Playing House in the American West: Western Women's Life Narratives, 1839–1987

always.

Introduction

Well, said Laura. Let's play keeping house.

      "We are keeping house, said Mary. What is the use of playing it?"

—Laura Ingalls Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek

One early winter day in Laura Ingalls Wilder's celebrated children's book On the Banks of Plum Creek, Ma and Pa Ingalls go to town, leaving their daughters alone in charge of the house. The chapter, entitled Keeping House, shows Mary playing her usual role of naysayer to her younger sister Laura. The exuberant heroine of the Little House series wants to play house, but Mary is too aware of their actual responsibilities to see the use of the game. Laura passes a long, quiet, uneasy afternoon trying to determine how to inhabit the little house without Ma. However, the arrival of a blizzard—which scares the girls into cramming the house with the whole woodpile (290)—abruptly makes her dilemma moot. In what can almost be taken as a comment on western literary criticism, even as the overwhelming physical fact of the West profoundly shapes women's domestic lives, it cuts short any consideration of how they are to conceive them. Outside trumps inside.

Laura is silenced by Mary's question: What is the use of playing house when one is actually keeping it? Countless western writers, though, answer for her, dramatizing the use of conceiving housekeeping as a game. This study looks to construe such use through uncovering the seam of disorderly and invigorating, disrupted and diverting, subversive and surreal housekeeping that runs through a century and a half of western women's autobiographies and autobiographical fiction. As the following chapters show, women writers of the American West consistently feature the domestic in making a case for their own or their protagonists’ difference from both the women they live among and the ones they imagine reading their words. Getting these texts published, in turn, makes the distinction actual in the public realm; authorship confirms private images. Records of far-out sites and far-out ways, their domestic narratives help compose the fictions of selfhood they would make, as residents and chroniclers of places both they and their reading audiences perceive as culturally marginal.

Domesticity has long been central to expressing female gender in American culture. It follows, then, that women life writers find wayward or eccentric or fantastic housekeeping an ideal vehicle for making arguments about being special. The West as a region—with its resonant physical and cultural landscapes; fluid gender and class identities; and innovative home and social practice—especially encourages this textual turn. Diverse geographies, late frontiers, and ongoing cultural diversity mean that over the past two centuries, the West has had more kinds of homes than other U.S. regions, especially homes that are not common textual settings for middle-class American life. The tents, teepees, dugouts, and cabins that loom large in frontier narratives give way to the dude ranches and adobe artist retreats—and tents again—of a twentieth-century West closely associated with leisure, recreation, and rejuvenation. More significant—regardless of whether actual western homes are anomalous—western writers consistently foreground acts and venues that are seen to deviate from standard models. Even women raised in the West represent it as remote from regular American life. That, they have imbibed, resides in the East.

A brief gloss of two life narratives, Louise Amelia Knapp Clappe's gold camp letters (1851-52) and Juanita Harrison's around-the-world travel diary (1936), may serve to suggest the varied textures of playing house in the West and some of the issues at stake. Clappe demonstrates how improvised domesticity can be requisitioned to craft an authoritative writing subject who cannot be evaluated by middle-class standards, while Harrison shows a similar relationship between outré homemaking and outré selfhood through the temporary homes she locates on the road. Landscape and home are not opposed in these texts. Rather, they are made equally available as sites for the construction and performance of selfhood.

At the height of the California gold rush, Louise Clappe accompanied her husband Fayette to a mining camp in the Sierras. Her opening letter recounts getting lost and having to spend a night sleeping out. She facetiously asks, Who knows how narrowly I escaped becoming an Indian chieftainess, and feeding for the rest of my life upon roasted grasshoppers, acorns, and flower-seeds? (10). She then adds, "By the way, the last mentioned article of food strikes me as rather poetical than otherwise. That she did not go on to adopt Maidu customs during her months in the mountains will come as no surprise. Nevertheless, she represents as rather poetical than otherwise the domestic life she conducted in her small cabin there, registering this experience as exotic and somehow ethnically inflected: I fancy that nature intended me for an Arab or some other Nomadic barbarian, and by mistake my soul got packed up in a Christianized set of bones and muscles. How I shall ever be able to content myself to live in a decent, proper, well-behaved house, where toilet tables are toilet tables, and not an ingenious combination of trunk and claret cases, where lanterns are not broken bottles, book cases not candle boxes, and trunks not wash-stands, but every article of furniture, instead of being a make-shift, is its own useful and elegantly finished self, I am sure I do not know (51). Clappe interprets her enthusiasm for living outside a proper home as a sign of having been packed up" in the wrong body—or at least, the wrong culture. Her ironic savor of makeshift cabin life confirms her success as a westerner; it also hints at the superiority she feels over those who can content themselves with the scripted and the routine.

