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 mythological 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 complex 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 between 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 treatment 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 heroine’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 parents, 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 negotiates 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. As this iteration of the Persephone myth suggests, contemporary audiences are receptive to the idea of a plucky girl hero whose trajectory may be plotted on a mythic paradigm, but one that is disrupted in a way that draws attention to her independence and courage. Such is Mattie Ross, whose search for her father’s killer is structured as a mythic quest, and whose tumble into the snake pit calls to mind the ancient motif of the descent into hell. I concentrate on the Coens’ True Grit for two related reasons. First, as I have already suggested, the fi lm introduces several signifi cant innovations that expand the initiatory motifs of the novel. Many of these motifs are universal in nature and correspond to the ritual behavior of a range of different societies, including those of ancient Greece. But the motif of initiation gains a special signifi cance when Mattie falls into the pit, an event that resembles the catabasis (or visit to the underworld) of ancient Mediterranean cult and mythology.7 Versions of the catabasis

in contemporary cinema) that: “A successful formulaic work is unique when, in addition to the pleasure inherent in the conventional structure, it brings a new element into the formula, or embodies the personal vision of the creator.” 7 For a summary of the mytheme in ancient literature see B. Louden, Homer’s Odys- sey and the Near East (Cambridge 2011) 197–221. Fletcher | The Catabasis of Mattie Ross 241 mytheme from ancient Greek literature include the Nekyia in book 11 of the Odyssey, an event that has little impact on the plot of the poem, but one that signifi es the rebirth of Odysseus and his reentry into civilized Greek society. More pertinently, Persephone’s abduction and descent to the underworld function as an analogy for marriage and the symbolic death of the bride’s virginal identity. As Bonnie MacLachlan has argued, a virtual catabasis was enacted by Greek parthenoi as a rite of passage at places such as the shrine of Persephone at the Grotto Caruso near Locri.8 A cleft in the earth becomes representative of a gap between maidenhood and womanhood, and for a moment the landscape draws the girl into the earth and then releases her transformed and ready to assume her new identity as bride, wife, and mother. My second reason for focusing on the latest version of True Grit is that the Coens change the ending of the story in a way that makes Mattie solely responsible for the death of Tom Chaney, the man whom she sought to bring to justice for murdering her father. In Hathaway’s 1969 fi lmic adaptation, it is Rooster alone who commits the deed, a modifi cation that lessens the moral impact of a girl’s problematic transition to adulthood, and effaces the complicated ethical questions that the novel raises about some of society’s most fundamental needs for law and order. The Coens’ version highlights elements of the novel that are suppressed in the fi rst fi lmic adaptation, but the Coens also make their own innovations that charge the narrative with a deeper and yet more ambivalent concept of justice. If Hathaway’s Mattie Ross (played by Kim Darby) is a symbol of the spirit and morality of America (an antidote to the growing disillusionment of the late 1960’s), then the Coens’ revision might seem to refl ect the pessimism of a nation in economic and social turmoil, for which no apparent antidote exists. Their Mattie (brilliantly played by Hailee Steinfeld), the erstwhile symbol of American freedom of spirit and purity of heart, is a more forceful version of the vengeful maiden of Portis’ imagination, and her act of revenge has a more intense mythological quality. The voyage to the land of the dead symbolized by the descent to and ascent from the cavern thus frames the fi lm’s deep moral concerns with law, judgment, and retribution. At this point it would be useful to expand upon my initial plot summary. The narrative is told retrospectively by Mattie as an adult,

