MULTI-ETHNIC LITERATURES and the SOUTHWEST Jana M
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University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository English Language and Literature ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations Spring 4-15-2019 RE-THINKING THE WEIRD (IN THE) WEST: MULTI-ETHNIC LITERATURES AND THE SOUTHWEST Jana M. Koehler University of New Mexico - Main Campus Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons Recommended Citation Koehler, Jana M.. "RE-THINKING THE WEIRD (IN THE) WEST: MULTI-ETHNIC LITERATURES AND THE SOUTHWEST." (2019). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds/267 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Language and Literature ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. i Jana Koehler Candidate English Language and Literatures Department This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee: Dr. Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán, Chairperson Dr. Bernadine Hernández Dr. Virginia Scharff Dr. Sara Spurgeon ii RE-THINKING THE WEIRD (IN THE) WEST: MULTI- ETHNIC LITERATURES AND THE SOUTHWEST by JANA KOEHLER B.A., English, Women & Gender Studies, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2011 M.A., English, North Carolina State University, 2013 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy English The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico May, 2019 iii DEDICATION To my mom, Donna Koehler, for inspiring in me a love for the Southwest and to my grandfather, Robert Smith, who always loved a good western. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank my committee members, Dr. Bernadine Hernández, Dr. Sara Spurgeon, Dr. Virginia Scharff, for their generosity in sharing their knowledge and time. A special thank you to Dr. Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán for her constant support and encouragement. I also want to recognize several organizations that funded my research, including the Elizabeth and George Arms fund within American Literary Studies and the Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Award. v RE-THINKING THE WEIRD (IN THE) WEST: MULTI-ETHNIC LITERATURES AND THE SOUTHWEST by Jana Koehler B.A., ENGLISH, WOMEN & GENDER STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT GREENSBORO, 2011 M.A., ENGLISH, NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY, 2013 PH.D., ENGLISH, THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO, 2019 ABSTRACT My dissertation examines the genre of weird fiction, specifically texts that engage the concept of the Weird West. While authors such as Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft are often seen as the founders of this genre, I argue that ethnic and women writers, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ishmael Reed, Leslie Marmon Silko, Lucha Corpi, and others, explore the hidden histories of the West and Southwest in ways that incite a rethinking of the weird. Most importantly, I seek to demonstrate how the weird is not only a literary genre but a literary aesthetic and methodology that women and ethnic writers deploy against violent patriarchy and white supremacy in addition to misleading and dangerous fantasies of the Old West. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER ONE ............................................................................................................. 17 CHAPTER TWO ............................................................................................................ 50 CHAPTER THREE ........................................................................................................ 77 CHAPTER FOUR ........................................................................................................... 99 CHAPTER FIVE .......................................................................................................... 127 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................. 158 WORKS CITED............................................................................................................ 169 1 Introduction Regionalism and the Weird West on the Border The western genre has undergone many reincarnations in American literary and visual culture, and its most recent iteration is the weird western, a genre that defies narrative expectations by introducing elements of horror, science fiction, the supernatural, and the fantastical into the typical western narrative. Recent examples of this kind of “weirding” of the West on television and in film include AMC’s television series and spin off series Walking Dead (2010) and Fear The Walking Dead (2015), as well as Preacher (2015), and films like Cowboys and Aliens (2011) and Bone Tomahawk (2015). Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series is perhaps the most mainstream example of a weird western, which has been adapted to film (2017) and is in production to become a television series. Other writers who weird the West in popular fiction include China Miévill, Jack Ketchum, and Joe R. Lansdale. Like the dead that often inhabit its pages, the Weird West resurrects old myths about the region to overturn them, but it is largely told from the purview of white, heterosexual men, usually American or British, with some women, such as Emma Bull and Nancy A. Collins. This dissertation considers how ethnic and women writers have weirded the West long before it became popular or part of the domain of white, heterosexual men and some women. The study brings together literary works by Anglo, Black, Chicana/o, and Native American writers, some of whom are closely tied to the Southwest and others whom are lesser-known or under-studied in discussions of western and southwestern American literature, weird or otherwise. The Weird West is unique in that it dialogues with two distinctly American literary traditions: the western and weird fiction. Most scholars contend that James 2 Fenimore Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales and Owen Wister’s The Virginian are the earliest examples of the western, both taking place on the frontier, an iconic American space that offers “the opportunity for renewal, for self-transformation, for release from constraints associated with an urbanized East” (Mitchell 5). Lee Clark Mitchell observes that the western landscape in these texts assumes a “space removed from cultural coercion, lying beyond ideology,” offering “the most ideological of terrains” (4). Both weird westerns and traditional westerns are retrospective, focusing on a West of the past or one that is slowly fading into history—more often than not, a mythic West that never was, which makes the western “a peculiarly flexible form” that is “available to an array of ideological issues” (5). In her study Exploding the Western: Myths of Empire on the Postmodern Frontier, Sara Spurgeon interrogates this nostalgia; instead of focusing exclusively on the western genre, Spurgeon looks at the frontier myth itself, observing that “myths are not history,” but they “are what we wish history had been,” making them powerful narratives that continue to influence American national identity (3). Both Mitchell and Spurgeon argue that the western and the frontier myth are part of particular cultural anxieties about the society in which they are produced. For Mitchell, the western’s ultimate concern is with representations of male cowboys, contending that the western genre is “deeply haunted by the problem of becoming a man” (4). That white heterosexual and predominantly male writers are dominating the mainstream market right now is not surprising, given the history of violence and constructions of gender that shape the West. The violent conflict with indigenous communities and the supposedly feminine West has propped up American culture and civilization rooted in the East. Spurgeon 3 explores how western myths involving gender and race “have become inextricably linked through the ongoing experiences of imperialism and globalization in a transformative, dialogic process” (9), which more accurately characterizes the purview of the weird western. H.P. Lovecraft is often considered the forefather of weird fiction, and he argued that America’s origins are uniquely weird, since they contain “the usual dark folklore” of Europe as well as “an additional fund of weird associations to draw upon” (60). Lovecraft imagined that his Puritan ancestors faced “vast and gloomy virgin forests in whose perpetual twilight all terrors might well lurk,” as well as “hordes of coppery Indians whose strange, saturnine visages and violent customs hinted strongly at traces of infernal origin” (60). He draws upon weird elements from the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, but most scholars argue that weird fiction originated around the turn of the twentieth century with authors such as Lovecraft himself: Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, M.R. James, Lord Dunsany, Robert E. Howard, and others who appeared in the pulp magazine Weird Tales (1923-1954), subtitled “A Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual” (Luckhurst, “The Weird” 1042). Weird Tales was a series that was the first of its kind and “served as a crucible for genre exploration, creation, and hybridization at a very particular time and place in American culture” (Everett and Shanks