Dissertation

History, gender, and environment in “The Beulah Quintet”

Miller, Wendy Pearce

2007

Overview

This dissertation seeks to situate Settle's The Beulah Quintet within a Southern tradition of writing through establishing the work's relationship to a prominent Southern theme—the individual's concern with both personal and regional history—while simultaneously examining some of the ways in which the piece diverges from more traditional depictions of the individual struggle to come to terms with identity and world. Its ideas are shaped in part by narrative studies, masculinist studies, and ecocriticism. The first portion of Chapter I provides an overview of Settle's perception of history as well as the means through which she reconstructs history in the quintet; the second portion of the chapter examines Settle's depiction of the human tendency to rewrite personal history. In its entirety, the chapter is concerned with why and how history is \"forgotten\" and revised as well as the visible and psychological effects of such forgetting. Chapter II considers relationships between mothers and sons in the quintet; I foreground a series of relationships depicted as having a negative effect on the male characters and, ultimately, on the region's inhabitants as a whole. There is a direct connection among the forgotten history of the valley, the dangerous female figures that drive that history and the shaping of their sons, and the devastating effects that those sons have on the natural world. Chapter III contemplates the increasing human destruction of the Beulah Valley as depicted in the quintet. Although the New World offers some of the quintet's earliest characters the opportunity to begin anew, those characters and their descendants destroy the region, and Beulah's inhabitants degenerate through their pollution of the earth. By the final book, Settle depicts the future of the valley's inhabitants as being directly tied to the fate of the land. My conclusion considers Settle's intimation that there is the possibility of redemption for both humans and the environment at the end of The Beulah Quintet because of the reconstruction of forgotten history. Settle's female character, Hannah McKarkle, provides an alternative to Quentin Compson, and Settle provides an alternative to the Faulknerian school of Southern history as necessarily tragic.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: American literature / Faulkner, William (1897-1962) / Gibbons, Kaye / Harris, Jane (1961- ) / Modern literature / Settle, Mary Lee / Warren, Robert Penn (1905-1989)
• ISBN: 0549829660, 9780549829669