Year of Award
2015
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Type
Master of Arts (MA)
Degree Name
English (Literature)
Department or School/College
Department of English
Committee Chair
Nancy Cook
Commitee Members
Kathleen Kane, Christopher Preston, Nadia White
Keywords
Fuller, Colton, Oil, Fracking, Mythology, Petromelancholia
Publisher
University of Montana
Subject Categories
American Literature
Abstract
Alexandra Fuller’s book The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, often read as merely a sad biography of a young man who meets his demise in the Wyoming energy patch, performs urgent cultural work. Fuller captures Wyoming’s shift from conventional (Easy Oil) extraction to the extreme (Tough Oil) extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, at the dawn of the twenty-first century. This shift to Tough Oil involves far more than engineering concerns, as Stephanie LeMenager points out in her cultural critique Living Oil. LeMenager terms our national failure to acknowledge the crises that accompany Tough Oil practices petromelancholia, focusing much of her attention upon the BP Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and fracking near urban centers in Appalachia and California. The interior West and its landscapes of extraction remain overlooked, its denizens invisible. In this thesis, I argue that Fuller enacts a Western iteration of petromelancholia, and I make my case using textual evidence from The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, as well as secondary support from Stephanie LeMenager, Robert Warshow, John G. Cawelti, Wallace Stegner, Ray Ring, and many others.
In my first chapter, I explore the risks associated with the relinquishment of large tracts of Wyoming and the interior West as sacrifice zones, and I interpret the various strata of Fuller’s unusual comparison of drilling rigs to the Eiffel Tower. In my remaining chapters, I discuss the interplay of Western American mythologies with Colton’s worsening petromelancholic denial. In chapter two, I explore tensions between Wyoming’s cowboy identity and the petro-industrial complex. I then show how Colton’s cowboy repose positions him to enter the oil and gas industry. In chapter three, I explicate Colton’s deterioration and the various elements of his petromelancholia as he attempts to become a self-made man in the Western tradition. In my fourth chapter, I examine Colton’s denial and anger in Fuller’s gun-cleaning scene, and I analyze the ways in which Fuller rethinks two worn tropes of the Western genre, firearms and violence, to illustrate Colton’s deep and fatal petromelancholia.
Recommended Citation
Stephens, Lindsay, ""Horses and Oil in His Blood": Mythopoetics and Western Petromelancholia in Alexandra Fuller's The Legend of Colton H. Bryant" (2015). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 4499.
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/4499
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© Copyright 2015 Lindsay Stephens