FAUW FORUM

Faculty Association of the University of Waterloo Newsletter

Number 100, May/June 2000

 "OF COWBOYS, COWGIRLS, AND THE CANON"

an interview with Victoria Lamont, conducted by Andrew Hunt

Victoria Lamont joined the Faculty of Arts as an assistant professor of English in July 1999. She teaches American literature. Her research focuses on American women western novelists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an intrepid group of authors who found themselves treading on male-dominated terrain. She did her masters work at the University of Guelph and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Alberta. She has just recently finished an article on the Johnson County War, a Wyoming range war that pitted powerful cattle barons and their hired guns against bands of cattle rustlers (a popular western term for cattle thieves). The article will appear in the fall issue of Western American Literature. She graciously agreed to an interview for the FAUW Forum, which occurred on May 9. The interview was conducted by Andrew Hunt of the department of history. In his course, The American West: Myth and Reality (History 216), Andrew Hunt focuses on many of the same themes found in Victoria Lamont's research.

AH: You've just finished your first year of teaching here. How did it go?

VL: It was a lot of work, but I enjoyed it immensely. I've found that the students here are very strong, very hardworking; they're very engaged in their work. So overall, it was a very positive experience.

AH: Did you have a favourite course, a real labour of love kind of thing?

VL: A course that I had a lot of fun with was my survey course on nineteenth century American literature. It was my first opportunity to teach in my field of expertise, so it was something that I knew a lot about and that made the prep easier, but also a lot more enjoyable to do because there was just so much that I felt I could draw from. I felt really confident with the subject matter. I put a lot of experimental texts on the syllabus, texts that many students weren't familiar with, had never heard of, writers who have recently been recovered and discovered, and it went really well.

AH: Writers recently added to the canon, whose work is now recognized as having more merit than previously assumed?

VL: Yes, and writers who have, within the past ten years or so, garnered more attention from scholars, and that attention has been translated into making editions of their work available so they can be taught. For example, I taught a novel called Hobomok by Lydia Maria Child, who was a contemporary of James Fenimore Cooper, a far more familiar name. So one of the risks I took in this course was to teach authors that these students had never heard of, alongside some familiar names, and I was a little bit worried about how the students would respond to that. It was very gratifying to see students pick up on my own interests, to see them open up to wider possibilities about what literature is or can be.

AH: So it sounds like you were able to mix some of the American renaissance types--Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne--with others whose texts may have had some influence at the time but have been perhaps unfairly marginalized for many years.

VL: Yes. I think when the whole canon revision, which has also been called "the New Americanism," got going, there were a lot of reservations about what that would do with established writers. Would that mean books like Moby Dick would no longer be taught? Would that mean American renaissance writers would be forgotten and replaced by a kind of counter-canon that represents African-American writers, women writers, and other marginalized traditions? What I've tried to do is teach a lot of the more well-known writers side by side with some of these newly discovered writers and to show how they're in conversation with each other. What I'm trying to do with that approach is not only expose students to some of these lesser-known literary traditions, but also broaden their understanding of the canonical writers like Hawthorne and Melville. You know, you can open up a lot of doors into understanding a novel like Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, which I taught, when you read it in the context of a novel like Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, when you see how the sentimental movement that Stowe is coming out of is also informing some of these American renaissance writers.

AH: You wrote your Ph.D. dissertation on a fascinating topic: women writers of the American West. Can you give me some of the details?

VL: Well, my dissertation focused on a particular period, 1880 to 1920, which American historians call the progressive era. This is an important period in the literary history of the western novel because it was when American culture was adjusting to the idea of frontier closure and what that meant for the future of the nation. It's a period also known as the "birth of the western," because, following James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking novels, westerns were taken up by dime novel publishers. And so the reputation of the genre was somewhat sullied, you might say, by this popularization, this ghettoization.

AH: It was thought of as 'low literature'. . . .

VL: Yes, it was coming to be thought of as low-brow, boy's literature. Owen Wister [author of the influential 1902 western The Virginian] was a little bit uncomfortable about writing westerns because he aspired to be another Henry James. So what Wister, I think, quite self-consciously did was try to recuperate the genre as a literary genre, and he was quite successful. His great achievement was the 1902 western, The Virginian, and that novel is considered the foundational text of the popular western that we're now familiar with, through the novels, through the movies, through figures like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name, et cetera.

AH: Yes, Wister coined the line, "Smile when you call me that. . . ."

