Francis Parkman's grotesque body: Disease, disgust and desire in The Oregon Trail

Abstract

This essay applies Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of carnival and grotesque realism to Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail. Tracing a journey from the 'civilized' east to the 'uncivilized' west, Parkman's narrative expresses a simultaneous fear and fascination towards the Otherness he encounters (and, indeed, constructs) that leads finally to the hybrid carnivalising of his own body. These deep-seated ambivalences in the west ultimately reveal much broader anxieties over social disorder prevalent in the urban east.In Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 Paul Boyer suggests that the rapid growth of the nineteenth century city, combined with increasing expansion westward across the continent, constituted an unparalleled threat to the eastern social and cultural elite. With the first decades of the nineteenth century experiencing an extraordinary rate of urban growth, there developed a corresponding fear that traditional hierarchies of social order were breaking down.