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West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns
A leading figure in the debate over the literary canon, Jane Tompkins was one of the first to point to the ongoing relevance of popular women's fiction in the 19th century, long overlooked or scorned by literary critics. Now, in West of Everything , Tompkins shows how popular novels and films of the American west have shaped the emotional lives of people in our time.
Into this world full of violence and manly courage, the world of John Wayne and Louis L'Amour, Tompkins takes her readers, letting them feel what the hero feels, endure what he endures. Writing with sympathy, insight, and respect, she probes the main elements of the Western--its preoccupation with death, its barren landscapes, galloping horses, hard-bitten men and marginalized women--revealing the view of reality and code of behavior these features contain. She considers the Western hero's attraction to pain, his fear of women and language, his desire to dominate the environment--and to merge with it. In fact, Tompkins argues, for better or worse Westerns have taught us all--men especially--how to behave.
It was as a reaction against popular women's novels and women's invasion of the public sphere that Westerns originated, Tompkins maintains. With Westerns, men were reclaiming cultural territory, countering the inwardness, spirituality, and domesticity of the sentimental writers, with a rough and tumble, secular, man-centered world. Tompkins brings these insights to bear in considering film classics such as Red River and Lonely Are the Brave , and novels such as Louis L'Amour's Last of the Breed and Owen Wister's The Virginian . In one of the most moving chapters (chosen for Best American Essays of 1991 ), Tompkins shows how the life of Buffalo Bill Cody, killer of Native Americans and charismatic star of the Wild West show, evokes the contradictory feelings which the Western typically elicits--horror and fascination with violence, but also love and respect for the romantic ideal of the cowboy.
Whether interpreting a photograph of John Wayne of meditating on the slaughter of cattle, Jane Tompkins writes with humor, compassion, and a provocative intellect. Her book will appeal to many Americans who read or watch Westerns, and to all those interested in a serious approach to popular culture.
Into this world full of violence and manly courage, the world of John Wayne and Louis L'Amour, Tompkins takes her readers, letting them feel what the hero feels, endure what he endures. Writing with sympathy, insight, and respect, she probes the main elements of the Western--its preoccupation with death, its barren landscapes, galloping horses, hard-bitten men and marginalized women--revealing the view of reality and code of behavior these features contain. She considers the Western hero's attraction to pain, his fear of women and language, his desire to dominate the environment--and to merge with it. In fact, Tompkins argues, for better or worse Westerns have taught us all--men especially--how to behave.
It was as a reaction against popular women's novels and women's invasion of the public sphere that Westerns originated, Tompkins maintains. With Westerns, men were reclaiming cultural territory, countering the inwardness, spirituality, and domesticity of the sentimental writers, with a rough and tumble, secular, man-centered world. Tompkins brings these insights to bear in considering film classics such as Red River and Lonely Are the Brave , and novels such as Louis L'Amour's Last of the Breed and Owen Wister's The Virginian . In one of the most moving chapters (chosen for Best American Essays of 1991 ), Tompkins shows how the life of Buffalo Bill Cody, killer of Native Americans and charismatic star of the Wild West show, evokes the contradictory feelings which the Western typically elicits--horror and fascination with violence, but also love and respect for the romantic ideal of the cowboy.
Whether interpreting a photograph of John Wayne of meditating on the slaughter of cattle, Jane Tompkins writes with humor, compassion, and a provocative intellect. Her book will appeal to many Americans who read or watch Westerns, and to all those interested in a serious approach to popular culture.
272 pages, Paperback
First published March 26, 1992
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206 people want to read
About the author
Jane Tompkins
24 books9 followersJane Tompkins (born 1940) is an American literary scholar who has worked on canon formation, feminist literary criticism, and reader response criticism.[1] She has helped develop the idea of cultural work in literary studies.[2] She earned her PhD at Yale in 1966 and subsequently taught at Temple University, Duke University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago.[3]
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September 23, 2019
A Wild Bunch of Phallacies
In all fairness, I feel obliged to admit right away that I tend to be rather wary of studies on the western that approach their subject with a hefty dose of moralistic know-it-all-ism and prefer books that take their time to observe, explain and leave the judgment to the reader. I also try to steer clear of authors that wallow in psychological terminology and see a penis where a normal person would just see a gun, a man on a horse crossing a plain, a cigar or a combine harvester – because you can just about “prove” anything with psychological legerdemain. So, in a way, Jane Tompkins’s West of Everything and I were bound to get off on the wrong foot.
A look into the Introduction will already tell you what you are in for. After Tompkins has said that as a child she was very interested in horses and took riding lessons, she goes on like this:
Now, to whom would such a question seem inevitable? I hardly know anybody who would come up with the idea that a girl’s love for horses and riding should be read in Freudian terms of Penisneid and although I admit there are some scenes in westerns – like Montgomery Clift and John Ireland effusively comparing their weapons and going on about how well they lie in their hands and how big they are – that allow of an interpretation of guns as penes, still I would say that most things that occur in a western (or any other story) are no metaphors for a penis, and that to interpret them that way tells you more about the interpreter than about the text itself. But then Freudians have another of their impressive terms for my narrow-minded lack of obsession with penes - Verdrängung. Verdrängung is an invaluable concept to Freudians because it allows them, without the need to resort to fair argument, to count any attempt at putting a Freudian tenet to the question as implicit proof of its correctness. Be that as it may, we now know about the author’s potentially phallocentric worldview.
