Virginian (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (5 page)

After this moment, the narrative tracks back in time, and we see the shootout as it happens, first from the perspective of Trampas and finally from that of the Virginian. Only then do we finally see that the hero has killed Trampas, and we can share in Molly’s relief at the survival of her lover and her recognition that he did what he had to do. The final characteristic of Wister’s shootout is that it conclusively resolves all issues deriving from the conflict generated by the novel’s plot. Of course, the villain’s power is ended and with this the social corruption and chaos that he and others like him had caused. But even more importantly, the shootout resolves the moral and sexual conflict between Molly and the Virginian by, as Jane Tompkins suggests, bringing about a complete subordination of the feminine to the masculine force embodied in the hero. This in turn makes possible the happy culmination of the romance and the Virginian’s rise from obscurity to success. In a way, Wister helped create the modern western by writing a complex version of a Horatio Alger tale in cowboy boots.

Before the box-office disaster of
Heaven’s Gate,
Michael Cimino had made one tremendously successful film.
The Deer Hunter
(1978) is a highly disturbing film about the war in Vietnam. It derives much of its power from themes deeply ingrained in the American consciousness since the great impact of Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales of the mid-nineteenth century. The title of Cimino’s movie not only echoes that of Cooper’s last Leatherstocking novel,
The Deerslayer,
but the film itself was a deeply ironic postmodern variant on such central Cooper myths as the heroic lone hunter, captivity and escape from savages, and the ambiguity of the wilderness as representing both terrible danger and the hope of regeneration. Having created a strikingly powerful ironic interpretation of Cooper’s version of the myth of the American West, it was not surprising that Cimino turned for his next movie to the Johnson County war, the background for Wister’s modern version of the mythical West.

Unfortunately, the original version of
Heaven’s Gate
was three and a half hours long, and Cimino seemed unable to control his many different themes. Apparently, he was attempting to show the irony of how the American elite—men like Wister and Roosevelt—imagined the role of the West, by contrasting their vision with actual western history, which involved the exploitation of immigrants and the reckless destruction of nature. Unfortunately, Cimino could not find an effective fictional frame for his ideas, nor was the American public ready for this very different approach to the portrayal of the West.
Heaven’s Gate
failed as dramatically as
The Deer Hunter
had succeeded. (Interestingly, fifteen years later, in 1996, Ken Burns and Stephen Ives created a brilliant documentary series, more than twelve hours long, based on a similarly critical view of the mythical West.) Some historians have seen the
Heaven’s Gate
disaster as symbolizing the end of the modern western as a major cinematic genre; yet there have been several highly successful westerns in the last two decades, and many of them echo aspects of Cimino’s work.

Cimino was certainly right in recognizing the important relationship between Cooper and Wister’s versions of the western, for just as Cooper articulated the central themes that would dominate the development of the western genre in the rest of the nineteenth century, Wister’s
The Virginian
embodied the most important mythical patterns for the genre in the twentieth century. The similarities and differences between them offer many insights into the significance and the evolution of the myth of the West in American culture.

Like Cooper, Wister set his novel in an area that is on the edge of civilization. But where Cooper’s wilderness is the great forest of the Northeast and its dangers derive from savage Indians, Wister’s scenes take place mainly on a large cattle ranch and in the wild streets of a Wyoming town. The Virginian has one brief encounter with a wandering band of Indians, but his major antagonists are outlaws and rustlers. Significantly, Wister’s hero enters a Cooper-like forest only in the romantic final scene of his honeymoon. For Wister, the forest is no longer a site of adventure and danger, but a place for tourism and romance. Moreover, Wister’s Indians are marginal figures, whereas Cooper’s Indians reflect the deeply ambivalent feelings about nature shared by many early-nineteenth-century Americans. As good Americans they rejoiced in the conquest of the wilderness, while as good pre-Industrial romantics, they lamented the loss of nature. Cooper powerfully portrays this ambivalence by dividing his Indian characters into two completely different groups. There are the vicious savages, like Magua in
The Last of the Mohicans,
who deserve to be exterminated. But there are also the noble savages, like the Mohicans Uncas and Chingachgook, whose vanishing is a cause for melancholy nostalgia. The only noble savage in
The Virginian
is the Virginian himself, and he is ultimately co-opted into the new industrial world when he rises from cowboy to large-scale rancher.

Wister may have sensed the irony in the fact that the cowboy hero’s success in ridding the country of outlaws and becoming a capitalist himself meant the end of the time in which the Virginian’s type of heroism and nobility was necessary. On the whole, however, he seems to rejoice in the Virginian’s social advance. Later writers and filmmakers increasingly exploited the ambiguity of the hero’s last act, which both brings civilization to the West and makes it a place where heroes are no longer comfortable. In almost all of the major westerns of the 1940s and 1950s—such films as
The Gunfighter, Shane, High Noon,
and the great westerns of John Ford—the hero is either killed at the end or finds that he must leave the civilized state he has helped to bring about.

Cooper’s Leatherstocking is noteworthy for his wilderness skills. He is a great tracker and hunter. He is an expert in wilderness survival and he understands the culture and character of the Indians, having been raised with them. In fact, so deeply intertwined is he with the wilderness that when civilization arrives he is quite unable to adapt to it and is forced to move farther into the wilderness. When he last appears, at the end of
The Prairie
(1826), he is still fleeing civilization and his fate is to die, like an Indian, calling on the Great Spirit in the midst of nature. He and his story embody the sense that the coming of civilization means the end of the wilderness and the permanent loss of those spiritual values that reside only in nature. Cooper wrote for a generation on the verge of the Industrial Revolution, and he sensed that a rapidly developing America was reaching a point of no return. Like many of his contemporaries, in both America and Europe, he feared that these changes would destroy much that was of value to humanity.

