The Frontier Myth and the Frontier Thesis in Contemporary Genre Fiction

THE FRONTIER MYTH AND THE FRONTIER THESIS IN CONTEMPORARY GENRE FICTION _________________________________________________ A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri-Columbia _________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy _________________________________________________ by JIHUN YOO Dr. Andrew Hoberek, Dissertation Supervisor DECEMBER 2015 The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the dissertation entitled THE FRONTIER MYTH AND THE FRONTIER THESIS IN CONTEMPORARY GENRE FICTION presented by Jihun Yoo, a candidate for the degree of doctor of philosophy, and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. _________________________________________________ Professor Andrew Hoberek ________________________________________________ Professor Sw. Anand Prahlad ________________________________________________ Associate Professor Joanna Hearne ________________________________________________ Associate Professor Valerie Kaussen ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation committee—Drs. Andrew Hoberek, Sw. Anand Prahlad, Joanna Hearne and Valerie Kaussen—for helping me with this project from the very beginning until now. I would like to thank, in particular, my dissertation advisor, Dr. Hoberek, for guiding me through the years. This dissertation wouldn’t have been possible without his wise advice and guidance. The support and encouragement of Drs. Dan Bauer and Kathy Albertson, and my colleagues at Georgia Southern University was also greatly appreciated. Especially, I would like to thank my family—my wife, Hyangki and my daughter, Yena—and both of my parents and in-laws who sacrificed so much to offer support and prayers during the Ph.D. program. Also, I want to thank pastor Hanjoo Park and church members at Korean First Presbyterian Church of Columbia for their support and prayers. Finally, I would like to praise God for all his love and grace. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: City of Glass and the Frontier Myth: Turner’s Frontier Thesis and 42 the Detective “Eye” as Logocentric Projects Chapter 2: No Country for Old Men and the Frontier Tradition: Determinism 77 vs. Free Will, the American Dream, and Rugged Individualism Chapter 3: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the Frontier Model of 119 Economy and Socio-Economic-Political Crisis Chapter 4: Mason & Dixon and the Re-charting the Frontier Myth: History, 161 Myth and the Mythopoetic Vision Conclusion 200 Works Cited 206 Vita 219 Introduction Richard Slotkin, in Regeneration Through Violence, investigates how the myth of America evolved and gained credence and power. Slotkin’s diagnosis on America’s adherence to this myth—the conception of America as a “wide-open land of unlimited opportunity of the strong, ambitious, self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top” (5)—captures the very essence of the myth of America. Illustrating the frontier myth, David Mogen has commented that within the myth “The Old World and the New World archetypes generate an expandable set of opposing terms, adaptable to any time and any scale” that “has been evoked by the settlement and the wilderness” (24). Moreover, Mogen interpreted that the myth “utilize[s] this inherent symbolic environment as a background for [a] narrative” (25) which features a frontier hero “from the Old World journey to the New World in the hope of rejuvenation and the regaining of innocence, trying to return to a time before the Fall, to become . the American Adam” (27). According to the myth, the New World was conceived to be a “gateway through which one might escape from time into space, from bounds to boundlessness, and from the works of corrupt and corrupting humanity to works of God in uncorrupted nature” (Mogen, Busby and Bryant 6). David Nobel likewise recognizes that the “central tradition in American historical writings has been the assumption that the United States, unlike the European nations, has a covenant that makes Americans a chosen people who have escaped from the terror of historical change to live in timeless harmony with nature” (ix). He further argues that “the drama of American intellectual history has been the hope of the European emigrants in coming to the New World: they could there undergo a 1 religious experience of rebirth which would allow them to transcend the tension of the historical communities of the Old World” (x). Most scholars, in particular, will agree with Mogen’s and Nobel’s analyses of the frontier archetype: the opposition between the Old World (civilization) and the New World (frontier/nature/wilderness) and the process in which God’s chosen people escape from the limitations of the Old World and venture into the New World in the hope for regeneration and rebirth that results in the triumph of progress and the metamorphosis of the frontier figure. There is nothing new to the fact that the “Judeo-Christian tradition constituted . [a] powerful formative influence on the attitude toward [the] wilderness of the Europeans who discovered and colonized the New World” (Nash 13). In fact, the “discovery of the New World rekindled the traditional European notion that an earthly paradise lay somewhere to the west” (Nash 25). Seconding Henry Nash’s view, Sacvan Bercovitch suggested that “New England evolved from its own origins into the American Way . by the concept of an errand into the wilderness” known not simply as a migration “from one place to another, but from a depraved Old World to a New Canaan” (8). As Annette Kolodny correctly noted, “Eden, Paradise, the Golden Age, and the idyllic garden, in short, all the backdrops for European literary pastoral, were subsumed in the image of an America” (The Lay of the Land 6). Since the publication of Frederick J. Turner’s The Frontier in American History, many scholars, regardless of their acceptance to or disapproval of Turner’s frontier thesis, have commonly treated the American frontier as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization” (Turner 2) and an “area of free land” (Turner 22) unjustifiably defined by Turner himself. Defined in this binary paradigm, the American frontier seems to be a 2 place of ambivalence: a place where savagery and chaos exist side by side with civilization and order. Regardless whether scholars embraced or disapproved of such a notion, commentators on the frontier and frontier experience still fall into two parties— those who claim that the historicity of the frontier resulted in creating an unique American myth as a positive force that fosters the evolution and maturation of the American spirit and those who consider this to be somewhat mythical or illusionary. If the Turnerian assumption is accurate—if the wilderness, or realities of the American landscape, enables the settlers to “acquire certain elements or qualities distinctively derived from and suited to that environment” (Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence 26)—then why would the frontier myth not be the same as, or at least similar to, the myth of aboriginal Indians? Obviously, despite sharing common features of the frontier environment, the frontier myth developed differently between that of Euro-Americans and native Indians. Yet, the question raised here does not attempt to disprove the arguments made by the first camp. Indeed, it is hard to deny the colonist’s physical and psychological situation—“the wilderness of the land, its blending of unmitigated harshness and tremendous potential fertility; the absence of strong European culture on the borders; and the eternal presence of the native people of the woods, and the psychological anxieties attended on the tearing up of home roots for wide wandering outward in space and, apparently, back in time” (Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence 18)—that shaped the mythology of America. However, such a myth cannot be the sole product of reality “drawn from history” that “dramatize[s] the world vision and historical sense of a people, culture, reducing centuries of experience into a constellation of compelling metaphors” (Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence 6). What scholars like 3 Slotkin ignore is the fact that (the frontier) myth is simultaneously shaped by a culture’s (frontier) consciousness—an illusionary or imaginary vision of the world. According to Roland Barthes, myth is “constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things” (142) and its function is “to empty reality” (143). While many scholars use the term “myth” in many different ways, in this paper, the word is used to indicate an imaginary story or popular misconception which supports a particular culture’s ideology and world view. Relying on Roland Barthes, my position to myth, particularly with the frontier myth, is that it is a product of socio-economic and political apparatuses performing a very specific function—a function that drains reality, hiding its mythological fullness. Thus, diverting from the second camp but relying on Barthes, I suggest that the myth of the frontier, rather, informs an American consciousness and worldview veiling its own socio-economic-political agendas. To sum, in this paper, I content that the frontier myth, implicitly, necessitates the imperative of transfiguring a chaotic, mysterious, and savage wilderness (the New World) into an ordered civilization (the Old World). Thus, borne out of this contest between the wilderness/chaos and civilization/order, is

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