Cowboys and Indians come to mind for many people when the idea of Southwestern literature is presented. The scene of a saloon shootout and John Wayne materialize. Southwestern literature is more than the O.K. Corral. Writers such as Willa Cather and Catherine Porter do not have the prototypical storyline stated above, but they are writers of Southwestern literature. In order to understand why Willa Cather and Catherine Porter should be considered a part of Southwestern literature, one must consider the difference between the American West and Southwest and understand that their writing is deeply influenced by the landscape and culture of the Southwest and centered on issues faced by inhabitants of the region.
Many people mistake about Southwestern literature for Western literature. The West encompasses the entirety of land west of the Rocky Mountains, both northern and southern, as outlined by the US Census Bureau.1 The geographical borders of the Southwestern region are slightly more varied; it centers around Arizona and New Mexico, but the inclusion of other states such as Texas, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and Oklahoma vary from source to source. What this means for literature is a difference of culture. While Western literature seems to primarily focus on westward expansion, the Manifest Destiny, of the Anglo settlers, southwestern literature draws upon the relationship between the inhabitants and the land, the culture and its ensuing corruption, and the relationships between natives of the land and those settling there.
Southwestern literature is dependent upon the authenticity of the imagery provided. Porter provides apt description of the Mexican terrain saying, “We were alive under that deepening sky, jingling away through ...
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...and settlers of the Southwestern region. More than a gunfight and saloon, the relationships between people chronicle the history of a region, even in fiction. Fiction is based upon understood realities, which is why Catherine Porter and Willa Cather have helped to illustrate the history and magic held in the Southwest.
Works Cited
1 http://www.census.gov/econ/census07/www/geography/regions_and_divisions.html
2 Xochitl: Katherine Anne Porter's Changing Goddess
Thomas F. Walsh
American Literature , Vol. 52, No. 2 (May, 1980) , pp. 183-193
Published by: Duke University Press
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2924811
3 The Indian-Detour in Willa Cather's Southwestern Novels
Caroline M. Woidat
Twentieth Century Literature , Vol. 48, No. 1 (Spring, 2002) , pp. 22-49
Published by: Hofstra University
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175977
There were many of artists and writers, who demonstrated symbolism and imagery within their work of art, set in nineteenth century New Mexico. Willa Cather and Georgia O’Keeffe were best known as an author and an artist in the nineteenth century. Willa Cather had a long memorable career writing novels, short stories, poems, and essay, and contributing to any newspapers, editor, and journals as writer. She travels at length to gather material for her narrative and characters, and was recognizable with and respect by many other popular writers in the nineteenth century. In one of her novel, “Death Comes for The Archbishop”, Willa Cather demonstrates her unique ability to show remarkably compound landscapes within delightfully expressive writing. She brilliantly includes symbolism and imagery to express lowest point of emotions that are generally applicable, while artfully portraying the victories or failures of her characters. Georgia O'Keeffe spending most of her summer in New Mexico, delighted by the desolate landscape and extensive atmosphere of the desert, would explore the subject of animal bones in her paintings while she in New Mexico. The flowers, she painted the bones puffed up and captured the stillness and isolation of them, while expressing a sense of beauty that lies within the desert. She explored the symbolize and imagery in her magnified paintings of flowers that attract people emotionally, although her purpose was to express that nature in all its beauty was as powerful as the extensive of the period. As an author, Willa Cather demonstrated a history of New Mexico through her writing. As an artist, Georgia O’Keeffe was using paint and canvas to verify the loveliness scene of New Mexico. Even though, Willa Cather and...
Michner’s use of historical fact is extremely accurate in his portrayal of events in Texas history. Particularly when he writes of the fight for Independence from Mexico. Michner only strays to fiction in an attempt to illustrate to the reader what the lives of early Texans must have been like. His characters interact with actual historical figures and create very believable scenarios of the events depicted in his novel.
