Cowboys of the waste land: Modernism and the American frontier

What does the figure of the rugged cowboy have to do with effete high modernism? My dissertation responds to this question by uncovering the ties linking early twentieth-century Western novels by authors such as Owen Wister and Clarence Mulford to a series of modernist texts that likewise engage deeply entrenched frontier myths in a post-WWI context. Throughout the 1920s, notable modernist figures like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway, while striving to break with American literary tradition, simultaneously probed the residual mythic strands of frontier discourse that informed hugely popular cowboy stories such as Wister's The Virginian (1902) and Mulford's Hopalong Cassidy (1910). In responding to these works, Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway sought to confront the problem of depicting the post-war American by synthesizing the cowboy---an emblem of the nation's past---with "modern" figures ranging from Hemingway's wounded, sexually impotent expatriate Jake Barnes to Cather's cowhand-turned-archeologist Tom Outland to Fitzgerald's ambiguously ethnic "nobody from nowhere" Jay Gatsby.;But the absorption of Western motifs into the canon of American modernist prose casts a long shadow, I argue, for it is the figure of the hero as he is conceived by the writers mentioned above that, by the 1950s and 60s, comes to define the image of the cowboy found not just in literature but in cinema. Just as post-WWI American fiction writers looked to the Western to help shape their modernism, post-WWII Western films like Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) and The Magnificent Seven (1960) likewise absorbed the idiosyncrasies of 1920s modernist experimentalism. As I argue, the filmic Western becomes over time more and more preoccupied with the modernist deconstruction of the hero. The modernist undoing of these tales of identity and nationhood haunt the Western, making it the crucial site not only for establishing what it means to be American but, thanks to this passage between high modernism and popular film, for undoing it. The Western, paradoxically, is where modernism lives on as a way of helping us think about what it means to be American.