The Relationship of the Gun and Masculinity

In the literature of the Wild West, the presence of guns is almost always incorporated into the context of the novels. The gun, a powerful object that has the ability to end one’s life in the spur of a moment, can be seen as both a physical and psychological weapon to protect one’s self. In moments of danger, the gun always makes a presence as a tool to resolve a conflict by death or intimidation. We have seen repeated moments in the Ox-Bow Incident and All the Pretty Horses, where a gun is used in a critical moment in the novels. Focusing on the social aspect of intimidation, I believe the gun is used as a man’s last resort to defend his masculinity. In both novels, we see a character challenged or humiliated, realizing he is in jeopardy of tarnishing his manhood in front of others, and resorts to the use of the gun. We see this threat in three instances with Ox-Bow Incident: the confrontation between Farnley and Art (Art defending himself as he smokes a cigarette and challenging Farnely), Tetley’s pistol whip to his son (Tetley’s authority and legitimacy was challenged by his son’s act), and Gerald’s attempted suicide (Gerald’s broken sense of worth living and embarrassment). In all cases, one of the characters or both deeply attacked their masculinity, which resorted to drawing out a gun. Blevins proves he is a good shot in All The Pretty Horses, after being pestered and ridiculed by Rawlins. In an attempt to save himself and defend his manliness, he resorts to his weapon, proving himself. Many conflicts can also be resolved by simple fist fights or soothing the situation, but the drawing of the gun is prevalent in many novels. Fist fights may be all fun and games, perhaps lightly prodding at one’s masculinity, but once challenged, the gun will inevitably appear. Other forms of violence, such as Canby knocking Gil out with a bottle, shows it was well-intentioned and received well. In any situation, the last resort to use a gun shows how fragile or protective men in the West are with their masculinity. 

Rhetoric of Conquering in All the Pretty Horses

When we read the Ox Bow incident, we talked about how Kinkaid represents the west, and how the major driving force behind the plot of the novel was to recover the idea of the west.  McCarthy also seems to be tackling the idea of controlling the frontier.  At the beginning of section two, one of the most important scenes is when the two boys are breaking the new colts (pages 102-105).  The language McCarthy chooses to describe the process of breaking the horses is particularly interesting.  First on page 102 he says, “The horses shifted and stood, gray shapes in the gray morning. Stacked on the ground outside the gate were coils of every kind of rope.”  Immediately, the horses are equated with nature and the environment through the repetition of the word gray.  However, contrasting that is the image of man-made ropes that will be used to constrain them.  McCarthy strategically presents these two images side by side.  Another piece to fold into this scene is on page 103 when McCarthy writes, “They did not smell like horses.  They smelled like what they were, wild animals” as if somehow the designation of ‘horse’ does not belong to the creature until it has been tamed.  If we take horses as a representation of the west (and they seem to be presented as such) then somehow the west is not the west until someone claims it.  I think this speaks to the myth that the west was empty, when in reality, settlers actually stole it from plenty of people already there.  To reinforce this idea, the image of the horses on page 105, and their horror as they are trussed up and separated, would seem to mirror the experience of the native people in the west.  As the novel moves forward, the metaphor of horses as the west should be attended to, as it seems that McCarthy has a particular message in mind.

Anonymity in The Ox Bow Incident

When Art lights a cigarette during the stakeout on pages 133-135, the novel offers us a look into what the code of masculinity is like in practice.  The men are positioned throughout the woods ready to catch the rustlers.  Art and several of the other men who are bored, or anxious, or for whatever reason distracted from the lynching at hand, decide to smoke.  There is the nice image of the way the small flame lights up the smoker’s face.  Smoking could compromise the ambush, but it also shows that, subconsciously, the man smoking is not 100% invested in the ambush.  If he is giving away their positions with the light, than he either must not care about the success of the plan, or he is too anxious or distracted to realize it is a problem.  The code of masculinity comes into play when Art is reprimanded for his actions by an unknown speaker.  He could be Winder, or Bartlett, or any of the other men from town.  This man is the “ideal man” who has a gun, and enforces the rules of the mob.  He calls Art a “lily” as a way to emasculate him, by extension saying that the smokers are weak, and that those waiting patiently in the dark are powerful (134).  The speaker draws some of his power from the fact that he can hide in anonymity, and claim the power of the group because he is not singled out.  However, because Art is illuminated, he is a target.  We see the same thing when Risley meets the men on page 211.  He offers them a “way out” by pretending he could not identify them.  If he doesn’t give names, then the men involved with the lynching can ignore their guilt and save their reputations.  Thus it appears that being the ultimate manly man does not just require manly actions, it requires assimilation and compliance, to be part of a group rather than an individual.  That way, no one can single out vulnerabilities or weaknesses that could get you run out of town, or killed.

