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Cowboys of the waste land: modernism and the American frontier

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Cowboys of the waste land: modernism and the American frontier

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COWBOYS OF THE WASTE LAND:
MODERNISM AND THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

by

David Shawn Tomkins

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

May 2009

Copyright 2009 David Shawn Tomkins
ii
Acknowledgements

Heartfelt thanks go to the following people for their wisdom and
encouragement: my dissertation committee, Joseph Allen Boone (what a great chair
you were Joe!), Bill Handley, and Bill Deverell; members of my qualifying exam
committee, Leo Braudy, Susan McCabe, and Carla Kaplan; and my friends and
colleagues in the USC English Department, most notably my fellow 501ers. Special
thanks go to Flora Ruiz for all her help over the years and for coming to my rescue
more than once. Thanks also to my brothers Bill and Fred Tomkins and my step-father
Reno Morra for familial support during some very lean years; Michael, Gesine, and
Elena Meeker for important lessons and excellent advice; Gary Simonian, Ryan
Calamusa, and Robert Short for years (and years!) of unwavering friendship. Thanks
most of all to Natania Meeker—without whose extraordinary love, reassurance, and
critical eye I never could have finished this project.

iii
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii

Abstract iv

Chapter 1: Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Endnotes 21

Chapter 2: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Pioneer Debauchee”: The Forgotten
Violence and Enchanted Objects of The Great Gatsby 24
Chapter 2 Endnotes 66

Chapter 3: Cowboys and Curios: Reappraising Willa Cather’s Frontier
Nostalgia in The Professor’s House 70
Chapter 3 Endnotes 111

Chapter 4: The “Lost Generation” & the Generation of Loss: Ernest
Hemingway’s Materiality of Absence and The Sun Also Rises 115
Figure 1: François Rudé’s statue of Marshal Michel Ney 120
Chapter 4 Endnotes 157

Chapter 5: Staking New Claims: Modernist Territories from
Black Rock to Westworld 164
Chapter 5 Endnotes 218

Bibliography 221

iv
Abstract

What does the figure of the rugged cowboy have to do with effete high
modernism? My dissertation responds to this question by uncovering the ties linking
early twentieth-century Western novels by authors such as Owen Wister and Clarence
Mulford to a series of modernist texts that likewise engage deeply entrenched frontier
myths in a post-WWI context. Throughout the 1920s, notable modernist figures like F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway, while striving to break with
American literary tradition, simultaneously probed the residual mythic strands of
frontier discourse that informed hugely popular cowboy stories such as Wister’s The
Virginian (1902) and Mulford’s Hopalong Cassidy (1910). In responding to these
works, Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway sought to confront the problem of
depicting the post-war American by synthesizing the cowboy—an emblem of the
nation’s past—with “modern” figures ranging from Hemingway’s wounded, sexually
impotent expatriate Jake Barnes to Cather’s cowhand-turned-archeologist Tom
Outland to Fitzgerald’s ambiguously ethnic “nobody from nowhere” Jay Gatsby.
But the absorption of Western motifs into the canon of American modernist
prose casts a long shadow, I argue, for it is the figure of the hero as he is conceived by
the writers mentioned above that, by the 1950s and 60s, comes to define the image of
the cowboy found not just in literature but in cinema. Just as post-WWI American
fiction writers looked to the Western to help shape their modernism, post-WWII
Western films like Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) and The Magnificent Seven (1960)
likewise absorbed the idiosyncrasies of 1920s modernist experimentalism. As I argue,
v
the filmic Western becomes over time more and more preoccupied with the modernist
deconstruction of the hero. The modernist undoing of these tales of identity and
nationhood haunt the Western, making it the crucial site not only for establishing what
it means to be American but, thanks to this passage between high modernism and
popular film, for undoing it. The Western, paradoxically, is where modernism lives on
as a way of helping us think about what it means to be American.

1
Chapter 1

Introduction

As historian Richard Etulain has shown, the Western genre came into
prominence in the United States between 1890 and the beginning of World War I.
Evolving out of the frontier-focused dime novel of the Civil War era, and benefiting
from a revised interest in the historical novel that spoke to Americans’ desire to
recapture “a past that they were reluctant to lose,” the Western offered readers a
gallant hero who embodied the “rough, virile, and out-of-doors” ethos characteristic of
the Progressive Era (Etulain 57). Indeed, as Etulain points out, this period of “the
Spanish American War generation, of Teddy Roosevelt, [and] of militant Anglo-
Saxonism” played a crucial role in the development of the Western. Particularly
important to the Western in this context was the tension existing between advocates of
Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and the New Freedom movement associated with
Woodrow Wilson’s early Populism. These two ideological camps of the Progressive
Era represented, respectively, the “new urban industrial thrust in American society”
and the “older mentality of a rural, agricultural America” (Etulain 58).
Notwithstanding the debate about the virtues of industry that divided the two camps,
followers of both Roosevelt and Wilson associated the American West with freedom
and individualism, qualities that both groups held dear and that both wished to
maintain.
The resultant love affair with the American West was not lost on writers of the
day, who Etulain explains “could assure themselves a larger audience if they portrayed

2
the West romantically” (58). And portray it romantically they did, beginning with
Owen Wister’s foundational novel The Virginian (1902) and continuing on in the form
of wildly popular Westerns by writers like Zane Grey, Clarence Mulford, Max Brand
(Frederick Faust), and others. While these stories of the American West may have in
large part grown out of the opposition between the followers of Roosevelt and Wilson,
the appeal of the Western far exceeded this political context, as the frontier
narrative—and its attendant mythologies—continued to grow in popularity throughout
the first two decades of the twentieth century. By the end of the First World War (if
not well before) the American frontier had become synonymous with American
individuality, freedom, and gallantry. Reverence for America’s frontier past had by
this point become a commonplace, typical not only of New Nationalists and the
advocates of New Freedom, but of those who held such ideological affiliations at
arm’s length. In fact, romantic tales of the American frontier even had an impact on
contrarians like essayist and critic H.L. Mencken who, in decrying the inadequacy of
the modern American, invoked the valor he associated with nation’s frontier past.
In his 1922 essay, “On Being an American,” Mencken writes of the
“unprecedented swinishness” that accompanied the United States’ participation in the
First World War (46).
1
Though not wishing the “civilized American” to forget the
“colossal waste of public money,” the “knavish robbery of enemy civilians,” or the
“complete abandonment of all decency, decorum and self-respect” practiced by the
U.S. government during this period, Mencken’s more pressing purpose is to point out
that the war was sold to the American people “not by appealing to their courage, but

3
by appealing to their cowardice” (46-47).
2
Mencken argues that the war’s advocates
issued predictions of a pending German invasion in order to capitalize on the
American public’s fear.
3
Oddly though, as Mencken then points out, proponents of the
war ironically banked on the hubristic military ambitions of these same “craven and
fearful” Americans, insisting that “the entrance of the United States [into battle] would
end the war almost instantly,” as the “Germans would be so overwhelmingly
outnumbered … that it would be impossible for them to make any effective defense”
(47). For Mencken, this vacillation on the part of the United States between
gutlessness and overconfidence only increased after the war’s conclusion. Despite the
many months during which the United States—staring like a “yokel” at a “sword-
swallower at a county fair”—stood idly by, watching the war unfold (and populations
dwindle), it then emerged, after only a year and a half of struggle, a “knightly victor”
(46).
Given the dishonor of the nation’s actions, the global dominance the postwar
U.S. gained as a result of its participation in the war seems, to Mencken,
incommensurate with the “baseness of spirit” that defines its people (51). Mencken
accuses Americans of the late teens and early 1920s of being both indiscriminate and
shallow, and, in summing up his critique, draws a distinction between modern
Americans and those of the distant past:
The typical American of to-day has lost all the love of liberty that his
forefathers had, and all their distrust of emotion, and pride in self-reliance.
He is led no longer by Davy Crocketts; he is led by cheer leaders, press agents,
word-mongers, up-lifters. (52)

4
Mencken’s comments in this passage insist upon the spineless gullibility demonstrated
by early twentieth-century Americans who had, in his view, allowed phony
opportunists to replace the bold, rugged leaders of their frontier past. What had been a
nation of individuals—the best of whom, Mencken suggests, were found on the
frontier—had become an “Eden of clowns” (64) susceptible in their cowardice to
whichever “prancing milch-cow of optimism” happened to occupy the White House at
the time (53). Yet, by invoking the folk hero Davy Crockett—a historical figure whose
life (and death) had become the stuff of frontier legend—Mencken introduces an
unstable element into his dichotomy.
4
Is Mencken referring to the Tennessee
congressman who, after being voted out of office, opted to explore Texas where he
died (perhaps in battle, perhaps not) at the Alamo, in 1836? Or does he meanthe hardy
frontier hunter who not only died, but died bravely, at the Alamo and who, along with
Daniel Boone, provided Theodore Roosevelt with “ancestors for his own developing
hero-persona” (Slotkin 41)? Given the ambiguity around his allusion to Crockett,
Mencken’s suggestion that early twentieth-century Americans lack the virtues of their
frontier ancestors raises the question: what is the function of these comparisons
between past and present Americans in the context of a historical past so often
confused with a mythic one?
The grey area that bedevils Mencken’s critique reflects the conflation of the
mythic and historical West that had shaped the national imaginary well before 1922
and continued to be visible in the popularity of frontier-related entertainments during
this period. Not only did an interest in folk heroes such as Crockett persist, but in the

5
years leading up to Mencken’s essay, Western novels such as Zane Grey’s Man of the
Forest (1920) and The Mysterious Rider (1921), as well as Emerson Hough’s The
Covered Wagon (1922),
5
topped lists of best-selling books in the United States.
6

Similarly, American filmmakers—who had produced scores of Westerns since Edwin
S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery made its indelible mark in 1903—maintained
their love affair with the mythic West during the postwar period, bringing out ever
more Western films, among the most notable being James Cruze’s 1923 adaptation of
Emerson Hough’s aforementioned best seller, The Covered Wagon. Cruze’s film
enjoyed such tremendous critical and commercial success that the number of Western
films made in the United States the subsequent year tripled (McVeigh 67).
7

Crucial to all of these works of Western fiction—and indeed to the nineteenth-
century frontier literature from which they descended—is the task of defining a
national character. The frontier hero central to these works was then and has since
remained a figure that embodies this national character—a character which, as
Mencken confirms in the passage above, consists of self-reliance, a staunch
independence, and a hard, emotionless exterior. So pervasive was the mythic language
of the frontier and its brawny hero that Mencken evidently fails to see it as such.
Rather, he incorporates this mythic language into his own historical narrative of
American devolution from mightiness to meekness. In doing so, Mencken ignores the
extent to which the modern Americans he sees and the mythic ones he imagines exist
within disparate registers.

6
The mythic frontiersman’s illusory nature notwithstanding, the stalwart,
honorable, and self-reliant loner central to most if not all frontier narratives—from
James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking series to Edward L. Wheeler’s Deadwood
Dick dime novels to Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian—provides the standard
against which Mencken would contrast the “clowns” of the postwar age. While
Mencken is seemingly unperturbed by the indiscriminate comparison of the mythic
frontier past and the actual American present, American novelists of the same period
such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway write their
preoccupation with this very conflation of history and myth into some of their most
famous novels. Short of delineating the dialectical tension between the very real
industrial and military prowess of the postwar United States and the persistence of the
mythic, rural “Old West” as a foundational element in U.S. nationalist discourse, the
American authors I examine in this study, by the mid-1920s if not well before, had
begun to consider the curious persistence of the mythic West in the correlative context
of American literary history. As I will show, works such as Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby (1925), Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925), and Hemingway’s The Sun
Also Rises (1926) respond to the enduring myth of the West, on the one hand, in terms
of the modern nation’s dissimilarity to the frontier of popular narrative. They also
question the formal and thematic chasm that appears to separate this popular American
literature of the postwar period from the “new literature” spearheaded (in an expatriate
context that nevertheless reverberates in powerful ways stateside) by Americans like
Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot.

7
In key works from the mid-1920s, Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway ask
what the figure of the rugged cowboy has to do with American literature not only after
WWI, but after the watershed year of 1922—the year in which Eliot published The
Waste Land and Pound insisted, partly in response to Eliot’s work, that people think of
1922 as the first year of a new literary era.
8
In negotiating a place for themselves
within this new avant-garde literary milieu—which for speakers of English had
“arrived as a commonly accepted public fact” by 1922 (North 6)—Fitzgerald, Cather,
and Hemingway seek to integrate the popular past into the new “modernist” present
while simultaneously maintaining a staunch individualism that puts distance between
them and the modernist “movement” presided over by Pound and Eliot. Striving on
the one hand (in the mode of the modernist) to break with American literary traditions
(among them the Western narrative itself), on the other hand Fitzgerald, Cather, and
Hemingway simultaneously probe the residual mythic strands of frontier discourse
that had informed popular cowboy stories ranging from Wister’s Virginian to Will
James’s Cowboys, North and South (1924). In engaging the frontier myths that are
crucial to these works, Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway confront the problem of
depicting the postwar American, encouraging the reader to ask: is this figure a farmer
or an investor, a cowboy or a capitalist? They do this by synthesizing the frontier
hero—an emblem of the nation’s past—with “modern” figures ranging from
Hemingway’s wounded, sexually impotent expatriate to Cather’s cowhand-turned-
archeologist to Fitzgerald’s mid-Westerner of dubious origin both blessed and cursed
with “an extraordinary gift for hope” (Gatsby 2).

8
In this study, I will identify the effects of these syntheses on the development
of postwar American literature. To that end, I will show how the works by Fitzgerald,
Cather, and Hemingway examined here attempt to reconcile the provincial wonderland
often rehearsed in popular Western novels with the world power the United States had
in fact become—and thus with the “Waste Lands” that the modernism of Eliot and
Pound often suggests are the fruit of such power. I will then show how these
developments affect subsequent American films about the West and its attendant
myths. Consequent to their engagement with the Western genre, works such as those
produced by Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway in the postwar period have an
important effect, I argue, on the way future Western stories are told, especially
cinematically. The absorption of Western motifs into the canon of American
modernist prose casts a long shadow, for it is the figure of the frontier hero as he is
conceived by the writers mentioned above that, by the 1950s and 60s, comes to define
the image of the cowboy found not just in literature but in cinema. Just as post-WWI
American fiction writers looked to the Western to help shape their modernism, post-
WWII Western films like Shane (1953), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) and The
Magnificent Seven (1960) likewise absorbed the idiosyncrasies of 1920s modernism.
The aim of this study, then, is twofold: to reanimate the American modernism of
Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway by showing the crucial importance of the cowboy
to their post-WWI modernist literature, and to illustrate the extent to which subsequent
filmic experimentation within the Western genre owes a substantial debt to the post-
WWI fiction of these same authors. I argue, on the one hand, that the Western genre

9
had an important impact on modernism; I also contend that certain important examples
of postwar modernist literature were preoccupied with sorting out the inconsistencies
inherent to the Western—both as a genre and as a trope within nationalist discourse.
As an extension of this argument, I maintain that later cinematic Westerns—especially
those of the post-WWII period—are in many ways more indebted to modernism’s
preoccupation with the Western than with the Western itself.
But making sense of what a preoccupation with the Western means in the
context of American modernism requires that the contours of this modernism be made
clear, especially as concerns the contributions of the three figures at the center of my
argument: Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway. Perhaps the best place to start when
talking about American modernism is to contrast the distinct but related literary
milieux of Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway with the English language modernist
“movement” being pursued in the British context from around 1908 with the arrival of
Ezra Pound in London. Such a contrast is useful insofar as comparing distinct modes
of modernist writing by Americans during the 1910s and 20s shows the
multidimensionality contained within this loose literary category known as American
modernism. In his superb study A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English
Literary Doctrine 1908-1922, Michael Levenson argues that the high priests of
modernist writing in English, American poets Eliot and Pound (along with their
English counterparts Wyndham Lewis and Ford Maddox Ford and Irishman James
Joyce) were first and foremost responsible for founding a literary movement based on
establishing “a clean break with the immediate past” (ix-x). Notwithstanding its many

10
successive doctrines—which ranged from Impressionism to Imagism, Vorticism to
Classicism, and which were designed, in part, to distinguish the new literature from
what had come before—the continuity of this movement, Levenson argues, emerged
out of a shared desire to “construct a unified theory of modernity” (viii). Such a theory
would cross boundaries of genre and discipline, for the idea was to make the “literary
doctrine” of the movement indistinguishable from theories of “painting and sculpture”
and from “philosophic or religious speculation” (viii).
As Levenson shows, the modernism of Eliot and Pound seeks to upend
aesthetic attitudes of the nineteenth century: whereas “Victorian poetry had been soft;
modern poetry will be hard,” whereas “Humanist art had been vital; the coming
geometric art will be inorganic,” and whereas “Romanticism was immature; the new
classicism will be adult” (ix). This interest in engaging with opposites likewise
appealed to Americans writing outside the English movement. By the mid-1920s,
authors like Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway were making the contrast between
past and present, urban and rural, male and female, and East and West key aspects of
their work. But unlike the American modernists writing in the British context,
Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway had no interest in resolving dialectical tensions by
replacing one element with another. Rather, their objective was to nurture such
tensions. As Fitzgerald says in “The Crack-Up,” the test of “first rate intelligence is
the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the
ability to function” (69). Thus, while writers in the British context sought to replace
past aesthetic attitudes and techniques with the extreme opposites of those approaches,

11
it was the notion of opposition itself that appealed to the likes of Fitzgerald, Cather,
and Hemingway. Whereas Pound and Eliot broke with the immediate past, Fitzgerald,
Cather, and Hemingway were preoccupied with it. And while modernists of the British
movement sought to quell their origins, the writers who are central to this study mined
them. As is the case of their counterparts in England, the authors considered here had a
vexed relationship with the literary past. But rather than dismiss this past out of hand,
insisting upon the immediate replacement of old ideas with new ones (or, in the case
of Pound, with the adoption of a wholly new calendar) Fitzgerald, Cather, and
Hemingway created new literatures by using their work as a site in which to examine,
question, critique, and sometimes dismantle the work of their literary forebears.
But despite the coincidence of their mutual preoccupation with negotiating past
and present literary themes, forms, and ideas in pursuit of something new, it would be
inaccurate to think of the authors considered here as constituting a separate, unified
arm of American modernist output. Although Fitzgerald and Hemingway were friends
for a time, the extent to which they “thought themselves in competition” (Donaldson
11) is well documented, as is the dissolution of their friendship by the late 1920s.
9

Similarly, Fitzgerald had a vexed relationship to Cather’s work, which he sometimes
applauded (as is the case with her 1924 novel The Lost Lady) and other times
dismissed (as is the case with The Professor’s House).
10
And there was never any love
lost between Cather and Hemingway, the latter having famously reviled the former for
allegedly plagiarizing parts of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, One of Ours (1922).
11

Indeed, the American modernist “scene” I examine in this study was not a unified

12
movement. Apart from their concurrent fascination with the dialectic between postwar
modernity and the mythic West, these three authors’ main source of alignment was
their interest in remaining independent. In fact, in constructing their own distinct
literary personas, Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway in many ways mirrored the
cowboy figures with whom they were so fascinated—these authors viewed a life in
American letters as an individualistic, self-reliant pursuit, not as a team effort.
Whereas in the English context, Pound would use his celebrity to draw attention to
other artists, an author like Fitzgerald, working outside the English movement, was
more interested in drawing attention to himself. For instance, near the end of The
Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald alludes to the success of his first book This Side of
Paradise in the voice of one of his characters, Richard Caramel.
12
Often working at
cross purposes and lacking the inclinations of a “movement,” Fitzgerald, Cather, and
Hemingway offered new literature interested in the cultural presence of the individual
working in his or her own way, according to his or her own artistic code.
Interestingly, as Levenson points out, by the late 1920s, modernists working
in the British context had come to the same conclusion—or rather the British
“movement” had been ripped apart from the inside. In the 1927 introduction to his
literary magazine The Enemy, Wyndham Lewis declares that with respect to British
modernism, “there is no ‘movement’ gathered here (thank heaven!), merely a person;
a solitary outlaw and not a gang” (Levenson 216, emphasis added). Lewis’s use of the
term “outlaw” is suggestive. Evocative of the Western genre, the “outlaw” not only
works alone, but is all the more formidable an opponent for doing so: one needn’t read

13
(or watch) many Westerns to discover that the lone Westerner is always the most
careful, the most precise, and thus the most deadly. Whereas a gang might only be as
strong as its weakest member, an outlaw’s only weakness is the rival gunman with the
quicker draw. And while “outlaw” may be a synonym for “bad man,” it is not even
necessarily the case that such bad men are criminals, for an outlaw in the Western
context can be, as Clarence Mulford writes, either good or bad depending on his
loyalty to law and order.
13
It would be better to say that outlaws are essentially
outsiders—those who function neither in gangs nor in general society. For Lewis,
modern writing in England becomes the practice of outlaws, just as it had been,
generally speaking, for the likes of Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway since the early
part of the decade.
14
In the American context, laying claim to the identity of the outlaw
doesn’t mean a break with the past; indeed, this gesture has a long history.
This history resonates not just in the modernist works of Fitzgerald, Cather,
and Hemingway and in the way they conducted themselves as writers of American
fiction. Their individual modernisms also take up this outlaw figure as a way of
understanding modern American literature’s relationship to the literary past. Adopting
the outlaw pose turns authors like Hemingway, Cather, and Fitzgerald into a part of
American literary history while they are simultaneously trying to distance themselves
from it. For the American modernists I examine here, the Western—and in particular
the figure of the cowboy—provides an organizing motif, though not in the service of a
unified movement. American modernism’s interest in the Western can be seen as a
coalescence of individuals orbiting a specific thematic center that manifested formal

14
repercussions within not only their work, but in the work of producers of Westerns
later on. The writing of Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway is not about the revision of
the Western but about the tension between apparent opposites. The coalescence of new
and old that we find in The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and The Professor’s
House defines the modernism of these works’ authors. For Eliot, who emerged from
the British modernist context the standard bearer of the new literature, the objective
(which in many ways broke the movement apart and certainly remained central to his
final disagreement with Pound) was the interjection of the avant-garde into general
intellectual life.
15
Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway, on the other hand, aimed to
integrate the popular into the particular—a synthesis which then, as I show in Chapter
4, passed back again into the popular.
There is no question that the developments I trace within the context of Anglo-
American modernism occurred alongside a myriad of profound aesthetic shifts that
until recently have received little if any attention. As the proliferation of various
“geomodernisms” continues to show, many more literary “outlaws” populated the
postwar modernist landscape in the United States and elsewhere than those who are
the focus of this study—writers for whom the political stakes of their artistic
interventions were significantly higher.
16
But rather than simply marking a return to
canonical Anglo-American modernism, my investigations into the dialectical tensions
that distinguish the modernism of Pound and Eliot from that of Fitzgerald, Cather, and
Hemingway is an attempt to redefine this canonical modernism from within. The
works I examine—from the postwar novels of Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway to

15
the mid-century instantiations of the Western in cinema that draw so heavily from the
aforementioned works—attempt to reconcile the undiminished allure of the cowboy
hero as an embodiment of American identity with the missing and fractured selves
found in so much modern American literature. The point of integrating the Western
into the new literature of the postwar period was not simply to experiment with some
genre-bending literary game; rather, it was to facilitate postwar explorations into the
contours of American identity, thereby forging a new relationship to “being” in the
years following the Great War. The Western appealed to the writers I examine in this
study because historically it had been the site for such glances inward. Concomitantly,
what later cinematic Westerns (such as Shane, Bad Day at Black Rock, and The
Magnificent Seven) show is the extent to which this postwar engagement with the
Western by the likes of Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway established its own
significance as a moment of profound reflection on the nature of American identity.
Of fundamental import to these explorations into identity, I argue, is the
relationship between the American West and the material landscape that is so crucial
not only to the myth of the West, but to the modernist engagements with that myth
examined here. Jane Tompkins and Patricia Nelson Limerick have addressed the
materiality of the West in relation to twentieth-century fictional works and historical
memory, respectively.
17
In the case of the former, the austere cowboy hero’s
emulation of the monolithic Western landscape is shown to prefigure the ultimate
merger of land and Westerner that accompanies the hero’s inevitable (and usually
violent) death. For the latter, what’s at stake is coming to terms with the West as “an

16
abstraction, an ideal, and a dream,” as well as an “actual, material, and substantial”
place that holds “layer upon layer of memory” (Limerick 28). This criticism
underscores the extent to which stories of the American West display an inherent
interest in landscapes and bodies, and, more specifically, in the relationship between
the land and the masculine body.
In a related context, scholars such as Bill Brown and Douglas Mao have
explored modernist interventions into theories of matter, noting the relationship
between modernism’s fascination with physical objects (ranging from statues to
landscapes, from ancient curios to skyscrapers) and early twentieth-century nationalist
mythologies in the United States.
18
It is my contention that this ligature between the
mythic and the material in U.S. modernism was most powerfully articulated within
modernist engagements with the Western, and in particular with the popular figure of
the frontier hero. This preoccupation with materiality gets taken up in all three of the
novels I examine—from Jay Gatsby’s merger, in death, with the landscapes of eastern
capitalism, to Tom Outland’s absorption of the mystical air of the Blue Mesa, to Jake
Barnes’s sexual loss figuring as a monument to the lost frontier. Moreover, this
fascination with the “stuff” of experience also appears in the filmic Westerns that I
discuss, from the Western hero’s severing of the tree stump in Shane to his missing
hand in Bad Day at Black Rock to the rematerialization of the Westerner in The
Magnificent Seven as an exotic figure of dubious national origin. In reading
modernism through the lens of the Western (and vice versa), I consider modernism’s
treatment of the frontier hero as a precursor to subsequent generic mutations within the

17
cinematic Western. In this context, my dissertation moves from high to low, crosses
boundaries of genre, and takes seriously the cross-pollination of literature and film.
In my first chapter, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Pioneer Debauchee”: The Forgotten
Violence and Enchanted Objects of The Great Gatsby,” I throw into focus the
relationship between Jimmy Gatz’s ethnic ambiguity and the author’s fascination with
cowboy novels such as Clarence Mulford’s Hopalong Cassidy and Will James’
Cowboys, North and South (1924). While critics like Walter Benn Michaels have
argued that the unabashed racism displayed by Gatz’s rival Tom Buchanan is an index
of Fitzgerald’s own prejudices, I hold that Gatz—in becoming Gatsby—in fact makes
no attempt to assimilate into the culture of whiteness that Tom Buchanan wishes to
preserve. Although Fitzgerald’s relationship with race may have been vexed, The
Great Gatsby nevertheless contends that western-born children of immigrants like
Gatsby have access to a frontier lineage that eludes old-money families such as the
Buchanans. While the material wealth of Gatsby translates into a mythology of the
frontier hero, the opulent display of Tom Buchanan—which is inherited, not self-
made—can never transcend its own material circumstance and enter into the realm of
myth.
Chapter Two takes issue with the critical commonplace that Willa Cather’s
body of work merely reflects a nostalgic longing for the “golden age” of the frontier.
In “Cowboys and Curios: Reappraising Willa Cather’s Frontier Nostalgia in
The Professor’s House,” I examine the representation of frontier existence found in
Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925), a novel that merges cowboy lore with

18
anthropological and scientific study, and that treats the land, the air, and the artifacts
of ancient indigenous cultures as materials of mythic renewal. Here, Cather situates
the figure of the Western hero as the ligature between the modern world and the world
of antiquity, as his discoveries amid ancient Indian ruins illuminate the materialist
origins of frontier narratives, thus enabling Cather’s novel not only to forge beyond
frontier nostalgia, but simultaneously to reflect and critique nationalist mythmaking
within the context of post-WWI U.S. literature. The Professor’s House suggests that
materiality provides the basis of all mythic narratives, and thus to mythologize
remembrance without concern for the tangible evidence of history is to live neither in
the past nor present, but in the nebulous space of popular imaginative fantasy.
My third chapter, “The ‘Lost Generation’ and the Generation of Loss: Ernest
Hemingway’s Materiality of Absence and The Sun Also Rises,” demonstrates how
Hemingway’s depiction of the sexually mutilated veteran of the Great War and what I
contend to be his inverted generic analogue, the cowboy hero, grows out of
modernism’s vexed enthrallment with material things. The spectral presence of Jake’s
missing penis combined with the novel’s attendant interest in objects (such as statues)
commemorating losses, not victories, underscore not only Jake’s need to recuperate
his material loss, but Hemingway’s desire to reclaim “loss” as a mode of artistic
power. Rather than accept the claim that his was a “lost generation,” Hemingway used
his first novel to explore the impotence of the post-war American, a figure whose
“lost” capacity for “generation” he likens to the pioneer filled with longing for a
frontier he outlasted. In Hemingway’s formulation, the pioneer becomes the sexually

19
wounded veteran whose desire to transcend loss finds its material correspondent in the
objects that embody and perpetuate national myth.
If chapters one through three respond to the question, “How does the
mythology of the Western haunt U.S. literary modernism?” my fourth chapter looks at
how the modernist literature of the 1920s effected far-reaching changes in ways of
conceiving the iconic cowboy hero, changes that particularly influenced the
development of the Western in film. In “Staking New Claims: Modernist Territories
from Black Rock to Westworld,” I argue that modernism’s intervention into Western
motifs gradually leads to the emergence of a new archetypal cowboy, one plagued by
the same ambiguities and disfigurations imposed upon the Westerner in 1920s
modernist fiction. By the mid-1950s, the frayed buckskins, white hat, and gangly
morphology of the classic Western hero ceased to dominate the look of a figure now
commonly represented by the ethnic outsider dressed in black (Yul Brynner in The
Magnificent Seven) or the aging, wounded war veteran of Irish descent (Spencer Tracy
in Bad Day at Black Rock), even as the space within which these transformations
occurred remained resolutely homosocial. As I argue, the filmic Western becomes
over time more and more preoccupied with the modernist deconstruction of the hero—
and more and more thoughtful about the issues that once plagued the modernist novel:
from the place of materiality in American myths of the nation to the role of embodied
identity in allowing or impeding participation in American narratives of success. The
modernist undoing of these tales of identity and nationhood haunt the Western,
making it the crucial site not only for establishing what it means to be American but,

20
thanks to this passage between high modernism and popular film, for undoing it. The
Western, paradoxically, is where modernism lives on as a way of helping us think
about what it means to be American.

21
Chapter 1 Endnotes

1
“On Being an American” appeared in the pages of Mencken’s book-length
collection of essays, Prejudices: Third Series, published by Alfred A Knopf in 1922.

2
Citing U.S. arms deliveries to Great Britain and its allies, Mencken dismisses
the United States’ position of neutrality during the first two years of the war as
“fraudulent,” arguing that the nation’s support was biased toward the Allies for
financial reasons.

3
British propaganda did have a substantial role to play in winning American
support for the Allies’ campaign against the Germans. For instance, in 1915, British
Viscount James Bryce issued a report supposedly based on the depositions of
eyewitnesses accusing the German army of perpetrating vicious crimes against
innocent Belgians. The report, which was featured on the front page of the New York
Times, was widely circulated throughout the United States and generated significant
outrage (Fleming 52-53).

4
For more on the life and legend of Davy Crockett, see: Buddy Levy, American
Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons,
2005.

5
The popularity of such works came on the heels of significant milestones in the
evolution of frontier literature such as the publication of Owen Wister’s The Virginian
in 1902 (a novel that has defined the character of the cowboy in American literature
ever since) and the nineteenth-century publication of James Fenimore Cooper’s highly
influential Leatherstocking tales, published between 1823 and 1841. For more on the
growth of the Western as a popular entertainment, see: Christine Bold. Selling the
Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860-1960. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1987.

6
For more on American best-sellers lists of the early to mid-twentieth century,
see: Suzanne Ellery Greene, Books for Pleasure: Popular Fiction, 1914-1945,
Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1974.

7
Chapters four and five of Stephen McVeigh’s The American Western
(Edinburgh University Press, 2007) provide a useful overview of Westerns in the early
era of American film production. See also Scott Simmon’s The Invention of the
Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-Century (Cambridge
University Press, 2003).

8
Also very much on Pound’s mind was James Joyce’s Ulysses, the completion
of which on October 30, 1921, Pound believed, marked the end of the Christian era.
Combined with the coincidental publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land, which Pound

22

had helped bring to fruition, the year 1922 marked the beginning of the new calendar
that Pound published in the Spring 1922 edition of The Little Review (North 3).

9
For more on the fraught history of the Hemingway/Fitzgerald friendship, see:
Scott Donaldson, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary
Friendship. Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1999.

10
Fearing he may have plagiarized a passage from A Lost Lady in the first
chapter of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald wrote Cather in late March-early April 1295
to apologize, claiming himself to be one of her “greatest admirers” (Life in Letters
100). Later that year, in a letter to his editor Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald calls Cather’s
novel The Professor’s House “almost as bad” as the very worst novels of the year; in
the same letter, he declares The Great Gatsby to be one of the very best novels of the
year (131-132).

11
See Hemingway’s letter to Edmund Wilson dated November 25, 1923 in which
he insists that Cather “Catherized” the battle scene in D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth
of a Nation in order to write the final lines of One of Ours.

12
The full passage, found in Book Three, Chapter Three of The Beautiful and
Damned reads as follows:
You know these new novels make me tired. My God! Everywhere I go some
silly girl asks me if I’ve read ‘This Side of Paradise.’ Are our girls really like
that? If it’s true to life, which I don’t believe, the next generation is going to
the dogs. I’m sick of all this shoddy realism. I think there’s a place for the
romanticist in literature. (421)

13
Mulford begins Hopalong Cassidy (1910) by explaining that “good bad-men”
distinguish themselves from “bad bad-men” by placing value in the “germs of law and
order and justice” and by standing by their principles (1).

14
Here I would liken the outlaw pose adopted by Fitzgerald, Cather, and
Hemingway to that of “celebrity” outlaws such as the infamous Jesse James. Like the
frontier badman whose antisocial deeds garnered mainstream appeal, Fitzgerald,
Cather, and Hemingway used their outlaw status as a basis for the publicity and fame
they sought (and ultimately gained).

15
As editor of the Criterion, Michael Levenson explains, Eliot became the
“Editor of modernism,” while Pound “remained the Loathed Disturber” (218).

16
Recent works on global modernism include: Michael Golston. Rhythm and
Race in Modernist Poetry and Science. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007;
Mark Whalan. Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America: The Short Story Cycles of

23

Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
2007; Douglas Moa and Rebecca Walkowitz ed., Bad Modernisms. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2006; Laura Doyle and Laura A Winkiel ed., Geomodernisms: Race,
Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005; Tace Hendrick,
Mestizo Modernism: Race, Nation and Identity in Latin American Culture, 1900-1940.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

17
See Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Patricia Nelson Limerick, Something in the
Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West (New York: W.W. Norton and
Company, 2000). For more recent readings of the American literary West, see:
William R. Handley. Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary
West.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 and William R. Handley and
Nathaniel Lewis. True West: Authenticity and the American West. Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2003. Other useful recent inquires into the historical West include:
William Deverell and Anne F. Hyde. The West in the History of the Nation: A Reader.
Three volumes. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000, and William Deverell, ed. A
Companion to the American West. Malden: Blackwell, 2004.

18
See Douglas Mao, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) and Bill Brown, Sense of Things: The
Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

24
Chapter 2

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Pioneer Debauchee: The Forgotten Violence and
Enchanted Objects of The Great Gatsby

O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
—Walt Whitman, “Pioneers! O
Pioneers!”

When Whitman said “O Pioneers,” he said all.
—F .Scott Fitzgerald, “The Note-
Books”

In his 1936 essay “The Crack-Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald identifies “first-rate
intelligence” as “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time,
and still retain the ability to function” (Crack-Up 69). Within the context of his essay,
Fitzgerald’s maxim distinguishes the earlier portion of his career from that which
followed the moment when he “suddenly realized that [he] … had prematurely
cracked,” as “too much anger and too many tears” had cost him his “vitality” (70-74).
Life, Fitzgerald argues, has “a varying offensive,” and those who best navigate that
offensive—who can “hold in balance” futility and resolve, failure and success, past
and future—possess the keen intellect that, for Fitzgerald, yields prosperity (71). This
emphasis on “opposed ideas” is more than anecdotal in the context of Fitzgerald’s
oeuvre; in fact, it highlights the role played by ambivalence as a structuring
component in Fitzgerald’s thought. Opposition between the rich and the poor, the elite
and the average, the young and the old, the urban and the rural, and perhaps most
notably, the American East and the West, are fundamental to Fitzgerald’s literary

25
portrait of the United States of the 1920s and 30s. These oppositions make up the
conceptual constellation within which Fitzgerald seeks to define the post-war
American as a figure simultaneously subjugated by and emerging from “the
contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future”
(70). From the “aristocratic egotism” of Amory Blaine in This Side of Paradise (1920)
to Monroe Stahr’s insistence that he wears his heart “where God put it—on the inside”
in The Love of the Last Tycoon (1941), Fitzgerald ponders the hubris and the
humility—the “varying offensive”—at work in the American mind of the post-war era
(This Side 26; Last Tycoon 17). Ultimately, Fitzgerald is more interested in exploring
the contours of these oppositions than in prescribing tidy resolutions. He uses his
ambivalence to transform “opposed ideas” into richly executed narratives of American
experience.
Perhaps nowhere in Fitzgerald’s fiction is the tension wrought by “opposed
ideas” more fully conceived than in The Great Gatsby (1925). Here, old money
families and the nouveau riche are separated geographically by way of the “sinister
contrast” between East Egg and West Egg, the “two unusual formations of land”
(situated twenty miles due east of New York City) that provide the setting for most of
the novel’s action (Gatsby 3).
19
By populating East Egg with entitled, fashionable
elites who look down on the hodge-podge of newly affluent unknowns occupying
West Egg, Fitzgerald establishes, in economic and cultural terms, the novel’s
overarching contrast between the Eastern and Western United States. The jaundiced
eye with which the occupants of East Egg view their socially inferior counterparts

26
across the bay betokens the cynicism informing aristocratic assessments of prominent
newcomers without privileged backgrounds, especially when these newcomers hail
from Western or mid-Western states. What is more, in his analysis of the aristocratic
psyche of East Egg, Fitzgerald takes pains to illuminate the particular loathing
reserved not only for those of non-Eastern seaboard origin, but those who have
benefited from entrepreneurial experiments conducted in the Western portion of the
United States.
Horrified by the lawless cowboy culture of popular “Wild West” narratives,
the old-money aristocrats of East Egg liken the West to a holding place for the dregs
of society. As a result, they find those who would stoop to immerse themselves in
Western impurities as desperate as their want of means is pathetic. No matter how
much wealth such individuals amass, their unremarkable heritage will always ensure
they remain outsiders destined to populate areas like West Egg. For the inhabitants of
East Egg hold a deterministic view of privilege. In their view, such privilege is a
birthright, a predetermined natural phenomenon: some are born into wealth, others are
not—such is the way of things. No truly deserving person would ever need to dirty his
or her hands with the muck of entrepreneurial endeavor (let alone physical labor)—
especially if such endeavors are based in the Western United States. In East Egg, one’s
heritage and only one’s heritage grants access to the inner aristocratic circle—and it is
this select group under whose auspice social improprieties are determined and judged.
A simple westerly glance, then, across the bay from East Egg identifies the father of

27
the novel’s greatest improprieties as recent West Egg settler, self-made neo-aristocrat
Jay Gatsby.
A stranger to the East, Gatsby quickly makes a name for himself hosting lavish
parties at his West Egg mansion that attract social climbers, minor celebrities, and the
attention of his elite neighbors. While Gatsby’s parties and his extraordinary estate
become the talk of the town, the man himself remains a mystery. Not only have most
of Gatsby’s many guests never made his acquaintance, only a scarce few can attest to
having actually seen him. Some of his guests insist that Gatsby “was a German spy
during the war,” while others maintain that while they haven’t a clue about Gatsby’s
past they are nonetheless certain that “he killed a man once” (29). But Gatsby himself
does little to quell such rumors: if anything, he facilitates them by opening his home to
those for whom he remains for the most part invisible. According to narrator Nick
Carraway, it is “testimony to the romantic speculation [Gatsby] … inspired that there
were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to
whisper about” (Gatsby 29). For his neighbors across the bay, however, Gatsby’s
presence threatens to destabilize the social order and thus embodies the fundamental
opposition out of which all others in the novel spring and on which Fitzgerald’s novel
ultimately turns. This crucial opposition, separating the deserving aristocrat of the East
from the undeserving social unknown of dubious origins, grows more complex as,
near the end of the novel, we learn of Gatsby’s childhood interest in heroes of the
“Wild West.”