My analysis begins, as it will end, where most cowboy movies begin and end, with the landscape.Western heroes are essentially synedoches for that landscape, and are identifiable by three primary traits: first, they represent one side of an opposition between the supposed purity of the frontier and the degeneracy of the city, and so are separated even alienated from civilization; second, they insist on conducting themselves according to a personal code, to which they stubbornly cling despite all opposition or hardship to themselves or others; and third, they seek to shape their psyches and even their bodies in imitation of the leanness, sparseness, hardness, infinite calm and merciless majesty of the western landscape in which their narratives unfold.All of these three traits are present in the figures of Rob Roy and William Wallace--especially their insistence on conducting themselves according to a purely personal definition of honor--which would seem to suggest that the films built around them and their exploits could be read as transplanted westerns.However, the transplantation is the problem for, while the protagonists of these films want to be figures from a classic western, the landscape with which they are surrounded is so demonstrably not western that it forces their narratives into shapes which in fact resist and finally contradict key heroic tropes of the classic western.
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Crane?s handling of Maggie is one that is very American. It leaves the reader without closure of the character. After Maggie?s death her mother wants too forgive her, but it is all too late. Nathaniel Hawthorne?s treatment of Hester Prynne was too be expected because of the society she lived in and of course because her ?mistake? (Pearl) would be with her always reminding the community of what she did. Willa Cather is the only author of these three to give her main character, who just happens to be a woman, a positive role within her community despite the tension between the two.
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Hine, Robert V., and John Mack Faracher. The American West: A New Interpretive Story. Yale University, 2000.
In her novel, My Antonia, Cather represents the frontier as a new nation. Blanche Gelfant notes that Cather "creat[ed] images of strong and resourceful women upon whom the fate of a new country depended" . This responsibility, along with the "economic productivity" Gilbert and Gubar cite (173), reinforces the sense that women hold a different place in this frontier community than they would in the more settled areas of America.
All in all, the treatment of the American Indian during the expansion westward was cruel and harsh. Thus, A Century of Dishonor conveys the truth about the frontier more so than the frontier thesis. Additionally, the common beliefs about the old west are founded in lies and deception. The despair that comes with knowing that people will continue to believe in these false ideas is epitomized by Terrell’s statement, “Perhaps nothing will ever penetrate the haze of puerile romance with which writers unfaithful to their profession and to themselves have surrounded the westerner who made a living in the saddle” (Terrell 182).
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In Elena’s own introduction to the novel, she recalls an empty, inhabited American West and questions why the forefathers of South Texas have been forgotten:
The western frontier is full of many experiences that changed the frontier. Each significant event has an important role on the shaping of society and way it influenced a new nation. Each author brought a new perspective and thought process to the western experience which either contradicted Turner or supported his theories. The frontier ideas that interested me include topics such as trading frontier, farming frontier, nationality and government, and the neglecting of women.
"Terrain as Narrative Lens in All the Pretty Horses." 2012 Brennan Prize Winning Essay // // University of Notre Dame. University of Notre Dame, 2012. Web. 02 May 2016. . Mexican wilderness comes to reflect John Grady Cole’s internal processes in its role as a vast tract of fenceless space, a canvas upon which McCarthy renders his main character’s experiences as they shape his identity. Meanwhile, the tightness of a Texan terrain scarred and lotted by barbed wire boundaries recognizes the restlessness that drives John Grady’s transience. The effect is a realization of the rapport between
Julia Alvarez was an example of how a Latina writer identified herself in a new culture outside of her comfort zone. She, as a Dominican Diaspora, had to reinvent herself as she migrated into a new scenario. Her assimilation into the United States culture allowed her to understand and relate to the reader’s needs and points of interests. After all the effort, Alvarez kept in mind that she could not comfort to all the reality that she lived in, so she re-reinvented herself all over again to process her thoughts and beliefs into her life. She put her perspective on her writing so that the new wave of readers, even if they did not understand, could relate in some way and appreciate the differences. The sole purpose of her writings was for everyone to change their perspective from “walk to the other side of the street in order to avoid sharing the same sidewalk” to “I do not know them, but I do not avoid them because I do not know them”. She instilled in her reader’s mind how ordinary events were viewed differently through other cultures’ eyes. Her story Snow was a great example of how she portrayed her technique.