Wister wrote for a later generation that had already accomplished the primary industrialization of America and Europe and had embarked on a global imperialism that would eventually spread the culture of modernism throughout the world. Wister’s Virginian is, like Cooper’s Leatherstocking, a man of the past, but unlike Leatherstocking he is not connected to nature. Instead, the Virginian as cowboy represents an earlier phase of social development, when men worked directly with their hands and horses rather than with money and machines. However, this hero is capable of moving into the new society. Once he has broken the power of the outlaws by killing Trampas, he can get married and become part of the new world of business.

Thus, the Virginian’s shootout with Trampas is both the climax and the end of his life as a free-ranging cowboy. In the twentieth-century western the shootout became a key episode, serving not only as a dramatic climax to the action but as a key symbol of the transition from one age to another. Thus, it was fraught with the ambiguities inherent in the situation of the cowboy hero whose act of heroism leads in the end to his own obsolescence.

Wister’s recognition of the complex significance of the shootout is perhaps his single most important contribution to the modern western. There are no real shootouts in Cooper, for Leatherstocking’s weapon is the long rifle and his confrontations with his enemies, such as the evil Indian Magua, usually take place at long range. Natty’s skill is his “hawkeye” and his ability to shoot something at a distance. In contrast, Wister’s version of the shootout—with its accompanying complex ritual, the villain’s challenge to get out of town before sundown, the heroine’s attempt to prevent the hero from going through with the fight, and the hero’s justification for his actions—became the basis of innumerable cinematic scenes. Indeed, one can almost trace the thematic evolution of the western through the different variations on the shootout enacted in such films as
Hell’s Hinges, Stagecoach, High Noon, Shane, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, A Fistful of Dollars,
and
Unforgiven.
As the western developed through the twentieth century, the ambiguities of the shootout became ever more central to its meaning and some of the most memorable later westerns became increasingly focused on it. For example,
High Noon,
which many critics consider one of the best westerns of all time, is entirely devoted to the ironic representation of the events leading up to a shootout.

The Virginian
remained a best-selling novel for much of the twentieth century. However, as the western genre has increasingly faded into the sunset, and narrative types like the detective story, the thriller, the horror story, and science fiction sagas like
Star Wars
and
The Matrix
have taken its place, Wister’s novel, like the cowboy hero he created, has become a thing of the past. It will always have an important place as a historical and cultural document and for its role in inventing the twentieth-century western, but it remains worth reading as a work of considerable artistic skill and charm, and as a rich evocation of the way in which early-twentieth-century Americans liked to imagine their past.

Cawelti has published ten books, including
Apostles of
the
Self-Made Man
(1965),
Adventure, Mystery and Romance
(1976),
The Spy Story
(1987),
Leon Forrest: Introductions and Interpretations
(1997), and
The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel
(1999). He has also published about seventy essays in the fields of American literature, cultural history, and popular culture, and has made oral presentations at more than one hundred universities and scholarly conferences.

Cawelti’s scholarly work has consisted mainly of studies in popular culture, particularly the analysis of popular genres or formulas. He has also written about such major American authors as Cooper, Melville, James, and Faulkner, and about various aspects of American history and culture, such as ethnicity, regionalism, and the ideology of success. Most recently, he coedited Leon Forrest’s last novel,
Meteor in the Madhouse
(2001), and published his own book
Mystery, Violence and Popular Culture
in spring 2004.

A Horseman of the Plains

TO THEODORE ROOSEVELT
¹

 

Some of these pages you have seen, some you have praised, one stands new-written because you blamed it; and all, my dear critic, beg leave to remind you of their author’s changeless admiration.

Rededication and Preface

Ten years ago, when political darkness still lay dense upon every State in the Union, this book was dedicated to the greatest benefactor we people have known since Lincoln.

To-day he is a benefactor even greater than he was then; his voice, instead of being almost solitary, has inspired many followers. The lost habit of sincerity gives promise of returning to the minds and lips of public men. After nigh half-a-century of shirking and evasion, Americans are beginning to look at themselves and their institutions straight; to perceive that Firecrackers and Orations once a year, and selling your vote or casting it for unknown nobodies, are not enough attention to pay to the Republic. If this book be anything more than an American story, it is an expression of American faith. Our Democracy has many enemies, both in Wall Street and in the Labor Unions; but as those in Wall Street have by their excesses created those in the Unions, they are the worst; if the pillars of our house fall, it is they who will have been the cause thereof. But I believe the pillars will not fall, and that, with mistakes at times, but with wisdom in the main, we people will prove ourselves equal to the severest test to which political man has yet subjected himself—the test of Democracy.

 

To The Reader

CERTAIN of the newspapers, when this book was first announced, made a mistake most natural upon seeing the sub-title as it then stood, A
Tale of Sundry Adventures.
“This sounds like a historical novel,” said one of them, meaning (I take it) a colonial romance. As it now stands, the title will scarce lead to such interpretation; yet none the less is this book historical—quite as much so as any colonial romance. Indeed, when you look at the root of the matter, it is a colonial romance. For Wyoming between 1874 and 1890 was a colony as wild as was Virginia one hundred years earlier. As wild, with a scantier population, and the same primitive joys and dangers. There were, to be sure, not so many Chippendale
^a
settees.