28
In the final pages of Fitzgerald’s novel, Gatsby’s father Henry C. Gatz arrives
in West Egg three days after his son’s murder. After revealing to Carraway that his
friend’s name wasn’t Gatsby at all but rather Jimmy Gatz, the elder Gatz shares with
Nick his son’s well-worn copy of Clarence Mulford’s cowboy narrative Hopalong
Cassidy.
20
Gatz makes a point of pointing out the inscription that a teen-aged Jimmy
Gatz had committed to the book’s rear flyleaf. This insertion consists of a “schedule”
and a set of “general resolves” reflecting not only Jimmy’s interest in working hard
and cultivating his intellect, but in building up his savings (116).
21
This conflation of
cowboy fantasy and financial ambition evokes the popular theory held by Theodore
Roosevelt (and echoed by Owen Wister, whose own cowboy hero ascends to new
capitalistic heights in the final pages of his 1902 novel The Virginian) that these two
extremes of the American character were in fact starting and ending points along a
single continuum—a theory that flies in the face of the contrary view held by the
inhabitants of East Egg. From their perspective, only those individuals related by
blood to the Eastern aristocracy have a right to exist within it, which explains why a
Chicagoan like Tom Buchanan—a man born into an extraordinarily wealthy and
privileged family—finds such comfort in East Egg while “self-made” Westerners like
Gatsby remain unwelcome. While hailing from a notable bloodline grants one access
to elite Eastern circles and makes moot the issue of one’s specific geographic origin,
emerging from an unremarkable family does the opposite. But such feuds between
wealthy members of society over who resides in the more fashionable part of town
don’t hold much interest for Roosevelt, who instead remains preoccupied with the sum

29
of civilized progress. In this context, Roosevelt insists on a what he sees as a radically
different story of “aristocratic” development than the one popular among East Egg
residents: for Roosevelt, the elite of the early twentieth century necessarily evolved
out of consecutive generations of frontier heroes, under whose buckskins resided a
keen “aristocratic character” (Slotkin 35). If you are a member of the upper classes,
Roosevelt seems to be saying, you must then have something of the cowboy in you.
Still, while Roosevelt argues that the nation’s elite class has its roots in the
frontier past, Rooseveltian thought also contends that “the demands of [a given] …
historical moment foster the emergence and triumph of a distinctive … cultural entity
… [whose] differences must be rooted in ‘blood’ or heredity” (Slotkin 38). So,
Roosevelt would not have taken issue with the importance of heredity to the design of
the elite class; in fact, he would have insisted on it. But he would have likewise
insisted that ruling elites necessarily possess an “aristocratic character” first found on
the frontier. For Roosevelt, the rise of elite individuals always happens in accordance
with the development of the society in which that individual thrives. Thus, given the
characteristics that Roosevelt felt must be valuable to early twentieth-century culture
in the United States—independence, fortitude, bravery—the most logical ancestor to
the modern ruling class was the Western hero in his various permutations from the
frontier hunter of James Fenimore Cooper to the cowboy hero made popular by
Roosevelt’s friend Owen Wister in The Virginian.
But, like the inhabitants of East Egg, Roosevelt also insists that any ancestor of
the dominant class in the United States must be of Teutonic blood. To that end,

30
Roosevelt represents all cowboys as Anglo-Saxon, thereby overlooking the racial and
ethnic diversity that was actually quite common among them.
22
Therein lays the blind
spot that Fitzgerald exploits in his novel. The author raises the question: what if the
origin of Roosevelt’s frontier aristocrat is not in his Anglo-Saxon blood but rather in
the national imaginary itself? Drawn from such a source, isn’t the emergence of the
modern subject (which Jay Gatsby represents) marked by a turn to mythic self-
creation that necessarily disavows heredity in matters of class ascendancy? Jay Gatsby
embodies this amended version of the Rooseveltian hero. And while Gatsby (like
Wister’s Virginian before him) brings together the two extremes of American heroism,
the cowboy and the capitalist, he does so not as a descendant of Teutonic peoples but
rather as an abstract figure without a past, a man born not of woman but of his own
subjective impulse to transform the “fantastic conceits” of his imagination into a
material reality (Gatsby 65). It is largely for this reason that the Eastern establishment
rejects Gatsby, for from their perspective the patrimony enabling entry into East Egg’s
aristocratic circle inevitably leads to the old world—across the Atlantic to Western
European ancestors.
But the Rooseveltian frontier narrative (upon which Roosevelt himself depends
in order to support his personal frontier mythology) undermines the aristocratic ethos
that insists upon a progression of dominance rooted in the East and claiming dominion
over the West. Crucially, the Rooseveltian theory that Gatsby’s presence invokes
suggests the existence of an aristocratic class that moves in the opposite direction—
from West to East. Even more threatening to the reigning aristocratic order in this

31
context is Gatsby’s ethnic ambiguity, which ironically erases his origins in a way that
draws him closer to the mysterious beginnings of the Western hero, beginnings that
Roosevelt presumes are Teutonic but that cowboy mythology—in the strong
correlation it draws between nature and the Western figure—leaves unconfirmed.
The matter of Gatsby’s ethnicity—and in particular the implication that his real
name, Jimmy Gatz, may identify him as Jewish—is not an unfamiliar topic in recent
criticism. According to Walter Benn Michaels, The Great Gatsby emerged out of the
same discursive wellspring that produced books like Hemingway’s The Sun Also
Rises, Cather’s The Professor’s House, and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.
23

These novels, Benn Michaels argues, dramatize the gradual alignment of white
Americans’ fears of miscegenation with the development of American modernist
literature generally during the 1920s. In other words, they exemplify American literary
modernism’s interest in claiming possession of American culture by first establishing
a standard criterion for citizenship: namely, white racial purity. In the case of The
Great Gatsby, Benn Michaels zeroes in on the blatant racism of Tom Buchanan,
arguing that, in decrying the influx of non-whites into the United States, Buchanan
acts as Fitzgerald’s mouthpiece.
According to Benn Michaels, Buchanan’s attempts “to keep [his wife] Daisy
from Jay Gatsby”—like Jake Barnes’ need to keep Brett Ashley away from Robert
Cohn in The Sun Also Rises and Katherine St. Peter’s disgust over her sister
Rosamond’s husband Louis Marsellus in The Professor’s House—are an index of the
author’s anxiety about the lack of “breeding” characterizing non-Anglo-Saxons living

32
in the United States, marrying into white families, and producing racially mixed
progeny (7). Benn Michaels’ suggestion here is that Buchanan’s hostility toward
Gatsby has its basis in race and not class relations, and that, more specifically, Gatsby
is—if not Jewish—then certainly something “other” than white. Responding to Benn
Michaels, most critics agree that the name Gatz is either German or Eastern European,
but no one has proven conclusively that Jimmy Gatz is in fact the son of Jewish
immigrants. Either way, the ambiguity Fitzgerald wrote into the character continues to
puzzle readers as much as it entices them.
24

Whereas Benn Michaels’ work overlooks the relationship between Gatsby’s
ethnic ambiguity and his Western background, this chapter seeks to understand what
role Gatsby’s frontier lineage plays in Fitzgerald’s ethnically ambiguous description of
him. How does recognition of his “otherness” as a product of the West enhance our
assessment of the novel’s contribution to modernism as both an aesthetic and a theory
of origins? While frontier narratives are typically held at a distance from the “high”
aesthetic ambitions of canonical modernist texts like The Great Gatsby, I will argue
that the frontier is latently present in the character Jay Gatsby and in Fitzgerald’s
novel on the whole. By cultivating a celebrity mystique around his status as an
unknown newcomer, Gatsby becomes Fitzgerald’s vehicle for re-imagining the
cowboy hero in an Eastern aristocratic context. Like Gatsby, Western heroes typically
disclose very little about themselves, and in their own context usually trade on as
much myth as substance. Generally speaking, the less known about a frontier hero, the
more generically consistent he (usually he) is. In this respect, Gatsby’s mysterious

33
background is in keeping with the unknown origins of the cowboy hero. What is more,
Gatsby is allowed a different relationship to his identity—his otherness—precisely
because of his appropriation of the cowboy narrative.
By entering the Eastern world of elite capitalism, Gatsby seems to be
repressing his cowboy past, but his actions ironically reveal this past in a way that
makes him an even greater threat to the status quo of East Egg. Gatsby’s actual ethnic
origin is less important than the result of his ambiguity within the East Egg / West Egg
matrix. In embodying both the cowboy and capitalist—and thereby manifesting the
natural consequence of Theodore Roosevelt’s progressive historiography—Gatsby
dethrones the privilege of heredity. This is true just as Gatsby’s eventual death (by
gunshot) completes his cowboy’s journey, as it would for the Western hero for whom
death—the opportunity to join with the material world—brings about the most noble
end possible. The result is a character whose contradictions demonstrate how
Fitzgerald’s ambivalence regarding racial and ethnic relations in the U.S. exists
alongside (and functions in tandem with) what I will show to be his oscillating interest
in the frontier and frontier-related narratives.
Pioneers Debauchee
After a bullet from George Wilson’s pistol brings Jay Gatsby’s tragic tale to a
close, Gatsby’s friend and confidant Nick Carraway finds himself burdened with
making funeral arrangements for his once fashionable but now forgotten companion.
This responsibility falls on Carraway, in part, because Gatsby left behind no indication
regarding the whereabouts—or indeed the existence—of his blood relatives. Carraway

34
makes it clear in his narration that Gatsby “had never told [him] definitely that his
parents were dead” (110), and that the closest Gatsby ever came to disclosing any
information about his [Gatsby’s] progenitors came in the form of the narrative he put
forth regarding his tutelage under millionaire prospector Dan Cody. Indeed it is
Cody’s portrait, and not that of Gatsby’s actual father or mother, that Carraway finds
while rummaging through his dead friend’s things in search of family contacts. Nick
explains that “only the picture of Dan Cody” remained to account for Gatsby’s origins,
adding that he, Carraway, took the portrait to be “a token of forgotten violence, staring
down from the wall” (110).
But who is this man Cody? What is the nature of the violence with which
Carraway associates him? How—and by whom, precisely—was this violence
perpetrated? Why is it now “forgotten” and what does it have to do with Cody’s life as
a “pioneer debauchee” (66)? With respect to the latter charge, issued with particular
disdain by the novel’s narrator Carraway, there is little doubt that Gatsby’s mysterious
mentor evokes American pioneer lore. For his name alone—which one critic describes
as “a fictional amalgam of Daniel Boone and William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody” (Castille
232)—echoes a dime novel mythology of the American West that Fitzgerald, in
elaborating on Cody’s character, puts into dialogue with well-known historical and
theoretical discourse about the frontier. In 1910, seventeen years after he declared the
frontier closed in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” historian
Frederick Jackson Turner noted that the “first ideal of the pioneer was that of
conquest” (271). In a commencement address at the University of Indiana, Turner held

35
the pioneer up as a beacon of American ambition, noting that the pioneer “was
building a new society as well as breaking new soil” (271). Similarly, Dan Cody
comes “from a civilization based on individual competition,” and he brings that
“conception [of competition] with him to the wilderness where a wealth of resources,
and innumerable opportunities [gives] it a new scope” (271). Yet Cody seems to part
with Turner when it comes to “the ideal of democracy,” for whereas the frontier settler
described by Turner has “a passionate hatred for aristocracy, monopoly, and special
privilege” (271), Cody enjoys an extravagant, elevated lifestyle, sailing about on his
yacht, drinking himself to excess, and pursuing an “infinite number of women”
(Gatsby 66). Likewise, Cody resembles but ultimately falls short of emulating the
frontier hunter turned captain of industry envisioned by Theodore Roosevelt. While
Cody does not appear to lack the desire “to strive after great things,” he does seem to
prefer a “life of slothful ease” to the “strenuous life” that Roosevelt insists embodies
“all that is most American in the American character” (Roosevelt 267).
On the one hand, then, Cody is more a wealth-obsessed entrepreneur than a
humble Turnerian cultivator of frontier land. But, on the other hand, he is more a
saloon dweller than a dapper Eastern socialite. Thus, Cody does not fit in to either
region with ease, his eccentricities eliciting negativity presumably from Easterners and
Westerners alike. Thus, Dan Cody’s imperfect yet salient correspondence with both
popular and theoretical conceptions of the frontier underpins the emergence of his
protégée, Jay Gatsby, as a figure whose unknown origins and mysterious past unnerve
the inhabitants of East Egg in a way that resembles the stir the arrival of an enigmatic

36
gunslinger might cause among the inhabitants of a sleepy Western town. When viewed
in this context, Carraway’s dismissal of Cody as a “pioneer debauchee, who during
one phase of American life brought back to the Eastern seaboard the savage violence
of the frontier brothel and saloon” (66) in fact seems aimed at his friend Gatsby,
whose unexplained wealth, infamously decadent parties, and scandalous demise can
best be understood in relation to Cody’s own unusual ascendancy.
Dan Cody earns his fortune extracting precious metals from the silver fields of
Nevada, the Yukon, and the High Sierras, and according to Carraway, makes himself a
millionaire several times over by participating in “every rush for metal since seventy-
five” (66). Given his profession, Cody must leave trails of rubble in his wake—
evidence of the violence upon which his success depends. In turning to the land to
fulfill his desire for riches, Cody subjects it to harsh brutality. Maintaining a lucrative
mining career at the turn of the twentieth century means that Cody has to adopt
common mining practices that range from using high-powered water streams to blast
away mountainsides to dredges that scoop up huge portions of earth. Of a piece with
his many years of tunneling, digging, and pulverizing the landscape in search of its
valuable materials is the violence Cody does to himself in transforming an earth-
roaming frontiersman of the American West into a leisure-seeking wealthy aristocrat.
Thirty-two years prior to his first interaction with Jay Gatsby, Dan Cody is himself
seeking to remake his rather unremarkable teenage self into a figure liberated by the
substantial wealth he has extracted from the earth. Like Jay Gatsby, Cody cultivates a
mysterious persona whereby he erases his past. But unlike his ambitious disciple,

37
Cody has no need to wedge his unknown self into an elite class that sees ancestry as a
key to entry. Rather, by 1902 Cody has taken up residence on his yacht, thereby
concerning himself with neither the East nor the West. Fantastically wealthy, his
mining days behind him at forty-five, Cody opts to explore a new frontier of comfort
and leisure by sailing along the Great Lakes and Eastern seaboard indefinitely.
Five years later, in 1907, Cody meets young Jimmy Gatz when the then
seventeen-year-old boy is engaged in a yearlong stay along the shores of Lake
Superior. After a brief, two-week enrollment at St. Olaf’s Lutheran College in
southern Minnesota, Gatz soon finds himself “searching [once again] for something to
do” off Lake Superior, having grown frustrated at St. Olaf’s “indifference to the drums
of his destiny” (64-65). Gatz is biding his time as a clam digger and salmon fisher
when he spots Cody’s yacht—the Tuolumne
25
—on the treacherous shore of Little Girl
Bay. Gatz pulls out to Cody’s yacht in a barrowed rowboat to inform the then fifty-
year old tycoon “that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour” (65).
While saving Cody from “the most insidious flat on Lake Superior,” young Gatz, the
son of “shiftless and unsuccessful farm people,” transforms himself into Jay Gatsby, a
sharp-witted drifter without family ties or a past of any kind (64-65). Cody is so taken
with Gatsby that he invites the young man to remain on the Tuolumne as a hired hand,
someone to watch out for Cody’s considerable interests while the older man lives with
abandon aboard his yacht. For Gatsby, this first step away from the unremarkable life
of Jimmy Gatz leads to five years of tutelage in the ways of decadent living as he and
Cody sail “three times around the Continent” between the years 1907 and 1911 (66).

38
For Gatsby, Dan Cody’s yacht represents “all the beauty and glamour in the
world” (66), and it is this type of “vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty” that Gatsby
finds himself pursuing until his untimely death (65). By characterizing Gatsby’s love
affair with ostentatious display in this way, narrator Carraway not only explains how
Cody could so rapidly become a surrogate father to Gatsby, but also puts in a divine
context the imaginative well spring that brought forth Gatsby in the first place. When
Carraway says that Gatsby is a “son of God” going about “His Father’s business” in
looking to cultivate wealth, he means that Gatsby acts under the auspice of a deity of
Gatsby’s own making. In creating a “universe of ineffable gaudiness,” Gatsby
conjures a God who has designed the kingdom over which Gatsby will preside. Hence,
Gatsby demonstrates in his response to Cody an almost religious dedication to the
possessions that signify the wealthy older man’s social prominence. Wealth is all for
Gatsby—and the more wealth one possesses, the closer one comes to understanding
beauty. For beauty, in Gatsby’s mind, equals excess, and to display one’s excesses—
obtained through ruthless capitalist enterprise—is to please God. To that end, the God
whose love Gatsby seeks is not only a God of wealth, but a God who smiles on those
most driven by their want of money. In other words, in Gatsby’s mind, God the father
loves the rich—and so Gatsby, in turn, sets about earning God’s love.
Almost immediately upon accepting Cody’s invitation to join him on the
Tuolumne, Gatz procures from the older man the material goods needed to make his
initial transformation into Gatsby complete. Once onboard, Gatz finds his “torn green
jersey and … canvas pants” replaced by a “blue coat, six pairs of white duck trousers,

39
and a yachting cap” (64-65). These articles of clothing, so evocative of the Eastern
leisure class, not only provide Gatsby with a uniform during his time on Cody’s yacht,
but also they represent the ease with which Cody himself appropriates Eastern
customs in creating his own world aboard the Tuolumne.
26
Cody takes what he wants
of the East while insisting that the seat of power resides on his yacht. There, Cody
enjoys the authority that elite capitalism affords him while at the same time
maintaining the freedom of the frontier. Cody’s influence allows Gatsby to adopt the
manners of the well-to-do; it also helps him develop the self-serving ruthlessness that
ultimately enables Gatsby to cultivate such substantial material success. But Cody’s
investment in Gatsby works to the wealthy prospector’s benefit as well, for under
Cody’s instruction Gatsby spends time as “steward, mate, skipper, [and] secretary”
aboard the Tuolumne. In addition, Gatsby works as Cody’s “jailor” so that the young
apprentice might confine Cody whenever the old man’s drinking habit gets the better
of him (66). Once Cody has drained the land of enough riches to sustain him, the older
man gleefully drains the contents of the bottle, giving in to self-indulgence and putting
his capable apprentice in charge of his affairs. Like Hopalong Cassidy, the steady and
reliable ranch hand that Jimmy Gatz reads about as a youth, Jay Gatsby displays great
loyalty in looking after the interests of his pioneer employer. While obviously
different in terms of setting and vocational context, the relationship between
Fitzgerald’s characters nevertheless echoes in significant ways that of Cassidy and his
ranch owning boss, Buck Peters. For that reason, I will briefly digress into Mulford’s
novel, for his depiction of the dynamic between cowboy and ranch owner provides a

40
useful point of reference in understanding the relationship between Gatsby and Dan
Cody.
Mulford depicts his hero Hopalong as a man whose practices under the employ
of Buck Peters’ Bar-20 ranch are as disciplined and loyal as they are ruthless.
Meanwhile, Mulford makes clear that Buck Peters is a land owner, and what is more,
he owns and operates a business on the land he owns. Buck works to nurture his
investment in his ranch, the Bar-20: he hires reliable hands to work his land and look
after his cattle, and he engages in (sometimes violent) negotiations with surrounding
land owners whose interests undermine his own. Peters’ capitalist endeavor is
fundamental to the doctrine of manifest destiny. Why else would a capitalist nation
seek to expand its land ownership if not to use it to produce more capital? A
frontiersman, then, is in essence, a capitalist, whereas a ranch hand or cowboy supplies
the labor enabling the ranch owner to produce goods for sale on a consistent basis.
Thus, a ranch hand like Hopalong has as his primary interest the aims of his employer.
In the particular case of Hopalong Cassidy, the moral code by which he abides is
rooted in protecting Buck’s property above all else, for as jovial, dependable, and
thoughtful as Hopalong may be, he also possesses a great capacity for violence,
violence exacted for his employer’s sake. Hopalong’s contract with Peters provides
the basis of what is, for him, the difference between right and wrong. Hopalong kills a
good number of men, and not only does he do so with impunity, but without a hint of
regret or hesitation. As long as the killing serves Peters’ interest, Hopalong stands by
his actions. Similarly, Gatsby serves Cody’s interests notwithstanding his

41
acknowledgement of Cody’s brand of unrestrained frontierism. Indeed, it is during his
time as Cody’s employee that Gatsby developed an understanding of the
communicative power of ostentatious display and the power of things—yachts, fine
clothes, fine wines—to establish entitlement among Eastern elites in lieu of familial
aristocratic ties.
If Jimmy Gatz resolves to adopt the guise of a figure without a socially
limiting ancestry by transforming himself into Jay Gatsby, this “Gatsby” seems, like
Western frontier heroes, to emerge from the land itself when he first appears before
Dan Cody in 1907. It was then that Gatsby began to cultivate the mystique that years
later would inspire so much curiosity, envy, and attraction among the social set
attending his lavish parties on West Egg. In considering Gatz’s transformation into
Gatsby, Nick Carraway explains that Gatsby arose from his “Platonic conception of
himself” and as such occupied the body, if not the life, of poor Jimmy Gatz (65). The
quotidian existence of Gatz was not part of any actuality Gatsby could recognize, for
the “fantastic conceits” of Gatsby’s self-conjured “universe of ineffable gaudiness”
seemed much more real to him that the lowly farm life of Gatz (65). Thus, Gatsby
contrived to live the life he, Gatsby, had willed into existence rather than the one into
which Jimmy Gatz was born. Having convinced himself that the “reality” of Jimmy
Gatz was in fact an “unreality,” Gatsby emerged as the self-righteous and determined
(if emotionally stunted) man that the physical body of Jimmy Gatz would merely serve
to animate (65). Gatsby, Carraway insists, was the sort of persona “a seventeen-year-
old would be likely to invent, and to this conception [Gatz] was faithful to the end”

42
(65). The mysterious young man who presents himself to Dan Cody off the shore of
Lake Superior is already all myth—a walking collision of competing conceptions of
the quintessential American.
I will now turn to another potent source of the frontier elements that Fitzgerald
embeds in his portrayal of Gatsby—the cowboy author Will James. In a letter to
Maxwell Perkins dated December 1
st
1924, Fitzgerald points out that in addition to
revising The Great Gatsby (known at the time as Trimalchio in West Egg)
27
he had
also been enjoying—in fact, loving—“the cowboy book” that his wife Zelda recently
began reading aloud to him “to spare his mind” (Life in Letters 89). The book to which
Fitzgerald refers is Will James’ Cowboys, North and South (1924), which conveys
(according to its author) the experiences of a writer who “was born and raised in the
cow country” and who wishes to persuade his readers that “a cowboy is just as human
as any human ever was” (James viii). Like Fitzgerald, James was published by
Scribner’s during the nineteen twenties, and also like Fitzgerald, James benefited from
the editorial skills of Maxwell Perkins. Both written and illustrated by James,
Cowboys, North and South was published by Scribner’s under the supervision of
Fitzgerald’s editor, the aforementioned Perkins, who, it turns out, strongly admired
James’s work. According to Perkins’ biographer A. Scott Berg, Perkins first came into
contact with James in 1923 when James submitted “an article on bucking horses to
Scribner’s Magazine” (55). For Perkins, who had a penchant for “authentic American
vernacular” (Berg 55), Will James not only masterfully depicted but also convincingly
embodied “the ideal of a cowboy,” for he had a “light, lean” appearance, an “acquiline

43
[sic] type of face,” and the ability to fix his gaze on others “through the smoke” that
rose from his hand-rolled cigarettes (Perkins 62). These unusual qualities betrayed the
drifting lifestyle of a man who “had been orphaned at the age of four and taken in by
an old trapper” who subsequently died during James’ thirteenth year (Berg 55).
According to the tale James told at the time, his foster father had been responsible for
teaching the young orphan to read and write. As his writing developed, James claimed,
he began recording his remembrances about his experiences on the Western plains—at
first in obscurity, and later, with Perkins’ help, professionally.
While Perkins remained a staunch supporter of James until the author’s death
in 1942, Fitzgerald’s relationship to James’ work appears to have been more vexed.
On December 20
th
, 1924, Fitzgerald wrote Perkins a rambling letter in which he states
that, on “second thoughts I didn’t like Cowboys, West + South” (Life in Letters 92-93),
and while this assessment seems relatively transparent on the surface, it is worth
considering that Fitzgerald begins his letter by noting, “I’m a bit (not very—not
dangerously) stewed tonight” (Life in Letters 90). Fitzgerald’s drunkenness might
explain why he misremembered the title of James’ book (Cowboys, North and South);
it might also explain why in a letter that jumps wildly from the author’s financial
concerns to his recent manuscript revisions to, most curiously, his randomly expressed
desire to utilize the word “whose” properly,
28
Fitzgerald claims to have gained an
understanding of his character Jay Gatsby, a character whose identity had thus far
perplexed Fitzgerald and who Fitzgerald later admitted was “never quite real to [him]”
(Trimalchio ii).
29
On the other hand, however, Fitzgerald’s lack of consistency

44
regarding such matters as literary taste and artistic reflection may have had less to do
with drink than with a creative process for which skepticism about all areas of artistic
creation—from the influence of the literary scene at large to his own original ideas—
was more a structural method than evidence of soft-mindedness.
Although Fitzgerald dismisses James in the letter mentioned above, it is
suggestive that the elusive Gatsby suddenly came into view for the author right around
the time he was reading James. Given that James’ claims of authenticity were his
selling point, the narrative of his upbringing under the care of a Montanan trapper
would have been readily available for Fitzgerald’s appropriation. The trapper who
James claimed had adopted him after his parents left him orphaned at the age of four
was not only responsible for teaching James to read and write but about the ways of
the West. Under the trapper’s care, James would gain the right to call himself, as he
did so often, an authentic cowboy.
30
James’ biography brings together the nineteenth-
century tale of the frontier hunter with the early twentieth-century concept of the
cowboy hero that Owen Wister brought into fashion with The Virginian.
Moreover, James’ narrative has at its core two central contradictions that, in
fact, are fundamental to any number of frontier narratives. If the chain of instruction
on the frontier is to be maintained one must invent new origins, thereby allowing one
to absorb the authenticity of the western experience from a seasoned frontiersman. In
order to become self-reliant, as all western heroes must, one must first submit to a
tutor’s instruction. From ranch owner Buck Peters, Hopalong Cassidy learns how to
raise cattle, cultivate land, and lead a crew of hired hands (which is to say, he acquires

45
the skills needed to work up his own piece of land one day). Likewise, Will James
learns from his foster father the ways of the “trapper,” just as Dan Cody teaches
Jimmy Gatz (the farm boy) how to become Jay Gatsby (the aristocrat). What Gatsby
gains from Cody is authenticity of a slightly different variety, however—it is the
authenticity of the capitalist frontiersman who, as Cody had done before him, brings
violence to the Eastern seaboard by forcing the Eastern elite to yield to the social
standing his vast wealth affords him. In Will James’ autobiographical story of life as a
trapper’s adopted stepson (as in Clarence Mulford’s tales of Hopalong Cassidy’s
service on the Bar-20 ranch), the process of becoming an authentic westerner involves
first erasing a former identity. Similarly in the case of Gatsby, a previous identity must
be submerged, as the lowly farm boy makes way for the ambitious entrepreneur-
frontiersman. But in that submersion, whereby the mysterious origins of the upwardly
mobile Jay Gatsby obscure the unremarkable material past of the lowly Jimmy Gatz,
also resides a controversial ethnic ambiguity that, like the Eastward lean of Gatsby’s
financial ambitions, ironically enhances Fitzgerald’s take on post-WWI Western
narratives. In the following section I will show how the novel’s mixed message with
respect to race not only conforms to the articulation of “opposed ideas” that was
central to Fitzgerald’s artistic process, but also how Fitzgerald’s complex rendering of
Gatsby betrays a greater depth of consideration about racial identity on Fitzgerald’s
part than previous accounts of the author’s racism acknowledge.

46
Western Justice
In Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism, Walter Benn Michaels
famously contends that The Great Gatsby—like several other novels written by
American modernists after the first World War—exemplifies a mode of authorship he
identifies as “nativist modernism”: a literary movement of the 1920s aimed at
preserving the “linguistic, national, cultural, [and] racial” purity of white America
(3).
31
In Benn Michaels’ view, the nativist context out of which The Great Gatsby
emerged cannot be separated from the experience of reading it, for he insists that The
Great Gatsby is not only fundamentally about race, but that its protagonist, Jay
Gatsby, is meant to represent a threat to white racial purity.
32
Gatsby, Benn Michaels
argues, is not an outsider among the elite of East Egg merely because of his
unremarkable class background; rather, the glory of the elite class exceeds Gatsby’s
reach because he is “persistently understood by … [the Buchanans and by Nick
Caraway] as belonging to something more like a different race” (7). For Benn
Michaels, Gatsby—whose real name, Gatz, identifies him as Jewish and thus “in some
sense black” (25)—inspires dread and disdain on the part of Buchanan in particular for
the same reason that Louie Marsellus draws contempt from Godfrey St. Peter in The
Professor’s House: he seeks the hand of a white American woman—namely, Tom’s
wife Daisy. Benn Michaels argues that if—within the context of nativist modernism—
the “‘stranger’ who wants to marry into your family” can be identified as racially
undesirable, then the family upon which that stranger focuses his attention can only be
among the purest—and thus most needing to remain unsullied—of American families

47
(8). Hence, The Great Gatsby is, in Benn Michaels’ estimation, a highly reactionary
work—a work whose author means to alert white readers to the threat of
miscegenation posed by racial intruders such as Jay Gatsby. Read in this context, the
novel’s resident racial alarmist, Tom Buchanan, comes across, Benn Michaels
suggests, as the book’s hero. It is, after all, Buchanan’s family that Gatsby’s designs
on Daisy threaten, a circumstance that not only situates Buchanan as the sympathetic
head of an endangered family, but one that consequently underscores the extent to
which the Buchanans exemplify the white racial purity that the likes of Gatsby put at
risk.
Notwithstanding Benn Michaels’ critique, which the occasional appearance of
anti-Semitism and racism in Fitzgerald’s fiction, letters, and essays does to some
extent bear out,
33
Jay Gatsby represents more than just a threat to white racial purity.
Missing from Benn Michaels’ argument is an acknowledgement that instances of
racism in Fitzgerald’s writings coexist with a curiosity about ethnicity in the context of
American nationalism—a curiosity upon which Fitzgerald’s creation of Jay Gatsby at
least in part depended. Benn Michaels considers Gatsby’s status as an outsider crucial
to our understanding of him as a racial pariah. Indeed, Gatsby is an outsider. In fact,
he may very well be a Jew (this despite the just-as-likely Germanic derivation of the
name Gatz, which would place Jay Gatsby safely within the Rooseveltian matrix of
American racial purity). The problem with Benn Michaels’ preoccupation with
Gatsby’s ethnicity is that it overlooks the fact that Fitzgerald reads Gatsby’s alterity
not only in terms of miscegenation or some other (racially) destructive quality. Rather,

48
Gatsby’s emergence as a son of the West also associates him—and his alterity—with a
literary tradition in novels of the American West whereby the outsider makes use of
his exclusion, turning it into something generative.
The cowboy hero of Owen Wister’s The Virginian provides a fine example of
this generative outsider. Although the Virginian has indeed “lived many outlaw years”
(292), Wister makes clear that through it all the Virginian has remained “responsible”
(317), especially as an employee of ranch owner Judge Henry. When it comes to
ensuring the continued prosperity of the Judge’s ranch, Sunk Creek, the Virginian
does not hesitate to demonstrate his loyalty, going so far as to execute his friend Steve,
a fellow cowboy (and outsider) who had been stealing horses from the Judge. While
Judge Henry does ultimately repay this “son of the soil” for his efforts (9), making the
Virginian a business partner and paving the way for him to become “an important
man, with a strong grip on many various enterprises” (323), Wister gives us no reason
to believe the Virginian had these benefits in mind when carrying out his
“responsibilities.” Rather, the Virginian’s dedication to the growth and prosperity of
Sunk Creek is indicative above all of the cowboy hero’s investment in justice (which
exceeds the bonds of friendship), especially as it pertains to the advancement of those
whose interests he serves. Similarly, in Clarence Mulford’s Hopalong Cassidy, the
novel’s narrator explains that while all cowboys are fundamentally “bad-men,” some
of these bad-men are “good” while others are “bad” (1). Good bad-men, the narrator
insists, only kill “by necessity” whereas the “wanton murderer” acts purely in his own
self- interest (1). Unsurprisingly, Hopalong Cassidy exists among the good bad-men.

49
Always ethically motivated, Mulford’s cowboy hero holds in his soul “the germs of
law and order and justice” (1) and thus, fittingly, puts his own life at risk so that Buck
Peters’ Bar-20 ranch may survive and flourish. In both cases, the cowboy hero doles
out justice in the name of those he serves, notwithstanding his outsider status. Like the
Cooperian frontiersman from whom the cowboy hero descends, the Western hero of
the early twentieth century makes “the wilderness safe for a civilization in which he is
unsuited…to participate” (Slotkin 34).
Meanwhile, in Fitzgerald’s novel, this same generative principle applies to
Gatsby’s actions with respect to Daisy, whose marriage to Tom Buchanan Gatsby
perceives as an imperfection in the otherwise ordered world he has created. In
Gatsby’s mind, the difference between a just world and a pernicious one depends
entirely on Daisy’s swift relocation to his West Egg estate. For Gatsby, Tom
Buchanan’s pursuit of Daisy arrested the true romance Gatsby and Daisy shared, a
romance that should have resulted in marriage. From Gatsby’s perspective, Buchanan
descended on Daisy in a moment of weakness while he, Gatsby, served in the war.

During his absence, Daisy began “feeling the pressure of the world outside, and she
wanted to see [Gatsby] … and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she
was doing the right thing” in waiting for him (Gatsby 100). Daisy “wanted her life
shaped … by some force,” Nick Carraway tells us, and “That force took shape … with
the arrival of Tom Buchanan” (101). Gatsby, on the other hand, views that force as
highly injurious. What is more, he sees himself as a righter of wrongs, the one man
destined to rescue Daisy from Buchanan’s influence. While some might see Tom as

50
the figure more logically situated as a defender of justice when he denounces Gatsby’s
pursuit of his wife, it is in fact Gatsby whom Fitzgerald presents as seeking to save
Daisy from an unjust marriage.

To the extent that Gatsby believes Daisy never actually
loved Tom but rather yielded to his advances out of fear, Gatsby is able to convince
himself of the fundamentally criminal nature of the Buchanans’ marital union. To
remove Daisy from Tom’s clutches would be to attune a profound inequity, and thus
to remain faithful to “law and order and justice.”
One way to read Gatsby’s appearance in West Egg, then, is as a force of
justice, even if that justice is only his own. Like the Western heroes of earlier
twentieth-century American novels, Gatsby is a “man without a past” who operates
according to a self-fashioned moral code (99), a mysterious stranger who, in this
instance, finds his vision of justice in conflict with the barriers of class privilege. In
this context, Fitzgerald does indeed read Gatsby as an “other,” but more in terms of
class than of race. Fitzgerald goes out of his way to play up Gatsby’s various
oppositions within his Eastern milieu. For instance, Fitzgerald portrays Gatsby as a
rarely-seen phantom in a world of material privilege in which being seen is
everything. Moreover, much is made of Gatsby’s impoverished mid-Western
background and the extent to which it puts him at odds not only with indigenous
Easterners, but with the likes of Buchanan and Carraway, men whose ascendancy
from “prominent, well-to-do people of the Middle Western city” (Gatsby 2) grants
them de facto Eastern acceptance. Given these facts, Benn Michaels’ preoccupation
with Fitzgerald’s racist fears about miscegenation seem to miss the point, for in The

51
Great Gatsby, white racial purity is not at stake so much as is the purity of the leisure
class itself, a purity particularly vulnerable to the Westerner’s nationalistic
significance, which itself depends, in large measure, on his (or her) status as an
outsider of ambiguous origin. This is all to say that Fitzgerald foregrounds the
outsiderness of Gatsby (and not the racial abjection, to the extent that it exists) because
Gatsby represents, at least in part, a myth of the American West that reveres the
outsider as a bringer of equity.
This reverence underscores the popularity of fictional frontiersmen from
Leatherstocking to Lassiter, figures who, like the frontier itself as described by Turner,
possess “freshness, and confidence, and scorn of the older society” as well as
“impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons” (38).
Turner’s description could just as easily refer to Gatsby in terms of his descent on the
elites of East Egg, and indeed Fitzgerald makes use of this correspondence in his
novel. The emphasis Fitzgerald places on Gatsby’s association with the West allows
the author to read Gatsby’s (possible) racial difference in a more nuanced way,
making racial identity more complicated in The Great Gatsby than it might be
elsewhere in Fitzgerald’s oeuvre. Despite Benn Michaels’ arguments to the contrary, it
is not the case in The Great Gatsby that Jew equals bad and Anglo equals good.
Rather, within the context of Fitzgerald’s novel, the ambiguities of the mysterious
(and thus all the more compelling) outsider are indeed those common to the Western
hero. Not only is an outsider simply that, an outsider, in this isolated realm of privilege
and leisure, but it is also the case that outsiders such as Gatsby inspire a certain

52
incredulity among the defenders of prescribed social norms in Fitzgerald’s novel that
recalls the disconnect between townsfolk and cowboy hero found in many early
twentieth-century Western novels.
34

It is this disconnect that Fitzgerald exploits in plotting Gatsby’s intervention
into the Eastern milieu from which he hopes to rescue Daisy. Echoing his mentor Dan
Cody, Gatsby “debauches” the illusion of Eastern serenity, “doing violence” to the
social hierarchy by drawing attention away from the elites of East Egg and
undermining the social superiority their ancestry has afforded them. Gatsby
“debauches” at least in part, then, by “seducing” the Eastern socialites who attend his
parties: Gatsby’s arrival in West Egg is a “penetration” of the elite class whose
violence presages a sexual reconnection with Daisy. Through these means, Gatsby
turns the imperial ethos of manifest destiny on its head, using the mindset of the
American pioneer to carve a piece of the East for himself. Fitzgerald demonstrates the
extent to which Gatsby’s association with the mythic frontier gives him access to a
national identity that Buchanan cannot obtain, despite the social power he derives
from his ancestors. If Buchanan has a clear ancestral advantage that has ensured his
passage into the leisure class, Gatsby comes from nothing—he is, as Buchanan at one
point calls him, a “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” (86). But rather than be to his
detriment, Gatsby’s mysterious Western background—his emergence out of the West
and, his tutelage under “pioneer debauchee” Dan Cody—affords him an authenticity
in a nationalistic sense that Buchanan lacks.

53
Despite Buchanan’s mid-Western roots, his notable paternity ensures his
acceptance among the Eastern elite—indeed, it makes his particular geographic origin
irrelevant. Contrastingly, Gatsby possesses an American authenticity inaccessible to
Buchanan because, being a mythic figure, Gatsby, unlike Buchanan, cannot account
for his particular origins, for doing so would reveal his true identity as Jimmy Gatz.
Rather, Gatsby represents himself as having emerged out of the West itself—like
Wister’s Virginian, Gatsby is a “son of the soil.” So, while Buchanan is merely from
the West, born to well-heeled parents for whom the comforts of the leisure class were
not unfamiliar, Gatsby is of the West. Born first of lowly farmers, and then, in an act
of self-creation, launching himself from the shores of Lake Superior onto Dan Cody’s
yacht and into the world beyond, Gatsby, in both material terms (as a body formed in
the West) and as an idea (like the frontier itself, Gatsby strives to escape from what
Turner calls “the bondage of the past” [38]), both embodies and expands the myth of
the West. While Gatsby’s rival, Tom Buchanan, faces the ironic limitations of his
privilege, Gatsby’s self-creation is a quintessentially Western phenomenon.
underscored by Gatsby’s emergence from the Western scene, his embodiment of its
contradictions with respect to purity and racial ambiguity, and his acquisition of
property in West Egg—which he procures and cultivates for Daisy in an attempt to
civilize a “wilderness” of less fashionable lodgings—a gesture of Turnerian
frontierism unequalled by Tom Buchanan, who owes his substantial landholdings to
his aristocratic paternity and thus to his class privilege.

