SOURCE: “The Female Transformation: The Role of Women in Two Novels by Wright Morris,” in Prairie Schooner, Vol. 53, No. 2, Summer, 1979, pp. 95-115.

In the following essay, Albers examines the way Morris treats the conflict between desire and repression in The Field of Vision and Ceremony in Lone Tree.

They came in covered wagons, in buckboards, on horseback, on foot. They ate what they could when they could. They cursed and prayed and fought, their fear and terror overcome by a dream. Many died; some survived. Everything tasted like dust. They left a trail of their possessions and their dead across the land.

“Circle the wagons and trap the past! Women and children in the center! Lord, protect us from the future. Give us this day our daily dream, and forgive us—though we have not sinned.”

The struggle to break free of the past is itself the sin...