AtD and morbid, diseased conditions #2
Paul Nightingale
isread at btopenworld.com
Thu Aug 17 10:30:18 CDT 2006
More on the Western, from Deborah L Madsen (1998) American Exceptionalism,
Edinburgh UP ...
Madsen begins by describing exceptionalism in terms of the "spiritual and
political destiny" of New England Puritans: "In this view the New World is
the last and best chance offered by God to a fallen humanity" (1-2).
So recall Medoro's reference to Bercovitch's The American Jeremiad: "... the
jeremiads, or political sermons, rhetorically transformed America into the
second site of Eden and placed it under the prospect of God's punishing
wrath" (The Bleeding of America, 2), anxiety framed in terms of a new
beginning, death and rebirth, "the cyclical idea of shedding the past and
starting over [that] conjures up the imagery or language surrounding
menstruation" (7).
>From Madsen's Ch5, "the so-called Turner Thesis" in which Frederick Jackson
Turner "defines the West not as a geographical place or region but as a
process, a process that arises from and defines a unique American
character". The frontier as such no longer existed ... and "Turner's thesis
offers historical justification for a concept of the West that is informed
by the imperialist assumptions of the ideology of Manifest Destiny.
"This ideology and Turner's conception of the frontier as a meeting of
savagery and civilisation find expression in the ever-popular
twentieth-century form: the Western."
Having noted that the Wild West was already disappearing as it became
mythologised, Madsen concludes here: "The controlling irony of the Western
is rooted in the nostalgic, elegiac conditions of its creation. The Western
is a product of the twentieth century - the first Western was Owen Wister's
The Virginian (1902) - and this century's desire to construct for itself a
noble if doomed past." (122-123)
Madsen has left out the C19th 'dime novel' (and others) in beginning with
Wister, precisely because Wister is looking back to "a vanished world" (the
novelist's own definition (cited, 125).
On Wister's own experiences as a young man gone west, see: G. White Edward
(1989) The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of
Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister, Yale UP / UT Press.
Wister's hero, it seems, is invariably a 'tenderfoot' (or indeed 'pumpkin
roller').
More later from: Richard Slotkin (1993) "Buffalo Bill's 'Wild West' and the
Mythologization of the American Empire" in Amy Kaplan & Donald E. Pease eds,
Cultures of United States Imperialism, Duke UP.
And in spite of the censorship she describes, Geller notes that the
"controversial new genre, the western" might be accepted as "harmless
adventure" (Forbidden Books, 87), which indicates a conscious downplaying of
the ideology of exceptionalism.
And yes, coming back to this stuff in the light of P's title ...
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