SOURCE: Meldrum, Barbara. “Vardis Fisher's Antelope People: Pursuing an Elusive Dream.” In Northwest Perspectives: Essays on the Culture of the Pacific Northwest, edited by Edwin R. Bingham and Glen A. Love, pp. 152-66. Eugene: University of Oregon Press, 1979.

[In the following essay, Meldrum explores Fisher's portrayal of the Western frontier experience in Toilers of the Hills, Dark Bridwell, and April.]

From the earliest days of our country we have had an ambivalent attitude toward the West and what the West means. In 1782 Crèvecoeur expressed this ambivalence in his Letters from an American Farmer; the new American was a westward pilgrim best embodied in the class of freeholders, people “respectable for their industry, their happy independence, the great share of freedom they possess, the good regulation of their families, and for extending the trade and the dominion of our mother country.” Crèvecoeur's happy farmers promoted material progress while achieving individual fulfillment through worthwhile labor, family affection, and a sense of independence and freedom. But Crèvecoeur also acknowledged the essential role played by the pioneers who were directly influenced by the rugged environment they sought to tame in the name of advancing agriculture—the “back settlers” who “appear to be no better than carnivorous animals. … They are a kind of forlorn hope” who precede the more civilized farmers. They become hunters and, “once hunters, farewell to the plough. The chase renders them ferocious, gloomy, and unsociable.” They live off the land and become lazy and careless; “eating of wild meat … tends to alter their temper,” and rather than manifesting a noble independence and freedom, they demonstrate “a strange sort of lawless profligacy.”¹ But the freedom of the untamed, uncultivated frontier also had its appeal for Crèvecoeur; near the end of his Letters he wrote of the attractions of the thinly inhabited western regions where one might cheerfully go in quest of peace.² Although fundamentally Crèvecoeur was committed to an agrarian ideal, which he thought could coexist with the ideals of independence and freedom (or what might be termed “individualism”), he saw the lawless, degenerate frontiersman as an essential link in his chain of progress and he finally admitted to the attractions of the frontier life.

Henry Nash Smith has pointed out a similar tension in the Daniel Boone tales, where Boone was heralded both as freedom-loving frontiersman, a “child of nature who fled into the wilderness before the advance of settlement,” and as “standard-bearer of civilization and refinement,” one who rejoiced to see the inevitable influx of American freemen into the rich western lands.³

Frederick Jackson Turner is, however, the most articulate and important spokesman for our twentieth-century view of the meaning of the western frontier experience. In his delineation of the so-called frontier thesis he describes the social stages of typical frontier development. The western pioneer returns to “primitive conditions” as the “wilderness masters the colonist. … He must accept the conditions which [the frontier] furnishes, or perish.” But this experience is described by Turner as a “development” through which a “perennial rebirth” takes place. On the frontier, defined as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” the pioneer “little by little … transforms the wilderness.” The result is not only the taming of the wilderness but the development of a new American character. In describing the “intellectual traits” of the new American, Turner states that

to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.⁴

For Turner, then, the American character owes its individualism, resourcefulness, and sense of freedom to the frontier experience. The existence of free land was essential, in Turner's view, to this development, and he remained strongly committed to the idea that an agrarian economy would best foster American democracy. What in Crèvecoeur was a clear distinction between the frontiersman and the agrarian becomes in Turner a unified ideal wherein the best traits of frontiersman and agrarian are combined and are realizable in the cyclical experience that occurs when one is “reborn” on the frontier and passes through the primitive to the civilized stage of development. Although Turner acknowledge some negative traits and side effects of this Americanization process, he is essentially positive. The American West offers an opportunity for individual fulfillment that is both materialistic (the attainment of property) and idealistic (the pride of self-achievement, independence, and freedom).

It seems to me, however, that the seemingly unified ideal of Turner is misleading. One problem is that Turner seems to be speaking about Americans generally (thus including women), whereas the experience he describes applies more to men than to women. As David Potter has pointed out, the Turner thesis speaks of opportunities that in fact “were opportunities for men and not, in any direct sense, opportunities for women.” Potter concludes that the “frontier for American women” was the city, where women could achieve independence.⁵ Turner fails to see that the frontier meant different things to women, and he ignores the impact of the woman's differing experience on the man with whom she was associated. Also, by failing to distinguish clearly between the frontiersman and the agrarian, Turner oversimplifies the nature of the western frontier experience. He sees the western venture in masculine terms, whereas there was really a tension between the masculine and feminine, the frontiersman and agrarian.

Perhaps my point can be made clearer by reference to the views of several literary critics. Roy Male, in Hawthorne's Tragic Vision, wrote that America has been “from its beginning … a predominantly masculine venture … a gamble that movement westward might assure not only prosperity but also some kind of moral purification. … In this predominantly masculine enterprise, the role of woman has always been anomalous.”⁶ He then proceeds to show how Hawthrone used the masculine-feminine dichotomy in his fiction to focus on some of the fundamental problems of human existence; in Hawthorne's fiction, man is space-oriented and characterized by a tendency to speculate; woman is time-bound and characterized by a tendency to conserve. Other critics have noted the masculine emphasis in much western fiction, particularly in the Westerns of the cowboy and gunfighter. Wallace Stegner writes of two forces, “the freedom-loving, roving man and the civilizing woman” (terms which recall Male's discussion of Hawthorne). “Almost every writer who has dealt with family stresses on the frontier has … [written of] male freedom and aspiration versus female domesticity, wilderness versus civilization, violence and danger versus the safe and tamed.”⁷ The dichotomy Stegner describes seems most reminiscent of the frontiersman versus agrarian that we have seen in Crèvecoeur's Letters. A recent critic, Jay Gurian, extends the dichotomy to include the two dominant myths of the West, the myth of the Garden and the myth of the Western Hero: “Behind the Myth of the Garden there is the Romance of Democratic Settlement, which affirms that the ‘good’ end—civilization, commerce, culture and church—was the guiding goal of the American settler. … Similarly, behind the myth of the Western Hero, there is the Romance of Lawlessness. … While one romance glorifies violence, death, and ‘evil,’ in the various frontiers, the other glorifies peace, order, welfare and natural goodness.”⁸ These dualities, I propose, can be seen as the conflict between masculine and feminine traits and values. The linking of masculine with the frontiersman is easily seen; the linking of feminine with the agrarian is not so simple and needs further clarification.

The alignment of the feminine force with the agrarian is most apparent when we consider the commitment to home, civilization, family responsibility, and the productivity of “mother nature.” Also, the word materialism derives etymologically from roots which suggest both mother and matter or substance.⁹ Classical mythology associates materialism with Demeter, the Greek goddess of corn, who is both matriarchal and agricultural. The title character of Willa Cather's My Ántonia provides one concrete example of this linking of woman with the agrarian and the material abundance of nature. However, in much western fiction woman does not find fulfillment in an agrarian life: she is trapped rather than free, she ages prematurely, she may even lose her sanity. Her husband, the male agrarian, is seldom wholly committed to the feminine-agrarian, but is usually a blend of the masculine-frontiersman and the agrarian. Just as Turner fails to distinguish clearly between the complementary but essentially conflicting claims of the frontiersman and the agrarian, so the western farmer seldom understands the duality of his own inner nature and his ambivalence toward these conflicting values, for he is both freedom-loving, individualistic frontiersman and home-loving, productive agrarian. If he does not achieve the realization of his dreams, his wife may seem to be responsible for his failure since she limits the idealistic speculation of the man, limits his freedom, ties him to family responsibilities, and promotes an empty materialism. But the woman too faces unrealized dreams, for her own avenues of fulfillment are dominated by the man upon whom she depends and whose “vision” has thrust her into the hard life of the frontier. Although by all our cultural expectations she should achieve her fulfillment in home and family and the productivity of nature, she is all too often overwhelmed and defeated.

Many western writers have dealt with the ideas discussed above. The purpose of this essay is to explore ways in which Vardis Fisher has portrayed the western frontier experience in three novels of the Antelope country of southeastern Idaho: Toilers of the Hills (1928), Dark Bridwell (1931), and April: A Fable of Love (1937).¹⁰ As Fisher worked on his first novel,¹¹ he wrote a number of sonnets about the people of the Antelope Hills; some he destroyed, but thirteen were published in periodicals and anthologies.¹² These surviving sonnets provide vignettes of Idaho pioneers, some of whom reappear in the novels. Although the country they live in is beautiful, their lives do not reflect that beauty, and in various ways they evade life, living in fear and distrust, avoiding emotional involvements that might add meaning to their existence, haunted by doubts and lacking faith in the God they profess, overwhelmed by events they are powerless to change. One character “might now be a poet” if he but lived “where poetry's not transmuted into prose” (“Dick Rowe”). Another hates the mountains because they dwarf his own dominion; so he goes eastward to the city where, “Beneath a torn earth, sewer-foul and dredge-gutted, / He heard life building tunnels underground” (“Perg Jasper”). Another, Lizzie North, is surrounded with the drudgery of housework and baby tending, takes out her frustrations and hatred on her baby, and drones “one crazy song: / Love is a gift to man, the woman pays.” One character, however, is portrayed positively, and that is Joe Hunter; in a sonnet which anticipates Dock Hunter of Toilers of the Hills, Fisher tells how this pioneer entered “the grayest waste of Idaho,” “clubbed the desert and … made it grow” until “he left the aged and barren hills aglo / With color.” This man “poured his great dream into golden wheat; / Until his gnarled and calloused hands had wrought / A deep and quiet holiness of work.”

Toilers of the Hills is Fisher's most consistently agrarian novel, and Dock Hunter provides a convincing portrait of the hard-working pioneer of vision and ingenuity who struggles to transform a wilderness into a garden. The novel focuses on two central conflicts: one the conflict between man and nature as Dock seeks to conquer nature and make it productive; the other, the conflict between Dock and his wife Opal, between the pioneer who lives and works for the future and loves the soil, and the woman who lacks his vision and his love of the land, who is haunted by the isolation, the loneliness of their pioneer life, and who longs for community life and the relative comforts of the valley they have left behind.

Fisher's tale begins with the Hunters' move into the Antelope Hills in about 1906. Dock breaks new ground, trying to dry farm, believing that these barren hills can be made to produce grain. He maintains that anything of value comes through hard work and that continued work will bring positive results. Although he loves the land, his love is not for the natural beauties—the wild flowers and birds—but for the potential productivity as man conquers nature. It is a formidable task, for the dry soil is hard and unresponsive to Dock's meager tools, the brush resists his grubbing efforts, and the essential moisture comes seldom and must somehow be made to count and not be wasted. But Dock's determination is equal to the task—“‘I'll conquer them brush or I'll bust my worseless neck,’” he exclaims (p. 26); and he believes this country needs “‘men who would never say die, men who would turn this place into fields of gold. Worse spots than this had been conquered by men; worse trials than these had been endured by them.’” He takes heart in the example of his own father who “had been a pioneer on new frontiers” (pp. 199-200). Dock conceives of his own task in a broad perspective which lends both dignity and hope to his endeavor.

Men had conquered worse than weeds; they had endured worse than drouth. They were conquering the world day by day, inch by inch, and when this job was done, they would conquer all else in sight: the sun and the moon, if need be, and even the stars, if their minds turned that way. They would conquer the mountains, too, if that was their mind, and it would not surprise him a little bit if some day the mountains were orchards and fields of grain. Some time, by a strange turn of will, they would conquer lightning and thunder, and they would make rain come when they wanted it, and when they did not want it they would somehow send it away. Had they not conquered all the wild animals of earth and shut them up in pens or hitched them to plows or made them give milk and lay eggs? … Men would invent perpetual motion before they were done with it; they would make water run uphill as fast as it ran down; and they would discover ways whereby to make wheat an overbearer, like fruit trees and innumerable other things, and once seed was planted, then the job would be forever done. And these were only a scant few of the things, he could now see, which men would do. They would invent machines that would harvest crops without the need of a man at all, and they would make fruit trees grow as big as pines and strawberry plants as large as sagebrush.

(pp. 230-31)

But Dock's achievement is slow in coming; year grinds on to year after weary year, and Dock and Opal still live in a cottonwood shanty with a sod roof that drips mud when rain falls, they still rely on water carried from the distant river or hoarded from melting snow, their debts grow, and Dock's grain is still scanty and weed-infested. But three factors eventually lead to a qualified success for Dock. One is World War I, which brings inflated prices for grain. The other is Dock's experimentation, the application of mind to matter, whereby he has developed dry farming techniques which eventually make his farm the most productive one in the region. The third is the forbearance of nature itself which does not destroy his bumper crop with hail or frost. Success comes, then, through a combination of luck, fertility of nature, and inner traits of human character and intelligence. Dock's dream is fulfilled, perhaps not in the grandiose terms of his early vision, and not in time for him to avoid the wearing effects of his toil, but his dream has proven to be realizable.

Not so, however, has been Opal's dream. Hers was of a home with running water and minimal comforts, of neighbors nearby, community and fellowship, of beauty and life. Her dream has been swallowed up by Dock's dream; her dream had to die. In the conflict between Dock and Opal and the resolution of that conflict we can see the deeper dimensions of the pioneer agrarian's experience.

Dock conceives of his role in strongly masculine terms. To things inside the house he gives feminine names; to things outside, masculine names (p. 101). At times he senses an awing power in nature that makes him aware of his own relative insignificance; but at other times, as he seeks to conquer nature, he feels as though he could embrace nature “and make it yield to him, make it moving and supple and eager like a woman's body” (p. 66). Opal senses that to Dock the hills are so alive that he will want to “marry one of them hills” (p. 100). As Dock tills the soil Opal sees he is “scarring the gray breast of the earth” (p. 252). His work is an act of conquest whereby he imposes his masculine will upon the feminine earth. A frontiersman at heart, he idolizes his father and recounts tales of his father's exploits over man and beast (pp. 108-09). Even his name, Hunter, he believes to be a sign of his fighting nature and commitment to a goal he will reach (pp. 255-56). Physical strength and swearing are signs of masculinity (p. 44); if a neighbor's stray cow gets into his wheat field, he executes primitive law and justice to protect his own property (pp. 124-25); male children are valued because they will be of use, whereas girls are of no account (p. 61). Dock's concept of his wife's role is that she should stand by him and support his hopes and dreams, be pretty and not work in the fields like a man, cook his meals and keep his house clean, produce male children and care for them, and achieve her own sense of fulfillment in the realization of his own dreams. In Dock's male-dominated world, Opal his little chance to realize her own dreams.

Several key scenes demonstrate the conflict between Dock and Opal. When they first arrive at the place which is to be their home, Opal is depressed by the greyness of land and sky all around her. She cannot see the colors Dock promises to bring to this barren land, and she longs for a home in the valley they have left behind. While Dock prepares their bed for the night, she wanders into the night and fails to respond to Dock's calls; when he finds her, she is “looking westward … over round hills that were like gray silences.” With terror in her voice, she cries, “‘I can't stand these hills and them lonely mountains!’” But Dock reprimands her: “‘You promise to love a man and stick to him through hell and high water and then you go a-bawlun for your mother. You ain't no sight of a wife for a farmer’” (pp. 14-15). Later, when the much needed rain comes thundering down, dripping mud from the sod roof into the house and drenching all within that flimsy shelter, Opal reminds Dock of his failures and complains of the wet and cold; but Dock talks on and on of his dreams, works to keep household goods dry, and Opal wonders “at his dauntless way in the face of a pitiless nature that crushed completely her will to live” (p. 107). As the storm subsides, Dock builds a fire, cooks food, dries the bedding, all the while telling Opal about his father and then shifting to tales of his own future and what he will accomplish. His example brings to Opal new love and understanding for her husband, and she minds less the mud-stained cottage and Dock's sweat-soaked clothing. In the beauty of the new morning she goes outside and picks blossoms for her home. But when she enters, her pleasure is crushed when Dock reprimands her for picking blossoms that would have ripened into fruit that they could have eaten.

She found herself again among the ugly things she hated. … She gathered the blossoms and threw them out into the mud of the dooryard. … Bitter rage and loneliness were choking her, pushing her heart down into the hard lump that it must become if she remained here. The blue sky mocked her now and the showers of blossoms and all the wet sweet things of the hills. Going behind a bush she wept and moaned at the pain reaching through her being, at the sharp ache of something imprisoned in her breast, pushing out vainly to new life and dying there as it had been dying now for a long year.

(pp. 113-14)

To Opal, these hills foster ugliness, loneliness, and death. So long as she maintains her own dream but remains with Dock in these hills, her life is as grey as the hills around her.

What is required of Opal is a total self-effacement. This comes in the final scene of the novel when her own dream dies and she takes Dock's dream for her own. She acknowledges that she has been “‘no account as a wife,’” but resolves to be better in the future: “‘We'll make our home as lovely as we can.’” Opal looks “at the long grey road leading valleyward. It was a road to forget, for she had closed the door to her dreams.” As she looks around her, she sees the color of the hills, the golden rays of the setting sun, the purple valley, the lilac and orange of a cloud-castle, the deepening blue shadows and the golden haze. “And little by little the gray road blurred and vanished” (pp. 360-61). The greyness is now identified with the valley; hand in hand with Dock, she sees the color and beauty of the life surrounding her.

Significantly, this resolution comes only after Dock's dream has been realized. They already have a new and better house, made possible by Dock's successful harvest and wartime prices; but making that house a “lovely home” is possible only when Opal renounces her dream and reconciles herself to the only home she will ever know. When early in the story Dock had reprimanded Opal for wanting to return to the valley, he had confessed, “‘I sometimes wonder why a man ever gets hisself a missus anyhow’” (p. 15). Indeed, one wonders whether he really does need Opal, for her nagging and her anticipation of defeat (that would enable her to return to the valley) certainly provide no help or encouragement for Dock. But the masculine vision of Dock needs woman to give significance to his achievement. This frontiersman pioneer wants home and family. The novel becomes, then, a classic portrayal of the male agrarian, who is both frontiersman and farmer, and his wife, who is imprisoned by the dimensions of her husband's world and who can find freedom and fulfillment only through total self-effacement.

In Toilers of the Hills Fisher maintains a detached perspective. Although much of the story is told from Opal's point of view, the overall effect is praise for Dock's indomitable pioneer spirit. In his next novel, however, Fisher expresses a much more ambivalent attitude toward agrarian values. Dark Bridwell begins with a prologue which describes the rugged Antelope Hills country to which Charley Bridwell takes his wife Lela. The first owners of their home had been a pioneer couple who had cleared enough acres for hay and a garden and had built a humble home. The man had loved the isolation of his mountain home, but his wife hated the loneliness and wild animals, so urged him to move away. The contrast sets the scene for Charley and Lela's drama, for Charley wishes to avoid the evils of civilization and brings his family here, believing his children will “grow up, with powerful bodies and clean minds” nurtured by nature (p. 316); but he has failed to account for inherited traits, the sinister effects of nature, and the opposing values of his wife.

Charley is a far cry from Dock Hunter. A frontiersman at heart, he disdains overalls as a sign of slavery. A vagabond in his early life, he settles down, but not to build a newer and better house or to till increasing acres; rather, he farms sporadically, hunts and traps, refuses to work a full day at a time, and enjoys life. He detests work because he believes work is a senseless striving for an accumulation of things of little value; as long as he can manage to get along without work, he is happy and content. When farmers come to ask him to help with harvest, he usually refuses and, when he points out the futility of labor to these men, the farmers blame their wives for making them work so hard (pp. 14-15).

Indeed, work is identified with woman in this novel; when Fisher contrasts the frontiersman with the agrarian, the frontiersman is clearly masculine and the agrarian, feminine. And both are identified with varying aspects of nature. Charley identifies with the mountains, which are “great hulks of philosophy and peace … they sat on their heels and let time move over them with good things.” He also likes lakes, which are deep and still, rather than the river which annoys him with its constant striving, “as if it had work to do between its source and its graveyard of the sea. But it had nothing to do that was worth doing” (pp. 43-45). Lela, however, embodies the duality of mountains and river. She responds to the quiet beauty that surrounds her in this amphitheatre of the hills, the tranquility linking her with Charley, who nearly convinces her that she prefers the quietness of his indolent life. But she also identifies with the river, and this identification becomes increasingly stronger when Charley's domination of her life allows her creativity no outlet. Indeed, the anonymous narrator of the novel asserts that Charley's “greatest mistake” lies in his efforts to make Lela into “a kind of idle princess” who is not allowed to work. The river haunts her, makes her aware of her “desire to create, to build her life into a thing of meaning”; although its restless seeking seems to be as unchanging as the “chloroformed seasons of her life” (pp. 270-71), it keeps alive her ambition which is spurred into action by the dark side of Charley's nature.

Charley is both tender and violent, loving and cruel. Although he seeks to live attuned with nature, we soon learn that nature includes much which promotes cruelty. This aspect is most apparent in his son Jed, who is “schooled by savagery” and who feels both kinship and ageless enmity for rattlesnakes (pp. 152, 167). The solitude and ruthlessness of life in this mountain wilderness prompt him to reckless deeds; his growing hate for his father leads him to strive to exceed his father in cruelty (p. 153). Unlike Turner's frontier prototypes, the Bridwells are not reborn as upstanding American democrats through their immersion into the primitive wilderness; to Fisher, genetic inheritance usually counts more than environment, and nature can foster the dark side of man's nature as well as man's more socially acceptable traits.

Charley's two sons grow to hate him and leave home to seek a new life outside of the paradise Charley has sought to provide his family. His daughter is seduced by a sheepherder who seeks to revenge a cruel joke Charley once played on him, and the broken father forces a shotgun marriage. With her older children thus lost to her. Lela seeks some way to endure her life and prevent a repetition of disappointment in her newborn daughter's life when her nearest neighbor, Prudence Hunter, points the way for her: Prudence inspires her to work so that she can educate her daughter and tells her how to raise turkeys and make money from cheese, fruit, and vegetables. So is born a “new vision” for Lela who resolves to push aside her husband “and follow her path to freedom. No longer a house-fixture to be adored, sitting with useless lovely hands, she would go boldly into life, even as the river went” (p. 329). Undaunted in her ambition, she insists on mowing the hay herself in spite of Charley's complaint that mowing is man's work. But she joys in her work and even seems to grow younger (p. 340). Thus is framed her dream: “to earn and save money, to flee with Hetty, to find her sons” (p. 345).

For seven years she labors, successful in her agrarian efforts; never is her agrarian life an end in itself, but simply a means to an end; for her, freedom and fulfillment lie beyond these mountains, vaguely in the city where her sons have gone. Significantly, the goal is expressed as lying westward, even though literally it is eastward—just as Jed had followed his westward vision that would lead him east, for so deeply ingrained is our American sense of westering that we believe that vision must somehow lie westward even though for some, opportunity exists somewhere east of that presumed paradise which never really existed in the first place, or was more a prison than a paradise.¹³

And so Lela leaves, spurred to depart through a final brutal scene in which she believes Charley has corrupted her young son, her ambivalent hatred and love for Charley is resolved into a lively hate, and Jed returns in time to confirm that hatred and rescue his mother. Charley, alone in the desolation of his ruined paradise, tries to drown his grief with wine, then wanders off alone, “eastward … into the empire of solitude” (Epilogue). But he has been east before, and no opportunity beckons him; cursed and abandoned, he is damned to a living death of fragmented dreams.

It would seem that Lela's way has been best and that Charley has been proved wrong. But though Charley is defeated, he is not despised, and Lela's freedom is not the promise of new life. The narrator forewarns that her victory will be a hollow one, for he writes: “And in that hour of mid-winter, seven years later, when she went forth into freedom, she forgot that deeper than ambition, as deep almost as motherhood itself, was her love for Charley Bridwell; and she did not remember until it was too late” (p. 335). The narrator also tells of Lela's sketches which she makes during the idle winter months. One of these is a painting of “the river buried under ice, its waters lost in a black and cold and flowing graveyard. Charley did not like this one. It made him think, he said, of something that had slaved all its life and then got lost, that had entombed itself with labor. … ‘Hang it in the corner by the stove. Mebbe it'll thaw out’” (pp. 347-48). Then, in the last haunting image of the book, the narrator describes the abandoned and desolate Bridwell place: “Lying behind and under the stove are six empty wine bottles, deep with silence and age. And above hangs one of Lela's paintings, netted in spiderwebs. It shows a mighty river, caught in the power of its own unresting greed, smothering itself with bitter white death” (Epilogue). The ceaseless striving of the river of ambition leads not to life, but to death. Moreover, without love, endeavor is vain.

Fisher followed this powerful novel with his autobiographical tetralogy, also rooted in the Antelope Hills country of Idaho. Commenting years later about this period of his career, Fisher said, “I loathed and hated the Antelope country and was merely trying to come to some kind of terms with it.”¹⁴ That he did achieve a resolution to his own ambivalent attitude toward the region of his childhood can be seen, I believe, in his final Antelope novel, April: A Fable of Love. Fisher struggled with this book while writing his tetralogy, working through five different versions to produce the novel he later claimed was his favorite.¹⁵ This short work of poetic prose is satirically comic in its portrayal of a homely fat girl who desperately wants to love and be loved but rejects the homely man who has patiently courted her since childhood because her lover is not like the romantic heroes she has read about in novels. The scene is still the Antelope Hills, but the impression of life is radically different from that of the earlier novels. We are not concerned with the pioneering era, but with a time of settled agrarian life. Yet even though the people portrayed are farmers, they do not seem to be working very hard. Physical needs are minimized in this fable which focuses on the problems of love.

The agrarian context is, however, still present and important. June's lover, Sol Incham, has lived in New York, Georgia, and Hollywood; although we learn nothing more specific about his background, we know that he is now a farmer, that he perceives the inner beauty of the homely June Weeg, and that he wants to marry her, thus suggesting that his years of wandering have led him to seek fulfillment of his dreams in a western agrarian life with wife and family. Sol's empty house becomes for June “a symbol of his need: something empty and unused, a loneliness waiting for a woman, for gentle ways to smooth it into beauty and repose” (p. 67). But the house haunts June, for she resists falling in love with Sol because she dreads the kind of married life she sees around her: marriage without love, the wife becoming nothing but a brood sow, beaten down by sweat and toil (p. 194). She longs instead for a gallant lover (a blend of frontiersman and knight in shining armor) who will come in beauty and strength and waft her away to a new life. Realizing her homeliness will not attract such a lover, she invents a new identity, which she names April for the beautiful month she likes best. But it is difficult to sustain such a fantasy, and she is continually brought face to face with the realities of a life she cannot come to terms with. She entertains various alternatives, each one an escape from the fate of an Antelope farmer's wife: she will become a nun, or a whore, or an actress; finally, she decides to leave and seek her fortune elsewhere. But before leaving, she is drawn to visit Sol once more to bid him farewell; not finding him at home, she notices how dirty his house is and how unlike Sol's home it was, for he was usually neat and clean. But she begins to realize that Sol's incentive to work and to keep a tidy home has been undermined by her apparently final rejection of him several months before. Without realizing why, she decides to clean up Sol's house before writing a farewell note (this is the first time in the novel that June engages in any work); then she decides to cook him a meal; then she sets the table for two, resolved to eat with him before leaving; finally Sol returns and, seeing “more in his face, more in his eyes, than she had ever found in books,” she goes to his waiting arms (p. 206). This final scene, which was entitled “The Death of April” when Fisher published it separately as a short story, suggests that true beauty is of inner character, that self-fulfillment is more a matter of love than of material achievement, and that love can ennoble and give meaning to work. Only by facing the realities of life—which includes both beauty and ugliness—can one learn to give and to accept love.

Thus, in these three novels of the Antelope People, Vardis Fisher explores the possibilities of self-fulfillment through the western experience. Toilers of the Hills portrays the victory of the male agrarian in his pioneering struggle with nature; but that victory is measured against the consciousness of a wife who must surrender her own dream and adopt her husband's if she is to live with love and beauty. Dark Bridwell pits frontiersman against agrarian in a drama of conflicting dreams; although the narrative victory goes to the agrarian, that victory is undercut by the symbolism of the closing scene, and we know that all has been lost with the loss of love. In April, the love which gives meaning to life and to labor is found by both man and woman; self-effacement is not required, and beauty is found amidst the ugly realities of life. For Fisher, the West became much more than the meeting point between savagery and civilization; it became a state of mind, a paradise that must be found within, and that blossoms only through the dynamics of love.

Notes

1. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, ed. W. P. Trent and Ludwig Lewisohn (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), pp. 72, 59-60, 67-68 (Letter III).

