Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Gendering the American West: Feminized Landscapes and Phallic Intrusions"

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Josh Masters
University of Connecticut
JJM98001@UCONNVM.UCONN.EDU

The very fact of the wilderness appealed to men as a fair, blank page on which to write a new chapter in the story of man's struggle for a higher type of society...[T]he West offered an exit into a free life and greater well-being among the bounties of nature, into the midst of resources that demanded manly exertion.
--Frederick Jackson Turner

In American letters, the West has long been mythologized as the birth-place of the national character, and in the East there developed a collective desire to legitimate, moralize, and aestheticize its conquest. This imperative, I will argue, found its highest expression in the image of the book, both as a symbol of knowledge and as a trope for the readability and knowability of anything the writer claimed to have the key to deciphering. Frederick Jackson Turner, like Washington and Jefferson before him, imagined the West as unexplored, blank space awaiting inscription, viewing the project to map, order, commodify, and partition it as an inevitable and relatively non-violent process. The act of writing the American West, as my epigraph suggests, was heavily invested in gendered metaphors, where "blank," uncolonized, "virgin territory" awaited phallic inscription, or "manly exertion," to articulate its meaning. My paper examines this gendered exchange in a wide range of western travel narratives (particularly George Catlin and Francis Parkman), using John Gast's 1872 lithograph American Progress as my point of departure.

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Josh Masters
University of Connecticut
JJM98001@UCONNVM.UCONN.EDU

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Updated May 23, 1999