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  • Picturing a Different West: Vision, Illustration, and the Tradition of Cather and Austin
  • Jeane Harris (bio)
Picturing a Different West: Vision, Illustration, and the Tradition of Cather and Austin, by Janis P. Stout. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007. 368 pp. $40.00.

Any new book by Janis P. Stout is a cause for celebration, particularly among those whose scholarly interests are focused on women writers. Over the past two decades, Stout's contribution to feminist scholarship has been nothing short of astonishing. In her latest effort, Picturing a Different West: Vision, Illustration, and the Tradition of Cather and Austin, Stout focuses on three separate but interrelated ideas outlined in the preface: Willa Cather and Mary Austin's experience with Western landscapes, their personal participation and investment in the choice of illustrations for their books, and their re-vision of the importance of gender in the art and literature of the American West. The conversation regarding gender, art, and the American landscape is important and has been carried on for decades. It is one that women artists and writers agree needs to continue. In her article, "Feminism, Women Writers and the New Western Regionalism: Revising Critical Paradigms," Krista Comer argues that "Western criticism is saddled with male-centered, white-centered and pre-contemporary aesthetic ideals which disable it on questions of gender and race."1 That Cather and Austin and other women who wrote about the West need to be included in this discussion is also an area of consensus among women writers and artists. Janis Stout's participation in the discourse is welcome indeed. Unfortunately, Picturing a Different West: Vision, Illustration, and the Tradition of Cather and Austin is overly speculative and equivocates rather [End Page 183] than illuminates. In trying to contribute something new and different to scholarship on Cather and Austin, the author overreaches and fails to add something new and insightful to the field.

The first indication that Stout's book is on shaky ground is in the preface where she characterizes her method as "often descriptive, often analytical, but primarily narrative. . . . Only rarely and tangentially is it theoretical" (p. xx). Stout's perception of her book is not necessarily alarming. However, a few sentences later, she states that while her purpose may be to write a "literary history," her method is "more impressionistic than academic literary criticism" (pp. xix-xx). Although it is clear that the word "impressionistic" refers to art, the word also applies to Stout's tentative diction, which undercuts her arguments. Indeed, the first five chapters, while proving her assertion that her book is "often descriptive" and "impressionistic," are somewhat disingenuous. In her attempt to prove a meaningful relationship between Cather and Austin's occasional interest in the illustrations in their books and their "highly visual prose," she speculates about events, relationships, and even meetings for which she clearly has no evidence (p. xviii).

The first of such speculations comes early in the book when Stout is laying out the central underpinnings of her arguments about Cather and Austin: "I am convinced that Cather was observing and responding to Austin's work more than Austin . . . was responding to Cather's" (p. xix). Although she offers no evidence to support her statement, Stout establishes a pattern that pervades the rest of her book. She seems aware that her approach to her subject is dubious when she laments in the preface that she has no "formal training in art history and techniques" (p. xx). She goes on to "beg the reader's indulgence as I share my interest in the physical presence of these books and the regional pictorial history that comprises so important a context for both their illustrations and the texts themselves" (p. xx).

Stout's scholarship is at its most tenuous when dealing with Cather. In trying to prove that Cather was aware of the drawings of Hallock Foot, Stout suggests, "Since we know that the Cathers read Century, it seems fairly likely that the fifteen-year-old Willa would have been aware of the series" (p. 29). Based on this statement, Stout concludes that "we can be certain that she would have found them striking in their feminized...

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