Soft Canons: American Women Writers

Mining the West: Bret Harte and Mary Hallock Foote

The category “Western writing” is a slippery one, and the exercise of forming and reforming a Western canon has become relatively obscure in the larger context of recent critical considerations of regionalism. Yet, even against a background where Western writers’ status is liable to shift, Bret Harte occupies a peculiarly insecure position not only in relation to the tradition of frontier narratives traced from Cooper but even within literary histories of Western literature, where his work is rarely described. Mary Hallock Foote has disappeared in a more complex way from “Western writing,” in a manner predictable to the feminist literary historian , only to reappear as a quite distinct figure within the various spheres of 1970s historical writing. Here she is constructed as a writer who is, in some absolute sense, in the wrong place. This is certainly the assumption of Rodman W. Paul, whose edition of Foote’s unpublished reminiscences, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West (1972), has played a major part, along with Caroll SmithRosenberg ’s “Female World of Love and Ritual” (1975), in recovering Foote as, if nothing else, a Victorian middle-class lady occupying the “separate sphere” of 1970s feminist historical and critical discourse. Paul’s assumption is that Foote’s experience of the West — and apparently, by the same token, her writing — is especially, if not exclusively, mediated through her class identity as it intersects with constraints upon her as a woman: hence, his use of the anachronistic term “gentlewomen,” encoding ideas of inappropriate refinement, blinkered vision, and undemocratic values .1 This approach has been influential, not least because it Mining the West: Bret Harte and Mary Hallock Foote janet floyd matches one of the most common assumptions of writing about Anglo women in the West: that middle-class Eastern migrants were so much in the thrall of contemporary ideologies about womanhood as to be unable to take advantage of the relative flexibility of Western society. “No one,” as Richard W. Etulain puts it, “would have predicted she would have become a well-known Western writer.”2 Yet such assumptions seem to me to have generated a persistent misrepresentation of Foote’s writing, and especially of the mining fictions with which I shall primarily be concerned : “In Exile” (1881), The Led-Horse Claim (1883), and John Bodewin’s Testimony (1886). Interestingly, Foote’s own impulse was to separate herself from a tradition she associated with Harte, though this was not an issue of gender difference. She was not, in my reading, much given to positioning herself in relation to other writers of the West. If anything , she seems to have wanted to link herself with British traditions of medievalism, especially Tennysonian Arthurianism and Victorian fantasy (as, for instance, in the underground fairy stories of George MacDonald); or to have wished to respond — this is true of her woodcuts especially — to the New England canon of her day.3 But this is what she has to say about Harte: “The East continually hears of the recklessness, the bad manners and the immorality of the West just as England hears of all our disgraces, social, financial and national; but who can tell the tale of those quiet lives which are the lifeblood of the country,— its present strength, and its hope for the future? The tourist sees the sensational side of California — its scenery and its society; but it is not all included in the Yo Semite guidebooks and the literature of Bret Harte.”4 Here, at least, in her restatement of the Howellsian realist project in the context of writing about the West, Mary Hallock Foote places herself at odds with Harte’s melodramas of social dislocation and societal hypocrisy. It comes as something of a surprise, then, to find critics of Harte’s and Foote’s work choosing to understand them in very similar terms, that is, by association with the activity that some of their most important work describes: mining. This association is very striking in Harte criticism: he is a “casual, clever, literary miner,” who “exposes” in order to “exploit,” who is “lacking in literary conscience” in his use of his surroundings in California, merely scratching at the surface of his subject to turn a quick harte and foote : 203 profit on fictions of cheap “unearned effects.”5 This criticism represents the West as a literary gold mine that Harte exploits without reflection or pause, to turn...