In her introduction, we also learn that there are hardly any Indians in western movies and that individual Indians were usually played by white or Mexican actors. This made her so sad that she deliberately excluded the aspect of how Indians were and are treated in western movies from her analysis. One might argue, however, that this is a pity because a closer look would have shown her that her indictment of the western as anti-Indian, however true it may be at its core (especially with regard to the “whitewashing” standards of casting), needs to be qualified, especially, but not exclusively, with regard to time. It’s hard to believe that Tompkins has never heard of westerns like Anthony Mann’s “Devil’s Doorway” or Delmer Daves’s “The Broken Arrow”, which tried to present Indians in a more sympathetic light and do justice to them, as early as 1950. They might not live up to modern standards of political correctness – but then, who or what does? However, they started a movement in westerns that culminated in modern films like “Dances with Wolves” or “Geronimo”. She might also have learnt about how a director like John Ford used his influence and his westerns to improve the economic situation of the Navajo Indians, as you can read, for instance, in Joseph McBride’s Searching for John Ford. Nevertheless, Tompkin sidesteps the topic “Indians” completely and leaves us with the impression that all westerns are anti-Indian in the presentation or the neglect [1] of Indians. That’s apparently more convenient for her.
Instead, Tompkins concentrates on how the western is a typically male thing, which means that is bad, bad, bad. In a way, one of her motives for writing this book seems to be to come to grips with her own professed liking for the genre, so we can regard the book as the equivalent of a religious action, something the good old Puritans would call “exploring and chastising yourself”. She starts on the wrong question, though, by asking
Why is this the wrong question? Well, because it already takes for granted that the western hates women, whereas a more neutral, intellectually honest question would have been, “What are the roles that the western assigns to men and women?” Tompkins takes for granted that the western is anti-woman, and consequently she will consider only those data that corroborate her premise, never challenging or qualifying its validity. She can do this because this is politically correct and plays into the hands of the need for a guilty conscience that has become an ersatz religion for many secularized people socialized in Protestant surroundings. It is also in tune with her major thesis that the western, with its legitimation of violence, its distrust of words and of Christian values and its emphasis on pain and perseverance in the face of outward cruelties, is an answer to, and a rejection of, the kind of religiously motivated literature of edification and moral introspection that thrived in the middle of the 19th century and let to a rising social and cultural influence of women. I will not deny that she may have a point there but to narrow all the possible influences and inspirations of so popular and powerful a genre to one single phenomenon is putting a lot of straws on one camel’s back. This way of seeing the origins of the western also fails to take into consideration the history of the western genre, the development the western formula underwent, something that has been done to a T in David Lusted’s brilliant study The Western. One may safely assume that American history of the 20th century – there were quite some wars, for instance, and let’s not forget about the Red Scare – played a more important part in the development of the movie western than the literature market of the 19th century.
The western’s alleged distrust of words is another observation that Tompkins uses in order to support her claim of the western as a genre that is basically opposed to values regarded as “female” such as expressing one’s emotions and showing one’s vulnerability. This claim, however, begs the question how many words are needed to express any particular feeling adequately. A dozen? A score? Half a dictionary? If you remember the scene from “The Searchers” where Martha gets Edward’s things ready before he joins an expedition with some other men, you’ll realize that it very often does not take a lot of words, especially with a director like John Ford, who believed in the maxim of “showing, rather than telling”. This is, of course, directly at variance with the tenets and the wear and tear of verbiage of, let’s say, “Gilmore Girls”. But even Tompkins herself has to admit that the western is famous for its memorable one-liners, and what can be more expressive of a mastery of words than their aphoristic use? Whether it was Voltaire, Pascal, Goethe or Mark Twain who coined this phrase, but is there not some truth in the sentence “I had no time to write a short letter, so here’s a long one”?
Unfortunately, it goes on in this rather simplistic and fault-finding way, the author atoning for her feeling of guilt at being fascinated by the western genre, which she feels she should despise from her moral highground, by pointing her finger at its alleged ethic shortcomings. This did not give me a lot of insight into the western, though, but some insight into the author’s motivation for writing the book.
Let’s just allow the following passages to speak for themselves – passages which do not make me like the book any more but at least lead me to admire the author for her honesty:
How dare those Plains Indians not live up to a modern-day vegetarian’s expectations, unglamorously prioritizing their own survival instead? How dare they be real-life people, warts-and-everything, instead of sublime objects of projection for a modern-day person’s moral principles, thereby making the world unnecessarily complex?
And then there is this one, which speaks volume and does not need any comment at all:
All in all, West of Everything did not teach me a great deal about westerns (especially not about the movies, which are only mentioned in the first part of the book), but it did teach me something about Jane Tompkins’s highly ambivalent, but eventually disdainful attitude to this genre. Only problem being that I was hardly interested in that.
[1] By the way, would it be more politically correct to always have Indians appear in a western? Or would it not rather enforce a stereotyping of Indians in that they’d become the sine qua non of a western?
[2] My underlinings.
In all fairness, I feel obliged to admit right away that I tend to be rather wary of studies on the western that approach their subject with a hefty dose of moralistic know-it-all-ism and prefer books that take their time to observe, explain and leave the judgment to the reader. I also try to steer clear of authors that wallow in psychological terminology and see a penis where a normal person would just see a gun, a man on a horse crossing a plain, a cigar or a combine harvester – because you can just about “prove” anything with psychological legerdemain. So, in a way, Jane Tompkins’s West of Everything and I were bound to get off on the wrong foot.
