The Plains Crucible as Regional Metaphor in Oscar Micheaux’s The Homesteader and Sophie Trupin’s Dakota Diaspora : Memoirs of a Jewish Homesteader

Abstract

A these two epigraphs document fundamentally diff erent experiences of the Great Plains, they really represent two sides of the same coin. An “Okie” who has abandoned agrarian life, Maury Grant has an epiphany as he travels through the badlands of South Dakota. What he realizes is that he has sinned against the land that he loves, and to redeem this sin he returns to the Plains so that he can help restore them from their “dust bowl” state back into a “golden bowl” of prosperity. Conversely, Jonathan Raban describes a phenomenon of permanently lost faith that is all too familiar in the history of the Plains. For those whose names are on the grave markers he observes, the experience of the place was one full of ruin and loss. Taken together, these two passages tell a story comMaury clenched his fi st. He had done something terribly wrong. He had, for four years, doubted the land. In the years to come, he would work doubly hard to make the earth, and his own heart, forget that he had been unfaithful. — Frederick Manfred, Th e Golden Bowl