Resituating Western Women Writers through Wind Metaphors: The Case of B.M. Bower

I recently attended a meeting of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, where, as a scholar of western women’s writing, I felt a bit lonely. No-one appeared to have heard of the western women writers I was... [ view full abstract ]

I recently attended a meeting of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, where, as a scholar of western women’s writing, I felt a bit lonely. No-one appeared to have heard of the western women writers I was working on, and the majority of papers were about women writers of the East, particularly New England. Despite substantial recovery work on western women’s writing, the metaphor of uni-directional westward migration continues to structure the production of knowledge about American women’s writing: As a scholar of American women’s writing, I am expected to know my Beecher Stowe and my E.D.E.N. Southworth, but the reverse is not true for most scholarship about Eastern women writers.

           What would happen if this metaphor of westward movement was supplanted by that of trade winds, as this seminar’s call for paper suggests? My paper will explore this question through the example of popular western writer B.M. Bower. In 1902, Owen Wister’s version of the western cowboy, arrived in Bower’s Montana home on the current of an eastern-dominated print culture. When Bower began writing her own fiction about the western cowboy, she rode on a less powerful, but nonetheless influential easterly tradewind, arising from the demand for writers of an “authentic” west—eyewitnesses such as Bower herself, who lived among cowboys. The resulting exchange between eastern cultural producers and this eyewitness to the west that so fascinated American readers has had a profound, but as yet unacknowledged, impact on the popular west as we now know it.