8 B. MacLachlan “Women and Nymphs at the Grotto Caruso,” in G. Casadio and P.A. Johnston, eds., Mystic Cults in Magna Graecia, (Austin 2004) 204–16. 242 Classical World who recalls how she sought revenge for the senseless murder of her father by his hired hand, known to her family as Tom Chaney, in Fort Smith, a town on the Arkansas border. As I have already noted, Mattie is a precocious teenager with a legalistic mind and a head for business. Chaney will recognize her as “little Mattie the bookkeeper,” alluding to her role as her father’s accountant. She demonstrates her fi nancial acumen in Fort Smith when she threatens Colonel Stonehill, a horse trader, with legal action, thereby forcing him to buy back the fi ve ponies he had sold to her father. She then adroitly gets him to sell the in- trepid Little Blackie back to her for a trifl ing ten dollars. She uses some of her funds to hire Rooster Cogburn, an alcoholic, one-eyed, ruthless U.S. marshal, who possesses the ineffable quality of “true grit.” With some reluctance, Rooster (played by Jeff Bridges) and a Texas ranger known as LaBoeuf (Matt Damon) travel with Mattie to the Choctaw nation, a wilderness haven for outlaws, in pursuit of her father’s murderer. After several days of high adventure, and two brutal encounters that end with Rooster killing over half a dozen men, Mattie delivers the fatal wound to Chaney, but is then catapulted into a snake pit from the recoil of the gun. In Portis’ novel Mattie does not kill Chaney, but only wounds him; Rooster fi nishes off the job. Hathaway’s Hollywood version drastically waters down the denouement by making Rooster solely responsible for the execution of Chaney. In the Coens’ revision, Mattie shoots Chaney in self-defense after he puts a knife to her throat. LaBoeuf intervenes at this point, but is knocked out by Chaney, and the young girl is left to fend for herself. But her aim has been to bring her father’s murderer to justice, and ultimately she accomplishes her goal. Justice, however, is not obtained inside a courthouse but outside in the wilderness, a space often associated with puberty rituals in a variety of different traditions. The Coens’ amendment, and it is an important one, makes Mat- tie’s coming-of-age coincident with an act that is both a performance of justice and a homicide. The fi lm bestows an agency on this powerful maiden that highlights the workings of justice and its availability to the marginalized victims of crime—for Mattie knows full well that the authorities at Fort Smith have little interest in dealing with her father’s killer. As I hope to demonstrate, the Coens embed their girl hero’s entry into the complex world of law and jurisprudence within a timeless mythic paradigm that not only highlights her transitional status and mu- table identity, but also situates her in a social space where the strictures of law are temporarily suspended. Fletcher | The Catabasis of Mattie Ross 243

II. The Catabasis in Contemporary Culture

For now, however, let me dispense with an inevitable question. Whether or not the Coen Brothers know about Greek catabatic myth and ritual, or ancient texts such as the Homeric Hymn to Demeter or Ovid’s Metamorphoses 5. 341–661 (that is, the two most famous versions of the myth of Persephone/Proserpine), should not be an issue here.9 As I have already suggested, my hypothesis does not rest on a deliberate citation of the myth, but it bears noting that the story of Persephone is a well-established trope in fi ction and is thus recognizable to a broad audience. The myth already had many variants in Greco-Roman literature and infl uenced European art and literature for centuries. But after the discovery of the manuscript of the Hymn to Demeter in 1877, Perse- phone’s story became one of the most popular subjects of the classical tradition. I provide a few examples from many possibilities to illustrate this point. Helene Foley surveys the phenomenon in poetry from the Vic- torian period to the present, including for example Margaret Atwood’s “Double Persephone.” Andrew Radford examines the myth’s infl uence in works such as Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and D. H. Lawrence’s The Lost Girl, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels that, according to Radford’s thesis, negotiate a more woman-cen- tered approach to classical antiquity initiated by the work of Jane Harri- son and the Cambridge ritualists. Holly Virginia Blackford’s monograph, which begins with an excellent overview of the Persephone story’s infl u- ence on poetry, opera, drama, art, and other cultural products since the eighteenth century, surveys how the Hymn to Demeter shaped the motif of the virgin’s transition in children’s fantasy literature of the past century, from J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Wendy (1911) to Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (2002). She notes in particular how the myth of Persephone’s abduction can be used as a symbol for the psychic individuation of a girl from her mother.10 Other adaptations of the myth in recent novels

