Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary West by William R. Handley (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary West. By William R. Handley. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 261 pages, $60.00. Reviewed by Forrest G. Robinson University of California, Santa Cmz With this fine book, William R. Handley joins ranks with a bright new gen­ eration of scholars— I am thinking of Neil Campbell, Krista Comer, Susan Kollin, and J. David Stevens, among others— who are bringing notable breadth, critical perspicacity, and theoretical sophistication to the study of western literature. The key terms in Handley’s title— marriage, violence, and nation— suggest the variety of his interests, ranging as they do from sex and gender, myth and popular culture to aspects of regional history and political ideology. If a book as critically adven­ turous as this one can be said to have a center, then that organizing point is the western variation on connubial bliss once waggishly referred to (by an old student of mine) as “con-nudial blister.” “Even more than with the frontier,” Handley observes, “much of the literary West’s recurring preoccupation is with marriage.” He goes on to argue that western literary marriages, “in settings bodi before and after the ‘end’ of the frontier and in both formula Westerns and more ‘high brow’ western fiction, counter the prevailing cultural myth that the frontier chiefly pro­ duced the masculine individual, that national figure celebrated in much formula Western fiction and film. In contrast, the nation we find epitomized in so much lit­ erature of the West resembles what might be called (to put it mildly) a dysfunc­ tional family” (2). Handley is thus a revisionist both in his direct challenge to the triumphalist master narrative of frontier conquest, and in his displacement of the White male hero from his preeminent position in that familiar story. Handley is hardly inclined to prosecute his thesis in routine “marriage-inwestem -literature” fashion. In his chapter on The Virginian, for example, he argues that Owen Wister deploys his “marriage plot” as a way of refonnulating “the meaning of democracy and American character” (67). But Handley finds that the novel’s matrimonial thematics— reflecting Theodore Roosevelt’s in­ junctions to “patriotic” reproduction of the embattled Anglo-Saxon “race”— run athwart potent if less visible traces of same-sex desire. Drawing on biography and cultural history, he shows how Wister’s irreconcilable commitments to the hetero­ sexual imperative, on one side, and to the love between men, on the other, give rise to the novel’s contradictions and to its distinctive, highly charged narrative point of view. Marriage is thus an important element in Handley’s analysis, but in his deft treatment it cannot be understood in separation from a host of other considerations, some familiar, others original with him, and all brought together in a comprehensive, persuasive critical unity. Handley’s approach is decidedly intensive. He has gathered together a hand­ ful of well-thumbed western classics for close critical scmtiny, acknowledging as he does so that his texts are not “universally representative”— that he has not, 212 WAL 3 8 .2 SUMMER 2 0 0 3 for example, turned attention to “what literary marriages might mean in relation to national identity for Native American, Chicano/a, and other writers of color” (8). But if Handley’s range of texts is relatively narrow, the range of critical per­ spectives he brings to those texts— it bears repeating— is remarkably broad. At just those points where earlier scholars have been content to rest their cases, he is inclined to seek fresh angles of vision. Something of this exemplary critical lat­ itude is on display in Handley’s scholarly credo, the elements of which surface more or less serially toward the beginning of his book. Above all else, he aims to “employ an intertextual methodology” that locates “the historical in the literary and vice versa, rather than by treating one as the ‘background’ of the other” (1). He aims as well to eschew tidy binaries, to give equal space to popular and canonical texts, and to treat women writers on a par with men. As we have seen, he wants to jettison the Tumerian frontier and its heroic male...