much acclaimed and morally com- plex fi lm provides an opportunity to refl ect on what it is about True Grit that makes Mattie Ross’s particular quest unique and relevant to 2 On the mythic elements of the Western, see M. M. Winkler, “Classical Mythology and the Western Film,” Comp. Literature Stud. 22 (1985) 516–40; S. Voytilla, Myth and the Movies: Discovering the Mythic Structure of 50 Unforgettable Films (Studio City, CA 1999) 47–69. E. B. Holtsmark (“The Katabasis Theme in Modern Cinema,” in J. J. Clauss, ed., Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema [Oxford 2001] 27) describes the Western as “the most archetypally heroic genre.” In a special volume of Arethusa (Celluloid Clas- sics: New Perspectives on Classical Antiquity in Modern Cinema, K. Day, ed.) devoted to mythic themes in contemporary fi lm, K.Day (“‘What Makes a Man to Wander?’: The Searchers as a Western Odyssey,” Arethusa 41 [2008] 11–49) examines the overlap be- tween the ideological concerns of epic poetry and of America in the 1950s as articulated in John Ford’s The Searchers. 3 J. J. Clauss “Descent into Hell: Mythic Paradigms in The Searchers, ”J Pop Film TV (1999) 27, 2–17. I am grateful to one of CW ’s anonymous reviewers for drawing my attention to this article. Fletcher | The Catabasis of Mattie Ross 239 contemporary sensibilities. The Searchers narrates the obsessive quest of Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), a Civil War veteran, to fi nd his niece Debbie (played successively by Lana Wood and Natalie Wood), who has been captured by Comanches, and whom he eventually fi nds living as a Comanche woman. Similarities can be drawn between the abduction of Debbie and Ethan’s quest to fi nd her, and the rape of Persephone and Demeter’s search for her daughter. Clauss identifi es Scar, the Comanche chief, as a Hades fi gure or “the king of the dead,” while Debbie as his wife has become an “American Persephone.”4 Kirsten Day has drawn parallels between Debbie’s role in this fi lm and Greek epic poetry’s treat- ment of women as chattels whose sexuality is an aspect of their male rel- atives’ honor and shame. As she has pointed out, Debbie is persistently commodifi ed by the male agents of the narrative and treated as a “form of currency”: her bride price is “sixty ponies,” and Ethan’s sense of mas- culinity is apparently contingent on her chastity.5 The Persephone paradigm operates quite differently in the story of Mattie Ross. Far from being a commodity or a unit of exchange, this young virgin is fully engaged in the world of fi nance and commerce. She is not to be bought with ponies as Debbie was, but is actually an adept little horse trader herself; she negotiates and enforces a contract with Rooster Cogburn; and she is consistently evaluating the worth of services for which she has paid (for example the unsatisfactory dinner provided by the boarding house in Fort Smith). In all respects, Mattie is an autonomous agent. She travels into the wilderness, an analogue of the underworld, of her own free will, even managing to thwart the efforts of Rooster to prevent her from crossing the river into Choctaw territory. There is no grieving mother searching for her lost daughter, because Mattie is much more self-reliant than her mother. Thus while True Grit evokes a mythic paradigm—death symbolism frames the fi lm so insistently that it is diffi cult to ignore allusions to the underworld—it does so in a way that disrupts that paradigm in order to accentuate the remarkable personality of Mattie Ross.6 4 Clauss (above, n.3) 12 also notes that in the novel Debbie is only Scar’s ward, not his wife. The change accentuates the catabatic motif to emphasize Debbie’s equation with Persephone. 5 Day (above, n.2) 23–25. 6 The fi lm exemplifi es the contention of J. G. Cawelti (Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture [Chicago 1976] 12, cited by Holtsmark [above, n.2] 24 in relation to the different adaptations of the catabasis motif 240 Classical World Perhaps one further fi lmic comparandum will help to support my assertion that contemporary fi lm and fi ction can construct a version of Persephone who is self-actualized, resourceful, and independent. Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (2002), adapted by Henry Selick into an animated stop-motion fi lm (2009), is a deliberate evocation of the Persephone myth, as several signposts indicate. One signal of course is the hero- ine’s name, Coraline, a variant on Kore (“Girl”), a common appellation of Persephone. Another comes early in the story when Coraline meets Whybie, a boy who is at fi rst dressed as Death, just at the point when she is trying to fi nd a well in the earth. Eventually, she travels through a tunnel to Other World where she encounters simulacra of her par- ents, but Other Mother is really a witch who plots to keep Coraline in Other World and entraps her real parents in a snow globe. Like Mattie, Coraline is a quick-witted, courageous, and autonomous girl who nego- tiates her own passage into Hades. Again, there is no grieving mother searching for her daughter; indeed it will be up to Coraline to rescue her parents from Other Mother, who has imprisoned them in a miniature winter. Furthermore, Coraline is never married (she is far too young, although she would be considered nubile in ancient Greece), and her heroic efforts result in a reintegration into her family.