Date of Award
Spring 2002
Document Type
Dissertation - Restricted
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English
First Advisor
Bates, Milton J.
Second Advisor
Chappell, Virginia
Third Advisor
Duffy, Edward
Abstract
I grew up in the West, but my West was nothing like the one I had read about or seen in the movies. My West was located at 10220 Roan Meadows Drive on the suburban edge of Boise, Idaho. We had a two-car garage, a two-story rectangular house with white aluminum siding, an acre yard with a few trees barely taller than I was, and, before the neighbors built an oversized metal shed, a nice view of the mountains. As a child, from what I could tell by looking at the world around me, I could see no connection between my place in time had no connection to the time that had preceded it. There were no cowboys and no cattle, and there were no black and white pictures on the wall or in albums of my parents or grandparents standing beside homesteads or sitting atop horses with the wide-open, empty land receding in the backdrop. Though my dad told us wonderfully sad stories about what it was like to be a child in the orphanage in Seattle during World War II, and although there were rumors to the effect that my great-grandmother on my mother's side was connected to the Platte family for which the Platte River in Wyoming and Nebraska is named, Seattle had nothing to do with the West of my imaginings and the Platte association was too tenuous to offer me any kind of connection with what I considered to be the real West. Consequently, though I obviously lived in the West-there was no denying that fact often thought of myself as growing up in a place that possessed no past...