A look into the Introduction will already tell you what you are in for. After Tompkins has said that as a child she was very interested in horses and took riding lessons, she goes on like this:
”Up comes the inevitable Freudian question: Horse as penis? I don’t know.”
Now, to whom would such a question seem inevitable? I hardly know anybody who would come up with the idea that a girl’s love for horses and riding should be read in Freudian terms of Penisneid and although I admit there are some scenes in westerns – like Montgomery Clift and John Ireland effusively comparing their weapons and going on about how well they lie in their hands and how big they are – that allow of an interpretation of guns as penes, still I would say that most things that occur in a western (or any other story) are no metaphors for a penis, and that to interpret them that way tells you more about the interpreter than about the text itself. But then Freudians have another of their impressive terms for my narrow-minded lack of obsession with penes - Verdrängung. Verdrängung is an invaluable concept to Freudians because it allows them, without the need to resort to fair argument, to count any attempt at putting a Freudian tenet to the question as implicit proof of its correctness. Be that as it may, we now know about the author’s potentially phallocentric worldview.
In her introduction, we also learn that there are hardly any Indians in western movies and that individual Indians were usually played by white or Mexican actors. This made her so sad that she deliberately excluded the aspect of how Indians were and are treated in western movies from her analysis. One might argue, however, that this is a pity because a closer look would have shown her that her indictment of the western as anti-Indian, however true it may be at its core (especially with regard to the “whitewashing” standards of casting), needs to be qualified, especially, but not exclusively, with regard to time. It’s hard to believe that Tompkins has never heard of westerns like Anthony Mann’s “Devil’s Doorway” or Delmer Daves’s “The Broken Arrow”, which tried to present Indians in a more sympathetic light and do justice to them, as early as 1950. They might not live up to modern standards of political correctness – but then, who or what does? However, they started a movement in westerns that culminated in modern films like “Dances with Wolves” or “Geronimo”. She might also have learnt about how a director like John Ford used his influence and his westerns to improve the economic situation of the Navajo Indians, as you can read, for instance, in Joseph McBride’s Searching for John Ford. Nevertheless, Tompkin sidesteps the topic “Indians” completely and leaves us with the impression that all westerns are anti-Indian in the presentation or the neglect [1] of Indians. That’s apparently more convenient for her.
Instead, Tompkins concentrates on how the western is a typically male thing, which means that is bad, bad, bad. In a way, one of her motives for writing this book seems to be to come to grips with her own professed liking for the genre, so we can regard the book as the equivalent of a religious action, something the good old Puritans would call “exploring and chastising yourself”. She starts on the wrong question, though, by asking
”Why does [the western] hate women and language so much?”
Why is this the wrong question? Well, because it already takes for granted that the western hates women, whereas a more neutral, intellectually honest question would have been, “What are the roles that the western assigns to men and women?” Tompkins takes for granted that the western is anti-woman, and consequently she will consider only those data that corroborate her premise, never challenging or qualifying its validity. She can do this because this is politically correct and plays into the hands of the need for a guilty conscience that has become an ersatz religion for many secularized people socialized in Protestant surroundings. It is also in tune with her major thesis that the western, with its legitimation of violence, its distrust of words and of Christian values and its emphasis on pain and perseverance in the face of outward cruelties, is an answer to, and a rejection of, the kind of religiously motivated literature of edification and moral introspection that thrived in the middle of the 19th century and let to a rising social and cultural influence of women. I will not deny that she may have a point there but to narrow all the possible influences and inspirations of so popular and powerful a genre to one single phenomenon is putting a lot of straws on one camel’s back. This way of seeing the origins of the western also fails to take into consideration the history of the western genre, the development the western formula underwent, something that has been done to a T in David Lusted’s brilliant study The Western. One may safely assume that American history of the 20th century – there were quite some wars, for instance, and let’s not forget about the Red Scare – played a more important part in the development of the movie western than the literature market of the 19th century.
The western’s alleged distrust of words is another observation that Tompkins uses in order to support her claim of the western as a genre that is basically opposed to values regarded as “female” such as expressing one’s emotions and showing one’s vulnerability. This claim, however, begs the question how many words are needed to express any particular feeling adequately. A dozen? A score? Half a dictionary? If you remember the scene from “The Searchers” where Martha gets Edward’s things ready before he joins an expedition with some other men, you’ll realize that it very often does not take a lot of words, especially with a director like John Ford, who believed in the maxim of “showing, rather than telling”. This is, of course, directly at variance with the tenets and the wear and tear of verbiage of, let’s say, “Gilmore Girls”. But even Tompkins herself has to admit that the western is famous for its memorable one-liners, and what can be more expressive of a mastery of words than their aphoristic use? Whether it was Voltaire, Pascal, Goethe or Mark Twain who coined this phrase, but is there not some truth in the sentence “I had no time to write a short letter, so here’s a long one”?
Unfortunately, it goes on in this rather simplistic and fault-finding way, the author atoning for her feeling of guilt at being fascinated by the western genre, which she feels she should despise from her moral highground, by pointing her finger at its alleged ethic shortcomings. This did not give me a lot of insight into the western, though, but some insight into the author’s motivation for writing the book.
Let’s just allow the following passages to speak for themselves – passages which do not make me like the book any more but at least lead me to admire the author for her honesty:
”Plains Indians culture, it seemed, was made entirely from animals. Their mode of life had been even more completely dedicated to carnage than Buffalo Bill’s, dependant as it was on animals for food, clothing, shelter, equipment, everything. […] I had expected that the Plains Indian Museum would show me how life in nature ought to be lived. Not the mindless destruction of nineteenth-century America but an ideal form of communion with animals and the land. What the museum seemed to say instead was that cannibalism was universal. Both colonizers and colonized had their hands imbrued with blood. The Indians had lived off the animals and had made war against one another.”
