Western Landscapes and the Dreamwork of Whiteness: The Virginian in The Virginian

Since at least the Civil War, wild American nature has, in general, been located somewhere west of a given white observer. From the first farms and villages to the antebellum period, European American settlement pushed against a range of frontiers—not only west, but also north and south, from coastal plains into mountains and forests and swamps, from the urban / pastoral/“civilized” to wherever native peoples still retained their numbers, rights, and culture. Postbellum, as countless writers have discussed, the West became the privileged site of a nature at once wild and national, a place both ahuman and the literal and figurative ground of white American masculinity. The reasons for this identification of “West” and “nature” can, of course, be readily explained by simple facts of geography and settlement: in the second half of the nineteenth century the East was much more thoroughly developed than the West, had a far greater human population density, had killed or exiled much of the native population, had much less recognizably wild land; the West, in turn, was far less populated and developed, and incorporated a stunningly beautiful variety of landscapes and creatures, readily available for both admiration and exploitation.

Those simple facts and the straightforward explanation they offer in turn yield a simple and straightforward, and wrong, superimposition of a geographical transition onto a historical one. In this conflation, the physical movement from East to West becomes the unresolved contradictory assertion that going west is at once a movement from old to new—from the overcivilized East burdened by history, to the new frontier—and from new to old—from the technologically enthralled East ruled by perpetual change, to a place of natural origin and renewal. For (at least) white men, in the late nineteenth century, to go west was to return home to a place you’d never been.

My point in noting this contradiction is not to resolve it, in another version of the always already misguided attempt to define what nature “really is,” but to ask what work it was doing, what the embrace of those wide open landscapes obscured, what was hidden when the human historical present disappeared in that new/origin oxymoronic nature of the West. To search for what’s missing is necessarily speculative and difficult, but nevertheless is, or should be, a central part of ecocriticism’s concern with the uses to which humans put nature, even when the “use” here involves an embrace of the “unspoiled” landscape rather than its material exploitation. While the notion of an untouched nature and the contextualized and ahistorical quality of wilderness experience has come in for an extensive critique in ecocriticism, at least since William Cronon’s “The Trouble with Nature” (1995),¹ the focus of such critique, especially in Western studies, has often been, on the ways that the human history of the West, most particularly the longstanding presence of the native population and the genocidal violence perpetrated against it by white men, was erased in the sublime embrace of the landscape, and the ways that such an experience naturalizes the class (high/leisured) and gender (male) of the individual observer, making spiritual recreation and masculine self-fashioning, and not work or domesticity, the nature of Nature.

Such approaches are invaluable and necessary; I wish to add to, not supplant, them. Specifically, I want in the first instance to move back a step, and focus not on the ways the eastern privileged observer erased western history to produce the ahistorical western wilderness, but on the ways such a move was also an erasure of the cultural and racial history of that Easterner, a changing of the subject, in every sense, from an earlier violent eastern history to a fresher violent western one. Second, since that earlier eastern history was fundamentally structured by white-on-black racial violence that produced two explicit racial identities literally defining the geography of the East from the Mason-Dixon Line to the Color Line, I also want to broaden the individualized class and gender focus of the second instance in an examination of how the embrace...