Western American Literature

All landscapes are haunted by ghosts.

Patricia Price

The West for me is a haunted place. There are these mythic ghosts everywhere you go.

Claire Vaye Watkins

The US West, a geomythic stronghold of the US national imagination as well as a transnational phenomenon, keeps being revised, rewritten, and reimagined. With the publication of her 2012 short story collection Battleborn, Californian author Claire Vaye Watkins established herself as a prominent US western writer, pondering the “legacy of the gold rush and westward expansion” (Watkins, “Nevada Gothic”) and “interrogating the myth of the American West” (Watkins, “‘Interrogating’”). Titled after Nevada’s historical nickname, Battleborn draws its attention to the state where Watkins herself grew up—a western region that has received less scholarly attention than others (Rio 17–18). Comprising ten stories varying in style and length, the volume revolves around a coterie of tortured characters who inhabit the US West. From gold diggers in the Old West to struggling mothers in contemporary California, Watkins’s westerners are troubled by a problematic past, both personal and historical.¹

With the publication of Battleborn, Watkins started treading a path that has been recently explored by other writers who have also addressed the ways the West is, and has been, imagined. One thing that unites these writers is their reliance on a representation of a [End Page 99] West that is defined by its concomitant violence—whether in relation to gender-identity construction, as represented in Emma Cline’s The Girls (2016) and Daddy (2020); the overlooked history of racial violence against Asian Americans of C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020); or the sexual politics of the Wild West in Anna North’s Outlawed (2021), among others.² At odds with the Stegnerian, hopeful vision of the West stand texts that insist on the quintessential conception of the West as a violent space—an idea that Richard Slotkin famously theorized in his “regeneration through violence” thesis, which posits that early American narratives of warfare between Puritans and Indigenous populations “formed the literary basis of the first American mythology” (Regeneration 56), especially as they later developed into frontier narratives. Presenting the West as a space defined by violence, then, is not only not new but an emblematic trait of dominant western culture.

However, this archetypal manifestation of violence was, in the western myth, self-affirming and self-aggrandizing—a violence that served to legitimize and uplift the Anglo-white settler project that obscured and silenced the actual violence perpetrated against Indigenous peoples and the environment. Battleborn, despite its insistence on the violent ways of life in the West, abandons the realm of hegemonic myth and deals instead with a different kind of violence—one closer to the one explored by William R. Handley in his Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West, where he addresses the violence found not in the (masculine) frontier but within the intimate spheres of families and marriages, tainted by a dead (but haunting) imagined past. As Handley argues, against the paradigm of the American Adam emerge the “complicated, often very unromantic and at times exceedingly violent relationships that carry the burden of the western past, rendered for us through the distortions of retrospection and the perspective of lonely narrators” (7). An act of retrospection in itself, Battleborn delves into the haunted and haunting images of not only the traditional, Old West landscape but, crucially, of the contemporary West. This qualifies the text as an example of postfrontier fiction, defined not “by expansionist views, but by a reinterpretation of the frontier myth to reveal its darker underside” (Rio 35). [End Page 100]

This paper sets out to explore the meanings of western violence present in “Ghosts, Cowboys,” Battleborn’s opening story, especially as conveyed by its spoiled landscapes. Featuring geographies as diverse as the Comstock Lode, the Spahn Ranch, and the Nevada Test Site, the story centers the sense of place in a state that is heir to the violently expansive settlement of the West. Because “the very invocation of ‘landscape’ in western discourse predetermines the ways...