9 Nonetheless, it would seem from O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000), which is based on Homer’s Odyssey, that the Coens have some familiarity with classical myth and literature. Despite their claim not to have actually read the Odyssey, the fi lm displays some subtle allusions to Homer’s original. See J. Siegel, “The Coens’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Homer’s Odyssey,” Mouseion 7 (2007) 213–45. Of particular note is her analysis of the cinema scene as a type of catabasis (230), from which Everett and Delmar emerge “with crucial information that will affect their future.” 10 H. Foley, “Interpretative Essay,” in H. Foley, ed., The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary and Interpretive Essays (Princeton 1993) 97–103, 150–69; A. 244 Classical World include John David Morley’s Feast of Fools (1994), which takes place in modern Munich, where a young wife deserts her husband temporarily for an intriguing undertaker. In Amy Bloom’s Away (2007), set in the early twentieth century, a Jewish refugee from Russia, Lillian Leyb, treks across America to Alaska in search of her lost daughter. Suffi ce to say then that the myth of Persephone has seeped into contemporary culture deeply enough to become a recognizable trope.11 The descent of Persephone is but one version of the catabasis, as other variants of the myth have also infl uenced Western culture. In addition to the Odyssean Nekyia, variations include Orpheus’ descent to Hades, most famously told in Vergil’s Fourth Georgic, and Aeneas’ ex- tensive trip through Dis in Aeneid 6. The experience of Aeneas descend- ing to Hades and making a subsequent ascent, or anabasis, features the acquisition of special knowledge (e.g., Aeneas’ vision of the future Rome) leading to the renewal of identity (Aeneas’ role as the father of the Roman empire), a recurring feature of catabatic narratives and one that has obvious parallels with coming-of-age stories. The Vergilian version of the descent was an important infl uence on Dante’s Inferno, which in its turn has shaped subsequent Western literature, including, for example, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and Malcolm Low- ry’s Under the Volcano (1947).12 David Pike, who summarizes the evo- lution of the motif from the medieval to the modern period, describes the descent as “a fundamentally allegorical form: the core fact of death is imbued with the hero’s individual past, the past of his society, and the past of the motif itself.”13 In a similar vein, Rachel Falconer writes about a “katabatic imagination,” or “a worldview which conceives of selfhood as a narrative construct of an infernal journey and return.” Her study explores how texts produced between the Nazi genocide and the 9/11 attacks negotiate

Radford, The Lost Girls: Demeter-Persephone and the Literary Imagination, 1850–1930 (New York 2007); H. V. Blackford, The Myth of Persephone in Girls’ Fantasy Literature (New York 2011). For further discussion of the infl uence of the Persephone myth see N. J. Richardson, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Oxford 1974) 68–86; A. Grafton, G. W. Most and S. Settis, The Classical Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 2010) 254–55. 11 J. D. Morley, The Feast of Fools (London 1995); A. Bloom Away (New York 2007). 12 See G. Cambon, “Dante’s Presence in American Literature,” Dante Studies 118 (2000) 217–42. 13 D. Pike, Passage Through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds (Ithaca 1997) 2. Fletcher | The Catabasis of Mattie Ross 245 tragedies of the holocaust, AIDS, and terrorism, and the challenges of a social apocalypse that include redundancy, divorce, and mental illness. The monograph includes Holocaust biographies, fi lms, and novels, and culminates with a chapter on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, all of which illustrate that “Western culture is saturated with the idea of a self being forged out of an infernal journey.”14 Also relevant to my analysis of True Grit are other contemporary authors who have incorporated catabatic elements in novels with initiatory themes. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon features a young man’s experience in a cave as a rite-of-passage narrative that confl ates Greek mythic elements (such as the fi gure of Circe) with African-American folktales. I have also investigated how John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse uses the motif in a postmodern pastiche of the Odyssean Nekyia that deals with a young man’s coming-of-age.15 As all these preceding examples illustrate, the catabasis has become a powerful metaphor not only for maturation, but also for loss, renewal, and redemption in contemporary Western cultural products. Our reception of True Grit is thus shaped by a pervasive motif that has its origins in Greek mythology, but that has been adapted and reworked to fi t with modern constructions of the human psyche, the formation of cultural identities, and concerns with the individual and society. Finally, it is also germane that ethnographic research of the past century has brought attention to the universality of coming-of-age rituals in diverse cultures; these rites of passage can often be associated with death and rebirth. Victor Turner describes this condition as “betwixt and between,” and observes that initiates may be buried in the earth or covered with earth as a ritual metaphor for the end of childhood, an observation that resonates with the catabatic initiation rituals of ancient Greece.16 As we shall presently note, the Coens’ fi lm alludes to several universal initiatory motifs that have been catalogued by anthropolo- gists such as Arnold van Gennep, who observed that the fundamental

