A foray into nostalgic childhood memories reveal narratives that have saturated America’s culture for decades: A good man in a white hat and a bad man in a black one, lonely days on the open range with only a horse and the imminent threat of an Injun attack for company. The mythos of the wild, wild west is truly a cultural obsession. Perhaps it is the stunning western scenery, the rugged, independent masculinity, or the clear division of morality that makes wild west narratives so enchanting to America. Whatever, the reason, this mythos seems to be preferable to the real story of the American west: death and disease, oppression and colonization, and the genocide of the native population. America would clearly rather hear about the rugged man …show more content…
in the white hat. In Sam Shepard’s True West, the setting functions as a critique of the mythologization of the wild west; this is evident in descriptions of sounds, the set dressing of the play, and descriptions of the taming of the desert. Background noise, particularly coyotes yapping, is used to contrast the real west with the fantasy, and critique the inherent falseness of wild west mythology. Lee engages Austin in a short but telling discussion of the coyotes: Lee: Damn Coyotes kept me awake. Austin: Oh yeah, I hear them. That [sic] must’ve killed somebody’s dog or something. Lee: Yappin’ their fool heads off. They don’t yap like that on the desert. They howl. These are city coyotes here. (13-14) Lee’s comparison of desert coyotes and the city coyotes not only illustrates the falseness of the setting but at the same time criticizes this falseness.
City coyotes yap while tearing apart domestic pets. Consumption can be seen as an allegory for appropriation: Narratives and symbols are stolen from their appropriate context, dissected (or torn apart) before being repackaged in a sanitized context for consumption by an audience. In this metaphor, both media producers and audiences are the noisy coyotes, picking apart stolen narratives for to be consumed for entertainment. It is also worth noting that the stock sound clips usually used in westerns were of coyotes yapping rather than howling, further tying the yapping coyotes in True West to the notion of a false wild …show more content…
west. The positioning and content of the set dressing allude to a false wilderness and a rejection of reality. The set consists of a kitchen and an alcove. The kitchen is a symbol of technology used for convenience and casual incorporation of technology into the norm. The adjoining alcove is filled real plants and carpeted with fake grass. The fake grass on the floor of that alcove indicates a preference for a constructed facsimile over reality: If the person that decorated the space wanted to be on grass, couldn’t they go outside? The house is in a nice neighbor in southern California, surely the backyard is mostly pleasant. However, reality is sometimes messy and unpleasant, much like history often is. Better to construct a cleaner, controlled version for one’s enjoyment. The technological kitchen environment and the plant-filled alcove may seems like a contradiction, but they are not; it is not the juxtaposition of the domestic and the wild, but rather the highlighting of a comfortable, gentrified wild. Austin and Lee’s self-destructive fantasy of the wild west occurs against a background of a fantasy wilderness. The real part of the sunroom, the living plants, die while Austin and Lee are lost in their own fantasy. Only the facsimile, the fake grass, remains green and inviting. The area the play is set in was once wide open desert, stretching nearly to the sea. It is now domesticated, plowed over, filled with people and shopping centers and neat green lawns. The area is a construct of what some feel California ought to be: more tropical than desert, more green than brown. The desert was plowed over and filled with palm trees (an invasive, non native plant) to make it more appealing. The entire area, once a flourishing desert, is now an imitation of dream environment that has never actually existed. Lee quickly addresses this stripping of the desert: “Lee: Up here it’s different. This country’s real different. / Austin: Well, it’s been built up. / Lee: Built up? Wiped out is more like it. I don’t even hardly recognize it (15).” Even the air quality is affected by this gentrification of nature: “Lee: I went up in the foothills here. Up in the San Gabriels. Heat was drivin’ me crazy. / Austin: Well, wasn’t it hot out on the desert? / Lee: Different kinda’ heat. Out there it’s clean. Cools off at night. There’s a nice little breeze (14).” Although searing heat is part of the wild west mythos, Lee subtly suggests that the heat in the domesticated desert has an inauthentic quality, that it is less clean. The fantasy of the west that motivated so many to come to it has resulted in the pollution of the actual desert environment, the wild west reality. This constructed wild west mythos has resulted in a kind of everyday hyperreality, where millions live in a constructed fantasy environment. In Megan Williams’ essay “Nowhere Man and the Twentieth-Century Cowboy: Images of Identity in Sam Shepard’s True West”, Williams argues that Lee’s description of Lonely are the Brave is a commentary on wild west hyperreality. Lee’s choice of Lonely Are the Brave records the death of the American cowboy and of the American west.
