Monstrosity on the Southwest Frontier: Grotesque Terrain, Body, and Voice in the Works of Henry Clay Lewis and George Washington Harris

Deploying ideas derived from Wolfgang Kayser, Mikhail Bakhtin, and others, this analysis brings to bear paradigms of grotesque theory to explore causal relationships and models of connectivity among terrain, body, and voice in selected work from the literature of the Southwest Frontier. In so doing, it recontextualizes received conceptions of the function of the grotesque in this literary corpus and in the aesthetic of two of its most gifted practitioners, Henry Clay Lewis and George Washington Harris, writers who are the most radical and experimental with the subversive power of this material.At the narrative centre of these tall-tales are frontier “roarers”—therianthropic rhetorical monsters in the liminal space posited by Frederick Turner’s “Theory of the Frontier.” Critical work on Southwest Frontier literature has represented grotesque characters and effects. Signalling the presence of the grotesque in this corpus, this scholarship has predominantly focused on grotesque character or activity as evidence of the monstrous in a normative world and of monstrum as portent. This study, however, looks at this literature, and in particular the works of Lewis and Harris, as a “way of seeing,” and shows how models of terrain, body, and voice are mobilized to convey that vision. In these two authors, the grotesque moves from dislocating effects created by shocking incongruities or monstrous character sketches recorded by urbane literary narrators to an aesthetic structure and strategy. Lewis creates a hoaxingly autobiographical Swamp Doctor as oral centre, while Harris produces the quintessential American freak Sut Lovingood, a monster who engineers monstrous tableaux to violently assail and ultimately reorient the perceptions of his auditors. The product of conscious design rather than psychotic excesses, I argue, these structures and strategies put into new perspective the arcs of these authors’ work and of their central voices. What other critics see as perverse and obscene aesthetic failure, I see as coherent and purposive aesthetic accomplishment. These arcs are strategic and aesthetic tours de force, emblems of the instability at the heart of their creators’ transgressive grotesquerie.

Department dc:contributor.department

English

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• McMullan, Alfred James

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Henderson, Greig

• George Washington Harris
• Grotesque
• Henry Clay Lewis
• Southwest Frontier

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/130763

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/130763