The western American landscape has always had great significance
in American thinking, requiring an unlikely union between frontier
mythology and the reality of a fragile western environment.
Additionally it has borne the burden of being a gendered space,
seen by some as the traditional "virgin land" of the explorers and
pioneers, subject to masculine desires, and by others as a
masculine space in which the feminine is neither desired nor
appreciated. Both Wallace Stegner and Cormac McCarthy focus on this
landscape and environment; its spiritual, narrative, symbolic,
imaginative, and ideological force is central to their work. In
this study, McGilchrist shows how their various treatments of these
issues relate to the social climates (pre- and post-Vietnam era) in
which they were written, and how despite historical
discontinuities, both Stegner and McCarthy reveal a similar unease
about the effects of the myth of the frontier on American thought
and life. The gendering of the landscape is revealed as indicative
of the attempts to deny the failure of the myth, and to force the
often numinous western landscape into parameters which will never
contain it. Stegner's pre-Vietnam sensibility allows the natural
world to emerge tentatively triumphant from the ruins of frontier
mythology, whereas McCarthy's conclusions suggest a darker future
for the West in particular and America in general. However,
McGilchrist suggests that the conclusion of McCarthy's Border
Trilogy, upon which her arguments regarding McCarthy are largely
based, offers a gleam of hope in its final conclusion of acceptance
of the feminine.