Prairie Women: Images in American and Canadian Fiction by Carol Fairbanks (review)

184 Western American Literature Together they built up the successful Honeyhill Farm. Friends said Cecilia was wasting her education to become a farmer’s wife. She answered them saying, “They were wrong. I needed that education and I used it every day of my life!” Her letters to her family form a detailed document of life on the Wyoming frontier, dealing with food production and preservation, with sick­ ness, death, birth and failed dreams. They depict women’s efforts to bring beauty, grace and comfort into their homes and community. “I’ll be a writer someday,” Cecilia said. These letters were written with the intention that they be preserved in lieu of a journal. Cecilia wrote in a straightforward and objective manner. Except for a few love letters and poems, she wrote obliquely about herself in order to camouflage her feelings, and to detach herself from intimacy. Her autobiographical intention was pow­ ered by the motive to convince readers of her self-worth and to authenticate her self-image as she learned to cope. Thus Cecilia’sletters are autobiography, as defined by Estelle Jelinek in her study of the genre, Women’s Autobiog­ raphy. Though this narrative is comprised of selective letters, reading becomes tedious because the correspondents remain names rather than becoming char­ acters. The letters lack both introspection and romanticizing of events. There­ fore, their greatest value is their detailed record of folkways, foodways, and local customs. They document beginning technology as the horse and plow are replaced by machines. They record the experience of two very civilized people who took to the frontier their culture, values and education. The Hendricks were destined to be leaders in society, politics, education and business. VIRGINIA C. PARKER Logan, Utah Prairie Women: Images in American and Canadian Fiction. By Carol Fair­ banks. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. 300 pages, $22.00.) I grew up reading Laura Ingalls Wilder, enamoured with the spirited character of young Laura, her sisters and her mother, though perhaps even as a young reader intuiting that the image was a bit too sentimentalized. Yet, Wilder was not alone in depicting the strong female counterpart to the westwardbound male, and the image persisted in history books and in literature. In recent years, however, an exciting new kind of history has prompted scholars to read diaries, journals, and personal letters of prairie and western women and acknowledge, perhaps with reluctance, that many of the women who quietly obeyed their husbands’ directives to move and move yet again, farther and farther west, harbored deep resentments and found the experi­ ence to be difficult and disheartening. In her new book, Prairie Women: Images in American and Canadian Fiction, Carol Fairbanks acknowledges that the long-suffering alienated image Reviews 185 of frontier woman “pervades frontier letters, journals, diaries, memoirs, poems, paintings, popular songs, fiction, travel books, and illustration” (p. 5), and admits: “There is no reason to doubt its accuracy” (p. 5). Yet, in this oddly contrived volume, she seeks to counter that image. She sets out to illustrate how women’sfictionalized accounts of prairie life offer an alternative to this crumpled figure; seeking in novels an image of women “energetic, strong, self-sufficient, inventive, and far-sighted,” and she finds it. Fairbanks concludes: “Women’sprairie fiction reveals a pervasive optimism rarely found in the works of men” (p. 252). While Fairbanks has done a commendable job of pulling together important sources and fiction on the prairie, it is most regrettable that she has not, then, confronted the question of why the fictionalized accounts by women of women contradict the personal accounts of the pioneer women themselves. The question of literature reflecting reality must be the critical one here. She does not argue that these works of fiction should be taken as more historically accurate than the personal writings of pioneer women, yet she also does not tackle the momentous question of why this alternative image persists in the fiction. Fairbanks hedges her bets by merely stating that the novels offer a different image. Now, she or someone else should tackle the question of what we do with this fascinating information. As for the argument about whether pioneer women were tough...