Beauvoir articulates the process whereby women, by agreeing to live in comfort inside the fantasies of men, put themselves in a permanently false position. . . . [M]en are forever feeling betrayed, not supported, . . . because when fantasy is governing perception, the truth appears as a blasphemy. . . . Woman as Object may be spared the heavy burden carried by primary Subjects only by suffering the dishonor of constant two-way self-betrayal. . . . [She] often meekly accept[s] every form of raw deal in punishment for representing falsity and weakness.
Simone de Beauvoir,” 1999, p. 84.
Jane Tompkins argues that one enemy is language itself: “Westerns treat salesmen and politicians, people whose business is language, with contempt.”[1] This is the case even though the occupation of the implied reader of the westerns is in fact a man who earns his living in talk-work. The comical Rebel in the movie of Shane boasts loudly, drunkenly, with a courage lacking temperance; and we know, Tompkins observes, that he is doomed (in the book from which the movie derived he is less central and his lack of taciturnity is less emphasized). “It’s Shane,” she writes, “the man who clips out words between clenched teeth, who will take out the hired gunman.”[2]
Taciturnity is not noticeable in Homeric heroes. After all, they are Hellenes, addicted to persuasive talk. The index of speeches in Stanley Lombardo’s translation of the Iliad contains about six hundred items, and these not mere bright quips (“A crippled newsie took them away from him”) but full-blown exercises in persuasion, about 25 per book, a long interlude of yammering every 30 lines or so.[3] The knights of the Round Table, according to Mallory, yammered a good deal, too. Maybe it is specifically Roman, and romanizing, revived in a particular sort of haut-bourgeois gentleman in the 19th century, to demand as it were laconic behavior from our heroes.
Mary Beth Rose suggested that a new and bourgeois and even feminine “heroism of endurance” takes the place in early modern times of the aristocratic heroism of action.[4] She notes, with Norbert Elias, that the nation state required a monopoly of violence. Just as the cow towns of Kansas disarmed their cowboys, the Tudors and Valois disarmed their barons. In Milton’s Paradise Regained (published 1671), Rose observes, Christ is not the venturing warrior of Book VI in Paradise Lost but a hero of taciturnity. His victories against Satan tempting him in the wilderness consist of not engaging in speech-making, as at the end of Book I, in three lines of in effect a Valley-Girl “Whatever” dismissing a loquacious 25-line appeal by Satan to “talk at least.” After Christ’s brevity Milton himself adds an amazing half-line: “He added not” (I, 497), embodying Christ’s noble—that is, Roman—unwillingness to talk. Satan, the great talker and venturer-forth, is thoroughly puzzled: “What dost thou in this world?” (IV, 372, emphasis supplied); and elsewhere:
Perplexed and troubled at his bad success
The Tempter stood, nor had what to reply,
Discovered in his fraud, thrown from his hope,
So oft, and the persuasive rhetoric
That sleeked his tongue, and won so much on Eve,
So little here, nay lost.[5]
Milton, eloquent for the Commonwealth and English poetry, here disdains rhetoric, joining in this many 17th-century men of ideas and letters, from Bacon attacking metaphors with metaphors—thus too Descartes, Pascal, Hobbes, Spinoza—to Newton spinning one eloquent hypothesis after another while declaring “Hypotheses non fingo,” I do not [deign merely to] spin hypotheses.
By the end of the 18th century, in for example The Magic Flute, taciturnity has been raised to the very essence of masculinity. The one and only test of the opera’s hero to join the men’s club of Freemasonry is to keep quiet in the face of temptations from loquacious women. No heroic action; no swordplay: just endure like a tight-lipped Roman man. Mozart’s librettist stresses over and over that silence is Tamino’s badge of heroism, one which his comically talkative, less-than-aristocratic sidekick Papageno fails repeatedly to display. Tamino is a prince of the blood, again emphasized. By contrast a man of mere commerce must talk if he is to do business.
Shane a century and a half after Mozart still looks longingly back to an imagined aristocracy of taciturn and non-commercial Romans. E. Countryman and E. von Heussen-Countryman note that the movie “renders commerce problematic.” The lone knight Shane himself is willing to join the farmer Joe Starrett, a Cincinnatus finally driven to take down his weapons, in a stirring scene of stump-removing, “bonding on Joe’s ground, literally.” But it is honest, wordless toil—direct production for subsistence, not the schemes and weaselwords and endless bargaining of Ryker and his capitalist gang.[6]
To Ryker’s suggestion early on in the movie that Shane join the commercial side the knight replies, No deals. Jack Schaefer’s novel of 1949 is on some points less anti-capitalist than George Stevens’ movie of 1953. The offer from Ryker to Shane comes later in the novel than in the movie, in Chapter 12 out of sixteen, and therefore is less temptingly corrupt: Shane has long since become a Lancelot for the homesteaders. Starrett in the novel is more persistent than in the movie about his economic schemes for the farm and as a petit bourgeois man is more critical of the Ryker figure. Ryker, by the way, is called “Fletcher” in the novel. One wonders if the Dutch word rijker, “richer,” spelled in handwriting exactly ryker, is being evoked by some sly script doctor of recent Dutch ancestry. Anyway, Ryker engages, says Starrett, in “poor business” and is “wasteful,” the sort of prudential talk that would be read with pleasure by an American bourgeois in 1949. [7] Compare John D. McDonald’s detective novels, with their obeisance to the businesslike.
