Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"A Narrative of Settlement and Unsettlement:
Contextualizing Sarah Royce' A Frontier Lady
Deborah Lawrence
Department of English and Comparative Literature
California State University, Fullerton
dlawrence@exchange.fullerton.edu
The Gold Rush was predominantly an all-male enterprise. The federal census of 1850 reflected that the population of California was 92.5 per cent male. Two years later there was little change: California continued to be one of the most male-inhabited places not only of the nation, but of the world. But women caught gold fever, too. One goldrushing woman to venture west in 1849 was Sarah Royce. Her journey account is asignificant document because it is the only record of one who was a straggler. Her overland party did not leave Council Bluffs until June 10, much too late for anyone to be leaving for California.
What makes A Frontier Lady unique among contemporary writings about the West was Royce's perception of the sacrifices that had to be made by the emigrants, especilly the hardships suffered by the white frontierswomen. Royce records details that male writers tended either to miss or ignore. And whereas most of the story of the mining West tells of the efforts of men, Royce's eyewitness account of the Gold Rush is a rarity because it is one in which women matter. Her narrative illuminates the domestic side of the westering experience and the active roles women played in building new frontier communities.
Critics tend to consider nineteenth-century women's writings as confirmations of the home, supporting what Gillian Brown has called the "celebrated stillness of nineteenth-century women." As a product of her age and as a white, middle-class woman, Sarah Royce encodes to some extent a familiar domestic ideology in her narrative. But when critics read only a repetition of domesticity in her textualization of herself and her environment, they neglect aspects of her account and of her self-representation that are contingent on movement through place. Instead of portraying "stillness," from the first page of the narrative, Royce depicts geographical, spiritual, and psychological movement. It is my contention that Royce intended her writing to convey that though her experience on the Overland Trail and in the mining camps of California was hard, it was valuable and in some respects personally liberating. The focus of my paper is the way the frontier gives Royce the opportunity to modify conventional gender roles and accepted modes of behavior. By tracing Royce's journey, we bear witness to her awakending to selfhood and to a new understanding of gender roles as she witnesses the forty-niners creating new alternatives to conventional notions of nineteenth-century behavior. Her persona is directly related to the narrative movement: her travels invite her to think differently, to see anew, and this "lighting out" in a geographical context is a metaphorical percursor of her inner enlightenment.
Deborah Lawrence
Department of English and Comparative Literature
California State University, Fullerton
dlawrence@exchange.fullerton.edu
RETURN TO CONFERENCE SPEAKERS, TITLES AND PROGRAM
Updated May 23, 1999