How dare those Plains Indians not live up to a modern-day vegetarian’s expectations, unglamorously prioritizing their own survival instead? How dare they be real-life people, warts-and-everything, instead of sublime objects of projection for a modern-day person’s moral principles, thereby making the world unnecessarily complex?
And then there is this one, which speaks volume and does not need any comment at all:
”When I left the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, I was full of moral outrage, an indignation so intense it made me almost sick, though it was pleasurable too, as such emotions usually are. [2] But the outrage was undermined by the knowledge that I knew nothing about Buffalo Bill, nothing of his life, nothing of the circumstances that led him to be involved in such violent events.”
All in all, West of Everything did not teach me a great deal about westerns (especially not about the movies, which are only mentioned in the first part of the book), but it did teach me something about Jane Tompkins’s highly ambivalent, but eventually disdainful attitude to this genre. Only problem being that I was hardly interested in that.
[1] By the way, would it be more politically correct to always have Indians appear in a western? Or would it not rather enforce a stereotyping of Indians in that they’d become the sine qua non of a western?
[2] My underlinings.
August 6, 2014
An absolutely invaluable look at the messages (particularly surrounding masculinity) offered up by the Western genre. Not afraid to draw uncomfortable conclusions about violence and animal cruelty in the Western, yet still a loving and sharp-eyed view of the genre as a whole, even exemplified through television and museums. Perfect for almost any scholar of masculinity in American literature of any kind
May 10, 2023
Jane Tompkins excellent, thought-provoking analysis of the structure/form, general themes, characters, etc. of the portrayal of the West, in film & print.
She brings up the conflict between gender roles, as developed in the 19th century; Christianity & more animistic views; violence & stoicism; and self versus the other.
The author looks at popular movies, 19th century women's fiction, the legend of Buffalo Bill Cody and the lives and works of Owen Wist, Zane Grey & Louis L'Amour.
The ambivalence she feels about the entire genre is genuine and insightful, and even though written in 1992 presents applicable threads to the state of violence in modern America.
She brings up the conflict between gender roles, as developed in the 19th century; Christianity & more animistic views; violence & stoicism; and self versus the other.
The author looks at popular movies, 19th century women's fiction, the legend of Buffalo Bill Cody and the lives and works of Owen Wist, Zane Grey & Louis L'Amour.
The ambivalence she feels about the entire genre is genuine and insightful, and even though written in 1992 presents applicable threads to the state of violence in modern America.
November 18, 2007
If you want to know what insightful literary criticism can add to your understanding of culture, read this book. I haven't watched movies the same way since.
June 29, 2023
I didn't think this book was awful, but I dropped a star because it utterly fails to accomplish what it claims it will in the subtitle.
In her introduction, Tompkins says that “[a]n Indian in a Western who is supposed to be a real person has to be played by a white man.” She compares this practice to horses being played by dogs, or cattle by goats, and concludes that therefore she wasn’t going to discuss Indians within westerns. While this should have warned me I was dealing with someone who buys into the “a Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy” mentality, instead I thought of The Daughter of Dawn (a silent western with an all-Native American cast) and the Gene Autry flick The Cowboy and the Indians (wherein Jay Silverheels plays a WW 2 vet), and decided that this woman was defining Westerns in an extremely narrow way.
Which she does, saying, “the Western is secular, materialist, and antifeminist; it focuses on conflict in the public space, is obsessed with death, and worships the phallus.” The secular part of this definition would be a great surprise to Harold Bell Wright, who wrote the first western to be a best seller after Owen Wister’s The Virginian. Wright’s The Winning of Barbara Worth was among the top ten selling books in both 1911 & 1912. Nor can it explain why the winner of the 1966 Spur Award for Best Western Novel of the Year, Herbert Purdum’s My Brother John, stars a circuit preacher with a mighty punch. To this day, entering a request for “Christian westerns” into Amazon or the internet brings up currently-written books that would appeal to the L’Amour fan sprinkled among the more prolific western romances.
But where Tompkins most loses me is when she tries to convince the reader that The Virginian was a truly new direction, a complete change, a rejection of what had gone before. In particular, she loses me when she discusses one of the best sellers of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, saying:
As a type, [In His Steps] resembles the other most popular novels of the end of the nineteenth century – Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880), Mrs. Humphry Ward’s Robert Ellesmere (1888), and Hendryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis (1896) – novels that not only share its Christian frame of reference but make Christian heroism their explicit theme.
…. My point is that only six years after In His Steps came out and sold like wildfire, Owen Wister’s The Virginian initiated a narrative tradition so different from the one to which Sheldon’s novel belonged that the two seem to have virtually nothing in common.
p. 30
My problem with this claim is that In His Steps was strikingly unusual for a best seller even at the time. Ben Hur and Quo Vadis were both typical in the sense that they were exciting history novels with a Christian gloss. Exciting history novels – mostly with much less Christian gloss -- dominated the best seller lists from roughly the second half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, while In His Steps was a contemporary novel that followed the consequences of a pastor challenging his congregation to ask themselves “What would Jesus do?” and then do it. There’s the occasional bit of excitement in Steps, as when someone is nearly robbed, but it is in no sense the sort of action adventure story the average bestseller was at the time. It was a peculiar beast.