54
Notwithstanding the debate over American authenticity contained in the pages
of The Great Gatsby, the question remains: does Fitzgerald’s meditation on the
Western hero’s various contradictions evince the figure’s racial transcendence? In the
final assessment, the answer must be no, if for no other reason than the fact that the
mysterious Westerner’s ambiguity remains a threat to the white Eastern elite, a threat
based on difference. But Fitzgerald’s project with respect to otherness in The Great
Gatsby has significantly less to do with drawing absolutes about the cowboy hero’s
various troubling ambiguities than with pointing out that these ambiguities exist in the
first place. The Westerner remains an enticing subject for Fitzgerald in part because
his inherent internal oppositions not only allow, but indeed insist upon, the inclusion
of a space for ambiguity in discussions of racial exclusion in American literature, even
if it isn’t a very big space. As a narrative of the West, The Great Gatsby is not about
white or non-white but rather about ambiguity—for in the myth of the cowboy,
ambiguity is privileged. Fitzgerald resolves his interest in “opposites” by focusing on
this ambiguity—the space where both the authentic and marginalized are present at the
same time. Although Fitzgerald’s relationship with race may have been vexed, The
Great Gatsby nevertheless suggests that the Westerner of unremarkable ancestry has
access to a national mythology of the self-made pioneer that eclipses the aristocratic
paternity that legitimates the likes of Tom Buchanan, thus making Gatsby’s Western
narrative the mythic object of desire rather than its subject. While the material wealth
of Gatsby translates into a mythology incarnate, the opulent display of Tom

55
Buchanan—which is inherited, not self-made—can never transcend its own material
circumstance and enter into the realm of myth.
Enchanted Objects
But what do the authenticating powers of Western derivation do for Gatsby
with respect to the object of his desire, Daisy Buchanan? Why invoke the myth of the
West around Gatsby’s romantic obsession? The answer seems to lie in what one pair
of critics have recently dubbed “horizons of authenticity,” the dreams of American
progress that are inseparable from the West precisely because they, like the West
itself, are “always somewhere else in space or time” (Handley & Lewis 6). Both as an
object of nostalgic longing and as an ideal imposed upon visions of things yet to come,
the West remains difficult to pin down, its elusiveness begetting its stance “as the very
dislocation at the heart of the American dream of progress in the wilderness” (Handley
& Lewis 7). In underscoring Gatsby’s ties not only to the geographic West but to the
Western genre, Fitzgerald opens up a narrative context in which he explores both the
illusory nature of the West as an idyllic realm and the Western genre’s preoccupation
with the what Jane Tompkins calls the function of the West in Westerns, which is to
act as “a symbol of freedom, and of the opportunity for conquest” (4). Seemingly in
anticipation of Tompkins’ designation of the symbolic West, Fitzgerald uses his novel
to ponder the possible vectors of the West (as a symbol of freedom and conquest)
within the national imagination thirty-two years after Turner declared the American
frontier closed. Taken out of the nostalgic context of the formula Western exemplified
in the works of Zane Grey and others (works that look back longingly on a mythical

56
age in which freedom and conquest were possible) Fitzgerald aligns the West with
Gatsby’s dream of self-transformation—a dream of events that have yet to transpire.
And in turn, Gatsby locates his dream—that of the lowly farm boy who becomes, like
Wister’s Virginian, “an important man”—in his desire for Daisy Buchanan.
Whereas, in the context of the Western novel, the West offers an “escape from
the conditions of life in modern industrial society” (Tompkins 4), Fitzgerald figures
the West as a dream space into which flee those of Gatsby’s ilk, those for whom life
on a poor mid-Western farm is no escape at all. At the end of his novel, Fitzgerald puts
his protagonist’s dream in perspective by way of Nick Carraway’s narration. While
considering the “inessential houses” of West Egg, Carraway’s thoughts drift to the
island as it must have appeared to Dutch sailors seeing it for the first time. The “trees
that had made way for Gatsby’s house,” insists Carraway, “had once pandered in the
whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams” (121). Carraway speaks of a
“transitory moment” in which “man must have held his breath” while contemplating
“for the last time in history … something commensurate to his capacity for wonder”
(121). Carraway then adds,
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s
wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He
had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so
close that he could hardly fail to grasp it … Gatsby believed in … the orgiastic
future that year after year recedes before us. It eludes us, but that’s no matter
[for] … we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the
past. (121)

In describing “horizons of authenticity,” Handley and Lewis cite this moment in
Fitzgerald’s text as indicative of the West in literature—a dream objective that

57
authenticates the dreamer even while its elusiveness undermines him (or her). But in
treating the West in this way, Fitzgerald’s primary concern seems to be with the fact
that this Western dream—of freedom, and of conquest—persists within the national
imagination well beyond the frontier’s material existence. Indeed, by identifying
Gatsby’s tale as “a story of the West” (118), Fitzgerald wants to transplant the
symbolic West, excising it from the boundaries of genre so as to examine it in the
context of the present post-war (and post-frontier) moment. While we no longer have a
material frontier, Fitzgerald seems to suggest, we certainly have an imaginative one
wherein the dream of freedom and conquest “beat on, [like] boats against the current”
(121). The West, as articulated by Fitzgerald, is the quest for that which eludes us. For
Fitzgerald, this quest is not just Gatsby’s story—it is the story of America.
Thus, the freedom Gatsby seeks is the self-transformation—that is, the
“translation of the self into something purer and more authentic” (Tompkins 4)—that
will accompany his conquest of his beloved, Daisy. Generally in Westerns, as Jane
Tompkins has pointed out, this translation would occur by way of the Western hero’s
death and subsequent absorption into the monolithic material landscape of which his
rough demeanor is an imitation.
35
But in Fitzgerald’s novel, this conquest is
fundamentally linked to the opposition between Gatsby’s world and Daisy’s social
context, which Gatsby must not only infiltrate but also overcome—or conquer—in
order to finally win her. Whereas, in the context of the Western novel, the hero’s
“[f]ear of losing his identity drives … [him] west” (Tompkins 47), in the case of
Gatsby, the solidification of his identity depends upon leaving the geographic West

58
behind, focusing instead on the horizon of authenticity (the West as idea) embodied in
his dream of Daisy Buchanan. It is this dream for which Gatsby has set the stage in
West Egg in the form of his extraordinary mansion, flashy cars, and an assortment of
other material goods. For indeed it is the world of material acquisition into which this
Westerner has stepped—and in such a world, which is devoid of nature, it is the
synthetic, not the natural “thing” that aids in his sought after transcendence. While a
domestic life with Daisy may be the distant vision after which Gatsby longs, it is the
material world, which the privileged Daisy values above all and with which Gatsby,
like his heroic brethren of the Western, must ultimately join—by way of death—in the
“condition of objecthood” (Tompkins 72).
Though typically read as tragic, Gatsby’s death in fact echoes that of the
Western hero, whose demise in Westerns typically occurs “under the aspect of nature,
of beauty, and of some kind of spiritual transcendence” (Tompkins 24). Tompkins
argues that this transcendence is indicative of the cowboy hero having gone “as far
west as [usually he] … can go,” and hence her phrase “west of everything” describes
the cowboy hero’s ultimate—and most dignified, and thus most sought after—
destination (24). Like Gatsby’s death, the death of the cowboy hero is “always
sudden” (Tompkins 39), is usually brought about by murder, and brings the cowboy
hero into a state of material completion, a state in which he no longer imitates but
merges with the physical landscape—so that the world that in life the Westerner
embodies, in death takes him into its body in the ultimate gesture of authentication.
Therefore, as Tompkins has shown, it is not enough in the Western for the

59
“monolithic, silent, [and] mysterious” hero to emulate his physical environment (the
desert); rather, he must become a “solid object” so that he might be relieved of
“consciousness itself,” or more precisely of “consciousness of self” (57). For Gatsby,
freedom from consciousness of self would mean the completion of the self-
transformation he seeks. Such a transformative death would relieve Gatsby of
consciousness of his former self, Jimmy Gatz. In death, then, Gatsby erases that which
in life stands between him and Daisy. Just as the cowboy hero sees the landscape of
the West as transformative—in that it enables, upon the land’s “final invitation,” what
Tompkins calls the Western hero’s “complete materialization” (72)—Gatsby views the
physical realm extending out toward his horizon of authenticity as being similarly
transformative. But for Gatsby, this physical realm consists of precisely the objects—
the most ornate houses, the most expensive imported clothes, etc.—that resonate with
the wealthy Daisy Buchanan’s sensibility as a conspicuous consumer, and thus, in
acquiring such objects, Gatsby draws himself closer to his objective by projecting onto
his possessions the transformed version of himself that he envisions and after which he
strives. If, in life, the cowboy hero imitates the transformative substance of the
material landscape, Gatsby imitates the ephemeral material commodities crucial to his
own transcendent journey “west.”
In other words, Gatsby’s acquisition of various commodities brings him closer
to his horizon of authenticity—life with Daisy, his dream of the West—for it is
material goods to which Daisy responds. Over the course of Fitzgerald’s novel, we see
Gatsby gradually building up not only the material correspondence between himself

60
and his glorious possessions, but also his own material presence. Gatsby goes from
being a phantom, immaterial presence known primarily through his vast assortment of
elaborate possessions to being a material body (a corpse) that serves to crystallize the
myth of Gatsby just as it destroys the material history—and self consciousness—of
Jimmy Gatz. The conversations that Nick Carraway reports took place at Gatsby’s
many parties suggest that Gatsby had already begun cultivating a mythology around
his possessions, knowingly developing an anonymity that would position the focus
away from who he was and direct it instead on what he had. For most of Gatsby’s
party guests, Gatsby didn’t so much own his lavish house, car, and furnishings; rather,
he was those things. Even Nick Carraway doesn’t realize he’s been chatting with his
infamous host the first time he goes to Gatsby’s house until some time later. Indeed,
Gatsby’s reputation derives from his belongings, not from his presence. For instance,
during the first of Gatsby’s parties witnessed by Nick, a conversation between Jordan
Baker and another guest, Lucille, held at a table “with two girls in yellow and three
men” (28) reveals that much of Gatsby’s mythical status grows by way of material
objects. After reporting that she had ripped her gown at one of Gatsby’s parties, she
concludes by saying, “inside of a week [she] got a package from Croirier’s with a new
evening gown in it” (28). Lucille’s tale draws commentary from the other girl at the
table who declares, “Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once,” to which
Lucille responds, “I don’t think much of that … it’s more that he was a German spy
during the war” (29). “Oh no … it couldn’t be that” responds the other girl at the table,
“he was in the American army during the war” (29). Gatsby’s fixation with material

61
objects and his tendency toward excess expands the extent to which his party guests
spin colorful narratives out of the collisions between Gatsby’s physical absence and
the opulence of his possessions.
According to Nick, the many comings and goings that tended to punctuate the
various phases of Gatsby’s entertainments on any given summer day show the extent
to which Gatsby had built a veritable industry around catering to the desires of
unknown hundreds. Nick explains that during the day he would watch Gatsby’s guests
“diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach”
while at night he heard “men and girls” pass through Gatsby’s “blue gardens” like
“moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars” (25). While Gatsby’s
“Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in
the morning and long past midnight,” his “station wagon scrambled like a brisk yellow
bug to meet all trains” (Gatsby 26). Nick also reports that huge quantities of food and
drink were shipped to Gatsby’s home every Friday, the remains of which would then
be shipped out the following Monday. Guests at Gatsby’s parties enjoyed “buffet
tables, garnished with glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams … and turkey’s
bewitched to a dark gold,” and drank from a bar equipped with “gins and liquors” and
any number of significantly aged “cordials” (26).
While examples such as these demonstrate how Gatsby’s material
possessions—and his frequent dispensation of high-end foods and gifts—forms the
image among Eastern socialites upon which he builds his reputation, the full extent to
which Gatsby means for his effects to embody him (rather than the other way around)

62
becomes clearest during Daisy’s first visit to his West Egg home. Having persuaded
Nick to assist him in planning a rendezvous with Daisy, Nick arranges for Daisy to
visit him one afternoon for tea at his “eyesore” (4) of a house located conveniently
next to Gatsby’s. Coming from the splendor of East Egg, Daisy has a reaction to
Nick’s accommodations that is not surprising: “Is this absolutely where you live,
dearest one?” (56, emphasis added) she asks, with an “exhilarating ripple” in her voice
that betrays her shock—and perhaps her disgust. Later Gatsby, having contrived to
appear shortly after her arrival, feigns surprise at the sight of his former love. After an
awkward reintroduction between the two, Gatsby convinces Daisy (and Nick) to tour
his home. While waiting along with Nick for Daisy to exit Nick’s house, Gatsby
rehearses commentary designed for Daisy’s benefit, asking “My house looks well,
doesn’t it?” (59, emphasis added). The fact that Gatsby speaks of his house in the form
of a question is important given his reaction to Daisy as she makes her way around his
assortment of belongings. Gatsby, according to Nick, revalues “everything in his
house according to the measure of response it [draws] … from [Daisy’s] … much-
loved eyes” (60). Later, these eyes cry “stormily” during the famous sequence in
which Gatsby presents Daisy with his selection of fine imported silk, linen, and flannel
shirts. Her head buried in the pile of shirts, the weeping Daisy exclaims, “They’re such
beautiful shirts,” adding that “It makes [her] … sad because [she’s] … never seen
such—such beautiful shirts before” (61).
Daisy’s extraordinary show of emotion in this sequence is notable in that she
appears so much more intimate with Gatsby’s shirts than she does with Gatsby

63
himself. Sobbing through the “thick folds” of Gatsby’s clothing (61), Daisy seems
more attached to these objects than she does to the man to whom they belong. It is as
if Daisy’s emotional response reflects her frustration at the chasm between the
extraordinariness of Gatsby’s material acquisitions—which she can understand as
having value—and the ordinariness of Gatsby himself. Though he may own beautiful
things, Daisy does not yet understand this man Gatsby as a thing of beauty. If only,
Daisy’s behavior suggests, Gatsby could become those things. Daisy loves the objects
that belong to this man, and she loves that this man can acquire such objects, but
unless the two (objects and man) are made one, Gatsby (the promise of mythic
authenticity) is no match for Buchanan (whose aristocratic paternity—which exists in
the here and now—outstrips Gatsby’s mere promise, which looks to the horizon, and
thus the future, for authenticity). As they are superior to the human body of a mid-
Westerner of dubious birth, Gatsby’s possessions can be consumed, and, more
importantly, their worth can be measured socially as well as financially. Rather than
being an expression of regret about not marrying Gatsby five years prior, then, Daisy’s
tears—and the expression of her desire for Gatsby—read more like exasperation about
the as-of-yet incomplete materialization of Gatsby’s mythic presence, which she does
desire, but which she cannot possess without its transformation into a form that
registers some value in her East Egg context. Through ostentatious consumerist
display, Gatsby makes his claim on the powerful new social standing that necessarily
follows his most treasured of modern American achievements—becoming rich. But it
is Gatsby’s death that solidifies him as a mythic figure. Just as the cowboy hero joins

64
with the material landscape of the West—the landscape that he values and emulates—
Gatsby simulates this complete materialization (thereby completing his journey “west
of everything”) by joining with the material of the Eastern elite—namely, the
commodity that is used and tossed aside.
Epilogue
Just as the early twentieth-century cowboy hero’s authenticity and purpose is
grounded in his fundamental relationship to his material environment, so does Jay
Gatsby mimic and ultimately merge with the landscape of his inexorable journey
“West.” In Fitzgerald’s hands, the cowboy narrative of the early twentieth century
confronts the ambiguities and oppositions inherent to the Westerner, who here figures
as an outsider—an “other”—responsible for cultivating a mystique of the West that
eclipses the otherness that otherwise would be anathema. Not only do Gatsby’s ties to
the geographic West (as the son of poor mid-Western farmers) allow him a different
relationship to his status as an outsider amid among Eastern aristocrats, the mystery
Gatsby cultivates in this context about himself and his origins serves as a mythological
asset. Like the enigmatic outlaw figure about whom very little is known, Gatsby is a
cultivator of myth—a myth not only embraced by the public, but spread and
embellished by them. That is to say, Fitzgerald’s Western hero inspires others’
curiosity just as he provokes their desire. By emphasizing the Western in the context
of class privilege, exclusivity, and conspicuous consumption, Fitzgerald puts
competing economic, racial, and cultural desires of the post-war American scene in
dialogue around the familiar nationalistic ambitions of freedom and conquest.

65
Whereas this accent on the West in a post-frontier context grounded Fitzgerald’s
career at the young age of twenty-nine, his fellow American author, Willa Cather,
came to it later, publishing her second novel, O Pioneers! (1913), at the age of forty.
In the same year Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, the then fifty-two year old
Cather brought out The Professor’s House, a novel which, as I will show in the
following chapter, shares with The Great Gatsby an interest in examining not only the
ambiguities of the cowboy hero, but the substance of frontier dreams.

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Chapter 2 Endnotes

19
According to the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, this pair of “enormous eggs,
identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into … the great wet
barnyard of Long Island Sound” (3).

20
Much has been made of the fact that, despite Jimmy Gatz’s notes being dated
September 12, 1906, Mulford’s novel was not published until 1910. While this
discrepancy clearly indicates an oversight on Fitzgerald’s part, it is possible that,
rather than misdating the book, Fitzgerald simply confused Hopalong Cassidy with
Mulford’s Bar-20, which Mulford did publish in 1906 and which constituted the first
book in Mulford’s Hopalong Cassidy series.

21
The schedule that Jimmy Gatz wrote in the back of his copy of Hopalong
Cassidy consists of the following:

Rise from bed………………………………………..6.00 A.M.
Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling…………………6.15-6.30 “
Study electricity, etc…………………………………7.15-8.15 “
Work…………………………………………………8.30-4.30 P.M.
Baseball and sports…………………………………..4.30-5.00 “
Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it………..5.00-6.00 “
Study needed inventions……………………………..7.00-9.00 “

GENERAL RESOLVES

No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable]
No smokeing [sic] or chewing
Bath every other day
Read one improving book or magazine per week
Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week
Be better to parents

22
See pp. 36-42 in Slotkin for more on Roosevelt’s mythologizing of and
identification with cowboys.

23
In Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995), Walter Benn
Michaels essentially argues that Gatsby is punished, not only for accumulating wealth,
but for doing so as an immigrant interested in penetrating—and thus assimilating
into—an existing aristocratic culture of wealth—that is, the “old wealth” of Eastern
aristocrats. Furthermore, Benn Michaels suggests that the book represents Gatsby’s
fall not as a tragedy but as a reinforcement of the Nativist ethos informing Tom
Buchanan’s rant vis-à-vis “this man Goddard” (Gatsby 9).

67

24
Indeed, this puzzlement has a lengthy history, as both Fitzgerald’s editor,
Maxwell Perkins, and, later, one of his readers—the celebrated author Edith
Wharton—commented on their inability to get a fix on Gatsby. In a dedication of
Gatsby to a friend, Fitzgerald himself suggests that the book’s great weakness comes
that he never fully grasped the character’s full complexity.

25
Cody’s yacht appears to have been named after Tuolumne County, a famous
mining locale in the Central Sierra Nevada region of California.

26
Gatsby’s wardrobe change aboard the Tuolumne also recalls a brief passage
from chapter thirty-five of Wister’s The Virginian. Upon arriving in the Wyoming
town where he plans to wed his beloved Molly, the Virginian swaps out his cowboy
duds for “civilized apparel proper for a genuine frontiersman when he comes to town”
(296). “It is only the somewhat green and unseasoned cow-puncher,” says the novel’s
narrator, who fails to make “a sober toilet for the streets,” seeing that nothing “but his
face and bearing [remain] out of the common when he [is] in a town” (296). Here,
Wister underscores the Virginian’s social savvy, pointing out that he not only
understands but also embraces such markers of civic prudence.
For the Virginian, donning “civilized apparel” is as much a part of being a
“genuine frontiersman” as is wearing a gun. Hence, the ease with which the Virginian
shifts form town clothes to country clothes makes Gatsby’s transition in apparel from
that of farm boy to that of a junior aristocrat under Cody seem more, not less evocative
of the West. Gatsby, like the Virginian, can move with ease between the two extremes,
maintaining a balance that befits the “genuine frontiersman.”

27
The name “Trimalchio” comes from the Satyricon by Petronius (c. AD 27-66).
Trimalchio is a freed slave who becomes wealthy and, at one point in the Satyricon,
hosts a lavish party. The title, “Trimalchio in West Egg,” was among the many titles
that Fitzgerald considered using before settling on “The Great Gatsby.” Although
Fitzgerald’s October 27
th
, 1924 letter to Maxwell Perkins refers to the novel as “The
Great Gatsby” (offering the title “Gold-hatted Gatsby” as a possible alternative), in a
separate letter written to Perkins c. November 7
th
, 1924 Fitzgerald expresses
enthusiasm about calling the novel “Trimalchio in West Egg.” (Here again, however,
Fitzgerald offers a list of four possible alternatives.) Although Perkins’ colleagues at
Scribner’s balked at calling the novel “Trimalchio in West Egg,” an abbreviated
version, “Trimalchio”—a variation Fitzgerald himself suggested in the November 7
letter—did appear on the galley proofs. While he subsequently suggested half a dozen
other alternatives (including “On the Road to West Egg,” and “Under Red, White, and
Blue”) Fitzgerald was ultimately forced to name the book “The Great Gatsby,”
Scribner’s having sold the novel in advance to the trades using that title (West xvii).

28
Having used the word “whose” in a sentence poking fun at fellow author
Thomas Boyd, Fitzgerald circles the word and begins his next paragraph by asking

68

Perkins, “See that word?” “The ambition of my life,” Fitzgerald continues, “is to make
that use if it correct. The temptation to use it as a neuter is one of the vile fevers in my
still insecure prose” (Life in Letters 92).

29
This admission on the part of Fitzgerald comes from an inscription to Charles
T. Scott in a first edition copy of The Great Gatsby. Scott’s copy of Fitzgerald’s novel
now resides in Special Collections at Michigan State University. A facsimile of the
inscription appears amid the front matter of James L. W. West III’s edition of
Trimalchio: An Early Version of The Great Gatsby.

30
James’s account of his childhood has since been disproved He was not born, as
he had claimed, in Montana or orphaned at the age of four. Rather, he was born to
middle-class, French-speaking natives of Quebec. James’ real name was Joseph-
Ernest-Nephtali Dufault. Intriguingly, James’ actual story—though unknown to either
Perkins or Fitzgerald—somewhat resembles that of Jimmy Gatz. Like Gatz, Dufault
changed his name in order to appear more “authentically” American and cowboy-like.

31
Benn Michaels contends that “nativist modernism” strove to “racialize” the
American, thereby transforming “American identity from the sort of thing that could
be acquired (through naturalization) into the sort of thing that had to be inherited
(form one’s parents)” (8).

32
Benn Michaels argues that the racist views espoused by Tom Buchanan when
he (parroting Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color) claims that “Civilization’s
going to pieces” as a result of “these other races” having “control of things” (9),
anchor the novel’s nativism in the notion that inferior races are infiltrating American
society and exceeding so-called “native” whites when it comes to science, art, and “all
the things that go to make civilization” (9).

33
Fitzgerald does not hesitate, for instance, to depict Gatsby’s criminal associate
Meyer Wolfsheim in racist terms that, in fact, earned Fitzgerald praise from other anti-
Semitic authors such as Edith Wharton who congratulated Fitzgerald on creating the
“perfect Jew” (qtd. in Fitzgerald, Crack-Up 309).

34
In The Virginian, for instance, Wister’s narrator repeatedly refers to the story’s
hero as something other than human, comparing the movements of the Virginian’s
body to the “undulations of a tiger” (3) and later referring to him as a “wild man” in
need of “taming” (145). In a similar example, the heroine of Zane Grey’s Riders of the
Purple Sage, Jane Withersteen, thinks nothing of referring to Lassiter, the novel’s
cowboy hero, as “half horse” (70). Notwithstanding the Rooseveltian conception of
the cowboy as a figure of high breeding, in the works of Wister, Grey, and others he
not only remains distinct from those of Anglo descent, but more often than not he
possesses the attributes of a being more animal than human. In the context of

69

Fitzgerald’s novel, such gestures of exclusion seem at once familiar and different, for
while Gatsby’s outsiderness clearly limits his access to the elite social circle of East
Egg, not even his arch-rival Tom Buchanan goes so far as to insist upon Gatsby’s
biological link to animals. Given the correspondence, however, between the
exclusionism experienced by Gatsby and that commonly experienced by his analogue,
the cowboy hero, in narratives of the “Wild West,” it seems likely that what Benn
Michaels takes to be racism plain and simple in Fitzgerald’s novel is in fact at least in
part demonstrative of Fitzgerald’s interest in the social ambiguity shared among both
heroes of the West and those individuals who are marginalized more generally.

35
For more on the cowboy hero’s death and the transcendent power of the
physical landscape see chapters one and three of Tompkins’ West of Everything: The
Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press) 1992.

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Chapter 3

Cowboys and Curios:
Reappraising Willa Cather’s Frontier Nostalgia in The Professor’s House

It’s the feeling that I’ve put a great deal behind me, where I can’t go back to it
again—and I don’t really wish to go back.
—Godfrey St. Peter

Early exponents of Willa Cather’s written work such as H.L. Mencken, despite
their admiration for her, nevertheless contended that there was “nothing new” in much
of her fiction (Schroeter 7). Cather’s formalist prose and linear story-telling seemed,
for Mencken and others, largely conventional and in keeping with the description-
laden tales of familiar nineteenth-century realists like Sarah Orne Jewett and William
Dean Howells. More severe attacks, such as that famously leveled by Ernest
Hemingway, accused Cather of plagiarizing parts of her Pulitzer Prize winning novel
One of Ours (1922).
36
Along similar lines, critics Granville Hicks and Lionel Trilling
complained that Cather’s mythic tales of the frontier did little more than romanticize
the pioneer experience and thus failed to exceed the regionalist aspirations of the local
colorist.
37
These writers read Cather’s frontier mythos as being far too conservative,
since for them it failed to display the artistic innovations associated with high
modernism’s frequent employment of mythic themes and structures. They agree with
the likes of Eliot and Pound that literary modernism should respond to the
“conventional, popular, and [the] nostalgic” by being “difficult, up-to-date, and
international” (North 173).

71
Such negative evaluations tend to overlook the close interweaving, in much of
Cather’s fiction, of frontier mythology with questions of national identity—questions
that dominated American literary thought during the period of Cather’s most sustained
artistic production, the nineteen twenties.
38
Rather than calling upon a “nostalgia …
[in which] … everything [modern] … seemed drab and more than a little cheap”
(Kazin 251), Cather’s mythically resonant fiction in fact enabled her to negotiate the
lingering spirit of nineteenth-century American frontierism in light of the increasingly
complex social, racial, and sexual dimensions of early twentieth-century nationalistic
debate. Cather’s engagement with this debate (and with postwar cultural uneasiness in
the United States in general) undoubtedly motivated her much maligned backward
glances—examinations of the American past that, rather than betraying some
artistically constricting nostalgia, in fact represent the cornerstone of her unique brand
of modernism.
39
Responding to criticisms that her work was passé, conventional, and
“lady-like,” Willa Cather combined an unusual mixture of mythography, classicalism,
and modern social consciousness into an aesthetic synthesis that not only forged
beyond mere frontier nostalgia, but that simultaneously reflected and critiqued
nationalist mythmaking within the context of post-World War I American literature.
Although Willa Cather’s interest in pioneers, cowboys, and the western
frontier of the United States in general is such that, as Guy Reynolds argues, “we can
locate a thematic continuity linking Cather to her [American literary] forebears,” her
fiction nevertheless “marks a significant break from the nineteenth-century model” in
its representation of history (20). Regarding most nineteenth-century American fiction,

72
Reynolds continues, the realm of social complexity was distilled into a series of
mythic narratives transforming the “exploitation of nature and subjugation of Indians
or blacks” (18) into tales of provincial innocence. The result of this phenomenon was
the disconnection between the history of ideas and the sociological circumstances
from which they developed—the mythic past had, in essence, superseded historical
memory. Because Cather’s mythmaking is among the more salient aspects of her
artifice, Reynolds contends that “historical actuality erupts into [Cather’s] text” every
time one such mythological “oddity” appears in her work (20). In other words,
whenever Cather’s fiction “becomes intricate and difficult to interpret”—that is to say,
whenever it falls into what Reynolds calls the “mythic register”—it creates a rift in the
text from which well up the more profound ideological implications of Cather’s
mythicizing (20).
But is Cather’s mythicizing always so “intricate” that it resists interpretation?
The preponderance of mythical inflection in Cather’s richly symbolic texts indicates
otherwise, and it seems much more likely, in fact, that Cather’s “mythic register”
invites rather than repels interpretative work. What is more, much of her literary
output abides by the very archetypal structures Reynolds associates with nineteenth-
century American literary traditions in order, ultimately, to comment upon the way
such traditions require re-articulation in the context of postwar American literature
precisely because they persist as recognizable, culturally-reflective aesthetic forms.
Cather did not trade on tradition so much as she commandeered it, and consequently
much of her fiction evokes the familiar mode of Jeffersonian pastoralism (complete

73
with reverence for those transformers of the American landscape who, in their “pursuit
of happiness,” likewise transformed American thought) so that she might in turn
convey more memorably her keen awareness of the expanding nation’s debt to its
western inhabitants, regardless of ethnicity, sex, or pedigree.
40
It is this awareness, I
argue, that not only enabled Cather to enlarge the canon of American pastoral
literature to include “a realm of experience . . . beyond the purview of [late nineteenth-
early twentieth-century] fiction,” but also to advance a complex reading of American
frontier mythology that calls into question the very nostalgia of which her critics so
often accuse her and that generates what is truly modernist about her work (Reynolds
10).
In this chapter I will demonstrate how Cather’s often criticized backward
glances do not reflect her nostalgic longing for the pioneer era so much as they reveal
the intermixture of discursive strands (ranging from the frontier hypothesis of
Frederick Jackson Turner that I have already mentioned in my discussion of
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to the anthropological notions of ritual and renewal
associated with James Frazier and Jesse Weston) that form the theoretical backbone of
one of her most important novels, The Professor’s House (1925). By viewing Cather’s
novel in this light, one sees how her work often ritualistically discards the past while it
simultaneously assesses the potential inherent in the present. If the work of
Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau reflected the Jeffersonian notion of the sovereignty
of the present, then so, in turn, did Cather’s writing often seek to free the present from
the weight of the past.
41
Through her occasionally ironic appropriation of literary

74
convention, and in particular her wryly Adamic representation of the American
Westerner, Cather’s novel The Professor’s House explores the formative gulf between
America’s “golden age” and its new frontier. Although some of Cather’s critics have
concluded that her tendency toward mythic discourse betrays a retrograde aesthetic
formalism, the mythic topoi that figure in so much of her work in fact possess qualities
popular among other writers of her day. As one sympathetic critic has recently shown,
Willa Cather’s literary techniques “arise from a sensibility that is surprisingly
‘modern’ for [an author] … who has been so closely identified with the nostalgic
pioneer West of the past” (Middleton 10).
42
Indeed, one needn’t look too far to
discover the extent to which Cather’s work in fact resembles that of writers such as
Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald in that she, too, crafted narratives around
familiar archetypal figures whom she then rendered less familiar by way of some new
behavioral or contextual wrinkle.
43

Perhaps most notable among Cather’s hybridized heroes is the rugged cowboy
turned thoughtful scholar, Tom Outland, whose downbeat narrative and tragic death
during the First World War set the tone of The Professor’s House. Cather uses the
specter of Tom Outland (most effectively by way of the novel’s centerpiece “Tom
Outland’s Story”) to explore the social and economic interconnections that necessarily
existed between the American East and West during the frontier period. Tom
Outland’s transformation from a simple railroad hand to an intellectually curious
reader of Latin texts; from a cowboy to a novice archeologist; and from a late-
blooming undergraduate to an ingenious scientist of pneumatics, reflects the transitory

75
mood of the United States during the nineteen twenties—rural frontierism having all
but totally given way to the pulsating machinery of industrial expansion. Therefore,
rather than undercutting her depiction of early twentieth-century Westerners with a
needlessly debilitating nostalgia for a fanciful depiction of pioneer living, Cather’s
narrative—and in particular her treatment of Tom Outland—promotes a nationalist
discourse of regeneration that challenges criticisms leveled against her backward-
looking literary and cultural concerns. Tom Outland’s unusual intellectual trajectory
not only yields insights into Cather’s uniquely dualistic conception of the frontier
(which seems both to extol and eschew the notion of a “golden age”), but also
undercuts and thus forces a reappraisal of her apparent frontier nostalgia.
44

To the extent that Cather renders Tom Outland purely within the memories of
the novel’s living characters (since he has died before the events in the novel take
place), the author’s phantasmal depiction of her deceased hero typically engenders
suspicion among critics wishing to substantiate what they take to be Cather’s
unyielding interest in glorifying the hopelessly inaccessible past. However, it is
important to remember that the person upon whom Tom Outland’s absence weighs
most heavily—Tom’s friend and mentor Professor Godfrey St. Peter—laments
Outland’s loss not merely for the sake of the boy’s past successes, but also for the life
he left unlived—the unrealized potential, as a scholar, as a friend, and as a husband to
St. Peter’s daughter Rosamond, that Outland’s untimely death prematurely snuffed
out. The Professor’s despair, then, rather than constituting nostalgia for that which
once was but is no more, in fact comprises a complex condemnation of past events,

76
events that disallowed a brightly anticipated future from coming into being. For, from
the Professor’s point of view, it is the past—not the woeful present—that has
prohibited the emergence of the utopian promise that Outland once embodied. If we
have concerns about our nation’s future, Cather seems to be arguing, we best direct
our disparagement, at least in part, at the mistakes of the past. Therefore, Cather’s
depiction of Outland, rather than promoting nostalgic remembrance, in fact pries open
the central contradiction inherent in all romanticized depictions of the American
frontier period: that the frontier somehow existed as a pastoral utopia in defiance of
the very economic and industrial structures that not only enabled Western expansion
in the first place, but that inevitably came to represent the ultimate objective of the
frontier project—which was to cultivate the frontier, not to capture and somehow
preserve it. Thus, the infusion of myth and nostalgia into Cather’s rendering of Tom
Outland enhances rather than undermines the author’s understanding of her historical
moment.
But while Cather’s myth-laden representation of the frontier acknowledges a
sense of the symbolic largely associated with early to mid twentieth-century American
studies and archetypal criticism in general, current interpretation of Cather’s mythic
work does not require by any means a return to now largely discarded archetypal
modes of criticism.
45
Rather, in employing familiar archetypal discourses, Cather’s
mythic works recognize and thereby engage the social, political, and economic
concerns that the creation of such archetypes for the most part either ignored or
distorted. Taking this approach to Cather’s works, I want to suggest, not only helps us

77
directly confront the problem of seemingly realist convention as it appears in Cather’s
fiction, but it also allows us to re-evaluate the manner in which she chose to express
familiar American archetypes. Take, for instance, the weighty ancestral concerns that
preoccupy both Outland and St. Peter, figures derived from a host of archetypes
ranging from the Adamic frontiersman to the Euro-American colonizer responsible for
“taming” ancient cultures indigenous to the New World. In seeking to give an account
of their own respective origins, these men inevitably turn to a wide array of mytho-
historical narratives. While Outland’s ancestral fantasy involves viewing the New
Mexican ruins of an ancient tribe of cliff dwellers as the former home of his “poor
grandmothers [from] a thousand years ago” (219), St. Peter’s ancestral preoccupations,
considerably more scattered than Outland’s fascination with the Blue Mesa, similarly
dominate the Professor’s thinking about his adult life. From his obsession with
narrating the “adventures” of the Spanish conquistadors, to his romanticization of
growing up near Lake Michigan, to his late re-discovery of his long forgotten “original
[child] self,” the Professor cannot view the present for his obsession with the past.
Similarly, neither St. Peter nor Outland can completely account for the adult men they
have become, a condition worsened not only by the inviolate nature of their respective
childhoods but also by their persistent recollection of personal misfortune. Their
collective desire to establish a link between themselves and the land, the people, and
the moment in time from which they originated dominates their thought and
consequently begets mythologized accounts of their ostensible forebears. Be it
mnemonic (which is to say, purely cognitive) or tactile, the material through which the

78
novel’s main characters choose to sift holds promise because of what these men
assume it contains: something of themselves.
Notwithstanding the contrasting ancestral narratives of these two characters,
the lives of Outland and St. Peter share points of intersection that work toward
questioning the unqualified romanticization of the past that critics typically see as the
project of The Professor’s House. While Granville Hicks—in a rare moment of praise
for Cather—has famously argued that within Outland’s narrative Cather “escapes from
her gloom and writes with …vigor and tenderness” (Schroeter 144), his reading of The
Professor’s House all but ignores the most significant event that takes place in “Tom
Outland’s Story”: namely, the dissolution of Outland’s friendship with Rodney Blake,
the fellow with whom Outland shares his experiences amid the ruins of the ancient
cliff dwellers. After chastising Blake for selling the artifacts they had extracted from
the ruins to a German collector in order to raise money for Tom’s college education,
Outland soon regrets Blake’s bitter departure and learns to fear his own
“heartlessness” (228). Though he remains for several months in sublime isolation at
“Cliff City,” Outland ultimately recognizes that “anyone who requites faith and
friendship as [he] did, will have to pay for it” (229). Thus, Tom’s excavation of the
Blue Mesa fails to yield the joyous “self discovery” that Eudora Welty recognizes in
Thea Kronborg’s experience amid the Ancient People’s cliff dwellings in Cather’s The
Song of the Lark (Bloom 158). Rather, Outland sustains “a [personal] crisis and a
lasting sorrow in human relationship” (Bloom 158) that, again according to Welty,
haunts him for the rest of his short life. Consequently, the assertion that “Tom

79
Outland’s Story” merely enhances Cather’s dismal assessment of the present falls
short, as the tale in fact underscores the effects that past tragedies have on the present.
Virgin Land
The Professor’s House begins with Godfrey St. Peter walking about the now
vacant house in which he has lived “ever since his marriage, [and] where he had
worked out his career and brought up his two daughters” (3). Although nearly all his
belongings have been moved across town to the new house he is to inhabit with his
wife Lillian now that their daughters have left home, the Professor cannot bring
himself to give the old house up. Though married, St. Peter’s daughters find
themselves quite differently situated, as Kathleen’s husband Scott McGregor works a
freelance writer while Rosamond’s husband Louis Marsellus, an electrical engineer,
has made a fortune developing an engine invented by the deceased Tom Outland.
Before his death, Outland had been engaged to Rosamond, and upon leaving for the
war, he had “made a will in her favor” that, on account of Louis’ persistent cultivation
of Outland’s ideas, has yielded substantial returns (30). Rather than confront the
reality of the Marsellus’ vast new wealth, not to mention the inherent jealousy that
now defines the chilly relations between his daughters, St. Peter arranges to rent his
old house indefinitely. The Professor spends that majority of his time in his cramped
old study that doubles as a work room for Augusta, the family’s maid and dressmaker.
Surrounded by the forms Augusta has used over the years to treat articles of clothing,
Professor St. Peter contemplates the death of his young friend Outland and the
significant events that have followed in its wake.

80
Although Tom Outland embodies, on the one hand, the purity and primitive
nature of the early twentieth-century Western hero, Cather complicates the familiarity
of Outland’s character by basing his subsistence not on provincial duties such as
farming or tracking but rather on the most pervasive of all industrial outcrops: the
railroad. At the beginning of the novel’s second section, “Tom Outland’s Story,” the
reader learns that Tom works in Pardee, New Mexico as a “call boy” keeping tabs on
freight crews for the Santa Fé railroad. During his tenure on the Santa Fé, Outland
meets and befriends “a new fireman on [his] division” named Rodney (sometimes
called “Roddy”) Blake (160). Blake, who according to Tom “[had] been drinking and
acting ugly ever since he’d been on [Outland’s] division” (160), nevertheless
resembles Outland in that he too embodies a curious mixture of provincial innocence
and industrial wariness—and Blake’s material circumstance, like that of the other
“working men” in town, cannot be easily romanticized. According to Outland, Blake
was one of those fellows with a settled, mature body and a young face, such as
you often see among working-men. There was something calm, and
sarcastic, and mocking about his expression—that, too, you often see among
working men. (161)

Like Outland, Blake is a Westerner whose occupation ties him to Eastern industrial
interests, and he appears to don the signs of industry’s mastery over his body with
calculated exuberance. Though it “wasn’t customary,” Outland tells us, Blake
enjoyed playing poker “in his greasy overalls and sweaty blue shirt,” with “his
face streaked up with smoke” and “his hands … so greasy they marked the cards”
(160). Though Blake is only ten years older than the not-quite twenty year old
Outland, the maturity of Blake’s body disagrees with the youthfulness of his face

81
in ways that recall similar descriptions of urban workingmen in any number of
early twentieth-century American novels that deal with industrial enterprise and
the laboring class.
46
In the harsh industrial world, the youthful body becomes
tarnished with excessive wear; one’s face is all that remains to betray the youth of
one’s now brutalized frame. Blake’s uniqueness, by contrast, lies in the fact that
while his story takes place on the Western plains, he physically resembles an urban
laborer.
This conflation of characteristics generally associated with “provincial” and
“innocent” Western frontiersmen and “weathered” and “jaded” working-class
Easterners arguably reflects the view first advanced in 1893 by Frederick Jackson
Turner regarding the evolution of American industry in relation to the expanding
Western frontier. In his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American
History,”
47
Turner points out that “the advance of the frontier aroused seaboard
cities like Boston, New York, and Baltimore” to engage in trade with the “pioneer
[who] needed the goods of the coast” (24). The result, according to Turner, was a
“grand series of internal improvement and railroad legislation” that yielded “potent
nationalizing effects” (24). Turner’s assessment of the interconnections existing
between the Western frontier and the Eastern seaboard challenges provincial myths
that depict the pioneer’s struggle against the advancement of Northeastern
industry. Although such popular utopic conceptions suggest that the frontier
remained fundamentally at odds with Northeastern economic interests, the

82
multivalent economic and social underpinnings of Turner’s frontier hypothesis
undercut this notion.
While Turner concedes that “the frontier is productive of individualism,”
which produces “antipathy to … any direct control” such as that likely imposed by
Eastern interests, he likewise stresses that nothing “works for nationalism like
intercourse within the nation” (30). Just as the pioneer served Eastern interests in
forging westward, Turner suggests, frontiersmen “reached back from the frontier
and affected profoundly the Atlantic coast and even the Old World” (30). Thus,
Cather’s choice to leaven Westerners like Outland and Blake with qualities
evocative of Northeastern laborers demonstrates the extent to which The
Professor’s House echoes not only views expressed by Turner, but also the vision
of the West advanced in novels like Owen Wister’s The Virginian. By the time The
Virginian first appeared in 1902, Alan Trachtenberg reminds us, “Eastern
corporations had virtually accomplished their control of Western enterprises,” and
so when Wister solidified “the genre of the Western … into the form which would
remain the staple of twentieth-century popular culture,” he incorporated into his
work a cowboy hero who vaunted “at once the values of personal honor and
worldly success” (24). Like The Virginian, then, Cather’s novel subtly conflates
Easters interests with Western ones, and figures not only the frontier but the
frontier hero as being intrinsically tied to Northeastern capitalism.
The multidimensionality that characterizes Cather’s Westerners in The
Professor’s House continues to grow in complexity once Outland falls ill with

83
pneumonia shortly after he and Blake become acquainted. Blake, Outland
explains, takes him “down to his room” and with the help of the “old Mexican
woman” with whom Blake lives, nurses Tom back to health (165). On the advice
of a local doctor (as well as that of Father Duchene, another close acquaintance of
Tom) Blake continues to develop his new-found role as care-giver to Outland. He
soon quits the railroad, opting instead to secure an appointment for Tom and
himself with the Sitwell Cattle Company, thus allowing them to “live in the open
all summer” (165). It is during their stint as cattle-herders working a few miles
south of Pardee that the two men explore a local landmark—the Blue Mesa—
where they discover the remains of an ancient indigenous civilization that becomes
the focus of their lives both during and after their employment with Sitwell.
Captivated by the ruins of the location they ultimately deem “Cliff City,” the two
men decide to spend the entirety of the following year excavating the ruins
together, choosing to live off Blake’s poker winnings from the previous season.
Ultimately, Blake convinces Outland (with the help of Father Duchene who visits
the two men occasionally) that he, Outland, should “go to Washington and make
some report to the Government, so that the proper specialists would be sent out to
study the remains that [they] had found” (199). Tom’s trip to the Smithsonian
Institute proves a fool’s errand, however, as his fraught interaction with the
institutes’ bureaucracy yields little more than an empty wallet and a good deal of
frustration.

