 became, over time, condensed into the dream of a solitary hero, beholden to no community, driven by nothing more than his own desire. The Western seemed doomed to be little more than highly enjoyable entertainment, designed to uphold this status quo: the adventures of a stoic frontiersman with the politics of a schoolboy. And yet as the frontier was pushed ever further across the continent, and through time, into the latter half of the 20th century, things got even stranger. This is when, to my mind, the genre of the Western began to open up. In academia, the New Western History school advanced a much darker vision of the West, and emphasised the costs at which it was settled, against the expansionist orthodoxy of rugged individualists taming the savage frontier. Artists, in turn, seized the frontier narrative and flipped it. If what entertainment does is to maintain the status quo, to make the comfortable more comfortable, what art does is to shake the roots of received knowledge, turn it inside out, discomfit, make strange. Out of the stereotypical Spaghetti Westerns that encouraged Americans' allegiance to the individual and their antipathy to communal good, there rose Cormac McCarthy's){kind=link}
It’s time to give this derelict genre a new lease of life – by reconnecting it to the violent women’s tales from which it was born
Imagine a Western, and you’ll probably think of laconic macho cowboys, tumbleweed and casual murder on the high plains. But the Western hasn’t always been so rigidly conceived, and in the 21st century, the old stereotypes of life on the frontier are cracking open to reveal something fresh and new. To understand how the Western came to be – and to catch a possible glimpse of the genre’s future – you have to look at what came before.The rootstock out of which modern fictions about the American frontier evolved can be traced back to 17th-century captivity stories: born from the brutal clash when Europeans encountered indigenous cultures, these ostensibly non-fictional accounts of the kidnapping of Christians haunt our visions of the Wild West.Among such captivity stories, Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682) is surely the most famous. This short pamphlet was written by Rowlandson herself, making her one of the first female authors in America. It vividly describes the events of 1675-76, after a confederation of Wampanoag, Narragansett and Nipmuc warriors raided the small settlement in the Massachusetts frontier where she lived. The kidnapping of Rowlandson and her three children was harrowing: her six-year-old daughter, Sarah, died piteously in her arms. Eleven weeks later, Rowlandson was released after ransom payments were made, and her memoir, reprinted several times over in New England and across the Atlantic, became an early bestseller. Its immense popularity can be explained by the titillating nature of the bloodshed and anguish contained within – serving a gruesome appetite readers have not, in the centuries since, overcome – as well as the way it satisfied Puritan ideals of redemption through suffering.The new genre also acted as powerful propaganda, convincing European and colonial readers not only of the barbarism of the native Americans, but also of the divine right to seize their land and slaughter them. “It is a solemn sight to see so many Christians lying in their blood, some here, and some there, like a company of sheep torn by wolves,” Rowlandson wrote, turning her captors into something animal and alien, “all of them stripped naked by a company of hell-hounds, roaring, singing, ranting, and insulting, as if they would have torn our very hearts out.”
More captivity stories followed, often in the form of as-told-to narratives compiled by men of the church. One concerned the tale of Hannah Duston who, upon seeing her baby’s brains dashed out against a tree by the native men who captured her, rose up one night with two fellow captives and murdered and scalped the entire indigenous family that was keeping them, including their six children. She was made a heroine, becoming the first American woman to have a statue erected of herself, in Boscawen, New Hampshire, where she killed her captors.Here lie the seeds of the Western, and the formation of an American identity: an individual beset by a hostile world; bloody strife; an assumption of supremacy by the colonising force; nature as foe to be fought and mastered; and the enshrinement of expansionism as proof of Christian godliness.The first professional American novelist to pick up these threads and weave them into fiction was James Fenimore Cooper, born in 1789 and raised in the then-frontier of upstate New York, in Cooperstown, a village founded by his father. About two centuries later, I was also born and raised in Cooperstown, and I have a profound love for Cooper, not just because he was the only writer I could claim as something of kin when I was a child – I could climb up onto his statue in Cooper Park, three blocks from my house, and sit on his cold bronze lap whenever I wanted – but also for his own virtues. These do, in fact, exist, even if his literary reputation has never quite recovered from Mark Twain’s assault on it: among his many complaints, Cooper’s English was a “crime against the language”, and his “love-scenes” were “odious”. It may be true that Cooper’s characters are mostly wooden, but his nature writing is thrilling, sensitive and full of dazzling insight. And though his stories would be problematic to the kind of 21st-century reader for whom authors’ historical biases are unforgivable sins, Cooper didn’t subscribe to the kind of demonisation of Native Americans typical of his time. There are no better, kinder, more loving individuals in his entire oeuvre than Chingachgook and his son Uncas, the title characters of The Last of the Mohicans. Cooper’s frontier narratives of the early 19th century contained far more complexity and subtlety than later iterations of the genre would allow.
In Leatherstocking Tales, a series of five novels published between 1823 and 1841, Cooper’s central character, the woodsman Natty Bumppo – also known as Hawkeye, Pathfinder, and Deerslayer – became the manly archetype for the lone hero of countless Westerns that bubbled up in the centuries after him. The author drew on Old World traditions to form his New World hero, making him a kind of knight-errant. Upon this original warrior figure a national identity began to be built. This character diminished in ever paler replication until, at last, we arrived at the stoic, murderous, strong-jawed, tobacco-spittin’ cowboy that is familiar worldwide.The American dream, the quest for happiness and liberty in the New World for all (except those who were robbed of their lives and land) became, over time, condensed into the dream of a solitary hero, beholden to no community, driven by nothing more than his own desire. The Western seemed doomed to be little more than highly enjoyable entertainment, designed to uphold this status quo: the adventures of a stoic frontiersman with the politics of a schoolboy.
And yet as the frontier was pushed ever further across the continent, and through time, into the latter half of the 20th century, things got even stranger. This is when, to my mind, the genre of the Western began to open up. In academia, the New Western History school advanced a much darker vision of the West, and emphasised the costs at which it was settled, against the expansionist orthodoxy of rugged individualists taming the savage frontier. Artists, in turn, seized the frontier narrative and flipped it. If what entertainment does is to maintain the status quo, to make the comfortable more comfortable, what art does is to shake the roots of received knowledge, turn it inside out, discomfit, make strange. Out of the stereotypical Spaghetti Westerns that encouraged Americans’ allegiance to the individual and their antipathy to communal good, there rose Cormac McCarthy’s blistering critiques of the brutal, toxic hyper-masculine West.