Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature (review)

Birthing A Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature. By Susan J. Rosowski. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. 242 pp. $50.

One of the foundational arguments of American literary studies, as it came to be constituted in the 1950s and 1960s, drew on the historical work of Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner argued in "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893) that the settlement of the West was integral to the creation of an autonomous American identity. He stressed the transformational encounter between self and wilderness; he emphasized the determining power of environment and located American individualism in a seedbed on the frontier. But, of course, this was a predominantly male world. While the "New Western" history has spent a quarter-century overturning and reconstituting the mythology of the frontier, literary scholars have also begun to open up, deconstruct, and reconstruct the story of the literature of the West.

Susan Rosowski's Birthing a Nation emerges from this context: a revived and revisionist regionalism, where the West is both fit for study as an important terrain in its own right and ready for reconfiguration. Behind Rosowski's study lie Annette Kolodny's path-breaking works The Lay of the Land (1975) and The Land Before Her (1984). Like Kolodny, Rosowski is interested in the female experience of the American West, and like Kolodny she is especially concerned with the metaphorical language used to describe landscape. Rosowski accepts that the West has been gendered in explicitly feminized terms; but whereas in the 1970s this insistent feminization was seen as a form of subliminal sexism, for Rosowski the associations between Western landscape and woman are a cause for inspiration and excitement. The novelty of Rosowski's argument is that she accepts much of the typecasting of the West, but sees it as a reservoir of productive imagery. Her argument turns the metaphorical association between land and woman inside-out. An earlier phase of feminist thought sought to critique the gendered construction of the West; Rosowski, conversely, accepts (at least in part) these associations: the soil of the West is feminized and becomes a fructive imaginative terrain for the woman writer. Quite literally so, since she finds a pattern of imagery in which the West becomes a place where the female self is born. Speaking of Marilynne Robinson, for example, Rosowski argues that "[l]ike Margaret Fuller and Willa Cather, Robinson places female creativity at the center of her myth of origins and makes birth her central metaphor" (187).

Rosowski focuses on Willa Cather, Jean Stafford, and Marilynne Robinson. An early chapter also enlists Margaret Fuller (Summer on the Lakes) as a founding mother of a Western female tradition. The particular originality of Birthing a Nation emerges from Rosowski's combining of these writers into a regionalist genealogy. Counterpoint and juxtaposition between these writers make for a procreative criticism. However, one can also imagine a much more capacious study that would encompass notable Westerners such as Louise Erdrich. It is also worth noting that Rosowski's sense of the West is somewhat selective since her topography encompasses the prairies, the Rocky Mountains, and the Southwest, but is not particularly urban. A Western genealogy must also, surely, encompass Joyce Carol Oates and the Midwestern cityscapes (notably Detroit) she explores in works such as The Rise of Life on Earth.

But it would be churlish to push this criticism too far. Rosowski's book provokes us to think of alternative voices in a conversation about Western writing. Indeed, she predicates her book as a dialogue and asks us to think of her writers as committed to "the potential range, flexibility, and rigor of the conversation" (197). At heart, this is an exchange about regionalism, and the recurring topic is the notion of literary "area studies." Birthing a Nation thus takes its place alongside other recent books; Patricia Yaeger's Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930...