Nelson Denoon From Norman Rush's Term Paper

Moon is an outsider and stranger from a strange American place who has found a home in a formerly colonized non-white area, like Denoon. The missionary family of the Quarriers and the anonymous narrator of Mating provide, by virtue of their recent entry into such societies, an outsider's view of such insider figures as Denoon and Moon.

In at Play in the Fields of the Lord, evangelical missionaries are attempting to spread their religion to the Indians, much as Denoon wished to spread the gospel of self-empowerment and chastity to the abused women of Tsau. But like Denoon's anthropological community, the missionary work and zeal of the missionaries proves be a mistaken example of artificial cultural tampering, and is destructive to both the missionaries and the Peru Indians' ways of life, just as Denoon's chaste utopia, however attractive to the narrator, is not really workable in reality.

Denoon's tampering is intellectual while the missionaries of Matthiessen's novel are morally rather than cerebrally driven in their quest. But both groups end up in states of despair. Likewise, much like Moon, Denoon leaves his original environment to seek healing for himself in another land, in the hopes that this other land can provide him with sustenance, solace, and comfort that his lacking in his current environment. But this is not the case, for the 'native' people of Peru are anything but perfect -- for example, Moon often takes the Indians to task for their wasteful practices, even though the Indians hardly care about his chastisements.Also, not all of Denoon's subjects are equally enthusiastic about his gospel of chastity, beneath the surface. "One difference between women and men is that women really want paradise. Men say they do, but what they mean by it is absolute security, which they can obtain only through utter domination of the near and dear and the environment as far as the eye can see," says the narrator, words that become unwittingly prophetic as she becomes simultaneously enchanted with, and than disenchanted with Denoon, especially after he relationship does become physical. (44)

Both Moon and Noonan see themselves as carrying a new kind of 'white man's burden' -- in Noonan's case, to undo the male oppression of both colonialism and African gender tyranny, and in Moon's case, to lift himself from the oppression his Native people experienced in America and to enjoy a different life in a land far away -- a land he simultaneously critiques and profits from. Noonan's impositions of outside ideology are not any more sustainable than the harsher impositions of foreign ideologies such as apartheid, however better their author's intentions. Thus, in the bodies of these characters, both books suggest the same message -- ideological shifts must occur from within a land, rather than be compelled or orchestrated by….....