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Outland’s failure in Washington notwithstanding, it is clear that the discovery
he and Roddy make at Cliff City reflects Cather’s interest in the “revolutions in
social science, anthropology and archeology that had occurred at the end of the
nineteenth century” (Reynolds 16-17). The expansion of history beyond “the short
span of modern ‘occidental’ progress” (Reynolds 17) that was the result of the
scientific revolutions occurring in Cather’s day allowed her to ponder notions of
civilization and progress in relation to the development of ancient cultures. Despite
the traditional mythic association between the American West and the notion of
“virgin land,” the new frontier depicted in “Tom Outland’s Story” is anything but
“virgin” or unmarked. Rather, it bears the imprint of a ruined city whose former
inhabitants tamed the land hundreds of years before the nineteenth century’s surge
of Euro-American settlers. Contrary to the expansionist assumption that pioneers
were the original “tamers” of the West, Tom’s discovery underscores the
distinction Cather wants to make in The Professor’s House between frontier lore
and historical fact. The New Mexican landscape in which Tom and Robby subsist
is not so much an untamed land as it is a dead land “once living”—a land
conquered long ago and occupied by the ghosts of a people now extinct.
In pointing out that cowboys such as Outland and Blake were among the last,
not the first, to explore the southwestern landscape, Cather put at the forefront of
her novel questions not only about how the recently discovered past relates to the
present, but also the ways in which the failures of past cultures dictate the
progression of modernity. Without question, Cather’s interest in the past informs

85
the story she has to tell in The Professor’s House. But rather than being a novel
rooted in simple nostalgia, The Professor’s House presents the past as a place
where even the most pleasant memory is tinged with failure and regret. Cather’s
concern with the past transcends the simplicity of nostalgic reminiscence, for she
stops far short of arguing that the present world fails to match the promise of the
pioneer era. Rather, her project involves uncovering the human failures of the past
that are inherent in the phantasmal discourses of selfhood that persist in the
present, discourses that, on the one hand, pertain to her characters’ emotional
and/or professional vulnerabilities, and on the other hand, serve as a reflection on
more global distinctions between historical fact and cultural myth.
48
It follows,
then, that a character such as Godfrey St. Peter provides the novel with its
psychological center, since St. Peter’s major scholarly accomplishment, The
Spanish Adventurers in North America, illustrates the Professor’s rather devious
capacity to frame politically fraught historical events to suit a particular narrative
purpose. This purpose, in the case of his scholarship, anyway, reveals that he is
more inclined to favor colonizers than the colonized.
Curiously, however, the Professor himself seems similarly accepting of a kind
of self-directed colonization. Early in the novel Cather points out that
Though he was born on Lake Michigan, of mixed stock (Canadian French on
one side, and American farmers on the other), St. Peter was commonly said to
look like a Spaniard. That was probably because he had been in Spain a good
deal, and was an authority on certain phases of Spanish history. He had a long
brown face, with an oval chin over which he wore a close-trimmed Van Dyke,
like a tuft of shiny black fur. With this silky, very black hair, he had a tawny

86
skin with gold lights in it, a hawk nose, and hawk-like eyes—brown and gold
and green. (4)

According to this passage, St. Peter’s appearance resembles a Spaniard in the most
clichéd sense: the Professor’s “tawny” skin, like his “close-trimmed Van Dyke” and
“very black hair” evoke an image of the conquistador that might well appear in the
pages of St. Peter’s multi-volume “adventures.” Similarly, his “hawk nose” and
“hawk-like eyes” suggest there is something predatory about St. Peter—as if in writing
the conquistadors’ “history” the Professor himself has developed a keen eye for
colonial endeavors. In taking on the physical appearance of the mythologized figures
that have informed his life’s work, St. Peter reveals the extent of his longing for an
identity, his domestic and professional lives having failed to yield the self-satisfaction
he sees inherent in, for instance, the Spanish colonial project or Tom Outland’s
excavation of the Blue Mesa. Rather than cultivating a shared sense of purpose with
his wife and daughters, the Professor views the demands they have made of him as a
form of possession, which his love affair with the conquistadors ironically reflects.
Not only has St. Peter chosen to mythologize colonial conquerors in response to his
family’s perceived ownership of him, but what is more, St. Peter’s appearance
demonstrates the extent to which he has, in essence, colonized himself—his profound
lack of an acceptable identity enabling him to impose upon himself a fanciful one.
While living with his wife and daughters in a single dwelling near his
university in Hamilton, Michigan had for many years provided St. Peter the
opportunity to cultivate a kind of colonial authority over both his home as well as his
physical appearance, he now faces the inevitable departure from his old home as a

87
result of the recent marriages of both his daughters. For much of The Professor’s
House, we see St. Peter grapple with the task of departing from his well-loved old
house so that he and his wife might enjoy the new one they have built across town
with prize money brought in by St. Peter’s celebrated scholarship. The dilemma St.
Peter now faces lies in the fact that his new demesne, void as it is of the memories that
sustained him in his previous domicile, will force him to confront the extent to which
he has indeed relied on such emotionally charged recollections to sustain his adult
identity. What is ultimately at stake, then, for St. Peter, for Cather, and ultimately for
the reader, is how deeply one can depend on the past—or rather on the narratives of
the past transmitted through memory and myth—to frame one’s notion of the self.
Notably, it is St. Peter who provides Cather with a vehicle through which to
express Outland’s speculations regarding the Cliff Dwellers’ history. Within “Tom
Outland’s Story”—Outland’s ostensible recollection of his exploits on the Blue
Mesa—Outland reconfigures his own cultural lineage by appropriating the Cliff
Dweller’s ancestry. He accomplishes this by boldly asserting that Cliff City’s former
inhabitants were his blood relatives, a sleight of hand that transforms his interest in the
Mesa and its relics from that of a scavenger of ancient curios to that of an earnest
descendant. Tom claims that the relics he and Roddy have collected “belonged to my
poor old grandmothers a thousand years ago” (219). This self-serving revisionism
arguably is what attracts St. Peter to Tom’s story, as Outland’s careful re-articulation
of a particular group’s history is not altogether unlike the historical gesture the
Professor makes in his multi-volume dedication to the Conquistadors’ “adventures.”

88
Outland’s presumptive historiography takes possession of the Cliff Dwellers just as St.
Peter’s works assume authority not only over his “adventurers” but over those who
suffered at their hands. Thus, Tom’s tendency to affiliate himself with the home and
possessions of his supposed ancestors titillates the Professor’s own ancestral
curiosities. Although St. Peter glorifies his deceased friend Outland throughout
Cather’s novel, one can measure the full extent of St. Peter’s apotheosis of his friend
in “Tom Outland’s Story”—“the story [Outland] had always kept back” (155). This is
the case largely because of the context in which Outland’s story is presented. Rather
than constituting an accurate representation of Outland’s well-guarded narrative,
“Tom Outland’s Story” is in fact less a document recounting Outland’s impressions of
his experience on the Mesa than it is a record of St. Peter’s recollection of the
monologue Tom shared with St. Peter one night not too long before Outland left St.
Peter’s life forever.
The final chapter of the novel’s first section, “The Family,” commences by
explaining that “Lillian [St. Peter’s wife] and the Marselluses [St. Peter’s daughter
Rosamond and son-in-law Louis] sailed for France early in May. The Professor, left
alone, had plenty of time to spray his rose-vines, and his garden had never been so
beautiful as it was that June” (150). The narrator goes on to reveal that St. Peter means
to use his time alone not only to tend to his garden, but to edit, annotate, and write an
introduction for the diary Outland left behind detailing his findings at the Blue Mesa.
49

The narrative then slips completely into the Professor’s unconscious mind in order to
explain not only St. Peter’s anxiety about the introduction he means to write to Tom’s

89
diary, but the series of memories regarding Outland that now preoccupy him so
thoroughly that he cannot seem to get started writing. St. Peter has become so
interconnected with Outland’s narrative as an “object” of great significance that he can
no longer view it as just an object of memory once possessed by Outland. In other
words, Tom’s narrative is to St. Peter what the artifacts found at the Blue Mesa are to
Tom—links to an ancestral past, and thus a means to a much desired end. The
Professor uses Outland’s narrative to give an account of himself—to establish a
history and a point of origin. The St. Peter we come to know in Cather’s novel has
come into being after having “discovered” the artifact known as “Tom Outland’s
Story.” But within the logic of Cather’s novel, the subjective quality of St. Peter’s
rendition of Outland’s story overrides the reliable recounting of historical truth in
order to illuminate the codependent relationship that exists between myths of origin
and acts of creation. Cather differentiates “Tom Outland’s Story” from the rest of her
novel not only by setting it aside as an independent section, but also by filtering it
through St. Peter’s memory. Thus, in considering the import of Tom’s narrative to his
friendship with St. Peter, one confronts the unreliability of St. Peter’s recollection of
“Tom Outland’s Story,” which is as inherent in Tom’s narrative as it is to the
Professor’s histories of “adventurous” colonial conquest.
By the time “Tom Outland’s Story” comes to a close, we have passed through
St. Peter’s recollections of Outland’s university commencement, Outland’s choice to
remain at St. Peter’s university and work in the Physics department, and finally
Outland’s post-commencement summer, which Outland had largely spent dining and

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conversing with St. Peter. As has been previously suggested, it is while we are amid
such remembrances that readers finally gain exposure to Outland’s story of his
adventures among the New Mexican cliff dwellings. Because the chapter never makes
a transition out of the mnemonic register in which it spends the majority of its time,
readers experience “Tom Outland’s Story” as St. Peter must have heard it—which is
to say, the story Tom recounts passes through St. Peter before it reaches the reader.
One discovers layer upon layer of reminiscence being passed off as an historical
account in Cather’s novel, as all of the narratives involving Outland come to us by
way of subjective reminiscence, and are thus inevitably unreliable. In this way, Cather
draws a correlation between memory and myth, stressing the relationship between the
mythic, the romanticized, and the unreliable, and suggesting that the myths we create
to romanticize the past sometimes impinge upon our ability to prosper in the present.
To this end, The Professor’s House contains a number of moments in which
Cather’s view of the past is anything but nostalgic, and both in the case of Outland’s
narrative and in a number of episodes featuring St. Peter, memories become
memorialized through their association with significant physical locations: invariably,
these locations become sites of loss. For example, early on in the novel we learn that
St. Peter “had spent the happiest years of his youth [as a student] in a house at
Versailles” (Professor’s House 4). The Professor alludes to his joyful adolescence in
France on a number of occasions, and early on in the novel we learn that he has
incorporated his memories of France into a contained monument of which he is the
sole caretaker:

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The Professor has succeeded in making a French garden in Hamilton [the
Michigan town in which he and his family live]. There was not a blade of
grass; it was a tidy half-acre of glistening gravel and glistening shrubs and
bright flowers . . .The French marigolds and dahlias were just now at their
best—such dahlias as no one else in Hamilton could grow. St. Peter had
tended this bit of ground for over twenty years, and had got the upper hand of
it. (6)

Within his walled-in garden, the Professor tends over the physical manifestation of his
adolescence, which he later describes as a period—like so much of his life—that was
controlled from “the outside” (240). Not coincidentally, St. Peter began making his
“walled-in garden” soon after his wife Lillian gave birth to their first daughter and
“began to be unreasonable about his spending so much time” at Lake Michigan (5),
which lay near where he had grown up—and which, as we will see, is another potent
site of mythic loss for St. Peter.
For the Professor, Lake Michigan is not “a thing thought about, but a part of
consciousness itself” (Professor’s House 20), and the Professor tends to conjure its
calming image when life pulls him in undesirable directions. During the early parts of
the novel, for example, St. Peter describes the lake as a site of renewal, a place to
which he can always escape:
When he remembered his childhood, he remembered blue water . . . the great
fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake. The sun
rose out of it, the day began there; it was the open door that nobody could shut.
(20)

The view of the lake from the study in his old house provides the adult St. Peter with
an imaginative means of escaping his own dull existence, one that he feels he abides
not for himself but for his wife and daughters. While in Michigan, the Professor
constantly searches for an escape; and so it happens, escape is always within view

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from the window in his upstairs study. Since the Professor’s view of the lake “has
been of more assistance than all the convenient things he had done without” (20), he
considers his imminent departure from his old house a form of surrender: with Lake
Michigan no longer in his sights, escape ceases to be a possibility. Although St.
Peter’s reverence for the lake relates back to his association between it and the
freedom of youth (thereby alluding to traditional associations between water, life, and
fertility), Cather’s use of this mythic trope does not allow St. Peter to benefit from its
regenerative and renewing powers. Rather, she reveals late in the novel that what St.
Peter had taken to be a source of regeneration was in fact a hindrance, perhaps even a
bringer of sickness and ultimately death.
The specter of death hangs over St. Peter throughout the novel, and it appears
to have haunted him on and off since he was a young boy, for the narrator tells us that
the Professor “nearly died” when his mother and father decided to “[drag] him and his
brothers and sisters [from Michigan] to the wheat lands of central Kansas” (20).
During the novel’s first half, the displacement St. Peter experienced as a youth clouds
his view of the western plains: as he reminisces about his Kansas upbringing in the
novel’s first few pages, St. Peter depicts the frontier not as a site of opportunity,
democracy, individualism, or hope; rather, he describes it as a cruel and unforgiving
vandal of youthful innocence. But this characterization is not constant throughout the
novel, for as St. Peter’s recollections of Tom Outland intensify, so does his fondness
not only for the frontier, but also for the child he had been while growing up in the
Solomon Valley of Kansas. Not long after the completion of “Tom Outland’s Story,”

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the Professor has a vision of the “boy Godfrey,” a representation of St. Peter’s child-
self so clearly evocative of Tom Outland that at first the Professor has to check his
recognition of this new apparition against previous encounters with his old friend
Tom’s ghostly counterpart:
Tom Outland had not come back again through the garden door (as he had so
often done in dreams!), but another boy had: the boy the Professor had long
ago left behind him in Kansas. (239)

St. Peter’s conflation of his child-self and Tom Outland epitomizes the constant play
that exists between these two figures throughout Cather’s novel. As a point of
comparison, St. Peter claims long ago to have left the “boy Godfrey” behind in
Kansas’ Solomon Valley. Likewise, Kansas is the state in which Tom Outland lost his
parents, an event that swiftly brings an end to Outland’s childhood. St. Peter’s lost
child-self has a bond with the earth, as Tom Outland does, and the Professor refers to
the “boy Godfrey” as a “primitive,” who is even less cultivated than “Outland’s old
cliff-dwellers must have been” (241). Tom Outland is in many ways the Professor’s
child-self personified, a kind of walking representation of the Professor’s repressed
unconscious. Outland’s uncivilized nature corresponds to the truth “under all truths”
(241) that St. Peter recognizes in his own primitive past: the person he was in the
beginning has nothing to do with the person he has become.
Like St. Peter’s mythical connection to the Lake Michigan he enjoyed as a boy,
his recollection of a carefree life amid the plains of the Solomon Valley stands in stark
contrast to the domestic comforts that have defined his life since he left the United
States as an adolescent in order to study in France. But the “Kansas boy” he

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remembers in the passage below differs significantly from his previous sojourns into
the imaginative space associated with his memories of Lake Michigan. Reflecting on
his youth amid the Great Plains, the Professor recalls that
life with this Kansas boy, little as there had been of it, was the realest of his
lives, and that all the years between had been accidental and ordered from the
outside. His career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of
events which had happened to him … the Kansas boy who had come back to
St. Peter … was not a scholar. He was a primitive. He was only interested in
earth and woods and water … He seemed to know, among other things, that he
was solitary and must always be so … He was earth, and would return to earth.
(240-241)

In the present case, St. Peter conjures a mythical doppelganger—a version of his
youthful self who, while clearly linked to a specific locale, likewise emerges in
relation to “earth and woods and water.” It is by way of this set of fundamental
material elements that the Professor reformulates his previous preoccupation with
Lake Michigan, placing its most essential material component—water—among a
triumvirate of natural substances he now associates with youthful purity. The most
important of these natural materials, however, is no longer water but “earth”—as the
Professor insists, he “was earth, and would return to earth.”
St. Peter’s metaphysical meditation on “earth” and its relation to his child-self
on both substantive (“He was earth”) as well as determinist levels (“[He] would return
to earth”), not only establishes a conceptual framework whereby St. Peter
imaginatively transforms himself from a henpecked aging intellectual into a
“primitive,” Outland-like Adamic hero, it also heralds a profound recuperation of a
frontier mythos to which St. Peter had historically remained wholly ambivalent. In
bringing about the reincarnation of his earth-bound child self, St. Peter adopts a

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formulation of the frontier—which is, after all, the epitome of the earth—evocative of
Turnerian notions of individuality that are at odds with views expressed by St. Peter in
the novel’s first section. While Americans may eventually run out of earthen material
to cultivate, Turner suggests, a theoretical substitute exists in the mythical frontier that
has taken hold of the American mindset. The ethos of cultivation, progression, and
expansion that literally applies to the nation’s frontier experience likewise designates,
from a Turnerian perspective, the quintessential American disposition of the post-
frontier era.
50

Beginning Anew
As I have shown in the preceding section, Professor St. Peter’s recognition of
the distance separating his youthful and adult selves relies on a previously existing
rupture between past and present, a fissure that occurred in St. Peter’s life between
youth and adolescence that ensured subsequent events, such as his marriage, the birth
of his daughters, and even his scholarly work, would have little to do with what Cather
calls St. Peter’s “original ego” (241). Arguably, however, it is precisely the
“primitive” child-self with whom St. Peter becomes reacquainted near the end of
Cather’s novel that anticipates the ultimate synthesis of St. Peter’s “original ego” with
his thoroughly domesticated adult self. St. Peter’s vision of the “boy Godfrey” sets in
motion a series of events that ultimately constitutes his own ritual of perennial rebirth:
namely, the sequence in which St. Peter, wishing to warm the study in his old house,
lights the upstairs stove and then precedes to fall asleep “without meaning to” (251).
During the Professor’s slumber, a violent wind storm develops that blows out the

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stove’s flames, filling the room with toxic natural gas. When St. Peter at last awakes,
he finds “the room . . . pitch-black and full of gas” (251). Nearly asphyxiated, the
Professor has a brush with death that, with respect to the regenerative properties that
he exhibits afterwards, is in keeping with his re-telling of “Tom Outland’s Story” as a
creation myth.
A renewal or rebirth necessarily follows a kind of death, and indeed the
Professor does “let something go” (258) before his family’s housekeeper and dress-
maker Augusta pulls him to safety. In this final episode, Augusta plays Virgil to St.
Peter’s Dante: she guides him out of the underworld so that he may ultimately attain
an enlightened vision of the cosmos. Put in other terms, Augusta pulls St. Peter out of
his womb-like study, and in doing so grants him another chance at life. Once he
recovers from his ordeal, St. Peter “felt a sense of obligation toward [Augusta],
instinctive, escaping definition, but real. And when you admitted that a thing was real,
that was enough—now” (257).The comfort he finds in accepting his obligation to
Augusta calms him, and is indicative, first of all, of his renewed ability to perceive
reality through the imagination as well as through study, and second, of the extent to
which he feels a firm connection with his unconscious, for he now “felt the ground
under his feet” (258).
What we see here, in addition to a context for St. Peter’s recollection of his
“original self,” are the Turnerian resonances underlying the Professor’s reversion to
his “first nature.” These resonances demonstrate how The Professor’s House figures in
Cather’s modernist appropriation of a discourse of renewal that remains both mythic

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and historically precise. This discourse, which many early twentieth-century literary
artists associated with anthropological works by the likes of James Frazier and Jesse
Weston (both of whom famously influenced Eliot’s Waste Land) suggested that
correspondences existed between all the myths of the world, bringing otherwise
disparate cultures, time periods, and practices into proximity. Concurrently, early
twentieth-century anthropology concerned itself with the development of extinct
cultures, focusing in particular on the manner in which ritual, imagination, and myth
came together in renewal ceremonies within ancient cultures, such as the lost world
that Tom Outland discovers in New Mexico. While Cather found much to loathe in the
modern world, novels like The Professor’s House suggest that modern Americans
nevertheless have access to the potentialities—however remote or abused—of mythic
renewal, of encountering “successive frontiers,” that, in Turner’s words, will each
make progressive “contributions to American character” (10).
The notions of mythic renewal present in Turner, and elucidated in the work of
Weston and Frazier, exists, too, in the mid-century theoretical work of mythographer
Mircea Eliade, whose formulation of mythical renewal as an ever-present possibility
dovetails in a general sense with Turner’s theory of American frontierism:
We know that the archaic and traditional societies granted freedom each year
to begin a new, a “pure” existence, with virgin possibilities. And there is no
question of seeing in this an imitation of nature, which also undergoes periodic
regeneration, “beginning anew” each spring, with each spring recovering all its
powers intact. (Cosmos 157)

For Turner, the notion of the frontier is largely a state of mind; it comprises the
American consciousness, which, given the inexhaustible nature of the mythical

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frontier, rests, like most successful cultures, on the idea of renewal. It is the
phenomenon that Eliade articulates above that Cather anticipates in The Professor’s
House, a novel that, while on the one hand lamenting the past, on the other ultimately
valorizes the potential that exists in the present for renewal and change. St. Peter’s
recollection of ‘Tom Outland’s Story” constitutes, in Eliadian terms, “a ‘knowledge’
which is esoteric…because it is secret and handed on to others” and “because the
‘knowledge’ is accompanied by a magico-religious power” (Cosmos 18).
Insofar as St. Peter recognizes Tom to be a mythologized version of the “the
original, unmodified St. Peter” (239), the Professor’s ventriloquism of Outland’s story
serves as a kind of creation myth, whereby St. Peter becomes re-unified with the long
lost “boy Godfrey,” an event that serves as the catalyst to “the end of [St. Peter’s] life”
(243), and, thus, his life’s renewal. The teleological structure of Outland’s myth, in
which Outland’s recovery of an “absolute beginning” (Eliade Myth 37) ultimately
leads to his renewal (and thus his sojourn to St. Peter’s university in Hamilton),
provides St. Peter with a model for effecting his own regeneration. Thus, to read “Tom
Outland’s Story” through the filter of St. Peter is to understand Outland’s narrative as
a creation myth enacted by the novel’s central consciousness. Such myths, according
to Eliade, briefly summarize “the essential moments of the Creation of the World,”
and as such correspond to “original, strong, sacred Time” (Myth 36-37). St. Peter’s re-
telling of Outland’s narrative is, in Eliade’s terms, “a prodigious ‘going back’ . . .
accomplished by an effort of thought . . . [that] endeavors to understand the ‘absolute
beginning’ . . . [and hence] the mystery of the appearance of Being” (Myth 111-112).

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By re-telling Outland’s narrative through “an effort of thought,” the Professor conveys
a myth that brings about his own renewal. This renewal, whereby the typically
reclusive St. Peter experiences a longing for human connection and a continued
kinship with the earth (“he felt the ground under his feet”) and admits to feeling
“rather lonely—for the first time in months,” is what ultimately prepares him to “face
with fortitude … [his family’s return] and the future (255-258). I will now turn from
St. Peter’s use of Tom Outland’s story as his own creation myth to an examination of
the substance, or “materials,” of Tom’s story in order to introduce a broader
understanding of Cather’s modernist mythos of renewal.
Material Frontiers
Although Tom Outland lost his parents—and arguably his identity—“crossing
southern Kansas in a prairie schooner” (98), his firsthand contact with the Native
American relics of Cliff City instills in him the belief that he and the makers of these
curios share a fundamental ancestral association. Tom makes clear the depth of his
connection to the objects he finds when he imparts his narrative to St. Peter. The
emphasis Outland places on tangible objects such as the ancient artifacts of the Blue
Mesa, as well as the intangible (but nevertheless material) substances he finds there,
such as the “heavenly bodies” among which he sleeps and the “consuming light” that
fills him “to the brim,” underscores Outland’s desire to capture a quantifiable origin,
and likewise resonates deeply with St. Peter’s synonymous desires (226-227). While
the security provided by material locations such as the Mesa’s “humanized rock” and
the “insulation” of the Professor’s upstairs sewing room fail to supply these men with

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the knowledge they seek, their respective ancestral quests nevertheless hinge on an
engagement with the corporeal. Rather than finding redemption through tangible
objects, however, it is their interaction with invisible substances—like the divine Mesa
air that Tom inhales or the natural gas that nearly asphyxiates St. Peter near the end of
the novel—that, while not supplying either of them with a precise origin, do initiate
renewal.
In Outland’s mind the Blue Mesa holds the secrets of his origin, and he wishes
to share his fantastic discovery with the world. Whereas Outland projects mythology
upon the ruins he finds, thereby locating “a sort of [embedded] message” relating to
his desire to establish a material link between himself and his imagined progenitors,
St. Peter similarly imbues with myth his recollection of Outland’s infamous “story”
(173). In both cases, Cather’s characters engage a range of tactile as well as cognitive
objects through which they provide for themselves a basis for their appropriative
mythologizing. Cather depicts both of her main characters as committed archivists,
men whose understanding of the world and of themselves relates inherently to the
material objects that inform their studies and shape their lives. It is both significant
and ironic, then, that the text they simultaneously choose to look upon—De Rerum
Natura by the classical Roman poet Lucretius—corresponds to a school of thought
holding that all matter consists of particles so small that they cannot be perceived by
the human senses.
51
Like Lucretius, who celebrates the material nature of all things,
Outland and St. Peter look to objects for answers: these men have dedicated much

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time and energy, albeit in different ways, to recuperating their own ethnic, national,
and intellectual origin.
Lucretian materialism has its basis in the teachings of the Athenian-born
philosopher Epicurus (341-271 B.C.), whose doctrine of pleasure-seeking situates
delight as the first and most important mode of human existence. For Epicurus,
atomists such as Leucippus (fl.430 B.C.) and Democritus (460?-357 B.C.) were
correct in their assertion that “physical law … and not the gods ruled the world”
(Esolen, Introduction 3). From this fundamental atomistic tenet, Epicurus crafted a
philosophy that “used atomism to equate good and evil with pleasure and pain” and
held further that while “pleasures of the mind [are of greater value] … than pleasures
of the body … [bodily and cognitive pleasures] are not strictly separable” for the
materialist (Esolen, Introduction 3). Like Epicurus, St. Peter clearly cherishes the
experience of such inseparable pleasures, and what is more, he demonstrably upholds
the Epicurean teaching that “[man] is to spend his life in the company of friends”
(Esolen, Introduction 3). The following passage describing St. Peter’s interaction with
Tom Outland shortly before the beginning of “Tom Outland’s Story” clearly indicates
St. Peter’s Epicurean sensibility:
[St. Peter] cooked a fine leg of lamb, saignant, well rubbed with garlic before
it went into the pan, then he asked Outland to dinner. Over a dish of steaming
asparagus, swathed in a napkin to keep it hot, and a bottle of sparkling Asti,
they talked and watched night fall in the garden. If the evening happened to be
rainy or chilly, they sat inside and read Lucretius . . . It was one of those rainy
nights, before the fire in the dining-room, that Tom told the story he had
always kept back. (155)

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As John P. Anders has recently pointed out, St. Peter’s “meals are carefully prepared,
his habits are orderly, and his thoughts and impressions are cultivated and refined”
(109) Thus, Anders concludes, for “most of the novel, St. Peter is an epicure, enjoying
a life of sensations and ideas” (109). Anders presents his assessment of St. Peter’s
Epicureanism in the context of his argument that in The Professor’s House,
“homosexuality emerges as Cather’s most potent metaphor for [St. Peter’s] …
redemptive quest” (97). While Anders’ insightful interpretation of St. Peter’s
Epicureanism and its consequences regarding Cather’s treatment of homoeroticism
illuminates a heretofore underemphasized imbrication of pleasure, aesthetics, and
sexuality in Cather’s novel, his assessment falls short of articulating the ways in which
the professor’s interest in pleasure also advances Cather’s interests in the intermixture
of her characters’ “redemptive quests” and the materialist philosophy advocated in De
Rerum Natura.
Cather’s invocation of Lucretian materialism illuminates one of her novel’s
central thematic strands involving the mythic invocations inherent in her character’s
portrayal of the past. By introducing a materialist framework to the mythic narratives
with which she deals, Cather attempts to account for the historical past that myth, in
all its fancifulness and oversimplification, tends to overlook. Rather than long for
imaginative constructions that unrealistically glorify a particular moment in American
history, Cather’s novel contrasts a purely ineffable mythic language with a
distinctively Epicurean sensibility. The result is that her novel draws attention to the

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material referents that predate all myths but to which few mythic narratives actually
own up, a gesture we similarly recognize in the opening lines of De Rerum Natura:
Mother of Romans, delight of gods and men,
Sweet Venus, who under the wheeling signs of heaven
Rouse the ship–shouldering sea and the fruitful earth
And make them teem—for through you all that breathe
Are begotten, and rise to see the light of the sun (25).

In invoking the goddess Venus, and in associating her with the birth of “all that
breathes,” Lucretius seems to work against his own project. How could it be that a
work indebted to the philosophy of Epicurus, a philosophy that dismisses the notion
that the gods have any impact whatsoever on the lives of humans, could in fact begin
with a dedication to Venus? In fact, the birth of Venus serves as an appropriate model
for Lucretian materialism because it suggests that the basic substance from which she
emerges, water—which is atomic in nature—is divine, and this by extension means
that all things share a divine essence. For Lucretius, then, Venus represents “the force
of life itself”: her presence in his poem pertains to the “ceaseless creative activity…of
the atoms” (Esolen, Notes 238). Thus, not only is the nature of things material in
Lucretian philosophy, but the matter of which all things consist is itself divine—which
is to say, in De Rerum Natura, myth becomes a way to render that which otherwise
eludes human perception: fundamental matter. It is this very gesture we see echoed in
Cather, who likewise lends materiality to the otherwise ineffable.
Thus, the material focus of Cather’s characters’ ancestral pursuits allows
Cather to integrate her classical and anthropological interests successfully, which in
turn buttresses her novel against the kinds of attacks usually aimed at her backward-

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looking narratives. The frontier mythos surrounding Tom Outland (and by extension
Professor St. Peter) in fact illuminates crucial connections existing between Catherian
myth-making and her larger cultural moment regarding the failures and successes of
the frontier legacy. Cather’s integration of materialist, mythological, and ontological
discourses in The Professor’s House critiques the arbitrary value placed on some but
not all cultural origins by pointing out that origins are, after all, material and that we
are all descendants, in the Lucretian sense, of the atom—the basis of matter that is
nonetheless invisible. For the atom, the substance of which the world—and hence
every person—is formed, resists the arbitrary privileging of a particular cultural origin,
which ignores the fact that all material bodies share an atomic basis, and hence a
universal origin. Moreover, the atomic particles of which all things consist can never
be destroyed, even though all objects existing within the cosmos are susceptible to
alteration and even death in the case of biological organisms. While matter can move
around indefinitely, forever forming new atomic constellations, it is not susceptible to
expiration. Thus, Lucretian materialism holds that when the human body dies, the
atoms constituting (and controlling) that person’s powers of animation—the anima
(soul) and animus (mind)—do not cease to exist; rather, they become transferred into
new kinds of energy, ultimately forming and propelling new material bodies.
52

Given the extent to which Outland’s memory motivates the vast majority of St.
Peter’s actions throughout Cather’s novel, it becomes possible to view the author’s
often overlooked allusion to Lucretian materialism as crucial not only to our
understanding of St. Peter, but of Cather’s argument regarding the mythical past with

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which she is so often associated. From a materialist point of view whereby the
particles that animate living bodies reconstitute themselves elsewhere in the event of a
given body’s death, the deceased Tom Outland does in fact enjoy a “living” role in
Cather’s novel, which is to inhabit the consciousness of and to motivate—if not
control—her protagonist’s actions. Although Outland does not actually “exist” within
the present time frame of Cather’s novel, he nonetheless adopts something like
corporeality in The Professor’s House, driving the novel’s plot by way of his own
aspirations and desires—and in doing so, ironically steering Professor St. Peter into a
stupor of inactivity that ends with the accidental near-death experience discussed in
the previous section. It is this very act of renewal that rounds out the materialist
connection between Outland and St. Peter, as it is the latter’s near asphyxiation that
functions as a re-enactment of an encounter Outland has with the Mesa air near the
end of “Tom Outland’s Story.” Although Cather downplays St. Peter’s renewal
because, as we will see, it lacks the euphoria of Outland’s encounter at the Blue Mesa,
the fundamental knowledge that both men gain from their experiences is the same—
while one substance is invigorating and the other is poisonous, both share a common
(invisible) material base.
After his failed attempt to interest representatives of the Smithsonian Institute
in Cliff City, Outland returns to the Mesa ripe for enlightenment. Although Outland
has learned from local townsfolk that Roddy had sold a sizeable portion of their
ancient findings during his absence, Outland nevertheless undergoes a transformative
experience once he makes his way back to the Mesa. Before confronting Blake,

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however, Outland makes his way to the top of the Mesa in time to witness “rays of
sunlight [falling] slantingly through the little twisted piñons,” a sight which forces him
to pause and reflect. During this sequence, Tom comes to realize that the essence of
the Mesa’s power resides in its ability to facilitate imaginative thought, a process of
mind whose yield Outland comes to find—over time—more precious than any of the
artifacts he and Roddy had found. Outland’s narrative explains that he
had that glorious feeling that [he had] never had anywhere else, the feeling of
being on the Mesa, in a world above the world. And the air, my God, what
air!— Soft, tingling, gold, hot with an edge of chill on it, full of the smell of
piñons – it was like breathing the sun, breathing the colour [sic] of the sky.
(217)

Tom renders the corporeality of the invisible Mesa air in imaginative terms, and in
doing so takes his first step toward possessing the ancient secrets that the Mesa
contains. The weight of Outland’s transcendental encounter with the Mesa air does not
hit him until after he breaks with his partner, Roddy Blake. Despite the anger that
Outland directs toward Blake for selling all of their findings to a German collector in
his absence, Outland discovers, upon reflection, that the relics he and Blake had found
so important were in fact prohibiting them from seeing the Mesa in its proper light.
According to Outland’s narrative:
This was the first time [he] ever saw [the Mesa] as a whole . . . Something had
happened to [him] that made it all possible for [him] to co-ordinate and
simplify, and that process, going on in [his] mind, brought with it great
happiness. It was possession . . . [For him] the Mesa was no longer an
adventure, but a religious emotion . . .It had formerly been mixed up with other
motives; but now that they were gone, [he] had [his] happiness unalloyed.
(227)

107
This passage suggests that Outland’s encounter with the magical Mesa air has granted
him “possession” of the Mesa’s creative power. By “breathing the colour of the sky”
(217), Outland has absorbed the Mesa’s secrets. For all his previous preoccupation
with sifting through the ancient ruins looking for “absolute beginnings,” Outland now
understands the Mesa as an imaginative presence that is always with him, that serves
as a source of creative inspiration, and that possess an unshakable permanence. But
just as Tom “possesses” the Mesa by absorbing invisible bodies of divine air, the
Mesa, by extension, possesses him. In Lucretian terms, Outland’s body and the body
of Mesa air are composed of the same basic substance. Therefore, the mingling of
these two bodies creates a balance, which negates Outland’s preoccupation with
ancestral inquiry. His sights are now focused on creation. Outland has attained “a total
vision of the cosmos and of his place within it” and has thus acquired “the harmony of
the self” (Coupe 142).
Both Tom Outland and Professor St. Peter learn to understand that materiality
extends beyond the realm of the senses, and that reality is not necessarily tangible. To
understand that things are real in a Lucretian sense necessarily requires that one
fathom the basic paradox of atomism: things you can see and touch are made of things
that resist sensual perception. Thus, one’s knowledge of the reality of things is
dependant on one’s ability to imagine original matter. This fundamental conceit of
Lucretian materialism speaks to the novel’s historical context, for it ultimately checks
the ancestral obsessions of the novel’s main characters. What St. Peter and Outland
learn to accept—that the same divine substance composes all things—initially seems

108
unfathomable to them. But the lesson that Outland and St. Peter ultimately learn is that
imagination (and by extension narrative), not sensation, is the key to understanding the
origin of Being. By pointing to the fundamental sameness of the basic matter that
composes all things, Cather critiques arbitrary hierarchies designed to link certain
cultures to the beginning of civilization at the expense of other, marginalized cultures.
The poor outcome of Outland’s attempt to attract the Smithsonian Institute to
the artifacts he and Roddy had discovered at Cliff City arguably suggests that Cather
anticipated the extent to which her intermixture of myth and materiality in The
Professor’s House would be either dismissed or overlooked altogether. Although
Outland manages to gain an audience (after considerable effort) first with the Director
of the Smithsonian and later with an “authority on prehistoric Indian remains,”
ultimately his request is met with a lackluster response (211). Excavating Cliff City,
the Smithsonian expert explains to Tom, would require money “and [the Smithsonian]
had none. There was a bill up before Congress for an appropriation. [Tom] would have
to wait” (211). It becomes clear to Outland that his mission has been a failure when his
young female acquaintance at the Institute, Virginia Ward, informs him that the
bureaucrats in charge of the Smithsonian “don’t care much about dead and gone
Indians” (212). The sort of adherence to the status quo that Virginia regrettably
perceives in the behavior of her superiors reflects the very perception of the past at
issue in Cather’s novel. By ignoring an opportunity to put “imaginative constructions”
of prehistoric Indian cultures into a dialogue with the material facts of Outland’s
discovery, the governmental institution with which Outland has chosen to deal not

109
only maintains a position whereby the actual is eclipsed by the presumed, but a
generation of newly conjured imaginative constructions—such as the one
presupposing a blood relation between Outland and the ancient inhabitants of Cliff
City—become entered (however slowly) into popular thought.
Epilogue
Willa Cather’s famous declaration that “the world broke in two in 1922 or
thereabouts,” as well as her subsequent dedication of Not Under Forty (1936) to “the
backward,” has arguably done more than any external criticism to solidify her
reputation as a nostalgist (v). However, Cather’s novel The Professor’s House makes
clear that the backward-glances present in her writing do more than simply verify the
suspicions of nearly a century’s worth of critics. In this chapter I have shown that
Cather’s nostalgia for the frontier constitutes a far more complicated affair than is
typically thought, as ample evidence exists throughout The Professor’s House that
Cather’s formulation of the past is such that bygone days do indeed bear, if not the
brunt, then at least a sizable portion of the blame for the concerns that plague her
characters’ present-day lives. Given the state in which many of Cather’s characters
find themselves, it is clear that past mistakes are largely to blame, and that, moreover,
the mythic language human beings use to render the past by definition obscures the
historical occurrences to which such narratives refer. From St. Peter’s historical work
whereby colonizers are depicted as “adventures” to his regurgitation of the narrative
Tom Outland “had always kept back,” and from the Professor’s enchanted recollection
of the Lake Michigan he knew in his youth to his ultimate confrontation with the

110
earth-loving “Kansas boy” he had been while growing up among the Great Plains,
Cather’s protagonist in The Professor’s House draws on the mythic in order to
substantiate and maintain a debilitating nostalgia.
The Professor’s dangerous reliance on the mythic past to sustain him both
professionally and emotionally not only rebukes those who underestimate the
influence of mythic language on conceptions of historical events, it also critiques the
very sort of feckless adoration of the mythic for which Cather was so often criticized.
Despite her many criticisms of modern-day America’s euphoria for the mass
consumption of material things, her novel The Professor’s House nevertheless
suggests that since the nature of all things is corporeal, one should assess the past as
well as the present by taking into account the material circumstances that precede all
human thoughts, utterances, and behaviors. Furthermore, her novel suggests, one must
be mindful of the historical (and thus the material) basis of all mythic narratives, for to
abide by the mythic without concern for the material is to live neither in the past nor
present, but in the nebulous space of popular imaginative fantasy. By collapsing
discourses such as the mythic and the material—discourses we may not naturally put
together—Cather succeeds in illuminating the material basis of popular nationalist
myths (as Lucretius did before her). Cather accomplishes this task while
simultaneously criticizing the unchecked adherence to the amorphous, ethereal
language of myth—a language deserving of skepticism for it need not be “defined by
the object of its message” in order to form an utterance, and thus to inform and to
persuade (Barthes 109).

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Chapter 3 Endnotes

36
In a letter to Edmund Wilson dated November 25, 1923, Hemingway
unfavorably compares Cather’s One of Ours to E.E. Cummings’s Enormous Room,
which he calls “the best book published last year that I read” (Selected Letters 105).
Of Cather’s novel, Hemingway disparagingly proclaims: “Prize, big sale, people
taking it seriously. You were in the war weren’t you? Wasn’t that last scene in the
lines wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a
Nation. I identified episode after episode, Catherized. Poor woman she had to get her
war experience somewhere” (105).

37
First published in 1933, Granville Hicks’s “The Case Against Willa Cather”
resides among the most well known condemnations of Cather’s inability to develop
her art beyond “painting again and again the Nebraska she had once known”
(Schroeter 142). Hicks attacks Cather’s nostalgia by claiming that the mystical
conceptions of the frontier contained in the pages of O Pioneers! anticipate the
subsequent non-development of Cather’s literary career from that point forward.
Hicks’s views clearly resonate with his contemporary Lionel Trilling, whose 1937
essay “Willa Cather” accuses the author of being completely unable to progress
beyond her fascination with frontier existence: Cather’s “whole body of work,” insists
Trilling, “is an attempt to accommodate and assimilate her perception of the pioneer’s
failure” (Schroeter 149). Trilling holds in equipoise Cather’s depiction of rural people
making their way on the southwestern plain and James Fenimore Cooper’s “very first
presentation of Deerslayer” in which Cooper renders the pioneer figure as “a nearly
broken old man threatened with jail for shooting a deer, a pitiful figure overwhelmed
by the tides of commerce and speculation” (Schroeter 149).

38
My usage of the term “myth” in this chapter derives from Roland Barthes’
claim that “myth is a type of speech” that does not “evolve from the ‘nature’ of
things,” but rather “can only have an historical foundation, for myth is a type of
speech chosen by history” (109-110). Hence, I do not mean to suggest that the
nineteenth-century pioneer and the land with which we typically associate this figure
are somehow intrinsically “mythical”—they are not, but rather they provide the
“historical foundation” for a particular mythic discourse. Nor am I necessarily
interested in the specific derivation of mythical tropes emerging consequent to any
particular historical event said to have occurred in the western United States during the
later half of the nineteenth-century. Rather, my aim is to examine an existing mythic
language, which has been chosen, as Barthes says, “by history,” after it has been
filtered through the imaginative lens of a twentieth-century modernist writer like Willa
Cather.

