West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns by Jane Tompkins (review)

Reviews 241 West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. By Jane Tompkins. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 245 pages, $21.95.) jane Tompkins is torn between the politically correct schoolmarm view of the Western and getting down and wallowing in the thrill of it all. She contends the horses and cattle are politically oppressed, but she likes a L’Amour novel for “the sexiness of it, the titillation you get from reading books where excitement is so acute it becomes a physical sensation.” The book is not always this shameless, and she has a feel for the texture of novels and movies rare even in the best critics of the genre. But her generaliza­ tions are mostly commonplace or second-hand. The Western opposes the values of the nineteenth-century sentimental novel (Leslie Fiedler, unmentioned). Owen Wister rebelled against his mother (Darwin Payne). Males don’t talk about their feelings (Sher Hite). Buffalo Bill lived in a politically incorrect period, but “We cannot teach history how things should have been.” This last demonstrates the triumph of common sense over the ideology and gross sentimentality which cause her to weep over (absent) Indians, horses, cattle, and the Western hero himself and to sprinkle her acknowledgements with fulsome superlatives. The ideology leads to grave misreadings of The Virginian, the novel she discusses most extensively. Em’ly the bluestocking hen is not, finally, the butt of male superiority. The Virginian’s family is not “all boys.”The Virginian does at first refuse to discuss his enmity towards Trampas, as Tompkins points out gleefully to support her connection between “the Virginian’s mastery over Molly and his reticence.”But three pages later, he breaks his code to make “her his confidant in matters he had never spoken of before”and the lovers are made closer. The point about Wister’sVirginian is that he can change, that he can be “of two minds about one thing” (Scott Fitzgerald’s test of a first-rate intelligence) and still function. But this doesn’t fit Tompkins’thesis about the Western hero’s “scarification and eventual sacrifice” of his own heart. West ofEverythingis not always wrong, and it is sometimes eloquent. But one could wish it less sloppy in emotion and scholarship and more conscious of the distinction between art—especially popular art—and real human behavior. ROBERT MURRAYDAVIS University of Oklahoma ...