Reframing the West: New Fiction Makes Room for Voices Long Denied
Their eyes meet across a crowded street in 1870s Dodge City, Kan., the gunslinging bounty hunter and the impulsive rebel, one a dark-haired loner, the other a striking redhead: two young women destined to work out their mutual sparks on the frontier where Owen Wister enshrined the all-male, all-white Western genre novel with “The Virginian,” in 1902.
In Claudia Cravens’s debut novel, “Lucky Red,” the two main characters are Bridget Shaughnessy, earning her keep as a “sporting woman” at the Buffalo Queen Saloon, and Spartan Lee, a notorious sharpshooter who has touched down in Bridget’s life bearing the warning line, “Whenever I tire of a place, I just light out.” The sentiment, its history reverberating from Mark Twain to Zane Grey to Charles Portis to Cormac McCarthy, animates Cravens’s interrogation of traditional stereotypes and story lines in Western fiction.
So does the abiding trope of a mysterious stranger riding into town to upend law and order, minds and hearts. “I love that archetype,” Cravens said over lunch at the Greenwich Village restaurant Cowgirl, “but I thought, ‘what if the stranger Bridget falls in love with is a woman instead of a man?’” Cravens, a seventh-generation Californian who identifies as queer-bisexual, said that “playing with the genre and the mythic space” gave her imagination a home on the range.
She is not alone. A wave of new fiction, attuned to both revised approaches to American history and personal responses to the meaning of the West, is reframing the idea and image of the region to include realities and subject matter long ignored or denied.
