Wilderness And Violence In Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

As one of famous American contemporary novelists,Cormac McCarthy(1933-)is well-known for his writing of violence.In his works violence is the eternal theme.As one of his transitional fiction,Blood Meridian is assumed to be one of the best hundred English novels in the 20th century.The fiction describes heinous violence,and in a word violence is the "landscape" of the novel,which makes Blood Meridian the most violent and bloody fiction in the history of American literature.In the novel,violence and wilderness are closely associated with each other,and mutually reflected,sometimes they even correspond with McCarthy’s presentation of the West and western wilderness.The wilderness in the west is characteristic of violence and wilderness in human nature.For McCarthy,the west is no longer a garden to be designed for as that in the history of American development.Based on the West myth,the wilderness is rewritten through McCarthy’s typical "optical democracy" in which man and wilderness are violent.Just through such description of the West and wilderness as violent,American central themes---Frontier,West and the West myth are deconstructed.Through rewriting the "landscape" of the American west,McCarthy constructs new cultural memory of the West and Frontier.Although lots of scholars have studied Blood Meridian from the perspective of psychological analysis,new historicism,theological study,eco-criticism and chaos theory,and though violence is their major concern,few study has been carried out to explore relationship between violence and wilderness,and the related American West myth as well as memory of western geography and culture from the perspective of cultural geography,from which the present thesis analyzes wilderness and violence in Bloom Meridian,and points out that McCarthy’s western "landscape" is no longer a romantic and desirable place for Americans,but a violent vacuum without humanity and order,in which the natural world and human beings are violent and bloody.Besides introduction and conclusion,the argument will be elaborated in three chapters.The first chapter focuses on the wilderness and violence in the natural environment,in which McCarthy’s "optical democracy" is closely explored for the purpose to prove that the nature and human beings are equal,and even the nature is much wilder than human beings in McCarthy’s western landscape.The second chapter mainly analyzes the wilderness nature of the major characters in Blood Meridian,in which the child and Judge Holden are discussed.In a violent and immoral society,human nature is evil.The third chapter traces the origin of the West myth and the development in American history,and makes attempt to disclose the causes for the wilderness and violence in American west.Through the contextualization of McCarthy’s western landscape of wilderness and violence,the thesis asserts that wilderness and violence deconstructs the West myth,and meanwhile makes American west,which is usually taken to be the basis of Frontier myth,problematic,hence constructing McCarthy’s typical western landscape.