?The Western and History

?Other novelists writing early in the 20th century, like Hamlin Garland and Willa Gather, took as their subjects the lives of ordinary people in the West, such as the farmers of Nebraska and South Dakota. The Western film was largely to ignore the kind of material which Cather explored.

At the centre of the Western as it evolved in the cinema, and at the centre of the popular fiction which was its immediate predecessor, was physical action: the violent confrontation between men and nature or, even more crucially, between savage or outlaw and the representative of advancing civilization. Some critics, such as John Cawelti, have therefore seen Cooper's exploration of the theme of the frontier as the essential core of the Western, which is 'set at a certain moment in the development of American civilization, namely at the point when savagery and lawlessness are in decline before the advancing wave of law and order, but are still strong enough to
pose a local and momentarily significant challenge.' Cawelti perhaps underest?imates the extent to which the Western depends on a fruitful tension between wildness and civilization, rather than recording the victory of one over the other. But he is right to stress the importance of the conflict. His description of what lies at the heart of the Western clearly has much in common with the theories of the most influential historian of the West, Frederick Jackson Turner, who argued that the peculiar character of American society could be explained by the existence of the frontier, defined precisely as the point at which savagery meets civilization. The influence of other concepts of nineteenth-century history and politics, such as the doctrine of Manifest Destiny or the protest of the Populist movement, can also be charted in the Western. For example, Peter Wollen has uncovered in John Ford's films an antinomy between the West viewed as a garden or as a desert. These conceptions were traced back to the'ir roots in nineteenth-century economic geography by Henry Nash Smith in his book Virgin Land. In his critical study Horizons West Jim Kitses sets out a whole series of oppositions which he finds operating in the ideology of the Western. Fundamental is the clash between the Wilderness and Civilization. From this derives a series of structuring tensions: between the individual and the community, between nature and culture, freedom and restriction, agrarianism and industrialism. All are physically separated by the frontier between the West and the East. These differences may be manifested in conflicts between gunfighters and townspeople, between ranchers and farmers, Indians and settlers, outlaws and sheriffs. But such are the complexities and richness of the material that the precise placing of any group or individual within these oppositions can never be pre-determined. Indians may well signify savagery, but sometimes they stand for what is positive in the idea of'nature'. Outlaws may be hostile to civilization; but Jesse James often represents the struggle of agrarian values against encroaching industrialization. ?