I’m reading Nina Baym’s new book Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927, just published by the University of Illinois Press, and having a rollicking, swaggering, yee-hawing good time.
Who knew?
Almost every one of the novels, narratives, poems, and stories Baym discusses is new to me, and I bet I’m not the only one who’ll find an excellent and generous guide in Baym. (I don’t travel in American literature circles all that often, but I suspect that even many who can go to the frontier without map will be in new territory.) She makes it worth the trip.
If you study American literature, you have to get the book; if you are interested in women’s writing, you must get the book; if you are intrigued by the period of history during which America’s “manifest destiny” became emblazoned across the map even as the country itself was torn apart by civil war, you should get the book; and if you want to hear about a whole big bunch of remarkable tales told by settlers—who happen to be women—as this country entered its adolescence, you will enjoy this book.
Reading Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927—Baym chose the dates because they mark the year of the first volume she could find written about the American West by a woman, and end with date of the publication of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, which she sees as “one of the very greats of the western books”—is like sitting across a long table with a friend who has just heard the most exciting news she’s come across in a long time.
The stories she regales us with are many and varied, taking us from Texas, where we learn about M.E.M. Davis’s novel The Wire Cutters about “the so-called fence cutting wars of 1883” to Southern California and Constance Goddard Du Bois’s novel A Soul in Bronze about mining, false claims, vineyards, and forbidden love.
It’s rather like a hearing about dozens of potential movie plots all in a row; in fact, if I were a scriptwriter looking for material, I would start right here. The possibilities seem endless.
The women writers Baym deals with were not so fortunate, however, as to have agents and publishers banging on their cabin doors (let alone filmmakers, and despite the fact that many of these might have done very well as films, it seems as if few film versions were made). In contrast, many of them, Baym explains, felt as if they were driven to tell their stories precisely because they had been otherwise overlooked. A line from Eliza Spalding Warren of Oregon, who published a memoir in 1916, when she was 79 years old, sums up the sentiment quite tidily: “Let me say right here I do not think that the pioneer women have ever had the praise and credit that is due to them for their part in making this great northwestern country what it is.”
Baym argues that, having found 343 women publishing books about the American West between the years she’s used to bookend her study, that “once again, where women were supposed to have been silent, they were not. What they were not supposed to have done, they did.”
Such are the lines that have made me an admirer of Baym’s since I discovered her when I was a graduate student at New Hall, Cambridge (a far cry from the West). In preparing for this post, I went back to my old notebooks from that time, filled to the margin with the cheap cartridge pens that always turned my fingers blue, to find what I’d copied from the first book of Baym’s I’d come across.
From Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870, published by Cornell UP in 1978, I had jotted down the following: “Once a woman takes herself seriously, she enters the real world (alteratively, once she is thrown into the real world, she must take herself seriously) and discovers how deplorably she has been fitted by education or upbringing to deal with it.”
I’d remembered the passage and where it was in the particular notebook, because I’d been so excited to discover a writer brave enough—a critic, a scholar, a woman brave enough—to put down in straightforward terms what I had yet to recognize clearly for myself before that moment. I’d written the line in caps and underscored it repeatedly. It bled through to the next page.
And it’s underwritten much of my own thinking and scholarship over the years.
To have another new Baym book to enjoy is more than a pleasure. It’s a moment of significance. As Baym says to the rest of the scholarly community, “Much more could be done with these books and writers—I’m opening up a subject, not saying the last word about it.”
I’d like to suggest that we use that as the very definition of a work of importance: It opens up a subject, rather than trying to close it off with the last word. The frontier of real research, Baym suggests, is just up ahead, and a little to the West.
