The Western Hero's Stuggle with the Land

Question for Discussion: Do you agree with
Tompkins' argument that the desert landscape
of the Western mirrors the toughness of the
Western male hero?

Reading: Tompkins, pp. 69-87, 114-123 ;
Kakutani, Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation:
The Way the West was Won

Video: Red River (1948); Shane (1953);
Stagecoach: intro and Indians attacking
the stagecoach scene (1939)

Response Paper: How does the Indian's mythic story
of the West contrast with the "Mythic American West"?
Is this a counter-myth to the Anglo-American Mythic
West? (1-2 page paper due on Monday, Feb. 23.)
( See Turner vs. Limerick perspectives outline on
this debate )

Lewis, On the meaning of the Western
Story ( in-class)
Lewis, Some Fundamental Oppositions
in the Western (in-class)
Turner's Frontier Mythology of the West
( in-class)
Paticia Limerick's Vision of the West as
a Place undergoing Conquest. (in-class)
Turner vs. Limerick debate on the West as
Frontier vs. the West as place undergoing
conquest. (in-class)
Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show
Poster Advertising the Wild West Show (in-class)
Posters from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show (in-class)
Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show Poster (in-class)
Flynn, The Western as America's
Foundational Past ( in-class)
The Mythic West of the Mind ( in-class)
Athearn, The Imagined Frontier of the West
( in-class)
Cronon, The American West and
American Nationalism ( in-class)
Richard Slotkin and the Frontier Myth ( in-class)
American Progress by John Gast (1872) ( in-class)
Sloktin's Myth of the Frontier and Violence
( in-class)
The Frontier Myth and Regeneration
through Violence ( in-class)
Western Film Plots (in-class)
Limerick, The Adventure of the Frontier (in-class)
The Marlboro Man Myth
Flynn, The Silent Western as Mythmaker ( in-class)
Tompkins, The Landscape of the Western ( in-class)
Tompkins, The Pull Towards the Town in
the Western ( in-class)
Tompkins: The Western itself is the language of
Men (in-class)

The Mythic West of the Mind

"But not just the West of geography. It was also
the West of the mind, of the spirit, a concept that
for generations had reassured Americans of a
future, a place to go, even though most of them
would not choose to move. Somewhere out there
in the general direction of the Pacific Ocean lay a
depository of unending resources, imperfectly
described or understood...that often was one
more of imagery than of substance, yet dreamers
thought of it as being real."

Robert Athearn, The Mythic West in 20th-Century
America (p. 10)

Cronon, The Mythic West and
American Nationalism

"The Modern regional West has become the repository for a national frontier past. In this sense, the history of the frontier has never ended but continues to this day as a key element in the mythology and ideology of American nationalism."
William Cronon, "Becoming West"

Turner's Frontier Mythology of the West

"Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development......

The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact, that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people--to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life.

The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. As has been indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism. "

Frederick Jackson Turner (1893)

Athearn, The Imagined Frontier of the West

"They have imagined the frontier in a certain way, and whether or not that time, place, or condition ever existed is Iess important than the fact that their beliefs give psychological support to those who have that vision."

"The legend is rooted in a story with which just about anyone will identify. It tells what happened when ordinary people moved into an extraordinary land. Often enough they overcame the challenges that they met there, but the real point of the story is not what happened to the land, but what happened to the people. They were changed, the legend insists--transformed, reborn. And they were better for it. The ordeal in the wilderness created the American, we believe: free thinking, open, tough, optimistic, self-reliant--the litany goes on and on. The western hero has embodied these virtues and this message. He is us, only a little bigger, tougher, braver. "

Athearn, The Genesis of the Mythic West

Johnson, The Western: An Overview

"Thanks to Hollywood, virtually everyone knows the ingredients of the Western--the lassos and the Colt .45s; the long-horned steers and the hanging trees; the stagecoaches and the Stetson hats; the outlaws and the lawmen; the gamblers and the gunfighters. And virtually everyone knows the settings of the Western--the red rock monoliths of Monument Valley; the jagged, snow-capped peaks of the Teton Range; the treeless expanses of the prairie. The iconography of the Western is the largest and richest of all the film genres, and Hollywood has burned it into the minds of moviegoers from Dodge City to Timbuktu."

"Directors such as John Ford, Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann, and Sam Peckinpah excelled at prying unsuspected complexities and ironies out of the well-worn stories of the American West. As a result, in John Ford's The Searchers we have much more than a simple quest to find a young girl kidnapped by Indians; we have the story of a quest that will never end, for the story's hero, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), can never become part of the civilization he strives to restore."

"Some actors became closely identified with the Western, including Tom Mix, W.S. Hart, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Audie Murphy--but for many people, no one epitomized the Western like John Wayne. With a towering stature and a steely gaze, Wayne dominated his movies like a national monument dominates the land. His image has worked its way into the American consciousness as a metaphor for America itself, its strength, its determination, and its reliability. A quick survey of his movies--from Stagecoach to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance --is very nearly a list of the greatest Westerns ever made. While Wayne owns the top echelon by himself, a host of other actors have made powerful contributions to the genre, including Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Gary Cooper, Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott, and Clint Eastwood."