Example Posts

So here are a few example posts for you guys to peruse, and as with all good examples, these have some caveats attached to them:

1. They are not on texts we are reading for this course (this seems sort of obvious).
2. They are a bit longer than I may expect from you guys (though more is generally better -- as long as it's a polished "more") and reference more texts than you have to.
3. They link broader themes than I want you guys to write on. So, for instance, focus on particular images (like the rhetoric of the West as a space of "home" that we talked about on Monday) rather than larger themes (like "violence"), unless you can really specify what you mean by that theme (in other words, how do the texts we're reading define the terms of that theme?). However, the analytic rigor and specificity of these examples is representative of what I would expect in your posts.
4. They have questions at the end -- not a requirement, but an excellent add on that will help our class discussion if you find you have questions you'd like to pose to the class.

"Violence"
The Western landscape is no stranger to violence. Not only is there a history of ecocide and environmental degradation in the West, but nature also often seems a brutal, unforgiving force. Human on human bloodshed routinely characterizes the West in popular media as well. Ty Hardin’s quick and unfortunate end by lightening in Wyman’s High Country, the nuclear testing sites Mike Davis investigates in “Dead West: Ecocide in Malboro Country,” and Llewelyn Moss’ murder in McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men represent these overt kinds of “Western” violence. Violence can also be more subtle, enacted through the avenues of economics, politics, culture, and citizenry, as Tim Cresswell studies in the sixth chapter of On the Move, “Mobility, Rights, and Citizenship in the United States.” There, he investigates how laws surrounding mobility limit citizenry, belonging, and economic and political freedom in the American West. Sharman Apt Russel discusses her personal retaliation of political disenfranchisement in her essay “Illegal Aliens,” where she admits that she routinely offers work, shelter, and food to seasonal, migratory workers from Mexico. Furthermore, these violences never stand alone; while nature finds a way to “fight back” in Sherman Alexie’s “Distances,” the American Indians in his short stories cannot fight back against the political violence they suffer at the hands of the United States government and its twisted reservation politics. How does violence both to and from the environment in literature serve to accentuate or frustrate political, social, cultural, and economic violence? Does Western American literature suggest that the West’s environment invites a violent response to its brutal temperatures, lack of natural resources, and resistance to settlement? How does literature attempt to reconcile or explain the violence humans have done unto the West’s environment?

"Agriculture and Food"
Whether or not the West enables long term survival depends largely on the availability of agricultural resources. As such, the challenge of finding and maintaining a food supply resurfaces again and again in literature that deals with long- and short-term habitation in the West. Migration makes this process especially tricky, as moving through space both expands and diversifies a food supply, bringing more (potentially harmful and helpful) variables into play. To complicate this concern further, preserving sustenance for groups of people demands a more comprehensive and complex understanding of nature’s seasonal and regrowth processes, as Wendell Berry strives to communicate in Remembering. Similar to Snyder’s networking “off the path” in order to witness the wild at its most lush and diverse in Practice of the Wild, Berry yearns to reconnect with and cultivate a nature, unblemished by the scars of mechanical farming, that offers nourishment without harmful human intervention. With a similar aim in mind, David Masumoto uses small scale mobility to his agricultural benefit in Epitaph for a Peach. In this short autobiographical narrative, Masumoto explains that he frequently walks his orchards to learn and mimic their diversity of flora and fauna. At the same time, the migratory demands of the food market impede the selling and preservation of his Sun Crest Peaches. On the other hand, as Mary Oliver and Stephen Bordio reflect, hunting (done right) both brings us in closer communication with nature and gives us unique access to animals’ perspectives as predators and prey. What other natural processes does literature use hunting and gathering to access or interrogate? How does the ability to find food speak to or comment on mobility and its success? How does literature use agricultural and hunting practices to examine what it means to create or produce responsibly across a series of networked bioregions?

Welcome!

Welcome to our class blog (writing that as enthusiastically as I did just added 10 years to my age)! Here, we're going to collect the images, icons, motifs, etc related to the Wild West that we come across in our texts for this semester. A couple guidelines for posting here:

1. Everyone is required to post at least 5 times a semester. More and I will consider it extra credit.
2. Your post should be a good sized paragraph or two that maintains the same analytic rigor and specificity we strive for in class.
3. Make sure you use the labels for your post so that we can organize these findings along thematic lines; this will come in handy as a research tool as you write your papers and want to reference particular elements we've discussed here and in class.