Saving the West for Women and Civility

Question for Discussion: Do you agree with
Tompkins that in the Western the male hero
distrusts words, emotions, and his inner self?

Reading: Tompkins, pp. 47-67, 125-128;
Furniss, Richard Slotkin and the Frontier Myth;
Faragher, "The Myth of the Frontier"

Video: Red River (1948): scene with Millay and
Dunston in the camp ; Shane : scene at the burial
of a farmer killed by a gunmen (1953);

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 )

25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis
Appaloosa (2008): New Ed Harris Western (in-class)
New Yorker Review of Appaloosa
The Chevy Colorado:
Colorado has its own Western car (in-class)
Lewis, On the meaning of the Western
Story ( in-class)
Western Film Plots (in-class)
Lewis, Some Fundamental Oppositions
in the Western (in-class)
Tompkins: Women and the Language of Men
(in-class)
Tompkins: The Western itself is the language of
Men (in-class)
Quotes from Red River on being soft, on not
being manly enough (in-class)
American Progress by John Gast (1872)
The Marlboro Man Myth ( in-class)
Faragher, "The Myth of the Frontier" ( in-class)
Furniss: Richard Slotkin and the Frontier Myth
( in-class)
Sloktin's Myth of the Frontier and Violence
( in-class)
The Frontier Myth and Regeneration
through Violence ( in-class)
Real, Men and Depression

Westerns Film Plots:

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 small-town main street, or small frontier towns that are forming at the edges of civilization. Other iconic elements in westerns include the hanging tree, stetsons and spurs, lassos and Colt .45's, stagecoaches, gamblers, long-horned cattle and cattle drives, prostitutes (or madams) with a heart of gold, and more.

Usually, the central plot of the western film is the classic, simple goal of maintaining law and order on the frontier in a fast-paced action story. It is normally rooted in archetypal conflict -- good vs. bad, virtue vs. evil, white hat vs. black hat, man vs. man, new arrivals vs. Native Americans (inhumanely portrayed as savage Indians), settlers vs. Indians, humanity vs. nature, civilization vs. wilderness or lawlessness, schoolteachers vs. saloon dance-hall girls, villains vs. heroes, lawman or sheriff vs. gunslinger, social law and order vs. anarchy, the rugged individualist vs. the community, the cultivated East vs. West, settler vs. nomad, and farmer vs. industrialist to name a few. Often the hero of a western meets his opposite "double," a mirror of his own evil side that he has to destroy.

Typical elements in westerns include hostile elements (often Native Americans), guns and gun fights (sometimes on horseback), violence and human massacres, horses, trains (and train robberies), bank robberies and holdups, runaway stagecoachs, shoot-outs and showdowns, outlaws and sheriffs, cattle drives and cattle rustling, stampedes, posses in pursuit, barroom brawls, 'search and destroy' plots, breathtaking settings and open landscapes (the Tetons and Monument Valley, to name only a few), and distinctive western clothing (denim, jeans, boots, etc.).

Western heroes are often local lawmen or enforcement officers, ranchers, army officers, cowboys, territorial marshals, or a skilled, fast-draw gunfighter. They are normally masculine persons of integrity and principle - courageous, moral, tough, solid and self-sufficient, maverick characters (often with trusty sidekicks), possessing an independent and honorable attitude (but often characterized as slow-talking). The Western hero could usually stand alone and face danger on his own, against the forces of lawlessness (outlaws or other antagonists), with an expert display of his physical skills (roping, gun-play, horse-handling, pioneering abilities, etc.).

ON Slotkin's Myth of the Frontier
and Violence

According to the myth of the frontier, says Professor Slotkin, "the conquest of the wilderness and the subjugation or displacement of the Native Americans who originally inhabited it have been the means to our achievement of a national identity, a democratic polity, an ever-expanding economy and a phenomenally dynamic and 'progressive' civilization." Central to this myth was the belief that "violence is an essential and necessary part of the process through which American society was established and through which its democratic values are defended and enforced."

MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Richard Slotkin and the Frontier Myth

The frontier myth portrays North America as an empty, unoccupied wilderness (not withstanding occasional acknowledgment of the indigenous presence) where resources are rich and land is free for the taking; or, if not exactly free, the land becomes the rightful spoil of war for those representing the interests of civilization and progress. The symbolic landscape of the frontier narrative is marked by boundaries and by the encounter of opposites: civilization and savagery, man and nature, Whites and Indians, good and evil. These encounters are characterised in terms of conflict and violence as the protagonist struggles against the harsh environment, the unknown and potentially hostile Indians, the savagery of the empty land. Eventually these encounters are resolved through domination and conquest, through the subordination of Indians, nature, and evil to the forces of progress, civilization, and the ultimate will of God. The triumph of the protagonist highlights the triumph of the values of self-reliance, democracy, competition, and freedom, values that continue to define American ideals in the present.

