The Old Gringo | The Old Gringo and the Elegiac Western
In the following excerpt, Hall examines
Fuentes’s handling of the female perspective in The
Old Gringo and illustrates parallels between the
novel and “elegiac Western” films “which are
characterized by a quality of lament for the passing
of the hero, and by extension, of the heroic age
of the American West.”
The opening of The Old Gringo (1985), by Carlos Fuentes, sets in place the chief organizing principle of the novel, the narrated memories of Harriet Winslow, an unmarried schoolteacher from Washington, D.C., who, the reader discovers, once came to Mexico to instruct the children of the rich hacendado Miranda family and there became embroiled in the Revolution. Her contacts with the uillista general Tomas Arroyo and the Old Gringo polarize her experiences between an apparent infatuation with Arroyo and an attempt to substitute the Gringo for her lost father. In her memories of the...
[The entire page is 2189 words long]
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