The irony is that Robert Elsmere (Tompkins misspells it) was condemned by the Christian faithful and embraced by agnostics at the time precisely because they saw it as liberated from Christianity. Perhaps it seems a Christian novel today, I haven’t read it, but I can say it wasn’t seen that way back then. It, like The Virginian, was seen by Christian reviewers as another step on the downward slope to secularism. Later Tompkins claims that “the real antagonist of the Western” is the sentimental novels of the mid-nineteenth century, specifically naming The Wide, Wide World (published in 1850), The Lamplighter (published in 1854) and The Minister’s Wooing (published in 1859).
That sort of sentimental religious novel was still around when The Virginian was published -- Elizabeth Prentiss and Isabella Macdonald Alden carried that torch into the twentieth century, Grace Livingston Hill picking it up after that, and I have no doubt someone is writing them now – but most of the population did not read them. Even at its height, that sort of novel did not dominate the bestseller lists, sharing them in the 1850s with the likes of Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thackery, and then being replaced by E.D.E.N. Southworth and her ilk, whose works were considerably less didactic and everyday, and considerably more exciting and adventurous.
After the 1850s, the only women’s sentimental novels to reach the best seller’s list were Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) and Little Men (1871), and finally Margaret Sidney’s The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew in 1880. Sidney’s book shared that best seller status, not just with Ben Hur, but with Emile Zola’s Nana, a novel about a street walker clawing her way up the ladder to become a high class prostitute while destroying every man who tries to love her, then dying of small pox at the end as her country is gleefully self-destructing. You can hardly get further from an uplifting story of Christian heroism than that!
Tompkins does not understand the bestsellers around the time the Western emerged as a type, and I’m not convinced she understands Westerns, either. She certainly does not understand the debate about “what makes a man” that is at the heart of movies like Shane, The Searchers, Red River, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In her chapter on Zane Grey she makes clear why that is. In that chapter Tompkins argues that at the end of Riders of the Purple Sage the heroine’s final words, encouraging the hero to do what is necessary for them to survive, “represent the union of love and murder in her heart.”
But there can be no union between love and murder. There can, however, be a union between love and justice, and that is often the union characters in the more optimistic westerns strive for. Sometimes it is forefronted in the debates between the romancing hero and his heroine; sometimes it is a more subtle battle happening in the heart of the protégé of some western loner, or in the heart of that loner himself; but either way, achieving that union is a common western theme. Because Tompkins is not willing to recognize a western hero’s need to kill for what matters; because she does not recognize the right to kill another for self-preservation or to preserve the lives of others; and because she will not admit that such a choice is ever reasonable or necessary, she does not see the difference between justice and murder, or between the hardness necessary for survival and outright cruelty. Which means she misses the underlying debate in many, many westerns.
For example, when she discusses Red River, she dismisses the difference between how Wayne’s character Thomas Dunstan and his protégé Matt Garth treat their men, saying it “is a change only of degree, not of kind.” But in the movie that difference is crucial, because Dunstan’s ways cannot get the job done, and Garth’s can. Dunstan’s hardness has become outright destructive, and gets men killed unnecessarily. Garth’s hardness is reasonable – they’re doing a hard job that requires stern men of purpose-- but, unlike Dunstan, Matt realizes the job also requires unity and cooperation and helping each other, and that is precisely why Matt can get the job done in the end and Dunstan could not. And getting the job done matters.
But, just as Tompkins is blind to the difference between a sentimental novel about a woman living an average middle-class life of the time while learning to be a better Christian (The Wide, Wide World) and an adventure novel about a man driven by revenge who learns to forgive through meeting Christ towards the end of the book (Ben Hur), she is blind to the difference between Thomas Dunstan and Matt Garth in Red River, or between Ethan Edwards and Martin Pawley in The Searchers.
She understands that Westerns mourn a dying age, and that they recognize that Wayne’s harsh heroes in these movies cannot function in civilization. But she does not see that the movies also honor men like Joe Starrett in Shane or Ranse Stoddard in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance or even girls like Mattie Ross in True Grit; people who may not be so independent and hard as Shane or Tom Doniphon or Rooster Cogburn, but who are strong and hardworking, and who demand and believe in justice. Unlike the cliched Western loner, who often serves and/or mentors that type, those characters generally marry, and have children, and build communities. Shane is the past, both necessary and worthy of honor; but Joe Starrett and his son, if they honor his memory, are the future.
Tompkins shrugs off Zane Grey’s books as an anomaly, claiming that after Grey, “the landscape hardens… the empty spaces and lonely buttes of the classical Western depict a phallic landscape of death.” And certainly there are hard, cynical westerns where everybody dies. But about the time those westerns were at their height of popularity on the screen, written comedy westerns hit their peak as well, perhaps as some sort of cosmic balance. Even the movie westerns went comedic, in a more classic way with Support Your Local Sheriff/Gunfighter, but eventually humor even invaded the spaghetti westerns, starting with the Trinity films. Westerns can only be pushed so far into the "landscape of death" before the fans and the writers rebel.
More pertinently, from the beginning Westerns have followed Zane Grey's lead in sometimes fusing the two heroic types, presenting characters like the Ringo kid of Stagecoach, who ride off at the end, not with just their horse, but with a lady, and to their own land, intending to settle down and raise kids, meaning to shift from meeting the challenges of the life of a lone gunman to meeting the equally valid and difficult challenges of a family-man rancher in the west.
