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Shane and the Language of Men

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Shane and the Language of Men Arcadia 2018; 53(1): 72–88 Jesse Gerlach Ulmer Shane and the Language of Men https://doi.org/10.1515/arcadia-2018-0005 Abstract: Jane Tompkins has argued that a deeply conflicted relationship exists between men and language in the Western. Deploying too much language emas- culates Western heroes, men who privilege action over talk. For support, Tomp- kins turns to a number of moments in Shane, the 1953 film adaptation of the 1949 novel of the same title by Jack Schaefer. Tompkins argues that the film constructs a model of masculinity that wholly rejects language, a move that is destructive and exploitative to self and others. However, a close reexamination of the novel reveals a model of masculinity that is more positive and flexible towards lan- guage and gender than Tompkins’s views on the Western suggest. A close reread- ing of the novel shows that men in Westerns do not always use talk and silence to subjugate women and others, and that the valuing of language over action does not always end in violence or exploitation. Furthermore, the film adaptation of the novel will be examined, a work that occupies a more cherished place in American culture than the novel, a situation that is the reverse of traditional cultural hierarchies in which the literary source material is privileged over the film adaptation. Ultimately, the novel and film are engaging in different ways, yet Schaefer’s novel, rather than being relegated to middle school literature class- rooms, rewards serious critical and scholarly attention, particularly in the context of the film adaptation and critical discourse on the representation of masculinity in the Western. Keywords: masculine studies, Jack Schaefer, Shane, literary studies, adaptation 1 Introduction Though nearly seventy years old, the Western Shane continues to occupy a visible and viable position in American culture. Jack Schaefer’s novel, which deals with a young boy coming of age on the frontier and his relationship with a mysterious stranger that defends the community against a corrupt cattle rancher, has been translated into over thirty languages, has appeared in over seventy editions, and Corresponding author: Jesse Gerlach Ulmer, Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, P. O. Box 8095, Doha, State of Qatar, email: [email protected] Open Access. © Jesse Gerlach Ulmer, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. The publication of this article was funded by the Qatar National Library. Shane and the Language of Men 73 today sells around 120,000 copies annually (Marsden 340). The American Film Institute (AFI) considers the 1953 film adaptation of the novel, directed by George Stevens, to be one of the top five most important American Westerns of all time, sharing company with such esteemed works as John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) and Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952). Shane has even managed to transcend national borders to form part of the global imagination of the American West – a special edition of Shane was produced to help Japanese speakers learn English, and the United States Information Agency published an edition as an approved export of American culture (Marsden 340). Despite this broad popular appeal, however, some critics have been less than impressed with Shane. As enumerated by Matthew Costello in “‘I Didn’t Expect To Find Any Fences Around Here’: Cultural Ambiguity and Containment in Shane,” Shane has been characterized by a number of critics as a conventional, paradig- matic, “classic” example of the genre, one that perpetuates ideological orthodoxy and reinforces the social status quo (269). While this line of criticism applies to the novel, more often than not, it is, implicitly or explicitly, directed towards the film adaptation. Jane Tompkins argues in West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, for instance, that the film version of Shane is symptomatic of the genre’s general tendency to perpetuate rigid gender norms by emphasizing Shane’s masculine rejection of language. Tompkins argues that Shane offers a prime example of the deeply conflicted, structural relationship that exists between language and men. “For the really strong man, language is a snare; it blunts his purpose and diminishes his strength” (51). In Tompkins’s view, language emascu- lates Western heroes, mythic men who privilege action over dialogue, doing over talking. For evidence, Tompkins turns to a moment in the film version of Shane: When Bob asks Shane if he knows how to use a rifle, Shane answers, and we can barely hear him, “Little bit.” The understatement and the clipping off of the indefinite article are typical of the minimalist language Western heroes speak, a desperate shorthand, comic, really, in its attempt to communicate without using words. (51) Tompkins characterizes Shane’s use of language as “desperate,” even “comic,” adding that characters who regularly resort to the use of language in Westerns are usually treated with “contempt.”