VL: Exactly, it was in The Virginian where we saw the first showdown between the hero and the bad guy, and that showdown was over the honour of a lady. So the popular formula so familiar to us is understood to have its origins in that moment. But what's interesting about that moment is that there were also, I was amazed to discover, quite a lot of women writers who were writing popular western novels at the time. Women were becoming active in rodeos. The first professional women athletes in the United States were rodeo cowgirls. And, of course, this is the period of suffrage, culminating in the passing of the woman suffrage amendment in 1920. The more I learned about this period, the more I saw connections between all these things: the suffrage movement, westerns by women, rodeo cowgirls. I think the thing that drove my research in this area is just the act of discovering a really significant body of texts, and yet there is that pervasive assumption that the western is a man's genre and that women don't write them. To this day, when people ask me what I research and I say, "Westerns by women," they always say, "Did women write westerns?" Whereupon, I launch into my whole, "Well, yes. . . ."

AH: Were these female western novelists endeavouring to imitate Wister, were they writing low-brow dime novels, or were they fashioning a voice of their own? Or a little bit of all of the above?

VL: I would say it's a combination. This is where it becomes very difficult to describe because you don't want to draw these arbitrary distinctions, you don't want to stereotype these writers. You don't want to say, "Women writers did it this way," and you don't want to stereotype the male writers either. Be that as it may, there are some very interesting things happening in women's westerns. They might engage in a lot of the familiar ingredients of the genre: cowboy heroes, rustlers, cattle roundups, similar settings, a similar cast of characters in their novels.

AH: Are the main protagonists often men in their books?

VL: Just off the top of my head, I would say that in general they do tend to focus on female protagonists. But probably one of the most prolific women writers from this period of westerns was a women who published under the name B. M. Bower. Her name was Bertha. Her first novel was called Chip of the Flying U. The protagonist was very much modeled after the Virginian. His name was Chip. But she does very interesting things with this character. She describes him physically in feminized terms, she talks about his long eyelashes that any woman would be glad to own. He has a sensitive side. He is an artist who likes to paint, but he's a little bit ashamed of his painting. It's kind of a secret that he doesn't like to draw a lot of attention to because it might compromise his masculinity. Bower wrote serial novels, so the same cast of characters come up in different novels, different stories. She was one of the early progenitors of the serial western tradition. She had another character who has a reputation for being the greatest bronc-buster in the area - there isn't any horse he can't ride. He never gets thrown, and they always give him these terrifying wild horses to break. But he has a secret, and his secret is that he got his start as a circus rider and he used to have to wear tights and perform ballet maneuvers on the back of ponies in a circus ring. And so she's very playful with the tradition. . . .

AH: There's almost an androgynous element to it all.

VL: Very much so. In fact, Chip, the main character in Chip of the Flying U, is very much an androgynous figure. I sometimes see him as a model of Bower's own identity as an androgynous writer. She published by her initials, so she had an androgynous signature. I see a lot of parallels between the character Chip in the novel and Bower's persona as a novelist.

AH: The women in these novels, how are they in general portrayed? Is that, again, a mixed bag? Do we get gentle tamers, soiled doves, Belle Starr types?

VL: It is difficult to generalize. Certainly you do see a lot of the same kinds of stereotypes in these texts by women writers, and sometimes that's not what we want to see necessarily. We want to see women writers writing against those stereotypes more so than they actually do, or perhaps they write against them in a way that we don't recognize as subversive, but at the time might have been.

The main line of novels that Bower published and she was most of all known for were the Happy Family novels. The Happy Family was a bunkhouse of cowboys who worked on the ranch. These novels would focus on the exploits of the Happy Family, and the various adventures that they experienced. The women characters in these novels do tend to be fairly conventional female characters upon first glance. Chip's love interest--Chip's also a Happy Family cowboy--his love interest is Dale Whitmore, who is in many ways like The Virginian's Molly Stark Wood, the kind of genteel Eastern woman who arrives in the West. . . . These women tend to have attributes of the kind of American "new woman" of the period, who's more independent, more vocal, powerful, intimidating to men. Then the pattern is that they are, over the course of the novel, domesticated and they succumb to the appeal and even domination of the hero. In The Virginian, in the final pages of the novel, the independent heroine is melting into the arms of the hero, and I think that's something we're still familiar with in westerns, that old chivalric tradition of the westerns. And that's there in a lot of these women writers.

But Bower wrote a novel called Lonesome Land. She had been writing novels since 1904, and Lonesome Land was published in 1914. Here the heroine--she's kind of a mail-order bride--arrives in the West expecting to be a "civilizer," a gentle tamer who is going to transform the West into a garden. She finds that the man she's marrying and she's now going out West to join, is an alcoholic, a compulsive gambler, a cow rustler. The convention is that the single woman is in danger in the frontier, and marriage is, for them, about domesticity and safety. In this text, that is reversed, and marriage itself is very unsafe. So by the end of the novel, she ends up contemplating divorce. So that's kind of undoing the formula.