There may be westerns that are “secular, materialist, and antifeminist,” not to mention obsessed with death and the phallus. But the western category is broad enough that there are also plenty of westerns with Christian heroes, or with strong female characters, or that end with the hero learning to share his woman’s values (and vice versa) sufficiently that they can happily marry and settle down. I don’t think Tompkins understands many of the westerns she discusses in depth. But I know she doesn’t understand the genre and so misses some of the best it offers.
As an antidote to this book, I recommend the western comedies of Herbert Purdum (better known for his screenplays, he only wrote two books), or Rex Benedict’s juveniles (Good Luck, Arizona Man is his best of those I’ve read) or the movie Support Your Local Sheriff. They may not be the greatest westerns out there, but they provided a nice balance to the grim spaghetti westerns they were likely a reaction to and I think they’d serve the same purpose here.
In her introduction, Tompkins says that “[a]n Indian in a Western who is supposed to be a real person has to be played by a white man.” She compares this practice to horses being played by dogs, or cattle by goats, and concludes that therefore she wasn’t going to discuss Indians within westerns. While this should have warned me I was dealing with someone who buys into the “a Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy” mentality, instead I thought of The Daughter of Dawn (a silent western with an all-Native American cast) and the Gene Autry flick The Cowboy and the Indians (wherein Jay Silverheels plays a WW 2 vet), and decided that this woman was defining Westerns in an extremely narrow way.
Which she does, saying, “the Western is secular, materialist, and antifeminist; it focuses on conflict in the public space, is obsessed with death, and worships the phallus.” The secular part of this definition would be a great surprise to Harold Bell Wright, who wrote the first western to be a best seller after Owen Wister’s The Virginian. Wright’s The Winning of Barbara Worth was among the top ten selling books in both 1911 & 1912. Nor can it explain why the winner of the 1966 Spur Award for Best Western Novel of the Year, Herbert Purdum’s My Brother John, stars a circuit preacher with a mighty punch. To this day, entering a request for “Christian westerns” into Amazon or the internet brings up currently-written books that would appeal to the L’Amour fan sprinkled among the more prolific western romances.
But where Tompkins most loses me is when she tries to convince the reader that The Virginian was a truly new direction, a complete change, a rejection of what had gone before. In particular, she loses me when she discusses one of the best sellers of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, saying:
As a type, [In His Steps] resembles the other most popular novels of the end of the nineteenth century – Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880), Mrs. Humphry Ward’s Robert Ellesmere (1888), and Hendryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis (1896) – novels that not only share its Christian frame of reference but make Christian heroism their explicit theme.
…. My point is that only six years after In His Steps came out and sold like wildfire, Owen Wister’s The Virginian initiated a narrative tradition so different from the one to which Sheldon’s novel belonged that the two seem to have virtually nothing in common.
p. 30
My problem with this claim is that In His Steps was strikingly unusual for a best seller even at the time. Ben Hur and Quo Vadis were both typical in the sense that they were exciting history novels with a Christian gloss. Exciting history novels – mostly with much less Christian gloss -- dominated the best seller lists from roughly the second half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, while In His Steps was a contemporary novel that followed the consequences of a pastor challenging his congregation to ask themselves “What would Jesus do?” and then do it. There’s the occasional bit of excitement in Steps, as when someone is nearly robbed, but it is in no sense the sort of action adventure story the average bestseller was at the time. It was a peculiar beast.
The irony is that Robert Elsmere (Tompkins misspells it) was condemned by the Christian faithful and embraced by agnostics at the time precisely because they saw it as liberated from Christianity. Perhaps it seems a Christian novel today, I haven’t read it, but I can say it wasn’t seen that way back then. It, like The Virginian, was seen by Christian reviewers as another step on the downward slope to secularism. Later Tompkins claims that “the real antagonist of the Western” is the sentimental novels of the mid-nineteenth century, specifically naming The Wide, Wide World (published in 1850), The Lamplighter (published in 1854) and The Minister’s Wooing (published in 1859).
That sort of sentimental religious novel was still around when The Virginian was published -- Elizabeth Prentiss and Isabella Macdonald Alden carried that torch into the twentieth century, Grace Livingston Hill picking it up after that, and I have no doubt someone is writing them now – but most of the population did not read them. Even at its height, that sort of novel did not dominate the bestseller lists, sharing them in the 1850s with the likes of Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thackery, and then being replaced by E.D.E.N. Southworth and her ilk, whose works were considerably less didactic and everyday, and considerably more exciting and adventurous.
After the 1850s, the only women’s sentimental novels to reach the best seller’s list were Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) and Little Men (1871), and finally Margaret Sidney’s The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew in 1880. Sidney’s book shared that best seller status, not just with Ben Hur, but with Emile Zola’s Nana, a novel about a street walker clawing her way up the ladder to become a high class prostitute while destroying every man who tries to love her, then dying of small pox at the end as her country is gleefully self-destructing. You can hardly get further from an uplifting story of Christian heroism than that!
Tompkins does not understand the bestsellers around the time the Western emerged as a type, and I’m not convinced she understands Westerns, either. She certainly does not understand the debate about “what makes a man” that is at the heart of movies like Shane, The Searchers, Red River, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In her chapter on Zane Grey she makes clear why that is. In that chapter Tompkins argues that at the end of Riders of the Purple Sage the heroine’s final words, encouraging the hero to do what is necessary for them to survive, “represent the union of love and murder in her heart.”
