Cold Love: Silence and Otherness on the Northern Frontier

Abstract

Silence, Otherness, and Frontier RomanceHistorically, fictional narratives have played an important role in establishing frontier as geocultural imaginary for articulating essence of identity, manhood in particular, as hard-won triumph over inhospitable landscapes, harsh climates, and resistance of native people. As national Sinnbild and ideological concept, frontier represents an energetic, expansive vision of American triumphalism (Nagel 82), with highly romantic language of conquest and desire that mimics cultural norms for courtship and gender behavior. In love stories set in WestAnnie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain being notable exception-romantic love is typically ingrained in cultural discourses that represent heterosexual love as universally meaningful part of masculine quest for self-realization and fulfillment of desire. Whether seen as myth, history, or social reality, the cross-cultural encounters and conflicts engendered by 'frontier' are still with us (Limerick 83), and remain surprisingly stable elements in contemporary literature in frontier settings.The geocultural imaginary of frontier as mythical space of violence, destiny, and character building sustains countless westerns and romantic novels. Even contemporary film melodramas like Dances with Wolves (Dir. Kevin Costner) and its futuristic retelling Avatar (Dir. James Cameron) pursue central motif of frontiersman crossing into primitive territory and ultimately stepping into his true masculine self through romantic encounter with woman from other side. In both film and popular fiction, frontier, whether it be somewhere west of Mississippi, in future space, or in Alaska, offers a way of imagining self in boundary situation (Tompkins 14), that is, in liminal, ambivalent place which simultaneously evokes fears and desires of losing oneself to or in other. In classic frontier love story, Western hero's struggle between fear and desire of merging with other is often resolved by singling out woman he desires as different from her own people (as in Dances with Wolves where John Dunbar's sweetheart is white woman, who was taken captive by Lakota as toddler, and whose speedy recovery of her English language and manners in Dunbar's company helps to distance her from doomed Lakota), or by Western hero going native and becoming leader among natives (as in Avatar where paraplegic ex-marine Jake in end transforms into an able-bodied, fully acculturated avatar). Both options fulfill criteria of genre of wilderness romances, which according to literary critic M. H. Abrams project distinctively male imaginings of escape to an unspoiled natural environment, free of... an effete, woman-dominated civilization, in which protagonist undergoes test of his character and virility (99).The effect of this narrative tradition is twofold: one, marginalization and silencing of other in wilderness romance helps to authorize [masculine, Western] self, recognize its priority, fulfill its outlines, replete, indeed repeat, its references and still its fractured gaze (Bhabha 98); two, supposed alterity of indigenous other legitimizes romanticization of native women as subservient, sexually compliant bridges between colonizer and native culture.The ethnocentric perspectives that are historically embedded in seeing frontier as natural stage for manhood to conquer unknown (land, woman) continue to reinforce stereotypes about gender and ethnicity. In literature featuring romantic couple as willing native woman and virile white frontiersman, as in Kathryn Harrison's The Seal Wife (2002), colonial desire for land and control through knowledge of natural environment is narrated in parallel to desire for native woman's body and quest to dismantle her mysterious otherness. …