Elizabeth Furniss
----------------------------------------------------------------

The Frontier Myth and Regeneration
through Violence

The frontier myth thus provides a theory of history in which conflict, violence, and the subjugation of nature and indigenous peoples are legitimated as natural and inevitable for ensuring the ‘progress' of civilization. The frontier myth provides a master narrative of ‘regeneration through violence', through which American identity was initially defined, and continues to be continually reasserted, through acts of aggressive violence. [ 27 ] Slotkin sees this key metaphor of regeneration through violence, and this foundational narrative of history, to be continually expressed in diverse arenas of cultural and political activity, ranging from the military aggression of American foreign policy to the crop of urban vigilante movies produced by Hollywood in the 1980s. It is through such acts of heroic, aggressive intervention that American national identity
is continually expressed and celebrated.

Elizabeth Furniss

See Terence Real, I Don't Want to Talk about It (1998)

"Terry Real asserts that depression is often overlooked and misunderstood in men. He disputes the conventional wisdom that the rate of depression in women is two to four times the rate of men. Depression is experienced and expressed differently in men and women. Depressed men don't reach out for help in the same way that women do. Too often, men are reluctant to be too expressive of their feelings or too openly vulnerable. Depression is seen as unmanly and shameful. It carries a double stigma for men -- that of a mental illness as well as femininity." Bert Hoff, Review of Real's book

Tompkins, "Women and the Language
of Men"

"Fear of losing his identity drives a man west, where the harsh conditions of life force his manhood into being." (47)

"These are the classic oppositions from which all Westerns derive their meaning: parlor versus mesa,
East versus West, woman versus man, illusion versus truth, words versus things." (48)

"Westerns distrust language...Words are weak and misleading, only actions count; words are immaterial, only objects are real." (49)

"The pattern of talk canceled by action always delivers the same message: language is false or at best ineffectual; only actions are real." (51)

"The position represented by language, always associated with women, religion, and culture, is allowed to appear in Westerns and is accorded a certain plausibility and value. It functions as a critique of force and, even more important, as a symbol of the peace, harmony, and civilization that force is invoked in order to preserve." (55)

"To be a man is not only to be monolithic, silent, mysterious, impenetrable as a desert butte, it it to be the desert butte." (57)

"As the human incarnation of nature, he neither speaks nor listens, He is monumentality in motion, propelling himself forward by his instinct, no more talkable to than
a river or an avalanche and just as good company." (58)

"Molly is identified by her ties to the East, her class background, her education, but most of all by her involvement in language. Words are her work and her pleasure and the source of her power....[In The Virginian,] the man's sheer physical presence is
stronger than language, and so words are finally the
sign of Molly's--and all women's--inferiority." (63)

Tompkins, The Western itself is the Language of Men

"The silence of this inner voice, its muteness, keeps the woman's voice, its counterpart, from being heard. It is replaced by the narrative of the gunfight, the range war, the holdup, the chase. By the desert. The Western itself is the language of men, what they do vicariously, instead of speaking." (65)

"The Western hero's silence symbolizes a massive suppression of the inner life. And my sense is that this is a determined shutting down of emotions, this cutting of the self off from contact with the interior well of feeling, exacts its price in the end." (66)

"Men would rather die than talk, because talking might bring up their own unprocessed pain or risk a dam burst that would undo the front of imperturbable superiority. It may be that the Western hero flees into the desert seeking there what Gretel Ehrlich has called "the solace of open spaces," a place whose physical magnificence and emptiness are the promise of an inward strength and quietude." (67)

"In the intrapsychic politics the Western sets up, the body and the emotions have no "rights," as it were, no voice; like the animals they do not speak" (125)

"For both male and female heroes, gender patrols the borders of expression, keeping men and women from protesting their lot by threatening them with the label of deviance. Women cannot express their rage because to do so marks them as unfeminine. Men cannot register their pain because to do so marks them as unmanly." (127)

"Striving to be the opposite of women, the male heroes restrict themselves to a pitiably narrow range of activities. They can't read or dance or look at pictures. They can't play. They can't rest. They can't look at the flowers. They can't cook or sew or keep house, or carry on a conversation of more than a couple of sentences. They can't not know something, or ask someone else the way. They can't daydream or fantasize or play the fool. They can't make mistakes." (127)

Quotes from Red River

Thomas Dunson : "Cherry was right. You're soft, you should have let 'em kill me, 'cause I'm gonna kill you. I'll catch up with ya. I don't know when, but I'll catch up. Every time you turn around, expect to see me, 'cause one time you'll turn around and I'll be there. I'm gonna
kill ya, Matt."

