From the issue dated December 13, 2002
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At 100, the Western Still Spurs ScholarsBooks and conferences take new looks at the most prominent genre in American cultureBy PETER MONAGHAN His execution of justice complete, his six-shooter still warm, the maverick
Our hero's been beaten up. He's been plugged. Against long odds, he has shot up a gang of blackhats. He is a champion of values that no one knew he held, and which, it seems, civilized folk just ain't willin' to fight for no more. He's all man, all right, but there's no fit for him in this town, so he rides on. That's not how The Virginian closes. The eponymous hero, unlike his many successors, stays in town and ends up marrying the schoolmarm. Still, since its publication 100 years ago, Owen Wister's novel has provided plot elements and themes for countless westerns, both in literature and on film. Earlier frontier novels, like James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826), had depicted frontiersmen, and 19th-century dime novels had added cowboys and Indians to the cast. But scholars generally consider Wister's tale of a laconic horseman in the vast Wyoming Territory, who epitomizes qualities like chivalry, valor, and campfire camaraderie, to be the ur-formula western. Just as later novelists have mined its rich plot, filmmakers have borrowed freely from The Virginian, and from the first narrative film, The Great Train Robbery (1903). Together, the two works created a genre that has, for better and worse, been more prominent in American culture than any other. The genre is so taken for granted that the western novel's centennial has passed with hardly any fanfare, and little seems planned for the 100th birthday of the film western. But academic critics are not letting the Virginian, and those who followed in his trail, slip out of town unacclaimed. Several scholars present views of Wister's classic in Reading "The Virginian" in the New West, a volume of essays due out from the University of Nebraska Press in March, amid a spate of books and conferences on the genre. In October, 350 researchers attended the Western Literature Association's annual meeting, in Tucson, and just as many turned out last month in Kansas City, Mo., for the Film and History League's national conference, "The American West(s) in Film, Television, and History." Researchers brought up topics including race and ethnicity in the western; the way that a film like High Noon (1952) can be seen as a veiled comment on McCarthyism and the cold-war mentality; and the place of western lore in the military. Scholars at both conferences were also interested in broader formulations of the West in American consciousness. Those start from Frederick Jackson Turner's late-19th-century view of the frontier as a terrain on which the rugged individual could prevail over hardship, forge his manhood, and pursue his manifest destiny. They continue right up to and beyond the revisions of the new western history, which in the past 20 years has emphasized less-noble aspects, like greed and genocide. The western mythos still has its fans, even among scholars, but the predominant tenor of current research is to show that the genre is more complicated, and less blithely heroic, than popular audiences have assumed. With the rise of cultural studies in recent years, early westerns and variations, like the novels of Louis L'Amour, are attracting discussion alongside so-called more serious writing about the West by the likes of the novelist and scholar of American Indian life Frank Waters (1901-95), and the novelists A.B. Guthrie Jr. (1901-91), Wallace Stegner (1907-93), and Larry McMurtry (1936- ). "One part of the recent writing is returning to canonical or classic texts, like The Virginian and [Zane Grey's 1912] Riders of the Purple Sage, to recover their formal and thematic complexities," says Stephen Tatum, an associate professor of English at the University of Utah, who is an editor of Reading "The Virginian." One essay in that collection argues that American Indians were "erased" from the novel's framework to permit an uncluttered working out of white notions of manhood, which nonetheless borrowed from Indian "savagery." Another essay discusses the "queer frontier" by analyzing such homophilic elements as the narrator's infatuation with the hero. Several essays note that The Virginian, and the western in general, have always constructed the West as masculine, in opposition to a feminized East. The West as Mythic Space Such work continues the project of influential books of the 1990s, like Lee Clark Mitchell's Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (1996). Mr. Mitchell, a professor of English at Princeton University, holds that disaffected Easterners mythologized the West, grappling all the way with such issues of nation-building as family values, the use of natural resources, and the accumulation of capital -- and, of course, gender relations. The western was fixated not just on what it took to be a man, but also on the male body, he argues. Physicality and manhood commonly came together in the trope of the hero beaten to a pulp by bad guys, only to recover bravely and put down the evildoers with daring and dash. Mythic dimensions of the western had been monumentally worked out over 20 years by Richard Slotkin, a professor of English at Wesleyan University, in a trilogy of books that culminated with Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992). He wrote that the mythical West has been just as central as the real frontier in building nationhood and