The difficulties that pioneers endured while taming the frontier have been well documented by historians, writers, and literary scholars through the years. From the 1820s through the 1840s, James Fenimore Cooper's rugged fictional hero, Natty Bumpo, traversed the prairies, a solitary figure fighting the wilderness and noble savages; in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner evaluated the contributions of democracy and individualism in the development of the frontier in his "Frontier Thesis"; and Louis L'Amour and Larry McMurtey's twentieth century cowboys battled outlaws and range laws to preserve the freedom of the West. Myriads of writings such as these attest to how men's masculinity and selfhood have been defined through their "conquest" of the West.

However, until the mid 1970s, most scholars overlooked women's contributions during the western settlement period. In Frontier Women: The Trans-Mississippi West 1840-1880, Julie Roy Jeffrey argues that historians were omitting "the experiences of almost half the pioneers crossing the Mississippi." A few historians "briefly contrasted the adventurous male pioneer with his presumably passive and long-suffering wife," yet they neglected to consider the records left by the women themselves (xii). The settling of the frontier was a "family affair," believes Jeffrey, and she draws upon over two hundred women's journals, reminiscences, and collections of letters to redress this imbalance. Joanna L. Stratton profiles the lives of over eight hundred Kansas women in her work, Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier. She, too, believes that "women have constituted the most spectacular casualty in traditional history" (11).

In the current re-evaluation of the American heritage, previously ignored texts by women and minorities have gained prominence and respect, especially in the revisioning of the West. Using these sources, scholars are reassessing the accepted stereotypes of women pioneers, such as the myth of the "gentle tamers," refined ladies who reluctantly followed their husbands West, losing their health and sanity on the lonely prairies. The Women's West, edited by Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, examines the lives of frontier women, questioning these female stereotypes and presenting women "as actors, not as onlookers in history" (7). Deborah Fink, in Agrarian Women, although challenging the assumption that farm life on the frontier freed women from prescribed gender roles, illustrates the importance women played in fulfilling the Jeffersonian myth of an agrarian utopia: "The agrarian dream of the individual farmer working his own land and reaping his own profits contradicted the fact that farming by its nature is a collective endeavor. At no time in human history has farming been accomplished by single persons working separately and in isolation" (191).

Today, the significant and diverse roles that women played in the settling of the West have become an accepted part of America's western heritage. Unfortunately, most images of western women, especially homesteaders, depict the dark side of the frontier experience. In The Female Frontier, Glenda Riley writes:

One way to add a new dimension to this cardboard image of the typical pioneer woman would be to take away the grimace on her face as she struggles in her elaborate Victorian dress, made for serving tea in the parlor, with the wheelbarrow full of buffalo chips that she has collected for winter fuel--and replace it with a grin that acknowledges the irony of the situation. The civilizing process required more than a strong body, a courageous heart, and a vision for the future. An active sense of humor was as essential to pioneer woman as the windmill and the washboard.

One more area that needs further study is the role of humor, especially the literary humor of western women writers, in the settlement of the West. Louis B. Wright, in "Human Comedy in Early America," describes early settlers as "a serious people struggling to establish themselves in a wilderness," (17) yet he admits that "the comic spirit was not always absent when they sat down to write" (18). In Laughter in the Wilderness, W. Howland Kenney explains the importance of humor in the life of America's pioneers: "laughter helped them order their world and protect their sanity" (12). The hardships and isolation of the early settlers made a sense of humor necessary for survival. "Laughter produced the illusion of leveling obstacles in a world which was full of unaccustomed obstacles," states Constance Rourke in her pioneering study, American Humor: A Study of the National Character. "Laughter created ease, and even more, a sense of unity, among a people who were not yet a nation and who were seldom joined in stable communities" (86). Unfortunately, except for Caroline Kirkland's A New Home--Who'll Follow? (1839) and Marietta Holley's turn-of-the-century stories about Samantha Allen, few works of women's frontier humor have been explored. A closer look will reveal that some of our frontier literary foremothers laughed out loud, both at themselves and at society.

