University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository English Language and Literature ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations Summer 7-17-2017 Embodying the West: A Literary and Cultural History of Environment, Body, and Belief Julie E. Williams University of New Mexico - Main Campus Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Williams, Julie E.. "Embodying the West: A Literary and Cultural History of Environment, Body, and Belief." (2017). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds/178 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Language and Literature ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. i Julie Williams Candidate English Department This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee: Dr. Jesse Alemán, Chairperson Dr. Kathleen Washburn Dr. Kathryn Wichelns Dr. Daniel Worden ii EMBODYING THE WEST: A LITERARY AND CULTURAL HISTORY OF ENVIRONMENT, BODY AND BELIEF by JULIE WILLIAMS B.A., English, University of Montana, 2002 B.A., Political Science, University of Montana, 2002 M.A., Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2009 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy English The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico July, 2017 iii Dedication To Thurna, whose love sustains me, sense of humor inspires me, and who reminds me why these ideas are worth exploring. To my ma and pa, who gave me wings to explore the West, roots to recognize my place in it, and love to the moon and back. To the friends, family, colleagues, and strangers who believed in this project when I didn’t and shared their own stories. iv Acknowledgements This dissertation is made possible with the help of many people, all of whom deserve heartfelt thanks. My gratitude goes out to my dissertation director, Dr. Jesse Alemán, for his inspiration and guidance in bringing this project together. Many thanks, Jesse, for allowing me the freedom to explore what inspires me while also keeping me grounded in the scholarship necessary to write a well-researched dissertation. Heartfelt thanks as well to my dissertation committee, Dr. Kathleen Washburn, Dr. Kathryn Wichelns, and Dr. Daniel Worden, for your support, critical insight, and encouragement throughout the dissertation writing process and beyond. I am grateful for the guidance of my entire committee through coursework, comps, research, writing, and for helping me become the scholar I am today. I am grateful for the support of the people and organizations that had faith in my scholarship and extended funding for the research and writing of this dissertation. My gratitude goes out to the Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Foundation, whose dissertation fellowship supported my final year of writing this dissertation; to the Elizabeth and George Arms Fund for the American Literary Studies Research Assistantship, which supported a year of research and writing; to the Feminist Research Institute and the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies for their research grants which funded research on Mary MacLane and Miss Atomic Bomb; and to the Center for Regional Studies, whose Hector Torres Memorial Fellowship funded the early stages of my research that helped shape my ideas into this dissertation. The generous financial assistance of these organizations supported travel to the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections, where archival v staff generously answered questions and pulled hundreds of boxes and files and photos for my research. Thank you to the dedicated staff at these archives for your time and knowledge. My thanks also goes to the UNM English Department, Graduate and Professional Students Association, Career Services, and the Office of Graduate Studies for extending financial support for research and conference travel. I am also eternally grateful to my family and friends for their love and support throughout this process. A lifetime of thanks to my parents, who believed in this project before it was started, and encouraged me throughout to “get her done.” My heart does not contain enough gratitude to adequately thank my partner, Thurna Lucero, for her love, support, and encouragement to stay positive, but all the love it does contain goes to you, Thurna. I am also deeply indebted to my colleagues Elizabeth Oliphant, Annie D’Orazio, and Stephanie Spong for keeping me on track with my writing and helping me find balance between producing scholarship and maintaining health and happiness. Finally, thank you to the friends and colleagues in the communities I was a part of during the dissertation process that helped me understand embodiment and community in new ways. You helped me not only think about embodiment, but also to feel it. Thank you. vi EMBODYING THE WEST: A LITERARY AND CULTURAL HISTORY OF ENVIRONMENT, BODY, AND BELIEF by JULIE WILLIAMS B.A., English, University of Montana, 2002 B.A., Political Science, University of Montana, 2002 M.A., Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2009 ABSTRACT My dissertation challenges the dominant narrative identity about Western embodiment and opens the field of Western literary studies as it explores what the West looks like to women writers for whom it is not a space of regeneration through violence. I argue that women’s writing reconceptualizes Western literature, creating a counter- narrative about American identity by shaping a space for and a discourse about the embodied experiences that have been marginalized, silenced, and ignored. Through examining discourses of health and embodiment in women’s writing about the American West from the 1880s to the present day, my study brings together a diverse archive of narratives about bodies that have been excluded from cultural conceptions of the West: women with non-normative gender and sexual identities, American Indian women writers, atomic protestors and atomic beauty queens, and people with disabilities. My project drafts a new paradigm as it thinks of embodiment in the West, one that recognizes vii the body as both a physical object and a political one, and argues that the physical body holds meaning for the republic and its values. I focus on the tactics of storytelling and community building to disrupt dominant narratives that limit perceptions and representations of Western embodiment and what meanings that holds in our culture. The chapters are organized around themes that drive different manifestations of embodiment: alternative models of gender and sexual expression in chapter one, how the negotiation of language creates new modes of belonging in the stories of American Indian women’s embodied experiences in chapter two, the move from the West as a space of nuclear pageantry to one of protest in chapter three, and expressions of disability that push back against an ablest view of the West in chapter four. Chapters are not ordered chronologically; rather, they present different topics of embodiment and follow these threads through time to tease out the changing cultural landscape of Western embodiment. “Embodying the West” addresses a blind spot in Western literary and cultural history as it constructs an alternate genealogy of writers to make legible non- normative conceptions about the West and the bodies that inhabit it. viii Table of Contents List of Figures………………………………………………………………………… ix Introduction………………………………………………………………………….... 1 Chapter I: Walking, Riding, Shooting their Way to Freedom: How Narratives of Western Women’s Movement Advanced Gender and Sexual Liberation ………. 20 Chapter II: Telling and Surviving History in American Indian Women’s Writing ……………………………………………………………………………………….... 66 Chapter III: From Pageantry to Protest: Women’s Mark on the Atomic West .......................................................………………………………………………….. 116 Chapter IV: Waist High in the West: Expanding Horizons through Inclusive Perspectives ……………………………...……………………………………….... 153 Afterward: Continued Mobility, Continued Protest: Putting Our Bodies in the Streets ……………………………………………………………………………… 190 Works Cited ……………………………………………………………………….. 198 ix List of Figures Figure 1. Annie Oakley Holding a Bouquet, 1912, William F. Cody Collection, Buffalo Bill Center of the West……………….………………………………………… 28 Figure 2. Annie Oakley with Medals, Vincent Mercaldo Collection, Buffalo Bill Center of the West……………………………………………………………………… 31 Figure 3. Allen & Ginter’s cigarettes advertising card, 1880-1900, James Wojtowicz Collection, Buffalo Bill Center of the West …………………………………… 31 Figure 4. Annie Oakley in front of her tent at Chicago World’s Fair, 1893. MS 006 William F. Cody Collection, Buffalo Bill Center of the West ………………… 33 Figure 5. Annie Oakley Rides the Sterling Bicycle, Advertisement ca. 1898…………. 35 Figure 6. “Peripatetic Philosophers of This Many-Sided Town,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, May 29, 1910 ……………………………………………… 55 Figure 7. Mary MacLane’s non-traditional view of marriage, Library of Congress photo, 1918 …………………………………………………………………………… 59 Figure 8. “Wards of the Nation—Their First Vacation From School,” Harpers Weekly, 1899. Fray Angelico Chavez History Library, New Mexico History Museum …………………………………………………………………………………..96