Place in the novels of Jane Gilmore Rushing

Abstract

This analysis is the exploration of place--religion, culture, community, family, language, and landscape as it relates to the five novels and one novella of Jane Gilmore Rushing, a West Texas writer from Pyron, Texas. Rushing's autobiographical/historical account, Starting from Pyron, along with family letters and oral history support the seven works that chronicle life in Rushing's homeplace for one hundred years, beginning with the earliest settlement. The history of the westering migration of Anglo-Celts from the Atlantic to Texas is analyzed in depth. Evangelical religion is traced in origin, doctrine and influence on frontier temperament, mores, and habits--a powerful influence on Rushing's characters in the novels. Because Place is the subject of the analysis, the concept of place is delineated, fictively and philosophically, in the South, the West, and Texas, with an emphasis on West Texas. Rushing is closely akin to Eudora Welty in her concept of place. Theories of American westering character such as Tocqueville and Turner are explored along with Yi-Fu Tuan's principal theory. West Texas writers such as Elmer Kelton, Jim Corder, and Larry McMurtry are used to view various aspects of West Texas in contemporary time in terms of the past, myth, and memory. This analysis features feminist histories and theories of Western settlement to demonstrate the difference between male and female response to landscape and Nature by using the theories of feminist geographer Gillian Rose and Annette Kolodny. Female frontier historians such as Julie Jeffery, Sandra Myres, Nancy Cott, Harriate Andreadis, Joanna Stratton, Elizabeth Jameson, Susan Armitage, and Barbara Welter illuminate an ongoing controversy concerning stereotypes versus accounts of everyday reality. Autobiographical female accounts of early West Texas life are used to authenticate the above theories. These theories and accounts, along with frontier female fiction by Mary Austin, Dorothey Scarborough, and Louise Erdman, draw the analysis to a conclusion that women who adapt and are harmonious with life and Nature in the semi-desert are the ones who thrive. All of the above are inculcated into the analysis of the novels in an examination of how place influences Rushing's fiction.