39
As Michael North has recently shown in a discussion of Cather’s literary
orthodoxy, it is precisely her unusual appropriation of conventional tropes that makes
Cather’s brand of modernism so distinctive. North contends that instead of

112

“repudiating convention in favor of some putative reality” as many male modernists
did, Cather opted to put “convention, in language and behavior, in some sort of critical
resonance until it [yielded] up the freedom inherent within it” (177). Indeed, Cather’s
journeys through such well-traveled mythological territory corroborates North’s
hypothesis, for the “freedom” inherent to her modernist intervention always comes
consequent to her engagement with convention. Although North’s argument addresses
a larger debate regarding the dismissal of Cather’s work by leading male modernists,
his interpretation of Cather’s traditionalism dovetails with this chapter’s interest in
unpacking the aesthetic and cultural relevance of Cather’s mythography.

40
In novels such as O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My
Antonia (1918), Willa Cather famously broadens the scope of American culture by
focusing her attention on poor European immigrants trying make their way amid the
farm lands of the American west. For Cather, it was the underprivileged immigrant of
unremarkable ancestry who largely paved the way of the modern nation.

41
In The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth
Century, R.W.B. Lewis cites Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau as being among those
American literary figures of the nineteenth century who adopted Jefferson’s dictum
that “the dead have neither power nor rights over [the earth]” (quoted in Lewis 16).
This privileging of the here and now, what Lewis describes as the Jeffersonian
“sovereignty of the living,” serves as the backbone to a philosophy holding that the
past should have little or no bearing on the present, and that forms of “inheritance”
such as “tradition” were “mere forms of slavery” (16).

42
In Willa Cather’s Modernism (1990), Jo Ann Middleton argues that while
Cather may not have “sought the designation ‘modernist,’” a number of modernist
“affinities [nevertheless] … elucidate her work” (10). “Although Cather chose not to
experiment with stream-of-consciousness techniques, nor mechanistic prose,”
Middleton insists, “she did fully explore the possibilities of discontinuity as she
developed her techniques of juxtaposition and she mastered the poetic use of the
reverberating symbol and image” (10). Middleton likewise views Cather’s use of the
past as a modernist gesture, maintaining that Cather’s return to the “pre-European,
native American past” is commensurate with familiar modernist invocations of “exotic
primitive culture[s]” or “classic Greek and Roman myth” (10).

43
By pointing out such correspondences between Cather and younger male
modernists I do not mean to suggest that her relationship to them (and them to her)
was any less fraught. Indeed, Michael North has shown that Cather posed a threat to
male authors precisely because the innovations in her work undercut the “crude
practical power” that male writers argued allowed them to access the same aesthetic
creativity that, when approached by women, was considered “homely and artificial”
(175).

113

44
There is little doubt that Willa Cather had an affinity for the rural simplicity of
her youth and that she found much fault with the material concerns of the modern
world. However, an equally powerful – but significantly under discussed – emotional
strand likewise exists in her work that in fact laments the past for the sake of the
present.

45
The archetypal criticism to which I allude here manifested itself in the formal
interpretive techniques of the first half if the twentieth century, coming out of Jungian
psychoanalysis and articulated through the work of American critics such as Northrop
Frye.

46
Obvious cases would include Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), Frank
Norris’ The Octopus (1901), Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), and Jack London’s
The Iron Heel (1908).

47
Turner’s essay first emerged in the form of an address to the American
Historical Association in Chicago, July 12, 1893. By December of that year, printed
versions of “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” had appeared in
both the Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and the Report of
the American Historical Association. In his essay, Turner responds to a recent Census
bulletin in which the amount of “unsettled area” in the western part of the United
States “had been so broken into isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be
said to be a frontier line” (quoted in Turner 1). “The brief official statement” suggest
Turner, “marks the closing of a great historic movement” (1). The disappearance of an
official “frontier line,” however, does not in Turner’s estimation diminish the import
of the frontier to American life. Rather, Turner insists that

American social development has been continually beginning over again on
the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this
expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the
simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American
character.” (2-3).

48
Here I refer in particular to St. Peter’s tendency to mythologize and
subsequently take possession of the people and places he feels embody particular
qualities he lacks. Just as St. Peter assigns value to Lake Michigan and the Solomon
Valley of Kansas because they represent a version of himself with which he has lost
touch, he similarly mythologizes and assumes ownership of the Spanish conquistadors
about whom he writes and his deceased friend Tom Outland for whom he longs and
about whom he dreams.

114

49
According to the novel’s narrator, Outland’s diary “covered only about six
months of the boy’s life, a summer he spent on the Blue Mesa, and in it there was
almost nothing about Tom himself” (Professor’s House 150). The diary contains data
pertaining to Outland’s prehistoric findings at Cliff City only—it does not provide a
written record of his experience. This narrative, known as “Tom Outland’s Story”
exists only within St. Peter’s memory.

50
Naturally the figure of Tom Outland embodies the quintessential Turnerian
American described here, too, and it is by identifying with him that St. Peter
recognizes the ancestral import of his own young life on the Great Plains. The extent
to which the Professor identifies with Outland relates in important ways to the various
parallels that exist in their respective backgrounds. Like St. Peter, Outland was also
forced by his parents to lead a rather nomadic life as a young boy. His experience on
the western plains was much more traumatic, however, as both his parents expired
while “crossing Southern Kansas in a prairie schooner” (Professor’s House 98). Thus,
the journey West deprived Outland not only of his parents, but of a tangible link to his
own origins; although he subsequently recovers his connection with the past (or more
accurately he invents it) on the frontier with Blake. Pioneer life offers Outland a
chance to become an individual, and to exploit the opportunities he sees existing
inherently in the West and on the frontier. By mythologizing Outland, St. Peter
fashions a quintessential American figure—a lowly orphan in whom the promise of
Turnerian frontierism resides.

51
While Titus Lucretius Carus’ precise dates are unknown, conventional wisdom
has it that he was born in the early first century B.C. and that he probably died in the
year 55. Little is know, too, about the poem’s derivation: although Lucretius
specifically addresses his poem to his patron Memmius, the scope of the poet’s work
suggests that he intended the poem to persuade a much wider audience. One famous
but ultimately dubious account of Lucretius’ creation of De Rerum Natura comes by
way of Saint Jerome, who insists that the poet was “poisoned by a madness-inducing
aphrodisiac given him by his wife” and that it was while so inflicted that Lucretius
crafted his masterpiece (Esolen 1).

52
In his excellent three-volume addition of De Rerum Natura, Cyril Bailey has
provided an enlightening gloss on the distinction between anima and animus in
Lucretius’ text. Bailey informs us that “it is sufficient to say that [according to
Lucretius] the anima, [that is] the ‘soul’ or ‘vital principle’ consists of nuclei of ‘soul-
particles’ distributed throughout the body and is the seat of sensation, [while] the
animus or ‘mind’ is an aggregate of undiluted ‘soul-particles’, situated in the breast
and is there the seat of thought and emotion. It is unfortunate that there are no English
words adequate to represent the ideas: ‘soul’ is too vague, and ‘mind’ does not suggest
the seat of emotion, but they must serve in default of better” (1006).

115
Chapter 4

The “Lost Generation” & the Generation of Loss: Ernest Hemingway’s
Materiality of Absence and The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway pulled no punches when it came to decrying Gertrude
Stein’s insistence that his was a “lost generation.”
53
In his posthumously published
memoir A Moveable Feast (1964), Hemingway vehemently dismisses his former
mentor’s “lost generation talk” and attempts to shield postwar American writers from
what he took to be Stein’s unfair condemnation (30).
54
According to Hemingway, a
youthful penchant for “discipline” characterized the literary offerings of his generation
while the work of Stein’s fading set suffered as a result of their “egotism and mental
laziness” (30). But despite the connection he makes here between himself and other
artists of his generation, Hemingway’s investment in the literary aptitude of his peers
was considerably less ardent than was his desire to upstage the body of writers from
whom he inherited his particular craft. Consequently, the “discipline” of which
Hemingway speaks in A Moveable Feast applies mainly to his own painstaking mode
of literary production, which was—in its enormous difficulty—an index of
Hemingway’s commitment to the notion that “[no one] could write any way except the
very best he could write without destroying his talent” (Moveable Feast 155-156).
55
In
keeping with this maxim, Hemingway expresses irritation elsewhere in his memoir at
Stein’s preoccupation with avoiding writing that she considered “inaccrochable” or
socially unacceptable and hence, unpublishable (Moveable Feast 15).
56
From
Hemingway’s perspective, this sort of self-censorship—practiced purely for the sake

116
of increasing one’s chances of publication—was beneath the serious artist, and to the
extent that Stein and others engaged in it, Hemingway gradually came to see himself
as creating something artistically superior. His youthful bravura notwithstanding,
however, Hemingway remained susceptible to what he took to be Stein’s annoyance
regarding his lost generation. Consequently, insofar as Hemingway felt implicated in
Stein’s assessment of all “young people who served in the war” (Moveable Feast 29),
he took the position that even if his generation was lost, he most certainly was not. In
Hemingway’s mind, his literary output ventured beyond the limits of Stein’s so-called
“accrochable” literary forms just as it eclipsed the work of writers his own age.
57

Hemingway rebounded from Stein’s lost generation talk first in the form of a
novella, The Torrents of Spring (1926), which, in its parodic treatment of Sherwood
Anderson’s novel Dark Laughter,

could not have been more “inaccrochable,” at least
as far as Stein was concerned.
58
Anderson, himself a member of Stein’s “apparatus”
(Feast 28), had been at one time—like Stein—a mentor to Hemingway, and in fact
had supplied him with letters of introduction to some of the Paris literary scene’s most
salient figures (not the least of which, of course, was Stein).
59
Hemingway’s attack on
Dark Laughter signaled an obvious renunciation of his former mentor’s tutelage and
drew much consternation from Anderson as well as from Stein (who by this time had
likewise become a mentor to Hemingway). But insofar as The Torrents of Spring
meant to initiate a separation of the apprentice from the master, Hemingway’s novella
had more behind it than mere youthful rebellion. The Torrents of Spring spoke directly
to the question of loss that now—as a consequence of Stein’s assessment of his lost

117
generation—confronted Hemingway. Or, perhaps more precisely, the book allowed its
author to take possession of an inevitable moment of artistic liberation that was
necessarily accompanied by loss: the loss of one’s trusted counselor that comes with
maturity. In Hemingway’s next work, The Sun Also Rises (1926), he expands on this
initial gesture of renunciation—and indeed on the theme of empowerment through the
experience of loss—but in a less obviously parodic way than he had in The Torrents of
Spring. In fact, Hemingway responds to Stein’s provocation directly yet paradoxically
in his first full-length novel by situating loss at the heart of his literary project, making
loss itself the foundation of Hemingway’s bid for literary prominence.
In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway construes loss as a thing possessing
intrinsic value. Rather than focusing on the war-weary aimlessness to which Stein’s
“dirty, easy labels” seem to refer (Moveable Feast 31), Hemingway shifts the
emphasis to absence—to sites of loss (such as his narrator Jake Barnes’s genital
wound) that constitute material spaces within the context of Hemingway’s narrative.
Hemingway seizes upon such instances of loss in material terms by putting emphasis
on a variety of material objects—both inanimate and corporeal—that commemorate
immaterial events. In doing so, Hemingway shows that it is the absent or lost “thing”
that matters, maintains the greatest value, and defines rather than undermines every
generation. Moreover, it is through his emphasis on absent (yet nonetheless crucial)
things that Hemingway makes the experience of loss central to the production of a
new postwar American literature. Like the “frontier worthies” of Civil War era dime
novels who “fought off twenty Indians and rescued the heroine, even with one arm

118
badly wounded” (Etulain 57), Jake Barnes wears his wound like an emblem of valor.
Indeed, Jake has much in common with the Western hero of frontier fiction,
recapturing in an expatriate context the same Rooseveltian individualism that early
twentieth-century Western heroes extracted from a mythologized frontier. But while
Jake embodies the spirit of the land with his monolithic presence and proficiency as an
outdoorsman, his impotence suggests that this expatriate frontier lacks a future.
Ironically, this lack is precisely the value that Jake brings to the myth of the West, for
if this frontier is anything like the frontiersman with whom we associate it (i.e. Jake),
then it is incapable of bearing fruit, meaning that it cannot, unlike the actual American
frontier, come to an end—it is already at one. Hence, from his focus on Jake Barnes’s
lost penis, which Hemingway ironically casts as an object of value, to Jake’s
rumination on commemorative statues in the Latin Quarter of Paris, which ultimately
celebrate loss by memorializing what isn’t there, Hemingway’s negotiation of loss as
both a literary and historical problem is mediated through his engagement with
material things. Within The Sun Also Rises, physical absences such as Jake Barnes’s
genital wound—alongside historical markers of defeat such as the Parisian statue of
Marshal Michel Ney—constitute material spaces wherein Hemingway recasts loss as a
source of artistic power for his generation’s sake, as well as for the sake of his own
literary artifice.
Commemorating Loss
As Hemingway’s protagonist and narrator Jake Barnes makes his way around
the Latin Quarter throughout the first half of The Sun Also Rises, he confronts

119
numerous statues commemorating the bravery and/or ingenuity of several significant
nineteenth-century French citizens. Jake’s fascination with these statues—which
honor, for example, the accomplishments of Joseph Bienaimé Caventou and Pierre-
Joseph Pelletier, the pharmacists who invented quinine, and Claude Chappe, the
inventor of the modern French semaphore system—register as brief digressions in the
text, moments in which the narrator becomes momentarily distracted from the larger
narrative.
60
But one monument—that of Marshal Michel Ney, the Bonapartist military
hero whom Napoleon famously dubbed “the Bravest of the Brave” in 1812—elicits a
more sustained meditation from Hemingway’s wounded protagonist (Foster 213) (see
Fig. 1).
61
Returning home from an evening out with a group of expatriate
acquaintances, Jake pauses to reflect on the statue that stands not far from the
Luxembourg Gardens:
62

I passed Ney’s statue standing among the new-leaved chestnut-trees in the arc-
light. There was a faded purple wreath leaning against the base. I stopped and
read the inscription: from the Bonapartist Groups, some date; I forget. He
looked very fine, Marshal Ney in his top-boots, gesturing with his sword
among the green new horse-chestnut leaves. My flat was just across the street,
a little way down the Boulevard St. Michel. (Sun 37)
63

Jake’s picturesque description of Ney’s statue, in which the figure of Ney is
illuminated (by way of an arc-light) amid blooming Parisian flora, has received very
little critical attention despite its significance, not so much as an extension of Jake’s
aesthetic habit of thought, but more so as an index of his preoccupation with what
Baudrillard has since described as the human need for “a visible past, a visible
continuum, a visible myth of origin to reassure us of our ends” (19).

120
To the extent that Ney’s statue exemplifies a material mode of
commemoration, it thereby functions as a mechanism of both remembrance and the
.

Fig. 1: François Rudé’s statue of Marshal Michel Ney. Photographed by the
author, March 2007.

mythic invention of loss itself, as Ney’s myth is, after all, not one of origin but of
failure. Ney owes his renown largely to the strategic blunders of his Emperor,
Napoleon, under whose command Ney found himself unable to claim victory in any
other but the most undesirable way—through retreat.
64
But Ney’s profound loyalty to
Napoleon, as well as his reputation for extraordinary bravery on the battle field,

121
clearly had less of an impact on Hemingway than did Ney’s association with retreat
and, finally, with failure. In the description of Ney’s statue included in the pages of A
Moveable Feast, for instance, Hemingway recalls “what a fiasco [Ney had] … made
of Waterloo” and offers up Ney’s famous defeats as proof that “all generations were
lost by something and always had been and always would be” (30). Rebuking
Gertrude Stein in her infamous assessment of his generation, Hemingway implies, first
of all, that Ney’s generation was not likely to be any more lost than his own, and that,
moreover, the “egotism and mental laziness” that he identifies among Stein’s own
cohort was as indicative of regret as was Ney’s investment in Napoleon’s ultimately
doomed ambitions. Ney’s actions—indeed his expression of patriotism—were,
according to Hemingway, appropriate for Ney’s time, just as Hemingway’s own
generation’s turn to expatriatism made sense in the context of postwar American
malaise. For Ney’s generation, it seemed, one retreated in order to preserve the state;
for Hemingway’s—and thus for Jake Barnes’s—one retreated to eschew it.
65

Ney’s statue provides a visible (and tangible) memorializing correspondent to
“the real [that] is no longer what it used to be,” thus allowing “nostalgia [to assume]
its full meaning” (Baudrillard 12). As Baudrillard argues, monuments evoke
a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth,
objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived
experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance
have disappeared. (12)

In admiring Ney’s statue, Jake not only recognizes its value with respect to the
development and proliferation of a visible (and mythically inflected) past, but he also
projects his own sense of value onto it, which is to say that he recognizes the statue’s

122
ability to “materialize identity” (Brown, Sense 25). François Rudé’s statue of Ney not
only makes materially manifest Ney’s artificially resurrected identity, but it
contributes to (and indeed assists in) the cultivation of a larger national identity that
has more to do with the narrative necessarily spun off of such a monument’s creation
than it does with actuality, historical or otherwise. The statue, as a simulacrum of
Ney’s personage, manifests, projects, and indeed invites the invention of “second-hand
truth” that in fact then shapes the “actual,” or at least the way in which the actual
comes to be understood. It also provides Jake with both a thing and a narrative with
which to identify: for Jake, Ney’s statue is not only an object of fascination—it also
serves as a site of self-definition.
Whereas the “escalation of the true” in the case of Ney’s statue clearly works
toward cultivating the Marshal’s mettle and virility (he is depicted standing erect,
bravely “gesturing with his sword” amid the chestnut-trees that bloom all around him
as if somehow affected by his potency), the absence commemorating Jake’s war
service undermines the development of his own “second-hand truth.” Indeed, Jake’s
bodily/material loss stands in stark contrast to the simulated figure of Ney, who enjoys
not only a commemorative statue, but one that enhances and underscores his
manhood. Without a visual artifact by which to resurrect his figurative self (or indeed
because the thing Jake has to show for his service is, in fact, an absence that makes the
cultivation of a myth of success much more difficult), the statue’s contribution to the
development of a myth of origin appeals to Jake insofar as the impulse to retreat stems
inevitably from a combined sense of both dismissing and being rejected by the modern

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world. For this lost generation, then, commemorative simulacra such as Ney’s statue
provide the stimulation necessary to inaugurate a cultivation of the real, which may in
fact have nothing to do with the actual, but that nevertheless provides an experiential
framework within which these nationally unhinged figures exist, perhaps even thrive.
In particular, Jake’s fascination with Ney’s statue is aligned with the praise he
receives from his Italian military superiors regarding the site of absence that
memorializes Jake’s own military career: “‘You, a foreigner, an Englishman’ (any
foreigner was an Englishman) ‘have given more than your life’” (Sun 39). Likewise,
for Jake, the significance of the object honoring Ney’s “loss” lies in the circumstances
surrounding the fallen Marshal’s fame. To the extent that retreat (a non-tactile
phenomenon) is what Ney’s statue (a tactile object) commemorates, one can read this
monument as the inverse of the memorializing object that Jake develops in order to
foreground his own loss: his narrative.
66
While Jake’s narrative commemorates a
material loss by way of the immaterial form of a narrative, Ney’s statue—a material
object—pays tribute to an immaterial loss, his retreat from Russia. Thus, a bond exists
between Ney and Jake whereby each possesses the inverse of other’s circumstance.
Though widely ignored, this nexus between Jake’s genital wound and the Marshal’s
commemorative monument initiates a crucial dialogue within Hemingway’s text
around objects and ideas, substance and history. In what follows, I will demonstrate
how a critical element of this discourse involves the struggle of the novel’s characters
to represent verbally the absence memorializing Jake’s profound sacrifice.

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It Isn’t All That
Most recent critical assessments of The Sun Also Rises and of Jake Barnes’s
war wound in particular, have taken their cues from Mark Spilka’s influential work,
Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny (1990). In his book, Spilka contends that
Jake’s body is like that of a woman, in that he “cannot penetrate his beloved but can
only rouse and be roused by her through fervent kisses” (203). Spilka’s androgynous
assessment of Jake’s wound underpins his larger claim that androgyny and a fixation
with androgynous bodies constitutes “submerged and dominant strains” of homoerotic
anxiety in Hemingway’s published fiction (5). Consequent to Spilka’s reading,
scholars have mainly linked Jake’s wounded physical form to Hemingway’s life-long
“struggle with the homo-hetero binarism” (Moddelmog 92) in order to corroborate the
notion that Hemingway’s fiction typically blends “feminine and masculine versions of
manhood” (Spilka 5). While the work of Spilka and others has clearly formed
interpretive inroads into the Hemingway canon with respect to gender studies and
psychoanalytic criticism, such works have insufficiently considered the discursive
complexities inherent in The Sun Also Rises in regard to Jake Barnes’s physical
condition and the materialist discourse that typically frames discussions of Jake’s war-
torn body.
67

When Brett Ashley suggests “It isn’t all that you know” to her not-quite-lover
Jake in forth chapter of The Sun Also Rises (26, emphasis added), her utterance
confronts the problem facing nearly all the novel’s principal characters: that of
rendering—verbally or otherwise—the lingering presence of Jake’s absent penis.

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While Brett clearly means to console Jake when she insists that “it” (her unwillingness
to become romantically involved with him) involves more than “that” (his missing
penis), Jake immediately offers up a sharp retort that undermines her imprecise
allusion to the lack troubling their relationship: “No,” he says, “but it [his wound]
always gets to be” (26, emphasis added). In this brief but interpretively rich line of
dialogue, Jake glibly appropriates Brett’s use of the third person singular pronoun “it,”
which she uses as a synonym for love, but that he employs in reference to his missing
penis. Jake’s linguistic gesture replaces one abstract, immaterial referent (love) with
another (his absent penis), and his usage likewise betrays the clumsiness of Brett’s
attempt at conciliation, as the term “it,” being a neuter pronoun, produces a
connotation more aptly put to use by Jake within the context of the pair’s strained
relationship. By co-opting Brett’s terminology, then, Jake takes possession of the
cavalier language she has employed to represent his wound, which is made evident in
Jake’s proclamation that “what happened to [him] is supposed to be funny” and that
“[he] never think[s] about it” (26, emphasis added).
Jake’s response to Brett reveals his refusal to tolerate her attempts to cast his
sexual condition in abstract, offhand terms. It also underscores the fact that, in general,
Jake insists upon setting the parameters of connotative language as it relates to his war
wound and attendant impotency. But Jake’s rebuke notwithstanding, the looming
absence of Jake’s penis manifests itself, in part, by way of non-specific terms like “it”
and “that” throughout the rest of the novel. By employing such vague terms to render
Jake’s woeful state, Hemingway’s characters afford themselves the luxury of

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identifying Jake’s wound discursively while likewise maintaining the unspoken
ambiguity of its character. Due to the uncertain material actuality of his war wound—
which exists because Jake’s sexual body has been “rearticulated” and thus made
“culturally unintelligible”(Butler 3)
68
—Jake, as an object of sexual desire and/or
possession, defies the evaluative context of sexual exchange that Hemingway
cultivates within his text and to which Brett Ashley has grown accustomed.
Consequently, the novel toys with Jake’s material indeterminacy—insofar as it
concerns the novel’s treatment of hetero-normative interchanges of sexuality—by
utilizing a commodity discourse that works toward assigning value to the material
void of Jake’s physical privation. Yet despite the relative transparency of the discourse
involving Jake’s condition, “its” exact nature—that is, the specific details of Jake’s
sexual privation—goes rather ominously undeclared.
This textual omission remains consistent throughout the novel despite the fact
that we now know Hemingway to have fully conceptualized the nature of Jake’s
wound even though he chose not to disclose it within the novel’s pages. In a 1951
letter to Thomas Bledsoe,
69
Hemingway explains that The Sun Also Rises
came from a personal experience in that when I had been wounded at one time
there had been an infection from pieces of wool cloth being driven into the
scrotum. Because of this I got to know other kids who had genitor urinary
wounds and I wondered what a man’s life would have been like after his penis
had been lost and his testicles and spermatic chord remained intact. I had
known a boy that had happened to. So I took him and made him into a foreign
correspondent in Paris and, inventing, tried to find out what his problems
would be when he was in love with someone who was in love with him and
there was nothing that they could do about it. (Selected Letters 25)
70

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While Hemingway clearly understood the extent of Jake’s wound, he chose to
withhold this information from his novel’s readers. This tendency toward linguistic
obfuscation concerning the specifics of Jake’s wound is indicative of the novel’s
overall enigmatic treatment of the circumstances surrounding both his devastating loss
and its traumatic aftermath. Although such a distanced approach to Jake’s wound is
certainly of a piece with Hemingway’s famously terse style—and moreover might be
explained away (at least in part) through a consideration of the censorship regulations
of the day—the discursive mechanisms that enable the novel’s characters to conceal
willfully their feelings about and the actuality of Jake’s wound is nevertheless worthy
of closer consideration, especially as it relates to the handful of key exchanges, mainly
between Brett and Jake, but also between Jake and his friend Bill Gorton that, taken
together, delineate the rationale behind such coy wordplay. By insisting, as Bill puts it,
that “That’s the sort of thing that can’t be spoken of. That’s what you ought to work
up into a mystery” (115, emphasis added), Jake’s confidantes establish a discourse of
non-specificity whereby the inaccessibility of the novel’s central preoccupation—
Jake’s missing penis—becomes the unspoken source of a wide array of behaviors
ranging from nostalgic longing to libidinal expression. But the novel’s many attempts
to represent discursively, yet indirectly, Jake’s sexual lack also consistently underpin
Hemingway’s figural development of the postwar American hero.
Frontier Absence
The representation of Jake’s wound not only allows the novel’s characters to
establish a collective discursive space, but it also enables Hemingway to found a

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newly modernist literary hero—one who is nonetheless part of the literary tradition he
seems to reject. This tradition is that of early twentieth-century gunfighter cowboys
such as Owen Wister’s Virginian and Zane Grey’s Lassiter.
71
On the one hand, by
casting Jake in the image of these figures Hemingway anticipates the hardened,
detached, and ultra-macho heroes he would go on to develop first in stories like “Fifty
Grand” (1927) and later in novels like To Have and Have Not (1937). But in the case
of The Sun Also Rises, Jake specifically represents the problem Hemingway faced in
depicting American masculinity after the conclusion of the First World War. Jake’s
familiarity to readers lay in Hemingway’s portrayal of him as a crafty, quick-witted,
self-sufficient American frontier hero—the type popularized by “red blooded writers”
such as Wister and Grey (Slotkin 159). Like these well-known heroic types, Jake is an
isolated figure; despite his association with the constellation of expatriates who
populate Hemingway’s text, Jake’s profound social detachment registers among his
most salient characteristics. Despite being acquainted with many of his fellow
expatriates, Jake has only two relationships involving anything resembling intimacy:
namely, the one he has with Bill Gorton (with whom he descends upon the Irati river
in an episode typically read as a pastoral counterpoint to the novel’s metropolitan
scenes) and his love affair with Brett Ashley (the object of Jake’s romantic and
libidinous desire with whom he cannot engage sexually).
Notwithstanding Jake’s similarity to the early twentieth-century western hero,
Jake’s impotence severely undermines his ability to live up to the gunslinger tradition
with which his persona is so closely aligned. Thus it is in Jake that we see Hemingway

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working through the problem of drawing the popular cowboy hero in a post-World
War I context of American expatriation wherein the robust virility that was once a
“primary sign of social and moral superiority” has been replaced by a wounded
impotence (Slotkin 176).
72
Like the aforementioned heroic figures from which he
descends, Jake possesses youth, gentility and, most importantly, the love of an “upper-
class heroine,” Lady Brett Ashley (Smith 97).
73
But it is, of course, the ironic quality
of his strained love affair with Brett that troubles Jake most as a heroic personage,
since his inability to consummate their relationship necessarily impels the narrative
into unfamiliar generic territory. Jake’s inability to fulfill the sexual demands of the
novel’s heroine is of a piece with his failure to live up to the expectations of his heroic
lineage. What is more, the futility of Brett’s desire for a physical love affair with Jake
underscores (and runs parallel to) the novel’s preoccupation with traumatic loss and a
subsequent longing for that which is unattainable—a preoccupation that manifests
itself both materially and imaginatively by way of Jake’s sexual wound.
Whereas the novel’s characters attempt to position themselves within a
postwar, expatriate milieu, the book’s author attempts to negotiate the new American
literary context produced by and within the war’s aftermath. Thus, the novel’s
preoccupation with economic discourse is mapped onto its profound interest in getting
a purchase on what isn’t ever there: a substantive correspondence to the now obsolete
campaign of writing American literature for the sake of reaffirming the artist’s
“imaginary relationship with the past,” and in so doing unifying American literary
culture (Clark x). In Jake’s war wound, then, the crippled mythos of the frontier hero,

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indeed of the frontier settlement in general, manifests itself in the form of a significant
loss—a material absence that haunts the novel’s expatriate characters with the
inherited weight of a tradition no longer applicable (such as that of the pioneer hero
whose conquests were drawn in terms of edenic frontierism) and forms of artistic and
nationalistic growth no longer ideologically possible.
74
Thus, the cultural
unintelligibility of the hero’s war-torn body and the relentlessly absent presence of his
materially lacking instrument of both literal and figurative (re)production provides an
index of what this generation of expatriates have indeed “lost”: the efficacy of their
literary tradition, and the tools and wherewithal with which to inscribe a new one.
This is not to say, of course, that the traditional literary mode that seems to
hold these figures in check—in its indebtedness to Jacksonian expansionism and the
consequent mythologizing of what was clearly in large part a campaign invested in the
dispossession of native peoples and in material acquisition in general—is necessarily
worthy of valorization, at least not in terms of its informing political ideology. Indeed,
Hemingway’s text, on the one hand, goes out of its way to dismiss the literary heritage
out of which it has emerged; its parodic treatment of figures like Robert Cohn, Robert
Prentiss, and others suggests that if this generation of American would-be artists can
indeed be called “lost” it is because—their seeming confidence in their own abilities
notwithstanding—they lack the self-possession to see beyond the parameters of
erstwhile literary forms. Still, despite its implied critique of expatriate artists and their
tendency to draw from (rather than reinvent) American literary traditions,

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Hemingway’s novel ironically pays its own debt to the American literary past by
virtue of its characterization of the expatriate figures it purports to critique.
Shards of the Past
If the First World War and its aftermath in the United States exploded
American literary history, it was the dilapidated remains of that tradition that helped
formulate Hemingway’s early modernism, a modernism that—in both its debt to and
critique of its nineteenth-century literary heritage—inevitably engendered a fiction
that played host to the residual shards of a forgone literary era. These fragments
remain embodied not only in physically and psychologically damaged, sexually
incapacitated figures like Jake Barnes (as well as in morally repugnant, wayward
aristocrats like Brett Ashley) but they also manifest themselves in the novel’s ethnic,
racial, and sexual politics—a retrograde politics that the novel’s impotent narrator,
Jake, seemingly throws his weight behind. For instance, in reassessing his depiction of
Robert Cohn, Jake momentarily breaks away from his narrative in order to say of his
Jewish associate the following:
Somehow I feel I have not shown Robert Cohn clearly. The reason is until he
fell in love with Brett, I never heard him make one remark that would, in any
way, detach him from other people. He was nice to watch on the tennis-court,
he had a good body, and he kept it in shape … He loved to win at tennis. He
probably loved to win as much as Lenglen, for instance. ( 45)

In this passage, Jake’s anti-Semitism, spurred on by the jealousy he feels regarding
Cohn’s affair with Brett (the result of a weekend the two had spent in San Sebastian
together), combines with his misogynistic view of female athletes such as tennis
player Suzanne Rachel Flore Lenglen.
75
In describing Cohn as he might describe an

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athletic woman upon whom he had set his gaze (“He was nice to watch on the tennis-
court, he had a good body”), and by comparing Cohn’s sportsmanship (“he loved to
win at tennis”) to that of Lenglen—as per Jake’s disparaging depiction of her (“He
probably loved to win as much as Lenglen, for instance”)—Jake not only feminizes
the figure of the Jew, but also implicitly undermines the legitimacy of the female
athlete by associating her with his hostile view of Jewishness. Scenes such as this one
pepper the novel’s pages and make clear that Hemingway’s modernism (while in no
way purely mimetic) absorbed rather then impugned the prejudicial bent inherent in
the ideologies informing past American literatures—as did, of course, American
culture in general during the years leading up to and following the First World War.
While such treatment of women and minorities within the pages of
Hemingway’s fiction is clearly nothing new to those familiar with his work—or
indeed to students of American modernism in general—it is the way in which these
prejudices manifest themselves in The Sun Also Rises that is of interest here. While
Jake obviously takes offense at Cohn’s brief but tumultuous sexual relationship with
Brett, it is not because Cohn threatens to undermine Brett’s feelings for Jake. Clearly
Cohn does not pose much of a threat in that regard, as Brett quickly makes public the
extent to which she has tired of him (as she does, more or less, of all her lovers with
the exception of Jake, with whom of course she cannot have genital intercourse).
Rather, Jake’s irritation is a consequence of his “old grievance” (that is, his war
wound) which renders him unable to fulfill Brett’s sexual expectations. Thus, his
sexual lack allows men like Cohn (here depicted quite unfairly as anathema) to step in

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for Jake, the now incapacitated hero, who later in the novel—in a scene that adds
insult to injury in this context—gets punched so hard in a scuffle with his Jewish
adversary that he is rendered unconscious.
Jake’s “cultural unintelligibility,” then, not only disallows him from
functioning in his traditional mode, lending a layer of romantic heroism to the project
of conquest (here represented symbolically by way of sex), but the generic space made
available by his missing penis opens up possibilities for non-traditional heroes like
Cohn to replace him, their own ethnic unintelligibility notwithstanding. Hence the
possibility emerges for generic (and, with respect to possible offspring, genetic)
mutation to occur, and the discomfort that consequently registers among the novel’s
characters (and in particular, within Jake) coincides with widespread discriminatory
concerns of the time. But what is perhaps most worthy of note regarding the passage
in which Jake reconsiders his treatment of Robert Cohn has to do with what Jake
chooses to omit from his description. In addition to being troubled by the fact that
Cohn possesses that which Jake does not—a penis, which allows Cohn to pursue, and
indeed to experience, sexual relations with Brett—Jake is equally rankled by Cohn’s
ethnicity, as Jake’s inferred anti-Semitism in the aforementioned passage makes clear.
But while Jake tells us at the beginning of chapter one of Cohn’s Jewishness, he fails
to include that information in the passage cited above. As a result, Cohn’s ethnicity
becomes an unspecified absence that functions as a crucial presence.
While Jake wishes to recuperate his own loss in order to wield narrative power,
he acknowledges Cohn’s power (as a sexual replacement) over him and thus sets about

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undermining Cohn’s power within his narrative. Cohn’s ethnicity registers in the
context of Jake’s description as another unspoken absence that is nevertheless
luminously present. Whereas material absence or loss becomes an expression of power
for Jake, omission in this instance allows Jake to create an absence that leads to the
disintegration of Cohn’s power. In failing to mention Cohn’s ethnicity while exacting
his ethnic slur, Jake takes advantage of the reader’s associative abilities vis-à-vis
Cohn’s surname. By allowing the reader’s mind to generate Cohn’s Jewishness by
way of association, Jake anticipates and co-opts his reader’s train of thought, thereby
alienating Cohn. Just as Jake fights against others’ use of neuter pronouns to render his
wound (as their use establishes an unspoken but associative understanding among his
expatriate clique) Jake employs a similar technique here to establish an understanding
with his reader, thus taking away from Cohn the power he may have gained by way of
his able-bodied state. Although Jake has lost his controlling center of conventional
masculine power, he maintains control over his narrative, and in this way recasts loss
as authority.
The Idea of the Thing
As Bill Brown has recently shown, attempts to seize upon the materiality of
things—no matter how “concrete or self-evident” such objects may be—tend to
produce accounts of material phenomena in which “the idea of the thing” resides in
“some imagined place of origin” (Sense 1). Such attempts at apprehending material
objects, Brown continues, “employ a temporal structure wherein the mereness of the
thing, its present physical presence, is inseparable from its metaphysical [and hence

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imaginatively conceived] past” (Sense 1). According to Brown, then, investigations
into the “mereness” of things always begin with thoughts about objects and end with
materializations of preexisting thoughts. Brown’s overview of the ways in which ideas
and things have been historically paired provides a backdrop for his argument that
characterizations of things which privilege a priori mental representations occlude the
possibility of ideas actually existing within, and not beyond, material objects. Brown’s
project, then, is to explore—within the context of American modernism—the pressure
things “exert on us to engage them as something other than mere surfaces” (Sense 12).
Thus, the “object matter” of interest to Brown is that which American modernism
wished to “penetrate” in order to find the subject “within an object” (Sense 12).
While Brown’s elucidating analysis clearly provides insight into the object
culture abundantly interfused into turn-of-the-century American literature, his exegesis
stops short of examining modernism’s absorption of a decidedly commodity-minded
engagement with the human form—or more specifically with the incorporation of
bodies (or pieces of bodies) into the prevailing economic discourse of production,
distribution, and consumption. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises provides an excellent
example of a work that both critiques and relies upon the commodification of bodies,
as the cavalier attitudes engendered by an endless array of material trivialities likewise
constitutes the basis for human valuation within the context of Hemingway’s
expatriate Paris. Within this broader economic framework, the apprehension of things
makes human as well as inanimate objects commensurate, and thus the act of
assessing the value of “things” remains unencumbered by human factors.

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Consequently, formulations of objects that privilege a priori imaginative thought can
be helpful in identifying the unusual nexus we find in The Sun Also Rises between
ideas about things that traverse the boundaries of individual subjectivities (i.e. that
actually exist in the “metaphysical past”) and ideas that do indeed reside within
things—even things that are, like Jake Barnes’s missing penis, not empirically present.
The material absence of Jake Barnes’s penis in fact maintains a foundational
presence throughout Hemingway’s novel—a presence made all the more ubiquitous, I
argue, by the ideological pairing of loss and creative maturation contained within the
now missing object, as well as by the hetero-normative conceptions of generative
prowess associated with its former material form. The imagined idea of Jake’s pre-war
sexual body, an idea that existed before as well as after the traumatic loss of his penis,
impinges upon subjective perceptions of that object’s present circumstance of absence.
Moreover, such perceptions are complicated by the fact that Hemingway renders this
absence as itself a thing containing its own set of ideas about the relative value of loss.
Consequently, the idea of Jake’s undamaged penis (that is, the idea of it as a “normal”
sexual instrument and consequently of Jake as an able-bodied man) exists as a
normative formation within the subconscious register of the novel’s characters.
Despite the material absence of Jake’s penis, then, the idea of its former empirical
presence remains; this lingering intellection determines (or perhaps overdetermines)
the severity of Jake’s postwar condition, thus establishing multiple economies of
sexual interaction and exchange that underscore the prevailing motif of absence
rendered throughout the novel in terms of value, power, and control.