14 R. Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives Since 1945 (Edinburgh 2005) 2–4. Falconer’s introductory chapter includes an excellent overview of the scholarship and reception of the descent narrative. 15 J. Fletcher, “Signifying Circe in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon,” CW 99 (2006) 405–18; J. Fletcher, “Lost in the Underworld: John Barth Reads the Odyssey,” CML 23 (2002) 65–76. 16 V. W. Turner The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca 1967) 96. 246 Classical World character of rite-of-passage ceremonies is shared by many cultures and differs only in detail. Classicists, particularly those with an anthropological bent, have studied how the ancient Greeks celebrated and contex- tualized these transitions with rituals and myths that attest to anxieties about the potential danger of such passages.17 The following interpretation of the Coens’ True Grit is colored by all these aforementioned literary and anthropological approaches. My strategy will fi rst be to identify the initiatory motifs of the fi lm, and then to use the story of Persephone as an analogy for Mattie’s rite of passage, which is represented both as a separation from her mother and a visit to the land of the dead. Mattie is a version of the “lost girl,” whose mother, according to LaBoeuf, is anxious for her daughter’s return. While the Homeric Hymn to Demeter focuses on the experience of the grieving mother, and on Demeter’s search for her daughter, True Grit relegates this mother to the background. She is, in the words of her daughter, “indecisive and hobbled by grief,” leaving Mattie to deal with family business. The fi lm’s early scenes emphasize Mattie’s separation from Mrs. Ross. The landlady of the boarding house in Fort Smith also suggests that she will be anxious for her daughter’s return, but Mattie dismisses this concern as secondary to her duty to requite her father’s murder. Keeping this absent mother in mind, I observe that several moments in the fi lm—some expanded from the original novel, others introduced by the Coens—evoke Persephone’s descent. The manipula- tion of this paradigm is no idle conceit: as I have suggested, this story of a girl’s social transformation uses the conventions of coming-of-age mythology and ritual to provoke fundamental questions about relation- ships between law and justice, and Mattie’s engagement with these is- sues becomes the most salient aspect of her transition to maturity. The fi lm positions Mattie’s journey to adulthood in a physical borderland, beyond the political structures of jurisprudence, in a way that confl ates the wild landscape with her socially interstitial status as a legal minor on the cusp of maturity.

17 A. van Gennep, The Rites of Passage ( London 1909) 65–115. Two recent edited volumes illustrate the interest in initiation rituals, and the applicability (and arguably the overuse) of anthropological models for Ancient Greek society: M. W. Padilla, ed., Rites of Passage in Ancient Greece: Literature, Religion, and Society (Lewisburg 1999); D. B. Dodd and C. A. Faraone, eds., Initiation in Ancient Greek Rituals and Narratives: New Critical Perspectives (London and New York 2003). Fletcher | The Catabasis of Mattie Ross 247

III. Transitions and Transactions

Mattie’s move toward maturity is plotted as three physical transitions across topographical boundaries, the fi nal being the snake pit into which she falls. Throughout her journey she experiences the Choctaw nation as a transitional space, a strange frontier populated with hybrid creatures.18 Mattie arrives in Fort Smith, the portal to this other world, to claim the body of her father, which she sends home with the family’s hired man, Yarnell. Having spent every cent she has on these arrangements, she asks the undertaker if she can stay the night in the morgue, and so he offers her a coffi n, which she accepts. In addition to demonstrating this young girl’s mettle, the macabre innovation suggests a ritual sleep or incuba- tion that begins an initiatory process. Mattie’s night among the corpses is the prelude to her visit to what she terms “the valley of the shadow of death,” another Coen interpolation, although consonant with Portis’ scripture-quoting heroine. Rooster Cogburn is Mattie’s guide through this metaphorical valley of death, and her relationship with him is complex both in terms of the surface narrative (his drinking and chicanery put Mattie’s faith in him to test) and its deeper mythic intertext. We can see in him the fi gure of Hermes, the psychopomp, guiding Mattie to the underworld.19 On the other hand, there are reasons to think of Rooster as a Hades fi gure, although, as we shall presently see, it is only in death that he becomes Mattie’s bridegroom. Unlike Hades, however, he hardly qualifi es as her abductor. Indeed he is most reluctant to take this self-righteous virgin into dangerous outlaw territory, even though he had initially accepted payment from her. Despite Mattie’s stern remonstrance that they have a contract and that she is his employer, Rooster joins up with LaBoeuf, who offers a better reward for taking Chaney to trial in Texas on the charge of killing a state senator. Of course, contracts with children can- not be legally binding, as Colonel Stonehill reminded Mattie. And even if they were, Mattie should hardly be surprised by Rooster’s lack of scru- ples. His cavalier attitude towards the law was what appealed to her: she

