SOURCE: Stevens, J. David. “‘She war a woman’: Family Roles, Gender, and Sexuality in Bret Harte's Western Fiction.” American Literature 69, no. 3 (September 1997): 571-93.

In the following essay, Stevens maintains that Bret Harte's short stories of the American West challenge traditional values regarding gender, sexuality, and patriarchal family structure.

By almost all accounts, Bret Harte must be considered a progenitor of the popular Western in America. Although he eschewed the displays of violence central to other frontier texts, his renditions of town and mining camp life constructed the principal backdrop against which the struggle of the Western hero would later take place; and though his characters are not as stereotypical as some critics maintain, they are for the most part representative figures in the “universal” battle of good and evil that later Westerns underscore.¹ In Harte's fiction, ethical questions are settled by a contest of souls rather than a...