Narrating the American West: New Forms of Historical Memory By Jo ...

Yet the passage differs in crucial ways from much of Ehrlich’s work as well. While the story evokes Ehrlich’s concern with the power of western settings to strip away the artificial layers of modernity and reveal an essential self, it resists describing the healing power of this landscape to mend the wounds engendered by loss. In contrast to the story’s final image of an “aching, lonely” McKay lying in an empty bed (67), Ehrlich’s first and best-known work of nonfiction, The Solace of Open Spaces (1985), emphasizes the triumphant reinvention of a wounded self in the context of a curative western landscape.

Reviewers praised The Solace of Open Spaces—a collection of twelve autobiographical essays developed from the journal entries that Ehrlich wrote while producing a documentary film about Wyoming sheepherders—for painting “a largely accurate portrait” (Krza 42) that “fully captured the essence of [contemporary] Wyoming” (Brunhumer 105). Yet this generally positive critical reception fails to note that the text reproduces the romanticized view of western masculinity that marks formula Westerns. Although The Solace of Open Spaces revises the formula Western’s mythic version of the West through its depiction of a female sheep rancher participating in a predominantly male and “manly” profession, this inversion of conventional gender roles ultimately reinforces mythic versions of the cowboy and colonial representations of landscape, while neglecting complex histories of racial conquest.

The Solace of Open Spaces adapts the formula Western’s treatment of race, particularly its erasure of ethnic minorities from “open” western spaces, in order to claim these spaces for Euroamerican ranchers. The very concept of curative open space is based on and enabled by the historical and contemporary containment of American Indians, a theme that is formally reflected in the notable absence of Indians throughout most of the essays. Indian subjects are instead “contained” within one chapter. This marginalization both obscures and is essential to the work of the open space trope in formula Westerns. Tellingly, the title’s reference to “spaces” draws on a notion of “unbounded expanses” in contrast to the “bordered areas” associated with “places” (Scharff 287).