Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West by Monica Rico (review)

Monica Rico is an associate professor of history at Lawrence University who focuses on gender and environment in the American West. Following in the steps of Robert Athearn, Ray Allen Billington, and Robert Earl Pomeroy, she brings a linguistic orientation to Western American historical study.

Rico argues that the upper-class English who came to America, briefly or permanently, adopted Western American clothing and activities, particularly hunting, as an attempt to preserve their sense of identity as the landed gentry lost power and status in Great Britain. Furthermore, they formed a transatlantic, racially defined network of like-minded, self-consciously virile American men, with all “performing” masculinity, a process of creating a masculine identity that by definition excluded women and non-Caucasian men. Rico structures the book through gender theorist Judith Butlers argument that gender construction is a continually active process and sociologist Robert/Raewyn Connell’s concept of “hegemonic masculinity.” Connell argued that hegemonic masculinity was an active practice in which a minority of men capable of enforcing their conceptions of masculinity reinforced the dominant conceptions of masculinity in order to maintain a social/political/ economic order in which elite Caucasian men dominated all others.

Connell focused on actions and their consequences through short, wide-ranging biographies. Rico’s study examines the ways the language used by three well-known British men in America (William Drummond Steward, Moreton Frewen, and Windham Wyndham-Quin, Earl of Dunraven) and two Americans (William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and Theodore Roosevelt) constructed gender realities. She posits that these men were part of an international network of powerful elites seeking to define manhood through hunting rituals and exposure to the Western landscape, climate, and peoples in an effort to avoid the corrupting effects of industrial, urban modernity.

The subjects, with the exception of Wyndham-Quin, all spent time in the Great Plains, although the chapter on Cody focused on his work in London and that of Roosevelt on his African hunt of 1909-10. Readers will wonder why this relatively small sample of elites was chosen, outside of the literary evidence—fictional or no-fictional memoirs— they produced, given the decision not to relate their definitions of masculinity to their ability to effect change on ordinary men and women. Evidence of their interactions with nonelite males, women (outside of English travel writer Elizabeth Bird), and people of color would have strengthened the work Overall, Nature’s Noblemen succeeds most in its illumination of the (almost painfully conscious) efforts by British and American elites to define masculinity, their sense of a single, shared Anglo-Saxon empire, and evidence of a growing frustration at the constraints on their power and consequent need to seek escape.