Ranging bodies and borders: Frontier embodiment in American literature

Ranging Bodies and Borders: Frontier Embodiment in American Literature synthesizes research in nineteenth and twentieth century American literature and culture alongside postcolonial, feminist, and ecocritical theories in order to interrogate the dialogical relationship between territories of land and body. I argue that analysis of the representations, constructions, actions, and interactions of bodies in frontier narratives is crucial for understanding the constitution of internal hierarchical boundaries of national in/exclusion. In addition, I contend that the shift in focus from a land-based theory of frontier influence to a body-centric lens reveals the ease with which American frontier imaginings are transported across geographical boundaries and remapped overseas. My project begins with an analysis of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking novels and historian Frederick Jackson Turner's essay "The Significance of the Frontier." I examine how their work draws on discourses of the emergent sciences of biology and evolution, naturalizing the white male body transformed by frontier experience as the privileged site of truth and a new secular providence of American exceptionalism. Following this analysis, my project investigates how writers across the twentieth century have drawn on the referential power of these established tropes to both reinforce and critique the emotional and political currency of the secular frontier narrative. I do a comparative reading of Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage and Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, considering how the inherited gendered assumptions of the frontier narrative limit and condition the embodiments of their central heroines. Next, I turn to Phillip Caputo's Vietnam memoir A Rumor of War as a text that examines the ways in which American soldiers' experiences of Vietnam resisted the romantic frontier notions of masculine regeneration, while at the same time maintaining a desire to retain the trope of a collective, unified, masculine myth of survival. And my final two chapters argue that Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/ La Frontera and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible interrogate the imperial violence perpetuated by the frontier narrative while still drawing on its legacy of environmental consciousness, fundamentally shifting the perspective of wilderness survival toward an interdependent narrative ethic of ecological sustainability, generativity, and responsibility.