culture, including American concepts of masculinity. For Mr. Mitchell and other critics, the western has also always been ambivalent about the glorified male. In fact, the researchers say, close study of the form reveals unexpected attitudes toward the frontier past, and the larger national story into which westerns fit. They suggest, for example, that the authors of early westerns were not simply nostalgic for a fading frontier -- and not just intent on depicting men who were really men, according to the values of the day. They were also interested in weighing those values, anxiously and often explicitly, against challenges from the emerging suffragette movement and from 19th-century American society's increasing focus on domesticity, which was championed by sentimental novels of the time. As Mr. Tatum and the collection's other editor, Melody Graulich, a professor of English at Utah State University, note in the introduction to Reading "The Virginian," while Wister's novel initiated a form that was, by nature, nostalgic, the book was forward-looking as well. It closes with a view of the new West: The hero has become "the owner of a coal mine, ... and the West is ... getting down to the serious business of resource extraction, labor management, irrigation projects, competition for markets, railroad monopolies, foreign investment, Los Angeles real-estate speculation, 'cheap foreign' labor, and tourism, all mentioned in the text." The novel is ultimately a story of "forced choices," says William R. Handley, an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California. Just as America must build a nation in accordance with manifest destiny, the Virginian marries the schoolmarm -- choosing domesticity, but with misgivings. That plot development rings false, the professor suggests, as if even Wister wasn't convinced. "My interest in the western is how the texts actually work against that notion of inevitability," Mr. Handley says. So, while the formula western is decried for "representing everything wrong with the old mythic West," as Mr. Tatum and Ms. Graulich put it -- for amounting to "monolithic conservatism, the favorite reading of both Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan" -- in fact, the picture is not so clear-cut. For example, in the work of Zane Grey, a pioneer of the western novel, heroes fall in love with the "mixed blood" or otherwise alien woman. In Riders of the Purple Sage, the hero loves a Mormon woman, who must choose between marrying into polygamy and -- at the cost of inheriting her father's land -- marrying the gentile hero. She takes the hero, of course, but other Grey novels featured a Protestant minister who flirts with becoming a Mormon, and a Mormon defender of Indians. Insofar as westerns undermined their own claims for the manifest destiny of white culture, they can be seen as the precursors, not the antithesis, of a genre of anti-westerns, like the 1970 film Little Big Man, that deplored the genocide of Indians. If anti-westerns further complicated a picture of the western that was already more nuanced than was generally allowed, the picture has since been further shaded by African-American westerns, Italian "spaghetti westerns," and ironic films by Sherman Alexie and other current practitioners of an "insurgent Native American counter-cinema," in the phrase of Susan Kollin, an associate professor of English at Montana State University at Bozeman, who is working on a book titled Western/Anti-Western: Recovering an Alternative History of Popular Fiction and Film. In studies of film, academic revisionism began in the 1970s, most influenced by John G. Cawelti's book The Six-Gun Mystique (1970). Just as in literary studies, researchers have applied the familiar templates of cultural studies -- race, gender, ethnicity -- not just reflexively, they say, but in recognition of how often westerns explicitly raise those issues. "The American West was a very multicultural place," says Peter Lehman, a co-editor of the forthcoming The Searchers: Essays and Reflections on John Ford's Classic Western. Current scholars, says Mr. Lehman, director of the interdisciplinary humanities program at Arizona State University, emphasize that Ford's 1956 film and its many successors showed "that there is a complex and disturbing history of interaction between cultures, rather than just one culture going on its grand way to its manifest destiny." "The Searchers at least tackles these issues in a really unusual manner for Hollywood westerns of that time," he says. Its central figure, Ethan Edwards (played by John Wayne), spends years tracking down a relative who, as a young girl, was abducted by Comanches. When he finds her, he nearly kills her because she's "not white" anymore. In the end, he delivers her "home." One American Indian contributor to the Searchers volume, Tom Colonnese, assistant vice president for minority affairs at the University of Washington, argues that Indians can no more value such a film than Jews could one that glorified or excused the Holocaust. "Is the genre so inherently racist that it cannot accommodate issues of race?" asks Blake Allmendinger, a professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles, who is preparing a book-length study of the "black West." Black filmmakers, he says, have had little success in redeeming the genre. Most of them, like Mario Van Peebles, in Posse (1993), end up surrendering to its conventions of violence and vigilantism. For a better effort, Mr. Allmendinger recommends David Anthony Durham's Gabriel's Story (2001), a novel of a young black cowboy caught up