Unbridled Spirits: Short Fiction About Women in the Old West

Unbridled Spirits: Short Fiction about Women in the Old West, edited by Judy Alter and A. T. Row. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1994. xi + 365 pages. $17.95 paper.

I find the title of this collection, Unbridled Spirits, to be disturbing. Once again--and this time in a supposedly scholarly anthology--women are being discussed in terms of horse imagery in such a way as to imply that women are normally bridled--that is, tamed, mastered, ridden by males. The term tempts me to resurrect crude jokes overheard in western saloons in which the punch lines refer to the missionary position as "ridin' her saddle." As we know, a bridle is not removed at will by a horse, but must be removed by its master. Are we to believe, then, that a handful of women writers (and a few female characters created by males) were "unbridled," that is, "turned loose," given permission by their masters to exercises their literary voices? Such writings would be permitted only on the margins, of course, since an unbridled horse is definitely not in the middle of the action, but stands waiting in the corral for the master to bestow his attentions.

The cover art, entitled "Target Practice," is by a male artist, Tom Lovell. In it a nineteenth-century Western man and woman are standing on a windy prairie. The woman is wearing a blue calico dress and white apron and has a rifle (it looks like a Model 94 Winchester, although the barrel is a little short and I can't tell if it's octagonal) shouldered, taking aim. The man, of course, stands behind her, towering over her, overseeing the "Target Practice." The inference is that a woman can't handle a gun without male assistance. Just as the men are in control of this outing and the publishing world, so the Western myth is in control of this deferential text. Scholar Fred Erisman exercises this perceived control with the conclusion to his introduction:

Throughout this period of settlement and ever after, as the stories

in Unbridled Spirits remind us, women were in the West, they were

of the West, they helped shape the West, and they wrote about the

West. It is time for them to share the stage with their male

counterparts.

How generous of him to "allow" us onto the stage!

Still, this anthology is full of excellent writings by the likes of Mary Hallock Foote, Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, Dorothy Johnson, Mary Austin, and more. As the title suggests, it is a collection of fiction about women, so Section III contains pieces by the likes of Bret Harte, O. Henry, Owen Wister, Jack Schaefer, et al.

One of my favorite stories, Willa Cather's "A Wagner Matinee," is included in this collection. An elderly aunt of the male storyteller visits Boston; knowing she loves music, he takes her to a Wagner matinee. As the music plays, he sympathetically "reads" his aunt's mind, recalling summers he spent on the farm in Nebraska. At the end of the concert, she bursts into tears and says, "I don't want to go, Clark, I don't want to go." Clark, a stand-in for Cather herself, understands, as few men can, the silence of the plains that the afternoon of music has broken. Cather allows her character to suffer openly, to acknowledge and grieve for lost years and deep loneliness.

In contrast to Cather's sympathetic realism, Jack Schaefer creates a mythical selfless female character typical of the genre. His title character, Kittura Remsberg, waits patiently for over four years for her husband to return to take her west, and when he does, he bankrupts her. She gives up her inheritance and dowry for the sake of the relationship and loses it all. Later on, she is thrown from a horse and becomes an invalid who inadvertently witnesses her husband's infidelity. Does she openly convey her suffering? Of course not! Like a nice little lady she tells him he can do whatever he wants, and she will choose to live within the confines of her bedroom and the fantasy she has created about their life together. In Western fiction--at least in this male version--a woman dare not interfere with male movement and adventure. Schaefer's character is definitely not an "unbridled spirit."

In this day and age, it is disturbing that the cover and introduction for this anthology would so obviously promote the very criteria for approval that feminism has been working to subvert. If we were to accept the gendered binaries that the cover depicts, would a comparable collection of writings by and about men be titled Bridled Spirits? I think not.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Studies in Short Fiction
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