The Male West and the Battle for Civilization

Question for Discussion: Do you agree with
Tompkins' argument that the Western works
as a male story that challenges women's
authority in American culture and society?

Reading: Tompkins, pp. 23-45; Flynn, "The Silent
Western as Mythmaker"

Video: Riders of the Purple Sage (1996);
Red River: Indian Attack on the Wagon Train ;
Pale Rider: Scene where girl prays for a miracle

Response Paper: How does the Indian's mythic story
of the West contrast with the "Mythic American West"?
Do these Indians intentionally tell their story of the West in order to challenge every point of the Anglo-American story? Is the Indian's Mythic West a counter-myth to the Anglo-American Mythic West? (1-2 page paper due on
Monday, Feb. 23.)
( See Anglo-American vs. Indian Stories on
the American West )

Creating the Western Story in
the late 1800s and early 1900s

The Administration's New Financial
Rescue Plan
Banks to Assure Congress about the
Use of Public Funds
See Current Ad for the Ford Escape:
see the picture gallery of images (in-class)
The Great American West:
Pictures from the West (in-class)
Frederick Remington Art Posters (in-class)
Western Artists (in-class)
Posters from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show
( in-class)
Flynn, The Origins of the West in National Myth
( in-class)
Flynn, The Actual West gave way to the
Mythic West ( in-class)
Popular Western Novelists that
have shaped the mythic West (in-class)
Tim Dirks, Western Films ( in-class)
Classic Western Movies that
have shaped the mythic West (in-class)
Thirty Great Western Films (in-class)
American Progress by
John Gast (1872)
Explanatory Text used to Market
American Progress
Tompkins, Death in the Western ( in-class)
Lewis, On the meaning of the Western
Story ( in-class)

Tompkins, Death in the Western

"To go west, as far west as you can go, west of everything, is to die." (24)

"It is because the Western depicts life lived at the edge of death that the plot, the characters, the setting, the language, the gestures...are so predictable." (25)

"The Western is secular, materialist, and anti-feminist; it focuses on conflict in the public space, is obsessed with death, and worships the phallus...The most salient fact about the Western--that it is a narrative of male violence." (28)

"In Westerns, facing death and doing something with your life become one and the same thing. For once you no longer believe you are an eternal spirit, risking your life becomes the supreme form of heroism, the bravest thing a person can do." (31)

"When Christianity is no longer the frame of reference--that is, when Lassiter arrives--manhood can prove itself only through risking death." (33)

"The Western answers the domestic novel. It is the antithesis of the cult of domesticity that dominated American Victorian culture. The Western hero,
who seems to ride in and out of nowhere, in fact comes riding out of the nineteenth century." (39)

"Time after time, the Western hero commits murder, usually multiple murders, in the name of making his town/ranch/mining claim safe for women and children." (41)

"The women and children cowering in the background of Indian wars, range wars, battles between outlaws and posses, good gunmen and bad legitimize the violence men practice in order to protect them." (41)

"Why are Westerns so adamantly opposed to anything female? What in the history of the country at the turn of the century could have caused this massive pushing away of the female, domestic, Christian version of reality?" (42)

"The Western owes its popularity and essential character to the dominance of a women's culture in the nineteenth century and to women's invasion of the public sphere between 1880 and 1920." (44)

"The Western doesn't have anything to do with the West as such. It isn't about the encounter between civilization and the froniter. It is about men's fear of losing their mastery, and hence their identity, both of which the Western tirelessly reinvents."
(45)

Lewis, On the Meaning of the
Western Story

I think Tompkins is wrong here to over-emphasize the Western as a product of the struggle between male culture and a female, Christian culture. I think that
the struggle between the man's world of the West and the woman's world of the city and civilized America is also important. The western contrasts female and male values, wilderness vs. civilization, savagery vs. civilization, materialism vs. spirituality, secular vs. sacred, strength vs. weakness, courage vs. fear, bravado vs. emotion, action vs. talk, deeds vs. words, violence vs. civilized order, country vs. city, freedom vs. conformity, the lone individual vs. community, and the natural world vs. the Christian world. The western explores these dichotomies and polarities. Instead of focusing just on the dichotomy
between the male and female values as Tompkins does, we need to look at the other central dichotomies in the western. The American western is so popular and so prominent in American culture precisely because it examines some of the central contradictions in American life.

Flynn, The Silent Western as Mythmaker

The Origins of the West in National Myth

"The years that bridge the end of the Civil War in 1865 with the closing of the West in the early 1890s are of vital significance to the American psyche. During these years, the last vestiges of the Great Indian Nations crumbled and America, bustling with the promises of modernity, took its first infant steps toward world leadership. It was the culmination of almost a century of territorial expansion; a trek westward that began in Europe, traversed the Atlantic and penetrated the New World. With the Louisiana Purchase, the Seminole Wars, the acquisition of Alaska from Russia, and the migration south to the Rio Grande came a shrewd, ruthless, and determined policy, bringing with it prospectors, cattlemen, adventurers, opportunists, and eventually the settlers and the farmers who would work the land."

