Picturing a Different West: Vision, Illustration, and the Tradition of Cather and Austin (review)

Vision is a difficult word to pin down with its range of literal as well as metaphorical meanings and its fundamental presence in the vocabulary of disciplines as diverse as art and politics. Janis P. Stout's Picturing a Different West: Vision, Illustration, and the Tradition of Cather and Austin explores multiple aspects of the visual imagination in the literature and art of the US Southwest. Stout's analysis touches on ethnicity, economics, history, aesthetics, publishing, and more, but her argument is ultimately concerned with gender: Cather and Austin led a revisionist portrayal of the Southwest that used words and images to contest popular notions of the West as a rugged place of masculine adventure and violence, offering instead a vision centered on community, spirituality, gender equality, and loving the land rather than fighting it.

According to Stout, this different vision, while created by women, is not so much a feminized West as it is "an inclusively androgynous vision in which women and men alike were freed of prescriptive and rigidly conventional gender roles" (xviii). While Cather and Austin are the focus of Stout's analysis, she links their work to a remarkable array of women writers and artists, some contemporary to Austin and Cather, others still working today: Georgia O'Keefe, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Laura Gilpin, Elsie Clews Parsons, Leslie Marmon Silko, Margaret Randall, and Barbara Byers. Stout describes a network of women writers and artists in which the connections are sometimes direct and literal, sometimes the stuff of lineage and succession, and sometimes formed by an assumed awareness of others that by its nature is imprecise and often undocumented. Stout does not overreach by suggesting links between her female artists that did not exist; rather, she presents unexpected and tantalizing juxtapositions. She speculates, for example, that Cather and her companion, Edith Lewis, met Silko's ancestors—the premise is interesting and reminds us of the fun of research, but Stout does not lose track of the important point that like Cather and Austin, "Silko regenders the West not simply by feminizing it but by insisting on a strong female presence free from limitation by preconceptions of role or propriety" (218).

The book itself is an artifact that powerfully reinforces Stout's exploration of the visual imagination as source for and expression of creativity. With over seventy-five images, decorated chapter headings, extensive white space, and ornamented running heads and page numbers, the book encourages readers to ponder the relationship between word and picture. Words can become pictures, and pictures can be read as narrative and argument.

Some readers will no doubt label Stout's book an unholy jumble because of its diversity and range. Indeed, Stout's preference for imprecise and speculative language ("perhaps," "conjecture," "it seems fairly likely," "may well have") sometimes suggests a frustrating tentativeness and lack of focus. More often, however, such language comes across as refreshingly honest and has the effect of inviting dialogue and new critical explorations. In Picturing a Different West, Stout continues to stretch scholars in new directions—as she has previously done with her books on Cather's letters, Cather and material culture, and the cultural context of Cather's world.