ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: SHAPING INFINITY: AMERICAN AND CANADIAN WOMEN WRITE A NORTH AMERICAN WEST Anne Lee Kaufman, Doctor of Philosophy, 2003 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Marilee Lindemann Department of English This study posits a border-crossing, post-national conception of the “west,” enabling a trajectory of women’s literary history to become visible that transcends more narrowly-imagined Canadian or American paradigms. The dissertation looks across the 49th parallel to propose a semiotics and politics of North American women’s writings about the West. As a part of an ongoing critical conversation about entanglements of body, and place, this study considers the way maps and bodies and the potential of new places open up opportunities for women writers. My dissertation reimagines as a community texts that have previously been narrowly categorized as, for example, nature writing, or western, or written by a woman, or regionalist American or Canadian. The group of writers I’ve chosen includes Americans Willa Cather, Martha Ostenso, Terry Tempest Williams and Louise Erdrich, and Canadians Margaret Laurence, Ethel Wilson, Gabrielle Roy, and Aritha van Herk. The texts written by this group consider intersections of gender, power, and the physical specificity of the land while redefining the terms belonging and Otherness in the context of a new space. Rethinking language leads to interrogation of the ways that bodies (nations, communities, people) both join and separate themselves from other bodies, including borders, houses, and the way maps of belonging are drawn. The work of feminist cultural geographers is crucial to my interrogation of geographic and political borders and borderlands, the physical bodies inhabiting those literal and fictional liminal spaces and the effects of the language used by and about women who choose to locate their work there. The lived experience of westering women pervades the texts in this study; recognition of the great fact of the body grounds each one in a physical reality. Admitting the previously unspeakable female body precludes the preservation of those mythological structures that accompany given spaces. These writers create an imaginative space in which images of containing structures (maps and bodies, houses and even cars) escape their definitions to deliver on the promise inherent in new places for women writers and their texts. SHAPING INFINITY: AMERICAN AND CANADIAN WOMEN WRITE A NORTH AMERICAN WEST by Anne Lee Kaufman Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requ irements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2003 Advisory Committee: Dr. Marilee Lindemann, Chair Dr. Jackson R. Bryer Dr. Peter Mallios Dr. David Wyatt ©Copyright by Anne Lee Kaufman 2003 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation was written over many years, in many places: Takoma Park, College Park, and Bethesda, MD, Washington, D.C., Cambridge, Somerville and Dedham, MA, and in Westmore, VT. It was written in parking lots as I waited for school dismissal time, on street corners as I waited for playdates to end, in Widener and McKeldin libraries and in the mathematics department offices at Sidwell Friends School and Milton Academy…and the debts of gratitude have piled up. My dissertation advisor, Marilee Lindemann, expected scholarly rigor from me and challenged my work in productive ways. This project is much improved as a result of her interest. I thank my committee members as well, David Wyatt, Peter Mallios, and Jackson Bryer. Sue Lanser and Jennifer and Todd Solomon read early drafts and prospectuses and offered insightful suggestions about both the dissertation and the project of dissertating while parenting. Two members of my masters’ thesis committee from the University of Montana, Nancy Cook and Kenneth Lockridge, have continued to be generous and supportive mentors, encouraging and supporting me in all my scholarly endeavors. iii The staffs at the Schlesinger Library, Widener Library, the interlibrary loan department at the University of Maryland, and the Bailey Howe Library at the University of Vermont were unfailingly gracious and helpful. Many thanks to the Cambridge (MA) Women’s Book Group, who willingly read all my central texts (and some that will appear in the larger project) and generously shared their insights. Thanks are also due two wonderful mathematics department heads, Joan Reinthaler and Jackie Bonenfant, both unfazed by the idea that a math teacher was working on a doctoral dissertation in English, and both entirely supportive of all my efforts to do so. I am grateful to the readers for the University of Oklahoma Press, who, in recommending my dissertation for publication, offered numerous excellent suggestions that helped me shape this stage of the project as well as plan for its expansion into a book. I have been fortunate to find my professional homes in the Western Literature Association and Cather Studies. I thank Joseph Urgo, Linda Ross, Susan Rosowski, Ann Romines, Janis