In’s Lee’s summary, the present may search the past for a definition, yet all it will find it an empty image that rehearses the death of another moment in the American past; the only past the the present will ever know is the one where the cowboy and the mythical figure of America’s past loses his freedom and ceases to exist.
The fantasy of the cowboy, common as it is, is very different than the reality. The vast majority of cowboys were Native American and Mexican American men who were forced into a dangerous, laborious line of work because they had no other option. The myth of the white cowboy riding in on a white hat is just that: a
myth. The wild west was tamed in more than one way. While the landscape was shaped and sculpted into an unrecognizable semi-tropical fantasy land, the story of the wild west became a white-washed, hyper masculine fantasy where the good guy always saves the day. The stories of the west were whitewashed and gentrified into a cowboy fantasy, simplifying a time of violence and oppression into a palatable tale of white hats and black hats (and morality to match) and men who die for the love of a horse. Real lives, real stories, were transformed into an affirmation of straight white masculinity. Sam Shepard’s True West criticizes this mythologization with some vigour, using the same symbols repeated in wild west mythos to show their absurdity. Cleansing history into a more palatable version is something most countries do, but America is particularly guilty of this, glossing over what is quite possibly the largest genocide in the history of the world to the extent schools feel comfortable appropriating Native American ceremonial symbols at Thanksgiving. America’s history of slavery is distorted to the point that many believe it occurred hundreds of years ago, segregation is briefly touched upon but the long period of lynchings is not. America has set aside an honest account of history and turned to a version that inspires pride and patriotism. This preference for sanitized history exists at a cultural level. Fortunately, America has fiction, like True West, that is willing to combat this trend rather than advance it.
The West is a very big part of American culture, and while the myth of the West is much more enticing than the reality of the west, it is no doubt a very big part of America. We’re constantly growing up playing games surrounded by the West such as cowboys and Indians and we’re watching movies that depict the cowboy to be a romanticized hero who constantly saves dames in saloons and rides off into the sunset. However, the characters of the West weren’t the only things that helped the development of America; many inventions were a part of the development of the West and helped it flourish into a thriving community. Barbed wire, the McCormick reaper and railroads—for example—were a large part of the development in the West—from helping to define claimed land boundaries, agricultural development and competition, and even growth of the West.
To many families the prospect of owning land was the central driving force that brought them to the land known today as the wild Wild West. Much propaganda wa...
McMurtry, Larry. 2005. Oh What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West: 1846-1890. 10th Ed. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
Turner fails to realize the extent to which Native Americans existed in the ‘Wilderness’ of the Americas before the frontier began to advance. Turner’s thesis relies on the idea that “easterners … in moving to the wild unsettled lands of the frontier, shed the trappings of civilization … and by reinfused themselves with a vigor, an independence, and a creativity that the source of American democracy and national character.” (Cronon) While this idea seems like a satisfying theory of why Americans are unique, it relies on the notion that the Frontier was “an area of free land,” which is not the case, undermining the the...
There are many ways in which we can view the history of the American West. One view is the popular story of Cowboys and Indians. It is a grand story filled with adventure, excitement and gold. Another perspective is one of the Native Plains Indians and the rich histories that spanned thousands of years before white discovery and settlement. Elliot West’s book, Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers and the Rush to Colorado, offers a view into both of these worlds. West shows how the histories of both nations intertwine, relate and clash all while dealing with complex geological and environmental challenges. West argues that an understanding of the settling of the Great Plains must come from a deeper understanding, a more thorough knowledge of what came before the white settlers; “I came to believe that the dramatic, amusing, appalling, wondrous, despicable and heroic years of the mid-nineteenth century have to be seen to some degree in the context of the 120 centuries before them” .
