Frontier vs. cowboy redux
A few more notes on the evolution of the cowboy myth:
The source I was looking for is Frantz, Joe B. and Ernest Choate Jr.: The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality . These authors explain that while cowboys appeared in earlier fiction of the West, it was only in Owen Wister's The Virginian that cowboys came to dominate.
This one's interesting too: Etulain, Richard: Owen Wister. He says that as Wister transformed the cowboy into the hero, that meant such novels had to ignore many basics of real-cowboy life: roping, branding, dehorning. Wister set in motion this trend, as well as the one that proclaims that the arrival of a woman signifies the taming -- which is to say the ruination -- of the West. Pre-Wister, women were just women, not such heavy symbols.
Wister started developing this formula in a previous, less successful work called "Lin McLean" published in 1897. But The Virginian was the real watershed. After that, Etulain says, many lesser writers flocked to the formula -- though we can hardly blame Wister for their faults.
What do YOU think? Drop a line to info@johnclaytonbooks.com. To receive these posts via email, write to johnclaytonoutreach-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. (You need not put any text in the message.)
The source I was looking for is Frantz, Joe B. and Ernest Choate Jr.: The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality . These authors explain that while cowboys appeared in earlier fiction of the West, it was only in Owen Wister's The Virginian that cowboys came to dominate.
This one's interesting too: Etulain, Richard: Owen Wister. He says that as Wister transformed the cowboy into the hero, that meant such novels had to ignore many basics of real-cowboy life: roping, branding, dehorning. Wister set in motion this trend, as well as the one that proclaims that the arrival of a woman signifies the taming -- which is to say the ruination -- of the West. Pre-Wister, women were just women, not such heavy symbols.
Wister started developing this formula in a previous, less successful work called "Lin McLean" published in 1897. But The Virginian was the real watershed. After that, Etulain says, many lesser writers flocked to the formula -- though we can hardly blame Wister for their faults.
What do YOU think? Drop a line to info@johnclaytonbooks.com. To receive these posts via email, write to johnclaytonoutreach-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. (You need not put any text in the message.)