18 On the signiﬁ cance of geographical boundaries in catabatic Westerns, see Clauss (above, n.3) 9, who comments on caves and rivers as symbolic entrances to the underworld. See Holtsmark (above, n.2) 26 –27 on this and on the catabatic motif of strange or monstrous creatures in the underworld. 19 The catabatic hero is often accompanied and helped by a companion as Holtsmark (above, n. 2) 27 observes. 248 Classical World watched, and evidently approved of, his performance in the courtroom when he fudged the truth about killing a man for a bounty. Nonetheless, Mattie is dauntless, and when it becomes apparent that Rooster and LaBoeuf intend to leave her behind—a young inexperienced girl would be a handicap on such a perilous journey—she makes her pony, Little Blackie, swim across the freezing river, and thus reaches the Choctaw territory on her own steam. The river crossing, a dramatic indication of this young girl’s deter- mination, signals her transition to another social identity as she moves precariously towards adulthood. There is a long tradition of river crossing being associated with rites of passage, as van Gennep has observed.20 Jennifer Larson for example, discusses the importance of rivers in Greek nuptial transitions.21 The mythology of social transition can allude to the voyage across the Styx in Charon’s ferry, the ﬁ nal rite of passage. And the initiatory theme is sustained when, after Mattie arrives on the other side of the river, LaBoeuf thrashes her with a birch switch, suggesting the ritual beating of the initiate. Examples abound, but germane to this article (since it involves girls) is the ritual beating (a test of endurance) of adolescent girls in Botswana during their puberty rites.22 Some of these initiatory motifs (including the river crossing and the beating) originate in Portis’ novel, but the Coens expand upon the theme with their characteristic dark humor. Their treatment adds more mythological texture to Mattie’s narrative by emphasizing the girl’s transitional status and the liminality of the landscape that she has so insistently penetrated. The passage to adulthood has ritual associations with various forms of hybridity in different cultures. The concept of a young person on the cusp of sexual maturity often blurs the divisions between genders. For example, Plutarch (Lyc. 15.5) claims that Spar- tan women dressed in men’s clothing for their marriage ceremonies, and ancient Greek cult is not unique in featuring transvestism in rites of passage. Since Mattie’s costume seems to be characteristic of both

20 Van Gennep (above, n.17) 22–23 notes that a rite of spatial passage, including river crossings, can become symbolic of other types of transitions. Huckleberry Finn’s journey down the Mississippi is a classic ﬁ ctional example of the phenomenon. See Mah- di’s comments (in L. C. Mahdi, S. Foster, M. Little, eds., Betwixt and Between: Patterns of Masculine and Feminine Initiation [La Salle Ill. 1987] ix) on the quest journey as “the great metaphor for the initiation and individuation process.” 21 J. C. Larson, Greek Nymphs: Myth, Cult, Lore (Oxford 2001) 110. 22 P. Werbner, “The Hidden Lion: Tswapong Girls’ Puberty Rituals and the Problem of History,” Am Ethnol 36 (2009) 251. Fletcher | The Catabasis of Mattie Ross 249