Middlemen are featured in both novel and movie. The owner of the saloon and general store is a Good Bourgeois. But there are bad ones, too. The novel has a five-page scene of the aristocratic Shane and the aristocrat/peasant Starrett outwitting “a peddler or trader” who tries to overcharge for a new plow. The peddler in cruder novels would have had a Jewish name or would have been from the East, or both.
Shane is uninterested in becoming permanently a laborer for wages, or what is perhaps more to the point an adulterous Lancelot to Marion Starrett’s Queen Guinevere. In the end he rides on to further knight errantry—he tells Joey: “A man has to be what he is”—leaving the peasantry in possession. So do the surviving three in the Japanese cowboy movie, Seven Samurai (1954), based, the director Kurasawa said, on American westerns such as Shane. So do the surviving three in the American remake returning the favor to Kurasawa, with American cowboys/samurai, The Magnificent Seven (1960). The director of Shane, George Stevens (it was his only western), once declared outright that his hero had overtones of medieval knighthood.
All the westerns had it, as for example Stanley Kramer’s High Noon (1952). The bourgeoisie pursues Prudence-Only, economic goals, to “keep the town decent, keep it growing,” as the Thomas Mitchell character puts it emphatically. In Mitchell’s fluent, climactic speech in the church he argues—we are surprised by the argument, considering the conventions of the genre—not that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, which is the aristocratic, ducal formula, but that investors from the northern part of the state are thinking of investing in the town, and therefore to keep things quiet and commercial the Gary-Cooper character, the outgoing sheriff, should leave town without dueling with the villains.
The Gary-Cooper sheriff cannot then or at any other point in the movie find much eloquence to explain his knightly duty to stay and fight—not to the church people, not to a bourgeois town, not even to his new Quaker wife, the Grace-Kelly character. His wife does fight in the end, lethally. In the Cold War we all needed to, even Quakers. Contrast the reversal of such roles before anticommunism took hold. The John Wayne of Angel and the Badman (1947) becomes finally a pacifist under his wife’s influence. In 1947, after all, Americans were still laying down their weapons. Thomas Dewey, confident of victory in the 1948 elections, nobly refrained from using the anti-Communist card, which swiftly thereafter developed in American politics into the only winning card.[8] Though it is complicated: High Noon was designed as an anti-McCarthyite movie, inspiring right-wing replies from John Wayne.
But like noble Tamino and noble Shane, Gary Cooper scorns using the persuasive words. He is not a politician. It is revealing that High Noon is the favorite movie of U. S. presidents, measured by actual showings at the White House (Clinton saw it 30 times). The Gary-Cooper/President figure is an employee of the bourgeoisie but he is quite different from them, as are the taciturn hired swords/guns in Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven, impoverished aristocrats. The folklorist John Lomax had set the tone in 1910, as the Western myth was becoming bourgeois and respectable: “Dauntless, reckless, as gentle to a pure woman as King Arthur, [the cowboy] is truly a knight of the twentieth century.”[9] That “reckless” should worry Americans. Anyway, not a capitalist.
* * * *
For the self-dubbed knights of the bourgeois world the other enemies, aside from the talk-talk capitalists, were those tiresome, Bible-reading, church-going, water drinking, talk-talk women. As Peter French notes, “Women do a lion’s share of the talking in westerns,” and gain no honor for it.[10] Tompkins observes that the female lead in the 1957 version of The Gunfight at O.K. Coral, the Jo Van Fleet character, is merely an absorber of dishonor to purify the male lovers in preparation for battle, Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday. “Her [pacific] words are always in vain, they are chaff, less than nothing, another sign of her degradation.”[11] Words and women, say the cowboys, are a lethal combination. Guns first, talk later.