"This primal moment in American history -- the birth of modern America -- is also the founding moment of a vast array of contemporary American doctrines. Manifest destiny; rugged individualism; a pre-modern Eden of moral simplicity; a future built on the harmonious union of man and nature -- all four cornerstones of the American psyche, each with their locus on that single moment of expansion and creation. No other period in American history has so frequently been called upon to define and solidify national identity. For this reason alone, the migration West is the single most important event in American history -- an event that is replayed over and over in an affirmation of all that is American, all that is good, bad, and ugly."

The Actual West gave way to the Mythic West

"Shane riding toward the fragile frontier town with the Teton Range mountains rising behind him; The Ringo Kid's shootout with the Plummer Boys on the streets of Lordsburg; Butch and Sundance held frozen forever in a single image of outmoded heroics. These moments have come to encapsulate the grandeur and the glory of the American West. They are not real -- yet they have come to represent the real. The actual West gave way to the mythic West, a Neverland whose landscape was mapped by turnof-the-century popular media and then held timelessly frozen for prosperity on the silver screen."

"The mythologizing of the American Wild West begins not with film, but with the dime novels and newspaper serials written in the 1860s. Among these volumes were the apocryphal hagiographies of Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and many others who would soon constellate the firmament of American mythology. As celebratory chronicles of the untamed West, they constructed a history more in line with folkloric fantasies than actual fact, glorifying the frontier not as it was, but as people would liked it to have been."

"The Blood of America is the blood of the Pioneers," the film's opening credits boldly exclaimed before relating the story of a 2,000 mile wagon trek to the promised land of California. Grand-scale photography and panoramic settings conveyed the journey in such monumental terms as to make it seem a veritable Genesis of American culture. If Andre Bazin saw at the heart of the Western "the ethics of the epic and even of tragedy" (147) and an overriding style with a "predilection for vast horizons, all encompassing shots [and] virtually no use for the close-up" (147), he may simply have been referencing The Covered Wagon alone. The success of the film led to a direct and lasting rejuvenation of the genre. In the following year the number of Westerns produced had tripled (Fenin and Everson 132)."

"The silent Western was unique in its propinquity to the era it chronicled. While later Westerns looked back to a time that had since passed, the early Westerns were being shot current with the closing of the frontier. In 1908, convicted bank robber Al Jennings filmed a recreation of his own most famous hold-up in The Bank Robbery . Jennings would go on to make a career for himself as a director. The overlap between the reality being fictionalized and the mechanisms of that fictionalization was significant. Cowhandlers, sharpshooters, lawmen, Indian Chiefs, even ex-train-robbers and bandits turned initially to the Wild West Shows and then later trickled into the motion picture industry as hired-hands -- acting, writing or directing -- shaping what was once their reality into an eternal national myth. Personally and collectively it was an act of rewriting the past, transforming what at times was senseless and barbaric into something that could be handed down from generation to generation as a lost or fastvanishing Eden."

"All cultures must have a foundational past, a common point of genesis, a missionstatement handed down from wise and ancient ancestors. The Union, recently formed and still in the process of defining itself, realized this need and turned to the Frontier for inspiration. The dime-novels and Wild West Shows began what the silent cinema finished: they defined the modern American by way of the pre-modern American. The silent Western spread that Platonic form to the individual psyches of every American, giving it a specter-like presence which infiltrated and informed every aspect of that young nation. For this reason alone, the silent Western holds an unparalleled position in film and national history."

Tim Dirks, Western Films

Western Films or Westerns are the major defining genre of the American film industry, a nostaligic eulogy to the early days of the expansive, untamed American frontier (the borderline between civilization and the wilderness). They are one of the oldest, most enduring and flexible genres and one of the most characteristically American genres in their mythic origins. [The popularity of westerns has waxed and waned over the years. Their most prolific era was in the 1930s to the 1960s, and most recently in the 90s, there was a resurgence of the genre.

This indigenous American art form focuses on the frontier West that existed in North America. Westerns are often set on the American frontier during the last part of the 19th century (1865-1900) following the Civil War, in a geographically western (trans-Mississippi) setting with romantic, sweeping frontier landscapes or rugged rural terrain. However, Westerns may extend back to the time of America's colonial period or forward to the mid-20th century, or as far geographically as Mexico. A number of westerns use the Civil War, the Battle of the Alamo (1836) or the Mexican Revolution (1910) as a backdrop.

The western film genre often portrays the conquest of the wilderness and the subordination of nature, in the name of civilization, or the confiscation of the territorial rights of the original inhabitants of the frontier. Specific settings include lonely isolated forts, ranch houses, the isolated homestead, the saloon, the jail, the livery stable, the small-town main street, or small frontier towns that are forming at the edges of civilization. They may even include Native American sites or villages. Other iconic elements in westerns include the hanging tree, stetsons and spurs, saddles, lassos and Colt .45's, bandannas and buckskins, canteens, stagecoaches, gamblers, long-horned cattle and cattle drives, prostitutes (or madams) with a heart of gold, and more. Very often, the cowboy has a favored horse (or 'faithful steed'), for example, Roy Rogers' Trigger, Gene Autry's Champion, William Boyd's (Hopalong Cassidy) Topper, the Lone Ranger's Silver and Tonto's Scout.