Continental Divides: Revisioning American Literature by Anne E. Goldman

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 1 1 7 apparent in the reading of a Wasco tale in which a competent warrior’s spirit animal rebukes and leaves him after his father pushes him to hunt excessively (84-85). The story reveals that what Ramsey calls the “ecological imagina­ tion” is a fundamental component of the culture of tribal groups, a component that members of the contemporary West would do well to incorporate. Ramsey shows that even the Le Petit Jean tales of French-Canadian voyageurs and Bible stories of missionaries are absorbed and reworked to conform to the cul­ ture of their tellers. Most important to those who would like to teach or study oral stories, however, is Ramsey’s concluding chapter, which serves as an excellent primer on how to avoid some of the many critical mistakes that have entrapped casual readers and advanced scholars alike. Needless to say, Ramsey’s book is a worth­ while read, if not model, for the field. Continental Divides: Revisioning American Literature. By Anne E. Goldman. New York: Palgrave, 2000. 208 pages, $45.00. Reviewed by Andrea Tinnemeyer Utah State University, Logan The ambitious undertaking of Continental Divides is nothing short of un­ settling New England as the cultural, geographic, and literary center of the United States. Goldman models the kind of scholarship she advocates: con­ sidering Henry? James and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton in light of both authors’ treatment of Boston, placing the Mexican American War alongside the Civil War, highlighting the western experience of an African American author. What results is a more complex, nuanced set of readings that are the­ matically linked by issues of regionality and mobility. Goldman calls for more flexible models in our imaginings of U.S. literature that permit a careful analy­ sis of the West, which she terms a “third geographical register” (xvi). As a third space, the West exposes the limitations of all Manichean binaries: North/South, Black/White, upper class/laboring class. A t the heart of Goldman’s text is a well-placed and carefully crafted metaphor: the continental divide, a more organic image of the nation-space, intent on displacing the primacy, historical legacy, and limiting scope of race relations invoked by the Mason-Dixon line. Goldman defines the nature of her methodology in the following: [EJxpose one stress point and watch as this hairline break runs and splits, breaking into different channels, connecting up with other divides only to be carved deeper in its turn: the heavy incursions of nonnative Californians in the wake of the railroad and the Gold Rush, the difficulty of defining what constitutes the nation with “foreigners” WAL 37.1 SPRING 2002 on two different coasts, the pressure of movements for suffrage and labor, the economic transition to what the nineteenth century called “speculation.” (118) Tracing fractures and fissures at once denaturalizes the linear divisions of civ­ ilization moving west from the eastern seaboard, multiplies lines of regional and racial differences beyond the Mason-Dixon line and implicitly argues for the centrality of the West in the literature and culture of the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Goldman’s readings of seemingly unlikely pairings (Gertrude Atherton and Pauline Hopkins, Willa Cather and Owen Wister) force readers to consider the interconnectedness between regions. She argues particularly for the influence of the Southwest, the Mexican War, and the Gold Rush in the national imaginary, tracing out novels that draw on, substi­ tute, cross-dress, and otherwise play out national tensions on the Southwest territory, the land taken from Mexico in 1848. This focus on the Southwest is by no means reductive: she demonstrates how this landscape, its history and inhabitants, impact African Americans, Jews, Anglo-Europeans, as well as Native Americans and Mexican Americans. Ultimately, Goldman puts forth a compelling and complex argument that models the kind of scholarship that it calls for: interregional studies enriched in both scope and content through metaphors of mobility (tourism, Mexican War, train travel, migration, Gold Rush, forced removals, immigration), each ofwhich has its own regional, racial, gendered, and class dynamics. Continental Divides is an invitation to American studies and western scholars to examine relationships and interconnectedness in the way one studies a...