Literature, Gender Studies, and the New Western History

KRISTA COMER Literature, Gender Studies, and the New Western History It is no coincidence that one of the earliest and most visible critics of the New Western History, Larry McMurtry, is a writer.1 Or that one of McMurtry's principal targets, Patricia Limerick, is a white woman. At issue in the McMurtry/Limerick debate is the embattled status of"the imaginative" in revisionist history. Also at issue is the absence of prior revisionists in recent accounts of the western past. But something more is going on. That "something" has to do with the status of the white literary man in western history, the man who has critiqued western Anglo masculinity in ways that anticipate the New Western History by as much as a half-century. What kind of revisionism is this, McMurtry wonders, that bites off the hand that feeds it? A good question. And a strategically important one for anyone invested in promoting feminist politics within Western Studies. Now if the McMurtry/Limerick controversy is no long au courant in New Western History discussions, it nonetheless raises questions about the realm of"the imaginative" which seem ofcontinuing importance to New Western historians. One often hears in informal scholarly conversation a lot of open struggle and confusion about "stories," and the role that storytelling plays or should play in revisionist history. Historians speak, moreover, of their desires to tell "new stories" which also must be "multiple stories" of the western past. These questions, issues, and desires would seem to return us to the status of "the imaginative." They would seem to be illuminated by an inquiry into the structures or tropes which govern narrative organization, or by sophisticated consideration Arizona Quarterly Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 1997 Copyright © 1997 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-1610 iooKrista Comer of the role that culture or cultural production plays in the making of history.2 But few of these provocative topics earn much sustained thought. Part of the reason for the non-attention owes to the fact that, notwithstanding notable exceptions, the New Western History is quite conservative when it comes to narrative issues.3 This is not so surprising, of course, for professional history at large is similarly conservative. The point I wish to emphasize, however, is that the New Western History has its own very western reasons to be so, and those reasons have to do with the conservative role that culture—especially western mythology —is perceived to have played in western expansion, conquest, and history. That myth justified and in fact produced, so the broad assumption goes, every kind of racist, male supremacist, imperialist, and antinature politic under the western sun. Revisionist western history has thus been premised on a repudiation of western myth. From its inception , the New Western History dedicated itself to the production of a "realist" discourse that operates as counter-discourse to that ofmyth. Its legitimacy derives, at least in part, from the distance it claims between its own narratives and those which are "mythic." As the reader will have intuited, I wish in this essay to question the repudiation ofwestern "myth," not because I would retain it or valorize it in any simple way, nor because I dispute the fact that a vague but pervasive white male centeredness dominates the regional imaginary. But as someone more familiar with the cultural side of the New Western history project, I have come to believe that this "mythic West" that so many discussions depart from (including often my own) is something of a bogeyman, a straw man, gendered language intended. When one looks at it up close, it does not stand as still, or look as categorically fixed, as it seemed at first glance. More, as both historical and political thinkers, we impoverish our analyses if we over-rely on the supposed all-encompassing power ofthis myth to write history and popular opinion about the western past and present. Ifclassic myth-producing texts like Cooper's The Lost ofthe Mohicans or Wister's The Virginian do indeed perform very conservative cultural works, they are also shot through with all kinds of subversions of and challenges to white and male supremacy, female sexlessness, Indian "savagery," environmental...