Title: Code of the West
Author: Zane Grey
Date: 1934
Publisher: Harper
ISBN: 0-06-100173-2
Length: 359 pages
Quote: "Georgiana May...on her way to Arizona to be cured...of a slight tendency toward tuberculosis and a very great leaning toward indiscriminate flirtation."
Whew. Define "testosterone poisoning" and give an example: Code of the West. Granted, the popular romances of the early twentieth century were all pretty terrible. When I read the kind of fiction that sold when my elders were looking for relationship advice, I'm not so surprised that so many of them earnestly advised my generation not to read novels at all.
But even against that field of awfulness, Grey's reaction to "feminine rant about equality with men" stands out. It's such an egregious example of Masculine Rant that it deservesd to be on high school reading lists. Classes could be marched out to the field, boys accused of excessive or non-consensual eyeballing could be forced to read lines from the book aloud before being pelted with whatever the cafeteria staff know better than to try to feed the students, and all boys would then kneel down, place their foreheads on the ground, and repeat in chorus, "We're sorry. We're sorry., We're sorry., For all our lives we'll be sorry."
So little Georgie, who played kissing games at parties back in Erie, comes out to spread tuberculosis to Arizona. People did, back then. In a protracted and tedious beginning, Teacher Mary has a little fun with her recent graduates, leading them to believe the sister she's asking one of them to meet at the stagecoach stop might be ten years older than Mary is. Only Cal volunteers to do the decent thing; the other boys go out, though, to nobble his car. They all discover at once that Georgie is ten years younger than Mary. It starts to sound as if it was being written to fill up a minimum word count, but Zane Grey was better than that; he is setting up subplots for a man's version of a Romance. Cal falls n love with Georgie. She's seventeen; he's not much older. He's still the youngest in a large family of older brothers and cousins who have spet their lives Keeping the Child In HIs Place. He can relate to Georgie's adolescent rebellion.
Its most obvious form is being a fashion victim. In the 1920s, after the serious feminist demand for civil rights had gained serious ground came a generation of frivolous girls who thought that what they'd gained was the right to paaar-tay. Georgie's blonde hair is bobbed, and not only do her skirts show her knees but her stockings leave those knees bare to the cactus. That by itself wouldn't be so bad as the corresponding fad the Arizona boys have picked up, in the War: they don't drink alcohol, but they smoke cigarettes! But a generation's refusal to hear what women might actually have been saying had created a "code," according to which Georgie's conformity to unflattering fashions advertised... immodesty!
Modesty, the virtue of not calling attention to oneself, has always been hard to define. In a social circle like the school at Erie from which nobody even asks if Georgie bothered to graduate, modesty might have required that unflattering display of banged-up knees. Not that Georgie would have noticed; she really does lack modesty. What some people don't want to admit is that her lack of modesty does not by itself equal a lack of chastity. Georgie refuses to see any connection between bare knees and making unwanted babies. Well, there's not actually much of one, but if your house is not for sale you don't put "for sale" sign in the yard.
Anyway Georgie moves in with Mary and is bored. Nobody would propose that a t.b. case would consider a job, but also, at this period, despite documentation that women did work, there was serious opposition to their being paid enough to live on. Mary was probably working twice the hours a man in her position would have worked, and taking home half the wages. Georgie has a serious issue to rebel against, but all she sees is a chance to rebel against the older generation's exaggerated ideas of modesty. She wants to teach Arizona teachers the "latest" dances, the "African" influence of jazz, and introduce makeup, and kissing games!
And of course everyone else is so stifled by those tattered shrouds of misguided "modesdty" that nobody can tell Georgie, in plain English: Kissing games weren't a great sin against chastity in Erie, but they were and are a sin against sanitation. Cal has a real crush on Georgie. Everyone gives it the status of True Love, which Cal might be capable of feeling some day, if he doesn't die of tuberuclosis first. The other boys who flirt, dance, and smooch with Georgie are thinking less of her for not latching on to Cal. Bid Hatfield, a big burly lout who runs with that crowd, has already "insulted" ("code" for groped, if not raped) one of Cal's sisters, and though the brothers haven't said anything to aggravate the sister's violated modesty they're not merely jealous of Bid's apparent attractiveness. Bid is the type who really might decide to "ruin" Georgie and introduce Vice to the little town of Tonto, Arizona. Wouldn't be the first place where lack of respect for women's rights allowed that to happen.
(Do we need a few generations of equal abuse for men? I hope not, but...hit the ground, boys. For all your lives you'll be sorry.)