But there can be no union between love and murder. There can, however, be a union between love and justice, and that is often the union characters in the more optimistic westerns strive for. Sometimes it is forefronted in the debates between the romancing hero and his heroine; sometimes it is a more subtle battle happening in the heart of the protégé of some western loner, or in the heart of that loner himself; but either way, achieving that union is a common western theme. Because Tompkins is not willing to recognize a western hero’s need to kill for what matters; because she does not recognize the right to kill another for self-preservation or to preserve the lives of others; and because she will not admit that such a choice is ever reasonable or necessary, she does not see the difference between justice and murder, or between the hardness necessary for survival and outright cruelty. Which means she misses the underlying debate in many, many westerns.
For example, when she discusses Red River, she dismisses the difference between how Wayne’s character Thomas Dunstan and his protégé Matt Garth treat their men, saying it “is a change only of degree, not of kind.” But in the movie that difference is crucial, because Dunstan’s ways cannot get the job done, and Garth’s can. Dunstan’s hardness has become outright destructive, and gets men killed unnecessarily. Garth’s hardness is reasonable – they’re doing a hard job that requires stern men of purpose-- but, unlike Dunstan, Matt realizes the job also requires unity and cooperation and helping each other, and that is precisely why Matt can get the job done in the end and Dunstan could not. And getting the job done matters.
But, just as Tompkins is blind to the difference between a sentimental novel about a woman living an average middle-class life of the time while learning to be a better Christian (The Wide, Wide World) and an adventure novel about a man driven by revenge who learns to forgive through meeting Christ towards the end of the book (Ben Hur), she is blind to the difference between Thomas Dunstan and Matt Garth in Red River, or between Ethan Edwards and Martin Pawley in The Searchers.
She understands that Westerns mourn a dying age, and that they recognize that Wayne’s harsh heroes in these movies cannot function in civilization. But she does not see that the movies also honor men like Joe Starrett in Shane or Ranse Stoddard in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance or even girls like Mattie Ross in True Grit; people who may not be so independent and hard as Shane or Tom Doniphon or Rooster Cogburn, but who are strong and hardworking, and who demand and believe in justice. Unlike the cliched Western loner, who often serves and/or mentors that type, those characters generally marry, and have children, and build communities. Shane is the past, both necessary and worthy of honor; but Joe Starrett and his son, if they honor his memory, are the future.
Tompkins shrugs off Zane Grey’s books as an anomaly, claiming that after Grey, “the landscape hardens… the empty spaces and lonely buttes of the classical Western depict a phallic landscape of death.” And certainly there are hard, cynical westerns where everybody dies. But about the time those westerns were at their height of popularity on the screen, written comedy westerns hit their peak as well, perhaps as some sort of cosmic balance. Even the movie westerns went comedic, in a more classic way with Support Your Local Sheriff/Gunfighter, but eventually humor even invaded the spaghetti westerns, starting with the Trinity films. Westerns can only be pushed so far into the "landscape of death" before the fans and the writers rebel.
More pertinently, from the beginning Westerns have followed Zane Grey's lead in sometimes fusing the two heroic types, presenting characters like the Ringo kid of Stagecoach, who ride off at the end, not with just their horse, but with a lady, and to their own land, intending to settle down and raise kids, meaning to shift from meeting the challenges of the life of a lone gunman to meeting the equally valid and difficult challenges of a family-man rancher in the west.
There may be westerns that are “secular, materialist, and antifeminist,” not to mention obsessed with death and the phallus. But the western category is broad enough that there are also plenty of westerns with Christian heroes, or with strong female characters, or that end with the hero learning to share his woman’s values (and vice versa) sufficiently that they can happily marry and settle down. I don’t think Tompkins understands many of the westerns she discusses in depth. But I know she doesn’t understand the genre and so misses some of the best it offers.
As an antidote to this book, I recommend the western comedies of Herbert Purdum (better known for his screenplays, he only wrote two books), or Rex Benedict’s juveniles (Good Luck, Arizona Man is his best of those I’ve read) or the movie Support Your Local Sheriff. They may not be the greatest westerns out there, but they provided a nice balance to the grim spaghetti westerns they were likely a reaction to and I think they’d serve the same purpose here.
December 14, 2017
I think that the Western deserves more scholarly treatment than it has received to date, and while this volume can be interesting, I find its two major failings are the focus on cinema Westerns, and only examining three Western authors: L'Amour, Grey, and Wister. The viewpoints the author is drawing conclusions from are limited, and skewed very heavily toward the Western in cinema, which is a horse of a different colour. There is also an over-reliance on Freudian interpretations, to the disservice of all the works involved. For an example, discussions about Shane are only about the movie, the book was never read. Just a cursory glance at my shelves - The Big Sky, A.B. Guthrie, Jr.; The Ox-Bow Incident, Walter Van Tilburg Clark; Shane, Jack Schaefer; - many seminal works are ignored which would have expanded the scope of the book and contested many of the assertions laid out therein. It's a little like writing a book about Horror and only ever talking about monster movies, Stephen King, Peter Straub and maybe one or two lines about Lovecraft. The vast variety of viewpoint in the genre is condensed into a stereotype.
