Dionne Brockman

Ecocriticism

10 October 2000

Fairbanks, Carol. Prairie Women: Images in American and Canadian Fiction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986.

When thinking of an example of a harsh environment, more often than not we picture a place where extreme temperatures and weather conditions exist year round. What we may not honestly think of off the top of our heads is the precariousness of America’s prairies. Carol Fairbanks offers a brief survey of over one hundred and twenty different short stories and novels, reflecting on the lives of women as they endured the extremes of the prairie. What came as a shock in reading her book is that her survey is based solely on the feminist perspective and lives of female characters in the survey, which consists of female writers from Laura Ingalls Wilder on up to Louis Erdrich and Margaret Atwood. Fairbanks covers the past two hundred years of female writers, American and Canadian alike, in her search for the female perspective on prairie life.

Fairbanks book is separated into eight different chapters. Chapter one gives a brief introduction to her aims and how she will be explaining her purpose. Chapter two delves into the women and their description / relationship with the prairie landscape. Chapter three consists of books written by ‘first wave women,’ women who crossed the prairie with their husbands and fathers in the late 1800s. Chapter four examines the woman in relationship to the Native Americans. Chapter five researches the ‘second wave women’ and how their lives differed from the ‘first wave women.’ Chapter six brings us into the prairie town, while chapter seven invites discussion on those who were ‘prairie born, prairie bred.’ Last, chapter eight ties everything up with an appropriate “Miyopayiwin” - The Unity of All Things under Sky.

While examining all eight chapters, I cannot help but think that as far an our Ecocriticism class goes, chapter I - Introduction was the most helpful, simply because for the duration of the chapter, Fairbanks discusses the prairie, and not the feminist view of the lives of those who fictitously lived on the prairie. Although “fiction provides important clues to the ways women reacted to the frontier experience”, the vast majority of the book is based on the feminist critique of and the ‘reaction’ to the frontier, and not the frontier itself (28). And while some of us may have experienced a prairie at some point in our lives, chapter one gives us some concrete explanation of what to picture when we talk of prairies.

Dora Aydelotte gives a breathtaking definition of a prairie when she describes it. “Straight to the sky-line swept great waves of prairie land, lifting in one grassy swell after another. In every direction it was the same - miles of bare, rolling country, with trees keeping close to the stream - beds along the winding draws” (qtd 2). J. E. Weaver further describes the prairie as having “level areas that also consist of ‘knolls, steep bluffs, rolling hilly land, valleys, and extensive alluvial flood plains” (qtd. 2). The prairie can entertain extreme temperature ranges, from 100 degrees Fahrenheit to -50 degrees Fahrenheit, mostly because there are no wind barriers, and the air masses move freely across the country. We all know the prairie is subject to tornadoes, dust storms and hailstorms, but it also falls victim to severe frosts and droughts, and heat waves (2).

There is also a difference between the high plains and the prairie. The prairie is made up of any grasses considered ‘tall’ or ‘medium’, including big bluestem, little bluestem, and Indian grasses (3). The ‘short’ grass regions are considered “too arid for agricultural settlements” (3). Other qualifiers that dictate the differences between plains and prairies are: whether or not the soil is 60% arable or not, the soil composition, crops grown, native flower, tree, animal and bird life, wind, rain type and amount, temperatures, distance of the horizon, flatness or rolling qualities of landscape, and the intensity of the sky (3). While Fairbanks did not go into detail on what these each mean specifically, I imagine just picturing a prairie gives us an idea.

Fairbanks does tell her readers that most methods of writing the prairie literature was done through some sort of contact with the prairie. Many based their piece on a city or town they lived in for awhile while others interviewed and were given first-hand stories from settlers or first generation descendants. Still, other writers were the descendants, and wrote auto- or semi-autobiographical tales (28).

In Chapter II - Women and Prairie Landscape, Fairbanks begins by describing the changes wrought over the prairie, and described six different ways the settlers saw the vast, flowing fields. In fact,

a survey of the images of the prairie projected in books, magazines, and newspapers over two hundred years reveals a confusing range. Initially, the prairies of both Canada and the United States were described in negative terms [...] the prairie is ‘flat,’ ‘bleak,’ ‘inscrutable and unsmiling,’ ‘dreary,’ ‘unchanging,’ ‘without point or meaning,’ ‘godless,’ ‘blighted and withered,’ ‘barren,’ and ‘debilitating.’ (34)

The prairie is basically given every adjective possible to describe a place that is completely uninhabitable.

The six ways settlers saw the prairie were, prairie as: garden, fertile farmland, Garden of the World, wilderness, real estate, and wasteland. The prairie as garden shows pieces of literature describing the sheer beauty of the vast, floral hills (69). Prairie as fertile farmland demonstrates the hopes and fears that accompany any hardworking farmer (70). Prairie as Garden of the World equates the prairie with “an Eden,” “a New Jerusalem,” and “a Utopia” (71). Prairie as wilderness shows the importance of adapting to the varying wilderness and accepting it on the prairie’s terms in order to survive (71-72). Prairie as real estate shows the greediness of the settlers. Many saw “the land as real estate to be purchased at minimal prices when [other settlers] [...] fail[ed], and then to be held until demand brings an enormous profit” (73). Last, with prairie as wasteland, some settlers saw the prairie as merely nothing. Nothing at all (73).

Chapter III - First Wave Women discusses the first wave of women in the late 1800s, who Fairbanks divides into three categories: the prairie angel, prairie victim, and frontier hero. The prairie angel is the woman who is the epitome of thriving motherhood, satiating sustenance, and bearer of culture (76-77). The prairie victim is the woman who, though maybe not physically suffering, definitely are emotionally and missing family and friends ‘back home’ (77). The frontier hero is the woman who actively participates in the journey, the work involved in surviving, the ordeals with nature and isolation, and the satisfaction of watching farms and communities grow (81). And last, Fairbanks points out that “the major settlements of the grasslands in the prairie provinces began in 1880, and, by 1914 all the good land was gone” (84).

The remaining chapters in the book are based on the female characters in varying novels and short stories, and how she deals with different aspects of her life, not her environment. In IV - White Women and Indians, we see literature that instills or rips out the stereotypes of Native Americans and their treatment of and by the invading settler. In V - Second Wave Women, we see chapter three, just with newer generations of women. In VI - Prairie town, we do see more description of the prairie, but all excerpts from literature go in one of two directions: the prairie town was a molding lump in the center of the vast beauty of the prairie, or the prairie town was heaven on earth, an oasis for the settlers. In VII - Prairie Born, Prairie Bred we get a glimpse of how the changes over the years may have affected some native ‘prairians’. In a contemporary novel, Sharon Riis’s True Story of Ida Johnson, “Ida concludes a description of her homeplace with this abrupt comment: “It’s a children’s paradise but,” she adds, “time eats children” (qtd 222). And time has eaten the prairie, as well. The last chapter, VIII - “Miyopayiwin” - The Unity of All things under Sky, Fairbanks speaks of the endurance it takes to survive in the frontier prairie, and the uniting of land with settler rather than the conquering of it.

Although there is a lot of worthy information to be had in several different areas, whether it is Native American issues, exploring and pushing west, class issues, or gender issues, Prairie Women was not the easiest text to read ecocritically. If nothing else, though, the book is a fountain of primary or secondary texts to be used in other ways.