The Color of Democracy in Women's Regional Writing

6. New Women and the World of Business

6 New Women and the World of Business I. AMERICAN “PROGRESS” John Gast’s painting American Progress, reproduced widely in print form in the late nineteenth century, captures in microcosm many of the nation’s deeply held beliefs about Manifest Destiny. Telling the story of a frontier dividing line between two worlds—one of which must make way for the other—the image is divided in half: on the left side,Indians and animals (including the paradigmatic buffalo) scurry toward the margins of the frame, fleeing in fear of the advance of trappers,cowboys,and homesteaders as well as the railroad and telegraph wire that follow in their wake. Evocative of the biblical creation myth, American Progress uses light to divide the worlds of the West before and during the establishment of “civilization.”The shadowy landscape of the Native and the buffalo is dry and barren,while that of white settlement is fecund, irrigated, and filled with light, a “fortunate country,”to use once again Cather’s phrase from O Pioneers! Glorifying Indian conquest and the alteration of the natural environment in the name of “progress,”the print also pays tribute to the pastoral, that stage between the existence of a wild, uncultivated landscape and the over-cultivated, exhausted one. Interestingly ,the one extreme—that of an untouched landscape—that is visible in the print evokes the other extreme that is not, for the mountain peaks of the far West look something like the chimneys of factories,presumably the kind of eastern landscape the figures in the middle are attempting to leave behind. American Progress also lionizes the role of white women in the West,upholding the notion of them as civilizing agents that I discussed in the last chapter. The white female figure embodying America’s Manifest Destiny defines the dividing line of the frontier; it is she who, godlike, brings light to the West, New Women and the World of Business 157 and thus it is she whom the Natives most fear. Wearing what a précis of a print version tells us is a “Star of Empire,”she is “too much”for the Natives, one of whom throws up his arm to shield his eyes from the sight of her. An obvious metaphor for whites’construction of “civilization”and all that it entails (division and cultivation of land,literacy,technology),America’s brightness comes not only from her imperial start but more so from her clothing and, especially, her skin color. American Progress explicitly endorses the “legacy of conquest”about which Patricia Limerick and others have written and mythologizes white women ’s roles in such conquest, yet I want to argue that it is also possible to read this image ironically.1 As the ambivalence of an untouched landscape being evocative of a polluted one suggests, some observers worried that the supposedly “new” region was being cultivated with the seeds of its own demise .We saw in the last chapter that some critics of the region worried about the effects of its racial diversity and its supposed lack of class boundaries, while many of the leading proponents of the West thought that the moving line of the frontier had forged, for these very reasons, a white American race distinct from and superior to what Edward Ross called its various “European parent stocks” (Old World, 24).The logic linking geographical movement to racial development begs a question I want to take up now: what happens to this new “race” once the movement stops? Given Frederick Jackson Turner’s pivotal role in disseminating this logic, his frontier thesis, a lamentation of the “closing” of the frontier, can also be read for what it can tell us about the function the West was thought to assume in America’s racial and social makeup. According to Turner and the like-minded, movement to a raw frontier destroyed the fixed class hierarchies that ruled Europe and the East, ushering in a new, superior white American race and the world’s first democracy. Yet in its very novelty, the white race the frontier had supposedly spawned could be said to be in more danger of decline than its “parent stocks.” As Barbara Will points out, Turner worried that the closing of the frontier would hinder white racial evolution, that the racial development of which he spoke would stagnate once the settlement process was complete and the pastoral moment had run its course.2 Further, many Americans began to voice...