Gender, Genre & Narrative Pleasure

Derek Longhurst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136321528
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Recent years have witnessed important new initiatives in the study of popular fictional modes of writing. At one time the field could have been described with reasonable accuracy by two traditions: one that analyzed the production and distribution of popular fiction as commodities; and one whose proponents regarded popular fiction as the negative which offered definition to the exposure of the positive - the 'great' canonic literary tradition. Generally, then, popular fictions were to be 'evaluated' according to the institutionalized norms which had been established as common sense practice around literary studies.

The decade of the 1970s, however ushered in a bewildering range of theoretical debates - a crucial gain was establishment of interdisciplinary courses in communication, cultural and media studies, providing a network of contexts within which serious analysis could evolve and progress. Responding to a fundamental challenge from feminism, a primary objective of this book is to propose that all narrative and its reading are intrinsically inflected by sexual politics.

Various approaches represented here demonstrate problems of confronting the gendered pleasures of reading. Questions about self, sexuality and identity within specific historical formations are raised. The objective is to frame, describe and unearth the notion of 'men as readers' as a project rather than as the usual, unquestioned normative procedure.

Drawing eclectically upon Marxist, psychoanalytic and discourse theory, the essays set out readings of popular texts and genres – the Western, the sentimental novel, detective and crime fiction, political thrillers and horror and science fiction – in the interest of provoking other readers to see the critical study of popular fiction as unthinkable without gender as a central concern.

1

West of Everything

Jane Tompkins

THIS essay is part of a longer work on Westerns which is just beginning to take shape. It offers an explanation of why Westerns (novels and movies) arose when they did, taking other explanations to task in the process. My account departs from a single question and pushes its way forward, asking the questions implied by the answers it arrives at, until it comes to a major depot, rather like the trains that make their way across the plains in Western films, moving on from one forsaken little station to the next. Unlike the trains that chug harmlessly into the desert, and more like the gun battles with which Westerns normally conclude, the essay is polemical. But the conclusions it offers – the results of a first foray into unfamiliar territory – are meant to provoke discussion rather than to close it off.

Near the beginning of Hondo (1953), one of Louis L’Amour’s best-known novels, the hero discovers the remains of a fight between a band of Apaches and a company of US cavalrymen.

Atop the hill he drew up, looking around. He saw all that remained of Company C, the naked bodies of the dead, fallen in their blood and their glory as fighting men should.¹

Hondo muses on the scene of battle, reconstructing what must have happened, noting those whom the Indians had left unmutilated as a mark of respect for their courage, admiring old Pete Britton, the scout ‘who had held out at least an hour longer than the others. On his hard old face … a taunting, wolfish grin. He had defeated his ancient fears of loneliness, sickness and poverty.’²

Hondo continues on his way, taking shelter from a storm in a dug-out on the side of a hill. He settles down for the night, thinking of the woman he has just begun to love, and then L’Amour writes this paragraph:

Somewhere along the tangled train of his thoughts he dropped off and slept, and while he slept the rain roared on, tracks were washed out, and the bodies of the silent men of Company C lay wide-eyed to the rain and bare-chested to the wind, but the blood and the dust washed away, and the stark features of Lieutenant Creyton C. Davis, graduate of West Point, veteran of the Civil Wars and the Indian wars, darling of Richmond dance floors, hero of a Washington romance, dead now in the long grass on a lonely hill, west of everything.³

This passage makes explicit a movement towards death which marks the Western and sets it off from other genres. Death is portrayed here as transfiguration and fulfilment – ‘the silent men of Company C lay wide-eyed to the rain and bare-chested to the wind’, purified and made beautiful by death – as the apotheosis of personal achievement – Pete Britton has defeated his ancient fears, the others have fallen ‘in their blood and their glory as fighting men should’ – and as a comradely condition – Lieutenant Davis lies next to Clanahan, the drunkard (‘Hondo could picture the scene … the Lieutenant giving the bottle to the man he had several times sent to the guardhouse for drunken brawling, but a man who had died well beside an officer he understood’).⁴ And, faintly shadowed in the preceding passage but more explicit later on, death is figured as the fulfilment of sexual desire. As Hondo falls asleep, thinking of the woman he will eventually marry, L’Amour cuts to Lieutenant Davis, darling of Richmond dance floors and hero of a Washington romance, who ‘in the long grass on a lonely hill, west of everything’ has already met and embraced his bride.

To go west, to go as far west as you can go, west of everything, is to die. And death in the Western is double: glory, transfiguration, fulfilment and, at the same time, annihilation. For the Western rejects the notion of an afterlife and announces itself as determinedly secular, valuing the strength and skill required to stay alive above the glory of sacrificial defeat. The hero, who always defeats death by killing his adversaries, plays a game in which survival is everything. And this means that we ourselves do not have to face death, as we watch the movie or read the novel, but continually escape it, along with the protagonist. Thus, death is repressed in the Western because figured only as what happens to someone else.

