person and place in the works of joan didion
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attempt to get control of the Braden Place in Auburn, which belongs
to the McClellan family, but this is not her motivation. Instead,
pressured by Everett's absence during the war, Lily merely finds
Joe "interesting." Since her college days, she has learned to
appreciate the possibilities in men she does not like. But if
there is no moral defense, there seems, at least at first, to be no
strong indictment either; in this environment, there simply are no
moral distinctions. And apparently it is the sun's fault, because
when Lily comes home from her abortion of Joe Templeton's baby in
San Francisco, we learn that "the heat drained the distinctions
from things--marriage and divorce and new curtains and overdrafts
at the bank, all the same". She wonders "how she had gotten
pregnant in the first place by somebody she did not much like or
why, the heart of the matter, she had thought it made any
difference" (165-6). It will be noted that this blurring of moral
distinctions is not so much the result of an understanding of the
landscape, as merely a reaction to it. Lily is controlled by
forces larger than herself. In that sense, the novel is closer
here to naturalism than to the romanticism of the Western novel.
But the blurring of moral distinctions is true to the Western
pattern.