Cartographies and Choreographies: Traversing Gendered Frontiers

The American frontier has been persistently imagined as the central ground upon which the U.S. forged a unique national character. Even after the western continental frontier was declared “closed” by a census in 1890, the imaginative geography of this landscape continues to be a formative cultural geography into the 21st century. The traditional frontier narrative is predominantly populated by white male bodies surviving and taming a wilderness landscape. However, at the opening of the 20th century, both Zane Grey and Willa Cather chose to place heroines at the foreground of their popular frontier novels Riders of the Purple Sage and O Pioneers! In my paper I map the anxieties that erupt in the bodies and landscapes of Cather and Grey’s texts revealing the hierarchically gendered spacial logic embedded in the frontier narrative. In my comparative reading I suggest that Grey introduces a central female subject only to remap and stabilize the traditionally gendered terrain, whereas Cather uses a choreographic technique to transgress these boundaries.

This paper is taken from a larger project in which I argue that close attention to the markings, gestures, and movements of the multiple bodies and animate landscapes within our frontier literary tradition reveals the continued imperial hierarchies that perpetuate violence in our personal actions and political policies. In the 20th and 21st centuries we have seen our frontier discourses perpetually remapped beyond the “closed” territory of U.S. continental boundaries. Examination of these narratives provides a space for thinking about how the violent logic of the dominant frontier tradition is perpetuated and suggests a new relational alternative to our errand in the global wilderness.

Embodied Landscapes in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!

One of the most pervasive American imaginative geographies has been the frontier. In the 19th century, frontier narratives were predominantly characterized as the white male pioneer’s survival and taming of the wilderness. However, at the opening of the 20th century, Willa Cather reimagines this territorial space in her 1913 novel O Pioneers! by remembering women in the narrative of frontier history as active participants in the historic borderlands of America’s expansion. My paper examines how Cather’s text inherits a dominant discourse of gender and nation that limits and conditions the emergent female body of her central heroine Alexandra Bergson. However, I also attend to the anxieties, disruptions, and heterogeneity produced by the centralized inclusion of feminine embodiment in Cather’s text which I argue provides a space for differential narratives of self and nation to emerge.

The imaginative tradition that Cather’s frontier novel participates in typically situates its male hero as a rugged, self-reliant individual whose taming of a feminized wilderness creates an exceptional American self. In my paper I map the anxieties that erupt in the bodies and landscapes of Cather’s text which are produced by the emergence of a fully embodied feminine subject. These anxieties reveal the gendered spatial logic embedded in the traditional frontier narrative that privileges the male body as a naturalized site of unified identity, and marks the limits of participation by an active female body.

Although Cather’s heroine is limited by a hierarchically gendered geography that predetermines feminine presence as a passive site of submission, Cather’s representation of the frontier wilderness tries to reimagine a new relationality to the feminized landscape. Unlike the traditional frontier narratives, Cather’s Alexandra recognizes the intersubjectivity of her body and the land it inhabits. Cather’s representation of the land as resistant and wild — untamable by violence or imposition of a masculinized will — is threaded throughout the novel. This new relational ethic creates a potential space for exploring an alternative national geography that is not predicated on a gendered hierarchy of violence. In the 20th and 21st century we have seen the violent logic of our frontier discourses perpetually remapped beyond the “closed” territory of U.S. continental boundaries. Cather’s narrative provides a space for thinking about how this logic is perpetuated and suggests a new relational alternative to our errand in the global wilderness.

America Needs a New frontier?

Sexing the Frontier: The Emergent Female Body in Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage

Movement across the western territorial frontier has been intimately related to the formation of American national identity and one of the most pervasive tropes in U.S. literature. Since James Fenimore Cooper’s popular series of Leatherstocking novels, the American reader has been captivated by literary reimaginings of the engagement with the wilderness. Much critical attention has been given to the role of the frontier’s wilderness landscape and its representation in our various cultural texts. However, less attention has been given to the shaping of the textual bodies moving across and within this literary landscape. In my paper I look at one of the most popular western novels of the early 20th century — Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage– in order to examine how the reciprocal interplay between the bodies and landscape shape a particularly gendered movement and meaning in the narrative.

This paper is taken from a larger project in which I argue that by framing the American identity as exceptional in its wilderness experience, the American body becomes the naturalized site of a primitive corporeal Truth. As the national narrative becomes restaged as a progression of nature, it effectively dissolves responsibility and historical memory of the numerous bodies violently subsumed or destroyed in the wake of its progression. At the same time, close attention to the markings, gestures and choreography of the multiple bodies within our literary frontier tradition reveals the continued imperial hierarchies and exclusions that perpetuate violence and contradicts the nostalgic insistence of benignity.

In trying to convey her excitement as a young girl seeing Annie Oakley “live” (the actress who played Annie Oakley- lest you think my mother is much older than she is!!!!):

“Seeing Annie Oakley then was like young girls seeing Brittney Spears today!”

Now there’s a comparison you don’t hear every day.

Seriously though, I am looking forward to hearing more from my Mom about her perceptions of all the “Western” TV and film personalities from her youth and how she related to them as a girl. In a previous post I discussed how my childhood was not immersed in the  stories of the “frontier” in the same way that my husband’s childhood was. However,  I recently realized I was leaving out The Little House on the Prairie books (not to mention my fanatic devotion to the TV series). I remember taking out each of the books of the series from Sullivan Free library. I can even remember exactly where they were shelved, right next to the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series.

