Comparing Sexuality in Greys Riders of the Purple Sage and Doctorows

Sexuality of the Frontierswoman in canescents Riders of the Purple Sage and Doctorows get to to a great extent TimesThe presentation of femininity in Doctorows Welcome to Hard Times is a strong departure from the heroine of Zane Greys Riders of the Purple Sage. Through the fiction of the gun as the embodiment of masculinity, both authors closely examine the complexities of the sexualized relationship of a frontierswoman to the men of her society. Doctorow mirrors the tensions present in Greys novel though mollie acts as an extraordinarily different vision of what the West required of a woman than Jane Withersteen. Both novels reach a sexual climax as the heroine engages the men of her society in a violent action of crease and birth.Though it is a more desolate and harsh portrayal of a womans station, Doctorow places mollie in a similar situation as the dupe of her society to the more traditional Riders of the Purple Sage. While Jane Withersteen is certainly non subjected t o violence in the same way that the Bad world from Bodie raped, stick and nearly killed Molly, Jane is still victimized by her community. Doctorows portrayal of the conflict is indifferent in ways that Greys is not. In choosing to call Turner The Bad Man from Bodie for the majority of the novel, Doctorow makes him more an abstract notion of violence rather than the more human figure of jealousy Mormon Elder, Tull. However, in spite of the abstractness in Doctorows characterization, Jane is presented as an outsider in her community and is offered up as a sacrifice to the peace, much in the same way that Blue exhorts Molly to reenter Averys saloon. From this communal point of victimization, however, Doctorow departs from the gender conventions es... ... Pass. The falling rubble acts as the maidenhead restored, preserving Jane and Lassiter and Fay inside the womb, inside Eden. Thus, both novels examine the highly sexual tensions mingled with the predominate female figures an d the idea of masculinity as encapsulated by the gun, or more abstractly a weapon. Doctorow, though the tensions parallel Greys, counters the older spirt on nearly every point, finally culminating in a credit rating of the horror that frontier society creates. Much like the action of his novel, Grey retreats into a more idyllic vision of the West. However, he does admit the complexity of the gendered roles in the Western, though not to the extent that Doctorow casts the action in an Oedipal drama. plant life CitedDoctorow, E. L. Welcome to Hard Times. New York Penguin, 1998.Grey, Zane. Riders of the Purple Sage. New York Penguin, 1990.