genders, she conforms to Turner’s analysis of how initiates, or neo- phytes, are often conceived as either sexless, or possessed of the char- acteristics of both sexes.23 Correspondingly, Mattie, on the threshold of her maturation, wears her father’s coat and hat (which are several sizes too big) as she sets out on her voyage, but her frilly collar and girlish braids are always visible. The hybridity of her attire is consonant with her own transitional status; she is betwixt and between, to borrow Turner’s expression. Thus recalling the transvestism of initiation rituals, Mattie begins a journey in which the boundaries between animal and human are also blurred. Alone with Rooster (whose very name suggests this collapse of categories), she encounters Forrester, a bulky fi gure on horseback who appears from the shadows looking like a bear but gradually coming into focus as a man wearing a bearskin. Forrester is a permanent resident of the Choctaw territory, where he practices “dentistry in the nation, also veterinary arts, and medicine for those humans that will sit still for it.” This physician to both man and beast is the Coens’ invention; his brief appearance, with an emphasis on his entrepreneurial nature, reinforces a fi nancial motif. Forrester offers to sell Mattie and Rooster a corpse, the same body that the pair had found hanging from a tree, paying a form of justice for some unspecifi ed offense. They had handed the body over to a Native American man, who had evidently sold it to Forrester (who promptly extracted its teeth). Corpses are a form of currency in this valley of the shadow of death, and Mattie’s story is as much a series of transactions as transitions; revenge is an exchange, and justice is about balancing the books. Mattie proved to be a capable bargainer in Fort Smith when she closed a deal with the horse trader, and again when she negotiated her contract with Rooster. Her mission to fi nd Chaney is an entry in a ledger, as it were, of crime and recompense. Commenting on the punishment of a group of criminals she observes, “Justice had caught up with them to demand payment. You must pay for everything in this world, one way or another.” Becoming an adult involves participation in this economy. Mattie the bookkeeper will ensure that all debts are paid, although, according to the principles of talionic justice, she will be required to make a payment as well.

23 Turner (above, n.16) 98. For further examples and discussion in a Greek context, including the possibility of female transvestism at the Argive Hybristica, see M. Miller, “Reexamining Transvestism in Archaic and Classical Athens: The Zewadski Stamnos,” AJA 103 (1999) 242–43. 250 Classical World

The rough justice of the hanging mirrors the legal hanging of the three men that Mattie had witnessed in Fort Smith; those executions— however brutal they were—had nonetheless been ordained by a court of law as punishment for a crime. But on this side of the river there are no courts, and the systems of justice are negotiated outside the law. Mat- tie traveled here precisely because she refused any possibility of letting Chaney be tried in Texas. The strictures of civilization would deny Mat- tie the justice she desires, because the trial would not be for the death of her father. In this respect, Mattie shares an impetus with whoever had strung up the nameless victim in the wilderness. She not only exists in an interstitial space between childhood and adulthood, but also between law and its other. That other is a vengeful form of justice neither con- tained nor modulated by legal institutions. It is in this wilderness that Mattie experiences what it means to let violent reprisal replace law (however imperfect its mechanisms may be) when she and Rooster come across two thieves, part of Ned Pepper’s gang of outlaws, preparing a meal in a crude cabin—the gestures of civilization only emphasize how far they have departed from society. The encounter ends when Quincy, the elder of the two, chops the ﬁ ngers off a youth to prevent him from talking too much. His mutilation is a presage of Mattie’s eventual disﬁ gurement, but unlike her the Kid will not make it back to the other side. His corpse is left along with Quincy’s propped outside the cabin, and denied the most basic requirement of civilization, a burial.