Cherry Valance : You're fast with that gun, Matt. Awful fast. But your heart's soft. Too soft. Might get you hurt some day.
Matt Garth : Could be. I wouldn't count on it.

Nadine Groot : He didn't know about money, Matt. He never had none. He didn't know what to do.
Matt Garth : You mean he just doesn't know who to fight.
Nadine Groot : Yeah.
Matt Garth : Well that's all right.

Tess Millay : Whoever would have thought that you two could have killed each other.

Quotes from Shane

Shane : There's no living with a killing. There's no going back from it. Right or wrong, it's a brand, a brand that sticks.

Shane : Do you mind putting down that gun? Then I'll leave.
Joe Starrett : What difference does it make, you're leaving anyway?
Shane : I'd like it to be my idea.

Faragher, "The Myth of the Frontier"

"For two centuries the frontier West was the setting for America's most enduring form of popular entertainment. Daniel Boone — master hunter, pathfinder, Indian fighter, and a frontier leader of the American Revolution — was the progenitor of a long line of national frontier heroes. The subject of a short biography published in 1784, Boone was the archetypal Western hero: a man who loves and understands the wilderness, an intimacy he uses to defeat the Indians and tame the country."

"Essentially, the Western, the story form of the myth, tells a tale of progress, a justification of violent conquest and untrammeled development. Boone's story certainly had its triumphal side. But the Western also raises troubling questions. What is the cost of progress? Because myth is composed in the figurative language of metaphor and symbol rather than in the logical language of analysis, it may incorporate such doubts without actually confronting them. As historian Richard Slotkin writes, "The most potent recurring hero-figures in our mythologies are men in whom contradictory identities find expression."

"In the years following Boone's death in 1820, the frontiersman became a ubiquitous presence in American popular culture. Of primary significance was the work of novelist James Fenimore Cooper, who created an enduring literary version of the Boone character in a series of novels known as The Leatherstocking Tales , published between 1823 and 1841. Cooper staged a conflict between civilized restraint and natural freedom. On the surface, his stories make the case for "the march of our nation across the continent."

"In 1882 he organized "Buffalo Bill's Wild West," which toured America and the world for the next three decades. The presumed authenticity of historic reenactments was the highlight of Cody's show. Hunters chased buffalo, Indians attacked the Deadwood stage, and the Pony Express once again delivered the mail to isolated frontier outposts. The climax was a staging of "Custer's Last Fight," with Cody arriving just after Custer's demise, the words "Too Late" projected by lantern slide on a background screen. In the grand finale, Cody led a galloping victory lap of all the company's players — "The Congress of Rough Riders of the World" — with the American flag proudly flying in the company van. The whole spectacle, in the words of the souvenir program, was designed to illustrate "the inevitable law of the survival of the fittest."

"A good example is Owen Wister's The Virginian (1903), the most influential and widely read of all Western novels, which was filmed several times, most famously in 1929, with Gary Cooper in the title role. Both novel and film are staged as a series of tests of the hero's manhood. He rides at the head of a posse that lynches a group of cattle rustlers, including his own best friend. Years before they had ridden together as wild and woolly cowboys, but the Virginian has come to see that frontier conditions are passing away."

"Westerns thus had their political side. Most clearly, they were a vehicle for promoting America's role in the Cold War. Metaphors of Western violence —showdowns, hired guns, last stands — permeated the language of postwar politics. "Would a Wyatt Earp stop at the 38th Parallel in Korea when the rustlers were escaping with his herd?" a conservative commentator asked in 1958. "Would a Marshal Dillon refuse to allow his deputies to use shotguns for their own defense because of the terrible nature of the weapon itself? Ha!" Western analogies continued into the Vietnam era. President Johnson told a reporter that he had gone into Vietnam because, as at the Alamo, “somebody had to get behind the log with those threatened people." American troops carried these metaphors off to war. The primary object of the fighting, one veteran later recalled, was "the Indian idea: The only good gook is a dead gook." Reporter Michael Herr wrote of being invited to join an army company on a search - and -destroy mission. “‘Come on,' the captain hailed him, 'we'll take you out to play cowboys and Indians.' "

"Unforgiven" fills the screen with violence, but strips that violence of all pretenses to honor, romance, or nobility. "It's a hell of a thing, killing a man," says Eastwood, in the role of a hardened old gunfighter. "You take away all he's got, and all he's ever gonna have." These modern Westerns, asking viewers to consider the costs of westering, are true descendants of Daniel Boone."