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While these residual notions of material masculinity and their subsequent
sexual economies determine exactly that which Jake’s postwar form cannot embody
within the fictive world Hemingway has created, the material absence made manifest
in Jake’s genital wound does play host to the novel’s ideological quest to position loss
as a source of creative dominance. As a result of the novel’s investment in Jake’s
rearticulated sexual form, The Sun Also Rises necessarily resists critical assessments
which argue that Jake’s mastery over inanimate instruments—say, for example, a
fishing rod—actually represents the reacquisition of his “manhood.” Rather than
substitute, as some critics have claimed, some “fetishized commodity [whose] …
Freudian symbolic significance is something less than subtle” for the “version of
[Jake’s] maleness [lost during] the first World War” (Leland, “Economy of
Masculinity” 37), Hemingway actually forgoes the possibility of such masculine
“recovery” (Leland, “Economy of Masculinity” 37), establishing instead a sexual
economy in which the irretrievability of material masculinity holds substantial value.
While readily available (and thus easily tradable) commodities rarely escape
trivialization within Hemingway’s fictive Paris, bodily objects that lack physicality
(which are among the only objects in Hemingway’s novel that can be said to contain
“ideas”) fetch a substantial sum.
Although the import of such material absences cannot be overstated when
reading The Sun Also Rises, recent examinations of Hemingway’s novel—even ones
that consider the extent to which Jake’s “spending power” allows him to establish an
“American, male, expatriate identity”—fail to account for the way in which the

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absence created by Jake’s genital wound establishes the parameters of exchange that
define relations between most of the novel’s characters (Leland, “Economy of
Masculinity” 37). For instance, one recently published article argues that “it is not
toward objects themselves, or even accumulation and possession, that Jake’s spending
thrives” (Leland, “Economy of Masculinity” 40); rather, the author insists, Jake
engages in the act of spending in order to compensate for his sexual disability.
76
But
while Jake’s “earning and spending practices” (Leland, “Economy of Masculinity” 37)
may indeed work toward “forming a new, distinctly non-Franklinian idea of
‘American virtue,’” the “gap in [the novel’s] economy” created by Jake’s disinterest in
“accumulation and possession” (Leland, “Economy of Masculinity” 40) does not so
much establish his “male, expatriate identity” as it does underscore the lack defining
Jake’s irreparably damaged material masculinity. In fact, the ephemeral quality of
Jake’s purchases aligns his liberal spending habits with his physical circumstance—
which is to say, to pay and not to gain (as Jake commonly does) is, in essence, to lose.
Such monetary losses, then, rather than compensating for Jake’s genital
absence, work toward reinforcing its profound effect on his masculine identity. The
extent to which Jake has nothing to show for the money he spends puts his purchasing
practices on par with the war-time expenditures that cost him his penis. And it is these
expenditures that define Jake’s role within Hemingway’s fictive world, a world
inhabited by individuals who understand the untarnished materiality of the male body
as a fundamental element of (hetero-normative) masculine identity. Within this
framework, the gender alignments of Hemingway’s postwar Paris trouble the

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existence of a hero such as Jake, as he has been deprived of the very phallic signifier
so central to the ultra-masculine figure his literary context seems to demand he
embody. Thus Jake’s sexual depravation ensures that he remains at odds not only with
his fictive circumstance, but with the “portraits of sportsmen and soldiers, rum runners
and runaways” that were part of Hemingway’s attempt to revive “the lost frontier and
the possibilities of masculinity” for which he remains, in part, so widely known
(Spilka 63).
But Jake Barnes (who critics typically place alongside able-bodied Hemingway
heroes such as Robert Jordan and Nick Adams) in fact constitutes a different kind of
hero than is generally associated with the author, a hero whose misbegotten virtue
manifests itself in the form of a debilitating injury, an injury typically involving the
loss of some part of the body. Whereas Jake becomes wounded while fighting on the
Italian Front during the Great War, Harry Morgan, the hero of Hemingway’s 1937
novel To Have and Have Not, loses his arm after being shot while smuggling liquor
from Cuba to Key West. Despite the illegality of Harry’s occupation, the intentions
that underlie his actions are virtuous: after his attempts to earn an honest living as a
fishing boat captain fail, Harry turns to running contraband in order to support his wife
and daughters; it is during a smuggling operation gone bad that Harry loses his arm.
Likewise, Jake, in defending the solidarity of continental Europe, loses his penis and is
thus rendered impotent. In both cases, though, the intentions of these men, virtuous
though they may be, are not totally unimpeachable: Harry perhaps too easily resorts to
human trafficking and ultimately murder, while Jake, who enlists in the Italian air

140
force (presumably to avoid more harried conflict under the auspices of American
operations) ends up flying on what is by his own admission a “joke front” (Sun 31).
Either of these men could have chosen different, arguably more virtuous paths. Harry,
for instance, could have taken up some other, less compromising means of
employment, and Jake could have demonstrated a stronger commitment to the war
effort by enlisting, for example, in the U.S. military—thereby perhaps avoiding
engagement in a front he knew to be a “joke.” But these faults notwithstanding, both
Harry and Jake wear their wounds as symbols of profound sacrifice, and—in terms of
their effect on the women in their lives—are duly rewarded for their pains. For
instance, Harry’s wife Marie finds her husband doubly alluring after his accident,
insisting that his insecurities regarding his missing arm are “silly”: “Any that’s you I
like,” Marie says assuredly, put “it across here. Put it along there. Go on. I like it” (To
Have 113, emphasis added).
As is the case concerning Brett’s ambiguous naming of Jake’s genital wound,
the object to which Marie evidently refers, Harry’s missing arm, doesn’t empirically
exist. In this instance, however, Marie employs the term “it” in order to rehabilitate
Harry’s masculinity. Whereas Jake’s missing penis increases his desirability as far as
Brett is concerned because it enhances and sustains her power as a pursuer, Marie’s
recalibrated desire for “any that’s [her husband]” seems genuinely to enhance Harry’s
desirability, at least in the context of Marie’s extraordinary blend of perversion (“Go
on. I like it”) and devotion (“Any that’s you I like”). The sexual enthusiasm Marie
exhibits regarding her husband’s rearticulated material form is not unlike that of

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Renata, Colonel Richard Cantwell’s nineteen year old Italian love interest in
Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees (1950). Despite the Colonel’s
“split” hand, which, the narrator tells us, “had been shot through twice, and [thus] was
slightly misshapen” (Across 58) as well as his missing knee cap, which he had lost
during World War I, Renata finds the Colonel all but completely irresistible sexually.
Like Jake Barnes and Harry Morgan, Colonel Cantwell offers to his lover a damaged,
incomplete body that elicits in her overwhelming sexual desire. But despite their
numerous sexual encounters and endless mutual declarations of love, Renata vows
never to marry the Colonel, whose ailing heart is sure to end the Colonel’s life
prematurely. In denying her lover his utmost desire, Renata, like Brett in The Sun Also
Rises, inverts the traditional paradigm of courtship and thereby emerges in firm
control of her own powers of pursuit—her restraint, in this case, defines the
composition of her virtue.
Similarly, in The Sun Also Rises, immediate satisfaction of desire is always
unsatisfactory; it is always undone by virtuous restraint, which accounts for the fact
that upon each successive tryst with the many able-bodied men with whom she
exchanges sexual favors, Brett returns to Jake, whose desirability never subsides, as
his own desire can never be unleashed. Jake is materially bound always to remain
morally untarnished. Thus a link can be said to exist between Jake’s circumstances
vis-à-vis Brett’s desire and Hemingway’s claim that that The Sun Also Rises was about
“how people go to hell” (Selected Letters 204). Hemingway’s novel, understood now
to be much more of an indictment than a celebration of expatriate culture,
77
expresses

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its investment in the moral high-ground by way of Jake’s impotency, which
consistently undoes Brett’s sexual capriciousness. To the extent that (within
Hemingway’s fictitious realm of hetero-normative relations) the libidinal modern
woman always returns to the impotent world-weary man, Hemingway, by depriving
Jake of material masculinity, ironically casts his hero as a better, more desirable,
object. Thus, not only does Jake’s missing penis represent the power to be gained
though creative “losses,” but its material absence also puts in check the liberal
sexuality and idleness of the novel’s expatriate community. Thus, Jake’s new,
rearticulated material form gains a certain currency within his social circle, as Mike
Campbell and Robert Cohen, Jake’s rivals for Brett’s affection, find Jake’s sexual
irrelevance valuable, just as Brett comes to value—in a somewhat backhanded way—
the prolonged agony of desire that his sexual indefiniteness engenders.
While Brett’s longing for Jake proves itself to be emotionally costly, it is also
the case that Brett values Jake’s war-torn body precisely for its failure to satisfy her
sexually. For Brett, to seek satisfaction continually without hope of achieving it is to
revise the framework of sexual exchange within Hemingway’s text: rather than remain
the object of the male hero’s sexual pursuit, Brett becomes the novel’s primary sexual
pursuer. Moreover, Jake’s condition not only allows Brett to pursue him, but to
maintain her pursuit indefinitely. Brett’s desire—the desire that Jake’s material
absence produces—now manifests itself in her unwavering fascination with Jake’s
loss of “masculine power and authority”—what Wendy Martin has described as “the
axiomatic right to exercise social control” that Jake would otherwise possess given the

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gender alignments of Hemingway’s hyper-masculine fictive world (70).
78
While in
traditional Anglo-European courtship narratives, Martin continues, “the woman’s
power is the power to be pursued” (70), in the case of Brett’s courtship of Jake, she
not only “maximizes her opportunities … by retaining the interest of multiple suitors”
(70) such as her fiancé Michael, Robert Cohn, and the young bullfighter Pedro
Romero, but she also prolongs indefinitely the powers of pursuit she now wields.
Thus, for Brett, Jake’s impotence solidifies his enduring value as an object, rather than
an agent, of pursuit.
Moreover, the desire that Brett experiences resembles the allegorical
relationship that exists between named cultural absences and the human desire to
possess them that we find in larger cultural (and market oriented) contexts.
79
Hence
the absence that in this case drives Brett Ashley’s desire, and that induces among most
of the novel’s characters a cathected response to Jake’s wound, emanates, I argue,
from an unconscious mnemonic formation, a sense of the “missing” or “lost” past that
(to use Abraham and Torok’s term)
80
has been “incorporated,” buried, or hidden
within the subjective unconscious of most all of the novel’s characters. This
“incorporated” subconscious component—a longing for what once was but is no
more—constitutes the human desire explored in Hemingway’s text to access the
inaccessible material past, a past which – though unknown – nonetheless persists
subjectively in the form of imagined circumstance. Thought about the past begets
imaginative reverie, which in turn begets myth, fantasy, and sometimes, falsehood. In
the case of The Sun Also Rises, the desire associated with Jake’s own inaccessible past

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(and in particular with the form of his body before the war) corresponds to a more
broad consideration of longing for historical context as it relates to the project of
writing a modernist literature not only after the war, but after Stein, Anderson, and
others.
In Restraint of Trade
One consequence of Brett’s ability to perceive the value of Jake’s genital
wound is that it attenuates her experience of pleasure, as Brett’s valuation of material
absence calls into question the desirability of her own untarnished material form.
Despite the extent to which the novel’s economic framework (in which loss constitutes
power) benefits Brett by allowing her to maintain indefinitely her role as sexual
pursuer, this system of exchange conversely threatens to undercut Brett’s sexual allure
since it disallows Jake, the novel’s most longed for character, to use her body in order
to gain physical satisfaction. The numerous sexual exchanges that occur between Brett
and her many able-bodied lovers primarily involve their use of her body (at her
invitation) to “spend” their physical desires so that Brett’s own pleasure (whatever its
extent) at least on the surface remains “undercover” or merely responsive. Her
relations with Jake, however, require that she insist upon his keeping a physical
distance from her, as Jake’s touch would force her to confront the materiality of her
own body.
For instance, when Brett breaks away from the kiss she and Jake share at the
beginning of chapter four, insisting that Jake please not touch her (25), it becomes
clear that the taboo she puts on touching is manifestly a way to avoid confronting that

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fact that Brett ironically is without the kind of “lack” or absence that produces infinite
desire. To the extent that the wound from which Jake suffers has become, for Brett, a
projection of her own internalized “lack” (a lack that manifests itself in the wholeness
of her sexual form, which, in being obtainable, has a limited range of desirability),
Jake’s touch, which is necessarily for and about Brett’s body (as it cannot ever be
about his), emphasizes the lack of satisfaction her material body is doomed to provide.
Not only is Brett’s desirability limited in that she—unlike Jake—can be obtained
materially/sexually, but what’s more the satisfaction she longs for by way of sex with
Jake can never occur in any way because his touch can only underscore her inability to
satisfy him, and thus emphasize the inevitability of her sexual failure. Moreover,
Jake’s subsequent question, “What’s the matter” (26, emphasis added), brings the
doubled nature of his exchange with Brett into bold relief, as it is in fact the subject of
sexual touching—as Brett in particular imagines it—that defines their material
relationship. The “matter” in this case not only refers to the problem at hand (Brett’s
inability to please Jake sexually) it also underscores the question of value that defines
their relationship, as it is both the presence of her own sexual matter and the absence
of his that repeatedly brings Brett back to Jake.
Thus it is the thing comprising the void at the novel’s center that both Jake and
Brett seek to replace through a discourse of materialism, which in turn reveals Jake’s
loss of material masculinity as the reason that he is so removed from American
commodity culture as to be an expatriate. To that end, within his narrative Jake
typically limns the materiality of his indeterminate sexual body by dint of a

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consumerist idiom. For example, Jake “possesses” his injury while Brett “pays” for
loving a man incapable of completing a sexual transaction (26-27). Brett’s frustration
regarding her love for Jake motivates her cruelty, which she expresses early in the
novel upon seeing Jake at the bal musette in the company of the prostitute Georgette.
Brett characterizes Jake’s relation with Georgette as a transaction made “in restraint of
trade” (22), thus opting to embarrass and degrade him in public rather than have
anyone think that a prostitute could somehow undercut the degree to which Jake finds
Brett alluring. Brett’s neglectful treatment of Jake reinforces the extent to which she
finds him valuable, as it is Jake’s condition, after all, that enables Brett to enjoy the
gender inversion brought about by her sexual pursuit of him. In essence, Jake’s “loss”
is Brett’s gain—a condition that functions in tandem with the general mode of neglect
likewise demonstrated by the novel’s other characters.
One such character, Jake’s vacationing American friend Bill Gorton, combines
a contagious social affability with an alarming irreverence for things and people alike
that underscores his daft consumerism. Gorton, Jake explains, had made “a lot of
money on his last book and was going to make a lot more” (70). While Jake never
reveals the genre or subject matter of Gorton’s literary enterprise, he makes clear that
Gorton’s wealth is substantial enough to sustain his profoundly cavalier attitude about
commerce and material experience. Gorton arrives in Paris three weeks before his
planned trip with Jake is set to begin, as he means to get in some traveling alone
before moving on to Pamploma with Jake at the end of June. After a brief stay in
Jake’s flat, Gorton embarks on a whirlwind tour of eastern Europe, making his way

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first to Vienna and then to Budapest. Upon introducing Gorton into the narrative, Jake
immediately establishes the thoughtlessness motivating Gorton’s assessments not only
of Vienna and Budapest, but also of New York and the United States in general.
The paltry amount of linguistic capital Gorton is willing to spend to describe
the places he visits and the experiences he enjoys emphasizes their profound lack of
importance to him. Gorton uses the term “wonderful” to describe all geographical
locales and all states of being; his feeble evaluative utterances thereby draw attention
to the general ambivalence his wealth allows him to express. According to Jake,
Gorton “was very cheerful [upon his arrival in Paris] and said the states were
wonderful’ and that “New York was [likewise] wonderful” (70, emphasis added). And
once his eastern European travels begin, Gorton sends postcards to Jake saying,
“Vienna was wonderful” and later that “Budapest was wonderful” (69-70, emphasis
added). Although he admits, upon his return to Paris, that Vienna had “seemed better
than it [actually] was” (70), Gorton explains that his drunkenness (which lasted for
four days) had clouded his initial appraisal of the Austrian capital, and moreover
affected his ability to recollect his experiences there, as he cannot recall any of his
activities beyond writing Jake a post card (70). Rather than savoring his travels, then,
Gorton fritters away his time and his money, irreverently dismissing the privilege he
obviously enjoys.
Gorton’s drunken and dismissive behavior likewise manifests itself once he
returns to Paris. For instance, during one of his jaunts around the French Quarter with
Jake in which Gorton spies a taxidermist’s shop, he pesters Jake about Jake’s liberal

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spending habits, suggesting that Jake should buy “anything,” even something as
useless as a nice “stuffed dog” (72). Jake responds by pointing out Gordon’s
inebriated state (“You’re pie-eyed”), but Gorton carries on, playfully suggesting that
such an object would mean “everything in the world” to Jake after he bought it (72).
Simple exchange of values. You give them money. They give you a stuffed dog.” (72)
Gorton’s statements are in accord with the novel’s overall trivialization of material
commodities, a tendency that Jake adopts, on the one hand, to downplay his own
material unintelligibility (as an existing, functioning penis constitutes just another
everyday object), and on the other hand to assign value to himself according to the
language of material exchange utilized by his associates. Thus, in relation to the
transaction Bill proposes regarding the stuffed dog, the value of Jake’s cultural
unintelligibility comes into bold relief, as the various voices at play in normalizing
Jake’s unstable material body manifest themselves at every turn throughout
Hemingway’s text. Like the relation between Jake and Brett, the one that exists
between Jake and Bill consists of a pursuer and of one being pursued. And their
friendship, though not undone, is in its own way wounded by that fact that Jake cannot
“measure up” to Bill’s estimation of what constitutes a man.
With respect to the pair’s fishing excursion to Spain, Jake functions not so
much as a leader than as a facilitator. Jake’s knowledge of the Irati River, as well as
his ability to communicate with the local Spaniards, allows the two men easy access to
their intended destination. Bill and Jake continue on to Burguete where Jake functions
as a kind of scout, allowing Bill to arrive at his destination and enjoy a day of fishing.

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While their fishing trip to Spain has traditionally been read as an escape into
paradise—an edenic episode rendered as a release from the materialistic world of
metropolitan Paris in particular—when read closely, this episode contains the same
coarse qualities of the other worlds these characters inhabit. In fact, questions of value
permeate these rural scenes to the same extent that they do the novel’s urban episodes.
While Jake and Bill start off on seemingly equal footing, Jake’s choice to fish in the
shallow water suggests a hesitancy to fully engage with nature. Meanwhile, Bill not
only immerses himself in the river’s depth, enduring the force of its current, he casts
his rod from that point. His actions are suggestive of the type of hyper-masculinity
typically associated with the Hemingway hero.
He not only engages with nature, he steps into the middle of it, without
concern, and plunders it at will. Bill’s boldness comprises a kind of reverse
naturalism, whereby man’s own ambivalence with respect to nature manifests itself in
his thoughtless usage of it, which is indicative of his sense of entitlement: he claims
dominion over the natural world just as he does the urban realm. Jake on the other
hand, sticks to the shallows. While Jake comes back with fish, his treatment of them
differs profoundly from Bill’s:
I laid them out, side by side, all their heads pointing the same way, and looked
at them. They were beautifully colored and firm and hard … I slit them all and
shucked out the insides, gills and all, and tossed them over across the river.
(119)

Jake gazes at—and admires—his trout in solitude. While Thomas Strychacz
81
has
commented on the phallic nature of the trout and the extent to which Jake’s
description of their “firm and hard” bodies provides an unmistakable contrast to his

150
own absent penis, little has been said about why he chooses to clean and stow his trout
so hastily.
Rather than endure another symbolic emasculation by way of a comparison
between his trout and Bill’s, Jake performs a ceremonial castration in private, after
which he packs away his trout before Bill meets back up with him. Upon being
confronted by Bill, Jake refuses to allow his modest yield to be subjected to a
comparison with Bill’s more sizeable catch, each of Bill’s fish being “a little bigger
than the last” (120). When asked how his own fish measure up to those of Bill, Jake
replies that his fish are already packed and thus cannot be brought out. When pressed,
however, he concedes that his fish are “smaller” than Bill’s:
“How are yours?’
“Smaller.”
“Let’s see them.”
“They’re packed.”
“How big are they really?”
“They’re all about the size of your smallest.”
“You’re not holding out on me?”
“I wish I were.” (120)

Instead of constituting some sort of edenic interlude, this hyper-masculine mode of
comparison reflects the competitive spirit of the world from which Bill emerges and
from which Jake has fled.
Although both of these men make livings for themselves through writing, Bill
makes sure to point out that Jake’s writing—because of its expatriate context—isn’t
“worth” anything (115). Bill’s comment underscores the notion that stateside and
expatriate writing represent different cultural values—they constitute separate genres
in which Bill’s purely “American” work holds greater value. Moreover, he oddly

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accuses Jake of being both obsessed by sex and (as a consequence of self-imposed
exile) impotent:
You know what’s the trouble with you? You’re an expatriate … Nobody that
ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the
newspapers … You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake
European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become
obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working … One group
claims women support you. Another group claims you’re impotent.”
“No,” I said. “I just had an accident.” (115).

Jake’s response, that he wasn’t impotent but that he had “just had an accident” draws
an intense and serious reaction from Bill, who warns him, “Never mention that” (115).
Within the cutthroat environment of modern American urbanity, Jake’s lack of
productive power would—and has—rendered him basically powerless. His only
strength—that is to say, his only real value—has to do with the extent to which he
makes other, fully formed and intelligible males appear even more powerful,
productive, and virile. With the world of power-brokering imposing itself upon this
so-called edenic paradise, Jake returns from the river just as he emerged from the war:
less equipped to compete against his countrymen, lacking the ability to produce or the
power to provide.
Insofar as we can view Jake’s turn to expatriatism not as a reaction against his
own national ideology, but as an alternative to falling short within a competitive
(largely male, certainly virile) environment, we can assess the extent to which his
expatriatism depends upon on ideology of non-productivity. While Michael Reynolds
and others have argued that Jake is in fact the only member of his expatriate clique
who has any interest in productivity, such assessments are based predominantly on the

152
mere fact that Jake has a job. But this in and of itself doesn’t really establish Jake as
one who produces any more than his associates do. Jake doesn’t write so much as he
reports. His job involves collecting the thoughts, words, and dicta of others,
synthesizing them, and distributing them for easy consumption. He does not produce
articles for consumption; he merely helps those who actually are producing
information to reach an audience. He is a cog in the wheel of production; he himself is
not a producer. Just as Jake’s position requires him to distribute and package the
production of others, he likewise functions largely as a liaison throughout the novel:
the overwhelming majority of Jake’s material practices involve ensuring that a desired
object reaches its buyer. Among his expatriate acquaintances, Jake typically functions
as an intermediary: he appears to be the one person everyone knows, and thus resides
at the center of expatriate life. Jake is the common bond holding this group of
expatriates together. Of course, he perfects this role of liaison in Pamploma, where he
negotiates relations between Brett and the young bullfighter, Pedro Romero.
Critics of The Sun Also Rises typically read Jake’s introduction of Brett to
Romero as an example of pimping; here again, rather than engage in any transactions
in which he procures a desired object, Jake facilitates the (ultimately destructive) affair
that takes place between Romero and Brett. In this case, Jake’s compulsion to act as a
liaison between the two comes at great cost, as his relationship with Montoya, the
owner of the hotel in which the group is staying and an avid aficionado of the
bullfight, crumbles in the wake of his actions concerning Brett and Romero. Despite
Jake’s interest in getting his money’s worth, in this case he pimps his way out of

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Montoya’s graces, and thus forfeits his revered place among the aficionado
community in Pamploma. Meanwhile, the behaviors adopted by Jake’s group of
friends during their time in Pamploma are just as decadent and careless here as they in
Paris. Regardless of their location, these people act according to their whimsy; their
desires give purpose to their actions according to the way they think about things,
irrespective of environment or competing ideologies and/or traditions.
Brett engages in activities that suit her particular fancy at any given moment.
She has no occupation other than being the ex-wife of an English aristocrat; her
current engagement to Scotsman Michael Campbell seems contingent on the extent to
which Michael can bear Brett’s insatiable compulsion to sleep with other men. Critics
have read Brett’s sexual behavior in a variety of ways: some consider her a
nymphomaniac, while others, such as Wendy Martin, view Brett’s lifestyle in terms of
the changing parameters of hetero-normativity of which there is much evidence in the
nineteen twenties.
82
But, to the extent that we examine Brett’s lifestyle, and in
particular her sexual compulsions as a material practice, we can see her continually
engaging in transactions in which she routinely purchases that which seems most
likely to satisfy her immediate need. Once she’s finished with the men she sleeps with,
that is, once she gets her “money’s worth” out of the objects she procures, Brett
essentially tosses them aside. Brett’s investment in Michael seems most likely to
amount to some form of insurance: in the event she cannot make an acceptable
transaction, she can fall back on her fiancé.

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Brett’s relationship with Cohn, on the other hand, is perhaps the novel’s most
pathetic subplot. Like the other expatriates in Jake’s circle, Cohn lacks a profession:
he seems chiefly concerned with longing for that which he lacks, which is to say a
sense of purpose. Cohn comes off like a hopeless romantic in need of a romance; what
he finds instead is a hopeless romance. Cohn fails to see his fling in San Sebastian
with Brett from her point of view: instead of it being a simple exchange of values that
can be trivialized and forgotten (like most if not all material transactions made in the
novel), Cohn sees himself as buying a long term product. He misunderstands his
transaction with Brett, and thus Cohn does not, as Jake would say, get his money’s
worth. Like Brett, Cohn is a careless and impulsive buyer, but unlike her, he lacks
awareness of his carelessness, or at least his carelessness doesn’t register as such.
Once their trip to San Sebastian comes to a close and Brett tosses Cohn by the
wayside, Cohn behaves as though he had been swindled, as if he had paid for more
than he received.
After each of her liaisons with fully equipped sexual partners, Brett habitually
returns to her impotent love interest Jake, and it is with Jake that Brett makes herself
most vulnerable. The dialogue that follows suggests that Brett in fact views Jake’s war
wound as her own cross to bear: “When I think of all the hell I’ve put chaps through,
I’m paying for it all now” (26). In this sense, Brett interpolates Jake’s postwar body
into her own ideology of personal suffering (objectifying Jake’s subjective experience
of loss) and thus brings Jake into the invisible workings of her own sexual economy.

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We can read the response that Jake thinks to himself as a rehearsal of the ideological
parameters of his own postwar identity:
At one time or another I had probably considered it from most of its various
angles, including the one that certain injuries or imperfections are a subject of
merriment while remaining quite serious for the person possessing them. (27)

While Jake attempts to retain ownership of his loss in verbal response to Brett, he
momentarily relinquishes control of it in his narrative, as he concedes to having
thought about his wound from “most of its various angles.” Jake betrays the extent to
which his wound can be interpolated within an ideological system and thus assigned a
particular value. Jake is an oddity, a freak—not of nature, but of unnatural, man-made
mechanisms, and his sexuality has been unmade—or remade—by humankind’s
destructive power.
Epilogue
By claiming loss as a source of artistic power in The Sun Also Rises,
Hemingway grants himself the artistic authority he formerly saw belonging to
Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, and other members of the generation of
American writers that preceded his own. Reading The Sun Also Rises with this in mind
brings a new perspective to this much-discussed novel by showing the extent to which
Hemingway’s early modernism was invested in offering up tangible proof (in the form
of a book) that his work was not derivative of the likes of Stein and Anderson (despite
the huge impact these figures undoubtedly had on his development), nor was it of a
piece with the literature being produced by other writers his age. In its engagement

156
with this notion of loss, Hemingway’s novel also speaks to the larger literary tradition
from which it emerges.
In trying to set itself apart from this tradition—and in particular, from early
twentieth-century modes of the heroic and the set of generic expectations that go along
with such depictions of heroism—the novel ends up recalling these erstwhile forms in
ways that indicate the extent to which remnants of American literary history remain
lodged in Hemingway’s work. The allusion to Michel Ney’s statue (and to
commemorative objects in general) works toward acknowledging such generic
perversions, and more importantly shows how objects of the past also engender new
stories in the present. The result, then, is a form of modernism that simultaneously
commemorates and undermines traditional objects (be they tangible objects or
intangible stories), thereby presenting such objects in ways that induce generic
mutation. Hemingway’s early modernism, then, seems ultimately to view story-telling
itself as a “lost” cause—narrative being an absence that nevertheless has a presence,
which can then be commemorated in the form of a book. That which is materially
present, Hemingway ultimately suggests, is only valuable insofar as it enables us to
engage with whatever absence or loss helps us better understand a given generation.

157
Chapter 4 Endnotes

53
According to Hemingway, Stein acquired the phrase “lost generation” from the
patron of an automobile repair shop in Paris. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway
explains that Stein had been unsatisfied with the work performed on her “old Model T
Ford” by the young mechanic in the garage who “had served in the last year of the
war” (29). The mechanic not been “adept,” Stein felt, and thus on her insistence the
young man received a reprimand (Feast 29). The shop’s patron reportedly told the
mechanic, “You are all a génération perdue” (Feast 29). Stein, in turn, assigned the
same label to Hemingway and his contemporaries by claiming, “That’s what you are.
That’s what you all are … You are a lost generation” (Feast 29).

54
As Marc Dolan has shown in Modern Lives: A Cultural Re-reading of the
“The Lost Generation,” the phrase “lost generation” was originally “used extensively
in Britain and France in the first years after World War I to describe the literal age
cohort that had been ‘lost’ forever in the fighting of 1914-1918” (Dolan 16). It was
through her “lost generation talk,” then, that Gertrude Stein changed the phrase to
refer to the moral dissipation of Hemingway’s generation. While we can attribute
much of Hemingway’s anger at Stein’s usage to the generational conflict that I go on
to address in this chapter, it is also worth noting that Hemingway’s guilt at having not
actually fought in the war—and thus having not suffered as actual soldiers had—may
likewise have contributed to his outrage. By focusing on the generational and artistic
challenges specific to Stein’s indictment, Hemingway may have been (in part)
avoiding confronting issues concerning his own lack of real military service.

55
While this quote from A Moveable Feast specifically pertains to Hemingway’s
assessment of F. Scott Fitzgerald, I include it here because it effectively demonstrates
Hemingway’s desire to separate himself from other writers, be they his peers or
representatives of a previous generation. Responding to Fitzgerald’s admission that he
altered his stories in order to ensure their publication in the Saturday Evening Post,
Hemingway dismisses Fitzgerald’s revisions as “whoring” (155). What is more,
Hemingway goes out of his way to underscore Fitzgerald’s senior status (even though
Fitzgerald was only four years older than Hemingway), thereby implicitly linking
Fitzgerald to the likes of Stein and Sherwood Anderson—“older” writers from whom
Hemingway wished to remain detached.

56
Stein offered this advice in response to Hemingway’s short story “Up in
Michigan” about the rape of a small-town waitress by the resident blacksmith.
According to Hemingway, Stein declared the story “good,” but added that its subject
matter made the story “like a picture that a painter paints and then cannot hang it when
he has a show and nobody will buy it because they cannot hang it either” (Feast 15).
To write “accroachable” literature, then, is to abide by popular standards of decency;
to do otherwise is to sabotage one’s own chances of publication. This rumination on

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Stein’s literary practice reveals Hemingway’s desire to represent Stein as a practitioner
of modernism-for-sale, she having, according to him, more interest in placing a story
in the Atlantic Monthly than trafficking in less “accroachable” modes of literary
expression.

57
Of course, the blatant misogyny of Hemingway’s treatment of Stein cannot be
overlooked, especially given that her lesser-published corpus denied her the very
power in the marketplace upon which Hemingway’s attacks depended. By pointing
out Hemingway’s reaction to Stein’s “lost generation talk”—comments that the
posthumously published A Moveable Feast show continued to trouble Hemingway for
years—I do not mean to portray Hemingway as a figure who somehow suffered at
Stein’s hand. Indeed quite the contrary is true, as it is well known that Stein’s tutorship
of Hemingway had an enormously positive impact on the young author’s work and
reputation.
I mean, rather, to show how Hemingway’s aggressive reaction to Stein’s
unflattering assessment of his generation played an important role in the formation of
the philosophical contours of Hemingway’s early modernism. His dismissal of Stein
may have indeed been unfair—even demonstrative of a flaw in character—but it
nevertheless provides a crucial inroad to understanding Hemingway’s modernist
intervention into literary territories frequently perused not only by Stein, but by a
whole host of nineteenth and twentieth-century American writers. While
Hemingway’s critical shortsightedness and immaturity with respect to Stein’s
comment may be difficult to defend, the import it had to his early work (especially in
terms of the unexplored interpretive route taken in this article) should not be
undervalued.

58
Grosset & Dunlap published Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter in 1925. Of
Anderson’s work, Hemingway writes: “When [Anderson] wrote a novel finally called
Dark Laughter, so terribly bad, silly and affected that I could not keep from criticizing
it in parody, Miss Stein was very angry” (Moveable Feast 28).

59
For an overview of Hemingway’s early apprenticeship under Sherwood
Anderson see Michael Reynolds, The Young Hemingway (New York: Norton, 1998).

60
See Miriam B. Mandel, Reading Hemingway: The Facts and the Fictions
(Boston: Scarecrow Press, 2001) and John Leland, A Guide to Hemingway’s Paris
(Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1989) for more information on these statues and their
respective histories.

61
Born in Sarrlouis in 1760 (the same year as Napoleon), Michel Ney enlisted in
the Hussars’ Colonel-General Regiment in 1788 and quickly earned a reputation as a
master swordsman (Foster 15-16). Making his way through the ranks with exceptional
speed, Ney was given his first command at the age of twenty-four as captain of the

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Fourth Hussars in 1794, and he became “general of division” in 1799 (Foster 25,33).
Under Napoleon, Ney became a Marshal of France, and it was in this capacity that he
gained a national reputation.

62
François Rudé’s statue of Marshal Ney was unveiled on December 7, 1853 (on
the thirty-eighth anniversary of his execution) near the Luxembourg Gardens, not far
from where French Royalists executed the Marshal for treason (Foster 213).

63
A rumination on Ney’s statue similar to the one offered by Jake Barnes in The
Sun Also Rises can be found in Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast:

Then as I was getting up to the Closerie des Lilas with the lighting on my old
friend, the statue of Marshal Ney with his sword out and the shadows of the
trees on the bronze, and he alone there and nobody behind him and what a
fiasco he’d made of Waterloo, I thought that all generations were lost by
something and always had been and always would be and I stopped at the Lilas
to keep the statue company and drank a cold beer before going home to the flat
over the sawmill. (30)

64
First as a commander of the besieged Rear Guard during Napoleon’s retreat
from Russia, and later as a major player at the debacle of Waterloo, Michel Ney
became famous for his loyalty to Napoleon, but perhaps more so for showing bravery
in the face of utter defeat. In recounting Ney’s leadership during the defense at Kovno,
biographer John Foster describes Ney’s performance in the following way:

On June 24, Ney had led a corps of 35,000 men across the Niemen. Now, not
quite six months later, less than 300 officers and men represented the corps.
His losses, enormous as they were, typified those of his fellow marshals. The
Grand Army had shrunk from 600, 000 to less than 50,000. Of the 100,000
troops who marched into Moscow, less than 10,000 returned. Napoleon’s
Russian campaign is one of the worst military disasters in history. And yet,
without Ney, it could have been worse. (114)

65
Such a retreat, for Hemingway anyway, constituted a rejection of the “high
moral tone” commonly adopted in places like Hemingway’s hometown of Oak Park,
Illinois (Kennedy 80). According to J. Gerald Kennedy, Oak Park “epitomized the
virtues of industry, piety, sobriety (Oak Park was dry before Prohibition) and
rectitude” (Kennedy 80). Whereas “three years earlier … [Hemingway] had been
living under Prohibition in a town which forbade both public lewdness and sexual
education, now he inhabited [as a young man living in Paris’ Latin Quarter] a
neighborhood filled with drunks, prostitutes, ‘apaches,’ and homosexuals in various
guises. Hemingway idealized the seedy quartier around the place de la Contrescarpe
perhaps because it represented the cultural antithesis of Oak Park: an unpretentious

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lower-class milieu marked by joie de vivre and an easy acceptance of creaturely
appetites, a place where people tolerated personal differences” (Kennedy 84).

66
Here I am drawing a sharp distinction between an immaterial narrative, which
I construe as an idea or series of ideas, and a material book, an object containing a
printed reproduction of a narrative for the purposes of mass consumption.

67
Although Michael Reynolds has written at length about Jake’s interest in
“getting good value for money spent” and on the non-exclusivity of Jake’s frugality
and morality as they pertain to his work ethic (“Sun in Its Time” 47), what remains
unexamined is the economic discourse in which Jake and the novel’s other main
characters engage, a discourse that allows them to establish the parameters for
interaction with and valuation of one another.

68
According to Judith Butler, it is “the instabilities, the possibilities for
rematerialization, opened up by … [the reiteration of norms made necessary by
bodies’ inability to comply consistently with such norms] … that mark one domain in
which the force of the regulatory law can be turned against itself to spawn
rearticulations that call into question the hegemonic force of that very regulatory law”
(2). This process, Butler contends, constitutes an “exclusionary matrix” requiring the
“simultaneous domain of abject [i.e. ‘culturally unintelligible’] beings” (3).

69
Thomas Bledsoe was an editor at Rinehart, the press publishing Phillip
Young’s biography, Ernest Hemingway (New York, 1952).

70
A more assertive statement of Jake’s condition can be found in Hemingway’s
letter of June 18, 1952 to Charles A. Fenton. In this letter, Hemingway describes a
conversation he once had with Harold Loeb—“the man who identifies himself as
Cohn in The Sun Also Rises”—in which Hemingway explained, “if [Cohn] is you
then the narrator must be me. Do you think that I had my prick shot off or that if you
and I had ever had a fight I would not have knocked the shit out of you?”(Selected
Letters 764).

71
While the Cooperian hero fascinated “antebellum historians, journalists, and
politicians interested in the important questions of Indian policy, emigration, and
westward expansion” (Slotkin 16), by the early twentieth century the Hawkeye
tradition had been overtaken by that of the dime-store world. Outlaw protagonists such
as Edward Wheeler’s Deadwood Dick soon evolved into the virile gunslingers of
Frederic Remington, Owen Wister, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Clarence Mulford.
Zane Grey perfected the “formula western” between the years 1911 and 1925,
thereafter establishing the conventional frontier hero as a shadowy gunslinger who is
as effective at defeating his enemies as he is at wooing fair (and typically aristocratic)
young ladies (Slotkin 211).

161

72
In confronting Molly Stark Wood’s “sense of class superiority” with
“overwhelming masculine sex appeal” (Slotkin 177), Wister’s Virginian at once
emasculates and makes himself equal to the “elite of the Atlantic coast” whom Molly
represents (Slotkin 170). According to Slotkin, Wister believed the “the nascent
aristocracy of the great cattle ranches might provide a ‘permanent pattern’ for a new
American racial type,” a type that could prevent the “lesser breeds” from
outnumbering and overpowering the current ruling class (170). By proving their worth
to (and merging with) Eastern aristocrats, Wister envisioned a new aristocracy
comprised of (white) frontiersmen who would preside over “a post-Frontier world
order” (Slotkin 175).

73
Henry Nash Smith explains that while the “Wild West man” depicted by
authors such as Edward S. Ellis and Charles Averill were clearly descendants of
Cooper’s Leatherstocking persona, these later figures succeeded in earning the love of
an upper-class heroine; placing Leatherstocking into such a romantic context was
something “Cooper could never quite bring himself to do” (97). The introduction of
romance into the Leatherstocking tradition was of a piece with the general turn toward
gentility that came to characterize a figure increasingly identified with the “yeasty
nationalism” of western expansion (Smith 84).

74
As Robert Clark explains in History and Myth in American Fiction, 1823-
1852, early proponents of continental expansion in the United States argued that such
pioneering was necessary “to defeat Whig élitism [sic] and save America from the
horrors of industrialization and urbanization” (4). This frontier ethos applied, too, to
the conventional wisdom concerning the new nation’s ligature with Europe: “The
Declaration of Independence was said to have liberated the United States from the
corruptions of the Old World and to have allowed the new nation to become an
‘asylum’ where the poor and oppressed could regenerate themselves. Europe was
frequently described as being ‘despotic’, ‘feudal’, ‘aristocratic’; its historical destiny
was to struggle to realise [sic] in itself the constitutional perfection that the United
States had already achieved” (4). In this context, the expatriate project—particularly as
it is depicted by Hemingway—seems very much at odds with the earlier literary push
toward generating an Edenic conception of the United States as an example of “earthly
perfection that the New World holds out to the Old” (4).

75
Winner of twenty-five Grand Slam titles, Suzanne Rachel Flore Lenglen (May
24, 1899 – July 4, 1938) was famous both in France and England from 1919 to 1926.

76
In his recent article “Yes, That Is a Roll of Bills in My Pocket: The Economy
of Masculinity in The Sun Also Rises,” Jacob Michael Leland argues that most critical
assessments of “masculinity and its displacement” in Hemingway’s work involve
“new objects”—such as fishing rods, pocket knives, and hunting rifles—over which

162

the war-torn hero gains mastery as a way of recovering his masculinity (37). Leland
posits that such readings of The Sun Also Rises are misguided, as it is Jake’s material
practice and not his commodity fetishism that enables him to “establish an American,
male, expatriate identity in Paris” (37).

77
See Michael S. Reynolds, “The Sun in Its Time: Recovering the Historical
Context,” New Essays on The Sun Also Rises, ed. Lindsey Wagner-Martin.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.) 43-64. In this article, Reynolds
argues that conservative readings advanced during the 1980s of The Sun Also Rises,
which saw the book as “a study in moral failure … a fable of ideological bankruptcy,”
were “closer to Hemingway’s original view than most of us realize” (45). Reynolds
contends that Hemingway “had his fingers … firmly on the moral pulse of his times
for most American readers to appreciate his moral indictment …[and] … [t]o read
Hemingway’s indictment of his age as a paean to the ‘lost generation’ is to miss the
point badly” (45-46).

78
For more on Brett’s fascination with Jake vis-à-vis his loss of social control,
see Wendy Martin, “Brett Ashley as New Woman in The Sun Also Rises,” New Essays
on The Sun Also Rises, ed. Lindsey Wagner-Martin. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987.) 65-82.

79
In their introduction to Modernism, Inc: Body, Memory, Capital, Jani Scandura
and Michael Thurston take up the value of absent commodities in the context of
celebrity deaths. According to the authors, the “unseen corpses” of deceased
celebrities “become an allegory for all we have not been permitted to see, but have
been induced to desire to see and thereby possess” (3). “We no longer need the body
as an object to allegorize that which we could not bury … [because] … we are too
busy serving as gatekeepers for the entombed secrets of generations already past” (3).
While the specifics of Scandura and Thurston’s argument does not map exactly on to
my own, their example provides a useful template for understanding the nuanced
relationship between cultural production and the induction of desire.

80
In The Shell and the Kernel, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok define the
notion of “incorporation” as follows: “[incorporation supposes] the loss of an object in
order to take effect; it implies a loss that occurred before the desires concerning the
object might have been freed … Like a commemorative monument, the incorporated
object betokens the place, the date, and the circumstances in which desires were
banished from introjection: they stand like tombs in the life of the ego” (113). The
“fantastic mechanism of incorporation” (Abraham & Torok 113), then, operates within
the framework of Abraham and Torok’s guiding psychoanalytic principle,
“introjection,” which editor Nicolas Rand explains consists of “the idea that the
psyche is in a constant process of acquisition … a constantly renewed process of self-
creating-self” (Abraham & Torok 100).

163

81
See Thomas Strychacz, Hemingway’s Theaters of Masculinity. (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State UP, 2003) 78-79.

