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" Across a great divide : "
McGilchrist, Mary Megan Riley
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Latin Dissertation
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| Record Number
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1096811
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| Doc. No
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TLets486679
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| Main Entry
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McGilchrist, Mary Megan Riley
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| Title & Author
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Across a great divide :\ McGilchrist, Mary Megan Riley
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| College
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University of Derby
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| Date
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2008
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| student score
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2008
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Abstract
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In this thesis my aim has been to establish a link between the western Americanwriters, Wallace Stegner and Cormac McCarthy. My point of connection has been thetreatment of landscape and nature in the works of both authors, and I have argued thattheir works exemplify perspectives which are related to their authors' historicalpositions before and after the cultural watershed of the Vietnam era. Although theirworks are dissimilar in many ways, both writers have similar concerns with regard tothe western American landscape, and the social, political, and human ramifications of, the myth of the frontier, and crucially, its effect on the natural world. I argue thatStegner and McCarthy provide a link between the thinking of their respective eras·which reveals changes related to the loss of faith in the culturally accepted archetypesupon which much American thought was based prior to the upheavals ofthe era oftheVietnam War, the 1960s and early 1970s. I believe that despite what might appear tobe contradictory narratives about the'West and the western landscape, the subtext inboth authors is a deep questioning of widely accepted western mythic imagery and itscontinuing effect on American life and ideology.While western mythology has been examined before, it has IJpt been discussed inrelation to these two authors seen as a pairing exemplifying a movement from themore traditional realist narratives written prior to the Vietnam era, and the darker,more pessimistic narratives of the post-Vietnam era, in which a loss of faith in manypreviously accepted cultural givens became common. It might therefore seemappropriate to describe Stegner and McCarthy as modernist and postmodern, but Ibelieve those terms simplify, obscure, and in a very real sense misname the complexsets of issues and· traditions with which both authors deal from their vantage pointson either side ofthe divide which had as its defining moment the Vietnam War. I alsodiscuss the issue of the feminine in western landscape in the works of both authors.Again, Stegner and McCarthy reveal a change in American thinking, not necessarilyentirely positive, which has as its fulcrum the 1960s and '70s, and included suchculturally momentous events as the civil rights movement, the women's movement, anew, politicized environmentalism, and various other progressive movements.The western American landscape has always had great significance in Americanthinking, requiring an unlikely uniori between frontier mythology and the reality of afragile western environment. Both Stegner and McCarthy focus on this landscape andenvironment; its spiritual, narrative, symbolic, imaginative, and ideological force iscentral to their work. My goal has been to show how their various treatments oftheseissues relate to the social climates in which they were written, and how despitehistorical discontinuities, both Stegner and McCarthy reveal a similar unease aboutthe effects of the myth ofthe frontier on American thought and life.
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University of Derby
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