Tamings and Ordeals: Depictions of Female and Male Coming of Age in the West in Turn-of-the-Century Youth's Companion Serials

Coming of age: In literature it is characterized by a rite of passage that transforms boys into men, girls into women, often in highly stereotyped gender-specific ways. Although coming of age is a prevalent theme in much children's literature, it is a particularly powerful motif in the literature set in the American West. Because the West has traditionally been depicted as a place of hardship and danger, it has almost always served as a place of learning and change as well--key elements in portraying a young person's transition into the world of adults. As Kathleen Chamberlain observes, "The West is a moral landscape in which adolescents face and overcome both physical and ideological challenges" (9), and as a result, "the settlement of the West is not just the history of financial and technological growth. The stories also emphasize human growth, both personal and communal" (12).

That sense of growth is at the heart of this study, particularly as it is portrayed in two stories published for children at the turn of the century: "The Captain's Daughter" by Gwendolen Overton (1903) and "Miles City and Return" by Willis Gibson (1905). The stories were selected as representative of the type of serialized "Western" fiction published in a weekly family magazine, The Youth's Companion--the longest-lived and most widely circulated periodical published in America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1827-1929). "The Captain's Daughter" was written by a woman and contains a female protagonist; "Miles City and Return" was written by a man and contains male protagonists. Both stories express a central "coming of age" theme--a rite of passage that moves the protagonist from the world of childhood into the world of adults, with all its attendant rights, regulations, and responsibilities.

As representations of the type of serialized "Western" fiction published in The Youth's Companion, the two stories exemplify the ways that coming of age was depicted (and sometimes undermined) in a highly influential periodical that explicitly sought to shape the character of its young readers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Children's Literature as a Means of Socialization

Examining the messages contained in children's literature frequently constitutes a "first step" in understanding the ideologies of a particular time and place. Children's stories have almost always exhibited a prescriptive quality--they present to children the values approved by adult society, and they (overtly or covertly) attempt to explain, justify, and even impose on their audience what could be considered "correct" patterns of behavior and belief. Because they function in an educational capacity, children's stories perpetuate the values a society wishes to pass on about itself to future generations; as a result, they often contain within them the deepest currents of a society's life--its hopes and fears, expectations and demands.

As a form of popular literature, children's literature reveals much about the culture in which it is produced. While "serious" literature is likely to reflect a single author's personal perspective, popular children's literature appeals to its readership because it works within widely accepted cultural standards.

In addition, popular children's literature is often characterized by highly stylized writing, by formula, and by stereotype--characteristics that are especially prevalent in children's literature of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although it is tempting to criticize this literature for its use of stereotype and oversimplification, these stereotypical representations and formulaic structures may be especially useful in examining the widely held social beliefs and values of a particular time and a particular place. As Jane Tompkins writes about the popular American literature she examines in Sensational Designs, "I believe that [these texts] were written not so that they could...