Playing House in the American West: Western Women’s Life Narratives, 1839-1987 by Cathryn Halverson (review)

Cathryn Halverson presents an expansive, vigorously argued analysis of depictions of domesticity in autobiographical texts by women associated with the United States West from the mid-nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. Drawing on Leigh Gilmore’s concept of “autobio-graphics,” Halverson does not limit herself to autobiographies narrowly defined (p. 139). Instead, she is interested in texts that “occupy a borderlands textual space, situated somewhere between traditional autobiography and fiction,” including life writing that uses the techniques of fiction and novels drawing on authors’ life experiences (p. 10).

Halverson offers her analyses of women’s autobiographical texts as a riposte to a historical and critical school of thought that sees the arrival of women and domesticity as the end of the frontier West. Instead, she argues that the women she studies take up the conceit of “playing house” (as opposed to housekeeping) as a way to portray their western homes as “platform[s] for female autonomy, resistance, and imagination rather than sacrifice and obligation” and to reconfigure the West not as “the space of masculine adventure or conquest but the liberating and challenging terrain in which new versions of female individuality and subjectivity can be crafted” (p. 4). She begins with A New Home, Who’ll Follow? (1839), germinal sketches of Michigan frontier life by Caroline Kirkland, a genteel white easterner, and The Shirley Letters (1851-52) by Louise Clappe, a similarly situated woman writing from a mid-nineteenth-century California gold camp, and she closes with novels from the 1980s by Marilynne Robinson and Mona Simpson. In between, Halverson considers writers who are diverse in terms of race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality and, as she wisely announces in her introduction, she “neither celebrates nor condemns” the ways in which these women claim the West, a moveable space associated with United States imperialism and Native dispossession (p. 13). Instead, she carefully works through the textual consequences of the intersectional identities of her subjects.

As a specialist in women novelists (both popular novelists of the nineteenth century and Willa Cather in the early twentieth century) and publishing history, I came to Halverson’s book largely as an outsider to the two specialist conversations with which she engages most directly, namely scholarship on autobiography and literature of the American West. I learned a great deal from her book and came away with new ideas about how to read domesticity in nineteenth-century women’s texts, along with a list of books I want to read and perhaps teach. Why have I never even heard of, let alone read, The Story of Mary MacLane, by Herself (1902), a surreal, confessional book about the adolescent, middle-class author’s boredom and frustrated lesbian desires in Butte, Montana?

Halverson is most persuasive and interesting in her analysis of outsiders like MacLane who entered the public sphere of print through autobiographical writing, whether letters, memoirs, or journals. Halverson’s first book, Maverick Autobiographers: Women Writers and the American West, 1900-1936 (2004), encompasses MacLane as well as two other women who reappear in Playing House in the American West: Juanita Harrison, an African American woman who used her wages from household service in California to travel the globe, and Opal Whiteley, a young white woman from rural Oregon who presented lecture-demonstrations on natural history and published a book that was ostensibly her childhood diary. Elinore Pruitt Stewart, author of Letters from a Woman Homesteader (1914), was, as Halverson astutely points out in comparing her to Harrison, similarly situated (a white southerner relocated to the West, her letters are to her former employer in domestic service), as was Zitkala Sa, a Lakota woman whose stories of her childhood, boarding school, and college experiences are now widely anthologized. Kirkland and Clappe, while more privileged than these outsiders, similarly entered the publicity of print through life writing. Halverson rounds out her selection with...