In the introduction, Hämäläinen introduces how Plains Indians horse culture is so often romanticized in the image of the “mounted warrior,” and how this romanticized image is frequently juxtaposed with the hardships of disease, death, and destruction brought on by the Europeans. It is also mentioned that many historians depict Plains Indians equestrianism as a typical success story, usually because such a depiction is an appealing story to use in textbooks. However, Plains Indians equestrianism is far from a basic story of success. Plains equestrianism was a double-edged sword: it both helped tribes complete their quotidian tasks more efficiently, but also gave rise to social issues, weakened the customary political system, created problems between other tribes, and was detrimental to the environment.
Somewhere out in the Old West wind kicks up dust off a lone road through a lawless town, a road once dominated by men with gun belts attached at the hip, boots upon their feet and spurs that clanged as they traversed the dusty road. The gunslinger hero, a man with a violent past and present, a man who eventually would succumb to the progress of the frontier, he is the embodiment of the values of freedom and the land the he defends with his gun. Inseparable is the iconography of the West in the imagination of Americans, the figure of the gunslinger is part of this iconography, his law was through the gun and his boots with spurs signaled his arrival, commanding order by way of violent intentions. The Western also had other iconic figures that populated the Old West, the lawman, in contrast to the gunslinger, had a different weapon to yield, the law. In the frontier, his belief in law and order as well as knowledge and education, brought civility to the untamed frontier. The Western was and still is the “essential American film genre, the cornerstone of American identity.” (Holtz p. 111) There is a strong link between America’s past and the Western film genre, documenting and reflecting the nations changes through conflict in the construction of an expanding nation. Taking the genres classical conventions, such as the gunslinger, and interpret them into the ideology of America. Thus The Western’s classical gunslinger, the personification of America’s violent past to protect the freedoms of a nation, the Modernist takes the familiar convention and buries him to signify that societies attitude has change towards the use of diplomacy, by way of outmoding the gunslinger in favor of the lawman, taming the frontier with civility.
Louise Erdrich’s short story “American horse” is a literary piece written by an author whose works emphasize the American experience for a multitude of different people from a plethora of various ethnic backgrounds. While Erdrich utilizes a full arsenal of literary elements to better convey this particular story to the reader, perhaps the two most prominent are theme and point of view. At first glance this story seems to portray the struggle of a mother who has her son ripped from her arms by government authorities; however, if the reader simply steps back to analyze the larger picture, the theme becomes clear. It is important to understand the backgrounds of both the protagonist and antagonists when analyzing theme of this short story. Albetrine, who is the short story’s protagonist, is a Native American woman who characterizes her son Buddy as “the best thing that has ever happened to me”. The antagonist, are westerners who work on behalf of the United States Government. Given this dynamic, the stage is set for a clash between the two forces. The struggle between these two can be viewed as a microcosm for what has occurred throughout history between Native Americans and Caucasians. With all this in mind, the reader can see that the theme of this piece is the battle of Native Americans to maintain their culture and way of life as their homeland is invaded by Caucasians. In addition to the theme, Erdrich’s usage of the third person limited point of view helps the reader understand the short story from several different perspectives while allowing the story to maintain the ambiguity and mysteriousness that was felt by many Natives Americans as they endured similar struggles. These two literary elements help set an underlying atmos...
