Frederick Manfred’s The Golden Bowl: Myth and Reality in the Dust Bowl

Abstract

D IA N E D U F V A Q U A N T I C Wichita State University Frederick Manfred’s The Golden Bowl: Myth and Reality in the Dust Bowl The popular image of the Dust Bowl has been nurtured by historical and sociological studies, by films such as “The Plow that Broke the Plains,” and by the photographs of Dorothea Lange and others, but surprisingly few novelists have focused on the struggle to survive the dust and Depres­ sion on the Great Plains. Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is often cited as the classic Dust Bowl novel, but while the Joads’ problems originate with the failure of the land, Steinbeck’s theme is the displacement of the Depres­ sion, not the struggle to preserve life on the dry land itself. Only a few Great Plains novels focus on the effects of the Dust Bowl.1 Of these, Frederick Manfred’s The Golden Bowl is the most powerful exploration of the con­ flicts that arose from the clash of optimistic myth and grim reality on the Great Plains. Robert Thacker says that in The Grapes of Wrath, the role of the prairie isthat of a landscape at the bottom of a cycle (198). The description is even more appropriate to The Golden Bowl, the story of a drifter who encounters a farm family struggling to preserve their belief in the land’s potential as they try to survive on a parched South Dakota farm. Manfred’s first novel, its genesis was a hitchhiking trip the author took soon after grad­ uating from college in 1934. Three years later, Manfred recounted the story of that trip at a party in Minneapolis. As he later recalled, he discovered his style and his subject that evening: “it came to me what I should do: write the way I’d told that dust bowl story that night. I . . . had told it according to the way 1 saw it in my head” (Wind iv). “I learned to write on this one,” he told John Milton. “That was my teething book, so to speak” (Conversations 81). After the party that night, Manfred wrote fifty pages of his story of the “Dirty Thirties.” After “seven different tries at it,” The Golden Bowl was published in 1944, 298 Western American Literature When he found his voice, the familiar vernacular that connected him to the language of his native region, Manfred also found his connection with the land and the mythic tradition of Great Plains literature. The memoir of that trip, The Wind Blows Free (published in 1979), provides evidence of the genesis of several incidents in the earlier novel. From a chance encounter with a hobo and a rattlesnake, Manfred developed the character of Maury Grant and a memorable incident in the novel (Wind 43; Conversations 54-55). Driving for an eccentric spinster gave him material for a key scene in Maury’s awakening journey through the Bad­ lands when he flees the Thors’farm. A chance encounter with a struggling ranch family provided the genesis for the Thor family (Wind 237-53; Conversations 83-84). What Manfred adds to these incidents is a juxta­ position of the harsh realities of the 1930s against the great westering myths, those cultural symbols of Manifest Destiny, the safety valve, the promise of the garden and a democratic utopia that reflect the collective attitudes that sustained westward expansion for much of the nineteenth century.2 The evocation of these myths is a part of the Great Plains literary tradition. Like other novelists who focus on the establishment of farms and communities on the prairies and plains, Manfred explores the conflicts that arise when the strong individual is faced with the challenge of subduing and surviving on the land.3 Manfred focuses unrelentingly on the parched South Dakota landscape and the barren lives of those trapped by poverty and stubborn determination. As Wallace Stegner has commented, “few writers ever achieve so sure a sense of place and of how humans are shaped by it” (Conversations xv). The land itself is the chief antagonist in The Golden Bowl. Manfred establishes an ironic contrast between the mythic ideal of the simple...