Abstract

My purpose here, then, is to reexamine a form which has already attracted considerable attention and, more particularly, by utilizing precisely that same mythopoetic analytic grid established by Fielder and Slotkin to reread on of its most popular incarnations, only adding to it a feminist perspective. My reading will thus avoid the unacknowledged and unexamined assumption which marks their work: the assumption of gender. Nonfeminist critics, after all, tend to ignore the fact of women as readers as much as they tend to ignore the potentially symbolic significations of gender within a text. Fiedler, for example, obviously focuses on a male audience when he asserts that "westering, in America, means leaving the domain of the female" . And Slotkin, in making the same mistake, ignores the fact that women, too, required imaginative constructs through which to accommodate themselves to the often harsh realities of the western wilderness.Annette Kolodny, the author of The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters, has recently completed the first volume of Westering Women, a projected multivolume analysis of women's imaginative responses to the successive American frontiers. She is presently working on Dancing through the Minefield, a study of the theoretical political, and methodological concerns of feminist literary criticism