Old gold and old races: Whiteness and gender in narratives of the American West.

Abstract

This dissertation is an analysis of four fictional narratives that illustrate the productive power of the fictional American West as a projection of anxieties about racial and gender identity formation and revision. The West has long been treated as a space where new and uniquely American identities can be formed out of indigenous materials. My focus is on the ways that categories of race (whiteness in particular), gender (masculinity in particular) and class are transgressed and reconstituted in the West, open through cross-racial appropriation. The first chapter explores Owen Wister's use of the West in The Virginian (1902) to redefine gentility as a racial category (Anglo-Saxonism) as opposed to an economic and social one. In chapter two, I look at Zane Grey's use of Mormon villains in Riders of the Purple Sage (1912). Taking into account nineteenth-century racialized stereotypes of Mormons and reactions against their economic and cultural communalism, I describe the novel as a confrontation between an emerging corporate form of masculine identity and a pattern of individualistic masculine heroism identified with the western hero. In chapter three, I explore Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark (1915) as an example of western whiteness reconstructing itself. Cather critiques bourgeois, middle-class, midwestern whiteness in favor of a more cosmopolitan, bohemian whiteness that is, significantly, made possible through encounters with and imitation of non-white peoples of the West. My last chapter considers film westerns in the form of John Ford's The Searchers (1956). Here I continue the theme of cross-racial encounter and imitation and focus on the ways that the heroes of popular westerns borrow from the constructed category of Indianness to create their very influential version of white masculinity. The entire project is an attempt to read the American West in fiction as a utopic space where challenges to racial, gender, class and national identities can be dramatized and where the ambiguities of American identity are revealed.