ABSTRACT
Welcome to Hard Times is a historical fiction set in the Dakota Territory in the 1870s, right after the discovery of gold. It deals with the destruction, rebirth and final eradication of a small Frontier settlement during the colonization of the West. Welcome to Hard Times problematizes the relationship among the categories of victim, perpetrator and bystander, highlighting the extremely thin line that separates them in the context of psychological trauma. Welcome to Hard Times further succeeds in disrupting and subverting long-time fixed images of masculinity and femininity. In addition, the novel denounces the prevailing structures of gender domination and violence, seeking to undermine the model of society that supports itself on patriarchal gender configurations of production and consumption. And Doctorow resorts to the conventions of the Western, the quintessentially manly genre, to subvert and debunk such views, anticipating himself to much later socio-political movements.
