Examples Of Debra Marquart's Characterization Of Her Homeland

Debra Marquart’s Characterization of Her Homeland: The Midwest
A common children’s book for schools in South Dakota, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie breathed life into the frontier landscape of the Midwest in the 1800s through wild adventure, romance, and loss. And although many of us experience the same emotions Wilder did as a child, it will never again come close to her exciting tale of living on the prairie. The Midwest lost its charm that had captivated settlers many years ago. In her memoir, The Horizontal World, Debra Marquart describes her experiences about her childhood in North Dakota, touching on the lack of interest in the region. In this excerpt, Debra Marquart employs dismal diction and assorted allusions to

In the first paragraph, Marquart makes an effort to implement vocabulary to help portray the midwest as a desolate land. She claims that while driving on I-94, you see a road that is “lonely”, “treeless” and “devoid” of curves. The application of isolated diction creates a feeling of the reader wanting something more-- like reading a terrible book, and continuing to read it hoping that it will get better. In this way, Marquart effectively describes North Dakota as a cold, uninviting place, and implies that the rest of the upper midwest holds the same attributes. Marquart also adds depressing diction to further bash the midwest. Through her own writing, the land of the midwest is macabre, unimpressive, and monotonous (para 5, 6, 8). While the diction demonstrates the disappointing imagery of

Marquart references the modern world and thus provides the reader with a sense of familiarity. Towards the beginning of the text, in paragraphs two and three, Marquart mentions comedians and Hollywood. In the latter, she claims that in movies and dramas, fresh-faced, innocent women from the midwest best fit the role as their descent into big cities appears more appalling, due to hailing from a land with scarce crime and lower populations. People nowadays can refer to real life to better connect with the message that Marquart is driving. Instead of stating that the people of the midwest share the same boring character as the environment does, she claims that midwesterners, particularly young women, are pure compared to those on the Atlantic or pacific coasts. In essence, the identity of the midwest is shaped primarily by the people who live there. In combination with her modern references, Marquart also employs historical allusions. She mentions the Land Ordinance of 1785 in paragraph seven, which ultimately created the midwest, but also quotes a surveyor who found the midwest of old “dreary”and “inhabitable”(para 6) for those who depend upon farming for livelihood. Later on, she also mentions that taming the midwest was the settler’s “…job to fix”(para 8). Offering context for the reader, it is clear that