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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Lonesome Dove, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
American Mythology
Family
Luck, Fate, and Chance
The Good Life
The Meaning of Masculinity
Feminine Strength
Summary
Analysis
It isn’t long before Elmira starts questioning her decisions. She, Big Zwey, and Luke are plagued by rain, the constant rocking of the wagon makes her eternally queasy, and although Big Zwey leaves her alone, Luke keeps finding and making opportunities to get her alone and make lewd suggestions. He tries sweet-talking, offering money, and threatening her. One day, Elmira runs him out of camp with one of the buffalo guns.
Elmira left Arkansas driven by one overwhelming desire: to reunite with Dee Boot. Unlike July, who seems content to live a life directed by others, Elmira has taken control of her own fate. But she’s hardly in better or easier circumstances than her hapless husband. Neither approach is the right one, the book suggests, because neither is balanced.
Themes
That night, Luke is nowhere to be seen, but Big Zwey returns with a wild turkey for dinner. Elmira tells him that Luke has been trying to “marry” her. Big Zwey calmly observes that if Luke behaves badly, he might need to die. Just then, a shot rings out in the darkness and a bullet whizzes between the two of them, striking the cooked turkey. They assume it was Luke shooting, but when he shows up two days later, he acts like nothing has happened.
Luke poses a danger to Elmira because he feels entitled to having sex with her, as evidenced by his repeated overtures. Like the other women in the book, she’s vulnerable to the violence—sexual or physical—of men. Both Elmira and Big Zwey assume the shot in the dark comes from Luke, and while it’s possible he’s simply feigning innocence, readers should also remember that the drive is traveling through territory still contested between American settlers and disgruntled Indigenous nations.
Themes
The next morning, Elmira wakes up to find Luke straddling her. She resists him as best she can. And then, suddenly, Big Zwey tears him off her and casually starts slamming his head into the iron rim of the wagon wheel. Luke survives—barely. It takes him two weeks to recovered enough to get out of the wagon. One day, Elmira taunts him about missing his chance to kill Big Zwey that night by the fire. Luke is confused. He wasn’t responsible for the bullet that hit the turkey. Someone else must have been.
Elmira escapes Luke’s attempted rape thanks to Big Zwey, but the casual way in which he nearly pulverizes the smaller man suggests that he’s not exactly safe, either, if he perceives that Elmira has crossed him. His casual violence adds yet more evidence to the book's demythologizing and deromanticizing of the era: the frontier was a hard place full of hard people—and hostile Indigenous nations angry about being pushed off their land.
Themes
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