bove all one that will take her from her present life. It is the character who yearns for the nostalgia of an earlier age and who has elevated her sense of this primitive people in her mind to a high state so that they are held out as an ideal:
In "The Woman Who Rode Away" there is a total opposition of the primitive and civilized, and a consequent destruction of the civilized. But this antithesis operates only on one level. The American woman is not so much civilized as the "dead" product of a failure of civilization. As a person she is only cursorily developed in the fiction, but the way of life, society, and nature of the primitive tribe is not very fully developed either. The technique of the story, that is, insists that the reader is not to posit any choice between two societies, primitive and civilized, nor to see one as resolving the ills of the other (Widmer 348).
Peter Balbert finds that the story has been largely ignored for some time and that it was not treated well when it was addressed. What critical commen
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