only because his life or someones close to him was immediately in danger; the reasons were always very personal and never frivolous. In addition, regardless of his pursuits, it was clear that Buffalo Bill always kept his mother and family in mind. These indications were always at the end of each chapter, where the main character would ride home and pay off the mortgage or buy food for his hungry family. The best of the story papers, notes W.H. Bishop, reward virtue and punish vice. Their dependence upon the family keeps them, as a rule, free of dangerous appeals to the lower passions (53).Perhaps for women dime novels disrupted the norm a bit more than those stories targeted at young boys. In stories such as Buffalo Bills, women were protected, one might say respected, but their ability to fight and to be successful on the frontier was never actualized, because it was never women who fought, only men dressed as women. Novels such as The Hidden Hand and Willful Gaynell presented images of women opposite those in which they were seen in real life. These stories were a reflection of the emergence of the working girl, Capitola unable to find work as a girl and Gaynell as a headstrong factory girl. In the first, Capitola dresses as a boy (reversing traditional gender switches) in order to get a job. One circumstance he had particularly remarked, notes the author of The Hidden Hand, E.D.E.N. Southworth, the language used by the poor child during her examination was much superior to the slang she had previously affected, to support her assumed character of newsboy (41). What is implied here is that girls were more articulate and perhaps more learned than boys. More importantly, this gender switching reaffirmed that gender is often performance and not entirely natural, and that women could do men just as successfully as men could do women.Dime novels were never as morally contaminating as the middle class suspected they would be. O...
