Virginian (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (4 page)

Wister’s view of the Virginian’s significance shaped the multifarious popular western novels, films, and television programs of the twentieth century. One good example of the mythic resonance Wister helped give to stories of the Wild West echoes recurrently in the familiar words introducing the Lone Ranger. This character appeared on the radio in the 1930s and in movie serials in the 1940s and made the transition to television and feature films in the 1950s. His appearance was invariably heralded by a few bars from Rossini’s “William Tell Overture” followed by the mythic incantation “From out of the past come the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse, Silver. The Lone Ranger rides again.”

The Virginian
is not a world-class literary masterpiece like
Moby-Dick
or
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
or
The Ambassadors
(by Wister’s friend Henry James). Wister’s book is a little too romantic, a little too unrealistic, and a little too simplistic in its plot and characters. Nor did Wister himself invent many of the most important elements of his work. These had already been part of writing about the West for some time. In fact, two of Wister’s most important plot elements, the girl from the East and the shootout, had already been parodied in a brilliant short story, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” written four years before the publication
of The Virginian
by Wister’s great contemporary Stephen Crane. However,
The Virginian
is an undeniable cultural classic, for Wister gave a definitive form to the central themes and episodes that would be fundamental to the development of the western genre as it evolved through the twentieth century. Wister’s work contains a mythic vocabulary that later authors drew on as they replayed these themes in many different variations.

One reason these episodes have so much resonance is that they reflect earlier mythic images of the West, both literary and popular. A good example is the novel’s opening episode, which might be entitled “The Arrival of the Tenderfoot” or “The Dude Goes West.”
The Virginian
opens with a scene in which the unnamed narrator leaves the train that has brought him west and, his baggage lost, feels as if “a sort of ship had left me marooned in a foreign ocean” (p. 17). Utterly bewildered by the strange ways of Medicine Bow, Wyoming, he is helpless until the Virginian introduces himself. At first the narrator makes a bad social blunder by assuming his superiority to the cowboy; but his artificial manners are soon put to shame by the natural gentlemanliness of the Virginian. In short order he realizes that he must learn a whole new set of attitudes and skills to function here.

The civilized easterner encountering the wilderness and changing in response to it was an important element in the earliest literature about the West. In the
Leatherstocking
saga, James Fenimore Cooper’s aristocratic English officers at first think Natty Bumppo is some sort of bumpkin from the wilds, but they soon learn that their very lives depend on his perceptiveness and skills. Cooper in turn was probably influenced in his treatment of this theme by the famous historical episode in which George Washington warned the British General Braddock about the danger of Indian warfare, only to be ignored as Braddock marched his troops in European style to a disastrous defeat. Other nineteenth-century writers continued to explore this theme. Nathaniel Hawthorne created elaborate Gothic symbolism from his character’s confrontation with the wilderness in
The Scarlet Letter.
Mark Twain, in
Roughing It,
gave a humorous twist to the narrator’s encounter with new experiences as he travels across the West.

Wister gave the theme a new meaning by contrasting eastern gentility with the rough and tumble ways of the West. This became a favorite treatment in twentieth-century western novels and films. Wister’s most popular novelistic successor, Zane Grey, made frequent use of the conflict between eastern and western mores in works like
The Code of the West.
The first tenderfoot movie I can find is
A Bluff from a Tenderfoot,
made in 1899, three years before the publication of Wister’s novel. Since then there have been more than thirty movies centering on the dude or tenderfoot theme, while innumerable other films have tenderfoot episodes.

With the introduction of the Virginian, Wister transformed the western protagonist from a descendant of Cooper’s Natty Bumppo (Leatherstocking) into the western hero we have known ever since. Unlike Cooper’s rather garrulous and sometimes even querulous Leatherstocking, the Virginian is tall, strong, and a man of few words, except when he is telling one of the hilarious tall tales he uses as indirect ways of making a point. He is a man of remarkable skills. We first see him in the narrator’s eyes as he easily ropes a wild pony that other cowboys have been unable to catch. We later discover that he is a wonderful horseman as well as a gunfighter. In fact, the Virginian is the epitome of rodeo, and our perennial fascination with wonderful riding, roping, shooting, and other cowboy skills is something that Wister, along with Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show, helped to bring into the twentieth-century western.