IV. Mattie’s Catabasis

While Mattie’s experience in this fi rst circle of hell evinces the brutal- ity of frontier justice, she still has yet another border to cross to even more dangerous territory. Going down to a creek to fi ll her canteen, she comes unexpectedly across Tom Chaney, who recognizes her as “little Mattie the bookkeeper.” She fi res her gun, but only wounds him. Chaney grabs her, carries her across the creek—this second transition by water is now a genuine abduction—and takes her to Ned Pepper’s encampment. Once again, the divisions between human and animal are blurred as if to emphasize the transition. Pepper’s sheepskin chaps continue the ther- iomorphic theme, as his bottom half looks distinctly animalistic. More- over, among his crew is a man who never speaks, but only makes animal Fletcher | The Catabasis of Mattie Ross 251 noises, gobbling like a turkey, bawling like a calf, bleating like a goat, and crowing like a rooster. The fi rst time that the audience sees Mattie eat anything in the Choc- taw territory, she takes some bacon from the campfi re. Like Persephone with her pomegranate, Mattie’s acceptance of food signifi es another stage in her transition—it is a form of communion with her captors. Although she is a sweet-faced girl in a desperate situation, her desire for revenge beyond institutionalized justice puts her on the same side of the law as Ned Pepper’s gang. Paradoxically, she makes repeated references to her lawyer, offering his services to a succession of desperadoes, fi rst the Kid, then Pepper, and fi nally Chaney. In Mattie’s fantasy she can work the institutions of law; even in the most desperate circumstances in outlaw territory she imagines a destination enclosed within the archi- tecture of civil justice. When she tries to negotiate with Pepper, offering him a “good lawyer,” he sardonically responds, “I need a good judge.” But Ned Pepper, train robber and murderer, will never appear before a judge. He is one of Rooster’s many victims; falling to a justice that exists outside of culture, his corpse is left to rot with those of his companions. Before he goes to meet his death, Ned leaves Mattie in Chaney’s care, despite both their protests. Mattie will not leave well enough alone, and she hectors Chaney demanding the return of the gold piece he took from her father. There is a tussle. LaBoeuf intervenes unexpectedly, but is knocked unconscious. Mattie snatches Chaney’s rifl e and shoots him, this time fatally. Her act is both revenge and self-defense, but its imme- diate consequence is the recoil of the gun, which sends her into the deep pit behind her. This, the third boundary that Mattie crosses, is the fi nal and most lit- eral stage of her catabasis, wherein she shares the pit with a fully clothed human skeleton harboring a nest of rattlesnakes. Rooster hears Mattie’s cries, makes his way down the cavern, and, with the help of LaBoeuf, pulls Mattie above ground. The perspective is such that we, the audience, see the light above, creating a visual echo of Frederic Leighton’s painting, “The Return of Persephone” (1891), in which Hermes brings Persephone to the light. But Mattie does not emerge from her experience unscathed. One of the vipers has bitten her arm, the same arm that pulled the trigger on Chaney. Mattie is a girl with acute Old Testament sensibilities. As she had earlier observed, “You must pay for everything in this world, one way or another.” In the ledger of justice then Mattie must pay the price for her revenge, for she will lose this arm. 252 Classical World

The viper is a recognizable symbol for the repercussive vengeance that Mattie sets in motion, but it has farther ranging signifi cance as well.24 Snakes have ancient and enduring associations with death dating from Greek cultic iconography and beyond.25 In ancient Greco-Roman thought, snakes are chthonic symbols associated with the renewal of life and the catabatic tradition. Commenting on the use of serpent imagery found on some of the cultic items associated with the Locrian maidens’ devotion to Persephone, James Redfi eld observes, “[i]f serpents come up from the earth, they can in this way of thinking bring new life with them.”26 Mattie’s descent into the snake pit marks the completion of her transformation from child to adult—that is to say, her rebirth. She falls at the very moment that she kills Chaney, an adult act with adult conse- quences. And the snake pit is the culmination of a life-altering experience not only for Mattie but also for Rooster. As his nightly preparations made clear, Rooster had a fear of rattlesnakes: before falling to sleep he would encircle himself with a rope in the belief that it would ward off snakes. When he uses that same rope to rescue Mattie from the snake pit, it may be the fi rst altruistic act of his life. As he brings her from a virtual pit of death, Rooster also seems to be a version of Orpheus. The snakebite that sent Vergil’s Eurydice (an isotope of Persephone) to Hades (Verg. G. 4. 457 –459) not only instantiates the primeval connec- tion between serpents and the underworld, but also suggests a concep- tual association between love and death. Thus, in one Orphic theogony Zeus and Demeter turn into snakes to produce Persephone, and Zeus becomes a snake to mate with Persephone.27 The natural phallic symbolism of the serpent makes it easy to understand how it has become a cross-cultural signifi er of sexual power. Thus the serpent that wounds Mattie has multiple interrelated meanings that include vengeance, death and rebirth, and sexual maturity.

