The Action-Adventure Heroine: Rediscovering an American Literary Character, 1697–1895 by Sandra Wilson Smith (review)

Sandra Wilson Smith's The Action-Adventure Heroine: Rediscovering an American Literary Character, 1697–1895 presents an important new literary-historical study of a highly popular yet often critically neglected female character type. The action-adventure heroine, Smith argues, "tramps alone through forests, demonstrates physical strengths, braves dangers" (1) and engages in a host of other gender nonconforming activities. This figure has appeared in literary texts since the colonial era and has long been associated with "liminal environments, such as the battlefield and frontier, that allow for the blurring of gender codes" (1). The mythology associated with the American frontier, as well as the violent conflicts and material realities of westward expansion, have contributed to the development of this adventurous female heroine (237).

In her introduction, Smith notes that her research builds upon the recent work of other scholars who have challenged the "once-dominant separate spheres paradigm" (1). She acknowledges the ways in which her study is shaped and informed by the foundational research of feminist literary scholars such as Jane Tompkins and Nina Baym, both of whom examined the role of women in the nineteenth-century sentimental-domestic novel (3–4). Scholarship in the field of early American masculinity studies, such as Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler's Sentimental Men (1999), has helped us to understand betterhow men participated in the "nineteenth-century rhetoric of sentiment" (4). In establishing a theoretical framework for her literary-historical analysis, Smith draws heavily upon Female Masculinity, Jack Halberstam's now-classic work in queer-theoretical and gender studies. The Action-Adventure Heroine also builds upon and extends scholarship on the tomboy figure in children's literature, such as Michelle Ann Abate's Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History. Because the tomboy and action-adventure heroine are closely connected and often overlapping figures, Smith and Abate examine several of the same authors. Smith's work, however, focuses more exclusively upon the role of gender non-conformity in adult characters.

The Action-Adventure Heroine is divided into eight chronological chapters that cover literary and historical texts from the early American colonial period to the late nineteenth century. Smith's chapters offer new insights into some texts that have already been the subject of considerable critical attention, such as those of Mary Rowlandson and Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Smith's first chapter focuses on what she terms the "violent captivity narrative heroine" (49), a figure that appears in the written accounts of Rowlandson, Hannah Dustan, and others. Chapter 2 focuses on war narratives published between the years of 1790 and 1880, such as The Female Marine, and their representations of female soldiers and sailors. Chapter 3 considers the role of the "wandering female heroine," to use Smith's terminology, in the anti-seduction narratives of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The sentimental-domestic fiction of two iconic nineteenth-century novelists, Sedgwick and E. D. E. N. Southworth, serve as the focus of chapters 4 and 6, respectively. Smith points to the ways in which the heroines of Sedgwick's novels retain their femininity even as they perform acts of courage. Although Southworth's attitudes toward gender were "conflicted," Smith argues, her cross-dressing female characters, such as Cap Black, set the stage for the action-adventure heroines in the dime novel tradition that follows (178–79).

Chapters 5, 7, and 8 explore several highly popular texts, such as dime novels and frontier narratives. Smith calls attention to the troubling and often contradictory racial politics of the female heroine of the American West. This figure was cast as a "civilizer" of the "disorderly frontier" but also served as a "moral check" to white men who were "behaving badly" (138). Chapters 7 and 8 explore representations of female heroines in the respective dime novels of Edward L. Wheeler and Albert W. Aiken. Wheeler's dime novels highlight the importance of "individual acts of heroism," Smith notes, in a setting where justice...