In contrast to The Ballad of Baby Doe and Lizzie Borden, both of which conclude with older women paying for their sins against the family, Aaron Copland and Erik Johns's The Tender Land (1954, rev. 1955) concludes with a still-young woman named Laurie Moss striking out on her own, leaving her family and their farm behind her. Laurie's mother cannot understand why her daughter must leave, and she begs her not to go. Finally, she resigns herself, turning her attention to the younger daughter still in her care. She will begin anew with her. She will seek to protect her and ensure that she makes it to her high school graduation, unsullied by the outside world.

Laurie Moss is a key figure in American operas of the 1950s, for her assertion of self prefigures that of Susannah Polk, the tragic heroine of Carlisle Floyd's Susannah (1955) and the subject of the next chapter. Laurie and Susannah are both young, fiercely independent, and fatherless women. Both are the victims of patriarchal cultures that rely on sexual violence, threatened or realized, to keep women in a position of subservience. When Susannah, for example, supposedly “acts out,” she is slut-shamed and then raped. Her older brother finds out and seeks to avenge her (but also his) honor. Similarly, Laurie's mother and grandfather are so intent on protecting Laurie's virginity, and so worried that Laurie could be raped or seduced, that they seek to control her every move. Yet musicologists have glossed over the sexual violence on display in The Tender Land and Susannah, preferring to read the operas as coded critiques of the McCarthy era. These readings are incomplete, for they do not account for the gendered and racialized violence that informs The Tender Land and Susannah.

In this chapter, I scrutinize the sexual and gender politics emphasized in The Tender Land by analyzing several of the texts that informed the opera and revealing how the threat of sexual violence underscores the entire story. Musicologists have long acknowledged James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) as Copland and Johns's primary source material, but I show how Erskine Caldwell's 1944 novel Tragic Ground served as an additional source of inspiration.