"Even with the minor resurgence of the Western in the '90s, the Western exists in limbo. It still has the power to fan the sparks of imagination, but our distance from the West has weakened its authority. While the West once represented a simpler time in America's history, we now see that the power of the gun (as shown in Unforgiven and Tombstone ) could make lawmen just as dangerous as the outlaws. And although justice may have been swift; it was not necessarily fair and at times it was absolutely deadly."

Flynn, The Silent Western as Mythmaker

" 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 turn-of-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. In 1882, Buffalo Bill would mark the next stage of this process by premiering his Wild West Show. Appealing to the same sensibilities, Cody -- whose trailblazer reputation was built on dime novels -- gathered about him cow-handlers, pony-express riders, sharpshooters, and genuine Sioux Indians to romanticize and commodify the fast-disappearing West."

"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. Cow-handlers, 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 fast-vanishing Eden."

Flynn, The West as Foundational
American Myth

"All cultures must have a foundational past, a common point of genesis, a mission-statement 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."

Tompkins, The Landscape of the Western

"The desert is the landscape of death." (70)

"It is the genius of the Western that it seems to make the land speak for itself....(for example, L'Amour writes" "It was hard land, and it bred hard men to hard ways." (71)

"The landscape challenges the body to endure hardship--that is its fundamental message at the physical level." (71)

"To be a man in the Western is to seem to grow out of the environment, which means to be hard, to be tough,
to be unforgiving. The ethical system the Western proposes, which vindicates conflict, violence, and vengeance, and the social and political hierarchy it creates, putting adult white males on top with everyone else in descending order beneath...." (73)

"The female, the dusky, and the dressed up are not harsh and pure like the desert. Not strong and silent and unforgiving. The harshness of the Western landscape is so rhetorically persuasive that an entire code of values
is in place, rock solid, from the outset, without anyone's ever saying a world." (74)

"The apparent emptiness makes the land desirable not only as a space to be filled but also as a stage on which to perform and as a territory to master." (74)

"The various kinds of hardness nature seems to inculcate in Western movles and films are projected
onto the landscape by men and read back off it by them--images of the heart's desires and fears." (77)

"L'Amour in particular is captivated by the rich potential of the terrain his characters move across; the single most important relationship they have is to the land. They are in constant contact with it--thinking about it, using it, enjoying it, fearing it, seeing it. smelling it, touching it , hearing it." (78)

"Still, spatial location, the lay of the land, and the body's sensations in the environment dominate, and the passage concludes characteristically in a moment of heightened awareness....The moment consists not in thought or emotion, not in action or reaction, but in the textural features of the landscape, tallied and imprinted on the senses. To feel that moment, through and through, is what people turn to Westerns for. (79)

"In the end, the land is everything to the hero; it is both the destination and the way. He courts it, struggles with it, defies it, conquers it, and lies down with it as night.
In this, it is like nothing so much as the figure the Western casts out at the start: the woman." (81)

Tompkins, The Pull towards the Town

"In certain Westerns, both novels and films, I feel a tremendous desire to be in town, the town the hero rides into somewhere near the beginning of the story....The town represents a simple, more benign social order, a place for everyone and everyone in her place.

There is a tremendous tension in Westerns between the landscape and town. The genre pulls toward the landscape--that, in a sense, is its whole point. But because there's so much emphasis on getting away, town also exerts a tremendous pull; otherwise there would be no reason to flee." (85)

"But, in fact, town always threatens to entrap the hero in the very things the genre most wishes to avoid: intimacy, mutual dependence, a network of social and emotional responsibilities. Town fills basic needs, but basic though they are, they are precisely the needs that have to be denied because of what their satisfaction inevitably entails. Town seduces." (86)

"Nothing gets in Dunson' way. Not his friends, not his sweetheart, not the Indians, not the Mexicans, not the rebellious hands, not his old pal Groot who scolds him repeatedly, not the rivers, not the land, not the thousands of cattle, not even his own body." (116)

"But besides the river and its color, the title [ Red River] of the film evokes the land's fertility, the blood of the Indians who gave up the land, the blood of the Mexicans from whom it was also taken, the blood of all the others who died to make Dunson's victory possible." (117)

"The hero, who must take pain silently, learns to deaden his natural reactions to pain silently, learns to deaden his natural reactions to pain in order to survive his ordeal. And the habitual numbing of himself makes it easier for him to inflicat pain on others, as Dunson does, and even to kill them when necessary." (119)

"The hero suffers, makes himself suffer, causes suffering in others because this is what he has been trained to do....The rest of the film shows Dunson inflicting constant pain on himself and others, in response, presumably, to the blows that knocked him down when he was growing up." (122)