Heroes of Popular Culture ed. by Ray B. Browne, Marshall Fishwick, and Michael T. Marsden (review)

HEROES OF POPULAR CULTURE EDITED BY RAY B. BROWNE, MARSHALL FISHWICK, AND MICHAEL T. MARSDEN (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972.) Like a classical piece, editors Marshall Fishwick, Ray B. Browne, and Michael Marsden bracket their collection of essays, Heroes ofPopular Culture with a prologue and epilogue to explain the American adaptation ofthis Greek ideal. In between are fifteen articles analyzing this pantheon: the Alger hero, Dick Whittington, the tenant farmer, the athlete, Perry Mason, Joan Baez, the businessman, and even the dog. Though an obviously random sampling, the book moves from post-American Heroes, Myth and Reality (Marshall Fishwich, 1953), through modern heroes and anti-heroes, to the role of man's best friend. The essays thatlook backward (Alger, Whittington, the farmer) are touchstones for the modern hero's creation and popularization. Reading the selections, one must agree with Norman Mailer: "America is a country which has grown by the leap ofone hero past another." Thisgrowth is measured by Fishwick in "Heroic Style in America" as he connects the rise and fall of types of heroes with the evolution of new mythologies and the adaptation of "folkstyle," "fakestyle," and "popstyle." Nevertheless, with the effects of the ever-speeding media and the insatiable hunger ofaudiences for new heroes, Dan Piper in "Dick Whittington and the Middle Class Dream of Success," emphasizes the hero's archetypal qualities; Ronald Cummings ("The Superbown Society") says: "We do not abandon heroes, merely create new contexts for them in the very process of living beyond them." Hence, in "The Hero and the Anti-Hero" Marshall McLuhan maintains that John Wayne in True Grit plays a parody of himself. So, if we once claimed heroes whose elevated status we reached for, Anthony Hopkins in "Contemporary Heroism — Vitality in Defeat" suggests : "In the plight ofthe contemporary hero, people can see the essential fate of their own feelings of individuality and their own personal freedom. In the image of the annihilated hero, people see embodied and expressed their own real but perhaps inarticulate tension, anxiety, and a sense ofvictimization at the hands of social pressures and institutions." In this way, then, this collection of essays exposes the vagaries of hero-making and accomplishes what any study of popular culture does: serve as a mirror of American life. And what about the dog? If there are heroes to admire and those to identify with, there are also those we worship because we control them. John Stevens concludes in "Dog as Hero": "The dog is a hero, not because of his animal characteristics, but because he is a good nigger." And Ray B. Browne concludes: "It is basically fear that makes men and women create heroes and heroines." SHELLEY ARMITAGE* •SHELLEY ARMITAGE is an Assistant Professor ofEnglish at Tarrant CountyJunior College in Fort Worth, Texas. She is on leave at the University of New Mexico where she is an NEH Fellow studying "American Humor and Mark Twain." She publishes articles on popular culture and women and is book review editor of American Indian Quarterly. 94VOL. 33, NO. 2 (SPRING 1979) ...