American Frontiers: Pathways to Masculine Identity Realization
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AMERICAN FRONTIERS: PATHWAYS TO MASCULINE IDENTITY REALIZATION by Capron M. Hedgepath A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Middle Tennessee State University May 2019 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Mischa Renfroe, Chair Dr. Carl Ostrowski Dr. William Brantley ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who helped, motivated, inspired, and supported me. Deepest thanks and much gratitude go to Dr. Mischa Renfroe who tirelessly provided me with invaluable guidance, assistance, and patience during every stage of this dissertation. I also want to thank Dr. Carl Ostrowski who mentored me throughout much of my time in the program and assisted me with this project while always lending a kind and attentive ear. And many thanks are certainly due to Dr. Will Brantley who also helped lead me down the path of the journey. Most of all, I want to thank my wife, Elizabeth, whose sacrifices and infinite kindness allowed me to chase my goals, and whose dedication to others serves as a constant reminder to me that whenever I navigate the chaos of the frontier, I can always count on her to be by my side. ii ABSTRACT This dissertation explores and analyzes a recurring artistic impulse that emerges time and time again in narratives of American frontier mythology. From nineteenth-century texts such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and Herman Melville’s epic Moby-Dick, through current, reconfigured representations of frontier spaces in works like Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Stephen Hunter’s novel Pale Horse Coming, the path to meaningful masculine identity realization occurs by entering various iterations of the frontier. In this light, each narrative in this study is characterized by a longing to flee civilization and the negative effects of navigating America’s socio-cultural norms as they relate to frontier closure, industrialization, the gendered separation of domestic and work spheres, and the proliferation of a cultural emphasis on the extrinsic values perpetuated and reinforced by American affluence. As a consequence of the trajectory of such socio- cultural and institutional progress, American society has become almost entirely de- tribalized, divorced from our human evolutionary past in ways that have done much to contribute to significant rises in anxiety, loneliness, isolation, alienation, depression, and suicide. In the realm of American fiction, this cultural and existential malaise becomes expressed through frontier narratives by characters, men and women alike, who long for the meaningful masculine identity realization that is enabled when one is part of an inter- reliant group in which the three basic, intrinsic human needs of self-determination theory are met. Through various trials of confronting the inherent chaos and hardships found in either traditional or reconfigured frontier spaces, the male and female characters in this study can be read as seeking a return to our tribal past. The relative successes and cautionary failures of their journeys reveal much about the biological and cultural iii influences that shape masculine performances as they are characterized, assessed, and evaluated through artistic representations. In this context, this study explores the following works: The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Hidden Hand (1888), Pale Horse Coming (2001), Moby-Dick (1851), McTeague (1899), The Awakening (1899), No Country for Old Men (2005), The Call of the Wild (1903), Song of Solomon (1977), Fight Club (1996), and Captain Fantastic (2016). iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I – MASCULINITIES AND THE FRONTIER . 1 Conceptualizing the Frontier . 1 Gender and the Frontier . 16 Our Tribal Ancestry . 34 Three Frontier Spaces . 47 CHAPTER II – THE WILD FRONTIER . 60 Overview . 60 Narrative Influences . 67 Traditional Frontier Masculinities: Border Conflicts, Honor and Tribe . 71 A Young Woman in the Frontier . 92 Modernizing the Frontier Hero . 105 Honor vs. Dignity . 126 The Darker Side of Tribalism . 130 Crossing the Threshold . 137 CHAPTER III – THE WANING FRONTIER . 139 Overview . 139 Leviathan and the Frontier . 149 Race and Masculinity . 168 Sinking the Ship . 172 Industry and the Waning Frontier . 173 Divisive Competition . 185 v Extrinsic Motives . 191 The Search for Freedom in the Frontier . 193 Another Kind of Awakening . 196 The Death of the Frontier Hero . 208 CHAPTER IV – POST-FRONTIER RECKONINGS . 223 Overview . 223 The Call of the Frontier . 231 Failure to Adapt . 241 Tribal Connectedness . 245 (Re)Discovering an Ancestral Past . 249 Wasted Potential . 270 Manhood, For Sale . 272 A New Tribe . 277 Captain Fantastic: Into the Primitive and Back . 294 CHAPTER V – THE ROLE OF THE FRONTIER . 307 Closing Remarks . 306 WORKS CITED . 331 vi 1 CHAPTER I – MASCULINITIES AND THE FRONTIER “My shadow’s shedding skin . .” -Tool Conceptualizing the Frontier During the summer of 1893, at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, noted historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the American frontier played a pivotal role in the shaping of American identity, democracy, and exceptionalism. Within this same context, Turner insists “American social development has been continually beginning over and over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character” (1134). While delivering what has come to be known as his Frontier Thesis, Turner also moved to address what he described as the end or closing of the frontier, specifically in light of the U.S. Census of 1890, concluding with a sense of finality and an implicit gesture towards the future: “And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history” (1137). Ostensibly, the frontier, along with the prospects of taming an uncultivated wilderness, had reached the point of exhaustion. Aside from the national reckoning with geographically expansionist and sectionalist closure, Turner also draws attention to the pioneer’s need to adapt to the environment: 2 The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. (1134-1135) Here, Turner recognizes a reciprocal, if not symbiotic arrangement: an individual both shapes and becomes shaped by the frontier environment. Along the way in his thesis, Turner also examines what frontier colonization and eventual closure meant for American society as a whole, speculating on the possible future of the nation. What this meant for the future realm of American literature, however, might now be described as a contemporary reimagining or re-opening of the closed frontier, undertaken by numerous authors through creative, preservationist, frightening, cautionary, and potentially salvific possibilities. This project will situate contemporary reconfigurations of the frontier by Stephen Hunter, Toni Morrison, Chuck Palahniuk, Cormac McCarthy, and Matt Ross alongside canonical texts by James Fenimore Cooper, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Herman Melville, Frank Norris, Kate Chopin, and Jack London and explore many thematic connections that unifies these works in light of current theories of masculinity. My project seeks to investigate selected works of the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty first centuries with a specific emphasis on examining and analyzing depictions of the frontier as a liminal space in American fiction. As it currently stands, 3 the frontier and our contemporary conceptualizations of it are becoming increasingly occupied by representations of masculinity that challenge and often subvert previously stereotypical, flat, and one-dimensional characters. Modern iterations of the old, romantic, and heroic frontier are now shifting, allowing room for both intersectional and multicultural identities and experiences. Similarly, the face of the old heroic landscape has evolved to take the form of something more inclusive, ushering in complications and sometimes total deflation of the heroic ethos that arguably drives and defines many early frontier narratives. In his essay, “A Longer, Grimmer, but More Interesting Story,” historian Elliot West addresses such claims head on, juxtaposing the old conceptions of the frontier with the new: “These new themes, by contrast, emphasize a continuing cultural dislocation, environmental calamity, economic exploitation, and individuals who either fail outright or run themselves crazy chasing unattainable goals” (122). To put it another way, frontier stories in American literature were once (with a few exceptions, of course) overwhelmingly escapist, homosocial preserves that excluded women, people of color, and non-heteronormative gender performances, and in many cases, this still holds to be true. However, as Elliot West suggests, representations of the frontier have undoubtedly