The aesthetics of absence and the scopophilic text: Robert Penn Warren's Meet Me in the Green Glen

Though Cassie Spottwood's attempts to come into being are at the center of Meet Me in the Green Glen, she is largely ignored as a speaking subject not only by the other characters but also by many of the novel's critics as well. Her silence and invisibility are framed on all sides by men like Cy, Sunder, and Murray, all of whom objectify women throughout most of the text. Running counter to this overt pattern of scopophilic objectification is Warren's subtle aesthetic manipulation of a textual absence that places Cassie at the center of the text and highlights that her failure to gain a voice in the intratextual world of the novel is the fault of those who refuse to hear her and not indicative of her own failure to come into being.
In Meet Me in the Green Glen, Warren develops an aesthetic that privileges absence and exploits the limits of language to draw the reader into a landscape of loneliness so [...]