Westerns

Westerns in Literature

Westerns, and the concepts of masculinity they promote, trace their origins to the myth of the American frontier. This myth originated in New England in the 1680s in the aftermath of King Phillips War, which saw the appearance of captive narratives (mostly centered on females) and tales lionizing the frontiersman/Indian fighter. In his frontier romances, published between 1823 and 1850, James Fenimore Cooper created the masculine western archetype upon which subsequent authors and filmmakers built. His hero “Hawkeye” from the Leatherstocking Tales, modeled on the historical figure of Daniel Boone, embodies the masculine virtues of courage, loyalty, and endurance, which could only be fully realized, it was believed, by a white man, and only after abandoning a corrupt eastern “civilization” for a more natural western environment. Balancing an untamed and wild masculinity with a civilized genteel manhood, this was the masculine ideal of the warrior/protector willing to stand against “savage” Indians or ignorant and greedy whites.

Authors of dime novels wrote Westerns between 1870 and 1900 and, in a variation on Cooper's model embodying the balance between wildness and gentility, framed their protagonists as heroic badmen. Such was the case with Edward Wheeler's “Deadwood Dick” novels, which appeared in the late 1870s. Set in the Black Hills of South Dakota during the Great Sioux War, these tales juxtapose menacing Indians and corrupt easterners against a Hawkeye-type character who knows the wilderness and its natives, embodies the masculine virtues of physical bravery and resourcefulness, and is willing to take risks to save the female protagonist from Indian captivity. Reflecting the social unease created by urbanization, industrialization, and the rise of large corporations, however, Wheeler's protagonist achieves masculine heroism less by fighting Indians than by robbing stagecoaches and trains to take revenge against the eastern capitalists who wronged him.

Other dime novelists, such as Ned Buntline and Frank Tousey, used a similar format. Western fiction of the 1870s and 1880s romanticized historical outlaws such as Jesse James and Billy the Kid, attributing to them the same masculine characteristics demonstrated by Hawkeye and other fictional frontier heroes. Likewise, more serious Western novelists such as Owen Wister (author of The Virginian [1902], the first full-length Western novel) and Zane Grey featured heroes who embodied courage and stood by their principals regardless of the strength of the opposition. In their writings, Grey, Wister, and other early dime novelists reflected gender tensions and discontent with what they perceived as the soft, materialistic culture of the industrialized East where they were born and educated.

While the featured characters of the early Western novels were male, women played important, but secondary and stereotyped, roles, serving either as objects of contention or as redeemers who helped excessively savage outlaw males achieve the necessary moral grounding. As with Cora Munro in Cooper's Last of the Mohicans (1826), Molly in The Virginian, or Alice Terry in the Deadwood Dick novels, the featured women provided the male hero with an opportunity to serve as warrior, protector, and rescuer. On the other hand, women in the stories who challenged gender conventions and male [Page 490]power, such as female suffragists and reformers, were portrayed as old maids or harridans.

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