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From Main-Travelled Roads to Route 66: Transitions in Prairie Naturalism

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From Main-Travelled Roads to Route 66: Transitions in Prairie Naturalism UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones 5-2010 From main-travelled roads to Route 66: Transitions in Prairie Naturalism Michelle Nicole Munkres University of Nevada Las Vegas Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/thesesdissertations Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Repository Citation Munkres, Michelle Nicole, "From main-travelled roads to Route 66: Transitions in Prairie Naturalism" (2010). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. 468. http://dx.doi.org/10.34917/1452591 This Thesis is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by Digital Scholarship@UNLV with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Thesis in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Thesis has been accepted for inclusion in UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones by an authorized administrator of Digital Scholarship@UNLV. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FROM MAIN-TRAVELLED ROADS TO ROUTE 66: TRANSITIONS IN PRAIRIE NATURALISM by Michelle Nicole Munkres Bachelor of Arts University of Nevada, Las Vegas 2008 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts in English Department of English College of Liberal Arts Graduate College University of Nevada, Las Vegas May 2010 Copyright by Michelle N. Munkres 2010 All Rights Reserved THE GRADUATE COLLEGE We recommend the thesis prepared under our supervision by Michelle Nicole Munkres entitled From Main-Travelled Roads to Route 66: Transitions in Prairie Naturalism be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts English Joseph B. McCullough, Committee Chair Richard Harp, Committee Member John H. Irsfeld, Committee Member David Wrobel, Graduate Faculty Representative Ronald Smith, Ph. D., Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate College May 2010 ii ABSTRACT From Main-Travelled Roads to Route 66: Transitions in Prairie Naturalism by Michelle Nicole Munkres Dr. Joseph B. McCullough, Examination Committee Chair Distinguished Professor of English University of Nevada, Las Vegas To best represent a people of a specific spatial and historical context, literary texts must necessarily demonstrate a vested interest and familiarity of a region and its inhabitants’ common experiences. In examining one particular aspect of regional naturalism in American literature, this study explores the basic tenets of Prairie Naturalism as defined by three major authors: Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather, and John Steinbeck. The short stories in Hamlin Garland’s Main-Travelled Roads (1891) establish the foundation of Prairie Naturalism with meticulous attention to daily lives on the plains and with political strategies to improve the lives of the oppressed. Willa Cather’s novels, O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), again place national attention on the plains and provide representational balance with positive and negative aspects of prairie life. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) gives voice to an otherwise marginalized population in desperate need of conditional improvement. All three authors’ works function first as truthful representations of prairie ecology, economy, and ethnography; they function second as deconstructive entities against images of the pastoral plains inhabited by noble yeomen. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: REVISITING NATURALISM AND THE POST-FRONTIER PRAIRIE ...................................................................1 CHAPTER 2 TOILING THE INGLORIOUS: HAMLIN GARLAND’S PRAIRIE FICTION ................................................................................12 CHAPTER 3 EQUILIBRIUM IN WILLA CATHER’S NATURALISM ....................34 CHAPTER 4 “THERE AIN’T NO SIN AND THERE AIN’T NO VIRTUE”: PRAIRIE NATURALISM IN THE GRAPES OF WRATH ................... 59 CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION: COMPARING PRAIRIE NATURALISMS .............. 84 WORKS CITED ................................................................................................................96 VITA ................................................................................................................................102 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee chair and advisor Professor Joseph McCullough for guiding this study from its onset and for years being a professional mentor. I would also like to thank Professors Richard Harp, John Irsfeld, and David Wrobel for their invaluable assistance and counsel. I would also like to acknowledge my dear friends and colleagues with whom I’ve shared this experience, for they have made it pleasant and memorable. I thank my parents for giving me the opportunity and strength to follow my passions, and I thank my wonderful husband, James, for giving me the courage and confidence to keep going. v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: REVISITING NATURALISM AND THE POST-FRONTIER PRAIRIE Life in the American Prairies and Plains can be easily misrepresented. While there is an undeniable beauty in America’s Middle West and Great Plains, there is also a brutal nature that engages an individual in a struggle to survive. For the newly-emigrated, there is the additional challenge of assimilation into an unwelcoming culture. For the prairie woman, there is the risk of stagnancy and losing individuality after marriage and childbirth. Among the other minute yet important details, from lost or broken tools to cracked and weathered hands, which certainly constitute a part of the genuine Prairie experience, there is the solemn and too-possible threat of losing personal property and prosperity regardless of effort or faith. Adding to these anxieties, the United States eliminated the “frontier” category from the census in 1890, giving the nation’s populace a feeling of termination to an impossible and unattainable ideal. 1 Before, the frontier symbolized expedition and development within the country and its citizens; the frontier’s closure wrought anxieties of environmental and social enclosure. Meanwhile, those who actually lived on the Frontier, or more specifically those who acquired farmland in the nation’s Middle West, gradually learned that living in a region advertised as exciting meant exerting a great amount of effort and finances, often leading to a life of stagnancy or, worse, perpetual labor. Resulting from the combination of public unease stirred from the closing of the frontier and the realization of the anticlimactic life of the American farmer, a developing literary genre flourished. Owing to its aesthetic qualities and varied apparent authorial 1 purposes, the American Naturalism movement in the later nineteenth century called for close consideration and perhaps re-classification of literature’s purpose. In reconsidering naturalism in a contemporary setting, expanding the study of general naturalism to regional naturalism generates specificity in textual examination, and this specificity allows readers to observe how the portrayal of American lives differs between authors and regions. The American Great Plains, or more generally the American prairie, is but one of these regions. Examining the differences and similarities in the portrayals of the prairie helps produce a broad idea of the authentic prairie and how its portrayal survived through the means of progressive authors. These authors are Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather, and John Steinbeck. These three authors produced a trifocal vision of the American Plains through works including Main-Travelled Roads , O Pioneers! , My Ántonia , and The Grapes of Wrath . In addition to developing works that emphasized realistic experiences, these writers helped redefine naturalism with the added focus of one region and its specific cultures and historical instances. The fictions of Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather, and John Steinbeck preserved a spatial-temporal matrix through textual media, helping to prevent unique perspectives from quiet demise over time: their works function as truthful representations of a specific time, place, and people. These authors’ texts function within the tradition of literary naturalism, whose definition, as I hope to demonstrate in this study, will become increasingly complicated with each of these author’s contributions. Each of them preserves the voices and experiences of a people who are at risk of erasure from the American literary catalogue. 2 Naturalism is an effective vehicle for so preserving these voices and experiences, yet the genre’s precise definition gradually evolved into a complicated aesthetic classification. It began in the late nineteenth century in France with Émile Zola and his The Experimental Novel and Other Essays (1893), which introduced the notion of the removal of imagination from the novel. The text explains that “with the naturalistic novel and the novel of observation and analysis, the conditions change at once,” and the naturalist novelist “invents a plan, a drama; only
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