Elinore Pruitt Stewart, best known for her works, Letters of a Woman Homesteader (1914) and Letters on an Elk Hunt (1915), was born in poverty in the Indian Territory in 1876. Orphaned at eighteen, she struggled to support five of her younger brothers and sisters by working for the railroad. By 1906, she had left her husband, or been deserted, and had moved with her small daughter Jerrine to Denver, Colorado. Ill and desperate, Stewart decided to take control of her destiny and become a homesteader. She answered an ad in a newspaper for a position as housekeeper on a Wyoming ranch that promised "a good permanent home for the right party," and eight weeks later she had filed on a homestead claim and married her employer.

Stewart soon became a staunch proponent of homesteading. She believed that "temperament has much to do with success in any undertaking, and persons afraid of coyotes and work and loneliness had better let ranching alone" (LWH 215). Fortunately, Stewart's temperament suited itself ideally to homesteading, for she claims, "I am a firm believer in laughter. I am real superstitutious about it. I think if Bad Luck came along, he would take to his heels if some one laughed right loudly" (LWH 135). Because of her positive outlook on life and her strong sense of humor, she thrived emotionally in the wilderness: "I know I shall succeed; other women have succeeded. I know of several who are now where they can laugh at past trials" (LWH 134).

Another little-known nineteenth century pioneer, Kate M. Cleary, who came as a bride to Hubbell, Nebraska, in 1884, also used laughter to survive the poverty of her childhood and the cultural gap between life in Chicago and in a brand-new Nebraska village nestled in a valley near the Kansas border. Born in New Brunswick in 1863, Cleary wrote three novels as well as hundreds of stories and poems for newspapers and periodicals during her short life to help support her family. During the economic depression of the 1890s, when her husband's business and health were failing, her mother and two daughters had died from illnesses, and she was struggling against an addiction to morphine prescribed by her family physician after a difficult childbirth, she penned, ironically, her most humorous stories and poems. Laughter came to her rescue.

Cleary's friend, journalist Elia Peattie, notes Cleary's ability to cope with adversity through her humorous temperament. In her column for the Omaha World Herald, in an 1893 article entitled "A Bohemian in Nebraska," Peattie exclaims that "the art of living is not a thing controlled by environment and circumstances." Cleary is an example "for some of our serious, hard-working American women to know how humor, imagination, ability and adaptability can illuminate our lonely western life." Upon entering Cleary's home, Peattie writes, one is immediately ushered into a comfortable chair in the book-lined living room and handed a glass of beer: "The big world of letters is around you. You laugh with all those who have ever, by laughing, made themselves famous. You feel as if the spirits of all those who were cleverest that ever you have known, had come out with you over the wind-racked plains, and were there, drinking beer and laughing, too."

Both Stewart and Cleary, although called upon by necessity to be as heroic as the most stereotypical American pioneer woman, could, nevertheless, write stories that exemplified a less serious side of the western settlement experience. Through humor, they were able to achieve a balance between the hardships they were called upon to endure and its ironies. Emphasizing common sense, reason, and self-reliance, their humorous writings became acts of empowerment and survival.

Like the common difficulties they encountered in their lives on America's frontier, the loss of children, the isolation from communities of women as well as other writers, and poverty, Stewart and Cleary both employed similar devices in their humorous writings: vernacular or dialect humor, malapropisms, caricature, exaggeration, and verbal witticisms. However, the traditional comic personae of the eiron and the alazon are especially effective in their writings. According to Northrop Frye, the eiron is the witty, self-deflating fool who pretends to be less than he or she is, and the alazon is the boastful impostor who appears to be more than he or she is. Rourke describes these types in American literature as the "backwoodsman" and the "Yankee," stating that "their comedy, their irreverent wisdom, their sudden changes and adroit adaptations, provided emblems for a pioneer people who required resilience as a prime trait" (Wallace 86).

These types serve a broader purpose for their creators than simple entertainment; quite often they function as satire to expose personal and cultural flaws. "In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries," states Ronald Wallace, in God Be with the Clown: Humor in American Poetry, "as traditional views of the world were breaking down, as traditional values were eroding, poets turned to comedy both as a means of encouraging the destruction of atrophied ideas and beliefs and as a means of saving those ideas and beliefs that seemed indispensable" (32). The use of the eiron is especially effective for women writers, believes Nancy Walker in her article "Alegaste or Eiron: American Women Writers and the Sense of Humor," for this is "the figure, who, by pretending to be innocent, points out society's faults through his own naive questioning of the world around him" (105).

The same is true of the humor of Stewart and Cleary. Through their comedic perception of the frontier experience and their use of the eiron and alazon personae, they entertain their readers while pointing out follies and absurdities in the lives of western pioneers.

In Elinore Pruitt Stewart's Letters of a Woman Homesteader, Stewart herself, or rather the persona of "The Woman Homesteader" that Stewart adopts, is the eiron character. The Woman Homesteader refers often to herself as a "tenderfoot" and a comedic device, even after many years of residence in Wyoming. In a chapter entitled "A Charming Adventure and Zebulon Pike," Stewart emphasizes her naiveté in a camping trip to the mountains that she undertakes with her three-year old daughter. A heavy snow surprises them the second night out. "Such a snowstorm I never saw!" she exclaims and derides herself soundly: "I began to think how many kinds of idiot I was. Here I was thirty or forty miles from home, in the mountains where no one goes in the winter and where I knew the snow got to be ten or fifteen feet deep" (33). True to the eiron character type, Stewart seemingly deflates herself; only a tenderfoot would do something so foolish.

However, Stewart's niaveté is only a guise, for it is difficult to view Stewart as a foolish innocent in this story. In all of her adventures, she exhibits her expertise. In this particular incident, she takes two horses to carry her daughter, herself, and their supplies for the first night, then sends one home as he is no longer necessary, having reserved her other horse's strength for the rest of the trip. She knows how to stake out a horse to graze, build a roaring fire, fashion fragrant beds out of pine boughs and locate them "in an angle of a sheer wall of rock where [they] would be protected against the wind" (26), shoot rabbits and squirrels, catch strings of trout, and cook them all over perfect coals to be done exactly on time for breakfast or supper, adding mouth-watering side dishes of bacon, coffee, roasted potatoes, and icy, pure spring water. Obviously, Stewart's ineptitude is only a pretense, but it serves to set her character up as a tenderfoot who can describe the West with ironic innocence.

Even after Stewart discovers the snowstorm, her sense of humor surfaces, and she declares, "I could never see the good of moping," and begins to take action (33). Fixing a hearty breakfast to give them strength for the treacherous journey, she checks her supplies of food and ammunition so that she could ration it carefully, and then considers her options. She decides to wait until the snow stops to turn the horse loose, for she knows "he would go home and that he would leave a trail so that I would be found" (34). While waiting for the snow to cease, she goes hunting to provide rations for the day and sees smoke. Knowing help is near, she breaks camp, rides toward it, and discovers Zebbie, who accompanies her out of the mountains the next day. She takes a calculated risk in her outing, but knows how to deal with the consequences. Her courage and backwoodsmanship avert disaster, and in losing her way, she finds a new friend, a funny, little old man who serves as comic relief in the story. More important, she laughs about her experience afterwards. She does not need to be rescued by her husband or "be powerfully humble afterwards" (34). In this episode, Stewart emphasises her role as a tenderfoot, one who can laugh at her own follies and share the secret of her ineptitude with her readers--as long as they don't tell her husband.

In another story, "Sedalia and Regalia," the Woman Homesteader functions again as eiron as she meets the Lane family and learns their story. Stewart's innocent persona is seemingly impressed by the hardships the Lanes endure in their trek to the West:

Mr. Lane erects a shelter, starts a fire, and soon a baby girl is born. However, "'Mis' Lane' kept feeling no better fast, and about the time they got the poor baby dressed a second one came. . . . Luckily the fire lasted until the babies were dressed and the mother began to feel better, for there was no wood" (48).

The situation Stewart describes is heart-rendering; however, the pathos of the story is undercut by Stewart's humorous comments alluding to the lack of knowledge and common sense displayed by the Lanes. First, Mrs. Lane doesn't have sense enough to know that she is even pregnant; second, the family is traveling over the plains in November, too late in the season for a safe journey; and, third, they don't had the foresight to gather enough fuel for the obviously wintry weather. Stewart quips, "That she told me herself is proof she did n't die, I guess, but it is right hard to believe that she did n't" (49). She adds ironically, "Mr. Lane is a powerful good husband. He waited two whole days for his wife to gain strength before he resumed the journey, and on the third morning he actually carried her to the wagon. Just think of it! Could more be asked of any man?" (48). While appearing to be impressed with the adventure, The Woman Homesteader satirizes the ignorance and lack of "backwoodsmanship" of the Lanes. Playing the role of innocent onlooker, Stewert also chides men for their inability to understand a woman's suffering.

As the story progresses, Mrs. Lane and her daughter Sedalia take on larger comedic roles as alazon types, while the "t'other one" (49), her twin Regalia, serves as the eiron. True to tradition, fat and plain Regalia, because of her rustic charm and common sense, wins her pretentious twin's suitor. The boastful mother and daughter are deflated, especially when Zebbie overhears Sedalia talking about a "function" and warns everyone not to catch it from her: "So people edged away from Sedalia, and some asked her if she had seen a doctor and what he thought of her case. Poor girl, I'm afraid she did n't have a very enjoyable time" (56). The old man's ignorance of the definition of "function," a gathering of people not a contagious disease, and the fact the boastful mother and daughter did not know the meaning of the word either, make the women look doubly ridiculous--first for not knowing what the simple word means, and, second, for not knowing that they do not know.

A more obvious "tenderfoot" story appears in "The Horse Thieves." The Woman Homesteader laments to Mrs. Louderer that the Old West no longer exists. Mrs. Louderer takes this as a challenge and exclaims, "Dot yust shows how much it iss you do not know. You shall come to mine house and when away you come it shall be wiser as when you left" (158-9). Mrs. Louderer accompanies The Woman Homesteader out to witness a branding at her cattle camp and to view the Old West in action. However, this story becomes humorously complex when another innocent enters the scene, the blustering "N'Yawk," an alazon character who boasts that "he was n't afraid of no durned outlaw,--said his father had waded in bloody gore up to his neck and that he was a chip off the old block"(167). Brazenly equating himself with his father, he brags that he will react to danger with courage.

During the night, a posse rides into the camp in a fruitless search for horse thieves. The next morning, the cowboys discover that one of the wounded thieves has been there, daringly hidden in N'Yawk's sleeping bag. When the tenderfoot cowboy sees the blood on his shirt, he becomes "white around his mouth" (178). He whines to Mrs. Louderer that he wants to quit: "'I'm sick,' he stammered." Having no patience with cowards, Mrs. Louderer replies, "I know you iss . . . I haf before now seen men get sick when they iss scared to death." Once more N'Yawk calls up the image of his courageous father to attest to his own manhood:"'My old daddy--' he began." Mrs. Louderer does not let the imposter finish his boast: "Yes, I know, he waded the creek vone time und you has had cold feet effer since" (178-9). This dialogue between the backwoodswoman, Mrs. Louderer, and the whimpering fool, N'Yawk, flows smoothly into a humorous one-liner, rounding out Stewart's talent as a humorist. In this episode, the boasting alazon is shown for the coward that he really is. A timid tenderfoot has no place on the Wyoming range where the Wild West stills exists.

The Woman Homesteader sympathizes with N'Yawk when she admits, "Poor fellow, I felt sorry for him." However, her next line undercuts this pity and underlines the fact that she, herself, was not a coward: "I had cold feet myself just then, and I was powerfully anxious to warm them by my own fire." Although she admits that "My own home looked mighty good to me when we drove up that evening" and that she doesn't "want any more wild life on the range," she adds with a humorous gleam in her eye, "not for a while, anyway" (178). Safely home, The Woman Homesteader can laugh at her brush with outlaws and appreciate her warm feet.

In all of these stories, the pretended innocence of The Woman Homesteader is humorously balanced against her common sense wisdom and her knowledge of frontier life. Like Marietta Holley's character, Samantha Allen, an independent-minded wife married to a caricature of a traditional husband, Stewart's persona of The Woman Homesteader "introduces us to the rustic philosopher of sound country stock whose ideas on various issues are grounded in an affection for common sense and faith in its applicability to problems" (Curry 291). Besides giving particulars of the dangers and hardships of frontier experiences, Stewart gently chides those, including herself, who lack the foresight and backwoodsmanship needed in the unpredictable West. The West does not fail its people, she claims, but rather it's the tenderfeet who fail in the West.

In the stories of Kate M. Cleary, especially in her western stories, she utilizes the eiron figure but in a different style than Stewart. Whereas Stewart writes with outer seriousness and inner humor, with a straight face but a smile in her eyes, Cleary's humor is more overtly funny. However, she offers a more satiric look at our pioneer ancestors and ourselves.

Cleary, herself, does not adopt the eiron personae as narrator; rather, the type is presented through characters within the story which she narrates either from a third person omniscient viewpoint or through the eyes of a minor character who serves as a sort of "straight man" to forward the plot. Whichever viewpoint she assumes, she maintains a sophisticated, almost superior detachment from the comic characters, viewing them in realistic objectivity.

The eiron characters in Cleary's stories are complex; either an eiron struggles to maintain his or her rustic sagacity or the character becomes a composite eiron/alazon, a sort of double. These country figures begin as commonsense rustics, eirons whose practical wisdom the reader respects. However, complications arise, usually when social pretensions tempt them, and they act foolishly, often transforming into alazon characters, impostors blustering their way through life. Fortunately, the characters usually become aware of their foolishness, regain their honest backwoods approach to life, and win back the reader's esteem. Cleary's fallen eirons are "fortunate," for they have awakened to the absurdity of affectation and can become, as Linda Morris explains in Women Vernacular Humorists in the Nineteenth-Century: "the perfect vehicle for social judgments"(5).

Cleary pursues this theme of social pentensions in her short story, "An Ornament to Society." Cleary, as author, remains omniscient, outside and above the comic narrative. Cleopatra, a young pioneer girl, is Cleary's eiron, the country rustic, innocent of the burdens of society, who eventually has the courage to stand up against her father's desire for her to be an ornamental lady and, instead, chooses to lead a simple life close to nature. Even her name is heavy with historical implication. The name Cleopatra and that of her twin sister, Helenoftroy, who died as a young child, were suggested by the district school teacher who thought the girls should be named after beautiful, albeit fatally attractive, women. Only Cleo's common sense saves her from the affectations that society tries to impose upon her.

The story begins when Cleo's mother dies with two of her life's wishes unfulfilled; one was to have a black silk dress trimmed with beads and the other was that her daughter should grow up to be "a ornament to sassiety. Them's her own identical words." Harrowsby buries his wife in the beaded, black silk dress, but is perplexed about the second wish: "I'd like awful well to please Hat about it, but--what fetches me is--what is a ornament to sassiety?" (127).

