Los Angeles in 'The Day of the Locust'

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2013
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Haverford College. Department of English
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
This essay examines the relationship between an emergent Los Angeles and the region’s migrants as depicted in Nathanael West’s 1939 novel, The Day of the Locust. Los Angeles acts as a container for a variety of disenfranchised people, individuals moving westward to start fresh; however, I suggest that though the city was marketed as the land of sunshine and place of dreams, Los Angeles was hardly what it advertised itself to be in the first half of the 20th century, closer to a parasitic environment than one of paradise. Los Angeles is a mythic construction from the start and, pointing to Baudrillard, also a self-sustaining illusory system (i.e., simulacrum) – and Hollywood is the metaphysical symbol illuminating the eternal disparity between appearance and reality. Working for a Hollywood film studio and the seminal character of the novel, Tod represents the artist’s struggle for authenticity within a climate of simulations; the subsequent frustrations, though, may produce originality in its own right. Furthermore, I assert that Faye, the femme fatale of the novel, is an embodiment of Los Angeles, migrants falling victim to her image – none more so than Homer, the Midwesterner – despite the warning signs that she is disingenuous. In short, these migrants have come to the city where dreams die and innocence is lost, each selling him or herself for peace or prominence and instead finding loneliness and despair behind the marketed image; however, Los Angeles claims none but the willing victim – and the city made clear that it may not return their love.
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