Mamaw: A Novel of an Outlaw Mother by Susan Dodd
1989; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.1989.0008
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
Resumo176 Western American Literature of sexual union. Dulcie’s alcoholic husband interrupts their idyll. After Dulcie takes her dying husband to a hospital, Arliss returns to New York, electrifies his followers with ideas derived from Dulcie’s, and becomes engaged to the daughter of a powerful politician. Dulcie trustingly joins Arliss in New York, believing that his highminded social principles also apply to his personal life, but he cares more about the threat to his position than about her feelings. When she realizes she has been “used—exploited,” she stabs him, escapes unseen, and returns to the healing desert. As Graulich indicates, Austin modeled Arliss on Lincoln Steffens, who dumped her for another woman. At their worst, the men in Austin’s novels are egocentric, at their best, inept, unless they learn from an earth mother or Mother Earth. Arliss muffs his chance, and by telling the story largely from his perspective, Austin mercilessly exposes his hypocrisy. Austin’s editor identified the novella’s weakness when he rejected it because “the hero’s defection and his subsequent murder by the lady are not made absolutely convincing.” Arliss’s treatment of Dulcie in New York is so heartless that his portrait sometimes seems a man-hating diatribe. Though her “cactus thorn” foreshadows the stabbing, Dulcie herself neither exhibits a capacity for violence nor shows that Arliss’s death is essential to her peace, as other foreshadowing suggests, and not mere revenge. One suspects that Austin’sfury dimmed her artistic judgment. Nevertheless its themes and lyrical evocations of the desert make Cactus Thorn a welcome addition to the Austin canon. RAE G. BALLARD Pasadena City College Mamaw: A Novel of an Outlaw Mother. By Susan Dodd. (New York: Viking, 1988. 348 pages, $18.95.) In the “Author’sAfterword” to her novel Mamaw Susan Dodd states that the portrait of Zerelda (James) Samuel that she viewed in the James’s home stead near Kansas City, Missouri, inspired her to write the story of the mother of Jesse and Frank James. A photocopy of this portrait fills the front book jacket of the novel, and it is this face that Dodd “tried to be faithful to” in her depiction of Mamaw. To readers of outlaw narratives of the American West this novel adds a dimension to the usual plots that have illustrated the lives ofthe James brothers as Robin Hoods, avengers of inequities, paranoid gunfighters, or revolution aries. Where Dodd differs is in her concentration on the life and personality of Zerelda James while presenting the James brothers as dissenters against Yankee politics (Missouri Compromise issue) and Yankee money (trains and banks). The mother of these legendary men, Dodd implies, had to possess the traits that steeled her sons to their infamous exploits. Reviews 177 The personality that emerges isthe stuff of myth itself. As a youth Zerelda grew large-bodied, wild, and full of primitive appetites drawn directly from the frontier landscape. These physical characteristics were balanced, accord ing to Dodd, with a pagan “knowing” that was at once intuitive and realistic. In the novel, it isolates her from any institution, group, or savior (all for fools, says Zerelda). She survives the loss of children and husband, the encroach ments of mobs, and the relentless pressure of the law after her boys. Even the amputation of an arm, resulting from an attack by Pinkertons, does not bring her down. All through these struggles she communes with her sons, to whom she has passed on her “knowing” in pagan ritual. Thus, faithful to the face of Mamaw, Susan Dodd has imagined a force (prophetess and earthmother) out of the records of Missouri folklore and frontier history to justify the origins and legends of the James family. Mamaw is a convincing portrait finally because the narrative captures the simple crude ness of the people and times and does so with a voice that speaks in the vernacular of borderer culture. DAVID HECKER Olympic College Trail of Tears:The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. ByJohn Ehle. (New York: Doubleday Anchor Press, 1988. 424 pages, $19.95.) The removal of the Cherokee Indians to Oklahoma on a death march called The Trail of Tears is...
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