At the same time, death is continually courted, flirted with, risked and finally imposed – on others: Indians, villains, ‘Company C’, cowards, the protagonist’s relatives and friends. In fact, death is everywhere in this genre. Not just in the scores of bodies that pile up towards the narrative’s close, but, even more compellingly, in the desert landscape with which the bodies of the gunned-down eventually merge. The classical Western landscape is barren and hostile, a tableau of towering rock and stretching sand where nothing lives. Its aura of death, both parodied and insisted on in place-names like Deadwood and Tombstone, exerts a strong attraction. For although to die is to lose the game – Lieutenant Davis’s apotheosis is only a small landmark along the trail of Hondo’s victorious struggle to live – there is a strange play of irony in this. All the lieutenant’s dreams and expectations have ended on a lonely hill, suggesting faintly that there was something unrealistic about them, turning the joke on him. And yet, the pure glory of his death makes Hondo’s survival look momentarily banal. The sense of consummation L’Amour’s description of Company C conveys, their transfiguration in death, while it puts them out of play, also seals their perfection.

The ubiquity of death – it hangs over everything and everybody – and its doubleness, both glory and annihilation, are among the genre’s most salient features, features which we tend to take for granted, as if there had always been stories about men who shoot each other down in the dusty main street of a desert town. But these stories came into being only shortly after the towns themselves did, and although the shooting stopped a few years later, American culture has been obsessed by that particular scene of violence ever since. In trying to understand the Western as a narrative type that was speaking to and for the culture as a whole, one has to ask why, at a certain moment in history, a genre should arise in which death, both as a condition and as an event, should command so much attention.⁵

In a pithy article called ‘Origins of the Western’, drawing on the work of several other scholars, Richard Etulain has argued that Westerns came to prominence because of the circumstances surrounding the year 1900, which he summarizes roughly as follows:

1. revival of interest in the historical novel, signalling a need to recapture the past;
2. increased interest in the west;
3. the ethos of ‘the strenuous age’ characterized by the virile, out-of-doors fiction of Jack London and Harold Bell Wright, coinciding with the Spanish-American War, Teddy Roosevelt and militant Anglo-Saxonism;
4. the disappearance of the dime novel;
5. the strength of the melodramatic tradition as a feature associated with Western literature;
6. the mentality of the Progressive Era which precipitated conflict between the New Nationalists – optimistic reformers led by Teddy Roosevelt – and those nostalgic for a pre-industrial America who wanted to break up the power of the large corporations, represented by Woodrow Wilson.⁶

Etulain concludes that ‘the conflict between industrial and agricultural America and the resultant nostalgia for the past’ were crucial to the rise of the Western and reminds us that ‘the origins of a new popular idea or genre are usually tied to specific occurrences in the mind and experience of the era that produces them’.⁷ This is certainly true. But I believe that the occurrences Etulain and the scholars he relies on use to account for the Western’s popularity, while convincing as long as they are considered from a certain point of view, function less as explanations of the mentality the Western represents than as extensions of it. Located within the mind and experience formed by the Western, Etulain has been able to discuss the genre only in terms which the genre itself has made available.

Etulain and the historians he cites in his footnotes emphasize wars as important turning-points in human history (the Spanish-American War), reflecting a preoccupation with death and conflict in the public space; omit women from the historical record entirely (none of them imagines that women’s roles in this period could have anything to do with the rise of the Western), demonstrating an unconscious antifeminism; deny the relevance of religious or spiritual experience to understanding human events (none of them notes Christianity’s striking absence from the genre in an era of religious revival) and so betray their secular, positivist mentality; and, in focusing on ‘great men’ (Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson) and in assuming that both fiction and history naturally are about men, show the phallocentric bias of their thought. Rather than providing a perspective on the Western, these historians simply act it out.⁸

For the Western is secular, positivist and antifeminist; it focuses on conflict in the public space, is obsessed by death and worships the phallus. Etulain and company do not question the Western’s exhibition of these characteristics because they were formed by a culture that exhibits them as well. Thus, in explaining why the Western arose when it did, Etulain does not ask why it is a narrative of male violence, for that is what he already takes for granted, but focuses instead on something his assumptions have not already naturalized, the narrative setting. The question his account of the Western’s origin is always implicitly answering is, why does the Western take place in the west? This question cannot be answered by referring to ‘increased interest in the west’ and the popularity of ‘virile, out-of-doors fiction’, answers which only repeat the question; but it can be dealt with by returning to the question I have already posed: what accounts, at the beginning of the twentieth century, for the rise of a genre pervaded by death and the threat of death? If you hold this question in mind while examining the popular fiction that immediately preceded the Western’s rise to prominence, its preoccupation with death begins to make sense.

