SOURCE: “The Illustrator as Writer: Mary Hallock Foote and the Myth of the West,” in Under the Sun: Myth and Realism in Western American Literature, edited by Barbara Howard Meldrum, The Whitston Publishing Company, 1985, pp. 151-66.

In the following essay, Armitage draws on Richard Slotkin's concept of subliterary myth-making to show how Foote's stories of the West grew from her realistic illustrations of the region and explored the ambiguities inherent in Western life, especially for women.

In Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860, Richard Slotkin reasserts the idea that the genesis of myth is essentially “low-brow,” that is, it originates in shared, popular experience:

True myths are generated on a subliterary level by the historical experience of a people and thus constitute part of that inner reality which the work of the artist draws on, illuminates, and explains. In American mythogenesis, the founding fathers...