Let's now move the scene some eighty-five years forward and from a gold rush Sierra cabin to a Waikiki tent. Instead of a genteel New Englander delighting in picturesquely rough surroundings, the writer is a working-class African American from Mississippi, who identifies Los Angeles as home, and spends years traveling the world while supporting herself with stints as a domestic worker. Harrison was living in Hawaii just as her travel diary was compiled into a book, My Great, Wide, Beautiful World. The climactic epilogue reveals that income from the Atlantic Monthly enabled her to quit her job as a maid and erect a tiny home right in the Playgrowns of Waikiki (313). (Her editors chose to leave her idiosyncratic spelling, punctuation, and grammar intact.) I had a 7X7 Tent made just as I wanted it I had it that size so I can take up my house and walk, she explains. When the light is out and the door and Windows closed the lights of the street shine through the holes and on to the Top of my Tent and it looks just like the Stars. . . . This is my first and only Home. Villa Petit Peep are the name of my Tent as I let my callers sit on a seat in the yard and Peep in so I gave it this True name (318). Savoring the diverse scenes her new neighborhood affords, Harrison reciprocates in kind by encouraging callers to peep in and admire her tent occupation. Her book as a whole does much the same: the author puts herself on display in provisional, on-the-road homes that attest to her freedom from an American status quo that would have black working-class women laboring in white people's homes and black middle-class women aspiring to reproduce such homes themselves. Despite significant differences of era, place, class, and race, both she and Clappe produced texts that represent the writer as not keeping house but playing house in the West.

Theorists typically characterize play, in Johan Huizinga's well-known formulation, as accompanied by a feeling of tension, joyousness, and the consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary life’ (47). Satisfaction further stems from play's identity as a form of conquest, a way to gain active mastery of a situation (Hein, 69). The game of playing house, its obvious constraints notwithstanding, fosters self-expression and assertion. Children playing house not only rehearse but also revise social relations and gender roles. What matters most for the game is form. The work it centers on is not real—no tea is made, no kitchens are cleaned, no babies are cared for—but its motions are intently rehearsed. Something resembling this, I argue, holds true for the way women writers represent domestic life in the West: desperately important but in diverse ways conceived as forms of play.

Iterations of playing house persist across generations of western women's texts, alternative narratives of life in the West unlike both frontier scripts as stereotypically conceived and more recent views of western women's writing as especially rooted and local. The readings that follow probe the surprising ends to which western writers turn the familiar landscape of the home: evaluating community; managing trauma; arguing for a differently classed or racialized self; and, perhaps most especially, resisting conventional gender roles. Playing house is at once a symptom of estrangement and a manifestation of agency. Making a case for their difference from not only the westerners who surround them but also the easterners to whom they direct their texts, these authors recruit an unorthodox domestic to present location and selfhood alike as far from the norm. They render the home as a platform for female autonomy, resistance, and imagination rather than sacrifice and obligation. By playing with domestic and textual conventions, they reconfigure their western settings, too: as not the space of masculine adventure or conquest but the liberating and challenging terrain in which new versions of female individuality and subjectivity can be crafted.

Innovative generic forms advance the project. Not only is the home practice itself a form of play, but there is also a ludic quality to its representation, including a playful blurring of the line between autobiography and fiction. Writing becomes the ultimate game. The notion of playing house captures the glee with which these women represent renegade housekeeping, and it also captures the kind of figurative language they use. Their texts brim with irony, satire, fantasy, whimsy, and jokes. They are also studded with toys, dolls, and games; toy-, doll-, baby-, and playhouses; tents, theaters, and thrones; playgrounds, circuses, and excursions. Such portraits distance narrators and protagonists from the domestic work they do and the identity it connotes. They appear not as housekeepers but as women playing the role of such.

Most of the authors in this study were pressed for funds and working hard. Their life narratives, however, largely camouflage these truths. They belie real labor and financial need to highlight the novel, delightful, or liberating aspects of western housekeeping. The result: an illusion of privilege. For myself, I am perhaps too readily persuaded by the case Clappe makes for the satisfaction of life in a mining camp cabin, or Harrison's endorsement of the tent. Textual moments where home affairs seem most invitingly odd may in fact be a kind of red flag, signifying the greatest strain. After all, unlike her more placid sister Mary, Laura Ingalls has not only the imaginative ability to play house but also, as she comes of age, the psychological need to do so, in order to negotiate the disjuncture between her exuberance and the constraints of little houses in the West. Keeping house is often conceived as serving other people, but playing house serves the housekeeper.

In 1911, none other than Owen Wister proclaimed, The nomadic, bachelor West is over, the housed, married West is established (Members of the Family, qtd. in Handley, 10). Yet while the western home—the little house on the prairie—looms large in our conception of western women and is a key site for historians, it has attracted scant attention in literary studies. Western housekeeping can sound like a paradox, in that the values typically associated with the West are at odds with those typically associated with domestic realms. If the West is synonymous with open space, then how can the homes within it matter? In West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, Jane Tompkins insists on the distinct spatial fields of domestic fiction and formula westerns: popular westerns are enacted in outdoor or public arenas, whereas domestic literature takes place in private spaces, at home, indoors, in kitchens, parlors, and upstairs chambers (38). Her argument thus does not allow for the possibility that some texts afford both a regional and a domestic purview. Analogous is the claim with which Nina Baym concluded her plenary lecture at the Western Literature Association 2008 conference, The Many Wests of American Women's Writing, 1833-1928: that once women (presumably white) established homes there, the West as such ceased to exist. Euro-American homemaking standardized the region, making it indistinguishable from the rest of the nation. I argue the reverse: that western homes do not negate but express regional identity, and that in foregrounding domestic experience writers not only represent but actively construct the West.

Yet we could also say that in assessing the West and the domestic as mutually exclusive categories, literary critics like Tompkins are more right than they know. Western writers themselves, male and female alike, appear to view western housekeeping as incongruous, and thus precarious. Far from causing them to give up on domesticity, however, their commitment is reinforced, with the consequence that the domestic is a controlling feature of their texts. Across western literature, a widespread perception of the fragility of domestic life in the West results in a compensatory insistence upon it. (Bret Harte's gold camp stories would be one familiar example.) As I have argued elsewhere, Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage, one of Tompkins's case studies for West of Everything, is actually driven by a plot of coming to housekeeping maturity. That Grey's outlaw and cowboy heroes commandeer housekeeping from their female partners sanctions their turn to violence. Marilyn Chandler has shown that American literature, from Walden to Housekeeping, exhibits powerfully conflicted views on enclosure in a house (4). I would build on Chandler's argument to contend that representations of houses and housekeeping are especially charged in western texts.

Krista Comer emphatically reminds us that open landscape—which connotes the absence of homes—remains the signature of the American West: Far less suggestive of ‘home on the range’ than of the range itself and the expansive possibilities invoked thereby, the dominant spatial field . . . emplots normative western spaces in ‘open,’ ‘free,’ uncontained terms, . . . which unmistakably are gendered male and racialized white (27). She continues, "The most often celebrated feature of western space is its spatial non containment, its expansiveness, its vastness, its sheer, weighty limitlessness (28). To promote a western domestic is thus a rebellious textual act. Narratives of playing house breathe an air of noncontainment into home venues even as they give the West domestic contours, acting in and on it in surprising ways. They thereby negotiate the cognitive dissonance of West and housekeeping." By routinely keeping in play—and playing with the boundaries between—these differently gendered arenas, they give the West a domestic texture even as the home appears more exotic, unruly, and disruptive than usually conceived.

The authors in this study, then, deploy home practice in ways that have been overlooked in critical discussions of domestic literature, which usually emphasize social relations. Janet Floyd has suggested that because the pioneer women she studies wrote about home, their female versions of western individualism have gone unrecognized. She identifies in Writing the Pioneer Woman a critical predisposition to locate communitarian values in the life writing of women emigrants, to assume that in the West, of all places, women craved and embraced communal life (16). In a review of Women's Untold Lives: Breaking Silence, Talking Back, Voicing Complexity by Mary Romero and Abigail J. Stewart, and Telling Women's Lives: Subject/Narrator/Reader/ Text by Judy Long, Jeanne Marecek notes how predictably American women's texts and lives are understood by means of an overworked notion of care and connection, as totalizing as it is tedious (920). And the habit, as Leigh Gilmore reminds us in her formulation of Mary Mason's influential argument, determines the fundamentally different ways men's and women's life narratives get read: men are understood to write autobiographies that turn on moments of conflict and place the self at the center of the drama, whereas women represent the self in relation to ‘others’ (xiii).

In Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, family bonds are strengthened after Beth—who is dedicated to housekeeping and who rarely leaves the home—literally perishes. The pronouncement made by the Marches’ maid Hannah—Housekeeping ain't no joke (150)—is shown to be terrifyingly true. The western writers I look at, however, press housekeeping—jokingly—into a very different kind of service, that of personal advancement. Given that domestic life is as likely to stifle as foster individuality, the endeavor demands poise, strategy, and finesse. Narratives of feminized space are turned to unfeminine ends, with self-promotion located at home. Families appear conspicuously inconspicuous, a household fixture understood to be part of but not central to the script. Most especially, husbands are relegated to the margins of playing house texts. The logic seems to run thus: if home is meant to be women's sphere, then let's really make it so.

Despite the present commitment to reprinting western women's texts and the many studies of familiar writers like Caroline Kirkland or Willa Cather, book-length monographs on western women's literature as such remain startlingly few. The most prominent are Annette Kolodny's The Land Before Her (1984), Brigitte Georgi-Findlay's The Frontiers of Women's Writing (1996), Ann Romines's Constructing the Little House (1997), Susan J. Rosowski's Birthing a Nation (1999), Krista Comer's Landscapes of the New West (1999), and Janet Floyd's Writing the Pioneer Woman (2002); Janis P. Stout's work on Austin and Cather and my own Maverick Autobiographies add to the number. We lack, moreover, literary scholarship that moves across historical periods. (Birthing a Nation is an important exception, but confines its attention to only four writers.) The long-standing emphasis in western studies on history over literature and the ongoing tendency to read western texts first as historical documents and only second—if at all—as creative, aesthetic productions deter such an approach. As Nathaniel Lewis has demonstrated in Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship, from its inception, western literature has been assessed for how accurately it mirrors the real west, and this tendency is not one to foster critical roaming. The middle period between the frontier and the contemporary West is especially underrepresented in literary criticism, given that Kolodny's important study ends in the 1860s and Comer's begins in the 1970s.

Building on this scholarship, Playing House in the American West is affiliated with Comer's work in its attention to the links between western women's spatial and racial arguments. It offers an alternative to Kolodny's subject of domestic fantasy in the West, expands on Rosowski's project of identifying a shared regional literary legacy, and broadens Romines's single-author investigation of domesticity in a western key. To quote from Caroline Kirkland's 1850 essay Bush-Life, The idea—the feeling—is the main thing. This is certainly the chief source of the fascination of a wild western life (The Evening Book, 138). If one focuses on the idea—the feeling of a wild western life, then writers like Clappe and Harrison can—as I hope to demonstrate—be fruitfully discussed as participants in an ongoing female literary tradition; Kirkland's 1839 A New Home—Who'll Follow? can speak to Marilynne Robinson's 1980 Housekeeping.

To borrow Judith Fetterley's phrase, I conduct this conversation through unabashedly close reading[s] (492) of domestic scripts. These depict a range of home acts: setting up new homes; cooking, cleaning, laundry, and the other work necessary to maintain established homes; productive household work (making not beds but butter); habits of consumption; and interactions with other household members, whether parents, siblings, children, husbands, servants, friends, or lovers. For my purposes, what matters most is the way these acts register ideas about home, place, class, and self.

I consider books published over a period of close to one hundred and fifty years, 1839 to 1987, weighting the first decades of the twentieth century. Authors include representatives of the upper, middle, and working classes; the urban and the rural; natives and newcomers to the West. Many are securely within a western women's canon—Caroline Kirkland, Louise Clappe, Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Mary MacLane, Opal Whiteley, Mary Austin, Zitkala-Sa, Willa Cather, Jean Stafford, and Marilynne Robinson—but I also treat those not usually read in a western context at all, including Gene Stratton-Porter, Juanita Harrison, M. F. K. Fisher, and Mona Simpson. The study is meant to be not exhaustive but suggestive, intimating how to read across American literature for the consequences of domestic play; my hope is that it will alert readers to forms of irregular housekeeping in all manner of texts. I don't contend that scenes of playing house never appear in eastern writing or men's writing—Henry David Thoreau's beautiful housekeeping at Walden Pond strikingly shows that they do. What I do contend is that life in the West is eminently suited to this model.

Americans have long been fascinated by stories of western women comporting themselves in curious ways, and all of these texts were critical and/or commercial successes in their day. Speaking to their dual critical achievement and popular appeal, many of the early to mid-twentieth century authors I consider debuted in the Atlantic Monthly, in the guise of what editor Ellery Sedgwick would come to dub Faraway Women (The Happy Profession, 197). The seeming paradox of western housekeeping makes for a compelling formula: the expansive West situated within the confines of a house—and then again between the covers of a book or magazine. Some of these texts are at present little recognized, and many have yet to receive their critical due; to these, I aspire to offer useful introductions. Uncovering seams of playing house shows connections between well-known texts and the more obscure, as well as thematic continuities across lines of genre. Most readers are familiar with the domestic subjects of a Cather or Wilder. They may be less aware, however, of how readily we can locate the work of these canonical western writers within a web of texts sharing common tropes, themes, and arguments.

I limit my readings to published texts conceived for an audience, as the act of proffering a public account of private life is the crux of these domestic performances. Crafted with close attention to style, rhetoric, and readership, these texts are all literary in nature. They include, however, no autobiographies in the most conventional sense of the word, no birth-to-eminence records that celebrat[e] the autonomous individual and the universalizing life story (Smith and Watson, 3)—what was once thought of as the Enlightenment standard.¹ Instead I investigate the kind of writing that Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith suggest is better conceived as life narrative, including letter collections, travel accounts, diaries, and sketches. While such terms may sound straightforward enough, they in fact little reflect the generic hybridity of these texts, which incorporate many of the techniques of fiction. Consider, for example, the category of sketch, which could encompass Kirkland's A New Home, Stewart's Letters of a Woman Homesteader, and Austin's The Land of Little Rain. For A New Home, Kirkland refashioned the letters she had sent to eastern friends into autobiographical fiction, intermingling the experiences of her alter ego Mary Clavers with romantic and cautionary tales about fellow Michiganders. The letters that compose Stewart's book stand as such, albeit edited for publication. Yet they gloss over some of the most fundamental facts about the writer's personal life to underscore her narrative identity as the intrepid Woman Homesteader, and they are often given over to semifictive accounts of her frontier neighbors’ exploits. In The Land of Little Rain, Austin focuses so intently on describing the desert environment in which she dwells that the narrator's life is scarcely visible. All we learn of her is that she inhabits the place, as she relays the desert lore she has garnered. Texts such as these could be considered to occupy a borderlands textual space, situated somewhere between traditional autobiography and fiction.

Leigh Gilmore comments on the fallacy of assuming that in autobiography the organizational work is solved by chronology, the challenge of characterization is removed by what people really said and did, and invention is displaced by recalcitrant reality (Autobiographics, 41). Theorists have shown the genre to be shot through with techniques akin to those of fiction—increasingly so, Max Saunders argues in Self Impression, with the advent of modernism. There is, then, no inconsistency in the inclusion of autobiographical fiction in this study: texts that while not predicated on what Philippe LeJeune has famously termed the autobiographical pact—that the narrator can be safely identified with the author—are nevertheless located along a continuum with texts that are. In reformulating personal life experience, authors of autobiographical novels such as Willa Cather's My Ántonia or Gene Stratton-Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost do more than just incorporate biographical detail; they explore their own relations with the West and the domestic. As such, they are expressions of what Gilmore terms autobiographics, textual moments of self-invention, self-discovery, and self-representation (Autobiographics, 42).

In tracing a history of the narrowing gap between fiction and autobiography, Saunders states, Autobiography experienced a crisis in the later nineteenth century, partly because its project came to seem impossible. . . . It is as if the attempt to establish autobiographical sincerity culminates in an anxiety that sincerity is all the autobiographer can hope for (10-11). I am struck by how closely this statement resembles Nathaniel Lewis's incisive comments about another literary crisis, faced by those writers, readers, and critics of western literature who exclusively privilege realism. Lewis argues, When encountering a western work, readers tend not to engage ‘literary’ issues (such as narrative aesthetics, forms of signification, or intertextuality) but to question its realism: is it authentic or inauthentic? Accurate or unreliable, realistic or mythological? But to evaluate a body of writing in relation only to the real is to treat that writing—and indeed the ‘real’—as a strangely static body, without energy or purpose or mystery (2). Just as autobiography must reach beyond sincerity if it is not to come to a dead end, western literature must be seen to reach beyond sincerity's counterpart,