Westerns: A Women’s History by Victoria Lamont (review)

In Westerns: A Women’s History, Victoria Lamont has skillfully dealt with a perplexing problem: how to write a book about texts that are for the most part unfamiliar to her readers. Only four of the more than ten novels she analyzes—Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, Frances McElrath’s The Rustler, and B. M. Bower’s Chip, of the Flying U and Lonesome Land—are currently in print, all of them from University of Nebraska Press. Arguably, even these readily available novels are unfamiliar to most readers and have not yet been integrated into critical discussions and literary histories generally.

Lamont has organized her book chronologically into thematic chapters. She opens her analysis with “Western Violence and the Limits of Sentimental Power,” linking women’s Westerns to the sentimental tradition and the emergence of the woman suffrage movement by focusing primarily on Emma Ghent Curtis’s The Administratrix (1889). Her major contention in this chapter, as in others that follow, is that the “popular” Western “was founded as much by women writers as by men and played a significant role in American women’s literary history at the turn of the twentieth century” (1).

This initial chapter exemplifies Lamont’s dilemma: The Administratrix is a relatively unknown novel and unavailable in a contemporary edition. The chapter straddles, with grace and precision, the divide between overview (survey, description, and summary) and analysis. Lamont’s best solution to the task of working with unknown texts is to invoke a familiar theoretical formulation to carry the burden of her argument, as she does in one of the book’s strongest chapters, “Domestic Politics and Cattle Rustling” (formerly published as “The Bovine Object of Ideology”). This second chapter gains strength from the reader’s presumptive knowledge of Owen Wister’s classic The Virginian, to which Lamont compares Frances McElrath’s The Rustler, which she edited for publication in 2002. Both novels were published in 1902; their plots are strikingly similar; and, when taught together, they spark fascinating discussions in courses focused on gender, labor, and/or capitalist-fueled westward expansion. Lamont uses Slavoj Žižek’s concept of the “‘sublime object’ of ideology” to delineate the differing ideologies of these two novels (38), demonstrating that McElrath’s novel “interprets the Johnson County War as a class conflict rather than a moral one,” as does The Virginian, “and clears a space for female domestic authority on the frontier” (33). Her fifth chapter, “Cattle Branding and the Traffic in Women” employs a similar tactic. Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” provides the theoretical foundation for a comparative analysis that reads the feminist politics of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Emma Goldman against three Westerns: McElrath’s The Rustler, Katharine Newlin Burt’s The Branding Iron (1919), and B. M. Bower’s Lonesome Land (1912).

The balance of Westerns: A Women’s History follows a more conventional literary historical approach, each chapter exploring how these Westerns destabilize and revise standard heuristics for literary study. Chapter 3, “Women’s Westerns and the Myth of the Pseudonym,” examines the conditions under which women who wrote Westerns did so pseudonymously. For the most part, Lamont argues, rather than use masculine cover names to promote their work, these writers foregrounded their “authenticity” as those who worked, owned land, and identified as western by foregrounding their “insider knowledge of cowboy culture” (55). Chapter 4, “Why Mourning Dove Wrote a Western,” presents a superb analysis of Cogewea, placing this difficult novel within a context that includes the versions of the West produced in ethnographic narratives and popular “yellowback novels” (not to be confused with dime novels) of the late nineteenth century. Familiar with both forms and using their conventions to explore a third space of resistance, Mourning Dove “depicts Indigenous people in the context of modernity, their struggle against colonialism ongoing and contingent” (82). Here and in her concluding chapter Lamont draws our attention to Westerns other than the dime novels...