24 The symbolism of the snake as a force of vengeance is neatly encapsulated by Aeschylus’ image of the Erinyes, personiﬁ cations of revenge, as snake-haired Gorgons (Eum. 48–49). 25 The antiquity of this idea is evident. See W. Burkert, Greek Religion (Cambridge, Mass. 1977) 195. 26 J. Redﬁ eld, The Locrian Maidens: Love and Death in Greek Italy (Princeton 2003) 331. Turner (above, n.16) 99 says of the use of snake symbolism in initiation rituals: “ . . . the snake appears to die but only to shed its old skin and appear in a new one . . .” 27 M. L. West, The Orphic Poems (Oxford 1983) 73–74, 95, 97. Fletcher | The Catabasis of Mattie Ross 253

V. Re-integration and “Marriage”

As I have already suggested, the paradigm of Persephone’s marriage to Hades adds meaning to Mattie’s experience. This is not to suggest a simple one-to-one correspondence between True Grit and the Hymn to Demeter, although there are some provocative similarities between the two narratives. Mattie leaves her mother behind and enters a bleak landscape that corresponds to the sterility of the underworld. The dark tone and stark landscape of the Coens’ fi lm evoke a sense of death that is signifi cantly different from Hathaway’s Western with its brilliant blue skies and golden forests. Mattie’s transition occurs in winter (reminis- cent of the famine imposed by Demeter after the loss of Persephone) and often at night. Her budding sexuality is conveyed by LaBoeuf’s fl ir- tation with her. In Fort Smith she fi nds the prospect of kissing him unpleasant, but there is a tender moment in the wilderness when the two say their goodbyes like parting lovers. Mattie’s brief interlude with LaBoeuf takes place in a veritable underworld, suggesting a confl ation of love and death. Indeed her entire sojourn in the Choctaw nation is suffused with death, from the nameless corpse hanging on the tree to the various outlaws felled by Rooster, their bodies decorating this version of Hades. The descent into the pit is the most striking feature of Mattie’s coming-of-age, since it enhances the parallel with Persephone’s experience, which is a mythic paradigm for a Greek girl’s experience of marriage.28 In the fi nal scene of Mattie’s reminiscence, Rooster carries the unconscious girl in his arms, as a groom might carry a bride, to shel- ter, but this will be their last encounter for decades. Although Mattie lives out her life as a spinster, she experiences a symbolic marriage to Rooster that will bind him to her for eternity. And, like Persephone, she bears no children.29 The fi lm ends with a coda. Mattie is now a forty-year-old, one-armed spinster. According to the novel, she has become the prosperous owner of a bank. Her reintegration into society has not been as a wife and mother, but as a fi nancier, a role for which she is well suited. Despite

28 Foley (above, n.10) 104–12. 29 A. Suter (The Narcissus and the Pomegranate. An Archaeology of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter [Ann Arbor 2002] 95–96) makes the point of Persephone’s childless state in an argument against reading Persephone’s marriage to Hades as a coming-of-age myth, but I would argue in response that myths may often problematize the institutions they underpin. 254 Classical World her attempts to contact Rooster over the years, he has never returned to collect his payment. But after a quarter century he invites her to visit him at a Wild West show. Mattie arrives too late, since he died three days earlier. Rooster has been interred, but Mattie is undeterred. She has his coffi n exhumed, and takes him home to be buried in the family plot that she will share with him, her husband in death if not in life. The fi lm is thus framed by death; the coffi n of Mattie’s father was sent back to the Ross’s homestead in the early part of the story, just as the coffi n of Rooster is sent there at the end. The mirroring device lends symmetry to the narrative, emphasizing the cycle of death and mortality, a cycle that Persephone herself symbolizes. The last scene is a funereal landscape: a lifeless tree looms behind Mattie, while, dressed in black, she surveys the family plot. It is winter and a few snowfl akes are in the air. Like Perse- phone, Mattie presides over the dead.

WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY jﬂ [email protected]