'No True Woman' : Conflicted Female Subjectivities in Women's Popular 19th Century Western Adventure Tales
Seattle, Washington
University of Washington
1995
Ph.D. diss.
"This dissertation examines women's popular representations of western settlement written during the greatest surge of westering (1840s to 1880s). It explores how this subgenre revises our understanding of popular nineteenth-century images of both women and the frontier. Rewriting the male frontier romance, women focus on women actors in sensational accounts of female adventures and heroism. Blending domestic novel, adventure story, and sensational fiction, these hybridized texts portray the West as both a real geographical/historical place and as an imaginative site for working out gender conflicts. These popular western adventure tales complicate and/or contribute to feminist and western literary history, the history of gender construction, popular culture criticism, and New Western History. Through their co-optation of adventure for women, they express their critique of dominant nineteenth-century ideas of womanhood. The extreme conditions of western settlement afford opportunities for, and often impel, disruptive female behavior that repudiates the subjectivity and social roles prescribed for women by the Cult of True Woman-hood and domestic ideology. In their narrative disempowerment of true women characters (who suffer and die), these stories interrogate true womanhood's values. In their compelling depictions of defiant, rebellious women as female heroes, these texts protest the dominant power transaction of gender relations that ascribed spiritual and moral superiority to women at the expense of self-realization and social and economic power. The Indian novels of Ann Stephens (1830s to 1860s) exploring female submission and rebellion (chapter one), women's anti-Mormon fiction of the 1850s fusing dark reform literature with dystopian adventures on the Mormon frontier (chapter two), the 1860s dime novels of Frances Fuller Victor and Metta Fuller Victor featuring conflicts over western land (chapter three), and the far western stories of Frances Fuller Victor (1870s) refiguring female heroism as a synthesis of true and rebellious women (chapter four) all exhibit a double dynamic: negation (evacuating the ideal of true womanhood) and reconstruction/production (imagining women's daring appropriation of personal, sexual, social, and economic power). Women's border tales reveal the dominant nineteenth-century construction of female subjectivity as fragmented and envision an alternative womanhood, an integrated female subjectivity." [Author's abstract]