“Braggarts,” for instance, “are dead men as soon as they appear” (51). Again, Shane is cited: “When ‘Stonewall’ Tory [...] brags that he can face the Riker gang any day, you know he’s going to get shot; it’s Shane, the man who clips out words between clenched teeth, who will take out the hired gunman.” (51) For Tompkins, the cinematic version of Shane constructs a model of masculinity that renounces language in ways that are exploitative and destructive of self and others. Taciturn Western heroes such as Shane are, at bottom, textbook examples of psychologically and socially dysfunctional American men. 74 Jesse Gerlach Ulmer While Tompkins’s and other criticisms of the film version of Shane are valid in a number of respects, the source text – Jack Schaefer’s 1949 novel – presents something different. In the novel, the characterization of the lone gunman from the east is more problematic as it pertains to the relationship between gender and language. In contrast to the notion that Shane denotes a classic Western hero, a textbook example of conventional “cowboy masculinity,” I argue in this article that a careful reexamination of Shane’s characterization in the novel suggests a rather unusual portrait of the cowboy-hero, one that blends masculinization and feminization. In the novel, Shane is shown to practice a more flexible, open discourse, one that can move easily between masculine and feminine topics. In addition, the novel explores the perils and promises of nonverbal communica- tion, particularly in the famous stump-pulling sequence. Reconsidering curious moments within particular Westerns like the novel version of Shane can reveal surprising and interesting generic variations that complicate oversimplified, dog- matic, binary views of the relationship between gender and language. 2 Critical Framework: Masculinity Studies My critical analysis is guided by many of the trajectories and projects of contem- porary research on masculine subjectivity. A highly interdisciplinary endeavor that questions the construction of masculinity across time and space, current research in the field approaches masculinity not as a normative referent but as a problematic, polymorphous, gender construct. Some of the specific goals of studying masculinity (or masculinities, rather) include a critique of the ways masculinity is socially, politically, economically, and culturally situated and the interrogation of what it means to be a man at a particular historical moment. Though the field of masculine studies owes much to the social sciences, it is also frequently studied in the humanities, not through a quantitative epistemology but through a qualitative approach that positions masculinity as an issue of represen- tation, foregrounding language and signs as the primary object of analysis. This is the approach I adopt in this essay. Another goal of contemporary research on masculinity – one that I wholly endorse in this article – concerns the re-search for more complicated and positive models of masculinity that operate in nonhegemo- nic ways, or as Todd W. Reeser puts it in Masculinities in Theory, moments in which men break or attempt to break their own hold over power and the ways in which purely critical views of masculinity can be supplemented by more positive ones. If masculinity’s hegemonic operations can be hidden, they can also be subverted, male power can be destabilized, and experiences outside hegemony can be created. (134) Shane and the Language of Men 75 3 Shane: Background Information Born November 19, 1907 in Cleveland, Ohio, Jack Schaefer began writing the story that would become Shane in 1944; he wrote mostly at night, after finishing his day job as acting editor of the Norfolk Virginia Pilot. Interestingly, prior to the publica- tion of Shane, Schaefer had never been west of Ohio, which makes Shane a truly imagined version of the Western frontier. The story that would eventually become the novel Shane was first published in 1946 as “Rider From Nowhere” in a three- part serial in the July, September, and October issues of Argosy magazine. In 1949, the story was bought by Houghton Mifflin, retitled Shane, and published as a novel in a hardbound edition (Marsden 339–340). Initially published for a mature audience, the novel was subsequently revised and reprinted in 1954 for younger readers (Worden 143). Inspired by the historical events of the 1892 Johnson County War in Wyoming, which pitted settlers against cattle ranchers, Schaefer’s novel, set in 1889, is narrated by young Bob Starrett, the son of a determined settler, Joe Starrett, and his wife, Marian. One day, an enigmatic stranger named Shane rides into the Starrett homestead, befriends the family, and stays on to work as a farmhand. Meanwhile, a local cattle rancher named Luke Fletcher wants the land the homesteaders are using to expand his herd. Fletcher hires cowhands and gunslingers to harass the homesteaders, including the Star- retts. It is apparent when Shane first appears in the valley that he is a gunslinger himself, though one that is trying hard to leave his troubled past behind.
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