Owen Wister

Wister, Owen. The Virginian. NY: Barnes & Noble, 2005.

How can I write about Owen Wister? I feel like I'm ratting out family.

Wister gives a terribly romantic view of all this, but it's all massively familiar. I feel like I'm rooting Grandpa's Field and Stream's from the Forbidden Basement under the lizard's oven, sitting between old men with hearing aids and the odor of Hoppe's #9 floating around, or fingering the .22 case on my bedstand to think of my father.

I should probably reflect on how much of my ethical heritage derives from bad dialog and faux cowboys, but I'll leave it off for discouraging.

Let's leave it with this:

• The woman has to release her will over the V's violence to wed him. This is supposedly to do with her releasing her hold on class superiority and eastern niceties -- but that would seem a little optimist about the East and downright fanciful about the upper classes. This is supposedly plain-guy, populist stuff. Just how populist Wister's sentiments really are can be seen in much of what follows here.


• Wister grossly misrepresents relations between labor and management on the ranch in the expanding West. There's nothing about people railroaded and forced off their lands, for instance. (one might look to Frank Norris' The Octopus for comparison). The closest thing to worker organization is dismissed as cattle rustling, the act of lynching not only excused but lionized, defended at length by a character to whom Wister attributes education and legal background. The closest thing to a labor leader is a Snydley Whiplash named "Trampas" (Spanish for tricks, traps, or betrayals). He decides to get too drunk to shoot and call the V out, principally because that certain time of the book had arrived when his character had to be done away with so that V could marry.


• (see pp 198-202 for an extremist anti-union charade).


• The only good injun is a daid injun, or thereabouts. Wister scoffs at the notion of peaceful Indians, but shows the whites debating whether to raid an Indian village because unidentified Indians may have attacked someone on the road.


• The character is so zugnisch that one feels like appending a recording of the old Lenny Bruce routine, "Thank You Masked Man."


• The Virginian invests in land and becomes a capitalist, embodying Wister's imagination that the old venturesome spirit of the ranch-hand laborers (who else drove cattle and fought Indians and thieves?). He's told Shorty that Shorty should have just saved his money up to buy land; notwithstanding, Shorty is paid less because he's not as good a hand; also, he sends money back to a sweetheart back east, he has to sell his horse to get by. So Wister is taking the morés of the cattle men -- thoroughly romanticized, granted -- and pasting them onto these managerial types. So we continue today with the idea that the businessmen are in some kind of adventure, that our "Indians" in whatever place we're invading at the moment cannot be peaceful, pretending that Iraq has a civil war instead of a war iagainst occupation.

But then, I've got to say, I still miss Bodie.