Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2010
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly 30.2 (Spring 2010), pp 83-96
Abstract
The Tom-Walker (1947) associates domestic violence on a national scale with the domestic violence of veterans returning home after the Civil War and two world wars. This novel anticipates both the rise of McCarthyism and the long shadow cast by the atom bomb over the years constituting the Cold War. ... The Tom-Walker is remarkable in its depiction of the ugly, almost unmentionable effects of war on the domestic lives of individual veterans. Sandoz, like a number of her contemporaries, was particularly concerned about the horrors of war, but unlike many writers, she focuses on the home front and on the victimization of veterans by opportunists and corrupt politicians. For her time, she shows an impressive understanding of the effects of post-traumatic stress as she lays out the domestic conflicts of her characters. I want to look more carefully at those aspects of Sandoz's fiction that take us into the fractured lives of veterans and their families and reconstruct the social fabric of three postwar eras.
Comments
Copyright © 2010 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln