Blazing new trails
Outlawed
Anna North
Bloomsbury
It still surprises me that some of my favourite novels are westerns. It no longer surprises me that they're written by women. The territory once dominated by Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour has long since been opened up by Paulette Jiles, Mary Doria Russell, Molly Gloss and other women who have cut fresh trails in this old genre.
The latest foray comes from Anna North, a reporter for Vox. Her new novel, Outlawed, stirs up the western with a provocative blend of alt-history and feminist consciousness. The result is a thrilling tale eerily familiar but utterly transformed.
The story opens in late 19th-century U.S., though not quite the Old West we know. In this version of our past, the Great Flu of the 1830s killed 90 per cent of the U.S. population, snuffing out the Industrial Revolution and the federal government. A decimated nation was in no mood for Civil War. The few Black survivors of the plague escaped slavery on their own. And now, some 60 years later, the people remaining in the Dakotas have built a patriarchal Christian society centred on fertility.
That may sound like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale with saddles instead of bonnets, but North is working entirely in her own realm. The society she imagines has developed divergent theological myths and rites, like the annual “Mothering Monday,” a raucous holiday when men and women cross-dress and get wild.
What's most unsettling, though, is how similar so much remains to the position women long endured in actual U.S. history. In Outlawed, marriages are celebrated for their fecundity, and mothers of lots of children enjoy social power. But with medical science stuck in its earliest stages, wives bear the full blame for infertility. Although popular opinion is in flux between biology and magic, miscarriages are widely believed to be the work of witches. And as in old Salem, that fear brings down hellish punishments on women who are difficult, smart or barren.
Our narrator is Ada, the plucky daughter of a divorced mother who works as a local midwife. Ada is guileless and candid with a natural storytelling manner that's immediately engaging.
There's nothing formulaic or dogmatic about North's approach, but she has cleverly repurposed the worn elements of 19th-century mythology to explore the position of childless women. The shame and sorrow these young women suffer in the 1890s is not so different from what women trying to get pregnant — or end a pregnancy — endure in our own supposedly enlightened era.
The real outlaws in this society are women unwilling or unable to be mothers. She finally falls in with the Hole in the Wall Gang, a kind of Sapphic iteration of the Jesse James gang.
With her budding medical skills, Ada is welcomed into this bank-robbing, feminist commune, which allows North to explore the nonconformist, queer and genderfluid lives of brave and hunted people on the outskirts of society.