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Treacherous Texts: U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846–1946 ed. by Mary Chapman and Angela Mills (review)

The strength of Halverson’s book is in its acknowledgment of these moments when selffashioning and “playing house” are undone by imperial power and social hierarchies, all the while focusing on how, despite these “grim realities,” women’s writing about the West so frequently strives to offer “more palatable versions of their lives” (175). Playing House in the American West covers a wide range of texts, and its scope and ambition are truly impressive. That scope and ambition, though, can sometimes raise more questions than the book is able to answer. One curious absence in the book is the category of modernism. The emphasis throughout on simplicity and scarcity, and especially the book’s focus on texts from the early twentieth century to the 1960s, both canonical and lesserread, seems to complicate conventional understandings of modernist aesthetics. For example, Cather’s interest in resisting Victorian adornment and M. F. K. Fisher’s endorsement of simple, oneor twocourse meals as opposed to multicourse dinners seem to have more in common aesthetically (and perhaps politically) than because they were both ideas born in the region under consideration. Nevertheless, Halverson’s book is valuable because it makes such a comparison seem necessary. Playing House in the American West persuasively argues for the importance of domesticity, and its multiple modes, to a wide range of women who wrote about and made both fictional and real homes in the West.