Miller makes clear the impact of wilderness on early American life. While the Old World mentality presented wilderness as mysterious and filled with demons, the new American nation viewed it differently. Rather than possessing a sense of fear, their belief in the divine mission to spread democracy and civilization inspired them to journey west. Accordingly, they did so with a sense of excitement and a thirst for discovery. As such, I wholeheartedly agree with Miller’s view that the early romantic images of the American landscape were expressions of a new cultural nationalism. According to Miller, these early countrymen viewed the new nation as “...a place apart, an unpeopled wilderness where history, born in nature rather than in corrupt institutions,
Over the years, the idea of the western frontier of American history has been unjustly and falsely romanticized by the movie, novel, and television industries. People now believe the west to have been populated by gun-slinging cowboys wearing ten gallon hats who rode off on capricious, idealistic adventures. Not only is this perception of the west far from the truth, but no mention of the atrocities of Indian massacre, avarice, and ill-advised, often deceptive, government programs is even present in the average citizen’s understanding of the frontier. This misunderstanding of the west is epitomized by the statement, “Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis was as real as the myth of the west. The development of the west was, in fact, A Century of Dishonor.” The frontier thesis, which Turner proposed in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition, viewed the frontier as the sole preserver of the American psyche of democracy and republicanism by compelling Americans to conquer and to settle new areas. This thesis gives a somewhat quixotic explanation of expansion, as opposed to Helen Hunt Jackson’s book, A Century of Dishonor, which truly portrays the settlement of the west as a pattern of cruelty and conceit. Thus, the frontier thesis, offered first in The Significance of the Frontier in American History, is, in fact, false, like the myth of the west. Many historians, however, have attempted to debunk the mythology of the west. Specifically, these historians have refuted the common beliefs that cattle ranging was accepted as legal by the government, that the said business was profitable, that cattle herders were completely independent from any outside influence, and that anyone could become a cattle herder.
The birth of the Western film came almost exactly at the same time as the closure of the Frontier. Many people believed that the closing of the frontier meant that there would also be a closure on how the frontier effected the development of American identity. However, this was not the case. The West has been portrayed in many different ways throughout the history of film. Westerns showed many different aspects of The West, from train robberies, to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, to the many confrontations between cowboys and Indians, film helped share with Americans the many different aspects of the West. And although many of these depictions do not always show the audience the truth, all of them absolutely helped shape American culture in film.
The cowboys of the frontier have long captured the imagination of the American public. Americans, faced with the reality of an increasingly industrialized society, love the image of a man living out in the wilderness fending for himself against the dangers of the unknown. By the end of the 19th century there were few renegade Indians left in the country and the vast expanse of open land to the west of the Mississippi was rapidly filling with settlers.
Western movies such as Rio Bravo and El Dorado illustrate America’s rugged and picturesque scenery explaining life as it was in the wide open country, at a time when few laws were in place to safeguard the public. These two films tell the story of four men who arrest and
The initiation of the owls resembles how Zuni men undergo initiation to join a kiva. It is important to establish the necessity of ritualistic initiation in daily Zuni culture because it sets how the Coyote violates functionalist themes about society doing things the way that they are. The initiation is a specific cultural institution function that supports the structure of Zuni society. One cannot simply try to bypass the rules of society. It is in the moment when the Coyote pesters the chief Owl to teach him the dance and its meanings that it is understood Zuni society’s power dynamic and kin relations have been ignored. A functional analysis of the potential reason as to why the Coyote desired so badly to become integrated into the Burrowing-Owl clan also points structural issues in Zuni society. The fact that the Coyote was willing to meddle in another group’s customs perhaps may demonstrate his own dissatisfaction with his own kin system. As a result, he wanted to feel valuable and went to extreme lengths and literally killed off a member of his own kin system, his grandmother, to under a process of initiation into another’s
The Coyote in the story “Fox and Coyote and Whale” is shaped as the beneficent culture hero. Coyote does not appear much during the story, but he is very helpful to Fox, especially when he tells him “I think your wife is in love with somebody else” (Mourning Dove, 1). Coyote did not have to tell Fox these words. He was just being a loyal friend. Based on Coyote’s actions, he identifies how his culture has taught him to be straight forward no matter the situation. Additionally, “One day Fox and Coyote came home from hunting, she was gone” (Mourning Dove, 1), therefore Coyote travels with Fox to get his wife back. Coyote goes out of his own way to help Fox. Doing this indicates how he has been taught that no man is not to be left behind. Furthermore,