Comparing Sexuality in Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage and Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times

Sexuality of the Frontierswoman in Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage and Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times

The presentation of femininity in Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times is a strong departure from the heroine of Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage. Through the metaphor of the gun as the embodiment of masculinity, both authors closely examine the complexities of the sexualized relationship of a frontierswoman to the men of her society. Doctorow mirrors the tensions present in Grey's novel though Molly acts as an extraordinarily different vision of what the West required of a woman than Jane Withersteen. Both novels reach a sexual climax as the heroine engages the men of her society in a violent action of blood and birth.

Though it is a more desolate and harsh portrayal of a woman's station, Doctorow places Molly in a similar situation as the victim of her society to the more traditional Riders of the Purple Sage. While Jane Withersteen is certainly not subjected to violence in the same way that the Bad Man from Bodie raped, beat and nearly killed Molly, Jane is still victimized by her community. Doctorow's portrayal of the conflict is abstracted in ways that Grey's is not. In choosing to call Turner "The Bad Man from Bodie" for the majority of the novel, Doctorow makes him more an abstract notion of violence rather than the more human figure of jealousy Mormon Elder, Tull. However, in spite of the abstractness in Doctorow's characterization, Jane is presented as an outsider in her community and is offered up as a sacrifice to the peace, much in the same way that Blue exhorts Molly to reenter Avery's saloon.

From this communal point of victimization, however, Doctorow departs from the gender conventions es...

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... Pass. The falling rubble acts as the hymen restored, preserving Jane and Lassiter and Fay inside the womb, inside Eden.

Thus, both novels examine the highly sexual tensions between the predominate female figures and the idea of masculinity as encapsulated by the gun, or more abstractly a weapon. Doctorow, though the tensions parallel Grey's, counters the older work on nearly every point, finally culminating in a recognition of the horror that frontier society creates. Much like the action of his novel, Grey retreats into a more idyllic vision of the West. However, he does admit the complexity of the gendered roles in the Western, though not to the extent that Doctorow casts the action in an Oedipal drama.

Works Cited

Doctorow, E. L. Welcome to Hard Times. New York: Penguin, 1998.

Grey, Zane. Riders of the Purple Sage. New York: Penguin, 1990.