The Virginian is also, despite his skill in violence, a kind man; two of the most striking episodes in the novel—one involving a deluded hen named Em’ly and the other an abused horse—illustrate his great kindness to animals. As we noted earlier, the latter episode finds its source in Wister’s 1892 story “Balaam and Pedro,” which was probably the story in which Wister first conceived the Virginian. But above all, the Virginian is a man of honor, willing to face death to maintain it. What Robert Warshow later said in a classic essay about the western hero certainly applies to Wister’s creation:

In an early scene in the novel, perhaps the most famous of all, the Virginian first confronts his mythic antagonist, the outlaw Trampas, over a game of poker. The game suddenly turns deadly when Trampas calls the Virginian “a son-of-a—” (p. 23). The Virginian’s response, “When you call me that,
smile!”
(p. 34), along with the implied threat that he will draw his gun if Trampas doesn’t back down, is not only a defense of his honor but a witty way of preserving honor without resorting to violence. Trampas does back down here, but the scene foreshadows the climactic shootout between the two that will come at the end of the novel.

The next important mythic moment in the novel comes with the introduction of Molly Stark Wood, the archetypal schoolmarm from the East who becomes the Virginian’s sweetheart. The two meet near the beginning of the novel when the Virginian rescues Molly from a runaway stagecoach. Later they begin to fall in love, but Molly remains dubious about their relationship because of the great differences in their backgrounds. However, when the Virginian shows an insightful if somewhat unorthodox understanding of the literary classics Molly introduces him to, she begins to waver. When he is wounded by a marauding band of Indians, the spirit of her revolutionary forebears stirs within her. She nurses the Virginian back to health and agrees to be his wife. The final obstacle to their union is Molly’s moral distress when the Virginian is determined to face Trampas in a fight to the death. However, this obstacle is overcome when she realizes that her love for the hero is more powerful than her moral scruples and rushes into his arms. The novel ends with their honeymoon in a beautiful mountain forest.

The romance between the man of the West and the girl from the East became another formula of the western. In his presentation of this relationship, Wister developed two themes that were particularly important to him. One was the idea of the western experience regenerating the traditional eastern elite. Molly Stark Wood is the offspring of an old New England family, and one of her ancestors was a hero of the American Revolution: However, over the generations the family became genteel and lost some of the strength of earlier generations. Molly’s western experiences and her response to the violence that threatens the Virginian revitalize her and restore the moral fiber and courage that made her ancestors dare to challenge the might of the British Empire.

The second theme is the reunion of North and South in the West. The generation that preceded Wister’s had been enmeshed in the terrible conflict of the Civil War. Some of Wister’s older relatives and friends, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had actually fought against each other in that war. Reunion between North and South was very important to Wister, who frequently spent his summers in Charleston, South Carolina. Many novelists of Wister’s generation—from the unionist John W. DeForest to the rabid racist Thomas Dixon—depicted symbolic reunions of the warring sections in their fiction. For Wister, the marriage of the Virginian and the girl from New England portrayed the reunion of North and South in the West, and this became a frequent theme in early westerns.

Important as the romance between the Virginian and Molly is in the novel, there is one other axis of development that is, perhaps, even more important: the conflict between Trampas and the Virginian, which begins at the beginning of the novel and is finally resolved in the shootout at the end. As it develops, the struggle between the two generates several of the novel’s leading episodes, particularly those dealing with the significance of vigilante justice as an important aspect of the Code of the West. These episodes, largely derived from Wister’s understanding of the Johnson County war, include the Virginian’s leading a posse in pursuit of the rustlers and his lynching of two of them, including his former friend Steve. These events finally lead to the climactic shootout with Trampas, but before that Judge Henry, owner of the ranch where the Virginian works, offers an elaborate justification of vigilante justice to Molly, who is horrified by the Virginian’s participation in a lynching.

