FREE ESSAY ON WESTERN NATURE IN LITERATURE

WESTERN NATURE IN LITERATURE

Nature is a major theme throughout all of the stories we have read so far this semester,
weighing in heavily in the subject matter of each novel. Despite this common thread,
nature is handled quite differently in each story, with obvious varied effects in the
story. Willa Cather uses the nature of the southwest as an overwhelming presence that
stuns any who approach it, while John Steinbeck uses nature with his characters as one
would use water with a goldfish in his bowl. Norman Maclean creates nature as a religious
experience, and most interestingly, Wallace Stegner uses nature least of all, yet uses
the few scenes of nature he provides to jar and jab the plot into advancing. Each of
these portrayals of nature is radically different, but each allows the reader a closer
glimpse into the natural world of the west.
Examples of the overwhelming and awesome power of nature are abundant in Willa Cather's
Death Comes For The Archbishop. There are so many of them that one can virtually flip
open to any page in the novel to find an example of the sense of nature's awesome power,
but some are more amazing than others. Father Latour lay with his ear to this crack for a
long while, despite the cold that arose from it. He told himself he was listening to one
of the oldest voices of the earth. What he heard was the sound of a great underground
river, flowing through a resounding cavern. The water was far, far below, perhaps as deep
as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness under the ribs of
antediluvian rock. It was not a rushing noise, but the sound of a great flood moving with
majesty and power. (Cather 129-130) 
Other examples in Cather's writing are not so dramatic, but they highlight the
ever-present beauty of nature in the southwest. The water thus diverted was but a tiny
thread of the full creek; the main stream ran down the arroyo over a white rock bottom,
with green willows and deep hay grass and brilliant wild flowers on its banks. Evening
primroses, the fireweed, and butterfly weed grew to a tropical size and brilliance there
among the sedges. (Cather 165)
While Cather blatantly overwhelmed her characters with the beauty of nature surrounding
them, Steinbeck immersed his characters so deeply in their surroundings it seemed as if
they were unaware of them, just as we are unaware of the oxygen we breathe or the way our
heart is constantly beating. The one part of nature that is most often referred to is the
forest surrounding Tortilla Flat, and even then only sparingly, and in a way that often
downplays its existence, just the way we downplay things that seem common and unusual to
us. On the second page of the story, where Steinbeck says the ?forest and town
intermingle? he is making the forest seem more common, just another place for the
adventures of Danny and his compatriots to occur.
Sentences that could carry more weight in other narratives are simplified in this story,
to the point where they are stated as simple facts, as opposed to the poetic lines that
they could have been written as. ?The sun was warming the beach now.? (Steinbeck 91) This
sentence could have easily been developed into an entire paragraph about how the light of
the sun reflected back from the froth of the waves and the sparkle of the sand, and so
forth and so on. However, Steinbeck boils down the background to simple facts, making it
easier to focus on the characters of Danny and his unorthodox Knights of the Round
Table.
In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean may have attempted to boil all of the details
away from the story to simplify it, but in doing so he highlighted certain parts of
nature in such great detail that he helped exemplify the first sentence of the story. ?In
our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.? This is where
Maclean provides the first glimpse into nature as a religious experience. Cather made
nature overwhelming, but Maclean makes nature become an extension of religion. When
Norman, his brother and his father go out to fish, the hunt for the fish and the reeling
him in are much like a prayer, even like a litany or psalm.
He emphasizes this connection with comments about Norman?s father sitting on the bank
?somewhere in the sunshine reading the New Testament in Greek.? He makes references to
the book of John, discussing the Word and the water, thus making a connection to the
river they are fishing from (Maclean 94-96). This religious link to the river makes the
river an ever present force in their lives, not just as a place they go to fish, but a
place they go as one would go to church for solace from the world.
The way in which Wallace Stegner approaches nature is radically different than the way
any of the other three authors does. He doesn?t so much try to overwhelm or immerse a
person in it, nor does he make it fade into the background. From the picture on the cover
of the book, one might make the false supposition that the book would be filled with
flowery descriptions of the Rocky Mountains and other geographical features. This
couldn?t be further from the truth.
Stegner?s use of nature is often rather subdued, yet he always manages to use the local,
flora, fauna and geography as a starting point to conversation, or to jumpstart some
inner thought process of one of his characters. He highlights the dialogue and provides a
genesis for narrative shifts with descriptions such as the ones that occur when Oliver
and Susan arrive in Leadville together. ?The stage leveled off into what seemed a plain
or valley. She leaned to see. Ahead of them, abrupt as the precipice up which little
figures toil in Chinese paintings, she saw a wild wooded mountainside that crested at a
long ridge spiky with conifers. She pulled the curtains wide. ?But my goodness!? she
cried. ?You called them hills!?? (Stegner 82)
Stegner uses nature to set moods, such as this scene where he uses a description of the
world around Oliver and Susan to make the atmosphere a bit more somber and serious. ?The
trees on the crest - redwoods, Oliver said ? burned for a few seconds and went black.
Eastward down the plunging mountainside the valley fumed with dust that was first red,
then rose, then purple, then mauve, then gray, and finally soft black.? (Stegner 90) He
uses the deepening color shades to justify Susan shivering, and the more serious
conversation that followed, as well as allowed him to have Lyman discuss his heritage
without sounding trite or lewd as he discussed being made possible that night.
No matter where one looks in this literature, it is an inevitable fact that nature is an
ever-present subject. The environment in which each story was written simply will not
allow a writer to put blinders on in order to ignore it. The difference comes when one
sees the way the subject is approached. Which is the better portrayal of reality? In the
west, are we like fish in our bowl, oblivious to the nature around us? Or are we
overwhelmed by the sheer power of the nature, or perhaps do we wish to sit and perform a
sort of informal prayer because of our religious sensibilities, which we attach to the
west. Perhaps we are merely influenced at key points in our lives by the beauty of
earth.
Despite the opinions of many others on this wonderful earth, I would venture to say that
it is all of the aforementioned things in this literature that we draw from the wonders
of nature, especially that of the beautiful west. We are all impacted a little bit in
each of these manners, hopefully providing a better understanding of the west, and a
desire to preserve its beauty.