An Imaginative Landscape
Winning the WestOccasionally I've said a word or two about the importance of what Americans believe about themselves and their country, the myths that simultaneously create the national character and inform our experience. What do these myths tells us about ourselves? What do they demand of us today? Are the demands of older American mythologies in conflict with newer ones? Speaking to that is a fascinating article in Policy Review about "The West" in the American story, by Cheryl Miller.
Roosevelt, Wister, and Parkman believed that the frontier spirit had checked democracy’s dangerous tendencies. Now that the actual West could no longer serve that function, the idea of the West had to do so instead. So they sought to create a national myth that would shore up the American character against the debilitating effects of the new commercial age. As Smith argued in Virgin Land, it was not the actual experiences of Western pioneers that formed the American character, but rather an elite living in the East that self-consciously crafted the Western story for national purposes. Indeed, with help from Buffalo Bill, it turns out that a fairly small number of intellectual entrepreneurs managed in the space of about a quarter century to transform the West from a physical landscape into an imaginative one. The new, imagined West carried the same values through literature, histories, and popular culture. Vehicles for the new myth included Roosevelt’s own history, The Winning of the West, James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, the penny pamphlets chronicling the adventures of the great wilderness men Daniel Boone and Kit Carson, and, later, the dime-store sagas of Deadwood Dick and Calamity Jane. But by far the most influential work of Western mythology was Owen Wister’s The Virginian. - Cheryl Miller
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Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Culture
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"Behave. Or I'll sell you to the Indians" - Nana Jane
I am quite sure that a certain New Jersey dwelling grandmother did not mean the Cleveland Indians baseball franchise.
While attending the University of California at Davis, I was fortunate enough to attend the senior seminar conducted by Professor Jack Hicks on "The Literature of California" which explored this same idea over an entire course of in-depth study and comparative literature.
While I know Ms. Miller's article does not equate California with "The West" per se, but if there is one state in the Union that is so closely identified with this idea, it is California. The verdant valleys, the high mountains, the endless American continent stretching to the far ocean. Enough space for everyone. In the Chinese language, California is called "Gold Mountain"...if that moniker isn't an example of an imaginative landscape, I cannot think of what is!
If you explore the literature of California, you find how it celebrates the terrain, the people, the ethnicities, the space, and the broad vistas, and you then come to understand the components of this idealized location. Later on, this appreciation of the land turns into idealized myth-making embedded in the development of Southern California by real estate boosters, motor car companies, and Hollywood; no singular image personified the imaginative landscape of "the American dream" more than California in the mid-twentieth century: Disneyland, technicolor, Dragnet, and orange groves as far as the eye could see. At the same time, the seedy unsavory melting-pot of truth behind this scrubbed-up post-war mythology is found in the literature of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, & Nathanael West, and even later still with Bret Easton Ellis and James Ellroy.
Despite the beauty, there is something very wrong here...
Even Hollywood got over itself and took a look at this unsavory lining to the shiny dream (and perhaps what happens to the dream when left to its own devices,) with films like "Chinatown" "Blade Runner" and "L.A. Confidential." I still think that "Rebel Without a Cause" is a perfectly poignant example of the youth caught in this environment of hypocrisy - how are the mighty fallen in their young generations!
For a that examines the non-fiction side, I highly recommend Mike Davis' "City of Quartz"...a sociological and ecological view that helps to explain the Western American dream deferred. I also highly recommend Professor Jack Hick's anthology of "The Literature of California" compiles both fiction and non-fiction works exploring the ideal of the American West, and may be found on Amazon.