“Scandalously bifurcated garments”: Ecocriticism, American Pioneers, and Novelizing Women of the West

Gillian Gauer,Elizabeth E Tavares

doi:10.7710/2168-0620.0300

Abstract

While the Western novel is typically associated with cowboys and overarching masculine accomplishments of “settling,” the representation of women’s work beyond narratives of being “tamed” and the settling-down of motherhood has been overlooked by writers and ecocritics alike. Ecofeminist scholarship of the late 1980s and ‘90s, primed to take up such questions, focused primarily on the relationship between women and nature in abstract terms rather than on regionally-specific interpretations. This thesis, therefore, examines the representation of female-identifying protagonists in pioneer narratives of North America in three popular novels of the last century: Zane Grey’s posthumous Woman of the Frontier (1940/1998), Mrs. Mike (1947) by Benedict and Nancy Freedman, and the Oregon-specific Little Century (2011) by Anna Keesey. Using principles from feminist and ecocritical literary theory in combination, I consider the ways in which landscape is conscripted to convey a character’s interiority—an anthropocentric tactic that ultimately equates the objectification of women with the conquest of territory. As a twenty-first century pioneer woman born and raised on a rural Oregon ranch, identifying the significance of pioneer women and interrogating their representations beyond being extensions of the tamed landscape helps rewrite the conventional masculine lens of Manifest Destiny and the “West.”

Highlights

Who populates the “Wild West”? While in popular culture, the attention lands on cowboys and outlaws, the population of the American frontier was much more diverse
The “settling” of the American west, and especially what is referred to as the Pacific Northwest has long attracted the imagination of novelists
Using principles from feminist and ecocritical literary theory in combination, I consider the ways in which landscape is conscripted to convey a character s interiority—an anthropocentric tactic that equates the objectification of women with the conquest of territory

Summary

Some Conclusions

I have felt linked to the ranch, but I can only imagine the way Nan must have felt towards it, as the source of her livelihood but as her first home This question drove my interest towards other pioneer women and their attraction to their own homesteads. When examined with a historically sensitive ecofeminist lens, the women in these novels are much more complex than originally thought, but are still a limited representation of the Western experience of the women who lived it Exploring their stories through these literary characters is important because it highlights how far away from cohesive representation Western novels have developed as well as how different these women are from one another from a regional perspective. More work is needed on the Western novel to examine the representation of pioneer women, but to separate the Western into categories based on region in order to better understand the importance of womens stories in connection with the land

Works Cited

Knowledges and Postcolonial

Species in a Material Feminist