The typical western formula culminates in marriage, it ties everything together. That's the resolution. But in this particular novel, the resolution is divorce, or the thought of divorce, but it doesn't actually transpire. These novels tread on dangerous ground, but they don't go all the way. They try to contain these subversive ideas within the conventions of the formula. This is possibly something the writers had to do to get their stuff published. There is some debate among scholars about how you read women from this period. Are there subversive strategies that they're using, or are they just invoking controversies in order to undermine them?

AH: Our readers are very curious, and I've found too a great attraction among students when I taught my course on the American West. I know that when I proposed the idea of interviewing you, everyone on the FAUW Forum editorial board was very excited because they knew you and I would be talking about the American West. There seems to be this ongoing fascination with the West. There was the Ken Burns miniseries. Hollywood is not churning out quite as many westerns as it used to, but they're still making them. Can you account for the continuing fascination with the American West? Have you tried to figure that one out?

VL: That question confounds me and it always has. I don't know. And the fascination is international. I've heard that in Germany there's a lot of interest in western Americana, there's the great German western serial writer Karl May. . . . As much as my work involves debunking myths, the whole story of transplanting--and I know that this whole story is bound up in colonization and the displacement of aboriginal cultures--was a very bad thing and I don't want to celebrate the project of western expansion. But having said that, the whole idea of a society transplanting itself into a space and just starting over . . . perhaps that's where the fascination comes from. We all have fantasies of going to a desert island where there's nobody around.

AH: Yes, exactly. And that's a lost moment in history. That possibility doesn't exist anymore. There aren't really any more frontiers, are there? Well, I guess if you believe Star Trek, space is the final frontier.

VL: Well, and the Internet. There are some fascinating parallels between the whole discourse that's used to describe the Internet and the same discourse used to describe the frontier of the nineteenth century. In my actual scholarship, I'm kind of debunking it, critiquing it. But on the other hand, the irony is, this scholarship is driven by this fascination with the very mythology. . . . One explanation that I've seen is that North American society--our desires, our expectations--is very much premised on this idea that resources are unlimited, that economic growth, expansion, creation of wealth, building your wealth, these are all things we believe we're all entitled to as a society. But we know that resources are not unlimited, that they're scarce, and if I have a big house in the suburbs that's on an acre of property, it means that someone else has to live in an apartment in an urban area. The idea of a frontier rationalizes that for us, it's where we deposit this sense that the kind of lifestyle that we've carved out, that we value, that our values are actually possible, that they can be practiced.

AH: And the Internet analogy is right on.

VL: The Internet to me seems to play a function that's similar to the function the frontier played in the nineteenth century, where a way out for somebody unemployed in New York, let's say, in poverty, was they could go west and homestead. A cultural critic of the time said that even if you are poor, the idea of a frontier, of a place where you can go and claim your land, makes your poverty easier to live with. The Internet seems to have played a similar function when people were downsized. "Well, go off on your own, take your severance package, and start an Internet company." It's free land, right? Because it's imaginary, it's virtual.

AH: You just have to go out and squat on it. Get your own URL and you've got it made.

VL: Yes, right. Get your own Website, carve out your own space. And the same thing with Internet stocks. They've since been deflated. It's my understanding that a lot of these Internet companies, like amazon.com, their stock values are incredibly high but they're not making any money. It reminds me a lot of the kind of speculation that was going on in the nineteenth century. And the "I Love You" virus, which I understand often targeted files that have been illegally downloaded. So there's the whole vigilante thing going on.

AH: And all these viruses going around are the banditos, the Indians, the hired guns out to ruin the homesteaders. The analogy is a great one. Changing the subject slightly: Any plans for the future?

VL: The next project I'm just starting to work on is looking at, well, the formal name is an analysis of the woman's body on the frontier. The premise I'm working from is that the act of migration really disrupted the dominant ideas about femininity in the nineteenth century, which were based on domesticity, purity, piety, being in a closed place. And so I'm looking at how that whole ideology was disrupted by frontier migration and frontier living in general. But I also want to continue my work on women western writers, perhaps focusing on getting some of these writers published in new editions so they can be taught. But also there are writers that I know about and haven't had a chance to really research, who fall into the same genre.

AH: Thank you very much, Victoria.

VL: Thank you.

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