The Golden West: Enduring Myths, Persistent Facts

If we wish to search for some body of knowledge, some set of assumptions and values shared across generations in American culture, we need look no farther than the myths about the western frontier—about the wild West of the Indian and the coyote, the golden West of the prospector, the ritual West of the cowboy and his code, or the valiant West of the brave family surrounded by the lonely prairie. As Leslie Fiedler has written about the literary traditions of the wilderness and the western movement, "geography in the United States is mythological" (16).

The books, films, and television dramas generated by these myths are legion, and, in turn, feed the legend. David Dary notes in Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries that the vision of the Old West "glowing brightly in the minds of Americans" is "a blend of fart and fiction" created by the popular literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (332). Set pieces from Westerns are so universally known that the script writers and director of the movie Back to the Future, Part III could freely play on them for laughs, even though the primary audience for the film is an audience raised after the craze for Westerns had been replaced by a craze for space travel stories. One sign of a current revival of popular interest in the Western is the inclusion of some wild West settings in a new series for young adults known as Sunfire Historical Romances (see Litton). The myths and stereotypes about the West die hard.

There is another West recorded in journals and letters, in government documents, and in the histories based on such sources. Many of these histories, although written for a general audience, can be of interest to young people. In addition, a substantial body of fictional and factual accounts about the West has been written expressly for juveniles. The essays in this special section on the Golden West cover the ways in which the mythology of the West has been incorporated into children's literature and the ways in which that mythology connects (or misconnects) with the actual history of the western frontier.

In the first essay, Beyond the Divide: Lasky's Feminist Revision of the Westward Journey, Sibel Erol frames the topic by exploring the metaphoric values of East-West journeys in American fiction. She analyzes the differences between a male linear narrative that parallels the journey west with the protagonist's positive growth and a female cyclical narrative that requires a partial return to the East for self-realization. Examining books by Marilyn Cram Donahue, Sid Fleischman, and Kathryn Lasky, Erol finds in both models of narrative a chronotopic use of space—the westward or eastward movement coinciding with changes in characters' attitudes.

The gendered symbolism of lines and circles is also important to Louise Mowder's investigation of the male-female/wild-domestic oppositions in Laura Ingalls Wilder's works. Mowder finds a pattern of alternation between the linear movement west and the circular expansion of the settlers around their homesteads. When submitting her paper, "Domestication of Desire: Gender, Language and Landscape in the Little House Books," Mowder wrote that she was intrigued "by the fact that while Laura Ingalls Wilder's works are obviously part of the 'Go West' theme in children's literature—they are certainly not the stories of the Young man.'" The result of her interest is a thoughtful analysis of the "silencing" of Laura's and the land's wildness, and the partial literary silencing of Wilder's feminine view of the wilderness, by confining that view to children's books.

Mowder also touches on the confrontation of settler and Native American, arguing that in Wilder's books, feminine domesticity, representing civilization, succeeds in containing the male/ Native-American wilderness, somewhat to the regret of both Laura the character and Laura the author. This theme in Wilder falls between two major traditions in American frontier fiction: that of Fenimore Cooper's lonely hunter and Owen Wister"s gentle rescuer. Or, as Fiedler describes it, once the myth of the Indian and White man as "Good...