Playing House in the American West
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19th- and 20th-century West
20-50
A01=Cathryn Halverson
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American West
Author_Cathryn Halverson
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Category1=Non-Fiction
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COP=United States
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domestic life
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frontier culture
gender
gender and household labor
gender expectations
home and family
identity
Language_English
material culture
migration and settlement
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place
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private life
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public roles
social history
softlaunch
women's history
Product details
- ISBN 9780817318031
- Weight: 456g
- Dimensions: 154 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 26 Nov 2013
- Publisher: The University of Alabama Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Examining an eclectic group of western women’s autobiographical texts—canonical and otherwise—Playing House in the American West argues for a distinct regional literary tradition characterised by strategic representations of unconventional domestic life.
The controlling metaphor Cathryn Halverson uses in her engrossing study is “playing house.” From Caroline Kirkland and Laura Ingalls Wilder to Willa Cather and Marilynne Robinson, from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, western authors have persistently embraced wayward or eccentric housekeeping to prove a woman’s difference from western neighbours and eastern readers alike.
The readings in Playing House investigate the surprising textual ends to which westerners turn the familiar terrain of the home: evaluating community; arguing for different conceptions of race and class; and perhaps most especially, resisting traditional gender roles. Western women writers, Halverson argues, render the home as a stage for autonomy, resistance, and imagination rather than as a site of sacrifice and obligation.
The western women examined in Playing House in the American West are promoted and read as representatives of a region, as insiders offering views of distant and intriguing ways of life, even as they conceive of themselves as outsiders. By playing with domestic conventions, they recast the region they describe, portraying the West as a place that fosters female agency, individuality, and subjectivity.
The controlling metaphor Cathryn Halverson uses in her engrossing study is “playing house.” From Caroline Kirkland and Laura Ingalls Wilder to Willa Cather and Marilynne Robinson, from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, western authors have persistently embraced wayward or eccentric housekeeping to prove a woman’s difference from western neighbours and eastern readers alike.
The readings in Playing House investigate the surprising textual ends to which westerners turn the familiar terrain of the home: evaluating community; arguing for different conceptions of race and class; and perhaps most especially, resisting traditional gender roles. Western women writers, Halverson argues, render the home as a stage for autonomy, resistance, and imagination rather than as a site of sacrifice and obligation.
The western women examined in Playing House in the American West are promoted and read as representatives of a region, as insiders offering views of distant and intriguing ways of life, even as they conceive of themselves as outsiders. By playing with domestic conventions, they recast the region they describe, portraying the West as a place that fosters female agency, individuality, and subjectivity.
Cathryn Halverson is the author of Maverick Autobiographies: Women Writers and the American West, 1900-1936. She has published articles in Western American Literature, College Literature, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Children's Literature in Education, American Studies, and American Indian Culture and Research Journal. She teaches at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
