Chapter 9 - Mathews at the Limits of the Bildungsroman’s National Framework

Summary

One last excursion takes us west, across canyons and deserts to a location on the edge of the continent where “[there] is no there there,” as the Oakland-born writer Gertrude Stein quipped; an approximation that spoke to the perception of the late nineteenth-century Southwest as central to the American nation-state's formation, but peripheral to its cultural developments. Saturated in the land's natural sublimity, and its social history of frontier skirmishes and invasion, the region's literature has nevertheless thrived, often contending with borders and interfaces of the transnational. The Southwest has often appeared in American literature in ways that envision the ideological borders of nationhood, if only to make geographical sense of the heterogeneous, multicultural histories, and subversive social spaces that region contains. From nineteenth-century Native American and Mexican writing about the frontier, to interwar Euro-American and Indigenous social realism that depicted the region as multiethnic and linguistically diverse, literature of the Southwest has often challenged as much as it officiated mythologies of exceptionalism that were perpetuated in settler-colonial local color realism—or their reified versions in the form of the official maps of the American nation-state. Themes of Emersonian self-reliance and youth percolated its early novels, as disparate in style and theme as John Rollin Ridge's counter-nationalist vigilante hero in Joaquín Murieta (1854); Bret Harte's Californian local color romances of a region (and nation) in the making; or Mark Twain's satiric visions of the chimeric gilded land to which his young picaro “lights out” at Huckleberry Finn's conclusion. The early twentieth century saw the Bildungsroman become a prominent fixture of Southwestern literature. The novel of uneven development often presented the effects of land speculation and industrialized agribusiness, centered upon the unfixed figure of youth who struggles to integrate into the frontier mentality of perpetual growth that was mapped onto the region. Such was the case in Frank Norris's The Octopus (1901), Jack London's Martin Eden (1909), and Upton Sinclair's Oil! (1926); and later in the unsettling, documentary visions of rural poverty in Sanora Babb's Whose Names Are Unknown (1938) and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939).