Judge Henry tells Molly that there is a great difference between the lynching of blacks in the South and the justice meted out to rustlers in Wyoming. Southern lynching, he insists, is “semi-barbarous” because the action is carried out in public and the victims are tortured. In Wyoming, criminals are executed “by the swiftest means, and in the quietest way” (p. 313). Moreover, Wyoming vigilantes must take the execution out of the hands of the courts because the courts in Wyoming are corrupt and unable to carry out true justice. “They are withered hands, or rather they are imitation hands made for show, with no life in them” (p. 314). Therefore, ordinary citizens must “take justice back into [their] own hands where it was once at the beginning of all things” (p. 314). Instead of being a defiance of the law this is really, according to Judge Henry, “an
assertion
of it—the fundamental assertion of self-governing men, upon whom our whole social fabric is based” (p. 314).

The myth of vigilante justice has been an important symbolic pattern, not only in the western, but in many forms of twentieth-century popular literature, including the hard-boiled detective story, the crime saga, and the spy thriller. Of course, Wister’s argument was much the same one apologists like novelist Thomas Dixon and filmmaker D. W. Griffith used to justify the actions of the Ku Klux Klan. However much Wister may have thought he had put a convincing distinction between southern and western lynchings in the mouth of Judge Henry, the argument really does not hold up. In fact, some of the more powerful westerns created later in the twentieth century raised serious questions about the validity of vigilante justice.

Wister articulated another important mythic episode for the twentieth-century western: the gunfight or shootout. Shootouts raise fewer moral questions than vigilante executions because, by convention, they are forced upon the hero by villainous antagonists. Shootouts had been portrayed before Wister in western legends like the shooting of Wild Bill Hickok or the shootout at the OK Corral, as well as in dime-novel westerns, but Wister in
The Virginian
gave it the characteristic shape of a reluctant hero forced by his antagonists to use his skills with violence against them. Moreover, the shootout in
The Virginian
has two additional characteristics that were extremely influential for twentieth-century writers and filmmakers. First, Wister’s shootout is highly formal and ritualistic. It begins with the challenge, when Trampas issues the famous ultimatum “I’ll give you till sundown to leave town” (p. 334). Later westerns sometimes added another stereotypical formulation to the challenge, “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us,” but this was merely a variation of Trampas’s original threat.

Second, after the Virginian has accepted Trampas’s challenge, the Bishop and the Virginian’s sweetheart, Molly, representing Christian pacifism and domestic morality, try to persuade the Virginian to leave town rather than fight. Molly even threatens to end their engagement. But the Virginian invokes the Code of the West: “I am goin’ my own course.... Can’t yu see how it must be about a man?” (p. 340). These words later became the stereotypical “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” and an archetypal expression of the code governing the western hero’s actions. There is nothing quite like this in Fenimore Cooper, though after Wister an episode in which someone tries to stop the shootout by invoking conventional morality became almost a requirement of serious westerns.

The challenge and the attempted intervention lead to the shootout itself which in Wister assumes the classic form of a confrontation followed by a walk-down and then the draw and the shooting. Though sometimes the shootout takes place inside rather than on the town’s main street, the pattern is virtually always the same. Wister also uses an effective narrative device to increase the suspense by making it appear that Trampas may have killed the Virginian. He first presents the shootout from Molly’s perspective: “She did not fall, or totter, but stood motionless. And next—it seemed a moment and it seemed eternity—she heard in the distance a shot, and then two shots. Out of the window she saw people beginning to run. At that she turned and fled to her room, and flung herself face downward upon the floor” (p. 342).