The Western Landscape in Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegner Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature EDITED BY SUSAN CASTILLO, King’s College London 1. New Woman Hybridities 9. The Literary Quest for an Femininity, Feminism, and Interna- American National Character tional Consumer Culture, 1880–1930 Finn Pollard Edited by Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham 10. Asian American Fiction, History and Life Writing 2. Don DeLillo International Encounters The Possibility of Fiction Helena Grice Peter Boxall 11. Remapping Citizenship and 3. Toni Morrison’s Beloved the Nation in African-American Origins Literature Justine Tally Stephen Knadler 4. Fictions of the Black Atlantic in 12. The Western Landscape in American Foundational Literature Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Gesa Mackenthun Stegner Myths of the Frontier 5. Mexican American Literature Megan Riley McGilchrist The Politics of Identity Elizabeth Jacobs 6. Native American Literature Towards a Spatialized Reading Helen May Dennis 7. Transnationalism and American Literature Literary Translation 1773–1892 Colleen Glenney Boggs 8. The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo Catherine Morley The Western Landscape in Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegner Myths of the Frontier Megan Riley McGilchrist First published 2010 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2010 Taylor & Francis Typeset in Sabon by EvS Communication Networx, Inc. Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by IBT Global. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or here- after invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trade- marks, and are used only for identifi cation and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data McGilchrist, Megan Riley, 1955– The western landscape in Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegne: myths of the frontier / by Megan Riley McGilchrist. p. cm. — (Routledge transnational perspectives on American literature; no. 12) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. McCarthy, Cormac, 1933– —Criticism and interpretation. 2. Stegner, Wallace Earle, 1909–1993—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Landscape in literature. 4. West (U.S.)—In literature. I. Title. PS3563.C337Z77 2010 813'.54—dc22 2009022157 ISBN10: 0-415-80611-9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-80611-4 (hbk) For Lucy, James, and Kitty Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: A Changing Landscape 1 1 Myth, Environment, Gender 11 2 Stegner’s West 50 3 McCarthy’s Western Fictions 116 Conclusion: Across a Great Divide 196 Notes 215 Bibliography 232 Index 247 Acknowledgments The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission for use of the following material: Excerpts from Exploding the Western: Myths of Empire on the Post- modern Frontier by Sara L. Spurgeon, published by Texas A & M Uni- versity Press, Copyright Sara Spurgeon, 2005. Excerpts from “When You Wake,” by Dianne Luce, published in Sacred Violence, edited by Rick Wallach and Wade Hall, published by Texas Western Press, 1995. Excerpts from Susan J. Tyburski’s essay “Wallace Stegner’s Vision of Wilderness” are reprinted with permission of Western American Litera- ture, where the essay was fi rst published, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1983). Excerpts from The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy, by David Holloway, published by Greenwood Press, Copyright David Holloway, 2002. Excerpts from Nina Baym, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” American Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 2 (1981): 133, 135. Copyright Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of the Johns Hopkins Uni- versity Press Portions of Chapter 3 were fi rst published as “The Adversarial Femi- nine in McCarthy’s Western Landscapes,” by Megan Riley McGilchrist, in Cormac McCarthy: Uncharted Territories/Territoires Inconnus, Textes coordonné par Christine Chollier, Presse Universitaires de Reims, Publications du Centre de recherche surl’imaginaire, l’identité et l’interprétation dans les littératures de langue anglaise, 2003. Reprinted by permission. Advice and encouragement during the process of writing this book has been given by friends and family too numerous to mention. I owe them all a huge debt of thanks and affection. However, I would like to particularly acknowledge Dr David Holloway of the University of Derby, for his scholarly guidance and support. I would also like to thank my children, Lucy, James, and Kitty McGilchrist, who have lived through this process with me, from x Acknowledgments beginning to end. Without their faith in me, their constant encourage- ment, and their confi dence that this project would one day be completed, it certainly would not have been. They have lived with a mother far too occupied with questions of literature and landscape for far too long, and I only hope that the numerous trips that we have made to look at western landscapes have somewhat mitigated this fact. This has been in a very real sense their project as well as mine, and it is to them that this book is dedicated with all love. Introduction A Changing Landscape In the second half of the twentieth century, the United States went through its most traumatic upheavals since the American Civil War. America’s assumed role as the protector of the free world against what was perceived as inexorably encroaching Communist domination was, after the Second World War, a belief almost as deeply felt as the doc- trine of Manifest Destiny had been a century before, and for many of the same reasons. The dream of the endless frontier of the nineteenth century had been transformed into the concept of worldwide propaga- tion of “the American way” with remarkably little ideological diffi culty. However, just as there were always those who questioned the tenets of Manifest Destiny, so too there were those who questioned the idea that American global hegemony was unquestionably benign. Crucially, it was the period of the Vietnam War, the 1960s and early 1970s, the culmina- tion of the Cold War, which woke up large numbers of ordinary Ameri- cans to the reality that American policy was not always right, or heroic, or very much good for anyone who was not a white American, and that in fact it never had been. Accepted history, always questioned within the academy, was re-examined on all fronts. Along with the widespread civil unrest caused by the war, the civil rights movement precipitated an extensive reappraisal of the legacy of slavery, and created a new aware- ness of racial inequalities throughout American history. Additionally the women’s movement gained momentum during this period, calling into question many accepted views of American domestic life. It was a turbu- lent period indeed, and on either side of it may be placed the two authors I am examining in this book, Wallace Stegner and Cormac McCarthy. My purpose is to examine Wallace Stegner’s works and the western works of Cormac McCarthy in terms of their approaches to western American landscape and nature. Stegner and McCarthy at fi rst glance may not seem an obvious pairing. Stegner’s fi ction concentrates on char- acter development, self-awareness, personal loss, and the search for sanctuary in a world seen as hostile, both physically and metaphorically. The action of his novels happens mainly in domestic settings, and rela- tionships between men and women are the cornerstone of all his major 2 Introduction: A Changing Landscape fi ctional works. His questioning of the myth of the frontier is based upon both personal experience and environmental concerns, which are para- mount in his works. His concern with the lives of women in the West marks him as a precursor to later feminist thinking. In his western novels, on the other hand, McCarthy describes an almost totally male world in which it appears that women are absent or objectifi ed to the point of misogyny, exemplifying an exclusively mas- culine ethos. The action of McCarthy’s western novels is continuously mobile: domestic settings are transitory, and are often destroyed or repu- diated. Characters seem never to grow, but simply continue in a self- destructive cycle of violence, repetition and loss. Yet however different their works, I believe that Stegner and McCarthy have similar concerns with regard to the western American landscape, and a similar concern with the social, political, and human ramifi ca- tions of the myth of the frontier. I believe the subtext in both authors is a deep questioning of widely accepted western mythic imagery, and a re-imagining, particularly in McCarthy, of these images and myths. While a feminist view of western imagery and iconography is clearly not stated overtly in McCarthy, the fact that much of the action of the novels of The Border Trilogy is based upon an assumption of female betrayal opens the door to a feminist interpretation of these works in terms of nature and landscape. My premise in this study of these two authors is that they provide a hinge between ways of thinking before and after the cultural watershed of the 1960s and early 1970s in terms of their treatment of landscape, nature, and the myth of the frontier. The 1960s, as Ronald Lora pointed out, began as an optimistic decade, with a new, handsome, apparently idealistic young president and his beautiful, glamorous wife: Camelot. As the decade continued, however, everything began to change and assume new forms: the handsome president was murdered. Martin Luther King, the spokesman for non-violent civil rights, was himself killed.