Big Books Wanted: Women and Western American Literature in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

The study of women writers of the American West emerged from the margins of a marginal field. The identification of western writing with a denigrated popular form, along with the location of western writers and scholars on the margins of eastern power and prestige, meant that the literary West did enter the scholarly scene until the 196os. Leslie Fiedler, whose influential thesis--that classic American depicts heroes in flight from the domestic--foregrounded western texts and themes, perhaps creating space for a series of monographs published in the 1960s that redefined the West as a literary region in its own right, worthy of high literary treatment and inhabited by great American authors capable of transforming its people and places into art. In 1965, the Western Literature Association (wLA) was founded and began publishing its journal, Western American Literature. Major monographs were published within the space of a few years, including Edwin Fussell's Frontier: American Literature and the American West (1965), Robert E. Lee's From West to East: Studies in the Literature of the American West (1966), and James K. Folsom's The American Western Novel (1966). Women writers were on the margins of this conversation, with the exception of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Willa Cather, the only woman writer to receive more than cursory mention in early monographs in the field. It wasn't until 1979 that the first anthology on western American women writers was published: L. L. Lee and Merrill Lew-is's Women, Women Writers, and the West. Meanwhile, critical paradigms for the study of the frontier, most notably those by Richard Slotkin, emphasized its legacy of violent conquest, making a strong case for the importance of the West in and culture but further distancing women writers from western and frontier topics. More than thirty years have passed since the earliest anthologies on women and the West appeared. There is no doubt that tremendous inroads have been made in the field, as the essays in Nicolas Witschi's Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West (2011) make clear by devoting significant attention to women writers. A newcomer to the field might be surprised, however, to find relatively few big books on the topic, to use Christine Bold's phrase (Frontier Story 212). Much recent analysis of women's writing of the West is embedded in studies of other topics and rightly considers gender as one of many relations structuring western American literary production and reception. However, there is still a need for more work that attempts to organize the diverse study of women writers into larger narratives that position individual women within broader social networks and historical patterns. The relatively small number of monographs on western American women's writing is due to conditions structuring scholarship in the field, including the historically marginal status of western American and the extensive archival and recovery work required to underwrite substantive, major statements about the topic. ESTABLISHING THE FIELD If the early decades of the print record on women's writing of the American West reveal little activity, it is because scholars were writing; rather, the task of establishing the field involved work that was visible to conventional measures of scholarly achievement. In other words, the sparseness of print scholarship on women's western writing appearing during the early period in the field's history belies the groundswell of activity that was occurring at the grassroots level, as a new generation of scholars influenced by the feminist movement began actively to interrogate the received canon of frontier and western writing and seek women writers who, with a few exceptions, had largely fallen out of print. Progress in scholarship proved slow. Although Annette Kolodny, author of two landmark feminist studies of frontier literature, enjoyed strong support from her dissertation committee chair, who, she reports, never tried to constrain me to any kind of critical or canonical orthodoxy and encouraged me to find my own intellectual path, others dismissed her feminist work as faddish and not really literature (Interview). …