Citation

Madsen DL. Can. Rev. Am. Stud. 2009; 39(2): 185-204.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, University of Toronto Press)

DOI

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PMID

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Abstract

This essay offers a revision of frontier mythologizing by engaging issues of gender, race, and nation from the perspective of trauma theory. Crucial questions about the relationship between dominant frontier values, on the one hand, and violence against women and non-Anglo groups (particularly Mexicans and Native Americans), on the other, are explored in a close reading of Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove quartet. The analysis focuses upon the "symbolic economy" of violence represented by McMurtry's use of the captivity motif and his representation of violent mestizo or mixed-blood characters who symbolize the conservative racial politics of his reappropriation of the western genre. This reading of the contemporary neo-western reveals larger implications for the ways in which we might reread the U S frontier as a national trauma narrative.