Отрывок из книги
LEARNING TO BE AMERICAN
RICHARD FORD’S FRANK BASCOMBE TRILOGY
.....
With no more empty land available,14 the pioneer had to reinvent himself and turn to material substitutes. Gender scholar Michael S. Kimmel (2006) laments that the unmitigated accumulation of wealth has replaced a sense of adventure as the principal source of male accomplishment and fulfillment (186). On the other hand, Carroll and Noble (1984) link the closure of the frontier from the 1890s onward with a progressive fear of stagnation and death (244). This new feeling contrasts with the process of renewal previously represented by movement, which supports my initial notion of cultural identity as a process, a “becoming” rather than a “being” (Campbell and Kean 1997: 34). With the closure of the frontier, the myth of the West has been replicated in ‘tamer’ ways, from Hollywood movies to thematic parks, which try to offer a safer version of ‘the real thing’ (Campbell and Kean 1997: 126-27).
Not only have the experiences of the frontier people been idealized in both fictional and allegedly documentary accounts, but the kind of space encountered by those moving westward has been accordingly mythologized. Thus, Fiedler acknowledges that the nation is “sustained by a sentimental and Romantic dream” of escape into nature and “a renewal of youth” (1960: xxxiii). This sentimentalization was part of the project carried out by the literary nationalists known as the Young Americans. They aimed to turn the American landscape into a national symbol (Wald 1995: 111), so that the West would become embedded into the nation-building project. But more precisely, it is not the land itself as an element of geography that is deemed important, but the process of symbolization of the land and the relentless expansion westward according to some principles that have come to define the American spirit, such as liberty or equality (Wald 1995: 111). Much as this rhetorical construction aims to conceal it, this was not a peaceful process. In the frontier, the law of the gun ruled, to the point that Woodrow Wilson would acknowledge violence as part of “the spirit of American conquest” (quoted in Wald 1995: 255).
.....
