Feminizing the Frontier Myth: Masha Norman's The Holdup

Feminizing the Frontier Myth: Marsha Nonnan's The Holdup RICHARD WATTENBERG Mainstream theatre in the United States has undergone a number of transfonnations in the past decade. Not the least is the acceptance of woman to the playwriting elite. Plays by Beth Henley, Marsha Nonnan, Tina Howe, and Wendy Wasserstein have all had successful Broadway runs, and Henley, Norman, and Wasserstein have been honored with Pulitzer Prizes. These successes suggest the opening of the "establishment" to new and diverse voices. While some feminist critics view this "opening up" as a co-optation,I it may indicate a shift in mainstream cultural attitudes. Whether or not such a shift has actually occurred is debatable; nevertheless, these new woman playwrights touch on themes close to the hearts of traditionalists. For instance, in The Holdup (I98(}-3), Marsha Nonnan confronts the frontier West - long the focus of a male-centered mythology. While admitting that this play was not a typical " Nonnan play," that it has more fantasy than substance, and that it was not intended "to substantiate Western mythology" (all facts that might explain why some critics responded negatively to it), Nonnan also claimed that in The Holdup "there are serious things to be said about stories and how they operate on our minds.,, 2 Indeed, the structure of this play's "story" suggests a transfonn.tion of the frontier myth. Certainly, Marsha Nonnan is not the first American playwright to question the traditional frontier myth. This myth, which attained its purest fonn at the end of the nineteenth century, has been challenged and revised by twentiethcentury American male playwrights. To fully appreciate the change in approach that Nonnan's play represents, it will be useful to recall the way the frontier myth appeared in turn-of-the-century American drama and how it has recently been refonnulated by an iconoclastic male playwright like Sam Shepard. Given this context, it will not only be possible to isolate the changes in the myth made by Marsha Nonnan in The Holdup but to evaluate the extent to which these changes suggest a new feminist perspective on the frontier experience. 508 RlCHARD WATTENBERG The nineteenth-century version of the frontier myth was perhaps best expressed by Frederick Jackson Tumer in essays like "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893). Central to Turner's thesis is the belief that "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development. "3 This "area of free land" offered discontented Easterners a "gate of escape to the free conditions of the frontier. "4 " In a word, " Turner wrote, "free lands meant free opportunities. n5 Luring Easterners or immigrants west, this frontier was the anvil on which the American democratic character received its distinctive form. More specifically, Turner described this frontier as "the outer edge of the wave - the meeting point between savagery and civilization. ... the line of most rapid and effective Americanization . ,,6 Viewing"Americanization" as an interaction of Eastern pioneer and Western locale, he wrote: ..... at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. "7 Having adapted to the frontier, the pioneer soon begins to tame it. Gradually he "transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe.... The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.,,8 In short, Turner viewed this distinctly American product in traditional Romantic terms whereby a decadent civilization is purified through contact with uncormpted nature. In Turner's thinking, this process takes on the form of a synthesis or marriage of Eastern civilization and Western savagery. A Turner-like perception of the interaction .of East and West appears in the drama even before Turner began disseminating his famous thesis. Bartley Campbell's popular melodrama My Partner (1879) concludes with a marriage of Eastern heroine and Western frontier hero that bodes well for the play's fictitious community and, by suggestion, for the nation at large. In turn-ofthe -century American plays like David Belasco's The Girl...