Desiring the Southwest: Gender, loss, and landscape in twentieth-century American fiction

This dissertation springs from a great passion for both literature and nature. Epitomized in the American West and Southwest, the wildly natural American landscape has for centuries inspired great art, literature, and myth. In reexamining the role of myth in the literature of this region, I study the intersection between landscape and the creative imagination. Especially the pastoral motif, critics have shown, has contributed to an essential American ambivalence towards the land and entailed much environmental destruction. My work enriches this assessment with a consideration of the psychic patterns that, in their relationship to culture, condition perceptions of landscape. Drawing on object-relations theory, I show how a socially induced primary loss and the resulting desire for recovery shape myths that dictate environmental attitudes. In my analysis of four modern and contemporary novels written by men and women of Anglo American and Native American backgrounds, I look closely at the significance of gender and culture in perceptions of "mythic" landscapes. Grounding my analyses in ecofeminist and culture-sensitive psychoanalytic theory, I argue that the values of "reciprocity" and "mutuality" enable an ecologically sensitive re-imagining of the land and its native communities.;The first chapter explores the social-discursive and psychological origins of an American ambivalence towards the natural environment and suggests modes of envisioning an alternative attitude towards landscape. In the second chapter, I examine Willa Cather's evocation of myth in The Professor's House as offering redemption through recovery of an original creative receptivity to the natural environment. In chapters three and four, I challenge the premises of Southwestern myth through an ecofeminist reading of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams. In the final chapter, I explore the extent to which Leslie Marmon Silko's Native American perspective in Ceremony subscribes to and critiques a white ecofeminist vision.