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“When You Call Me That …”: Tall Talk and Male Hegemony in The Virginian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Lee Clark Mitchell
Lee Clark Mitchell*
Affiliation:
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
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Abstract

Owen Wister's The Virginian, considered the prototypical cowboy western, only vaguely satisfies formula expectations. Encounters consist more of wordplay than gunplay, and physical conflicts rarely occur. Far from depicting a conventional male violence tamed at last by a feminized East, the novel celebrates the Virginian's rhetorical triumph over the schoolmarm and the silencing of her feminism in favor of a “logic” of patriarchy. Why should this best-seller have established a formula it does not fulfill? One explanation may involve its setting in Wyoming—known as the “Equality State” for first having enfranchised women. By opposing a thesis of sexual inequality to that setting's implications, the novel could be read as two things at once: a paean to an older, masculine West and yet a brief for modern male hegemony. Readers troubled by a resurgent feminism could delight unawares in the novel's contradictions and read into it the formula western.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 102 , Issue 1 , January 1987 , pp. 66 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1987

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