Virginian (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

Wister went on to live a full and long life. He married a remarkable woman and fathered six children, was a frequent guest at the White House and a friend of presidents, became an important member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, and was active in many civic and political organizations. He continued to publish articles and books on many subjects. However, though he lived until 1938, the year 1902 remained the literary high point of Wister’s life. Almost immediately upon its publication,
The Virginian
became an enormous popular success, and it made Wister’s reputation as a famous American writer. The only other novel Wister published,
Lady Baltimore,
was not about the West and is now largely forgotten. His later books became increasingly cranky, conservative political and social polemics. In effect, the price of his fame was that Wister would always be associated with
The Virginian.
With a succession of editions, theater productions, movies, and finally television adaptations, Wister’s work remained an American classic for generations.

The year Wister arrived in Wyoming, 1885, was the heyday of what historian Walter Prescott Webb called “the cattle kingdom.” It was a time in which the raising and selling of cattle had not yet been industrialized and continued to require the special skills of riding, roping, and animal care that had been developed by horsemen over the centuries. The freewheeling cowboy fascinated late-nineteenth-century Americans. Yet this feeling was already elegiac, touched with the realization that this was a rapidly disappearing culture. In the 1902 preface to his novel (included in this edition), Wister informed his readers that he was writing about “a vanished world. No journeys, save those which memory can take, will bring you to it now.... [The cowboy] will never come again. He rides in his historic yesterday. You will no more see him gallop out of the unchanging silence than you will see Columbus on the unchanging sea come sailing from Palos with his caravels” (p. 8).

A series of terrible winters in the later 1880s badly damaged the cattle industry, and within a few years once-prosperous large ranchers were in serious trouble. Some of them, including Wister’s host, Frank Wolcott, faced bankruptcy. The ranchers’ open-range cattle methods were increasingly obsolescent, and they blamed rustlers and small farmers for their problems. In 1892 a group of them, including Wolcott, constituted themselves as a posse of vigilantes, hired a group of Texas gunmen, and set out to find and hang those men they considered the cause of their troubles. The resulting conflict gained national attention and became known as the Johnson County war. The ranchers were arrested and charged with armed insurrection, but, in the end, the authorities dropped the case against them.

The events of the Johnson County war inspired some of the crucial episodes in
The Virginian,
including the Virginian’s pursuit and hanging of the rustlers, Judge Henry’s defense of vigilante justice, and, indirectly, the final shootout between the Virginian and the rustler Trampas. Wister’s treatment of these events had a great impact upon his readers and helped give rise to the modern western. Ironically, the film that is often blamed for ending the western’s long reign as a major Hollywood genre also dealt with the Johnson County war. Michael Cimino’s
Heaven’s
Gate (1980), however, had a very different interpretation of the story. Where Wister essentially sympathized with the ranchers, Cimino’s film portrayed them as greedy cattlemen attacking a group of bewildered European immigrants. A costly failure at its initial release,
Heaven’s Gate
was actually not the last significant western, but it did highlight changing American attitudes that undercut the meanings Wister had ascribed to the myth of the West.

It was not really rustlers or the competition of small farmers that led to the decline of the open-range cattle industry and the “heroic” days of the Wild West. In fact, the West was subject to the same major economic and cultural trends that changed America from a country of farms and small towns into the urban and industrial powerhouse of the twentieth century. The decline of the open-range cattle industry and of the freewheeling life of the cowboy reflected this nationwide economic, social, and technological transformation. The coming of the railroad had already eliminated the great cattle drives from Texas that had spawned so many of the legends and images of the Wild West. The invention and manufacture of barbed-wire fencing closed the open range. The development of the automobile, the tractor, and other agricultural technology ended dependence on the horse. By the time Wister published
The Virginian,
the Wild West, insofar as it had ever existed, was rapidly fading into the past. However, with Wister’s help, the myth of the Wild West and the cowboy hero would remain an important symbolic influence on Americans, not only in the form of popular entertainment, but in some of the most influential social and political ideologies of the twentieth century.

