Enforcing Masculinities at the Border: An Ecomasculinist Reading of Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing

Abstract

This article analyzes Cormac McCarthy's (1994) The Crossing from the standpoint of ecomasculinity, and explores the dynamics between nature and cowboy masculinity that begin to emerge as the protagonist lives a nomadic life back and forth across the US-Mexico border, which destabilizes and demythologizes American Western myths and cowboy masculinity. Unlike a conventional heroic cowboy of the West, Billy, the protagonist, does not control the Southwestern wilderness through his cowboyism or moral supremacy, and does not proclaim an agenda that opposes the progress of civilization. Rather, he develops an ecomasculinist consciousness toward the environment of the Southwest borderland. In its capacity as a Western, The Crossing is not so much a critique of imperial agency as it is of imperial rhetoric - political, literary and historical - which portrays conquest as "progress" and posits the savagery of the empire as a noble endeavor. Billy's cowboy existence indeed invokes the mythology of the Old West and replays a drama that has come to represent the classic struggle between civilization and wilderness. By exposing parallels between Billy and the she-wolf, McCarthy upsets the trope of cowboy versus nature, indicating that they are not completely adverse figures, but equal agents and victims of patriarchy.