In 1896, Charles M. Sheldon, minister of the Central Congregational Church in Topeka, Kansas, began reading a story out loud to his young people on Sunday evenings. It was about a minister who, while preparing his sermon one morning, is disturbed by a ringing doorbell. He finds on his doorstep a young man in shabby clothes, hat between his hands, an air of dejection about him. The man says he has been out of work for a long time and wonders if the minister could help him find a job. The minister says he is very sorry, that he knows of no jobs, that he is very busy, and wishes the man luck. After closing the door he catches a glimpse of this homeless, forsaken figure making his way down the walk, heaves a sigh and returns to his sermon on following the teachings and example of Christ.

This sermon, delivered the following Sunday, is a great success, but just before the service ends, the figure of the shabbily dressed man appears in the back of the church. He makes his way forward and asks to speak, assuring the congregation that he is neither drunk nor crazy. He tells them that he has been out of work for ten months and has been tramping the country looking for a job. His wife has been dead for four months and their little girl is staying with friends. There are a great many other people like him who are out of work because machines are now doing the jobs men were trained for, and though he doesn’t expect people to go out of their way to find jobs for others, he wonders what the minister’s sermon about ‘following the teachings and example of Christ’ means to them. He quotes the hymns they’ve been singing: ‘Jesus, I my cross have taken, all to leave and follow Thee’, ‘All for Jesus, all for Jesus’ and ‘I’ll go with him, with him all the way’. He suggests in a quiet, reasonable voice that if the people who sang those hymns went out and lived them, the world might be a different place. What would Jesus do, he asks, about the men and women who die in tenements in drunkenness and misery? At this point, the man keels over, faint from hunger. The minister takes him home, but the man dies during the course of the week.

The next Sunday the minister arrives in church a changed person. He tells the congregation that he has taken a vow for the next year to ask before he does anything ‘What would Jesus do?’ and to try to act as he believes Jesus would in that situation. He invites members of his congregation who feel moved to take a similar vow to meet with him after the service. The rest of the story, which Sheldon called In His Steps, concerns what happens to these people as a result.⁹

There is no way to know even within several hundred thousand how many copies In His Steps sold because, through a publisher’s error, it was never copyrighted. As soon as it appeared, it was pirated by sixteen publishers in the United States and fifty in Europe and Australia (it was translated into twenty-one languages). Sheldon reports in a 1936 foreword to the novel that according to Publisher’s Weekly it had sold more copies than any other book except the Bible.¹⁰ Exactly how many copies In His Steps sold doesn’t matter. It was stupendously popular. And, as a type, it resembled the other most popular novels of the end of the nineteenth century: Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur (1880), Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Ellesmere (1888) and Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis? (1896), novels which not only share its Christian frame of reference, but make Christian heroism their explicit theme.¹¹

I have spent some time sketching in the opening of Sheldon’s novel because I want you to understand the kind of book it is and the nature of its appeal. Even today, without a supporting context, you can sense the enormous power it must have had. My point is that only six years after In His Steps came out and sold like wildfire, Owen Wister’s The Virginian initiated a narrative tradition so different from the one to which Sheldon’s novel belonged that the two seem to have virtually nothing in common. The juxtaposition, I think, helps to explain a great deal about the purpose and meaning of Westerns, and, among other things, begins to explain the Western’s preoccupation with death.

Death in late-nineteenth-century religious novels is neither a problem nor a focus. Whereas in The Virginian five characters die and the hero almost does more than once, in Sheldon’s novel no one even comes close. The main problem for his characters is not facing death but facing themselves, for, if you believe in the immortality of the soul, what you fear most is not death but sin. Avoiding sin means, for Sheldon and other advocates of the social gospel, following Christ’s example by reforming the evils of the world. His characters strive for the moral and social courage necessary to defy convention, and so, instead of risking death, risk losing their friends, the affection of their families, their money, their jobs and their social position. In these stories, facing death is never the challenge or the problem; it’s what you do with your life before you die that counts. In Westerns, the two become conflated; facing death and doing something with your life become one and the same thing. For once you no longer believe you are eternal spirit, risking death becomes the supreme form of heroism. The newly secular hero must pursue death in order to show what he is made of because risking death is the bravest thing he can do.

The Western plot therefore turns not on struggles to conquer sin but on external conflicts in which men prove their courage to themselves and to the world by facing their own annihilation, a form of heroism that has consequences for the kind of world the Western hero inhabits. When life itself is at stake, everything else seems trivial by comparison. Events that would normally loom large – birth, marriage, embarking on a career – become peripheral and the activities and preoccupation...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• New Title Page
• New Copyright
• Old Title Page
• Old Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Reading Popular Fiction
• 1. West of everything
• 2. The political unconscious in the maternal melodrama: Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861)
• 3. Sherlock Holmes: Adventures of an English gentleman 1887–1894
• 4. The stuff that dreams are made of: Masculinity, femininity and the thriller
• 5. The masculine fiction of William Mcllvanney
• 6. Rewriting the masculine script: The novels of Joseph Hansen
• 7. The divided gaze: Reflections on the political thriller
• 8. Gorky Park: American dreams in Siberia
• 9. Bodily symbolism and the fiction of Stephen King
• 10. Popular writing and feminist intervention in science fiction
• 11. Science fiction: The dreams of men
• Index