The Deconstruction of the Traditional American West

Abstract

Frederick Jackson Turner’s impact cannot be overstated when it comes to the presence of the American West in not only American history but in popular culture as well. Turner’s hyper-masculine version of the West is well documented as being fully imprinted into the rhetoric that many Americans continue to use even today when discussing the ‘pioneering’ and ‘establishment’ of the western United States. Within Turner, the roles of women are regularly ignored, Native Americans are often relegated to the ‘Vanishing Indian’ trope, and impacts of settler colonialism on the environment are consistently disregarded (1893). Laura Ingalls Wilder, however, writes a pioneer narrative that is not the Turnerian tale of male success and adventure that generally comes to mind when discussing Western mythmaking. Rather, Wilder’s autobiographical Little House series works toward the destruction of the masculinized West that has long outlived Turner in American culture. Wilder’s main character, Laura, has a renegade personality when it comes to, most particularly, the rules of femininity as established by her mother, and thus, Wilder is an activist of sorts as her works offer a nontraditional narrative that exemplifies what a girl’s life could be like during Western Expansion. The Little House series brings voice to white females who, as Laura experiences in the novel, were usually shushed rather than welcomed in terms of conversations and situations that greatly affected their own lives.

Keywords

• pioneer
• gender
• the American West
• masculinity
• femininity