“A Great Stained Altarstone”: The Environmental Curse And Ecological Violence In Cormac McCarthy’s Border Fiction

This thesis examines the violence in Cormac McCarthy’s border fiction in environmental terms. Primarily, it looks to Blood Meridian (1985) and the Border Trilogy—which consists of the novels All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998)—to explore the concomitances and tensions between history, cultural myth, and environmental violence. I triangulate pertinent historical, settler colonial, and ecocritical theories to navigate the ways in which McCarthy frames the violence in his western novels as a curse incurred by human tendencies to separate nature and culture into two distinct categories. Blood Meridian lays the foundation for the concept of the environmental curse through the terminology terra damnata, literally “damned earth.” Because of continuous human abuse via the implementation of artificial borders and the human desire to dominate nature, humanity now lives under a probationary curse. Particular human cultures exist in epistemic opposition to the nature. There is a rupture between nature and culture that creates a distance between humans and the world they inhabit. My analysis of the Border Trilogy traces out the implications of this curse in more recent history, which includes industrialization and increased enforcement of borders in the United States Southwest.