Gender and Genre: An Introduction to Women Writers of Formula Westerns, 1900–1950 by Norris Yates (review)

Reviews 407 nant culture but with a vision o f itself as covenanted new saints developing the new Jerusalem. The dominant culture Orientalized Mormons by refashioning them from a religious group into an ethnic group. It could thereby discriminate against a religious group by projecting its own ignorance and intolerance. W idely researched, theoretically informed, and gracefully written, this work is a model of significant interdisciplinary study. G ender and Genre: An Introduction to Women Writers o f Formula Westerns, 1900-1950. By Norris Yates. (Albuquerque: University of New M exico Press, 1995. 181 pages, $35.00.) Betw een 1906 and 1941, B. M. Bower wrote over 68 books and over 150 novelettes and short stories on western themes. W hile her estimated audience of over 2 m illion readers pales in comparison to Zane Grey’s 40 m illion and Louis L’Am our’s 190 m illion, it still suggests the huge popularity Westerns commanded among general readers in the early decades o f this century. B ow er’s first novel, Chip o f the Flying U, is the initial book in a series of fif­ teen that features the Happy Family of the Flying U ranch. Set in 1886, when the northern Plains cattle range was being fenced, the novel dramatizes the ini­ tiation of Dr. D ella Whitmore, a twenty-three-year-old woman from the East, into western ways. A confident, self-reliant woman who “can shoot a coyote, laugh off hazing, doctor a horse, and turn cow boys into pediatric orderlies,” W hitmore may w ell have “m asculine” attributes, but she ends the novel— apparently content to keep house and bear children— married to Chip, a cow ­ boy and bunkhouse resident. The name “Happy Fam ily” refers to cowpunchers who “participate in a quasi-fam ily lifestyle, of which the physical and psycho­ logical center— the hom e— is the ranch bunkhouse” where men do the chores and even cook. For Norris Yates, the story of Dr. D ella W hitmore’s dom estication displays many tensions regarding gender roles, sexuality, patriarchy, and the division of power within marriage. D espite sharing much with popular male-authored western fictions, which were written for “fast reading and quick forgetting,” Chip o f the Flying V nevertheless subverts certain characteristics of what Yates calls the formula Western. “According to the formula, self-reliance, the enjoy­ ment o f outdoor activities such as riding and shooting, the w ill to power, and the lure of achievem ent are m asculine motivations, whereas inclinations toward morality, law, romantic love, home, and parenthood are fem inine.” Bower, how ­ ever, played with the conventions o f the formula Western, that genre which “tirelessly reinvents masculine identity,” in a way that helped create a subgenre o f “formula Westerns with a difference.” This subgenre is the focus o f attention D a r r y l L . H a t t e n h a u e r A r iz o n a S ta te U n iv e r s it y W e s t 408 Western American Literature of “formula Westerns with a difference.” This subgenre is the focus of attention in Yates’s well-argued and likable book. Yates’s study surveys fiction by women w hose names are hardly known today yet who in their own day sold large numbers o f books and saw their nov­ els made into film s. Their names and the books they wrote carry a certain ring: Caroline Lockhart’s Me—Smith, Vingie E. R oe’s Nameless River, Honoré W illsie M orrow’s The Heart of the Desert, Mary Ellis Ryan’s Squaw Eloise, and Katharine N ew lin Burt’s The Branding Iron. With reference to fem inist lit­ erary studies by Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Jane Tompkins, Yates claim s the wom en authors innovated coded responses to the male im ages and patriarchal literary authority so dominant in formula Westerns. D espite romance plots generally ending with marriage and homemaking for fem ale protagonists, the authors managed to “stretch, bend, twist, or otherwise alter and manipulate the...