ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter explores and defines some of the key terminologies that undergird the ecofeminist, postcolonialist arguments of this book project: the American frontier, Perry Miller’s “errand into the wilderness,” the Puritan notion of the errand, and others. The chapter moves into an analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Moving from this text to a study of slave narratives by women in the following chapter, the book can more fully resolve the field of inquiry that surrounds notions of power, race, and gender in the context of the American empire. The analysis stresses the connectivity between America’s earliest self-ideation (of settler hood) and the actual outcome of this vision: an era of unprecedented violence against women of color as well as the environment. William Spanos’s expansion of Miller’s errand is used to understand the heart of American expansionism used to colonize women and the land.
