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She Won the West: An Anthology of Western and Frontier Stories by Women ed. by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini (review)
- Western American Literature
- The Western Literature Association
- Volume 21, Number 3, Fall 1986
- pp. 241-242
- 10.1353/wal.1986.0054
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Reviews 241 hurt”) is darkly, sexually dangerous; yet, Uncle Zen, a consumptive, alcoholic rake, is allowed to make a sex object of his niece Ginerva from the time he meets her when she is four until her sixteenth birthday, when an older woman in love with Zen contrives a successful stunt to make him realize what a fool he has been. At one point Ginerva’sfather gets a glimmer of what isgoing on, and takes Zen out to the back yard for a thrashing. Zen declines to defend himself, Birdeen (Ginerva’smother, Zen’ssister) gets angry with her husband, and Zen, expiated, resumes taking hisbarely pubescent niece for longdrives up Santa Ana Canyon where they neck to the sound of the river. This is a disturbing book. West heightens its strangeness by avoiding judgement of the wisdom of the family’s acceptance of Zen’s fixation while relating in detail the ordinary, dumb little events of every girl’sunfolding life, seeking to forgive, at all costs, a grown man’sawful need to be free of a terrible loneliness, the “state of stony lonesome” ofthe title. Conveniently, if unbeliev ably, Ginerva takes it all in stride. PATTY HENETZ Ophir, Colorado She Won the West: An Anthology of Western and Frontier Stories by Women. Edited by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini. (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1985. 372 pages, $17.95.) What would you expect from women writing about the region that gave us Crazy Horse and John Wayne? Local color with domestic detail—maybe a story of a spirited Scotch/Spanish girl’s love for a man with Indian blood? (Gertrude Atherton’s “The Conquest of Dona Jacoba.”) Or of a plucky pioneer who watches her husband hang and finds a better man? (Jeanne Williams’s “The Debt.”) Certainly you expect stories of love, women’s suffer ing, and the subtle ways they kept human values into the fight for survival. But, by golly, you’re also going to find stories of cowboy life and the easy-going prankishness of male fellowship, of the respect between an honorable scout and a gifted Indian horse thief, of the quiet greatness of Chinese and black westerners, of the determination of the Civil War veteran to die to bring an end to killing. There’s earthiness and grace, violence and romance in these four teen short stories, ranging from the 1890s to 1982, from the era of los ranchos grande to automobiles, from the major American literary figures of Cather and Sandoz to western writers like Elsa Barker and B. M. Bower. Among the group are several winners of the Golden Spur Award for best short stories. The longest, and most famous, of the selections is Dorothy M. Johnson’s “The Hanging Tree,” which, like “A Man Called Horse” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” was made into a film. Muller and Pronzini let the writers speak for themselves, with a three page introduction and a half page preface to each story to establish the setting, period, and theme, and survey other works of the author. Like the fabled 242 Western American Literature laconic westerner, they make a few words count, offering a wealth of sugges tions for further reading. Mary Austin’s poetically moving “The Walking Woman,” Ann Ahlswede’s realistic and yet hopeful “The Promise of the Fruit,” and Muller’s wry “Sweet Cactus Wine” are worth the book’s price. Certainly this is an excellent overview of women’s fictional views of the fron tier experience. MARY S. WEINKAUF Dakota Wesleyan University The Roll Away Saloon: Cowboy Tales of the Arizona Strip. By Rowland W. Rider, as told to Deidre Murray Paulsen. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1985. 114 pages, $9.95 paper.) Western historians who accept Walter Prescott Webb’s ideas on the importance of the end of the open range in the 1880’s recognize that there were open areas in the West much later than that. Rider’sbook is evidence of this fact, thus fitting in with other books such as Dane Coolidge’s Texas Cow boys (1937), Arizona Cowboys (1938), and Old California Cowboys (1939). Rider’s range was the Arizona Strip, which lies along...