The Color of Democracy in Women's Regional Writing

5. How the West Was Whitened

5 How the West Was Whitened I.THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMALE FRONTIER HISTORY In the final sentence of O Pioneers! Willa Cather calls the Nebraskan prairie a “fortunate country”that, receiving the hearts of the great pioneers “into its bosom,”will give those hearts “out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth.”1 Linking the land to “the people who own” it, “who love it and understand it,” this exchange memorializes transient pioneers who transform the blank landscape into “fortunate” country (272–73). In portraying such a symbiosis, Cather engages here, as she does elsewhere, in what Dorothee Kocks calls a “geographical embrace,” a belief that the “soil has its own agenda to which human beings submit.”2 And it is the soil’s agenda that a woman, Alexandra Bergson, rather than a man become one of the great pioneers who, having owned and loved it, will be received unto the land and made one with it. In looking to the environment to reenvision frontier history—Alexandra is a superior pioneer—Cather’s “geographical embrace”articulates a feminist version of the Jeffersonian yeoman , confirming a set of values that are seemingly written quite plainly on the landscape itself. Those values, of course, serve as a corrective to others associated with the West: rather than gun-toting cowpunchers riding past an endless series of mesas,or even an empty prairie that made it “possible for the largely male,wage-earning work force to improve its circumstances and condition in life,” Cather imagines a landscape made fruitful largely by the efforts of women, many of whom are immigrants from Europe considered by others to be too foreign to qualify as Americans.3 Notwithstanding the Hollywood-generated images of the region,Cather was not alone in stressing the importance of women to westward expansion. 132 Chapter 5 Because communities were understood to be aggregates of home and family, women were considered to be fundamental to the establishment of lasting cultural and social networks in a newly settled region. William Fowler’s 1880 Woman on the Frontier called women to the West as wives of pioneers , agents of civilization, and even “founders of the republic,” an idea echoed decades later by the eugenicists, who warned of the effects of foreign colonization without female settlement.4 Since women were ostensible representatives—if not arbiters—of civilization, the eugenicists claimed, their absence in a new territory would impede long-term conquest or, worse, lead to racial amalgamation (as supposedly was the case in South America).Even the most stereotypically masculine narratives of the region tap into the belief that women create permanent communities; in Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), an early Western that helped to establish the conventions of the genre, the transition of the title character from a wandering cowboy to the “bridegroom husband” of Molly Stark Wood, a teacher from the East, seems inevitable,a process to be welcomed even as it creates nostalgia for lost freedoms.5 As Jane Tompkins argues in West of Everything, “what makes The Virginian so interesting from the standpoint of the history of the Western is that it states so openly the counterargument to its own point of view,” ending with its manly hero transfigured,Wister writes, into an “important man, with a strong grip on many various enterprises, and able to give his wife all and more than she asked or desired.”6 The vision of a male-centered West, so pervasive in The Virginian and in the popular American imagination, tells only part of the story,representing just one step in the evolution from a supposedly empty landscape to a thriving regional community. Indeed, while recent work on the region has striven to paint a fuller picture of its gendered history, there are many indications—including the works of Willa Cather—that we have overemphasized the extent to which the West was, early in the last century, associated with men. If it is true, as Tompkins and others argue,that the region popularized by Wister and Turner was associated with masculine freedoms because of the early scarcity of white women, it is also true that, not much later, those women enjoyed their own sorts of freedom there.For instance,the mobility of the “new”region brought by railroad travel “broadened the geographical scope” of women’s social and economic options. So did the fact that in the first decades of the twentieth century...