82
See Wendy Martin, “Brett Ashley as New Woman in The Sun Also Rises,”
New Essays on The Sun Also Rises, ed. Lindsey Wagner-Martin. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987.) 65-82

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Chapter 5

Staking New Claims:
Modernist Territories from Black Rock to Westworld

In chapters one through three I have shown the extent to which a lingering
fascination with the thematic and formal characteristics of early twentieth-century
cowboy narratives helped shape the modernism of three canonical American authors
during the 1920s. While cowboy heroes such as Owen Wister’s Virginian, Clarence
Mulford’s Hopalong Cassidy, and Zane Grey’s Lassiter were themselves revisions on
a theme insofar as they constituted re -imaginings of James Fenimore Cooper’s
frontier trapper, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway elaborated
on the cowboy in ways that further broadened the generic boundaries of the Western.
For these three authors, the Western genre was too central to the nation’s idea of itself,
and the cowboy figure too closely aligned with the idea of American identity, for this
literature to avoid modernist intervention. In an effort to respond both to and against
this quintessentially American literature and its national mythologies of origin,
purpose, and character, the aforementioned authors transformed the cowboy narrative
into a site for literary experimentation. In novels such as The Great Gatsby, The
Professor’s House, and The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway
question, reformulate, and (sometimes literally) disassemble the Western hero—a
figure synonymous with American identity—in the context of the postwar nation’s
literary and political present. The result was (and is) a series of American novels that
exploit the dialectical tension that exists between popular Western literature and the

165
modernist writings of figures such as Stein, Eliot, and Pound—that is, between the low
and the high. Novels like The Great Gatsby, The Professor’s House, and The Sun Also
Rises not only embody this process of dialectical engagement, they offer a synthesis of
the pastoral and the urban, the past and the present, the popular and the avant-garde,
that presents an alternative to the incongruous persistence of frontier mythology in
postwar/post-frontier nationalist discourse.
In this chapter, I will argue that the transfiguration of the Western hero visible
in modernist literature from the 1920s passes back again into popular culture to inflect
the Western film, particularly in the response of the genre to its own popular apogee in
cinema during the nineteen fifties. The type of scrupulous self-reflexivity that
emerged, for instance, in films like Fred Zinneman’s High Noon (1952) or even John
Ford’s The Searchers (1956) was not present to the same extent in earlier Hollywood
Western films of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. This was due, in part, to the overt racism
that defined so many early Westerns once their production moved to Southern
California around 1910. In scores of these West Coast films, the Western hero was
often too fixated on besting invading “redskins” to pause and consider the parameters
of (typically) his own heroic privilege.
83
Over time, however, this orientation began to
change as the Westerns of Hollywood became more and more preoccupied with the
deconstruction of the hero, in a turn toward interiority mirroring that of the modernist
authors discussed earlier.
84
Particularly after World War II, Hollywood Westerns
become increasingly thoughtful about precisely the same issues that held the attention
of Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway: from the place of materiality in American

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myths of the nation to the role of embodied identity in allowing for participation in
American success. The modernist destabilizing of these narratives of identity and
nationhood haunts the filmic Western—and continues to do so—making the Western a
crucial site not only for establishing what it means to be American but, thanks to
modernism, for undoing it.
In the pages that follow, I will look at one particular strand of the filmic
Western from the nineteen fifties, noting in particular the way in which these films
incorporate modernist thematic preoccupations and, eventually, push them to the
breaking point. I begin by examining George Stevens’s Shane (1952), a film in which
the cowboy hero must absent himself so that a new generation of communal farmers
may prosper. I then move on to two Westerns by John Sturges, Bad Day at Black Rock
(1955) and The Magnificent Seven (1960), films that posit unorthodox changes to the
Western genre as a way of framing questions about both the Frontier-era’s mythic
legacy and its historical one. Whereas in Stevens’s Shane the cowboy hero must
sacrifice himself for the sake of a burgeoning community, subsequent films like Bad
Day at Black Rock and The Magnificent Seven dramatize the Western hero’s re-
emergence as a way of further meditating on the elasticity of his form and function in
a post-WWII context.
In Bad Day at Black Rock the Western hero returns in the form of John J.
Macreedy (played by Spencer Tracy), a wounded war veteran who unearths the hidden
evils of the communal frontier existence so lauded in Shane. On the one hand, with
Bad Day at Black Rock, Sturges seeks to discover how much revision the Western can

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withstand by dismissing convention and doing without horses, six guns, saloons, and a
whole host of other Western mainstays, and by setting the movie in the mid-twentieth,
rather than the nineteenth century. On the other hand, however, Sturges tests the
boundaries of the Western so dramatically in Bad Day at Black Rock precisely so that
he can demonstrate the genre’s on-going viability as the site at which questions about
American identity are best formulated and addressed. This viability is reinforced by
Sturges’s choice to return the Western hero—who under modernism strove to flee the
West—to the scene of his (Western) origins. To the extent that figures such as
Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, Fitzgerald’s Jimmy Gatz, and Cather’s Tom Outland
nurture the idealized West by traveling east, the presence of a figure like Macreedy,
who makes the opposite journey, suggests that Sturges aims to reacquaint the hero
with the Western world from which he earlier fled. Doing so makes this figure’s
narrative of loss essential not only to the Western U.S., but to the Western genre as
Sturges imagines it post-WWII.
Meanwhile, in The Magnificent Seven, the cowboy hero (along with his posse
of six other guns-for-hire) exits the United States in order to provide aid to the
inhabitants of a small Mexican village. Although The Magnificent Seven, with its
horses, gunfights, and cowboy hats, is more identifiably a Western than Bad Day at
Black Rock, the film ultimately demonstrates how the Western of this period looks
abroad for both its story (which comes from Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1954
film Seven Samurai) and the image of its hero (who is portrayed by Yul Brynner, a
Russian-born actor of Swiss, Russian, and Mongolian descent). Whereas in Bad Day

168
at Black Rock director Sturges moves his hero from East to West, in The Magnificent
Seven Sturges returns to an emphasis on the East—in this case, the Far East. Still,
notwithstanding the film’s Eastern overtones, Yul Brynner’s portrayal of the
gunslinger Chris Adams became so iconic that he reprised the role not only in Burt
Kennedy’s 1966 sequel Return of the Seven, but in a series of Westerns in which
Brynner donned the same black hat and struck the same kingly, inconsonant pose. I
end this chapter with a discussion of the most famous of these reprisals, Brynner’s turn
as a robot gunslinger in Michael Crichton’s 1973 sci-fi Western, Westworld, a film
that aligns the cowboy hero not with the American landscape that traditionally
underscored his rustic essence, but with a technology so advanced that it overpowers
its human creators. In looking beyond the conventional depiction of the cowboy hero,
the films examined in this chapter arguably come to mimic—in their engagement with
a figure in whom American story telling and national identity formation collide—the
expatriation so insistently chronicled in American modernist prose of the 1920s.
Loss on the Frontier
Whereas Hemingway, in The Sun Also Rises, turns a single, lingering absence
into a substantive thing, John Sturges’s 1954 film Bad Day at Black Rock depicts a
world suffused with missing matter. The landscape of this world is barren, yet replete
with the ghosts of native peoples; the town at the narrative’s center is mostly
uninhabited, yet bustling with the ghosts of erstwhile citizens; and, while the
narrative’s hero has lost an arm in battle, his purpose here is to extend a hand of
friendship to an intended interlocutor who, having been killed, no longer exists. This

169
section will explore these absences within the framework of an enduring modernist
interest in synthesizing the low and the high that yokes the filmic Western of the
1950s to the modernism of novels like The Sun Also Rises. In this context, I will
examine similarities between Bad Day at Black Rock and The Sun Also Rises in order
to draw conclusions about the losses that characterize both Hemingway’s and
Sturges’s view of the American West—or rather of the Western hero as he moves
across diverse media addressing a variety of cultural, temporal, and mythic contexts.
First, however, I will put this analysis in context by demonstrating how the dissolution
of the cowboy hero dramatized in George Stevens’s 1952 film Shane triggers
Sturges’s response, initiating the process whereby this heroic figure reemerges—albeit
in a different form. Although typically overlooked, the generic intersection of Shane
and Bad Day at Black Rock puts into bold relief postwar intra-generic disagreements
about the Western’s treatment of myth, history, individualism, and the social body.
George Stevens’s Shane, a film released three years prior to Bad Day at Black
Rock, demands that the cowboy hero bring about his own disappearance for the sake
of communal solidarity. The film posits a utopia of small, family-run farming
businesses working together to provide the antidote to greedy capitalism’s hold on the
burgeoning Western states. Notwithstanding the fact that the film’s main villain—a
cattle rancher named Rufus Ryker (played by Emile Meyer)—is himself running a
family business with his brothers, the communal ethos of the homesteaders’ joint
enterprise lays claim to the filmmaker’s sympathies. Thus, it is the lure of
sociability—and the domestic tranquility portrayed as its anchor—that convinces the

170
lone cowboy hero that the era of individuals has come to an end. In Shane, the cowboy
hero and the land-grabbing villain are portrayed as two sides of the same coin: by the
end of the film, both must depart in order to make way for an inevitable social and
economic revolution. To the extent that this revolution is a mythic construction, the
film requires one myth—that of the cowboy hero—to submit to the other. Having rid
the community of the last villain, the (perhaps fatally) wounded cowboy must ride off
into the darkness, dissolving into the hills from which he emerged, leaving the future-
bound social body to supplant his physical presence with nothing more than memory.
The community requires that the hero become, in the end, markedly absent.
85

Whereas Sturges’s Bad Day at Black Rock, as we will see, uses the absence of
genre-specific objects to invoke an imagined mythic past, Stevens’s Shane uses
familiar Western figures—such as horses, pioneers, gunslingers, and prairie farmers—
to put us immediately inside a familiar Western world. That is to say, Shane calls upon
the conventions of the Western genre in order to make clear to the audience that they
are indeed viewing a Western. At the same time, however, generic mainstays such as
the modest western town and prairie homestead are depicted as locations in transition,
places where the old regime of greedy land-grabbers and guiltless guns-for-hire
desperately clings to power in the face of growing farming communities like the one
led by Joe Starrett (played by Van Heflin). Thus, Shane is a film that dramatizes a
confrontation between a highly mythologized lawless individualism on the one hand,
and an equally mythic collectivist ethos of western expansion on the other. In Shane,
the town, the homestead, and the vast landscape are poised for cultivation by a new

171
wave of families (comprised of northerners, southerners, and even some European-
born immigrants who wish to cultivate a new communal west as an equitable social
body) working together in the years following the Civil War. In contrast, in Sturges’s
film, the handful of dingy outbuildings that constitute Black Rock signify a western
town in decline—a place where collectivism corrupts rather than liberates.
In keeping with Stevens’s emphasis on a new communal frontier, Shane opens
with a shot of the valley in which Joe Starrett and his band of homesteaders have
staked their respective claims. Stevens’s camera is nestled atop a nearby hillside,
surrounded by several acres of dense forest. The shot asks the viewer to consider the
flat, wide-open valley in relation to the tree-filled hills in order to establish the proper
context for Shane’s entry. Shane, played by Alan Ladd, enters the frame on horseback
from behind the camera on the left, and soon makes his way to the center. As Shane
rides toward the valley below, the camera settles on him, underscoring the significance
of his emergence from one world (that of the beleaguered gunfighter, traveling alone,
amid the shady trees) to another (that of families of farmers—some immigrant, some
native—tilling their land and building up their homes in plain view). Soon Shane finds
himself crossing through the Starrett family’s plot, and like John J. Macreedy, the hero
of Bad Day at Black Rock, Shane is initially met with skepticism that gradually turns
into hostility.
At first, Starrett is not at all sure what to make of Shane. For one thing, Shane
is markedly more glamorous than any of the homesteaders. His skin is tan, his body
toned, and his suit of frayed buckskin curiously clean. Shane emerges from the forest

172
as heroism personified—Olympian in posture and attitude. Having somewhat
begrudgingly agreed to allow Shane a drink of water, Starrett then notices the
approach of Ryker and his posse. Starrett, assuming Shane to be an agent of Ryker’s
who is up to some mischief, takes up his son’s rifle and orders Shane to move along.
Shane agrees, on the condition that Starrett lower his weapon.
86
Despite Shane’s pretty
appearance, Starrett thoughtfully puts his weapon down. Afterwards, Shane takes hold
of his horse’s reins and slowly leads the animal toward a nearby gate. By this time,
Ryker’s gang has arrived, and Shane overhears the ensuing confrontation, which he
feels compelled to monitor more closely. As the conversation becomes more heated,
Shane intervenes in defense of Starrett. It is this display of loyalty and friendship that
earns Shane Starrett’s trust; it is also the beginning of Shane’s transformation (albeit
temporary) from a lone gunslinger to a farm-hand in Starrett’s employ.
In trading in his frayed buckskins for store-bought denim work clothes, Shane
acquiesces to a desire for domesticity emphasized during an early scene in the film in
which Shane enjoys a home-cooked meal courtesy of Starrett’s wife, Marian.
Throughout the scene, Shane appears contemplative as he surveys the life Starrett
leads: a wife, son, and plot of land constitute precisely what Shane lacks in order to
befit this new world. Accordingly, Shane resigns himself to transforming from a lone
gunfighter to a farm-hand, from an ambivalent outsider to a participant in society’s
communal—and commercial—interests. After finishing his supper and thanking
Marian for an “elegant dinner,” Shane journeys outside, picks up an ax, and begins
hacking away at the massive tree stump situated just outside the Starrett home,

173
effectively accepting the job that Starrett had somewhat obliquely offered him over
dinner. The Starretts are overjoyed to see Shane attack the stump with such verve, and
before long Joe accompanies Shane, chopping forcefully at the stump from the
opposite side. Shane’s willingness to engage in a physical struggle whereby he bonds
with another man makes this scene typical of the Western. But what of the fact that in
this case his adversary is a natural object? In Westerns, nature is always revered. And
while men in Westerns “may dominate or simply ignore women … break horses and
drive cattle, kill game and kick dogs and beat one another into a pulp, … they never
lord it over nature” (Tompkins 72). Yet, in this scene in Shane, they do.
When he takes an ax to the tree stump on the Starrett’s farm, Shane does more
than simply make a break with his past: his actions signal a significant alteration not
only to the plotline of the Western, but to the code of the Western hero. “In Westerns,”
Jane Tompkins tells us, “the [male] obsession with the landscape is finally
metaphysical” (4) for nature “is the one transcendent thing, the one thing larger than
man … the ideal toward which human nature strives” (72). Because the landscape
possesses the qualities Western heroes wish to cultivate—“power, endurance, rugged
majesty” (Tompkins 72)—the Western hero imitates the land: he becomes like it while
striving ultimately, in death, to merge with it (via burial). This merger allows the
Western hero to attain a “condition of objecthood” free from consciousness (Tompkins
72), a condition of materiality that “vindicates conflict, violence, and vengeance” and
situates “adult white males on top with everyone else in descending order beneath”
(Tompkins 73). Thus, in cutting the tree stump away from the earth, Shane not only

174
does violence to nature, he does violence to himself, voluntarily severing his bond
with nature in an act of symbolic self-castration. Though formerly aligned with—
indeed, a part of—an unchanging material entity possessing unmatched generative
powers, Shane has now thrust himself into a communal life engaged with chiefly
economic concerns.
In this scene, George Stevens’s Shane announces the moment at which the
post-WWII cinematic Western ceases to denote the landscape of the American West
as a site of the cowboy hero’s embodiment.
87
When Shane servers his bond with the
land (thereupon shedding the buckskins of the hunter to don the denim of the hired
hand) he effectively annuls his relation to nature, leaving behind only the remnants of
a former material relation. That relation, once defined by the hero’s commixture with
nature, now consists of two discordant elements: the “condition of objecthood” that
the Western hero once strove to obtain and the “form of consciousness” that
previously had no meaning for him (Tompkins 72). In stunning contrast to the
buckskin-wearing warrior who strode onto the Starrett’s claim at the beginning of
Stevens’s film, the denim-clad farm-hand who emerges after the film’s first act is fluid
where his forebear was solid. In other words, Shane has transformed himself into an
unfinished man whose employment under Starrett marks the initial stage in a
transformative process whereby his former existence as a rogue agent acting outside
the world of commerce has been replaced by a life of wages paid for work completed,
goods bestowed for monies remitted. The underlying goal sought after by Starrett and
the homesteaders who align themselves with him is to build self-sustaining farming

175
businesses that will allow each family to prosper, hopefully establishing firm
economic foundations for generations to come. As a mere farm-hand, Shane is beneath
all this, providing services to advance Starrett’s business venture while keeping the
exact nature of his own plans unknown. But given Shane’s many glances at Starrett’s
wife Marian, we can safely assume that Shane has something on the order of marriage,
fatherhood, and farming in mind for himself as well.
However, as there are no single women within Starrett’s community, Shane’s
prospects do not seem promising. What is more, the one woman with whom Shane
shares an obvious connection, Marian Starrett, is not only married, but her interest in
Shane remains very much grounded in her initial experience of him as a lone warrior
of the West, powerful in his affinity for (and resemblance to) the landscape from
which he emerged. Once Shane disconnects himself from nature, once he goes from
simply being to indefinitely becoming, Shane parts ways with the raw sexual allure he
possessed as a cowboy hero. To the extent that Marian is smitten with Shane, her
interest begins with and remains rooted in her impression of Shane upon first seeing
him: quiet, armed, and clad in frayed buckskins, Shane was mysterious and more than
a little frightening. Now, as a farm-hand, Shane’s former self lingers in the form of a
powerful memory, one that maintains Marian’s interest and that, ultimately, brings
Shane to the conclusion that a man must be who he is, and who Shane is, he realizes,
can only exist as an absence—a subtraction—from the world as he now knows it.
After his transformation from loner to laborer, the character of Shane has more
in common with Hemingway’s Jake Barnes than he does with the Virginian or

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Hopalong Cassidy. While the heroes of Wister and Mulford work for wages as Shane
does, they remain ambivalent about their employers’ specific economic and familial
interests. Moreover, neither figure devolves (or shifts from gunslinger to farmhand to
gunslinger again) in the way that Shane does. While not necessarily dismissive of the
“process of becoming” (the Virginian is, after all, destined to become “an important
man” by the end of Wister’s novel) they never cease to be fundamentally imitative of a
“solid state of being” (Tompkins 72). Unlike these figures, but very much like Jake
Barnes, Shane has lost his direct connection with a physical nature that, within
Westerns, is inseparably bound to the phallus. In the case of Jake Barnes, the hero’s
relation to the objecthood of nature becomes inverted, as his lost penis aligns
Hemingway’s protagonist with a lost or absent nature. Whereas the standard Western
hero must merge with the physical objecthood of nature in order to attain complete
materialization, Jake must become, as Shane ultimately does, a material absence—a
haunting, immaterial presence. On the one hand, by chopping the stump from its root,
and by shedding his natural skin, Shane initiates the separation from nature that
ultimately produces his own absence, one that, given little Joey Starrett’s echoing cries
as the wounded Shane disappears into the horizon, will nevertheless maintain a lasting
presence among the homesteaders for whom Shane has sacrificed himself. On the
other hand, however, while the cowboy hero in Stevens’s film departs from mythic
convention, the emphasis the film puts on labor vis-à-vis the cowboy takes the figure
of the Western hero closer to the actual position occupied by cowboys in the historical
West.

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Rather than roaming the plains in search of the next gun battle, the historical
cowboy would have worked as a “hired hand on horseback” and would have been
“overworked, underfed, poorly paid, [and] ill-educated, for it “was ranchers and
cattlemen,” not cowboys, “who were regarded as the industry’s heroes” (Mitchell
25).
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From this vantage point, even the more authentic representation of Shane under
the employ of the Starrett family still manages to glorify what would have been a
distinctly unappealing circumstance. Whereas Shane enjoys three square meals a day,
agreeable hours, and moderate working conditions as a hired hand, it is the henchmen
working for Ryker—here depicted as despicable, unsympathetic villains—who come
closest to resembling the authentic cowboy that Mitchell describes. Even Shane’s
looks heighten his peculiarity, for his Olympian physique, well-groomed hair, and neat
appearance underscore the extent to which he differs from the other members of the
community. Ultimately, Shane, and those like him, must fade away in order for the
new society to flourish. Thus, Stevens’s film dramatizes the cowboy hero’s voluntary
disappearance, and his equally voluntary quest to bring about the disappearance of
those who resemble him in form if not in deed. Stevens’s film makes the hero into
something that should, in fact, be absent. By the end of Shane, both the hero and his
evil analogue Ryker disappear, leaving behind a community of homesteaders who, we
are asked to believe, will continue to cultivate their plots of land in the interest of their
future communal prospects. But this utopian formulation of frontier life finds its
antithesis in Bad Day at Black Rock, where the post-Shane communal frontier insisted

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upon by Stevens disintegrates into bitter isolationism, fear mongering, and murderous
racism.
While the dilapidated buildings of Black Rock betray the town’s economic
fragility and the failure of community to prevail, the small cluster of primitive
structures that constitute town for Joe Starrett and the other homesteaders in Shane
reflect the slow but steady growth of an emerging group of pioneers. It is this
argument advanced in Stevens’s film—that the pioneer had a greater investment in the
communal good than in that of the individual—that causes Shane to part ways with the
conventional wisdom of the most canonical of Frontier histories. In the Frontier
Theses of both Frederick Jackson Turner and Theodore Roosevelt, individual interest
constitutes the core of the pioneer ethos (along with the latter’s vehement support of
white, Protestant middle- and upper-class privilege). According to Turner, it is only
after the western settler began to “adjust his life to the modern forces of capital and to
complex productive processes” that his interest in individualism began to fade (276).
But in Shane, the pioneer settles into the notion that individual interests can only be
fulfilled in the context of communal well-being.
Starrett repeatedly beseeches his fellow homesteaders to hold firm against
Ryker’s demands that they abandon their claims. In doing so, Starrett cites federal
laws prohibiting Ryker from claiming more than his share of land. Whereas Turner
insists that the pioneer wished to develop his or her livelihood free from governmental
intervention of any kind (271), Starrett expresses interest in securing governmental
protection against Ryker and his henchmen. For Starrett, Ryker’s crimes are such that

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governmental intervention seems justified, even if it means bringing government into
his life and into the lives of his fellow homesteaders. Although in Turner’s estimation
the pioneer understood that the resources and opportunities of the frontier constituted
“prizes … for the keenest and strongest” (271), Stevens’s idealized version of the
pioneer supports a more Populist policy of equality under the law. But while Starrett
does insist that laws exist to protect homesteaders from greedy land monopolists like
Ryker, he does not base his commitment to his community’s land rights on laws or
governmental policy. For Starrett, all one needs to do is look around at the vastness of
the Frontier to understand that this land was not intended for one person such as
Ryker, but rather for homesteaders and cattle ranchers alike.
Although Turner does concede that the pioneer had almost as great an interest
in the “ideal of democracy” as he did in “the right of the individual to rise,” Turner
also insists that the pioneer mistook democracy to be “the result of … political
institutions” and not a consequence of the “free lands and immense opportunities
which surrounded him” (274). But in Shane, the land and its vast opportunities are
central to the ideal of democracy. Rather than seeing democracy in terms of “political
institutions,” Starrett presumes that the equal distribution of land is a fundamental
democratic right, and thus he makes the argument that no one individual should have
more land than he needs while others go without. For Starrett, the availability of land
and the pioneer’s right to exploit it are core democratic principles. Not only does
Starrett view democracy as inseparable from the availability of free land, but in doing
so, Starrett espouses a view that has an uncanny resemblance to that of Turner’s

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distanced perspective. In Turner’s view, the historical pioneer “subordinated the rights
of the nation … to the desire …that the individual should advance with as little
interference as possible” (273); hence the pioneer failed to recognize that democracy
was mainly the result of “practically free land into which men might escape from
oppression of inequalities” (274). Rather than resembling the historical pioneer Turner
describes, Starrett maintains the views held by Turner himself.
While, on the one hand, Starrett looks to the government to legitimize his
individual right to Ryker’s land, on the other hand, Starrett bases his right to this land
on the observation that the land Ryker wants to claim for himself is, in fact, too much
for a single individual to claim. Thus, Starrett—channeling Turner—ultimately
suggests that such vast quantities of land as Ryker currently possesses should be used
to cultivate democracy by way of that land’s equal distribution. To that end, Starrett’s
behavior is demonstrative of Turner’s insistence that among “the pioneers one man
was as good as his neighbor” (274). Like Turner’s historical pioneer, Starrett “[holds]
with passionate devotion the idea that he [is] building under freedom a new society,
based on self government, and for the welfare of the average man” (275). But, by the
same token, Starrett comes to this conclusion by surveying the land itself, noting the
extent to which it is plentiful, and not by assuming that the implementation of
democratic principles must be carried out by the government. Ultimately, Starrett
takes Turner’s assessment of the pioneer and makes a leap toward Populist idealism.
But to measure the full impact of director Stevens’s decision to cast the pioneer as a

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proponent of Populism, we need to assess his treatment of the equally influential
Frontier-related thought of Theodore Roosevelt.
As Richard Slotkin claims in his extensive writings on the Frontier Theses of
both Roosevelt and Turner, Turner’s more nostalgic view of the frontier past centered
on the yeoman farmer and on an implied “critique of the corruptions of the present”
(34). Likewise, according to Slotkin, Roosevelt’s belief that the modern industrial
nation was “the direct, logical, and hence desirable outcome of a frontier past” led him
celebrate a different kind of frontier hero: “a man of violence and conquest” who “was
appropriate to the kind of history [Roosevelt] wished to write” (35). This history
unfolded in accordance with Roosevelt’s Progressivism—that is, with his view that the
“present social order … represent[ed] the culmination of civilized progress” (Slotkin
35). As such, Roosevelt’s history of the West follows the evolution of the frontier
hunter of popular nineteenth-century American fiction as he gradually transforms
himself into a “neo-aristocrat” with a “right to rule” (Slotkin 35).

But, in Shane, it is precisely this neo-aristocratic figure who occupies the role
of villain, for it is Ryker—even more than his heroic analogue Shane—who must be
terminated in order for Starrett’s community of homesteaders to prevail. Stevens’s
film does go out of its way to adopt a separate element of Rooseveltian Frontier
thought in its portrayal of the homesteaders’ familial hierarchy. In “The Strenuous
Life,” Roosevelt insists that
a healthy state can exist only when the men and women who make it up lead
clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when the children are so trained that they shall
endeavor, not to shirk difficulties, but to overcome them; not to seek ease, but
to know how to wrest triumph from toil and risk. (269)

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Here, Roosevelt’s insistence, not only on hard work, but on the inseparability of the
“strenuous life” of “toil and risk” from a “clean, vigorous, [and] healthy” domesticity,
seems strangely distanced from the major thrust of his Frontier-related thought, which
focused so vehemently on the “aristocratic character lurking under the hunter’s
buckskins” (Slotkin 35). Far from the basic Frontier premise with which Roosevelt is
usually associated—that the American cowboy, a descendant of the Teutons, civilized
the West, paving the way for the rule of the elite class—the passage above simply
equates the health of the nation with the perseverance of the hard working family.
“The man must be glad to do a man’s work,” Roosevelt insists in “The Strenuous
Life,” “[and] to keep those dependant upon him … [while] woman must be the
housewife … [and the] wise and fearless mother of many children” (269).
While largely dismissing the more familiar current of Roosevelt’s thought that
focuses on the frontier hunter, Shane wholly endorses the sentiment expressed in “The
Strenuous Life” concerning the contribution of hard working families to the nation’s
well-being. In its depiction of the cowboy hero’s exodus from the frontier upon the
emergence of organized family farming collectives, Shane not only undercuts the
continuum Roosevelt sought to establish between the perseverance of the frontier
hunter and the progress of the nation, but also draws attention to the incompatibility of
Roosevelt’s notion that the health of the nation depended on the singularity of the lone
frontier hunter on the one hand, and the communal efforts of rural husbands, wives,
and their children on the other. Roosevelt’s interest in families in “The Strenuous life”
notwithstanding, his insistence on the centrality of the lone frontier hunter to the

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evolution of the nation totally ignores the presence of families—and in particular, it
ignores women, thereby making the production of progeny impossible. To the extent
that women do not play a role in Roosevelt’s cowboy narrative, the ability for his hero
to produce offspring—those hardy-blooded “children” whose ability to “wrest triumph
from toil and risk” is celebrated in “The Strenuous Life”—evaporates. Even if
Roosevelt’s frontier hunter were to have children out of wedlock, he would have
already de-stabilized the health of the very nation his dominance is supposed to have
ensured. As if in response to Roosevelt’s non-reproductive hero, Shane provides an
alternative myth of peaceful generation that overturns Roosevelt’s thesis precisely in
order to preserve the family structure Roosevelt himself insists upon in “The
Strenuous Life.” If you cannot produce progeny, you cannot abide the strictures of
“The Strenuous Life,” which leaves the nation fundamentally unhealthy.
John Sturges takes this idea a step further in Bad Day at Black Rock. First of
all, Sturges’s film elaborates on the implied critique of Roosevelt’s masculine hero in
Shane by depicting a town bereft of all but one woman and no children, and comprised
almost completely of aging, childless men. In addition, Bad Day at Black Rock also
seems to critique the Populism that Stevens’s film wants to celebrate. Sturges’s film
suggests that communities such as those depicted in Shane fail because they ultimately
turn back to the frontier-hero of Rooseveltian thought. We see this in the way the
town’s inhabitants rehearse the West’s paranoia about race by being concerned, as
Roosevelt was, with low birth rates and the “race suicide” committed by whites who
do not wage honorable war against non-whites. Thus, the mid-twentieth century

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reflection of Starrett’s community portrayed in Bad Day at Black Rock inevitably
coalesces around the racist fear of the collective losing its purity. Along the way, the
inhabitants of Black Rock make the same mistake as Roosevelt, which is that when
they conduct their war of racial purification, they forget about women and, in doing
so, forget to procreate. To that end, the lack of women in Black Rock is in part a
reaction to the one problem that the men of Shane have with the opposite sex: namely,
that women do not always do what their pioneer men want them to do.
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What is more,
even when the women of this fictive world do obey, they cannot be depended upon to
remain silent about the (mis)deeds of men.
Our West
Such is the context into which director Sturges thrusts John J. Macreedy, the
hero of Bad Day at Black Rock. Dressed in a business suit and hat, Macreedy looks
more like a banker than a cowboy—he carries no weapon and tucks his limp left
sleeve into his jacket pocket, thereby indicating the loss of his left arm. But while
Macreedy appears physically unthreatening, and while he may lack the stylistic flair
(and Olympian physique) of a character like Shane, his presence nevertheless
unnerves the townsfolk of Black Rock. Certain that Macreedy has come to town with
ill intentions, Black Rock’s inhabitants project onto him their fears (just as Joe Starrett
does to Shane before they become more acquainted). But whereas the homesteaders in
Shane wish to protect themselves against the malevolence of an outside force, the
townsfolk of Black Rock are themselves the perpetrators of a crime they suspect
Macreedy has come to solve. While their initial suspicions regarding Macreedy are far

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from accurate (he comes to Black Rock knowing nothing of the crime its inhabitants
hope to conceal) Macreedy, like Shane, does ultimately cleanse the town of evil. But
he does not do so for the sake of the town; rather, Macreedy is interested in keeping
himself alive.
Despite this key difference, the similarities between Bad Day at Black Rock
and Shane are many. In what follows, I will elaborate on Sturges’s apparent allusions
to Shane, allusions which, in their yoking together of opposites like East and West,
past and present, and town and country, share with the modernist novels discussed
earlier an interest in reconciling the myth of the provincial Old West with the
formidable world power it continues to serve. To what extent does the void created by
the absence of horses, six guns, spurs, and saloons in Bad Day at Black Rock serve as
a place-holder for Western myths now lacking substance? Are these absences
lamented or celebrated? Given that Macreedy comes to Black Rock shortly after
WWII to honor a fallen U.S. soldier, how might the commemoration of such a loss
compensate for the implosion of the collective—an implosion of the town’s communal
identity? One way to answer these questions is to consider the critique advanced
against the idea of communal solidarity in Sturges’s film. This critique, when
contemplated in relation to a film like Shane in which the converse is true, reveals a
gap between competing ideas about what Westerns are on the one hand, and what they
must do on the other. It is this gap that Sturges exploits in order to effect a
transfiguration of the Western hero that not only recalls the Western revisionism of

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Hemingway, Cather, and Fitzgerald, but that paves the way for further films to explore
the interiority of the cowboy, and thus, American identity.
In the opening aerial shot of John Sturges’s Bad Day at Black Rock, a west-
bound Southern Pacific passenger train plunges through a vast desert somewhere in
the American southwest. As the train hurries along, it disturbs the stillness of an arid
wasteland (a possible nod to Eliot given the film’s formal and thematic modernist
overtones) seemingly devoid of life—a place where sparse patches of grey sage blend
into the dull, grey earth and overcast skyline. This wide-open, infertile landscape
appears to be as exposed to the elements as it is empty of all but the dirt, weeds, and
rocks that meet the eye. But this desert plain does, in fact, conceal a dark secret, one
that weighs heavily on Black Rock, the small, dingy town that lies in its bosom. Four
years prior to the arrival of the Southern Pacific, the inhabitants of Black Rock were
party to a murder that they have since concealed, but that the town’s tumbledown
appearance all but betrays. The murder of one of the town’s former inhabitants—a
Japanese-American farmer by the name of Kumoko—was carried out by the town’s
impetuous leader, Reno Smith (played by Robert Ryan), and it has cast a dark cloud
over the town ever since.
Through a series of slowly pieced together revelations, we eventually learn of
the circumstances surrounding Kumoko’s death. Having been denied entry into the
U.S. Army for medical reasons the day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Reno
Smith returned home to Black Rock in a malevolent mood. Once home, Smith focused
his anger on Kumoko, against whom Smith already had a grudge. After leasing a plot

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land called Adobe Flat to Kumoko under the false pretense that the land had access to
water, Smith was chagrin to discover that Kumoko, having dug deep into his well, had
discovered that the land did in fact possess water in abundance. This, added to the fact
that Smith had drunk excessively upon returning home from his ill-fated attempt to
enlist in the armed forces, exacerbated his prejudice against his Japanese-American
tenant. In addition to conscripting his two thugs, Hector David and Coley Trimble
(played by Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine, respectively) into assisting him, Smith
also convinced the local café owner, Sam (played by Walter Sande), and the young
hotel manager Pete Wirth (John Ericson), to accompany him on a visit to Adobe Flat,
promising to give Kumoko a good hazing. After setting Kumoko’s house ablaze,
Smith shot and killed Kumoko as he ran from his house, his clothes on fire. Fearful
that Smith might turn his rage on them, the men accompanying Smith agreed to help
him bury Kumoko, and remained silent about what happened at Adobe Flat for the
next four years. During this time, this murderous, intolerant mid-twentieth-century
remnant of Joe Starrett’s unified frontier community had unapologetically dismissed
Starrett’s notion of a fair and equitable West. With Kumoko’s burial, Starrett’s idea of
the West—a West in which everyone who desires land, and who is willing to work it,
will have equal access to prosperity—has also been exterminated and buried under a
mound of once fertile American soil. Sturges’s film suggests that by the mid-twentieth
century, the unified frontier community envisioned in Shane has transformed into a
mob capable of both perpetrating and concealing murder. Those responsible for the
murder at the center of the film’s plot—as well as those who silently sanction it—

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suffer from their own moral failure. As a result, they are forced to watch their town
gradually crumble as it conceals from others—communities and individuals alike—its
horrific crime, and the unjustified hatred behind that crime.
In justifying Kumoko’s killing, Smith rehearses the racist sentiments about
Japanese-Americans prevalent among many whites in the United States after the
bombing of Pearl Harbor. But Smith’s thinking on the issue of Kumoko’s murder is
likewise traceable to Rooseveltian attitudes about the threat that immigrants and their
American-born offspring pose to elite whites. As an extension of the Social
Darwinism that informed his progressive Frontier Thesis,
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Theodore Roosevelt
warned against allowing white, Protestant middle- and upper-class birthrates to decline
compared to those of the underclass and immigrants. To ignore population growth
among immigrants was, for Roosevelt, to commit “race suicide,” as it would lead to
the extinction of the white ruling class. Roosevelt believed that, rather than grow
leisurely in its privilege, upper- and middle-class whites should remain on the
offensive and engage in “righteous war” against those who would corrupt their purity
and bring about their demise. (269) For Roosevelt, the Frontier had provided an initial
context for such race wars, which Roosevelt felt would empower so-called civilized
whites in obtaining the bold human quality required to oversee the modern nation.
In ridding Black Rock of foreigners like Kumoko, then, Reno Smith means to
maintain his own idealized virility by taking up, in his own small way, Roosevelt’s
“challenge of empire” (Slotkin 51). But Smith falls short of the Rooseveltian model,
for he cannot translate violence into progress. Rather, this primal act of violence

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keeps him and his townspeople in a state of economic suspension, not expansion. They
may consolidate class rule within the context of Black Rock, but Smith and his
followers are unable to broaden their imperialistic purposes. The violence they
perpetrate is not expansive; rather, it is implosive. The killing of Kumoko constitutes
Black Rock’s death knell, as the town descends into profound isolation which
hopelessly exacerbates its already dire economic straits. These circumstances suggest
that Sturges’s film takes specific aim at the Rooseveltian tradition that holds
encourages racial violence in order to build individual and social character.
Although we are unaware of the town’s horrible deed when the aforementioned
train appears at the start of the film, the staccato hits of André Previn’s brassy score
emphasize the urgency with which the train travels, thereby foreshadowing the danger
posed to the film’s hero by Kumoko’s killers. While the squalid town of Black Rock
broods darkly in the distance, Sturges’s camera races headlong toward the train, first
from the side, then straight on as if to collide with it. The camera pulls away just in
time, narrowly missing the train, but the suggestion of impending impact remains,
thereupon setting the stage for the ensuing confrontation between the townsfolk of
Black Rock and John J. Macreedy, whose business in Black Rock has the train making
its first stop there since Kumoko’s murder. Knowing nothing of the man’s brutal
killing at the hands of Black Rock’s citizens, Macreedy has come to the town to
present Kumoko with the military honors owed to Kumoko’s now deceased son.
Macreedy, we soon learn, has Kumoko’s son to thank for saving his life during WWII,
and because of this act of heroism Macreedy feels duty-bound to locate the youth’s

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father and express his gratitude. Little does Macreedy know, however, that in
attempting to locate his rescuer’s father in this destitute Western town, he must
confront the fact that the frontier ideals for which the young Kumoko gallantly fought
and died simultaneously provided the men of Black Rock with a justification for
racially motivated murder.
Insofar as Bad Day at Black Rock dramatizes a quarrel between a mysterious,
lone hero and a recusant band of hoodlums in the context of a dilapidated Western
town, Sturges’s film retroactively elaborates on the myth of the Wild West town by
exploring the inner workings of such a town’s mid twentieth-century remnant. The
town of Black Rock recalls its long-gone precursor notwithstanding the fact that its
inhabitants wish to distance themselves from a mythic West in which they have no
interest, but that they cannot help but recall. As Reno Smith tells Macreedy:
Somebody’s always looking for something in this part of the west. To the
historian it’s the “old west.” To the book writer it’s the “wild west.” To the
business man it’s the “undeveloped west.” They say we’re all poor and
backward, and I guess we are—we don’t even have enough water. But to us,
this place is our west, and I wish they’d leave us alone.

For the citizens of Black Rock, then, outsiders looking in at the town make the mistake
of collapsing idealized notions of the West with Black Rock’s material actuality. Do
calm, dusty roads conceal a culture of twilight gun battles? Does the reticence of the
townsfolk betray the deep-seated individualism and proclivity for self-governance that
characterized the frontiersman? While such questions might occupy the mind of the
inquisitive outsider, the inhabitants of Black Rock eschew the curiosities of those who
want the West to offer something more than the unremarkable lives of its flesh-and-

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blood inhabitants. For Smith, Black Rock is an unassuming Western town that does
not want to be associated with the mythic past any more than it does with the modern
present. It dismisses both equally. Black Rock is not a world of the past so much as it
is a world haunted by one.
Whereas Shane dealt with the hero’s sacrificial departure, Bad Day at Black
Rock documents his return, thereby questioning—if not positing the collapse of—the
populist ideal so central to Stevens’s film. Like Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises,
Sturges’s film has as its central character a disfigured war veteran: Macreedy has lost
either all or a portion of his left arm during WWII (just as in the case of Jake Barnes,
the exact nature of Macreedy’s injury is never specified, only suggested). Although
few details of Macreedy’s wound are revealed, we eventually learn that he “got it” in
Italy (again, like Jake Barnes) and that, as a result, he has since settled into “forced
retirement.” Although Macreedy ostensibly resides in Los Angeles, the city he is
bound for once his business in Black Rock concludes, he ultimately reveals that L.A.
is merely a “good jumping off place” for the likes of “South America, [or] the islands
…” Macreedy is, in fact, a wanderer, a lost soul, a man without a home, without
family, without a country. He travels west toward a new frontier of expatriation and
anonymity. Though he once identified as an “army man,” Macreedy’s injury—which
he received as a result of his service—now prevents him from participating in the
armed forces. In serving his country, Macreedy has been rendered useless to it. This
unfortunate circumstance extends into Macreedy’s civilian life as well, for the film

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implies that he has returned to a country that has no a place for him and that disavows
his value based, in large part, on the wound he received in its service.
Thus, for Macreedy, “pain”—such as the pain of losing a limb, and thus of
losing one’s sense of social connection and purpose—“is bewildering,” and
bewilderment is precisely what he experiences sitting on the westbound train on his
way to Black Rock. Macreedy’s only motivation is the “one last duty [he means] to
perform before resigning from the human race”: to deliver to Kumoko the medal
meant for his son. Suffering from severe losses, on a mission commemorating a loss (a
mission that is itself a lost cause), Macreedy exits the South Pacific train “looking for
a place to get lost.” Indeed, in Bad Day at Black Rock, there is a shared emphasis on
the “lost” object that is John J. Macreedy’s now missing left arm and the ostensibly
tangible but never actually seen medal of honor that Macreedy aims to deliver to
Kumoko. This unseen medal, together with Macreedy’s missing arm, symbolizes the
invisible—indeed impossible—gesture around which Macreedy’s visit to Black Rock
is centered: handing (with an arm that doesn’t exist) the commemorative object (which
we never see) to the father (the victim of a murder) of the man (also deceased) who
saved Macreedy’s life during the war. This transaction, then, which is central to the
film’s plot, is already, before the film even begins, a material impossibility. But is it
out of this cluster of losses that the film, again like Hemingway’s novel, wishes to
recuperate the idea of loss itself. Although Macreedy comes to Black Rock “looking
for a place to get lost,” it is within that state of simultaneously being and becoming
lost that he evolves. Conversely, the townspeople of Black Rock, under Smith’s rule,

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recognize a place for themselves in the town. It is from within the town itself, then,
that the idea of the mythic West is critiqued.
But Sturges’s film is not so uncomplicated as to suggest that the metropolis is
without its share of incivility. It is, after all, Macreedy’s intent to flee the so-called
civilized world that sent him to war and that now—after he has suffered the loss of his
left arm—refuses to readmit him into society. Despite the aimlessness that
characterizes Macreedy’s travel plans, once he comes upon Black Rock he enters the
town in a manner familiar to the Western genre. On the one hand, he stands, like the
Cooperian frontier hunter, “between the opposed worlds of savagery and civilization”
and acts as “civilization’s most effective instrument against savagery” (Slotkin 16).
On the other hand, however, Macreedy does not act on behalf of any “civilization”
whose assessments of “savagery” go beyond his own purview. This is to say, for
Macreedy, the civilized and the savage are not broken down in terms of white men and
red men as they are in Cooper’s Leatherstocking stories. Rather, Macreedy, in a mode
more like that of the Virginian, occupies a space wherein societal notions of civility
are eschewed in favor of the hero’s own moral code. Macreedy has suffered savagery
at the hands of the civilized, after all, and recognizes the savagery perpetrated by this
town of white men who, in the Cooperian (and no doubt the Rooseveltian) context,
would seem to count among the civilized. Yet, while Macreedy does act as an
“effective instrument against savagery,” it is not for civilization’s sake but rather for
his own. Unlike Shane, who rids the town of Ryker, Macreedy rids himself of the
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Thus, the idea of Western civilization is presented ironically in Bad Day at
Black Rock, as the film depicts the Western world of white men so lauded by both
Turner and Roosevelt as a dystopia of failed democratic ideals. Surrounded by acres
and acres of desiccated land, the town of Black Rock consists of just a few dilapidated
buildings, a barren and dusty main street, and a handful of citizens who are, for the
most part, as worn and grey as the town they inhabit. The town’s ragged buildings and
roads, its impoverished, underused cafés and hotels, provide a decaying habitat into
which its citizens blend like insects mimicking their surroundings to ward off
predators. Ironically, however, the only thing preying on the inhabitants of Black Rock
is the very environment into which these townsfolk so easily blend. This is not the
fertile West so beloved by Joe Starrett’s homesteaders. One sees no sign here of virgin
land awaiting cultivation by generation after generation of farming families. In this
place, rather than nurture a fertile center as it expands outward, one looks on
hopelessly as the sparse, deteriorating landscape slouches inward, threatening to
swallow up the beleaguered town at its center. Sturges’s film imagines Stevens’s
frontier farmers to have failed miserably at the task of building a new society, for the
town of Black Rock constitutes the mid-twentieth century residue of the same type of
frontier community that Shane sacrificed himself to secure. Not only has the town
collapsed into economic frailty, the land surrounding the town, as well as the people
living within it, have become infertile.
Thus, in the wake of Black Rock’s failed democracy, local landowner Reno
Smith emerges to stand bestride the broken remnant of Joe Starrett’s populist ideal.

