Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West

In Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West, William R. Handley examines literary interpretations of the western American past. Handley argues that although recent scholarship provides a narrative of western history that counters the optimistic story of frontier individualism by focusing on the victims of conquest, twentieth-century American fiction tells a different story of intra-ethnic violence, surrounding marriages and families. He examines works of historiography, as well as writing by Zane Grey, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner and Joan Didion among others, to argue that these works highlight white Americans’ anxiety about what happens to American ‘character’ when domestic enemies against whom the nation had defined itself in the nineteenth century, such as Indians and Mormon polygamists, no longer threaten its homes. Handley explains that once its enemies are gone, imperialism brings violence home in retrospective narratives that allegorize national pasts and futures through intimate relationships.

• This study sheds new light on the representation of the settlement of the American West in twentieth century American fiction • Examines canonical fiction and works of historiography as well as generic Westerns • Interdisciplinary: will be of interest to historians as well as literary scholars

List of illustrations; Preface; Acknowledgments; 1. Western unions; 2. Turner’s rhetorical frontier; 3. Marrying for race and nation: Wister’s omniscience and omissions; 4. Polygamy and empire: Grey’s distinctions; 5. Unwedded west: Cather’s divides; 6. Accident and destiny: Fitzgerald’s fantastic geography; 7. Promises and betrayals: Joan Didion and Wallace Stegner; Postscript.