Reading Against Genre: Contemporary Westerns and The
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READING AGAINST GENRE: CONTEMPORARY WESTERNS AND THE PROBLEM OF WHITE MANHOOD By Donika DeShawn Ross Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August, 2013 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Michael Kreyling Professor Dana Nelson Professor Paul D. Young Professor Sarah Igo For my families, the one I was born into and my chosen family who chose me back ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Vanderbilt’s English department showed great confidence in me by investing in my career for the last five years, and the added boost of a semester’s teaching relief was exactly what I needed to complete this project. The completion of this project would not have been possible without the insistent confidence and curiosity of my advisor, Michael Kreyling. Throughout this rather tortured process, he has been every metaphor for stability and calm that a graduate student could hope for: a port in storm, a lighthouse in fog, rock impervious, somehow, to the erosive effects of time and wind and water. Many thanks to my committee members, Dana Nelson, Paul Young, and Sarah Igo, whose doors were always open for conversations about white men and their feelings and who helped pry loose the ideas buried beneath the rubble of writer’s block. My writing group with Matt Duques, Elizabeth Barnett, Chris Pexa, and Nikki Spigner was awesome. Y’all’s patience and feedback and support and cheerleading and, in particular, Matt’s regular requests that we meet, kept me in the race. I am most grateful to my chosen family. Katie Kelly was steady, though not very tall, and helped me slog through the longest distance with great patience and love. My friends, my many amazing friends—Nikki, Deborah, Destiny, Diana, Matt, Sarah K., Sarah N., Shannin, Letitia, Monte, Elizabeth B., and so many others—thank you for your love and support, especially in the final sprint. Finally, I am deeply indebted to my niece, Mariah, my nephew, Makii, and the awful dogs I call my own, Chuck and Puppies, for giving me a reason to wake up and do something with my life. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION .................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... iii Chapter I. INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................1 Radical Empathy .................................................................................................3 The Problem of White Manhood ........................................................................6 Westerns and the West ......................................................................................11 Generic Fabrication ...........................................................................................18 The Women .......................................................................................................22 Chapter Outline .................................................................................................23 II. OUTLAWS ............................................................................................................26 Toward Untraining the Eye, or Reading against Genre ....................................30 Money and Mercurial Men in 3:10 to Yuma .....................................................41 An Outlaw’s Home in Appaloosa .....................................................................50 Jesse James and the Myth of Fatherhood ..........................................................57 III. THE BUNKHOUSE ..............................................................................................73 The Script of White Manhood ..........................................................................77 Dangerous and Indifferent Ground in “People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water” ..............................................................................................................82 Lonesome Dove and a Home on the Range ......................................................89 City Slickers and What the West Allows .......................................................101 IV. COMPANIONATE PARTNERS ........................................................................116 Gendering Friendship......................................................................................118 Not so Lonesome Dove ...................................................................................125 Appaloosa: Loyalty over Fidelity ...................................................................140 V. LONELY RANGERS ..........................................................................................154 Dangerous Games in All the Pretty Horses ....................................................156 The Brokeback Mountains ..............................................................................174 iv BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................199 v INTRODUCTION What happens when an Irish-Nebraskan hotelier and his family host a cowboy, an Easterner, and an anxious Swede during a snowstorm? The situation of Stephen Crane’s 1899 short story “The Blue Hotel” initially sounds like the setup to a bad joke, but the narrative that evolves from this situation is decidedly unfunny. From the moment he walks into the hotel, the Swede fears the other men plan to kill him simply because this is the West. When he supposes that “there have been a good many men killed” in the hotel, the men in the common room greet his supposition with confusion. He then accuses the Easterner and the cowboy of plotting to kill him, and he fears Scully, the owner, means to poison him. His accusations generate confusion among the men until the Easterner realizes that “this man has been reading dime novels and he thinks he’s right out in the middle of it—the shootin’ and stabbin’ and all.” As the cowboy knows, however, Nebraska in 1899 is not “out West”; it’s civilized place (106). After surviving one card game and an encounter with Scully, the innkeeper, in a darkened bedroom, the Swede realizes he is in no imminent danger and instantly transforms into a bully. He rightfully accuses the innkeeper’s son, Johnny, of cheating at cards, the two men engage in a ferocious brawl and the Swede emerges victorious. When innkeeper, Scully, the cowboy, and the Easterner band together and refuse to engage with the Swede, he packs his valise and makes the trek into town where he stops at the local saloon. There, he again provokes the men in the bar, ordering them to fraternize with 1 him, and when they fail to comply, he forces a small, unassuming man to drink with him. That man then sticks a knife in the Swede’s chest. From the beginning, Crane’s story is one of misreading and alienation. New to the West and unsure of what to expect, the Swede relies on information gleaned from dime novels to guide his interactions with the other men. As a result of this faulty framework, the Swede baffles the other men in his company. But he, too, is baffled by the men who do not play their part in the western script. The West that exists inside the hotel is at odds with the construction of the West found in the Swede’s dime novels. Instead, of rough and tumble men, he finds a family establishment, where the women stay in the kitchen and the men are content to play a friendly game of cards near the fire. More problematically for the Swede, the hotel’s apparent isolation from the town reinforces his assumptions about the hotel as a generically western space. The misreading doesn’t stop once the Swede leaves the hotel because the town is not the dime novel version of the West either. It is a new West, where money and fraternity are deeply intertwined and there is no visible differentiation between types of men. Unlike the hotel, where the Swede begged the reluctant Scully to take his money, the saloon appears firmly entrenched in market capitalism, and the bartender keeps a running tab on the Swede’s liquor consumption. Crane draws our attention to the “highly- nickeled cash machine” and the four men playing cards in the back of the room, two town businessmen, the district attorney, and a scrupulous professional gambler. Although the Swede reconfigures his assumptions about western men based on his interactions at the hotel, this reconfiguration cannot account for these less generic forms of white manhood. Though they seem disconnected from the men in the hotel, these men maintain a 2 communal loyalty to Johnny and Scully, and the Swede’s bragging and bullish ways earn him the gambler’s knife in his chest. “The Blue Hotel” provides us with an imperfect but useful schema for how not to read white manhood. The Swede repeatedly misreads the men at Scully’s hotel because he cannot see past his own assumptions about the West and the type of men who inhabit its forlorn spaces. He is fluent in myth rather than lived experience, and his expectations persist despite mounds of contradictory evidence. Crane initially encourages readers to enact the same kind of misreading by refusing to name his characters beyond ethnicity, work, and region, which keeps the tone of the story at the register of a joke until the moment the Swede is murdered. Beyond the figure of the Swede, however, the story also provides a framework