Overview

Examining an eclectic group of western women’s autobiographical texts—canonical and otherwise—Playing House in the American West argues for a distinct regional literary tradition characterised by strategic representations of unconventional domestic life. The controlling metaphor Cathryn Halverson uses in her engrossing study is “playing house.” From Caroline Kirkland and Laura Ingalls Wilder to Willa Cather and Marilynne Robinson, from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, western authors have persistently embraced wayward or eccentric housekeeping to prove a woman’s difference from western neighbours and eastern readers alike. The readings in Playing House investigate the surprising textual ends to which westerners turn the familiar terrain of the home: evaluating community; arguing for different conceptions of race and class; and perhaps most especially, resisting traditional gender roles. Western women writers, Halverson argues, render the home as a stage for autonomy, resistance, and imagination rather than as a site of sacrifice and obligation. The western women examined in Playing House in the American West are promoted and read as representatives of a region, as insiders offering views of distant and intriguing ways of life, even as they conceive of themselves as outsiders. By playing with domestic conventions, they recast the region they describe, portraying the West as a place that fosters female agency, individuality, and subjectivity.

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9780817318031

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Reviews

Playing House in the American West makes a worthwhile contribution to scholarly work in western American literature and in women's autobiographical writing. The book's key contribution to this field is a new lens--the idea of playing house--through which to view women's fictional and nonfictional accounts of home space and domestic activity. --Kathleen Boardman, editor of Western Subjects: Autobiographical Writing in the North American West

Through a series of incisive literary readings, Cathryn Halverson reconfigures the U.S. West as a space of liberating domesticity--the more unorthodox, the better. Exploring women life writers who range across race, class, sexuality, period, and genre, she excavates compelling conversations and legacies, unsettles assumptions about home-making, and mines unsuspected layers of textual play. The revealed relationship between women and the West just became that much richer. --Christine Bold, author of The Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880-1924

Author Information

Cathryn Halverson is the author of Maverick Autobiographies: Women Writers and the American West, 1900-1936. She has published articles in Western American Literature, College Literature, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Children's Literature in Education, American Studies, and American Indian Culture and Research Journal. She teaches at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

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