Wister belonged to the traditional social and intellectual elite of America and, like others of his generation and social status, was deeply distressed by the social and economic developments of his era. Some historians have characterized the later nineteenth century as a time of “status revolution,” in which the power of the established American elite was rapidly being eroded by new business and political leaders. Wister resented the increasing power of businessmen whose wealth—which derived from new industries like transportation, oil, and manufacturing—far exceeded his own. He also scorned the new breed of politician who served these businessmen or became powerful city bosses through their control of immigrant votes. He feared that American cultural values were irrevocably changing and that, in addition, the increasing pressure of new immigrants from southern and western Europe and from Asia would destroy the country’s central political and social traditions. Later Wister became a leading proponent of immigration restriction and an increasingly conservative critic of such twentieth-century developments as the rise of labor unions and the social legislation of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. However, in the later nineteenth century he could still see in the vigorous young men of the West some hope for the reassertion and regeneration of traditional American values.

Wister shared this vision of the West with his friends Theodore Roosevelt and Frederic Remington. Roosevelt created a powerful political rhetoric out of the myth of the West by riding to the presidency of the United States as a reforming Rough Rider. The theme of the hero from the West reforming a corrupted federal government would be echoed in many ways throughout the twentieth century. The artist Remington created a striking visualization of the Wild West (his works would strongly influence the development of the movie western).

All three—Wister, Remington, and Roosevelt—had originally gone west in hopes of curing various illnesses, illnesses that some scholars think reflected the stresses of the changing social and political positions of their class. In the West, these men found not only improvement in their health, but a new sense of heroic manliness and regenerative power. Like many Americans, they responded positively to what Roosevelt called “the strenuous life.” In addition, Wister and Roosevelt, influenced by the racist ideology of many Americans in the later nineteenth century, believed that the most important American social and political institutions had been created by men of Anglo-Saxon descent. In his popular history of America,
The Winning of the West
(1889-1896), Roosevelt treated the American settlement of the West as part of the historical movement of Anglo-Saxons toward world domination. Wister shared with Roosevelt the view that Anglo-Saxon manliness found its most intense contemporary expression in the West.

Though he apparently first thought of the cowboy as the last romantic hero, Wister increasingly understood the Virginian’s story as a mythical parable of moral regeneration and the reform of political and social corruption in America. When he rededicated a new edition of the book in 1911 to Theodore Roosevelt (included in this edition), he emphasized Roosevelt’s role as a heroic reformer fighting a corrupted federal government and an increasingly decadent American society. “After nigh half-a-century of shirking and evasion, Americans are beginning to look at themselves and their institutions straight; to perceive that Firecrackers and Orations once a year, and selling your vote or casting it for unknown nobodies, are not enough attention to pay to the Republic.” He went on to suggest that the story of the Virginian was a mythical embodiment of the heroic redemption of American culture. “If this book be anything more than an American story, it is an expression of American faith” (p. 5).

Many historians, most notably Richard Slotkin and G. Edward White, have showed how conservative Americans in the late nineteenth century were drawn to this vision of the West as a source of moral and political regeneration. But this idea was not solely the property of conservatives. More democratically inclined Americans also believed in the redemptive power of the western experience. In 1893 Chicago held the World’s Columbian Exposition, a great world’s fair celebrating the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America. On the Midway Plaisance, the entertainment area of the fair, Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show thrilled visitors with daily performances. Nearby, at a congress of scholars held in conjunction with the exposition, the young historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his first paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” In it he argued that the most important values of American culture—individualism, nationalism, and democracy—derived from the simpler society of the frontier and that these values had been continually regenerated by successive frontier experiences. Now that the Bureau of the Census had announced, in 1890, the closing of the frontier, Turner feared the erosion of these democratic values in an increasingly class-dominated and hierarchical America.