Some days, Georgie rides around with Cal, learning why real country people always cover their kknees. (Daisy Duke was pure comic fiction.) Grey was on familiar ground, now, writing about the beauty of some parts of Arizona. He dwells on that theme whenever he gets a chance.
Funnily enough...I'm not calling Zane Grey a liar, because other people have photographed and painted all that scenic beauty in Arizona. But I have been in Arizona. Several times. It looked like this.
But the settlement of Tonto, which does not exist as a town, may have been imagined as existing in what became the Tonto National Park, which is near a watercourse and is the source of many of those "scenic beauty of Arizona" photos.
So Georgie enjoys the scenery and the horses and being a useless pampered dilettante, and Mary is too kind to tell the poor little thing how badly Georgie is cramping Mary's life. The "code" forbids people to talk about things that matter. Money is not talked about. Work is seldom talked about. Sex is not directly talked about. Cal's older brother Enoch, however, wants a wife, and Mary wants a husband, and Georgie's in the way. Mary won't leave her alone; Georgie has no income and apparently no job skills, so she can't go somewhere on her own; Enoch doesn't want her living with him and Mary--so their marriage will just have to wait.
So all the other young men go along with the dumbest practical joke they've ever played. Why should Cal feel "heartbroken" by the thought o Georgie kissing Bid? Is he afraid of Georgie? What he needs to do is give her a good scare! Get her on to his horse, ride fast to the house he's been spending his time building, bully her into saying "I do" in front of the "Parson," then let her have it: "Mrs. Cal Thurman, I want my supper!"
It works, sort of. Cal throws a screeching, scratching Georgie across his horse, rides fast, and realizes how stupid this prank was when Georgie bumps into an overhanging branch. The lads chortle that she's been adequately "scared" when, barely conscious, she gasps "I do," but Cal will always know she's concussed.
What makes the story worth reading is that Cal understands the situation of a man who has hit a woman all too well. Even incultures that denied women's civil rights, the law of nature has always been: If a man hits a woman while he is awake, for the rest of his life he will never be able to go to sleep with a reasonable expectation of waking up. Far from laughing about having "scared" Georgie, Cal lives in fear of her. Georgie agrees to stay on his little homestead, and do some of the work--there's enough for her to do. Work actually agrees with Georgie. She even starts growing again! She enjoys Cal's company as much as she always had. But he knows that she thinks he hit her, and he leaves his rifle with her and locks himself in an outbuilding, every night, as simple life insurance.
Mary is delighted that Georgie's eloped. Woen teachers' contracts in the early twentieth century often specified that the job would terminate if there were any suspicion of the teacher doing anything like dating. Sometimes things like being seen in an ice cream parlor with a brother were specfied. Enoch and Mary have been quietly eying each other for years. When they hear that Georgie and Cal have eloped, Enoch wants the wedding to be one week after Georgie's. Mary thinks one month after, during the school holidays, would be in better taste.
So Georgie pretends to be happy with her farce of a marriage until Mary is safely married. Then she can think about her horrible future as a domestic servant in a town where few people can afford one, and she's known to have a Disease. Most of her wages will be paid in the form of "room and board." She will not be well fed. If she really needed to grow another inch, she won't have the chance. The small change that's saved up in her bank account will probably be paid directly to anyone she accepts as a husband. Then she can go on doing domestic drudgery, only without any claim on pocket change as wages. Yes. Women of her generation had more serious things to think about than short skirts and jazz dancing.
Why doesn't Georgie rush forth to embrace her fate? Why does she stay in a beautiful new house, cooking and cleaning and clearing brush, with the best pal she's ever had? Could it be True Love?
"No," the reader will growl, "it could not. They're not even full grown. It might, at best, be Puppy Love."
Well, it's not as if they have a lot of years to enjoy or suffer from it, anyway. Very few people who had tuberculosis in the 1920s survived long enough to be cured with antibiotics in the 1950s. If this story had a base in fact, Grey imight have felt free to publish it when he did after receiving the news that the model for Georgie had coughed up her lungs in, say, 1932.
But it's a romance. She'll have a blissful remission. Cal will convince her that her concussion was an accident, she'll have recovered without noticeable permanent brain damage--not that much she had much of a brain in the first place--and Cal will at least get to have sex with the vampire who's already draining his life. The other young men will enjoy a few good years of cigarette smoking and safe-in-the-sense-of-monogamous sex before they all start coughing blood, too. None of them will ever know why...
God. People.
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