Romancing the Cold War in Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy

Abstract

This essay attempts to investigate the ways in which Joan Didion explores the national myth of frontier romance re-invigorated in the Cold War period in A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy. In A Book of Common Prayer, Didion takes romance as a literary vehicle to meditate upon the national myth of frontier that has been continually regenerated from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the Cold War era. In Democracy, which covers Cold War history from America’s ascendency to a global hegemony symbolized by the Atomic Bomb to her imperial decline in Vietnam, Didion tests the narrative vision of romance she has developed in the previous novel in a more direct confrontation with the real. Tackling the Cold War history of romantic excess and imperial dream, Didion takes the narrative strategy of motivated amnesia and ellipsis so as to mythify and romanticize the historical reality of the U.S. Cold War imperialism.