Spoon River Anthology's Heterosexual Heartland

Abstract

Critics often assume Edgar Lee Masters’s best-selling 1915 collection of poems, Spoon River Anthology, to be a damning account of small-town corruption and sexual degeneration. This essay argues the counter-intuitive claim that the anthology instead confirms a pastoral image of small town life even as it appears to negate this ideal. I suggest that Spoon River Anthology paradoxically confirms the idyllic image of the small Midwestern town through the collection’s representations of adultery, unrestrained lust, and promiscuity – activities that were often associated with an “unnatural” version of heterosexuality in the early twentieth-century United States. To show that Masters’s critical account of Spoon River’s citizenry serves to substantiate representations of the heartland as an idyllic space for opposite-sex couplings, I offer close readings of two poems –“Lucinda Matlock” and “Washington McNeely”– and illustrate how they each present readers with compulsory versions of heterosexual couplings that contrast to the “deviant” opposite-sex activities that saturate the remainder of the text.