Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature by Susan J. Rosowski (review)

3 3 0 WAL 3 5 . 3 FALL 2 0 0 0 respects, The Last of the Ofos is a masterfully crafted tale, and Geary Hobson demonstrates why he is one of Native America’s most powerful storytellers. Birthing a N atio n : Qender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature. By Susan J. Rosowski. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. 242 pages, $50.00. Reviewed by Robert Thacker St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York For two reasons beyond Birthing a Nation’s subject, this excellent book ought to be of special interest to readers of Western American Literature. It began as Susan Rosowski’s presidential address to an annual Western Literature Association (WLA) meeting; while preparing her remarks, she wondered why she “felt so at home in a field that was prototypically male” (ix). Second, and in an understated way, Rosowski notes in passing that Jean Stafford, one of the four figures she considers here, “a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who came from and wrote of the West,” “is ignored in major antholo­ gies and bibliographies of western writing,” even those written or compiled by well-known members of the WLA (156). Upending such omission, Birthing a Nation is a compelling revisionist analysis of those writers “who most directly and deeply took up the challenge of giving birth to a nation—the women who believed in literature as a serious and noble form of art and wrote to influence how the United States perceived itself” (x). For Rosowski, these are Margaret Fuller, Willa Cather, Stafford and, a bit more tentatively, Marilynne Robinson; their westering quests define “a search for the genesis of cultural myth in lan­ guage” (198). They and their work are but illustration ofRosowski’s larger thesis, one that argues effectively the link between gender and writing, and then extends that argument into the larger relation between western writing and American literature. After preliminary consideration of early American literature, Rosowski makes a strong case for seeing Margaret Fuller’s response to the American West as indicative before taking up Cather and Stafford as her most extended illustrations. Aptly placing Cather within the contexts of postwar western immigration by examining Cather family letters prior to the fiction, Rosowski constructs an argument that moves from those letters through the early sto­ ries—especially “A Wagner Matinee”—to “The Bohemian Girl” and to My Antonia, a book she calls “American literature’s most fully realized response to the challenge to give birth to a nation” (11). The argument is excellent here, even brilliant, in that Rosowski defines Cather’s writing of a woman’s West, a rejection of “male quest and conquest” infavor of “female awakening and free­ dom” (77). In contrast to the (normative, male) view of bifurcated western space seen in Tumerian terms (precivilized, civilized), Cather writes in “A Wagner Matinee” of “a woman responding to an experience of lack,” a figure BOOK REVIEWS 3 3 1 who “embodies the suffering of the country” (61). In M3 1Antonia, Cather ereated an apotheosis when “she sent Adam packing and claimed paradise for women, restoring to them a pyschosexual identification with nature and appropriating for them the promise of nature’s wildness” (79). Turning to Stafford, Rosowski extends this argument through the stories into an exami­ nation of The Mountain Lion, where its author “uses her pen as a divining rod to reveal sources of the psychosexual violence so thinly veiled in western lit­ erature” (137). Ultimately, Rosowski brings her revisionism to bear on the par­ adigmatic texts of male domination of western space—The Virginian, Riders of the Purple Sage, Shane—and argues that in them “the use of language reverts to ever simpler principles until it resides solely in the hero as Logos, the Word.” As such, the formula western is “American literature’s most radically regressive response to the charge to create a national epicor... togive birthto a nation” (172). Written by one of our leading critics, Birthing a Nation offers a revisionism to be reckoned with—its arguments are precise, well considered, and broadly synthetic. Within and without, there is an inevitability in the analysis that compels: with Birthing a Nation, Rosowski extends her daunting expertise...