Humor abounds as the rural folk try their hands at definition: an ornament to society should "take an interest in reading polite literature," "be able to speak pieces about war at the Memorial day services," "dress stylish, an' always have her hair frizzed," and do "fancy work--that's the most refined thing I know" (127-8). Unfortunately, Cleo is "an angular, awkward young creature" who prefers farming and working with animals. However, to please her father, she submits to her social education:

Soon, pictures in six-inch gilt frames adorn the walls of the Harrowsby home, and drapes of silk and lace cover the furniture. Cleo realizes and admits the foolishness and pretentiousness of it all to Frank Stanley, the hired man: "It's rubbish--everything I try to do. I know it--you know it, too"(131). When Frank shows her a new black stallion that her father has just purchased, she determines to escape from the stifling, female parlor into the countryside and train the young animal herself. She succeeds, but dislocates her shoulder while doing so. Her father, dismayed, sends her away to a convent upon the recommendation of Mrs. McLelland who advises:

So Harrowsby duly dispatches the miserable Cleo to a convent, but, when Frank comes to visit her, they decide to get married. Her father doesn't object because he has already decided to marry an "ornament" of his own. Although the naive Cleo takes on the role of reluctant alazon to please others, her no-nonsense wisdom prevails. Everyone lives happily ever after, especially Cleo:

In Cleopatra, Cleary creates a sympathetic rustic character, honest and caring about her father's and mother's wishes yet strong enough even to confront the True Woman of the Victorian ideal. In her place, Cleary offers the ideal of the True Western Woman to whom "Life was such a good thing--and health--and energy--and the vast sweep of the immeasurable world around and companionship with birds, and animals, and trees, and streams, and all nature's delicious, ever-varying, never satiating sweetness!" (134).

In "An Ornament to Society," Cleary achieves humor through irony. The sophisticated townspeople are bound by foolish social conventions, and the country bumpkin Cleo exhibits wisdom. The young girl escapes the bonds of prescribed gender roles, does not marry the hardware man or the new doctor the townspeople think she ought to accept, and achieves a state of self-reliance and independence, choosing her own future and her own husband. To Cleary, this is the Cult of True Womanhood.

Cleary pursues this same theme in another short story, "Jim Peterson's Pension." The narrative is presented objectively, although sometime unreliably, through the eyes of Nannie Blake, the daughter of one of the "upper class" of the small Nebraska farming community, a school teacher engaged to a lumberman (which is, incidentally, the profession of Cleary's husband--a little inside humor!). Mrs. Peterson, one of Nannie's neighbors and the protagonist of the story, plays the eiron/alazon role: "Bright is the best word that described Mrs. Peterson. She had bright pink cheeks, and bright brown hair, and bright blue eyes that sparkled mirthfully. She gave one the impression of perfect health, a sunny disposition, and a sanguine spirit." Nannie plays "straight man" to Mrs. Peterson, forwarding the dialogue: "Your days must be well filled" (190), "You must have been warm" (196), and "Did you really?" (195).

Admired by Nannie and the community for her ability to care for her family since her husband was injured and unable to support them, Mrs. Peterson begins the story an eiron, a paragon of rural American industry and virtue--and naiveté. Besides taking in sewing for the women of the community and caring for her own family, Mrs. Peterson explains: "I clean the Methodist church every Saturday. That, and helping your mother's hired girl days when there's extra work or company is expected, let alone the fact that Mrs. McLelland lets me have a chicken once in awhile for sewing up her carpet rags, we keep real comfortable and I'm not complaining" (191).

The comedy in the plot arises when Mr. Peterson is granted his pension and fifteen years of back payment. The town rejoices with the Petersons, knowing that "She is such a sensible little woman. She has been so contented in her poverty I believe she will be wise in her prosperity." Unfortunately, as the undertaker's wife Mrs. McLelland darkly points out: "She's just got money-proud! That's all. . . . You jest watch Mis' Peterson--that's all" (193). Again, Cleary subverts the types. The outrageous Mrs. McLelland, a recurring, comic character who links many of Cleary's stories, proves wiser than Nannie, the sophisticated school teacher.