Thus, at the end of the nineteenth century both liberals and conservatives projected their concerns about the social trends of industrialism and urbanization into an idealization of the West that expressed both fascination with the openness and adventure of the Wild West and hope for social and moral regeneration. Wister captures this mood very effectively in
The Virginian.
His novel deeply influenced the development of the western in literature, drama, and film, with early popular westerns exemplifying similar hopes for regeneration. However, as the twentieth century progressed, bringing with it economic upheavals and global wars, westerns grew darker and less optimistic. Though even in movies of the 1940s, singing cowboys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers could foil the plots of Nazis and Japanese spies, the vision of more serious creators of the western grew increasingly skeptical about the idea of social and moral regeneration in the Wild West. Historians of the western have clearly traced this progression from
The Virginian
through the more complex and ironic vision of John Ford to the end of the heroic West in films like Sam Peckinpah’s
The Wild Bunch
and
Ride the High Country.

There was another important cultural ideology involved in the creation of
The Virginian.
Recent feminist critics and scholars have offered a further perspective on the historical significance of Wister and the kind of western he created. In
West of Everything
(1992), for example, Jane Tompkins stresses the importance of a new image of masculinity as a theme in Wister’s work. She sees
The Virginian
as climaxing with “a classic moment of female defeat... which set the pattern for the Western in the twentieth century” (p. 62). From this standpoint she views the modern western as an attempt by men to reclaim the moral and cultural preeminence that they felt had been lost to women in the preceding age of Christian sentimentalism. In literature this feminine dominance was manifested in those immensely popular novels of religious and domestic sentiment that Nathaniel Hawthorne once dismissed as the outpouring of a mob of scribbling women. In fact, the women writers who created these sentimental novels were the unchallenged best-selling American authors of the mid-nineteenth century. Though the literary realism of William Dean Howells and others offered an artistic challenge to their sentimental vision, the domestic novelists remained popular, and it was not until the works of writers like Jack London and Harold Bell Wright appeared at the end of the nineteenth century that a new ideal of masculine heroism began to grow increasingly popular on the literary scene. Wister was definitely part of this movement, and his version of the western does, as Tompkins argues, “[answer] the domestic novel. It is the antithesis of the cult of domesticity that dominated American Victorian culture.... If the Western deliberately rejects evangelical Protestantism and pointedly repudiates the cult of domesticity, it is because it seeks to marginalize and suppress the figure [of the woman] who stood for these ideals” (p. 39).

Seeing the western as primarily a sexist attack on the moral primacy of women seems overly simple, yet the themes of regenerate masculinity and the reaffirmation of female subordination are important elements in Wister’s work, as they were in much of the popular writing of his time. Ironically, these were the very themes that later evolved into a more complex form in the early masterpieces of American modernism—the thread that links the otherwise very different modern naturalism of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and T. S. Eliot to the masculinist vision of Wister and his contemporaries.

Wister’s lifelong admiration for the operas of Richard Wagner doubtless gave him some insight into the importance of cultural mythologies. Though he understood that he was writing about a hero from a “vanished world” who “will never come again,” Wister also sensed that this hero had a mythic relevance for Americans of the twentieth century. Like his narrator, Wister felt that something about the cowboy, “and the idea of them, smote my American heart, and I have never forgotten it, nor ever shall, as long as I live. In their flesh our natural passions ran tumultuous; but often in their spirit sat hidden a true nobility, and often beneath its unexpected shining their figure took a heroic stature” (p. 36). In his preface Wister suggests that his novel is a “colonial romance. For Wyoming between 1874 and 1890 was a colony as wild as was Virginia one hundred years earlier. As wild, with a scantier population, and the same primitive joys and dangers” (p. 7). Here he suggests that just as readers were inspired by mythic stories about the American colonists and their encounters with the wilderness, so would they also remember the heroic cowboy of the American West and his victory over Indians and outlaws.