Zane Grey Read Online Free PDF

it from Mormon hands) and kills Mormon associates of her father. Saving a woman from corruption, in other words, threatens to corrupt her while also cutting her ties to Mormon patriarchy. When Bess is recovering from her gunshot wound by Venters in Surprise Valley, the Edenic hideout and her condition offer Venters a seductively dangerous power over her: “You’ve saved me,” she tells him, “—and I’m—I’m yours to do with as you like.”
Riders
risks ever more ambiguous distinctions between moral codes. While Jane and Lassiter’s relationship is sanctified by conventional values (one man for one woman), the ending also upends them as Jane’s sexual virtue is threatened with corruption, by 1912 standards, since, as she is being saved, she and Lassiter are sealed in Surprise Valley without being married. (In the sequel, the grown-up Fay suggestively downplays this contravention of sexual norms when she reports to the Protestant minister Shefford that in Surprise Valley, “Uncle Jim and Mother Jane talked less as the years went by.”)
    Grey’s adulterous affairs may have inspired this pushing of the sexual envelope. One of his biographers, Stephen May, speculates that Grey’s “prurient interest in Mormon polygamy” may have influenced his philandering early in his career. On one hand, polygamy “shocked his Protestant sensibilities; on the other it excited a libidinous need in him. . . . Grey began to feel some justification for traveling with women friends” away from his wife. “After all,” May writes, “his Mormon friends engaged in plural marriages and yet led highly moral lives; why shouldn’t he?” That Grey’s hero has it both ways mirrors the symmetrically opposing arguments between Mormons and Americans over polygamy: “plural marriage” as either the cornerstone of “true” religion (in the Mormon argument) or its corruption (in the American one); religious belief as an excuse for lust (from the American point of view) versus sanctified sex as a form of divine exaltation (in Mormon belief).
    Grey’s first readers may have been nostalgic for an era of unresolved tension in which Mormon difference was preserved as a threat from which to rescue people. Frontier regions, Grey knew, provided this backdrop of dramatic contrasts as places that were, one could say, not yet nationally finished, just as southern Utah in 1871 was a border region in the sense that it was a federal territory and not a state, and in the sense that it was populated by both Mormons and Gentiles. In addition to suspenseful melodrama surrounding the rescue of Jane from Mormon polygamy, two other key elements thus help to explain the popularity and entertainment value of Grey’s novel when it was published: the inference of undomesticated sex and nostalgia for a West that was not yet fully Americanized. These may seem to contradict anti-Mormon sentiment somewhat: since antipolygamy arguments were based in part on the view that polygamy was licentious, such a view does not seem compatible with a desire for sexual titillation. Moreover, why would readers be nostalgic for Mormon difference when they had fought for years to eradicate it? In fact, these three elements are intimately linked and depend upon each other: antipolygamy fever was often prurient, and a culture is nostalgic not just for what it has lost but for what it has taken away, against which it had identified itself.

CHAPTER I
    LASSITER
    A sharp clip-clop of iron-shod hoofs deadened and died away, and clouds of yellow dust drifted from under the cottonwoods out over the sage.
    Jane Withersteen gazed down the wide purple slope with dreamy and troubled eyes. A rider had just left her and it was his message that held her thoughtful and almost sad, awaiting the churchmen who were coming to resent and attack her right to befriend a Gentile. 1
    She wondered if the unrest