I received some emails challenging various things I said in my article today. Some were good comments, and some just displayed a profound ignorance of the literature behind critical studies of Westerns. A lot of comments stemmed from issues over how I define the Western. Many felt that the Leatherstocking series by James Fenimore Cooper were Westerns or that the dime novels of the 19th century were Westerns. Here, I’m just taking cues from the established scholarly literature.
For the sake of time, let’s just take one historian of Westerns, John Cawelti, who in his Six Gun Mystique Sequel (an updating of his original Six Gun Mystique) considers the Leatherstocking stories (which include Last of the Mohicans) to be a “precursor of Westerns.” Likewise, the post-Civil War dime novels invented many of the characters that would later inhabit Westerns, but they weren’t Western either for various reasons. It was Owen Wister with The Virginian who revolutionized literature and invented the Western. Jane Tompkins examines Wister’s work well in West of Everything. Both Tompkins and Cawelti, incidentally, tie Westerns closely to the Progressive Era.
Cawelti didn’t invent these classifications, either. He’s just putting together the ideas of many who came before him in studying the Western. There’s no room to explain everything behind these ideas, but if one has a problem with it, I suggest one reads a few books on it. It’s nice that some readers have personal opinions about what are Westerns and what are not, but I’m going to go with the established literature on this one.
The fact that dime novels and other precursors of Western existed in the 19th century doesn’t mean they were popular. In truth, they were much less popular than the Victorian and romantic literature of the time. Dime novels were not considered appropriate for adults. Louis L’amour has remarked on how the very un-Western Sir Walter Scott was very popular reading (and his worldview highly influential) among the young men of the 19th century, many of whom would settle the West.
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I should also note that there was one factual error in my paper (that I know of) – Tom Doniphon was not the de jure law man of Shinbone in Liberty Valance, although he was the de facto one. The Marshal, while lovable, required Doniphon’s help to get anything done. This has no effect on my point, however, which was that Western tough guys are morally superior to Eastern educated types in the film.
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A good point was that one can argue that Once Upon a Time in the West was not really Leone’s last Western. Conceivably, we could include both Duck, You Sucker/Giu La Testa and My Name is Nobody/Il mio nome e Nessuno. Well, David Lusted does mention both as Leone Westerns while Cawelti does not list Nobody at all under his filmography for Leone. I adopted Cawelti’s view on Nobody, and I kind of went out on my own with Duck, You Sucker since it’s about an Irish Republican rebel in Revolutionary Mexico. In many ways, the focus is on the brutality of the Mexican revolution. It’s not clear to me at all that the film is about the American West or about American gunfighters. It lacks both the setting and the characters of the Western as generally defined. These definitions are flexible of course, but I would place Duck, You Sucker under Cawelti’s group of “post-Westerns” much like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or possibly Bonnie and Clyde.