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Weak and ineffectual men like the town’s sheriff, Tim Horn, yield to Smith’s despotic
ascendancy while others, such as the town’s circumspect doctor, T.R. Velie, are too
focused on self-preservation to bother challenging the tyrannical landowner’s control.
Though the town’s infrastructure has all but collapsed (even its water supply is in
danger of depletion) nothing stirs the pitifully idle inhabitants of Black Rock to action
until Smith returns home from the Army recruitment center the day after the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor. In leading the assault on Kumoko, Smith renews the
Rooseveltian practice of waging righteous race war, and in doing so, transforms the
defeated and deprived men of Black Rock into a mob complicit in racially-motivated
murder. To the extent that Kumoko’s killing bonds the men of Black Rock together
into a unified social body, this community-turned-murderous mob is a perversion of
the society sought after in Shane, for the men of Black Rock are only equal in their
service to Smith.
But Smith’s Rooseveltian ascendancy does not halt the process of extinction
that promises to produce the town’s perdition. For Smith forgets (as had his
ideological hierarch, Roosevelt) about women. As the unwed, childless men of Black
Rock grow older, this infertile town’s inevitable eradication draws nearer
notwithstanding their leader’s dual embodiment of the racially pure, elite capitalist on
the one hand, and the lone frontier hunter (with an inclination toward violence) on the
other. Thus, Sturges’s film suggests that just as the Turnerian emphasis on the farmer
and his “new society” leads to unpreventable collapse, the Rooselveltian faith in
Social Darwinism likewise produces failure. In Bad Day at Black Rock, these two

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competing understandings of the frontier cancel each other out, and as a result,
Macreedy leaves Black Rock almost as broken as he found it. At the start of the film,
Macreedy steps into a lost world—a world beyond saving comprised almost entirely
of aging men. By the film’s close, Macreedy may have liberated the town form
Smith’s rule, but he hasn’t rescued it from extinction. Although Doc Velie persuades
Macreedy to leave behind Kumoko’s medal, claiming that its presence in the town will
give Black Rock “something to build on,” this cannot be. For Kumoko’s medal will
always commemorate the young man’s sacrifice first and his father’s murder second—
and besides, Kumoko’s medal would not now be in the town’s possession now had it
not been for their murderous actions. Hence, while Macreedy may rid the town of its
villain, he does not save the town. Any good that befalls Black Rock as a result of
Macreedy’s actions is purely consequential. In Bad Day at Black Rock, it is the town
which resigns itself to a lingering death while the hero perseveres—a denouement that
functions as the inverse to the resolution of Shane. But a Western hero without a town
to save—without a social order to serve—constitutes yet another challenge to the
Western genre, yet another absence—one that again recalls The Sun Also Rises. In that
novel, as with Sturges’s film, loss—the only thing guaranteed to last—is all that
remains.
East to West
The somber final sequence of Bad Day at Black Rock is shot against an
unaccounted-for cluster of men and women of various ages who look on as Doc Velie
accompanies Macreedy to the train platform while imploring him to give the town the

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medal meant for Kumoko. These onlookers, who line the street across from the
station, are never the object of the scene; rather, they provide the backdrop against
which Macreedy and Velie pass, and as such, they are barely distinguishable. Are
these people from neighboring towns come to observe the apprehension of Smith’s
lackeys? Or are they locals who up to now have been too afraid to walk the town’s
streets? That these questions go unanswered is of particular significance if we are, in
fact, to assume that this cluster of people consist of newly emerged citizens of Black
Rock—ostensibly the very group for whom Doc Velie hopes to secure possession of
Kumoko’s medal. Velie insists that the town “might come back” had it Kumoko’s
medal “to build on,” but Macreedy remains largely unmoved, saying only that “some
towns do and some towns don’t … depends on the people.” Although Doc Velie does
quickly gesture in the direction of the watchful crowd (and the town’s buildings, and
toward the desert beyond) in pointing out the value of Kumoko’s medal to “us,” the
specific presence of the onlookers goes unmentioned. Meanwhile, Macreedy
completely ignores the spectators: it is as if they never register in his field of vision,
even though (one assumes) their appearance would be as surprising to him as it is to
the viewer. After all, up to this point, the town has remained nearly deserted except for
the handful of (mostly male) characters mentioned in the previous section. It is on this
group of men that Macreedy remains focused as he makes his way through town,
gazing across the train tracks at the scene unfolding in front of the Black Rock jail.
Once Macreedy and Velie reach the train platform we see perhaps the most
important shot in this final scene—the arrest of Pete Wirth—from Macreedy’s

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perspective. This shot of Pete, the youngest of Smith’s accomplices, punctuates the
sober resolution of Sturges’s film by evacuating the town of Black Rock of its only
youth, and thus, of its hope for survival. The emphasis that director Sturges’s places
on Pete’s apprehension quickly overshadows the more ambivalent depiction of the
townsfolk, who remain unaccounted for and indistinct, and as such, resemble so many
ghosts—long departed souls looking on powerlessly as the town of Black Rock edges
ever-closer toward nonexistence. One imagines this image of young Pete in handcuffs
weighing on Macreedy’s mind as he boards the westbound Southern Pacific. In
payment for its past sins, the town of Black Rock offers up not only its corrupt elders,
but its impressionable youth as well. In this context, Macreedy’s westbound departure
from Black Rock is of profound significance, for Macreedy does not return to his
place of origin as Shane does. Rather, Macreedy embraces a new frontier of
expatriation where he can “get lost” as far away as he can from the American West
whose future he knows to be as damned as its past. While a charitable Macreedy does,
in the end, present Velie with Kumoko’s medal, Macreedy does not hold out much
hope for the town’s renewal. In this final exchange with Velie, Macreedy’s
ambivalence about the West remains as palpable as his expatriation is inevitable.
Macreedy’s ultimate expatriation, all but confirmed by his choice to board the
westbound train at the end of Sturges’s film, underscores the extent to which the
Western genre, after Bad Day at Black Rock, finds itself at an impasse. Like
Macreedy, the Western cannot backtrack from where it has come. This inability to
venture back is due in large measure to the newly complicated relationship between

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the Western hero and the world around him. Unlike most mainstream Western
protagonists who are, in the words of Klaus Rieser, “powerful in their environment,”
while being “powerless regarding the larger social transformations that contextualize
[them],” Macreedy’s relationship to systems of power is less clear-cut (213). It is
reasonably apparent, on the one hand, that the historical changes that have
“contextualized” the wounded Macreedy after the war have contributed significantly
to his desire to travel west and eventually “get lost.” But within the context of his
presence in the American West, Macreedy does not seem any closer to his
“environment,” notwithstanding the fact that—in a fashion appropriate to the Western
hero—Macreedy’s “defining features are autonomy and detachment from the world of
common folks” (Rieser 220). Much of Macreedy’s detachment in fact derives from his
war wound, which sets him apart socially wherever he goes. And while Macreedy is
often “situated at the center of the screen with generous space around him” thereby
“effectuat[ing] his statuesque appearance,” it is precisely his lack of wholeness that, in
part, detaches him from the “environment” with which the mainstream Western hero is
typically linked (Rieser 220).
However, this detachment also has to do with the condition of the landscape
itself. Corrupted by men like Reno Smith (who have used the land of the American
West to conceal the charred remains of their drunken misdeeds) the Western landscape
of Bad Day at Black Rock no longer offers the promise of spiritual transcendence to
the Western hero. Thus, the death that has historically served as the Western hero’s
apotheosis—the state of perfection that once accompanied his final merger with the

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land—has been evacuated of its former glory. Once transcendent, this land has been
spoiled by the degenerate pioneers of Black Rock. Thus Bad Day at Black Rock poses
the question: what happens to the Western hero when the landscape with which he
seeks to merge becomes tainted? In such a circumstance, Macreedy can claim neither
east nor west, neither town nor country, as his domain. He lacks attachment to any
particular (geographic or national) context, and as a result he remains as disunited
from the West as he is in the East—in either realm, he remains “a misfit, an outsider, a
rebel” (Rieser 213). Unlike Shane, Macreedy cannot return to the landscape from
which he came; rather, he continues his journey away from both the Western margin
as well as the Eastern seat of white social hegemony: for, by boarding the westbound
train at the end of Sturges’s film, Macreedy aims to travel “west of everything”—
“everything” in this case referring even (or perhaps especially) to the West itself
(Tompkins 24). Whereas for Jane Tompkins “to go west, as far west as you can go,
west of everything, is to die” (24), Macreedy means to travel “west of everything” in
order to survive—for in the world of Westerns, an aimless survival is preferable to an
inglorious death. Without “the landscape’s final invitation” (Tompkins 72), the
Western hero is set adrift, his despair over the absence of a befitting destiny finding a
remedy only in his newfound desire to “get lost.”
Notwithstanding the state of the Western hero at the end of Bad Day at Black
Rock, Western films continued to appear in the years following its release, with
director John Sturges himself going on to make four more Western films between
1955 and 1959. But it was not until the appearance in 1960 of The Magnificent

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Seven—also directed by Sturges and famously based on Akira Kurosawa’s
masterpiece Seven Samurai (1954)—that the genre found the appropriate antidote to
John Macreedy’s expatriation. While Bad Day at Black Rock imagines the Turnerian
“new society” as a racist mob whose corruption of the land forces the hero’s departure,
The Magnificent Seven reflects on the virtues of a collective created outside the social
order. Despite the fact that The Magnificent Seven features white townships whose
residents unify around notions of (capitalist) progress that are inseparable from racist
perspectives, the film also contains characters who seek redemption from capitalist
influence. The cowboy heroes at the center of Sturges’s film are such a group: they
consist of seven “professional” gunfighters who, having lost everything selling their
services to others, now find redemption liberating a village of poor Mexican farmers
(who have little or no money to offer the gunmen) from a treacherous bandit named
Calvera (played by Eli Wallach) whose gang has overtaken the village, consuming its
food and murdering its citizens. The seven gunfighters learn of the besieged farmers
from the three representatives the Mexican village sends to purchase guns in an
unnamed border town a few miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border.
While in the town, the three Mexicans witness an unusual spectacle involving a
pair of drifting gunslingers and the “civilized” white inhabitants of the town who
dictate the parameters of local race relations. The Mexicans watch as the town’s
undertaker explains to a pair of bemused traveling salesmen that a funeral coach
containing the remains of Sam, a local Indian recently deceased, will not be allowed to
make the journey to the local cemetery. The undertaker insists that since the town

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became “civilized” it is no longer permissible for non-whites like Sam to be interred
among whites. While the salesmen (who had found Sam’s body and had put up the
money for his burial) stand perplexed, two unemployed gunfighters, Chris (played by
Yul Brynner) and Vin (played by Steve McQueen), volunteer to drive the coach free
of charge to the cemetery in opposition to the town’s racist objections—a strange
move for men accustomed to being paid for their efforts. The gunslingers offer no
explanation for their actions, but the pleasure they appear to take in the proceedings
suggests that Chris and Vin are easily as invested in countering the newly established
town custom as they are in securing a civil burial for Sam. Their act of rebellion
constitutes the first example in the film of men like Chris and Vin joining forces in
order to achieve an honorable objective. It also demonstrates the extent to which these
jobless, desperate men—men for whom towns such this represent the taming of the
West that has, after all, brought about their obsolescence—mean to differentiate
themselves from the “civilized” collective who are responsible for the gunfighters’
unemployment as well as for the trouble surrounding Sam’s internment.
In drawing attention to the agitation between disaffected gunfighters with
nothing to lose and the towns through which they pass, The Magnificent Seven
suggests that, in selling their services, these gunfighters have been complicit in their
own obsolescence. Rather than remaining detached, these “stranger heroes” have
entered “the world of common folks” and mistaken their “superior position” for a
commodity to be bought and sold (Rieser 220). Now that the West has been tamed,
however, and the services of paid gunmen are no longer in demand, these gunslingers

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must confront the knowledge that their professional lives had been spent—in part if
not in full—in the service of those with capital enough to develop the “civilized”
townships that now threaten the gunfighter’s very existence. Once on a par with the
natural landscape, emulating and embodying the purity of its material perfection, the
Western hero imagined in The Magnificent Seven instead embodies the commercial
landscape of the developed West and the corruptions it begets. Like the samurai in
Kurosawa’s film, the redemption the seven gunmen receive, many of them through
death, is the restoration of their elevated social station through acts of sacrificial
heroism. Whereas John Macreedy is quite clearly set apart from the immorality of the
community that surrounds him, The Magnificent Seven posits the hero’s culpability in
service of social mechanisms that he now—in desperation—rebels against. While
most Western films take for granted the honor of the cowboy hero, The Magnificent
Seven demands that he earn it.
The Mexicans sent to the U.S. on behalf of their beleaguered village give the
Magnificent Seven just such an opportunity. They begin by seeking Chris’ assistance
in purchasing guns to use in battle against Calvera and his bandits. After Chris points
out that, in this economy, men are much cheaper (and easier to come by) than guns,
the villagers offer the job of protecting their village to him. Chris accepts their
proposal, promising to assemble a team of likewise able gunmen, thereby bolstering
the planned defensive against Calvera and his gang. After conducting a series of
interviews, Chris decides on five expert gunmen: Vin, O’Reilly (played by Charles
Bronson), Britt (played by James Coburn), Lee (played by Robert Vaughn), and Harry

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(played by Brad Dexter). One final volunteer, a local young man of Mexican ancestry
named Chico (played by German actor Horst Buchholz), insists on following Chris
and his team to Mexico despite having been dismissed as inexperienced. The villagers
offer Chris and his gunslingers a total of twenty dollars each, thereby providing Chris
and his men with “everything [the Mexicans] have.”
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Given the pitiful economic
status of these once handsomely paid professionals, this promise of “everything” wins
the gunslingers over, as it more than sustains them within this new moral-based
economy in which they have no choice but to take part: all that remains for these men
to earn is their honor. So, while in material terms the paltry sum of twenty dollars
“won’t even pay for [their] bullets,” the seven—in accepting next to nothing for their
work—suddenly become quite rich in virtue.
Once in Mexico, Chris’ gunfighter collective resumes the Western hero’s quest
for an honorable death “under the aspect of nature, of beauty, and of some kind of
spiritual transcendence,” as the foreign setting allows the film to renew the “thematic
and formal codes” of the Western that Bad Day at Black Rock called into question
(Tompkins 24-25). What Tompkins describes as the “ritualization of the moment of
death” in Westerns, that is, the “rigid structure of sameness” whereby the death of the
Western hero occurs according to a controlled set of “maneuvers,” exists in The
Magnificent Seven precisely due to the “sense of familiarity” created because and not
in spite of the film’s foreign setting (25). In fact, given the film’s depiction of the
American West as a social/commercial rather than natural realm, the placement of the
Western hero in a Mexican farming village actually increases the “sense of

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familiarity” that typically accompanies the hero’s affinity for and alignment with the
landscape. This is due in large measure to the liberties director Sturges takes in
depicting his Mexican characters. Notwithstanding the Mexican government’s
insistence that one of their representatives be allowed on set to monitor the film’s
characterization of Mexicans, The Magnificent Seven depicts the villagers as basically
defenseless primitives who are as “natural” as the crops they grow and the soil in
which they grow it. Whereas the Mexican farmers—in both their husbandry and their
instinct to survive—are aligned with growth and fertility and thus with nature in its
feminine aspect, the seven gunmen, by contrast (and in a mode befitting the Western
genre), correspond to nature’s magisterial, masculine power—that is, the “solid state
of being” that the Western hero desires in life and joins with in death (Tompkins 72).
Thus, the film’s foreign setting ironically provides the quintessential American hero
with a pure natural landscape with which to align (rather than one corroded by
commerce), thereby allowing him once again—particularly in death—to achieve
“complete materialization” (Tompkins 72).
One particularly striking element of Sturges’s formulation of the Western hero
and his relationship to the landscape in The Magnificent Seven is the extent to which
the film makes the hero both master and servant of the foreign land he has agreed to
liberate. Sturges’s film seems to suggest that while, on the one hand, Mexican soil has
failed to produce people capable of protecting it from harm (thereby ceding a certain
amount of authority to men, such as the Magnificent Seven, who can and do offer such
protection), on the other hand, without this pure foreign landscape to draw strength

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from, men such as Chris’ band of gunmen would face ignominious disintegration back
home. Chris and his men are made more powerful (and thus more familiar in the
context of the Western genre) by the foreign land they now inhabit. But maintaining
that power demands that they indefinitely occupy—indeed be absorbed into—that
same foreign space.
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In addition, this connection between the Western hero and the
land that is, in a general sense, so central both to the Western genre and to the Western
hero’s cultural significance as a national emblem of masculine power has been, in The
Magnificent Seven, likewise heightened by the unusual physical presence of the film’s
star. Yul Brynner’s vague foreignness situates his version of the Western hero closer
to the “exotic” (and thus primal and feminine) Mexicans than to the John Waynes,
Randolph Scotts, and Lee Marvins of earlier Hollywood Westerns.
On the heels of a film like Bad day at Black Rock in which the future of the
Western and the Western hero is left in very much in doubt, Brynner brings to the
genre a mystique of unknown origin that works in tandem with the foreign character
of the film’s setting to revise (or perhaps revitalize) the Western hero. Moreover,
Brynner’s presence in the film also harkens back to the ethnic ambiguities that authors
like Fitzgerald and Cather injected into the basic Western formula (by way of
characters like Jay Gatsby and Tom Outland) in order to test the genre’s buoyancy
against an increasingly incommensurate social and political context. For her part,
Cather addresses the struggle of the Western hero to negotiate a newly
commercialized landscape first by sending an orphaned Tom Outland to the Blue
Mesa where he attempts to achieve “complete materialization” with his primitive (or

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perhaps “natural”) ancestors. When this attempted merger fails, Cather looks forward
to the solution offered in The Magnificent Seven, namely, sending the Western hero
out of the West where he meets his end but, in doing so, also achieves his goal of
joining with the natural realm. Conversely, Fitzgerald negotiates the lingering frontier
mythology of the post-WWI U.S. by sending his ethnically ambiguous cowboy hero
directly into the Wild West of elite capitalism: that is, the eastern seaboard. Through
his many material possessions, Gatsby comes to embody this corrupt landscape while
at the same time his ambiguous (ethnic) origins give him access to the myth of the
stranger hero. In death, Gatsby achieves “complete materialization,” but, in this
commercial context, the hero’s merger with the landscape begets his own
obsolescence: he becomes just another thing without value. Meanwhile Byrnner’s
characterization of Chris Adams—which cannot help but be affected by his off-screen
reputation as well as the unusual nature of his on-screen image—takes the ethnic
ambiguity of Gatsby (along with the mystique and rumor-heavy identity that Brynner
cultivated in his public persona) and combines it with the foreign solution introduced
by Cather.
Given what Brynner brings to The Magnificent Seven (and by extension the
Western genre) both in terms of his physical appearance as well as his mysterious
origins, it should be noted that the film’s producers initially envisioned Spencer Tracy
as the lead gunslinger. Early drafts of the film’s script called for a slightly older cast,
and for the actor in the starring role in particular to be closer in age to Takashi
Shimura who, when he was not quite fifty, played the samurai leader Kambei in

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Kurosawa’s film. Tracy, who was nearly sixty at the time and firmly established as
one of Hollywood’s elder statesmen, certainly would have come closer to invoking the
sagacity of Shimura’s head Samurai. But what is more, in terms of the trajectory of the
Hollywood Western and in particular Tracy’s performance a few years prior as the
disaffected hero of Bad Day at Black Rock, the presence of Tracy in a film
championing (rather than critiquing) the notion of the collective in the context of a
Western film would have made The Magnificent Seven perhaps more obviously a
comment on the previous film on the one hand, but on the other would have likely
made The Magnificent Seven a more limited statement.
While there is little reason to doubt that Tracy would have worked fine as the
film’s star, the decision to use Brynner significantly broadened director Sturges’s
palette. For, while Brynner brought to the role all of the masculine bravado and virility
that audiences had come to expect from the cowboy hero, at the same time his
presence was totally alien to the genre. Before The Magnificent Seven, no one had ever
seen a bald gunslinger with an indeterminate foreign accent and a vaguely Asian face.
In fact, Brynner’s presence in The Magnificent Seven makes what might otherwise
have been a rather solipsistic Western interested in reflecting on the genre’s past into
something much more global. This new global quality that Brynner brought to the
Western was also due to the reputation he earned earlier in his career for playing
“foreign.” At the time of The Magnificent Seven, Brynner was (and has since
remained) best known for his Oscar-winning turn as King Mongkut of Siam in Walter
Lang’s 1956 movie version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I. Brynner’s

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close association with King Mongkut furthered an ethnic ambiguity that Brynner
himself went out of his way to cultivate, accentuating his many portrayals of Thais,
Russians, Egyptians, Jews, and Cajuns with invented stories about his own exotic
origins.
Consequently, the choice of Brynner to play the lead gunslinger in The
Magnificent Seven throws into bold relief that which is the truly extraordinary about
Sturges’s film. That is, The Magnificent Seven—in both its look to the “East” for its
narrative and to Central America for its location—offers a response to the impasse
created at the end of Bad Day at Black Rock and, in doing so, troubles the elasticity of
the Western that was first scrutinized in the modernist novels discussed earlier.
Whereas Bad Day at Black Rock insists that the Western hero depart from an
American West no longer capable of sustaining its own mythological narratives, The
Magnificent Seven not only introduces but also incorporates the foreign into the
mythological frontier. After first addressing postwar prejudices against Japanese
Americans in the context of the American West in Bad Day at Black Rock, Sturges
takes his gaze further east in The Magnificent Seven, elaborating on the previous
film’s racial preoccupations not only by remaking a Japanese film in the guise of a
Western, but by casting in the lead role Hollywood’s most ethnically ambiguous star.
In Musical Stages: An Autobiography, composer Richard Rodgers writes of
first casting eyes on Brynner in December 1950 during the latter’s audition for The
King and I at the Majestic Theater in New York:
The first candidate who walked from the wings was a bald, muscular fellow
with a bony, Oriental face … He scowled in our direction, sat down on the

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stage and crossed his legs, tailor-fashion, then plunked one whacking chord on
his guitar and began to howl in a strange language that no one could
understand. He looked savage, he sounded savage, and there was no denying
that he projected a feeling of controlled ferocity. (270)
Rodgers’ account shows the extent to which Brynner had a knack for appealing to
limited conceptions of the foreign that were common among show business
gatekeepers. By conjuring an indeterminate amalgam of “exotic” behaviors derived
from his experiences performing with gypsy guitar orchestras in Paris or working as a
trapeze artist with the Cirque d’Hiver, Brynner developed a persona as boisterous as
his physical appearance was unusual.
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Though only one third Mongolian, Brynner
had a vaguely “Oriental” face that, combined with his “savage” presence and shaven
head, landed him not only the role of King of Siam on both stage and screen, but also
earned him a celebrity that, for a time, made Brynner the actor on whom Hollywood
called when it needed someone to play foreign.
After performing on Broadway and later touring with The King and I from
1951 to 1955, Brynner became the first actor to be cast in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten
Commandments (1956), DeMille having found the “exotic-looking Yul … [to be] the
perfect choice” for the part of Pharaoh (Capua 50). By the time Brynner became
involved with The Magnificent Seven he was a major star with an Academy Award
under his belt for The King and I. While both his mysterious past and his tendency to
play foreigners seemingly made Brynner an unnatural fit for a Western, the ambiguity
about his past actually blended nicely with the mythos of a hero who so often seemed
to emerge from the land itself: the less we know about the Western hero, the more
familiar he is to the genre. Just as there was (typically, and perhaps ideally) no

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accounting for the heroic gunslinger’s origins, no one knew for certain the origin of
Sturges’s mysterious leading man. Which meant that what audiences did (and perhaps
still do) universally recognize in Brynner was his foreignness, and in a film like The
Magnificent Seven, in which ethnic otherness is typically associated with the feminine,
this sets in motion an emphasis on women (albeit a problematic one) that is unusual in
Western films. Whereas in Bad Day at Black Rock the dearth of women in the town
contributes significantly to the failure of the collective, here women are not only
present but greatly valued by male villagers who do not grapple with contradictory
Rooseveltian notions of the lone frontier hunter and the communal “strenuous life”
simultaneously ensuring the health of the state. In a culture based around and
dependant on nature’s plentiful yield, the protection of reproductive systems is
paramount. So, although at first it appears that the village is devoid of women of child-
bearing age, the seven gunmen soon discover that, in their fear, the male villagers have
forced their wives and daughters into hiding.
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Though the town’s patriarchs trust the
gunfighters to save their village, they deem the Magnificent Seven less trustworthy
when it comes to respecting the purity of the village’s women. This purity has less to
do with some idealized notion of the women’s virtue than it does with concerns about
their bodies as mechanisms of reproduction—and, as such, as creatures “naturally”
inclined to act on their sexual desires.
To the extent, then, that the women are viewed on a par with the life-giving
earth—their “natural” mode being that of producing progeny—the male villagers seem
as concerned about the women’s sexual instincts vis-à-vis the Magnificent Seven as

212
they do the gunmen’s unbridled virility. On the one hand, the gunmen (whom the male
villagers seem to suspect of bestial sexual tendencies) might rape the women of the
village; on the other hand, the women—being “naturally” inclined to respond to such
demonstrations of masculine power—might seek out the gunmen as mates. Either
way, from the perspective of the male villagers, the presence of the Magnificent Seven
threatens to sully the village’s reproductive future, which, it should be noted, is not
among their concerns with respect to Calvera’s attacks. Whereas Calvera and his men
force themselves onto the village, the Magnificent Seven have been invited there.
Such a gesture, within the logic of Sturges’s film, underscores the male villagers’
association with a delicate femininity that empowers the gunfighters by facilitating
their sought-after merger with the natural, that is, unless the honorable cause for which
they have chosen to fight fails to take their lives.
Such is the case for Chris and Vin, who are all that remains of the Magnificent
Seven by the end of Sturges’s film. Although Chico also survives the final gun battle
in which the seven gunfighters defeat Calvera, the boy chooses to put down his six-
shooter for the love of a village girl with whom he looks forward to joining in a life of
farming. Meanwhile, Chris and Vin could likewise remain in Mexico, thereby
maintaining their newfound alignment with the foreign landscape. But after the defeat
of Calvera, the Mexicans have no further use for the professional services of
gunfighters, which means that in order to survive Chris and Vin would have to make
Chico’s choice—i.e. embrace the life of a farmer and with it nature’s feminine aspect.
Although we see them depart from the village, their final destination remains unclear.

213
Thus, Sturges’s film ends much as it began: though redeemed south of the border, the
Western hero faces anew a life of drifting once he returns to the United States. Though
The Magnificent Seven finds a way to recuperate the Western hero, it leaves the
American West in chaos. The social forces that have corrupted the cowboy hero’s
material bond with the physical landscape ensure that, upon his return to the American
West, his “drive toward materiality” (Tompkins 84) veers away from the natural and
headlong into the synthetic.
Although Brynner officially reprised the role of Chris only once, in Burt
Kennedy’s sequel The Return of the Seven, he nevertheless developed a reputation for
revising the character in other Western films made subsequent to Sturges’s classic
such as Invitation to a Gunfighter (1964) and Adios, Sabata (1971), films in which
Brynner wore then same basic black denim costume and struck the same kingly pose.
But nowhere was his invocation of Chris more obvious—or more renowned—than in
his portrayal of the robot gunslinger in Michael Crichton’s 1973 film Westworld.
Crichton’s film takes place in a futuristic theme park called Delos in which wealthy
professionals pay one thousand dollars a day to live out their fantasies in one of three
“worlds” meant to emulate Ancient Rome, Medieval England, and the American West
of the 1880s, respectively. The creators of Delos engineer human-like robots to
populate Romanworld, Medievalworld, and Westworld, programming them to interact
with but never harm the resort’s elite guests. Although the film provides the viewer
with glimpses inside the two remaining worlds, the brunt of the film’s action takes
place in Westworld (hence the film’s name) and involves a vacationing lawyer (played

214
by Richard Benjamin) and his associate (James Brolin) who travel to the resort in
search of a temporary respite from their busy professional lives. The men wish to
experience the primitive lawlessness of the “Old West” but quickly find themselves in
grave danger as Delos’ androids begin to malfunction shortly after the men arrive.
Failing to respond to the electronic impulses sent out from the park’s computerized
command center, the robots rebel and set about killing the resort’s many visitors.
While all of Delos’ androids turn deadly, none are more ruthless than the robot
gunslinger of Westworld portrayed by Yul Brynner.
Brynner’s cinematic memorializing of Chris Adams, the character he made
famous in The Magnificent Seven, builds on what was already an unusual
characterization of the Western hero. Whereas in 1960 Brynner’s ethnically
ambiguous gunslinger followed his inclination to merge with the physical landscape
right out of a deteriorating American West, in 1973 he returns to a commercialized
representation of the West as a mechanized commodity. Whereas, in his own mythic
context, the Western gunslinger seeks a merger with the physical that can only be
achieved fully in death, the gunslinger of Westworld emerges as a fully formed
material entity whose physical counterpart is not the Western landscape but its
simulacrum. Within the context of Crichton’s film, the Western hero—who previously
existed within and was an emblem of the national imagination—takes on an inorganic
material presence that runs counter to the figure’s mythic trajectory. While in U.S.
literature and cinema the desert landscape of the Western genre always dwarfed
humankind, imposing its power while likewise revealing its infinite promise, in

215
Westworld the fictional West is given borders in the form of signs instructing guests to
travel no further. Here, human beings attempt to transform the infinite desert plain of
the national imagination into a delimited, profitable tourist attraction—replacing
mythic space with an “authentic” prefabricated substitute. In this context, the Western
hero rebels against the material imposition of capitalism, overriding his own
“programming” in order to hunt down and kill the agent behind his unwanted synthetic
transformation. And that agent is the American consumer—who, in his/her leisure,
seeks to purchase a myth made material, and in doing so forces the merger of the
iconic Western hero with the all-important American “thing.”
Epilogue
On the one hand, the basic conceit of a popular amusement based around the
idea of a Western “world” is nothing new to anyone familiar with William F. “Buffalo
Bill” Cody’s traveling “Wild West” show. Nearly one hundred years before Crichton’s
film, “Buffalo Bill” Cody had begun crafting an entertainment for which he became
hugely famous by the end of the nineteenth century. But whereas Cody’s circus-like
show featured real cowboys and mixed appearances by well-known figures of the
American West such as Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull with staged re-enactments of
significant historical events (such as Custer’s last stand), the Western world of
Crichton’s film concerns itself only with making the imaginary into a material
experience. Cody used pieces of the actual West to help create the whole that become
known as “Western mythology.” The fictional creators of “Westworld,” on the other
hand, animate the literary and cinematic representation of that mythology. The

216
wealthy patrons of “Westworld” do not so much seek an authentic experience of the
historical West as they do the opportunity to interact with the fictive West of the
books, television shows, and movies of their youth. The “thing” these people seek is
the product of writers and filmmakers made material, animate, three dimensional.
On its own terms, Westworld is essentially a cautionary tale—a warning
against the use of (not fully understood) technology to fulfill the selfish (and childish)
fantasies of human beings. But the film’s more subtle point (about the desire to
experience simulacra being mistaken for the desire to understand historical actuality)
resonates with the preoccupations of the modernist writers mentioned earlier in this
dissertation. As I have already pointed out in my Introduction, the question that post-
WWI authors like Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway seemed to be asking was this:
What is to be done with an entertainment that has as its origin a national mythology
that fails to reflect the material realities of the nation’s current industrial and military
power? What can be done within narrative to address the commodification of such a
myth? And finally, given that the myth of the West—and in particular the Western
hero—continues to function as a site for puzzling over the contours of American
identity long after the close of the frontier, what can the modernist novel do to
illuminate the ease with which such an incommensurate mythology of agrarian
innocence can be sustained and rationalized by commerce? To the extent that Jay
Gatsby and Tom Outland preserve their own myths by imitating and later being
absorbed into the physical, and while Jake Barnes empowers his damaged physical
body by pondering the myths associated with commemorative objects, the works of

217
the modernist authors addressed in this dissertation anticipate the union of the mythic
and the material that we finally see realized in films like Westworld.
But even beyond Westworld, the Western remains the ultimate site of anxiety
around American identity, and this is due in part thanks to modernism. Within just the
last few years there has been a resurgence of what might be called modernist Westerns
in the mode of films like Bad Day at Black Rock and The Magnificent Seven. Paul
Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood and the HBO television series Deadwood are
two fine examples. These works focus on the material aspects of the American West,
as if the genre is attempting to discover what to do with the cowboy hero who
embodies the commercial rather than the natural landscape. Both Deadwood and
There Will Be Blood are examples of Westerns that meditate on what it means to be
American in terms of substances that come from the land and that, for all intents and
purposes, “make” the man in the context of a capitalist economy. For instance, Daniel
Plainview, the lead character in There Will Be Blood not only imitates the hard, brutal
landscape of the West, but he comes to embody a natural substance that forms the
basis of his substantial wealth. The new figure embodies that which comes from the
land (rather than himself being of the land, as is the mythic cowboy who rides up out
of nowhere), and in so doing embodies the material of capital exchange—and the
wealth and power that accompany it. The Western, then, perhaps paradoxically,
continues to be where modernism lives on as a way of helping us think about what it
means to be American.

218
Chapter 5 Endnotes

83
Early silent Westerns such as The Red Girl (1908) and Rose o’ Salem-Town
(1910)—both directed by D.W. Griffith—were filmed and produced on the East
Coast. According to Scott Simmon, the “initial surprise in looking back at the [East
Coast] Westerns that began to explode in popularity around 1908 is how often their
stories center on Native Americans” (3-4). Not only did these films generally portray
Indians positively, they also adopted James Fenimore Cooper’s interest in cross-
cultural relationships. Just as the friendship between Natty Bumpo and Chingachgook
was central to Cooper’s novels, “white-Indian friendship is likewise the key to the
eastern-filmed Westerns” (22). Once the production of Westerns moved to the West
Coast, however, the depiction of Indians shifts radically. From that point forward,
“injuns” mainly appeared in Western films to perpetrate violence against innocent
whites. Scott Simmon explains that this unflattering representation has become so
common “that it might [appear to] need little exploration except that it is this pattern –
not that of the eastern Western – that won the Western” (Simmon 37).

84
Whereas the earliest Western films—namely, the silent films produced on the
East Coast—were more interested in tableau and the co-existence of whites and Native
Americans, the Hollywood Western favored action. Cowboys vs. Indians were all the
rage in these films, so much so that they dominated the genre for nearly twenty years.
It wasn’t until the post-WWII period that Hollywood Westerns turned inward, the film
industry having chosen the genre most closely aligned with national identity as the site
of postwar self-reflection.

85
Arguably, Shane’s ultimate obsolescence follows naturally from Slotkin’s
theory of the Western Hero. According to Slotkin, “In the literary mythology of the
nineteenth century, the function of such a hero is to make the wilderness safe for a
civilization in which he is unsuited (and disinclined) to participate. He lives outside
the cash nexus of commercial society, in a pre-capitalist Eden; yet he gives his life, or
he destroys his own “natural” mode of living, for the sake of bourgeois society whose
rewards he does not value and whose manner of earning bread he despises” (34). The
character of Shane fits this description perfectly, as he emerges from the primitive
wilderness, committing himself to assist and protect the Starrett’s against the rancher
Riker who does not aim to honor the squatters claim to their land.

86
Earlier in the scene, Starrett’s son Joey cocked his rifle to prepare the weapon
for Shane’s inspection. Shane, hearing the sound of the weapon, quickly spins around
and nearly removes his gun from its holster before realizing that the dreaded sound
was the result of Joey’s tomfoolery, not a rival’s malice. Shane’s reaction to the sound
of Joey’s rifle sends a clear message to all that he, Shane, has led a hard life of
gunplay.

219

87
As I will soon show, the mode of the cinematic Western introduced by Shane
recurs in Bad Day at Black Rock, and then again in The Magnificent Seven. In the
former, the Western hero has been disassembled while the land with which he was
once associated has become the site where Americans bury the consequences of their
xenophobic hatred. Meanwhile, in the latter, the American landscape is of no
consequence at all, as all the action takes place in Mexico, where the movie was also
shot.

88
In his recent book Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film, Lee Clark
Mitchell points out that when “ranchers invented the cattle industry in the post-Civil
War period,” the “daily routine [of cowboys was] … monotonous and uneventful”
(25).

89
Even model pioneer women like Starrett’s wife Marian, played by Jean Arthur,
display untoward behavior. Though she never acts on her desire, Marian’s feelings for
Shane are well documented by director Stevens’s camera. Similarly, in Bad Day at
Black Rock, Liz Wirth (played by Anne Francis) agrees to assist the film’s primary
villain only to be murdered by him because she cannot be depended on to conceal the
truth of this actions.

90
For Roosevelt, “life and politics are a Darwinian struggle in which superior
types not only triumph but are justified in their hegemony” (Slotkin 56).

91
The terms of Chico’s eventual employment are never made clear. One assumes
that, as he has chosen to volunteer his services, he accepts no payment. Although, on
the one hand, this gesture is even more morally admirable than that being made by the
other six gunmen who accept the pittance offered by the villagers, on the other hand,
Chico, more than any other member of the seven, uses the villagers’ circumstance as a
context within which to assert his own worthiness.

92
In this regard, Slotkin’s assessment of The Magnificent Seven as a movie in
step with emerging U.S. counterinsurgency policy in the early years of the Vietnam
conflict takes on even greater significance. In this formulation, not only have the
gunfighters of the fictive “Old West” grown up to be Green Berets, but the
“contemporary crisis” they have presciently identified begets a new frontier of
colonial occupation.

93
Born in 1920, Brynner grew up the son of ethnically varied parents in the
Russian city of Vladivostok. Brynner’s Swiss-born grandfather—whose wife, Natalya
Kurkutova, “was the daughter of a Mongolian prince” (Capua 5)—had run a
successful import-export business. The business sustained the family throughout the
first two decades of the twentieth century, but when Yul’s father Boris left his
Russian-born wife Marousia Blagovidova in 1924, the young Yul found himself on

220

the move. As a teenager he traveled with his mother to Paris where he “made his
debut playing the guitar in a Parisian nightclub with a gypsy orchestra of 30 guitarists”
(Capua 8). In the years that followed, Byrnner joined the Cirque d’Hiver circus as a
trapeze artist and later worked as an apprentice at the Theâtre des Mathurins. For a
time, Brynner lived with his mother in China and, upon discovering she had been
stricken with leukemia, moved with her to the United States where he immediately
enrolled at the Chekhov Theater Studio.

94
It should be noted that, with respect to the film’s interest in the female
villagers, Brynner’s “foreignness” works in tandem with Kurosawa’s original plotline
regarding the male villager’s choice to conceal their wives and daughters.

221
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Asset Metadata

Creator Tomkins, David Shawn (author)

Core Title Cowboys of the waste land: modernism and the American frontier

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Degree Conferral Date 2009-05

Publication Date 05/11/2009

Defense Date 02/20/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cinematic westerns (relationship to Modernism),Ernest Hemingway,F. Scott Fitzgerald,frontier mythology,literature of the American west,Materialism,OAI-PMH Harvest,twentieth-century American literature,Willa Cather,World-War I

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Boone, Joseph Allen (committee chair), Deverell, William F. (committee member), Handley, William R. (committee member)

Creator Email dr.tomkins09@gmail.com,dtomkins@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2235

Unique identifier UC1194722

Identifier etd-Tomkins-2696 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-244240 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2235 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Tomkins-2696.pdf

Dmrecord 244240

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Tomkins, David Shawn

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu