74 Western American Literature allegiance to the wild totality that utterly transcends our calculations. “Economic Nature” belongs on the same shelf with “Life Without Principle.” At times, perhaps, Turner goes over the top—I part company with him when he criticizes The Wildlands Project as management-tainted (I think it and other restoration efforts could be carried out in authentic service of the wild)—but going off the graph is part of this book’s wildness, part of its uncaged potency. This is not a safe little treatise. It’s a clarion call, a manifesto, a defense summation for the embattled, innocent, integrated world. THOMAS J. LYON Utah State University Re-Imagining the Modern American West: A Century of Fiction, History, and Art. By Richard W. Etulain. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996. 243 pages, $45.00/$17.95.) The less one knows about a particular topic, the more useful this book is. Advanced students of western literature, for example, will find nothing startling in Etulain’s discussion of that topic, but unless they are also experts in western historiography and art, they will be grateful for mater ial on these areas and find much to admire in the obvious breadth of Etulain’s reading and his ability to synthesize. Like most consciously introductory works, this is organized around a few clear generalizations that get fuzzier, Etulain admits, the more close ly one examines them. He divides the century into three periods: the fron tier, typified by “the cultural ubi sunt of the 1890s that mourned the pass ing of the West Out There” and emphasized the movement “fo-the-West” (Wister, Grey, L’Amour, Turner, Remington, and so on); the regional, which took an ‘“/n-the-West” viewpoint to demonstrate “how, over time, physical and cultural environments shaped character and outlook” and to argue that the West had moved beyond cowboys and indians to establish “a new cultural identity” (Cather, Steinbeck, Webb, Benton, Wood); and the post-regional, where images of the pioneer myth clash with the changes introduced or accelerated by World War II and sometimes result in a never quite defined “remythologizing” of the West (Didion, Stegner, Limerick, Slotkin, O’Keefe, Gorman). These periods give the book its structure. The theme is that writers, historians, and painters gradually cease to ignore the importance of the environment and of diversity in gender, race, and ethnicity, a process that Reviews 75 culminated in the 1989 conference on New Western History whose prin ciples Etulain’s work espouses and embodies. As in most books of this type, authors and trends are clearest when most remote. The section on post-regionalists is the messiest. Etulain’s categories break down for these four reasons: poetry and non-fiction have become at least as important as the novel; most historians have moved beyond the broad and compelling generalizations of their predecessors; artists, like writers and historians, have come under influences that are not specifically western; and frontier, regional, and post-regional works stand shoulder to shoulder and sometimes eyeball to eyeball in bookstores and galleries. But on the whole, the book surveys and encapsulates a large body of essential information for beginning students. It also has a good deal to quarrel with, which, to the more advanced, will be even more useful. ROBERT MURRAY DAVIS University of Oklahoma John Muir’s “Stickeen” and the Lessons of Nature. By Ronald H. Limbaugh. (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1996. 185 pages, $22.95.) Ronald Limbaugh admits that “Stickeen,” the story of the feisty little dog who accompanied John Muir on his Alaskan glacier rambles, has never ranked very high in the nature-writing canon. It is, however, “the only literary product from Muir’s pen that can be directly and extensive ly linked to ideas formulated from the books of his personal library,” and it richly rewards the close study it receives here. We have grown used to two images of Muir: the gifted nature writer with a “dynamic but overtly conventional message,” and the “radical activist” subsequently appropriated by the 1970s ecology movement. Limbaugh presents us with a third, more overtly intellectual Muir, a decidedly bookish man as familiar with his private library as...
Reviews 241 West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. By Jane Tompkins. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 245 pages, $21.95.) jane Tompkins is torn between the politically correct schoolmarm view of the Western and getting down and wallowing in the thrill of it all. She contends the horses and cattle are politically oppressed, but she likes a L’Amour novel for “the sexiness of it, the titillation you get from reading books where excitement is so acute it becomes a physical sensation.” The book is not always this shameless, and she has a feel for the texture of novels and movies rare even in the best critics of the genre. But her generaliza tions are mostly commonplace or second-hand. The Western opposes the values of the nineteenth-century sentimental novel (Leslie Fiedler, unmentioned). Owen Wister rebelled against his mother (Darwin Payne). Males don’t talk about their feelings (Sher Hite). Buffalo Bill lived in a politically incorrect period, but “We cannot teach history how things should have been.” This last demonstrates the triumph of common sense over the ideology and gross sentimentality which cause her to weep over (absent) Indians, horses, cattle, and the Western hero himself and to sprinkle her acknowledgements with fulsome superlatives. The ideology leads to grave misreadings of The Virginian, the novel she discusses most extensively. Em’ly the bluestocking hen is not, finally, the butt of male superiority. The Virginian’s family is not “all boys.”The Virginian does at first refuse to discuss his enmity towards Trampas, as Tompkins points out gleefully to support her connection between “the Virginian’s mastery over Molly and his reticence.”But three pages later, he breaks his code to make “her his confidant in matters he had never spoken of before”and the lovers are made closer. The point about Wister’sVirginian is that he can change, that he can be “of two minds about one thing” (Scott Fitzgerald’s test of a first-rate intelligence) and still function. But this doesn’t fit Tompkins’thesis about the Western hero’s “scarification and eventual sacrifice” of his own heart. West ofEverythingis not always wrong, and it is sometimes eloquent. But one could wish it less sloppy in emotion and scholarship and more conscious of the distinction between art—especially popular art—and real human behavior. ROBERT MURRAYDAVIS University of Oklahoma ...
