Urban Wilderness In Cormac McCarthy's Suttree

Suttree is Cormac McCarthy's fourth book concerned with American Southern Literature.Set on the Tennessee river,Suttree presents a unique river landscape by which the social crisis is fully revealed.The novel depicts a highly complicated vision of urban life in Knoxville in 1950s where towns become cities,cities become metropolitans.In Suttree,Knoxville is no longer a traditional southern country,but an urban of wilderness polluted by industrialization and urbanization.McCarthy's Suttree depicts a city space of wilderness,through which he criticizes that nature is cruelly damaged in the process of urbanization and concerns about human being's living circumstances.In this thesis,wilderness is not a concept of primitive and pure world but a presentative of urban wasteland.Wilderness and urbanization are closely associated with each other and both are mutually embodied in city landscape and human beings.In the urban wilderness,the natural landscape is deserted and violent while the human landscape is alienated and relentless.This thesis will focus on the wilderness of Tennessee river in Knoxville which clearly manifests the main features of the "landscape" in the city.It is an innovative attempt to study Suttree from the perceptive of cultural geography.This theory holds that human social activities are closely related to landscape.It not only studies human cultural activities,but also concerns the relationship between nature and human beings.With the ideology of cultural geography,this thesis tries to give an analysis of McCarthy's deconstruction of American South,so as to illustrate that the "landscape" in American South is no longer a frontier romance but the wilderness of nature and mankind under the construction of capital and power.Besides introduction and conclusion,the argument will be elaborated in three parts.The second chapter focuses on the changes of traditional southern culture from the agrarian to the modernizing society.The change of the mode of production relentlessly changes Knoxville to wilderness as the Tennessee river "landscape" is a site of both the cradle of life and the tomb of death in Suttree,Chapter three mainly analyzes the circumstances of three main characters along the Tennessee river:Suttree,Harrogate and Wanda,who wander in the city and struggle with the violent urbanization.This thesis devotes to reveal that in the process of violent urbanization,not only nature is damaged,but also human beings face a huge threat with their family values deteriorating and ways of life disconnected.The fourth chapter makes attempt to reveal that under the dynamic construct of power and capital,urban wilderness in Suttree is McCarthy's deconstruction of American Southern Myth,which as a result constructs McCarthy's own southern "landscape".The conclusion summarize the whole thesis briefly and points out that as a transitional novel in McCarthy's literary career,Suttree have significantly influenced on American Literature.