Go West, Young Woman: Transforming Southern Womanhood through the Myth of the American West in Doris Betts’s Heading West and The Sharp Teeth of Love

Abstract

Though others may resist such an antiquated characterization, Knight's century-old sentiments still hold a great deal of truth for women of the American South. Tradition binds the two sides, and tradition has a way of defying logic. One narrative depiction of the resulting tension is the work of Doris Betts (1932-2012). This essay will explore two of Betts's later novels, Heading West (1981) and The Sharp Teeth of Love (1997), in terms of the sometimes combustive consequences and implications of Southern womanhood. Betts's novels depict how upholding the legacy of the Southern belle requires women to deny autonomy in favor of an impossible ideal. Unfortunately, Betts suggests, there is little hope for women to attain individualized identity within the cultural and geographic confines of the South. To remedy this predicament, Betts depicts women who consequent- ly abandon the region in order to achieve self-actualization by traveling west, but the question quickly follows: Why the West? If Betts's heroines require nothing more than a blank slate, there are equally symbolic land- scapes in the mountains of Appalachia or the plains of the Midwest. The answer lies in the West's potential for absolute freedom and transforma- tion. At the same time, the inherent masculinity of the mythic West poses a problem for Betts because she does not believe achieving selfhood means completely abandoning femininity. To circumvent this issue, she creates in Heading West and The Sharp Teeth of Love feminized, transformative narra- tives.