among horse-rustling murderers. Complicated Tasks As the western genre expands and evolves, the task of the theorist becomes more complicated. The western's offspring include revisionist fare like Clint Eastwood's 1992 film Unforgiven and novels like Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men (1980), a quasi-western that adds a Chinese-American perspective to the question of what the settlement of the West tells us about Americanness. Theorists also are considering such variations as the 1990s television series Northern Exposure, with its modern-day spin on cowboys and Indians; noir mysteries that continue the tradition of the maverick loner fighting for justice; and gay-and-lesbian westerns, including the popular Nevada Barr romance novel Bittersweet (1999), which uses women's frontier diaries to imagine the lives of lesbians settling the West. Such works raise the question of what the West was really like. Modern literary scholars criticize the new western history for claiming to have uncovered a tragic narrative of the West in contrast with the triumphalist narrative of conquest. Not only do early western novels contain a good deal of that supposedly new view, say the literary critics, but the new western history, by substituting one master narrative for another, has itself created just another myth of the West. A better approach, they suggest, is to study the history of such mythologizing itself. Some new-western historians have, in fact, done just that. Richard White, a professor of history at Stanford University, has described how Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show was already propagating fantasies of the West at the time Owen Wister was writing. Similar demystification is being done by Mr. Tatum, among others, on Frederic Remington's famous illustrations of the West. Both Wister and Remington traveled to the frontier at a time when prominent physicians were advocating the "West cure," a bout of hunting and tough travel designed to vitalize Eastern men. Wister's novel is dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt, who famously made just such a journey. "The West was somehow defined as more authentic, where real life might be experienced," explains Mr. Tatum. More authentic or not, the West was indisputably violent. Novelists and filmmakers have often used violence to represent aspects of national trailblazing, but the brutality was real, and palpable, too, argues Mr. Handley in his new book, Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West. He shows that much of the brutality involved intra-ethnic or domestic violence, which novelists depicted as a product of a frontier society floundering for stability once the threat from Indians and other enemies waned. In some recent westerns, like the novels of Cormac McCarthy, violence has no discernible formulaic purpose of, say, fashioning heroes or metaphorically advancing any national project. The irredeemable violence in McCarthy's West may, Mr. Handley suggests, even signify "degeneration, a failed national project." Whether that project has failed or not, versions of the western continue to be written and filmed. On the centennial of its birth, the western is in no danger of riding off into the sunset. A SAMPLING OF BOOKS ABOUT THE WESTERN Back in the Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western, edited by Edward Buscombe and Roberta E. Pearson (British Film Institute, 1998). Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Literature, by Michael K. Johnson (University of Oklahoma Press, 2002). Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, by Richard Slotkin (Atheneum, 1992). Having It Both Ways: Self-Subversion in Western Popular Classics, by Forrest G. Robinson (University of New Mexico Press, 1993). Hollywood's Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film, edited by Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor (University Press of Kentucky, 1998). John Ford Made Westerns: Filming the Legend in the Sound Era, edited by Gaylyn Studlar and Matthew Bernstein (Indiana University Press, 2001). Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women's Writing, by Krista Comer (University of North Carolina Press, 1999). Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West, by William R. Handley (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West, by David M. Wrobel (University Press of Kansas, 2002). Reading ěThe Virginianî in the New West: Centennial Essays, edited by Melody Graulich and Stephen Tatum (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming in March). The Searchers: Essays and Reflections on John Ford's Classic Western, edited by Arthur M. Eckstein and Peter Lehman (Wayne State University Press, forthcoming in fall 2003). The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel, by John G. Cawelti (Popular Press, 1999). Ten Most Wanted: The New Western Literature, by Blake Allmendinger (Routledge, 1998). True West: Authenticity and the American West, edited by William R. Handley and Nathaniel Lewis (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming in 2004). West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, by Jane P. Tompkins (Oxford University Press, 1992). Westerns: Films Through History, edited by Janet Walker (Routledge, 2001). Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film, by Lee Clark Mitchell (University of Chicago Press, 1996). http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 49, Issue 16, Page A12
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Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education