Zenna Henderson Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Fred Erisman

Critical Essay by Fred Erisman

SOURCE: "Zenna Henderson and the Not-So-Final Frontier." Western American Literature, Vol. XXX, No. 3, November, 1995, pp. 275-85.

In the following essay, Erisman analyzes Henderson's use of the myth of the American frontier in her stories of the People. Henderson applies the concept of frontier broadly, the critic contends: "She is concerned with the timeless frontier that occurs whenever an individual or a people confronts a challenge."

The American frontier experience has long been linked with space travel and interplanetary colonization. From at least the era of Hugo Gernsback and Edgar Rice Burroughs, the vocabulary and imagery of the frontier West have been superficially applied to the fictional exploration of space, and exploitation of the formulaic parallels between pulp Westerns and pulp science fiction has made the expression "space opera" more derogatory than "horse opera." Another kind of linkage, however, emerges from the efforts of authors to use science fiction...
(read more)