The Role of Women in the American Western Novel: Strong Woman or Dependent Female? An Investigation into Female Role Models in Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage

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Contents

  Contents  2

1  1912 : “No time - for a woman ?  3

2  2. Women in Zane Grey´s Novel Riders of the Purple Sage: Strong Female or  

  Dependent Woman?  5

2.1.  Religion  5

2.2  Sexuality  7

2.3.  Violence  11

2.4.  Landscape  12

3  1817 : “No time - for a woman ?  14

  Bibliography  16

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1 1912: “No time - for a woman” ?

Published in 1912, Riders of the Purple Sage became the year´s bestseller ¹ and spurred the production of innumerable other Westerns in fiction and film. Owen Wister´s great success with The Virginian had been one decade before and “Western one-reelers had titillated the public ever since 1903” (see Edwin S. Porter´s The Great Train Robbery). ² But what was it that made Grey´s novel such a success?

Lee Clark Mitchell tries to explain this aspect by considering larger transformations that happened during the Progressive era in order to realize how Riders of the Purple Sage “could have appealed to a middle class readership powerfully invested in regaining control of social institutions that appeared increasingly under threat.” ³ In his opinion shorter working hours were one main reason which contributed to the demand for a new entertainment industry and thus prompted changes in urban living arrangements through which especially young women were gradually released from parental surveillance, which brought about a clash between traditional standards of family life and a new ethos thought of as distinctly American. The problem of the New Woman emerged, including discussions about birth control, new divorce and property laws, prostitution as well as suffragism and the middle-class impulse to control sexuality (Mitchell 1995, xxvi f.).

The Social Purity Movement developed in order to restore to women control over their own sexuality by redefining sexual activity as a cultural construction and not a biological imperative. Among the middle class grew a sense of anxiety that traditonal ideals of female behaviour were being challenged. Middleclass daughters suddenly started to resist against conventional family structures, developed more aggressive manners, furthermore a smart language, and daring fashions (Mitchell 1995, xxviii f.).

¹ Ann Ronald even talks of „the best Western ever written“ (Ann Ronald, Zane Grey (Idaho: Boise State University, 1975), 17.).

² Cf. John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,1976), 230.

³ Cf. Lee Clark Mitchell, “White Slaves and Purple Sage: Plotting Sex in Zane Grey´s West,” Riders of the Purple Sage (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), xxvi f.

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Young working women´s sexual behaviour was described as “clandestine prostitution”, which covered a broad range of activities that included simple adolescent experimentation as well as affairs between unmarried people. Eventually, in 1910 Congress passed the White Slave Traffic Act to cut down the rising levels of prostitution.

Women became unnecessary through the 1910s as a point in civilization was reached when slaves were extensively employed and the dominant class of American citizens became liberally supplied with material goods. This led to the development of the “effete wife […], clad in fine raiment, the work of others´ fingers” ⁴ ; and it were all those effete women who had time to read novels and thus catapulted Zane Grey and his “distressed women and rescuing knights” ⁵ to the top of the bestseller lists (cf. Mitchell 1995, xxi).

So, Grey´s success lies in the difference which exists between the contemporary American society of the 1910s and 1920s where women were increasingly challenging their traditional roles and the West of Grey´s Riders of the Purple Sage which was supposed to be “a land where man were man and women were women” ⁶ , where “the hero subdues his enemies, wins his rewards, and receives the necessary knowledge and strength to be a complete man” (May 1997, 31).

⁴ Olive Schreiner, Woman and Work (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1911), 79 f.

⁵ Stephen J. May, Zane Grey Romancing the West (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1997), 15.

⁶ John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 240.

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2 2. Women in Zane Grey´s Novel Riders of the Purple Sage: Strong Female or Dependent Woman?

But what about the heroine? How does Zane Grey treat his heroines in his “romantic western novel” ⁷ ? What about their relationsships (towards each other and especially towards men), their thoughts, and faith? How do they cope with violence and what about the individual development of each feminine character - if there is any? In the following chapters Riders of the Purple Sage will be examined, focusing especially on these questions.

2.1. Religion

Quite at the beginning of the novel is it made clear that the year 1871 had marked a change concering the lives of the “peace-loving Mormons” ⁸ of the southern Utah border in Riders of the Purple Sage. There had been an invasion of Gentile settlers and forays of rustlers and the roles seem to be fixed: “fighting men and praying women” (Grey 1912, 221).

The heroine of the novel, Jane Withersteen, herself Mormon-born, stands on her great ranch with Withersteen House and prays “that the tranquility and sweetness of her life would not be permanently disrupted” (Grey 1912, 2). Although she is a Mormon woman, Jane is a friend to poor and unfortunate Gentiles which makes her suspicious to Tull, an elder of her Curch, whom she shall marry, but refuses to do. Her resistance towards her own people and faith already starts when she had not overbrought Tull´s message to her Gentile friend and rider Bern Venters, to leave Cottonwoods at once. She always stands between the two parties of the Gentiles, which are her friends, and the Mormons, which are the people of the Church she belongs to. On the one hand she wants to rescue Venters from being whipped, on the other hand she knows of the importance of obedience ⁹ towards an elder of her Church: “The religion in her, the long habit of obedience, of humility, as well as agony of fear, spoke in her voice” (Grey 1912, 7).

⁷ James K. Folsom, The American Western Novel (New Haven, Conn.: College and University Press, 1966), 23.

⁸ Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage (New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1912), 2.

⁹ Perfect obedience and performance of one´s terrstrial duty were the two keys to the attainment of progressive perfection and postmortem felicity and therefore highly important for Mormons (cf. Louis J. Kern, An Ordered Love. Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias - the Shakers, the Mormons and the Oneida Community (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1981.). Therefore Jane´s behaviour is a catastrophy for Bishop Dyer and the Mormon Community.