The Vagina Stars in Revisionist Western: Anna North’s “Outlawed”
Unfortunately for Cormac McCarthy, but fortunately for us, Anna North’s latest book, Outlawed, is a picaresque Western with an even greater prelapsarian element than McCarthy’s horses–in a word, fertility. Set in the Wild West, Outlawed maintains a Western’s traditional galloping pace but from a new, female perspective. Our narrator tells it straight in a killer opening: “In the year of our Lord 1894, I became an outlaw. Like a lot of things, it didn’t happen all at once. First I had to get married.”
The novel’s narrator, Ada, married at seventeen, is thrown out of her husband’s house when she doesn’t get pregnant. Ada’s hometown of Fairchild thrives on conspiracy theories–witches, curses, and Satan. In this society, babies are women’s currency. Science, however, was a cornerstone of Ada’s upbringing as her single mother is a midwife. Poised to continue her mother’s medical practice, Ada is suddenly cast out of the profession and subsequently, Fairchild, when she remains barren. In order to keep her mother and younger sister untainted by her “witchcraft,” Ada is sent away to a convent. In her typical dry humor she states, “The Mother Superior...said I could have sanctuary as long as I accepted baby Jesus into my heart. Baby Jesus had not helped me conceive a child, but neither had drinking four glasses of milk every day or keeping my legs above my head or lying down with Sam or anything else I had tried. I had nothing against baby Jesus.”
At the convent’s library, Ada seeks out the few medical journals which exist on gynecology. Barrenness is viewed as a curse and a contagious one at that. Ada wants hard data: “Then I could feel the quiet that only comes with knowing what you need to know. And I could teach other people what I knew. I remembered what Mama had said, that you couldn’t just take away something people believed in. You had to give them something in its place.”
In her search for truth, Ada leaves the convent to find a famous gynecologist but ends up joining the Hole in the Wall Gang to survive. The Gang makes up the crux of the novel–a gritty group of exiled women and gender non-conforming criminals who take Ada in as their doctor.
Their leader is the Kid; a nod to the legendary cowboy, Billy the Kid. Except, North’s Kid is a genderless, quixotic leader whose powers as an orator (quoting scripture every other chapter) wore on me. However, North’s crafting of the Kid is superb. No one trips on pronouns–the writing doesn’t overthink the Kid’s gender nonconformity, the Kid is simply called “the Kid.” Though the sermons grated on me, the Kid’s liturgy is radically feminist, introducing Ada to a new society, “‘We may be barren in body, dear Doctor, but we shall be fathers of many nations, fathers and mothers both. You see, when we found this land, I knew it was promised not just for us, but for the descendants of our minds and hearts, all those cast out of their homes and banished by their families, all those slandered and maligned, imprisoned and abused, for no crime but that God saw fit not to plant children in their wombs. I knew that we would build a nation of the dispossessed, where we would be not barren women, but kings.’”
Even after Ada has joined the band of outlaws, shot and robbed a man and held up a bank, the most serious crime she’s committed is her barrenness. The vagina and gender identity are at the front and center of this novel’s psychic troubles. They are strangely coupled with an adventure plot, one which highlights the disenfranchisement of women, women of color and queer folks who cannot bear children.
In Outlawed, the lithe, muscular male body, damaged and rescued by native peoples as in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, has been revised. But those guys still exist in this world. A handsome cowboy named Lark arrives not a moment too soon to complicate Ada’s questions about sex and fertility. I only wish Lark had more page real estate. He seems the epitome of the new male love interest for wounded feminists, a man simultaneously comfortable and at odds with his own masculinity. Lark and Ada’s short relationship is not strictly heteronormative–North may have forced certain parts of Lark’s past in order to make him fit the psychic troubles of the book, but their coupling does not end in domesticity and neither does their sex end in penetration. Their sex is a masterclass in desire, a refreshing revision of gender essentialism.
Ada is my favorite Western heroine–a mediocre shot, a small-breasted non femme fatale and a stilted cross-dresser whose gift is healing, helping women through that slim doorway between life and death in childbirth. Ada’s role in the gang is that of an herbalist, a surgeon, and a prescriptionist. Her use of medicine and gynecology reminded me of another heroine recently revised, Circe from Madeline Miller’s 2018 novel. As in Miller’s Circe, Ada’s herbalism and homeopathy is a distinctly female power. Although Ada cannot give birth herself, the knowledge she seeks about her body and the help she gives to others’ sanctifies life.
Horses abound in this novel, so rest easy Lonesome Dove and True Grit fans. They’re just not as important as the women they carry. And those women and genderqueer folks, like Ada and the rest of the Gang, are more important than the babies they cannot carry.
Outlawed
Anna North
261 pages. 2021
About Olivia Nathan
Olivia Nathan is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College where she writes about femininity, agency, and her life so far. She is a proud alumna of Barnard College and originally from Los Angeles.