The sentiment is old, right from the beginning of the modern story of emancipation alternating with reaction. The Magic Flute, again, is relentlessly misogynistic on this score. The gendering of aristocratic nostalgia could not be more explicit in the scripting of low-born Papageno’s failure as a man, except as one of inferior appetites. Papageno is unable to meet the Masonic/Shane standard of being “steadfast, tolerant, and discreet”: at one point he blurts out, startlingly, “Ich wollt’, ich wär ein Mädchen”: “I wish I were a girl.” Later he asks Tamino plaintively, “Can I not be quiet when I must? Yes! When it comes to business [Unternehmen, undertakings], I’m a man.”[12] But he’s not. Compare Sancho Panza—though the non-aristocratic character in Mozart carries no hint of anti-aristocratic irony, and Sancho in 1614 certainly has nothing feminine about him. By 1791 the gender world of Europe had shifted.
A century later it had shifted again. American literature after 1900 embodies a bourgeois and masculinist reaction to female religiosity and female rights. You can see it in the Westerns, the hard-boiled detective stories, the literary imitations of journalistic pith: Zane Gray, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway. “I don’t like eloquence,” says Hammett’s first hardboiled hero in 1924, the Continental Op (operative, that is, for the Continental Detective Agency). “If it isn’t effective enough to pierce your hide, it’s tiresome; and if its effective enough, then it muddles your thoughts.” An anti-rhetorical rhetoric was the imagined tough-guy’s way of eluding, as Claudia Roth Pierpont puts it, “the feminine imperative against which Hammett defined himself: the tireless urging to feel, to connect, to talk, talk, talk.”[13]
Talk, talk, talk is an American black imperative, too, against an aristocratic Roman and bourgeois American ideal of taciturnity. In Ralph Ellison or Zora Neale Hurston the men are very Attic Greeks in their eloquence, “big picture talkers . . . using a side of the world for a canvas.” In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) Jamie complains about her husband Jody off being the mayor: “You’se always off talkin’.” He replies, “Ah told you in de very first beginnin’ dat Ah aimed tuh be uh big voice. You oughta be glad, ‘cause dat makes uh big woman outa you.”[14] Women form in the book, until they get their own voices, a Greek chorus to the men’s eloquence.
Talk of prohibition and the vote for women—never mind blacks—stuck in the craws of a lot of American men, as had earlier the domestication of the bourgeois male, subordinate to the angel in house. “For most of the nineteenth century,” Tompkins notes, “the two places women could call their own in the social structure were the church and the home. The Western contains neither. . . . [M]en gravitated in imagination towards a womanless milieu.”[15]
Think of Teddy Roosevelt, the fragile (and “aristocratic”) child who adopts the strenuous Western life with grim manliness. After his first wife and his mother died suddenly in the same week he took his sorrowful exercises far away from home and church, a New-York Dutchman in Dakota with other splendid fellows shooting everything that moved. Roosevelt had been in fact a Harvard classmate of Owen Wister—The Virginian, 1902, is dedicated to Roosevelt. H. W. Brands writes that Roosevelt’s “great good luck was to come of age when America had a particular weakness for romantic heroes.”
Roosevelt was a prolific writer about his self-created romances, like his younger contemporary Winston Churchill. Churchill was of course an actual aristocrat, first cousin of the 9th Duke of Marlborough, nephew of the 6th Earl of Airlie, witnessing with dismay in Britain, as T. R did in America, the decline of “a small and serious ruling class.”[16] Roosevelt wrote a six-volume The Winning of the West (1889-96), which with Henry Jackson Turner’s presidential address to the American Historical Association at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 helped set the tone of nostalgia for a lost frontier of real men. Roosevelt’s history of the American navy of John Paul Jones and Oliver Hazard Perry remained a classic for decades. In the second year of his presidency a fourteen-volume oeuvres completes appeared—fourteen thick and self-authored volumes, not merely bureaucratic papers written by others. He was a man of many words. He wrote about ten letters a day, 150,000 in total, while Holmes, whom he appointed to the Supreme Court, managed a mere 10,000. A war-mongerer, then a peace-maker, a threatener, then a deal maker, a strike settler, Roosevelt talked, talked, talked from whatever pulpit he could command.[17]
Literary men of action early in the 20th century, especially in America before Hemingway masculinized American fiction, were caught uneasily between feminine words and masculine action, speaking softly but wanting to be known for carrying a big stick. William Carlos Williams writes in 1913:
First he said:
It is the woman in us
That makes us writeLet us acknowledge it—
Men would be silent.
We are not men
Therefore we can speak
And be conscious
of the two sides.