2. Crèvecoeur, pp. 287, 302-04, 315-18 (Letter XII). Crèvecoeur's narrator, James, decides that life with the Indians on the frontier is preferable to an agrarian life amid the perils of the Revolutionary War. Although recognizing that some hunting will be inevitable, he will try to avert the “charm of Indian education” which might induce his children to go completely native by encouraging agrarian labors as much as possible.

3. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950), pp. 55-56.

4. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893), in The Frontier in American History, ed. Ray A. Billington (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), pp. 2-4, 37.

5. David M. Potter, “American Women and the American Character” (1959), in History and American Society: Essays of David M. Potter, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 280-84.

6. Roy R. Male, Hawthorne's Tragic Vision (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1957), pp. 3-4.

7. Wallace Stegner, “History, Myth, and the Western Writer,” in The Sound of Mountain Water (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1969), p. 195.

8. Jay Gurian, Western American Writing: Tradition and Promise (Deland, Florida: Everett/Edwards, 1975), pp. 4-5.

9. “mater-,” in American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc., 1969), p. 1527.

10. Page references are indicated in the text and are to the following editions: Toilers of the Hills (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1928); Dark Bridwell New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1931); April: A Fable of Love (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1937).

11. Fisher wrote five novels which he destroyed; Toilers was his sixth, but first published novel. He wrote it, he said, “after reading the romantic foolishness of Willa Cather. There never were any pioneers of the kind she wrote about.” Vardis Fisher: A Critical Summary with Notes on His Life and Personality (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1939), p. 6.

12. The Antelope People sonnets were published as follows. See Voices: An Open Forum for the Poets, 7 (March 1938), 203-04, for “Slim Scott,” “Susan Hemp,” “Konrad Myrdton,” and 49 (April 1929), 134-36, for The North Family—“Charles North,” “Baby North,” “Lizzie North,” “Sally North,” “Jess North”; see Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1928 and Yearbook of American Poetry, ed. William Stanley Braithwaite (New York: Harold Vinal, 1928), pp. 113-17, for “Slim Scott,” “Susan Hemp,” “Konrad Myrdton”; Northwest Verse: An Anthology, ed. Harold G. Merriam (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1931), pp. 137-39, for “Slim Scott,” “Susan Hemp,” “Konrad Myrdton,” “Perg Jasper,” “Joe Hunter”; see Sunlit Peaks: An Anthology of Idaho Verse, ed. Bess Foster Smith (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1931), pp. 74-75, for “Tim Doole,” “Dick Rowe,” “Hank Radder”; all but the last three sonnets were reprinted in Dorys C. Grover, A Solitary Voice: Vardis Fisher (New York: The Revisionist Press, 1973), pp. 50-55.

13. Jed looks “west, feeling that his path of life lay through that blue valley and beyond” and is lured by “the glory of cities and far shores.” Although he looks westward, he imagines his journey will take him “eastward into the sun” across Nebraska, Iowa, the Atlantic, to France and beyond. When he actually leaves, he goes “westward,” but on a “pilgrimage that was to lead him into many strange lands of earth” (pp. 214-15, 263-64). Thiel follows his brother “into the west” (p. 290). Lela is a “prisoner” in the supposed paradise of Charley's place and determines to “follow her path to freedom” to find her sons and to place her daughter in “a great and noble school” that could probably exist only in a city (pp. 275, 329, 345). A similar east-west confusion occurs in Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth when Per Hansa, lost in a snowstorm, keeps himself going with a vision of the Rocky Mountains which he regards as his westward gateway to the Pacific even though he is actually headed eastward. O. E. Rolvaag, Giants in the Earth (1927; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 255, 265-66.

14. Vardis Fisher, “Hometown Revisited 13: The Antelope Hills, Idaho,” Tomorrow, 9 (December 1949), 18.

15. Vardis Fisher: A Critical Summary, p. 12. Fisher's opinion was published in 1939, before many of his books were written. Whether he still regarded April as his favorite book later in his career is not known. When asked in 1964 which of his novels he liked best, he replied, “This question, asked endlessly of writers, has always seemed to me to be childish.” “Western Novel: A Symposium,” South Dakota Review, 2 (Autumn 1974), 21.