April 8, 2024
A thorough examination of the mythology of the West, and a well nuanced exploration of how that mythology is expressed in art (films, novels, paintings) and how it effected American culture. The book is from 1992, and culture has changed considerably in the last 30 years and the place of the Western has arguably diminished, but there is still a lot to be gained from reading Tompkins' concise analysis of a genre that still feeds into the idea of what it is to be an American (in both negative and positive ways.) I have been a lifelong fanatic of western films & novels since I began watching cowboy movies with my dad as a little boy in the 70s. I have devoured as many western movies and novels as I could from that starting place. Tompkins adds a new depth of context and perspective to everything I've digested. I also appreciate that Tompkins' speaks from the point of view of a woman since traditional Westerns (particularly at the time she was writing) were not particularly woman friendly. I'm not a macho guy. I'm probably as far from the prototypical rugged individualistic cowboy hero as a guy can be, so I'm also not the type of person the genre embraces. I feel like the author is an much of outsider-looking-in as I am, and feel a kinship to her admiration of what the genre offers despite the somewhat myopic (and to modern audiences, outdated) world view it celebrates.
May 6, 2024
zanimljivo. opisuje elemente westerna.
apparently MUŠKARCI NE GOVORE puno jer je govor za slabiće te se jedino djela broje (aka heroes are doers, braggarts end up dead); žene su slabiji spol pa zato puno govore
SMRT je vazda prisutna: shoot-outs, piles of bodies (Indian and white), the desert landscape, place names (Deadwood, Tombstone), cowboys killing Indians, cattle slaughter...
KRAJOLIK je Bog (nije ga bog stvorio), suha pustinja bez vode, samotno stablo, nedostatak civilizacije - "a hard land that bred hard men to hard ways"
KONJI (!!!) su svugdje, kaubojev najbolji prijatelj zahvaljujući kojem on preživljava
let's be real, svi imamo ovu sliku u glavi: the desert, sunset, a lone rider outlined against the sky
apparently MUŠKARCI NE GOVORE puno jer je govor za slabiće te se jedino djela broje (aka heroes are doers, braggarts end up dead); žene su slabiji spol pa zato puno govore
SMRT je vazda prisutna: shoot-outs, piles of bodies (Indian and white), the desert landscape, place names (Deadwood, Tombstone), cowboys killing Indians, cattle slaughter...
KRAJOLIK je Bog (nije ga bog stvorio), suha pustinja bez vode, samotno stablo, nedostatak civilizacije - "a hard land that bred hard men to hard ways"
KONJI (!!!) su svugdje, kaubojev najbolji prijatelj zahvaljujući kojem on preživljava
let's be real, svi imamo ovu sliku u glavi: the desert, sunset, a lone rider outlined against the sky
September 6, 2025
“What are museums keeping safe for us after all? What is it that we wish so much to preserve? The things we put in safekeeping, in our safe-deposit boxes under lock and key, are always in some way intended finally as safeguards of our own existence. The money and jewelry and stock certificates are meant for a time when we can no longer earn a living by the sweat of our brows. Similarly, the objects in museums preserve for us a source of life from which we need to nourish ourselves when he resources that would normally supply us have run dry” (188).
January 4, 2021
I found myself asking why is it again that I enjoy Western films and novels? I also made a note to visit Cody, Wyoming and its museums. One chapter of the book is given over to Tompkins's impressions of her own visit to those museums now more than three decades ago. Those with an interest in Frederick Remington will appreciate the unexpected (and rather harsh) review of an exhibition of his work that was on display when she visited.
March 22, 2019
All in all I’d rather read Louis L’Amour than read about him.
January 29, 2020
The first half is fantastic. The last is more concerned with “cow genocide” than the actual genocide of Native Americans.
December 30, 2024
I hated it so much I read it twice. Review to come.
August 30, 2007
Tompkins is a self-professed western enthusiast. As a child she obsessed over the western genre. As an adult she became an English professor but couldn't give up her love of the western. As a compromise between her academic career and childhood nostalgia she completed this work analyzing the symbolism and meaning behind the Western's quintessential elements. The book has some flaws, including that she analyzes westerns in a time vacuum without regard to change in the western over time, she relegates the portrayal of Indians to an apologetic blurb in her introduction and allows her views on vegetarianism to colour her chapter on cattle in the western. Despite these flaws, her work is fun and insightful if one is a lover of westerns as she is.
March 7, 2015
When I picked this up I thought it might be an interesting introduction to and analysis of the Western genre, end though there was some interesting analysis, much of the book was the author's condemnation of underlying cultural elements in the roles of men and women, and people and animals. The first chapter about the role of death in Westerns with the author's connection of the Western genre to the somewhat contemporary genre of Christian novels was really interesting. The later chapters seemed to find problems that weren't really there or to over emphasize them. The whole book suffered from the author's conflict between rejecting what she saw as cultural failures underlying the Western and her own appreciation of the genre. The epilogue did a good job of addressing this conflict.
July 27, 2011
Sweeping generalizations with hardly a shred of scholarly evidence. Nevertheless, a number of her "insights" are thought-provoking and compelling, and she almost always elicits strong reactions.
February 29, 2012
Very interesting, nice layout of topics.
Want to read
October 17, 2013Alan Jacobs says that this is the best book on American studies.
March 15, 2015
Excellent exploration
February 17, 2016
Brutal and grimly poetic, much like our idea of The West.
Read
December 2, 2018I recommend this book for the reason that I believe Westerns defined masculinity for a couple generations, and masculinity is vital to understanding US history. This is a thorough and incisive explanation of what Westerns have meant to Americans. I'm not going to rate it in stars, though, because of the indefensible decision on the part of the author to not examine the role of Native Americans in Westerns. She's aware of it, and offers an explanation, but the explanation really doesn't justify the bizarre decision.
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