Unbent by the sensual
As befits accuracy.[18]
“Male poets born in the Gilded Age,” writes Guy Rotella about Robert Frost, who masculinized American poetic style, “confronted . . . a business-dominated society [judging] their chosen work not to be work at all, and certainly not manly work.”[19] About the same time, quoting an imagined manifesto for The Writer in Death in Venice (1912), Thomas Mann wrote: “We poets . . . . may be heroic after our fashion, disciplined warriors of our craft, yet are we all like women, for we exult in passion, and love is still our desire—our craving and our shame.”[20]
In the minds of literary men less subtle than Frost or Mann, such as Teddy Roosevelt, the non-work work was all supposed to come out gloriously in the end, this quasi-manly, poetic yammering leading to undeniably manly violence, women cheering from the castle window, like a knightly tale of olden times, the splendid little wars of imperialism, the white man’s burden, the charge up San Juan Hill—successful of course, with the bold colonel on horseback surviving, like a boy’s game. All four of Roosevelt’s sons served in France—as did the sons, I’ve noted, of British ducal families: noblesse oblige—and one got the Croix de Guerre.
The ageing Roosevelt was crushed when his youngest son, beloved, troublesome Quentin, met his fate somewhere among the clouds. Is this what war is like, a courageous son actually dying? In August of 1918, still three months from Armistice, he wrote, “It is rather awful to know that he paid for his life, and that my other sons may pay for their lives, to try to put in practice what I preached.” TR’s luck held, though. His other sons survived the War, and he himself died in 1919, before the apparent failure of the Peace had devalued the romantic sacrifice.[21]
After 1916, after Verdun and the Somme, the highbrows at least had started to doubt the old lie. Middle-brow culture held onto it. As you go up the stairs to the reading room of Harvard’s Widener Library you come on the landing to a gigantic, Rubenesque double mural painted by John Singer Sargent a little before his death in 1925. One panel is inscribed, “They crossed the sea crusaders keen to help the nations battling in a righteous cause”; the other, “Happy those who with a glowing faith in one embrace clasped death and victory.” Sweet and proper is it to die for the fatherland.
The romance of the Homeric hero spreads in American literature in TR’s time. It has roots of course as far back as Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823-1841). Think of Daniel Day Lewis’ luscious performance in The Last of the Mohicans. It persists to the present in the middle- and low-brow reading of bourgeois men. Early in Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912: it has since then never been out of print) Bern Venters rejects the voluble peacemaking by Jane Withersteen, and demands she return his guns, after a gunslinger who happens along has saved him from a humiliating beating: “Hush! Talk to me no more of mercy or religion—after today. Today this strange coming of [the gunslinger] left me still a man, and now I’ll die a man! . . . Give me my guns.” Venters disarms the woman by stopping her talk. Quoting the passage Tompkins remarks, “In Venters, American men are taking their manhood back from the Christian women who have been holding them in thrall.”[22] With words.
The text above is an excerpt from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, the first volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.
[1] Tompkins, West of Everything, 1992, p. ***
[2] Tompkins, West of Everything, 1992, p. ***
[3] Homer, Iliad, Lombardo trans., 1997, pp. 506-513.
[4] Rose, Gender and Heroism, 2002, pp. xii.
[5] Milton, Paradise Regained, 1671, IV, 1-7.
[6] Tompkins, West of Everything, 1992, p. 51, 52. Countryman and von Heussen-Countryman, Shane, 1999, pp. 15, 17.
[7] Schaefer, Shane, 1949, pp. 72-73, 82
[8] Richard Fried, “Operation Polecat,” 2002 and “Voting Against the Hammer and Sickle,” 2003.
[9] Lomax, Cowboy Songs, 1910, p. ***
[10] French, Cowboy Metaphysics, 1997, p. 32.
[11] Tompkins, “Me and My Shadow,” 1987 (2001), p. 2141.
[12] Mozart, The Magic Flute, 1791, Act Two, scenes II and XIX.
[13] Peirpont, “Tough Guy,” 2002, p. 68.
[14] Hurston, Their Eyes, 1937, pp. 85, 74.
[15] Tompkins, West of Everything, 1992, p. 44.
[16] Cannadine, Aspects, 1994, p. 157.
[17] Holmes numbers are given in Alschuler, Law Without Values, 2000, p. 39.
[18] Williams, “Transitional,” The Tempers, 1913, at http://www.english. uiuc.edu/ maps/ poets/s_z/williams/ additionalpoems.htm
[19] Rotella, “Synonymous with Kept,” 2001, p. 242, with elisions.
[20] Mann, Death in Venice, 1912, p. 72.
[21] Brands, TR, 1997, pp. 32, xi-xii, 797-799, 802, 812; Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt, p. 504; Cannadine, Aspects, 1994, p. 157.
[22] Tompkins, West of Everything, 1992, p. 33.
Read and watch Legends of the Fall for more such material. The short story is a jewel. The movie is flawed but engaging.