Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1996
Abstract
In her 1937 novel, Slogum House, Mari Sandoz turned the usual stereotype of greed and cupidity on its head. Instead of presenting a voracious male rancher aggrandizing his land holdings to the detriment of hard-working homesteaders, Sandoz created Regula Haber Slogum, a grasping woman who eventually owns nearly an entire county, which she has managed to have named after her family. Although Gulla, as she is known, controls most of Slogum County, she continues brutally to foreclose mortgages and force sheriffs' sales, even during the depression years of the 1930s.
Despite this depiction of what Katharine Mason has called "a caricature of motherhood," few analysts or critics have analyzed Sandoz's portrayal of greed as female. Those who have done so have had little to say. Barbara Rippey, in a parenthetical comment, remarked only that a woman who mistreated men and children was "an unlikely thesis" for Sandoz's era. Scott Greenwell hypothesized that Sandoz had made her antagonist female because she realized that "in the animal kingdom the female is frequently the aggressor with an instinct for acquisitiveness. "
These superficial probings leave several crucial questions unanswered. Why did Sandoz choose to portray evil as female rather than male? What did Sandoz convey to readers in making her Devil a woman? Could a Gulla Slogum have, in fact, existed in the late nineteenth- century and early twentieth-century West?
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 16:1 (Winter 1996). Copyright © 1996 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.