The Manly-Hearted Woman by Frederick Manfred (review)

Reviews 347 What she chooses to present, whether from lack of talent or lack of concern, is a paper Mormon and a cardboard temple, and only enough for those who are able to believe in cardboard temples (as Vardis Fisher might say). ALAN CROOKS, Seattle, Washington The Manly-Hearted. Woman. By Frederick Manfred. (New York: New American Library, 1977 [paperback reprint]. 204 pages, $1.75.) This paperback reprint of Manfred’s latest “Indian book” makes the novel available for classroom use, and it will be a valuable complement to a course in American Indian literature as well as any other course that examines the literature of the American West. Harking back to the scene of Conquering Horse, The Manly-Hearted Woman is vastly different from the earlier book — brief and story-like where the early book is long, complex, and novelistic — yet Manfred’s themes remain the same: the exploration of human sexuality, the creation of new American myth grounded in the American land and spirit, affirmation of the complexity and validity of Yankton culture. The plot moves with the inexorable flow of Greek tragedy, though the story itself is unequivocally Indian (again unlike Conquering Horse with its tangle of Greek and Hebraic roots. Aside from a distant connection to the most rudimentary Christ-myth, the plot of The Manly-Hearted Woman is indigenous). From the beginning of the story we know that the hero will die, and the only question is what will his relationship to the heroine be? There are few writers who can create a more detailed and believable picture of pre-white Indian culture than Frederick Manfred (none comes to mind). In The Buckskin Man Tales, Manfred applied that skill to the demanding discipline of historical fiction, producing a series both factually accurate and of mythic dimensions. Here his talent is focused on a different genre, and yet The Manly-Hearted Woman is not merely a romance but, like Conquering Horse, it is solidly grounded in a wealth of authentic ethnological detail and Manfred’s insight into universal human conditions. MICK McALLISTER, Littleton, Colorado ...