Reading The Virginian in the New West ed. by Melody Graulich, Stephen Tatum (review)

2 1 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 5 Reading The Virginian in the New West. Edited by Melody Graulich and Stephen Tatum. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. 300 pages, $39.95. Reviewed by Christine Bold University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada What has Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) to say to the twenty-first century? A great deal, on the evidence of this sprightly, intensely informed, and thought-provoking collection. Like Ahab’s doubloon, Wister’s novel provokes myriad interpretations, motivated by preoccupations with genocide, racism, gender performance, sexuality, class, national citizenship, and diasporic identi­ ties—in Wister’s time and ours. The volume makes a major contribution to western American studies, not just for what it says about one novel but for how it thinks about relationships among popular writing, cultural power, and critical debate. Melody Graulich’s reference to “our cultural conversations” nicely charac­ terizes this volume’s method (xiii). Contributors are in conversation with each other, with Wister’s writing, and with larger theoretical and political conditions, a dialogue facilitated by the editors’ running commentary. The conversational mode carries theoretical and ethical value. As Stephen Tatum says, these essays move beyond earlier critical obsession with the “divide between romance and realism or between authenticity and inauthenticity” (266). Their dialogic thinking moves beyond binary oppositions altogether, escaping the influ­ ence of Turner’s frontier thesis with its antithesis-to-synthesis structure. Here we encounter broader, richer, more diverse paradigms. Graulich’s “what if?” scenarios encourage readers creatively to resist conventional wisdom about authorship, gender, and power. Victoria Lamont argues that the popular frontier enfranchised multiple voices, across gender and class. Susan Kollin interrogates dichotomies purporting to distinguish Old from New West. Zeese Papanikolas and Neil Campbell restore hemispheric and diasporic contexts, exposing the brute power of Anglo-Saxonism mystified by Wister. Together the essays constitute what Tatum calls a “force field” of interpreta­ tions, offered not in the spirit of “either-or” but “both-and” (36). The Virginian’s cultural matrix both excludes Native Americans from privileged white mobility (in Louis Owens’s reading) and appropriates them for “indigenous” white hero­ ism (in Jennifer Tuttle’s). The railway functions as both an allegory of labor oppression (in Gary Scharnhorst’s reading) and a figure of repressed cultural hybridity (in Campbell’s). Wister’s rhetorical ruses both encourage women readers to accept subordination (in William Handley’s reading) and enable them to take back the text for feminism (in Graulich’s). Comparativist readings enrich each other—Papanikolas setting the novel against José Hernandez’s epic poetry, Lamont against Frances McElrath’s The Rustier, Kollin against Debra Donahue’s The Western Range Revisited. b o o k R e v ie w s 2 1 5 The conversation arcs from carefully nuanced textual details to large cul­ tural questions. Close readings—Handley on narrative point of view, Campbell on tropes offixity, Tatum on Arthur Keller’s illustrations—undergird broad ideo­ logical inquiry. Lamont asks how the field of cultural production is constituted. Owens asks how “establishment America" exploits the West as a “capitalist resource” (85). Tuttle, echoing Donna Haraway, asks howpopular writing enacts “the taxidermic gesture of conquest” (105). These essayists consistently forbid the novel to be innocent of history, bringing personal, publishing, legal, labor, and Native histories to bear. Richard Hutson explores the ideological legacies in the novel’s “prolonged afterlife” as stageplay and film (127). Kollin reflects on problems of “land use, tenure rights, and race relations” bequeathed to the New West (237). Choctaw/Cherokee/ Irish critic Louis Owens calls, stirringly, for ethical inquiry: “Who defines the West and its constituent element? Whose novel is the West, and who gets to tell the story?” (74). This volume probes those crucial questions with astute skepticism about how meaning is made and with exemplary intellectual and cultural reach. Whose Nam es Are Unknown. By Sanora Babb. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. 222 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Douglas Wixson, Professor Emeritus University of Missouri, Rolla The tale of Sanora Babb...