Reading the West Sideways: Queering the Frontier in Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion

Abstract

This essay argues for a queer practice of western writers, termed reading sideways. Using Jean Stafford's novel The Mountain Lion as a case study, this essay shows how allows previously marginalized women's narratives to emerge--narratives that, turn, debunk masculinist narratives of western conquest. Applying queer theory to The Mountain Lion reveals important connections regarding delay, death, and disenchantment that better inform of Stafford's text. By queering her main protagonist's development The Mountain Lion, Stafford subverts myth of masculinist frontier development. Throughout Jean Stafford's 1947 novel, The Mountain Lion, young girl protagonist Molly Fawcett presents an unsettling perspective of Colorado landscape. Usingthe foothills of Colorado Rockies as an artist's studio, Molly writes short stories and poems, collects flowers and insects, and, especially, takes pictures with her Brownie camera. As narrator notes, however, Molly's artistic vision is never straight; rather, it is always sideways: in her pictures sky took up more space than anything else and trees and buildings tended to be diagonal (209). In addition to her photographs, Molly's short stories and poems feature images of mutilation, characters with missing limbs, and moments of masochism. In each artistic move, Molly distorts her subjects, pushing outside center of frame. They are fragmented, continually undone, and out of reach. Turning her subjects sideways, Molly sees West with a queer eye, and, process, offers a perspective that destabilizes her viewers' relationship with supposedly fixed, mythic, Colorado landscape. This essay suggests that Molly's sideways vision of American West, which I read as a queer vision, provides a useful methodology for western writers. As Cathryn Halverson has argued, literary critics of American West have a reading when it comes to western writers; there has been great difficulty a literary tradition shaped by western women (Reading Problem 127). Part of problem, as Halverson has demonstrated, stems from western writers' own struggle to draw from other women's work, as many wrote isolation, with relatively few spaces of collaboration. Halverson proposes western writers alongside each other--intertextually, comparatively--as a potential solution to this critical impasse. Reading alongside, Halverson shows, offers a solid methodology for how literary critics might respond to western writers. It allows for shared histories, themes, and struggles to emerge, ripening possibility of identifying a literary tradition unique to western writers. In other words, while not ignoring difficulty of doing so, nor ignoring important differences, alongside advocates naming a comprehensive alternative literary tradition. The question of methodology has emerged as a central question study of western writers. Writing about this dilemma, Victoria Lamont notes, the increasing complexity of feminist work may have had unintended consequence of allowing master narratives to persist (Big Books Wanted 322). In particular, Lamont highlights problem of western writers into a feminized subcategory of domestic, communal, or sentimental (Westerns 3). This cordoning off has led entire groups of western writers to be ignored or explained away, such as writers of popular western. As a result, Lamont states, we tacitly endorse their continued exclusion from discussions of genre when we should be rethinking our understanding of genre order to account for them (Westerns 3). The problem facing feminist critics of American West, then, is two-fold. First, can we legitimately claim an oppositional, alternative narrative of western women's writing that does not reproduce equation of western women's writing as necessarily domestic or sentimental? …