Book Review

Book Reviews

Knight, Melinda

1997

Overview

In setting up his theoretical framework, [Norris Yates] draws on the work of Lillian Robinson, Jane Tompkins, Nina Baym, and especially Frances B. Cogan, who coined the term \"Ideal of Real Womanhood.\" The \"Ideal of Real Womanhood,\" of course, is quite different from that other stereotype of female behavior, the \"Cult of True Womanhood,\" a category of analysis used by many cultural, social, and literary historians ever since Barbara Welter defined the term. The \"ideal\" woman is distinguished from the \"true\" woman by her ability to earn a living, be rational and clear-headed, demonstrate physical fitness, and resist male domination even while working toward a partnership. While Cogan has argued that literary representations of this prototype disappeared in the 1880s, Yates finds them reincarnated in the women writers of formula Westerns, but with two distinct modifications: First, these writers added a romance plot; second, the heroine often helped reform a fallen man, a purpose not usually found in the domestic novel. In addition to recovering lost writers and showing how domestic fiction did not disappear but was rather transformed, Yates also wants to apply concepts \"developed by Elaine Showalter, Sandra M. Gilbert, and Susan Gubar to the analysis of these rediscovered formula Westerns by women\" (3). Specifically, Yates seeks to analyze the \"palimpsestic\" writing of these authors who, like other women writers, intentionally adopted a \"double-voiced strategy\" to resolve the \"demands of the macho Western and their feminist leanings\" (4). By creating female protagonists, which occurred much more often in Westerns by women than by men, these writers were able to resist the authority of a literary and publishing establishment dominated by and oriented to men. One consequence, though, of introducing such female heroines was the necessary obligation of sending them into domesticity at the end. But in doing so, the female heroines were allowed to retain some of their individuality and independence, \"without offending any literary and social conventions.\" As Yates puts it: \"Such alterations were among the significant ways in which these authors supported and yet subverted Western-style images of ideal femininity and male hegemony\" (5). Yates notices several other differences in formula Westerns by women, the fact that these novels included relatively less violence, particularly gunfights (that most common of Western action devices) and a greater frequency of indoor, domestic settings. Yates provides a good overview of his methodology. He has chosen to define the formula Western as \"material drawn mostly from the `slicks' (magazines printed on glossy paper with a high rag content), rather than from the `pulps' (periodicals printed on cheaper paper derived mostly from pulpwood). He argues that it is impossible to separate writers of pulp Westerns by gender because of the frequent use of pseudonyms; also, women writers of formula Westerns did publish more often in the slicks. He uses a somewhat narrower definition of the West than the one common to the New Western Historians. Yates describes the \"West\" as the \"area west of the Missouri, south of the tundra, and north of the Sierra Madre\" (6). Time in this study is bound by the end of the Civil War until about the end of the 1920s, the period of greatest immigration and internal migration in American history. Like Country and Western music, formula Westerns seem to have had generic plots that would cover all cases: the epic of construction, the ranch story, the empire story, the avenger tale, Custer's last stand, the outlaw story, and the marshall story. Yates notes three other qualities that mark the formula Western: a particular view of the West that sees \"place\" as bringing out the best and worst in people; as rewarding the good with adventure, romance, and prosperity and punishing the bad, usually with violent death; and as taking the male chauvinism of adventure fiction in general to an extreme.

• Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
• Subject: African Americans / American history / Artists / Audiences / Autobiographies / Black literature / Civil war / Conventions / Country music / Creativity / Domesticity / Dominance / Ethnicity / Females / Femininity / Feminism / Fiction / Gender differences / Hegemony / Heroism & heroes / Historians / Ideology / Immigration / Independence / Intellectual History / Internal migration / Jewish people / Literary Criticism / Literary Genres / Literature / Males / Masculinity / Multicultural Education / Music / Native North Americans / Nonfiction / Notices / Novels / Offending / Periodicals / Physical fitness / Postmodernism / Printing / Prototypes / Publishing / Romance languages / Sexism / Social History / Stereotypes / United States History / Violent death / Womanhood / Women / Writers