“A Damned Outrage”: Miasma and the Tragedy of Injustice in Cormac McCarthy’s The Gardener’s Son

Cormac McCarthy’s The Gardener’s Son shows how miasma, or moral pollution, has seeped into the fabric of Graniteville society at every level: domestic, religious, educational, social, civil, and environmental. The mill founder William Gregg’s funeral eulogy, which is tantamount to a proclamation of his utopian vision of Graniteville and the benisons the Graniteville Manufacturing Company allegedly confers, is a façade of an upright society that conceals injustice, hypocrisy, and corruption. McCarthy’s drama conveys the extent of this miasma by drawing on images, themes, and ideas from Attic Greek tragedy, Medieval Arthurian Grail legends, Shakespearean tragedy, and the Hebraic scapegoating ritual of atonement to fashion a tragedy of injustice. Scholarly discussion frequently posits that Robert McEvoy’s shooting of James Gregg is ambiguously motivated, but McCarthy’s screenplay, supported by the historical record, sympathizes with McEvoy’s indignation against the inequalities within Graniteville society. The article closes by suggesting that McCarthy’s narrative works by negative example in evoking the “damned outrage” of an unjust world and asking, as the lawyer W.J. Whipper asks of his court, “Is there anybody here who believes in justice?”