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“Bodies in Motion” Interdisciplinary Grad Conference, Rhode Island University
Sexing the Frontier: The Emergent Female Body in Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage
Movement across the western territorial frontier has been intimately related to the formation of American national identity and one of the most pervasive tropes in U.S. literature. Since James Fenimore Cooper’s popular series of Leatherstocking novels, the American reader has been captivated by literary reimaginings of the engagement with the wilderness. Much critical attention has been given to the role of the frontier’s wilderness landscape and its representation in our various cultural texts. However, less attention has been given to the shaping of the textual bodies moving across and within this literary landscape. In my paper I look at one of the most popular western novels of the early 20th century — Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage– in order to examine how the reciprocal interplay between the bodies and landscape shape a particularly gendered movement and meaning in the narrative.
This paper is taken from a larger project in which I argue that by framing the American identity as exceptional in its wilderness experience, the American body becomes the naturalized site of a primitive corporeal Truth. As the national narrative becomes restaged as a progression of nature, it effectively dissolves responsibility and historical memory of the numerous bodies violently subsumed or destroyed in the wake of its progression. At the same time, close attention to the markings, gestures and choreography of the multiple bodies within our literary frontier tradition reveals the continued imperial hierarchies and exclusions that perpetuate violence and contradicts the nostalgic insistence of benignity.