 In addition, I will probably expand the subect matter of the blog to include my teaching and more general day-to-day observations and events, however the primary subject matter will be  moving toward the end goal of my degree. Beginning again.

Fonzi Foucault

“The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the Outlaw, the great social nomad who prowls on the confines of a docile, frigtened order” ~ Michel Foucault
]]> http://rangingbodies.wordpress.com/2008/09/17/frontiers-of-foucault/feed/ 1 rangingbodies fonzi-foucault2 http://rangingbodies.wordpress.com/2008/09/13/maverick/ http://rangingbodies.wordpress.com/2008/09/13/maverick/#comments Sat, 13 Sep 2008 21:14:34 +0000 rangingbodies http://rangingbodies.wordpress.com/?p=13 ]]>  So, here we are again. I started this dissertation spurred on by the Texas Terror sweeping up the 2004 election and now I am watching in disbelief as Maverick McCain and his ultimate anti-intellectual frontier babe gallop ahead in the polls.

During dinner Thursday night my parents and Dan and I were discussing the Palin appeal. One of my questions has been why when Hillary came across as determined and angry and ‘strong’ she’s labelled a bitch but Palin has the same tone to her pronouncements (VERY different content however) and she is hoisted upon the shoulders of the Republican party? The conversation pointed to her image as an Alaskan frontier woman. Shockingly, despite my focus on this mythology over the past few years I hadn’t immediately made this connection. I understood the play on her appeal as a ‘hockey Mom’ ( and her awful quip about the difference between a bulldog and a hockey mom….), and her claims (and performances) of anti-intellectualism as a representation of her ‘connection to ‘real people’ (I won’t get into my rampage on her definition of what is and is not a “real’ person here). The anti-intellectual is of course is a primary characteristic of the frontier narrative, shoot first ask questions later , or never bother asking any questions at all. If she is the Alaskan frontier moose-huntin’ mother and she says- yeah go ahead and Drill baby, Drill- who is McCain to question her? It seems pointless to continue to go over all the insane claims and positions and rhetoric spilling out of Palin, wasn’t it ridiculous when McCain chose her? wasn’t everyone (his party included) in shock…and yet it’s serious, deadly serious. She may seem like a SNL wet dream, but wasn’t Bush too?…

And yet,  my latest surge of excitement over my dissertation has not been a renewed fury over how the frontier narrative reveals our country’s history of sexist, racist, violent behavior. To be honest, that aspect of its repetition from president to president, war to war exhausts me and , honestly, makes me wonder why I’m trying to spend so much time pointing out what seems obvious, and has been examined from so many sides already in American studies. Ironically it’s the potential for environmental consciousness and conservation that’s always been part of the narrative that seems to have potential for change. There is a counternarrative already built into this virulent mythology that could potentially act against the tide of the frontier ideology what Slotkin identifies as ’regeneration through violence’. Much attention has been given to how the land or American wilderness is often personified in frontier narratives. Annette Kolodny’s Lay of the Land is a classic criticism of how the language of the New World was gendered as a feminine body (virgin wilderness) which must be plowed and tamed, the violence inherent in the sexual imagery of the cultivation of the land. In formulaic western tales/movies the land often takes on or reflects the moods and actions of its protagonists, or its antagonists. The dark, mysterious ‘savage’ wild identified was directly connected to the ‘savage ‘indian (or in later metaphoric layering, the vietnam wilderness and the Vietcong acting as one antagonistic force). The racializing and gendering of the landscapes within which the actors acted in these narratives is often critically exposed in terms of its support of violence. However, couldn’t this personification of the land also provide a tradition in which the land as body acts as witness to and evidence of the scars and violence, as well as potentially suggesting a more ‘humane’ interaction with this entity that american texts have already both worshipped and feared. Couldn’t the centrality of the ‘wilderness’ to  American national narratives become one of regeneration through nuture,  recognizing its material as well as imaginitive necessity to our ‘well-being’. Of course there is along tradition of this sort of engagement with the wilderness and nature in our literary history from Thoreau and Emerson, Muir and a more contemporary example- Kingsolver. of course all of these writers can be criticized for their romanticization of the wilderness. Images of  America as a Pastoral Eden has its problems as well that should not be overlooked. But, the potential for re-using (recycling? but with a whole new, healthy, sustainable spin?) what seems to be a powerful narrative in our society to rethink our relationship to the world (both the material elements of land/water/air as well as the variety of bodies living in it) seems possible to me. To wrench the frontier mythology from our culture , its appeal and production of how we identify our values, is impossible. What are the dangers of writing counternarratives from within the tradition (obviously the narrative itself is always already full of countercurrents, in which case how can we re-interpret, re-read it’against the grain’)?

 Next post: role of body-mind, word-action dichotomies present in frontier narrative, what disrupts these binaries, and what they have to do with representation/production of wilderness/nature

Another “text” that plays into all of this that I recently viewed: WALL*E. An amazing (I think beautiful) film that deserves time and attention. BUT, that analysis will have to wait. I need to type up “real” notes on Cather/Grey and the New Woman.

A note: My son does not have a deficit…today he ”talked” with geese and ducks, showed off his sand bucket to a tree (apparently the tree was impressed), walked on the beach, dug in sand, chased sea gulls, dipped his feet in water, and played with pebbles.