Myth and Environment in Recent Southwestern Literature

The romantic perception of the American Southwest as a wild and dangerous frontier where heroic settlers prove their endurance has often responded to a common human desire to escape from the pressures of civilization and experience an “authentic” relationship with nature. This idealized notion about life in the Southwest, however, has contributed the subjugation of the indigenous populations and the natural world while helping rationalize the conquest of both. In Myth and Environment in Recent Southwestern Literature, Theda Wrede brings contemporary Southwestern American literature under the microscope to examine the ways in which the mythic narrative has influenced attitudes toward the land in the region. Focusing on popular novels by Corrmac McCarthy, Barbara Kingsolver, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Denise Chávez, Wrede explores the psychology behind the myth and discusses the ways in which the four authors deploy the mythic narrative, interrogate its validity, and offer visions for alternative modes of inhabiting the Southwest. In combining ideas from a culturally sensitive ecofeminist theory, psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies, and literary studies, the study offers an innovative conceptual framework for discussions about environmental responsibility in the twenty-first century. Finally, it also encourages its readers to partake in the process of mythogenesis by imagining “sustainable” narratives to help rescue the promise of the Southwest for the new millennium.

[This book is] an engaging exploration of the complexly interwoven space shared by growing populations and their Southwestern desert homes., One reads this book with real profit. Wrede reveals altogether new ways to read fictions—by Kingsolver, Silko, Cormac McCarthy, Denise Chávez—set in the American Southwest. She thinks with great originality about texts that remain, to criticism, unlicked bear cubs, as well as texts that have been subjected to rather a lot of prior academic attention.  I thought I knew all the angles on Silko and Cormac McCarthy, but I have learned otherwise in these pages.  Part of what makes this study so impressive is the theoretical sophistication that Wrede brings to it—she is as at home with feminist and psychoanalytic thinking as with the eco-criticism and ‘ecological mythopoeia’ that she foregrounds., Theda Wrede’s work is a fine overview of the many tribes of New Western literary criticism and a solid contribution to the growing critical discussion of the politics of space. Her scholarly acuity is directed at four classic novels of late 20th century Western literature by McCarthy, Kingsolver, Silko and Chavez. The psychic dislocations she elucidates in each work stem from the Western myth of conquest of the land, the female, the native. Respect for the land, a sense of place, she finds, is the foundation for equitable cultural identity and psychic health. In native, chicana, and white female communities, she finds healing models for human-nature relationships. Wrede has her finger on the rootlessness of American culture and offers hopeful paradigms for a new century of eco-consciousness., Teachers and students of literature, and indeed anyone who cares about a place and a community, will welcome Theda Wrede’s graceful and informative study of writings from the American Southwest. Combining literary criticism and ecopsychology, Wrede shows how a diversity of writers, including Chicana and Native American, have confronted the trauma of cultural loss and environmental degradation by imagining alternative narratives of hope and healing.

Theda Wrede is associate professor at Dixie State University.