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212Rocky Mountain Review no resistant medium against which it can define itself. It declines into a mere spiritual self-stylization, the somber foppishness embraced by fauxrebels like, say, Michel Foucault (whom, blessedly, Watt does not mention once). This is not a manifesto for a new authoritarianism, but simply an observation of fact—of important fact. Watt has crowned his career with a work of scholarship, literary brilliance, and moral urgency. It is, itself, individualistic and nobly humanist. It is what, after all, criticism is supposed to be. FRANK MCCONNELL University of California, Santa Barbara. NORRIS YATES. Gender and Genre: An Introduction to Women Writers of Formula Westerns, 1900-1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. 181 p. öeveral years ago a reviewer responded to one of my essays on western women writers by suggesting that I should include some comments on the work of B.M. Bower. I had heard of Bower, but I hadn't read her; my university library didn't have any copies of her books; none were in print; the few references to her work I found said nothing helpful or colorful. I needed Norris Yates, and I'm grateful to have him. Yates' Gender and Genre: An Introduction to Women Writers of Formula Western, 1900-1950 is a lively and entertaining book which succeeds admirably in introducing readers to a number of largely unread writers while presenting a sophisticated reading of their works, sensibly informed by feminist theory by writers like Elaine Showalter and Jane Tompkins. Yates builds primarily on the work of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who identify "muted" subtexts in women's writing which challenge dominant ideologies through a "double-voiced discourse," a term Yates applies successfully to show how his authors simultaneously accept certain conventions, such as the inevitable happy marriage, and yet refuse to be limited by them. While a writer like Caroline Lockhart might feel obliged to punish her rebellious women villains, she nevertheless "encodes dissent" by allowing them considerable success in the "male-dominated world." One such strong-willed villain is Dr. Emma Harp from The Lady Doc (1912), whom Yates identifies as "the first unambiguous delineation of a lesbian in hardcover American fiction " (46) and "probably the first [doctor] to perform an abortion" (137). From Frances Cogan, Yates borrows the "Ideal of Real Womanhood" as a counter ideal to the more familiar "true womanhood" to describe his authors ' heroines who were physically fit and well educated, could earn their own livings, and "showed clearheadedness and rationality rather than romantic infatuation, . . . had the right to independently choose a marriage partner, and after marriage, to enjoy his companionship rather than endure his domination" (2). Yates coins the term "domestic western," but his subjects —authors and characters—are hardly the browbeaten brides dragged Book Reviews213 west who sometimes became stereotypes in early academic western women's history. Predictably, characters like Vingie E. Roe's Rose Ivory, "a dance-hall queen who on occasion works as a federal deputy," are much more like the heroines of popular western history (69). Yet Yates makes very clear that they are not merely Annie Oakleys, outshooting the men, by attending to the overlaps between western mythic themes and women's domestic novels. Bower, for instance, he concludes, "implies that duality of gender invests a person with more social versatility than does singularity of gender and that gender, again, is a social construct, not an innate quality" (34). He also finds "relatively less violence, in particular less gunplay" in works by women (5). Besides Lockhart, Bower, and Roe, Yates devotes chapters to Honore Willsie Morrow and Katherine Newlin Burr, as well as one to several other writers. He effectively sets up paradigms for understanding recurring strategies in the works of his varied authors without forcing any one of them into a single pattern, emphasizing, for instance, Bowers's revision of western formulas by her creation of a nonbiological "Happy Family" at the "Flying U," Lockhart's humor and satire, Morrow's historical interests. While he says that he has resisted the "reductionist temptation—in this case, to reduce the varied motivations of a number of characters to a single yin-yang polarity—" he acknowledges...

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