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Out West: Sexual borderlands and the literature of the West
Abstract
This study is an examination of the literature of the North American West and the ways this literature can be given a gay or lesbian meaning by a knowledgeable audience. Utilizing an approach that calls into question "heterosexual assumption," the first half of the dissertation begins with an examination of Walt Whitman and his democratic vista for the Western states. For Whitman and writers such as Owen Wister and Francis Grierson, the West was imagined to be a place that allowed self-discovery and self-expression. This idealized freedom may have been a motivating force for a few men migrating to the West. Attracted by the promise of freedom and the chance to live in an all-male society far from traditional constraints, some homosexually-motivated men might have moved west to experience these emancipating aspects of frontier life. The dissertation lays the historical framework for these freedoms and details specific works of literature relating to these histories. The promise of freedom, however, was soon retracted as more and more settlers arrived and brought with them the constraints and conventions of the East coast and Europe. The settling of Euro/American culture often meant an end not only to a sense of personal freedom but to all ways of life deemed inappropriate or sinful by conventional mores, including the Native American berdache tradition. Finally, the repressive environment found in the West after settlement created the need for many sexually dissident individuals to head east. By focusing on the writings of Willa Cather and Sinclair Ross, the second half of the dissertation examines the literary responses of these two authors who find themselves confined by and at odds with a hostile, homophobic culture.
Subject Area
American literature|Canadian literature|American studies
Recommended Citation
Cramer, Timothy Robert, "Out West: Sexual borderlands and the literature of the West" (1996). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9628228.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9628228