Frontiers of Boyhood: Imagining America, Past and Future by Martin Woodside

Abstract

Reviewed by: Frontiers of Boyhood: Imagining America, Past and Future by Martin Woodside Kenneth Kidd (bio) Frontiers of Boyhood: Imagining America, Past and Future. By Martin Woodside. University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country." Martin Woodside opens his excellent study Frontiers of Boyhood by reflecting on this famous exhortation by Horace Greeley in 1865. Indeed, many young men and even boys did go West, some literally and still more in their minds and hearts. As Woodside emphasizes, the "frontier" of the American West was understood in the late nineteenth century as the place where boys could become the right sort of men: rugged, self-reliant, demonstrably masculine. And, just as important, the presence and activities of boys on the frontier would ostensibly help the nation grow up. Reflecting also on Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, Woodside emphasizes how boyhood and the frontier thus "develop through exposure to one another" (11). Including seventeen illustrations, Frontiers of Boyhood adds richly to a body of existing scholarship on American literary boyhood across and slightly beyond the nineteenth century: see, for instance, Marcia Jacobson's Being A Boy Again, Ken Parille's Boys at Home, Lorinda B. Cohoon's Serialized Citizenships, David I. Macleod's Building Character in the American Boy, and my own Making American Boys. Woodside is the first to focus on the frontier's particular importance for boyhood and vice versa. The book contributes not only to children's literature studies and American literary studies but also to studies of the American West, which have neglected the importance of youth on and to the frontier. Woodside's volume appears with the University of Oklahoma Press as part of its William F. Cody series on the history and culture of the American West. The book's placement in the series makes superb sense, as the organizing figure of Frontiers of Boyhood is William F. Cody himself, aka "Buffalo Bill," buffalo hunter, Indian scout, and consummate showman—architect of the world-famous Buffalo Bill's Wild West stage show, launched in 1883. Three of the book's five chapters take up Buffalo Bill and his show and their ongoing legacy. Woodside details how Buffalo Bill's persona and show [End Page 286] were fashioned for a child-friendly audience and thus had to navigate concerns about the show's sensationalism. The focus on Cody as a broker of American youth culture is one of the book's key strengths. Another is Woodside's persuasive account of the dime novel as a form of children's and adolescent literature. Woodside also engagingly explores the role of actual children in frontier mythology. That's not surprising, as Woodside earned his PhD in childhood studies from the (dare I say it?) pioneering program at Rutgers University-Camden. Woodside's introduction nicely sets the stage for the entertaining show that follows. Woodside draws on important work about American adolescence and gender norms by Joseph Kett, Kent Baxter, Sarah Chinn, and Gail Bederman. He makes the case that frontier narratives position the West as a space for white male development through a rhetoric of both "peril and promise" and by delineating "proper" from "improper" boyhood (14). The book proper begins in familiar territory, with a discussion in chapter 1 of the Bad Boy book as practiced by Mark Twain and Hamlin Garland and as approximated by Cody in his autobiography The Life and Adventures of Buffalo Bill (1879). Turns out, the bad boy book went West too. The chapter offers strong treatment of both Twain and Garland—and trust me, it's hard to say anything new about Twain. But Woodside does it in his engaging commentary on Huck and Tom Sawyer among the Indians and Other Unfinished Stories. However, as Woodside stresses, "it is Cody, not Twain, who successfully integrates the dime novel hero with a literary model of successful American boyhood" (42). Building on this insight, chapter 2 reframes the dime novel as a frontier form that walks the same tightrope that Buffalo Bill did with his show. Dime novel authors had to titillate without seeming to endorse violence or glamorize running away, all the more so...