Zane Grey Read Online Free PDF Page A

transformation. By setting the novel in 1871 (before federal pressure had forced the Mormon church officially to abandon polygamy), Grey re-creates a dramatic, pervasive threat from which to rescue his Mormon heroine. In culturally shaping the moral and sexual identity of the Mormon for an American readership, the work of fiction follows the work of law in the latter’s shaping of the Mormons’ future place in the American nation. Jane’s dilemma—the oppositional claims of Mormon and Gentile men and her inability to keep her land
and
her freedom—resembles the no-win situation in which Mormons found themselves in the years leading up to their church’s ban against polygamy: practice religious freedom and face destruction or give up the cornerstone practice of the religion and join the nation. Between a rock and a hard place, Jane rides away with Lassiter. The fall of Balancing Rock, which closes off Deception Pass “forever” at the novel’s end and thwarts the pursuing Mormon riders, allows Lassiter to hide Jane and to close a chapter in southern Utah’s history before a better and cleaner era begins, implicitly leaving to others the resolution of historical struggle.
    In the contest over sexual relations that Grey’s novel engages, grounded on the American side in the conflation of federal law and “natural” law governing the sexes, and on the Mormon side by invocations of religious freedom, a woman’s body, soul, and possessions are both battleground and sacrifice. Jane is possessed by her American savior only to be dispossessed of her Mormon father’s land and inheritance. (A woman in Utah in the 1870s had unusual rights of inheritance—and even divorce and property ownership—not accorded to women in the rest of the country.) Like all the contradictions in this novel, the fact that Jane resists the Mormon elders who want her land by allowing Lassiter to take her away from it forever is less troubling when viewed in light of the evil Mormon elders, perhaps the only characters who never contradict themselves. The crime of which Tull and his colleagues are guilty is quite simple; at the novel’s opening, Venters puts it directly: “You want her all yourself. You’re a wiving Mormon. You have use for her—and Withersteen House and Amber Spring and seven thousand head of cattle!” Connected to land and cattle, Jane is in the end forced to cede both to the Mormon elders in her absence. The fate of Jane’s womanhood is the microcosm of a larger legal and national destiny that Grey’s readers understood had overtaken Mormonism.
    When Venters exclaims to Tull, “You want her all yourself,” it is not just Tull’s polygamous plans, but his claim of exclusive rights to a woman and her land that upsets Venters, who is not immune, once he shoots, nurses, and falls in love with Bess, to wanting a woman all to himself. The two love plots in
Riders,
one involving Jane Withersteen and Lassiter and the other involving Bern Venters and Bess (or, as she turns out to be, Elizabeth Erne), reinforce the “natural” sexual law of “one man for one woman” that the novel is keen to uphold. Yet in reinforcing this principle, the plots also place the male hero in a role that imitates the Mormons’ seduction and captivity of women. To extend what Forrest Robinson says in his study of the Western, the American heroes have it both ways: both seducers and saviors, both enforcers of moral codes and liberators from religious codes. And their seduction and rescue of women border on a cruelty that in Venters’s case is redeemed only by his ignorance at the moment he pulls the trigger (Mormons, in contrast, know just what they are aiming at): Venters shoots Bess (but nurses her back to health), kills the man Bess thinks is her father (but she agrees to marry his murderer); Lassiter torches Jane’s house (in order to keep