Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature ed. by David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski

Abstract

Reviews 263 All My Relations: An Anthology ofContemporary Canadian NativeFiction. Edited by Thomas King. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. 236 pages, $14.95.) Thomas King’s anthology provides a welcome collection of Canadian Na­ tive fiction to those already familiar with the large and diverse body of Native American literatures. Doubtless itwill serve as a classroom companion to Craig Lesley’s TalkingLeaves: ContemporaryNativeAmerican Short Stones, An Anthology. King begins the collection with the transcription of an oral story told by Harry Robinson, thus signaling his attempt to push the traditionally-held boundaries of “fiction.”Also included are an excerpt from a Tomson Highway drama, Coyote stories by Peter Blue Cloud and King himself, and a selection from BasilJohnston’slife history/autobiography Indian SchoolDays. Inclusion of such selections goes a long way in challenging the boundaries offiction estab­ lished by the dominant culture, boundaries that have, in the past, successfully marginalized the art of oral and transitionally literate cultures. The stories which have obvious roots in oral tradition reflect a rich body of cultural myth, but other, more consciously literary, stories also skillfully inte­ grate the mythic.Jeanette C.Armstrong’s“This IsaStory”uses a narrative frame to present her prophetic storyabout the return ofKyoti.Joan Crate’s “Welcome to the Real World” intercalates a contemporary story with the mythic story of Thunder, creating a paratacticjuxtaposition that empowers her tale. Significant additions to the anthology are several stories not bound to, as King suggests, “the expectations conjured up by the notion of ‘Indianness.’” Beth Brant, Jordan Wheeler, and Richard Green offer stories that, while they have Indian characters, are not concerned with what separates the characters from the larger, white culture, but with what connects them to the larger, human culture. With his generous sampling of mature and maturing writers, with his willingness to enlarge the idea of “fiction,” and with his inclusion of Indian writers who risk writing about subjects and characters not solely “Indian,” Thomas King givesus avaluable collection ofsome ofthe best Canadian Native fiction. KATHYWHITSON University ofMissouri-Columbia Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at theFrontier in American Literature. Edited by David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, andJoanne B. Karpinski. (Madison, NewJersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993. 206 pages, $33.50.) Make no mistake, the “frontier”in this book has little to do with Frederick Jackson Turner’s or, for that matter, the American West’s. For the most part, the thirteen essayists concern themselves with interior frontiers having scant 264 Western American Literature relevance to either demographyor landscape. Like Geiger counters quickening to nuclear emanations, these critics pulsate when encountering even the word frontier, which triggers their free-wheeling use of it as metaphor. The trio of editors say the book “explores frontiers in social, racial, and gender politics as well as, even more fundamentally, frontiers ofart and language.”They paytheir respects to Turner, Fiedler, Lawrence, and Slotkin but more au courant throughout are Backelard, Bakhtin, de Man, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Todorov, and Voloshin. Indeed, a generation of critics goes and a generation comes. Characterizing the “gothic”frontier is the irreconcilable disparity between the two worlds separated by it: one world ordered, pragmatic, conventional, rigid; and the other, hidden world teeming with “weedy chaos,” “misty shad­ ows,” “riotous emotion.” The icon described here is Grant Wood’s famous painting entitled “American Gothic,” which serves as the book’s governing paradigm. Accordingly, the frontier beckons internal quests beyond geography, beyond social features and distinctions, into realms where culture gives way to the unknown and primordial; to evil, terror, desolation, despair; to the “trans­ formation of consciousness.”However, the collection’s best essays retain link­ age to the exterior reality ofplace. Davis Gross on O. E. Rolvaag (“No Place to Hide”); Scott P. Sanders on the poet Richard Shelton and novelist Leslie Silko (“Southwest Gothic”); and Mark Busby on Sam Shepard (“Frontier Gothic”) affirm such localitywhile opening gothic mysteries that are not merely bizarre or grisly (conventions of an earlier gothicism) but that juxtapose our own colliding fears and ideals. As a gloss toJames Fenimore Cooper, EdwardAbbey, and others, the lateJames K. Folsom, towhom the book isdedicated, quotes the redoubtable Walt Kelly’s Pogo—“we have met the enemy and...