Mrs. Peterson, foolishly wasting the pension payment of $2,160 on fancy clothing for the family, extravagant furnishings, and even a new addition to the house, transforms into an alazon character: "Mrs. Peterson actually made a trip to Chicago, from which city she returned with various purchases of pictures, chiefly valuable for their width of gilt frames, and enough cheap laces, silks, and embroideries to have furnished a small dry goods store" (194). However, her absurd pretensions climax at the party she plans because "Now the children are growin' up, we got to have a position in sassiety." She issues invitations, "glorious with gilt script," to everyone in town, taking care that the different social divisions do not arrive at the same time (195). Unfortunately, according to Mrs. McLelland, the party is a disaster: "I guess Mrs. Peterson must have got her people mixed or she would never have so transmorgrified us visitors" (198). Satirizing the rigid class divisions than exist in even the smallest western villages, Cleary mocks not only the behaviour of Mrs. Peterson but the restricting social structure of the town itself.

Life at the Petersons rapidly disintegrates until Mrs. Peterson, "in spite of all of her finery . . .looked neither well or happy. Her cheeks were pale. Her eyes no longer sparkled" (198). The money runs out and the family's health fails because of the rich foods. Finally, Mrs. Peterson's hired girl, who "had lived with people that was used to money and knowed how to spend it," forces her to see the absurdity of her pretensions (201). She reverts to her former eironic self with the compassion of her husband, who declares: "This has been a hard summer on her, Miss Blake. I'm sorry for society people. They've got no end of hard work"(202). In the end, Cleary sympathetically portrays Mrs. Peterson, who made a foolish choice, but laughs at the culture which still prescribes to such false standards. "Poorer but wiser," Mrs. Peterson reverts to her former self-sufficient self, freed from the false bonds of social status.

Mrs. Peterson and Cleopatra Harrowsby are examples of Cleary's complex use of the eiron and alazon types. She wanted to entertain her readers, but she also had values to promote. Cleary's satire of the folly of social pretension and the foolishness of material extravagances, especially in the raw newness of the democratic West, warns readers "that the worst enemy of domesticity is women's fondness for fashion and accompanying ideal of becoming a 'lady'" (Morris 28). The traditional humorous characters of the wise man and the fool as vehicles for moral proclamations, "whether they are separate parts of the same character or two different characters, offer the reader a fresh perspective from which to view nineteenth-century society. They are both, strictly speaking, outside the mainstream of the society and, as such, unsullied by its influence" (Morris 5). Because of the eiron's transformation into an alazon and the resulting Fortunate Fall, wisdom is gained and happiness is secured for both of her western women.

Working within these humorous conventions, both Stewart and Cleary not only document realistically life in the pioneer West, but they also humorously point out the incongruities and absurdities of the idealized standards and cultural icons that have been imported, along with bustles and brocade drapes, to a frontier in the process of formation. "The so-called frontier humor was admirably constituted to image the problems of meaning and existence in a society that was very much caught up in the process of formation," states Louis D. Rubin, Jr. in The Comic Imagination in American Literature. "Society, in other words, was being reordered, and former distinctions of class and caste rearranged in accordance with the realities of wealth and power in a changed community" (13). Both authors, through their humor, emphasize the importance of balance, common sense, and reason in this transformation process.

The difficulties encountered in the wilderness, believes Kenney, made a sense of humor an essential attribute for America's pioneers, for it "helped them order their world and protect their sanity" (5). Stewart defined her West as a mythic garden, but only if one did not act foolishly. Real dangers and hardships awaited the tenderfoot in the West if he or she did not act wisely. Cleary believed that a new country demanded a New Woman, freed from the articifial and debilitating conventions of the East. The idealized Angel of the House seemed out of place in the big outdoors of the West. Both writers saw, first hand, that women, too, wanted independence and the chance to prove themselves in the West. However, they also realized that to do that, they needed to be able to grin.

Susanne K. George, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of English

University of Nebraska at Kearney

Kearney, Nebraska 68849