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CHAPTER FOUR Home on the Range: Montana Romances and Geographies of Hope NANCY COOK Go to any gathering of scholars in western American studies and watch what happens when someone begins a quotation that goes like this:“In the American West we are struggling to revise our dominant mythology, and to find a new story to inhabit.Laws control our lives,and they are designed to preserve a model of society based on values learned from mythology. Only after re-imagining our myths can we coherently remodel our laws, and hope to keep our society in a realistic relationship to what is actual”(Kittredge Owning It All 64). By the time the presenter gets to the word “struggling,” lips move in unison, and the audience looks more like a Sunday school class reciting a familiar Bible quotation than a room full of academics. William Kittredge’s words have become the mantra for “new Western” literary critics the world over and deservedly so. Many publishers have embraced this narrative “call to arms,” and we now have dozens of revisionist studies of western American literature, as well as a distinguished crop of memoirs, short story collections, and novels, all positing “a new story to inhabit,” or, at the very least, further critiques of the same old western story. Myth busters such as Mary Clearman Blew and Judy Blunt have insisted, quite eloquently, that we attend to the costs the old mythology has extracted from the women of the region. The books I discuss in this essay are, in many ways, unlikely companions to the work of such writers as Blew and Blunt, but they perform important cultural work for looking at the codes of the West from a gendered perspective. Running along a parallel track, and seemingly unaware of either the new Western criticism or the revisionist memoirs and fiction in the marketplace, the popular culture industries keep churning out countless iterations of what looks a lot like the Old West mythology,and nowhere is this more evident than in the formula romance novel. Novels of frontier couplings, romantic captiv- 56 Women Writing Montana ity, and romantic renewal in both the old and the new West abound. My essay focuses on a group of these novels that takes Montana, past and present, as their setting. My interest in romance novels comes out of a larger interest in the relationship between genre and place, and so I resist many of the leading theories of romance that dismiss place as mere setting—absolutely interchangeable stages for the ritualized mating dance of the romance novel.1 Romance publishers seem conflicted in their emphasis on a novel’s setting. On one hand,setting seems important enough for marketing teams to promote series set in particular regions (“Made in Montana,”“Big Sky Brides,”“Montana Mavericks,” and “Code of the West,” for example). In 1994, with the first appearance of Montana Mavericks, Silhouette sponsored a contest to promote the series,with the winner receiving a weekend getaway at Big Mountain Resort in Whitefish, Montana.“Fallen in love with Montana’s Big Sky Country?”the insert asks.“montana mavericks has the answer to cure your yearning heart.” By entering this contest,readers make the connection between the Montana of the romance series and Montana, the tourist destination. On the other hand, promotional materials, mailers, and blurbs rarely indicate where a novel is set. Harlequin’s mailers and its website continue to list titles by subgenre, not by place-based series name. For example, the Harlequin mailer for April through June 1999 offers several titles set in the West, but they are not listed as such. Readers might recognize the names of authors who write western romances, but most of these authors set novels elsewhere as well. The titles and cover illustrations offer some idea of theme (How to Catch a Cowboy is one such title), but the principle of organization is the subgenre: “Harlequin Temptation,” “Silhouette Desire,”“Harlequin American Romance,”for example. Given this conflicted marketing, how are we to evaluate whether or not place matters in these books? Some places prove more popular as settings than others, and the ranching and cowboy West seem to have enduring popularity, judging from the consistency with which new titles with such characters appear every month. Silhouette chose to revive its Montana Mavericks series,and between 2000 and 2002 titles in the series regularly made the weekly“Top Ten”lists compiled by chain bookseller Waldenbooks/Brentanos.2 Some authors...

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