Stout, Michael Peterman, John J. Murphy, Melissa Homestead, Nancy Chinn, and Florence Amamoto for a decade of friendship, productive criticism, and sustaining e- mails. Laurie Ricou has been an intrepid co-conspirator, iv explorer, and reader of maps. Bob Thacker has been my friend and mentor for ten years; without his encouragement, this project would not have been completed. I am most grateful to my family: my parents, Linda and Andy Kaufman, my brother David Kaufman and sister-in-law Carol Millard, my nephew and niece, Nathan and Miriam Kaufman, my brother and sister-in-law Dan and Stefanie Kaufman. My days are brightened by my daughters Sophie Kaufman and Maya Scott, who are, for their part, grateful that this part of the project is finally finished. Rob, thanks will never be sufficient—that conversation at Doyle’s has led us halfway around the world and back. A ‘wild patience’ indeed. Table of Contents Acknowledgements. .ii Introduction. .1 Chapter I— Bathtubs, bed linen, and birch trees: Bodies and landscapes in Cather and Ostenso. .32 Chapter II— “the least common denominator of nature”: the imaginative space of the prairie in Cather, Roy, Laurence, and Erdrich. .89 Chapter III – “A wild cartography of longing”: Wilson, Laurence, and Kishkan. 137 Chapter IV— Canadian connections: Willa Cather and Aritha van Herk. .190 Works Cited. .254 1 Introduction Where I live as a woman is to men a wilderness, but to me it is home. Ursula Le Guin Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors? --What suits the character or the native waters best. Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West. More delicate than the historians’ are the map- makers’ colors. Elizabeth Bishop, from “The Map” In June 1995, at the Sixth International Cather seminar in Quebec City, the Canadian writer Aritha van Herk gave a plenary session entitled “Cather in Ecstasy,” in which she performed Willa Cather on an imaginative excursion through the city. A milliner’s shop was prominently featured, as was a bathtub—both important markers in Cather’s novels and short stories. All in all it was a remarkable, funny, creative and irreverent 2 presentation (and, it must be noted, a talk that offended a number of those in the room). I left the room feeling that I had experienced a pivotal academic moment; that presentation was really the catalyst for this project. Demonstrating the connection between “Cather in Ecstasy” and the works of Willa Cather is one way to describe the way the texts included in this study form a continuum, working with ideas about and descriptive language for bodily occupation of imaginative spaces. Still, the methodology and theoretical underpinnings of the work were elusive until I began to understand that a cross-border project of this nature could not rest solely on literary theory. I read the work of feminist cultural geographers, historians, and cultural studies scholars. I thought about water, and bodies in water, and maps, and other ways that the texts I was interested in seemed to speak to one another. This study proposes a semiotics1 and politics of North American women’s writings about the American and Canadian West, an interpretive conversation among the separate political strategies of terrain, language, bodily and lived experience. To that end, this study draws together theoretical concepts from literary study, studies of cultural politics, and cultural geography to provide a 1 I thank Marilee Lindemann for her help in articulating this concept. 3 new set of axes of meaning on which images of domesticity can be read as a part of the process of thinking about bodies in place, a new plane on which a set of stories about a North American women’s West might be limned. Annette Kolodny, in The Land Before Her, posits the Euro-American woman as “captive…in the garden of someone else’s imagination,” the “unwilling inhabitant of a metaphorical landscape she had no part in creating”. Kolodny argues that such women turned to gardens and gardening to avoid the issues their male counterparts faced as despoilers of “lost Edens,” and to resolve their exclusion from the wilderness. Stacy Alaimo comments that “the frontier women Kolodny describes imagine their gardens as an extension of domestic space, a ground within the sphere of their influence, a space of their own” (15). Vera Norwood, too, in Made From this Earth: American Women and Nature, links nineteenth and twentieth-century women to environmental activities through the domestic, arguing that “the values of middle-class family life were conflated with the domestication of the landscape” (277). If women are perceived as entering wilderness only under cover of the domestic, a realm that has tended to erase individual bodies in favor of the images of the Republican Mother, the housewife of the nineteen-fifties, and the turn-of-the- 4 century soccer mom, then it is no surprise that critical conversations about the implications of (and issues facing) real, individual, physical bodies in those spaces have taken so long to surface, as they began to do in the 1970s.