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American Literature 74.3 (2002) 647-649



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Performing the American Frontier, 1870–1906 . By Roger A. Hall. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. 2001. xii, 281 pp. $54.95.
Embodiment of a Nation: Human Form in American Places . By Cecelia Tichi. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. 2001. xii, 303 pp. $39.95.

Where do we find frontier stories? Roger Hall and Cecilia Tichi would answer very differently. Hall would look to the western as a genre, which he argues developed on the stage decades before the invention of film, while Tichi would look across multiple genres and discourses. Hall's goal in Performing the American Frontier is to exhibit the "variety of subject matter and style represented by frontier drama, as well as the contradictory meanings the frontier expressed" (3–4). Through a chronological discussion of 150 plays and outdoor western exhibitions, he shows contrasting ways that Americans imagined the West: as a site for both violent action and sentimental melodrama, as both a savage state awaiting civilization and an idyllic pastoral retreat. Hall's discussions of the plays are brief, devoting a few paragraphs each to plot summary; themes; backgrounds of the writer, director, and significant actors; descriptions of performances, scenery, and staging; and critical reception. Breadth takes precedence over in-depth analysis, making the book a useful reference for readers interested in American theater or representations of the West. It includes numerous stories that invite further scholarly attention, such as the dizzying copyright pirating that followed Bret Harte's story "The Work on Red Mountain" (1860) as it evolved into two competing plays about the feisty California orphan "M'liss," each starring an actress fighting for the role that would make one of them famous. Also fascinating is the career of Gowongo Mohawk, "The Only American Indian Actress," as she [End Page 647] billed herself, a Seneca woman who expanded her limited theatrical opportunities by writing numerous plays, such as Wep-ton-no-mah, the Indian Mail Carrier (1892), in which she cross-dressed to star as the heroic male lead.

Written from the perspective of theater studies, Hall's work is not cultural criticism. He asserts that these plays reinforced popular ideas and prejudices but does not explore their cultural impact. One of his arguments is that these plays rose from "lowbrow" to "highbrow" status when "the marginalized public seized control of their own entertainment" (14), eventually forcing prominent producers and writers to take up frontier themes in "respectable" productions. But we don't learn how these audience members responded to the plays or if they were somehow empowered by this seizure of control. A more searching account might have looked to historical trends like the perceived closing of the frontier or literary trends like the renewal of interest in historical romance as possible factors influencing the frontier's emergence as a legitimate setting for American drama after 1890. This is a limitation of methodology rather than execution; Hall's exclusive focus on drama precludes studying how these plays participated in the broader construction of the frontier in American imaginations.

More experimental in method is Tichi's Embodiment of a Nation. Reaching across genres and periods, Tichi explores various ways that Americans have expressed national identity through "geographical embodiment," a trope that figures land as a human body. She finds these tropes in literary as well as nonliterary texts, such as journalism, medical discourse, national park guidebooks, and government policy reports. This eclectic archive is matched by the unusual historical framework that holds together the book's two-chapter sections. In each of these sections, the first chapter traces rhetorical efforts in the nineteenth century to negotiate conflicting visions of national leadership and progress; the second chapter explores parallel efforts in the 1960s and 1970s, when white male authority, expectations of technological and capitalist progress, and exploitative relations with the environment were explicitly (although not always successfully) challenged. In both periods, writers used the rhetorical device of identifying American landscape with different kinds of bodies or body parts to suggest national character...

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