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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.