way: he looms up, as if from nowhere, isolated by the camera with Monument Valley as a backdrop; he appears as if from nature itself, more completely beyond the confines of the town. And once he secures the passage of the stagecoach, and, in a shoot-out, avenges his brother's death, he leaves the social order again, riding off to the Mexican border with the woman he has come to love (the prostitute), both of them 'saved the blessings of civilization,' as the doctor says, watching them take off. (At the same time, the doctor, who has sobered up to deliver the baby, accepts the offer of a drink, reestablishing his own exteriority.) Thus, while defending civilization against the uncivilized Native Americans, Ringo defends himself against Civilization by (as Huck Finn would have it) lighting out for the territories.
Nonetheless, in Stagecoach, as in Hired Guns, the hero's union with a woman provides the sense of closure denied by this escape; and as Laura Mulvey has said of Western films, 'marriage' functions to sublimate 'the erotic into a final, closing, social ritual.' But the Western's resistance to society — most vociferous in its attack on business interests and Eastern decadence — is exemplified not least by the formula's tendency to exclude this 'social ritual' from the plot itself, to project the possibility of 'marriage' into an unknown future (the possible basis of an Edenic society elsewhere), or to idealize love outside this social institution. Points West (1928), written by 'B. M. Bower' (Bertha Muzzy Sinclair, the one woman who consistently -367- worked in the genre), portrays as its heroine a 'fighting cowgirl' who is very much the fighting cowboy's equal; their relationship is á based on a type of filial rivalry that negates the typical asymmetry of the gender code and thus the threat of domestication; nonetheless, as the novel closes, Billy simply has his 'eye on the girl,' and marriage as such (that social mark of change) remains excluded from the pages of the novel. More simply, in Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), which defines the 'love of man for woman' (noticeably not between man and woman) as 'the nature, the meaning, the best of life itself,' the hero and heroine disappear together into the uninhabited Surprise Valley, the 'nature of life' dissolving into nature. And if this marginalization of marriage suggests the thoroughness with which the Western resists society, with which it resists the idea of its hero's socialization, then the status of law, explicitly addressed in one novel after another, more clearly confirms the idea that existing social institutions stand in the way of happiness and success. The hero of Eugene Manlove Rhodes's Barnsford in Arcadia (1913) puts the matter simply: law 'rouses no enthusiasm in my manly bosom,' he claims; 'I am endowed by nature with certain inalienable rights, among which are the high justice, the middle, and the low.' It is only this endowment that enables every Western hero to establish a justice that transcends law. In Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), it is the very voice of the law, the voice of Judge Henry, who legitimizes extralegal activity, the vigilante justice of the West: 'far from being a defiance of the law,' the judge argues, 'it is an assertion of it.'
This extrainstitutional status of true law and true love converges with the extrasocietal status of the adventure hero, and the atemporal and atopian action, to make the adventure formula not just escapist but a lesson in escapism: a study in the need for the individual to get beyond society. But this is true only of the Western at its most formulaic. In fact, Wister's novel, which marks the advent of the modern Western, finally suggests an altogether different emphasis — not on the separation of the hero from society, but on his integration. The Virginian, indebted less to the dime novel and more to Cooper's Leatherstocking tales and the American historical romance (as Wister suggests in his preface), provides the modern formula with its basic semantic elements (above all the cowboy, a loner, a 'handsome un-368- grammatical son of the soil') and the ideology of Anglo-Saxonism and individualism. But its plot concludes by locating the hero within society, the family, and the economy. Furthermore, Wister locates the story in a specific time and place, Wyoming, between 1874 and 1890, and implicitly addresses a moment in recent history: the Johnson County War (1892) between cattlemen and homesteaders. The love story between the cowpuncher and the Eastern schoolmarm resolves the antinomies that structure every Western (East/West, civilization/ nature, society/individual), and just as she learns the necessity of the West's code of violence ('how it must be about a man'), so too he learns the beauty of Shakespeare and Scott. Both characters change before their marriage, and the Virginian himself rises within the cattle industry: he begins as a hand on Judge Henry's ranch, advances to manager, becomes the judge's partner, and, with the coming of the railroad in the 1890s, ultimately establishes himself as 'an important man, with a strong grip on many various enterprises and able to give his wife all and more than she asked or desired,' the sort of 'important man' who will later serve as the formula's embodiment of evil. Wister reports these last two stages of success hastily, in the closing pages, but they serve to foreground the fact that The Virginian is an economic novel: its central dispute, between the Virginian and Trampas, is a dispute between management and labor; by serving Trampas 'an intellectual crushing,' the Virginian suppresses the organization of men against the judge's interests. Thus, the outsider (who, as a Virginian, is actually an outsider to the West) serves to stabilize an economic 'civilization' within which he occupies a central place.
The point, then, is that The Virginian finally insists not on the exteriority of the West and the Western hero but on their centrality, their pertinence to modernization's advance. In a Wyoming 'as wild as was Virginia one hundred years earlier,' Wister's hero, as a latterday Thomas Jefferson, exemplifies for the Eastern narrator the central point of American democracy: 'It was through the Declaration of Independence that we Americans acknowledged the eternal inequality of man'; 'true democracy and true aristocracy are one and the same thing.' The fact that true aristocracy finds itself confirmed by economic hierarchy makes the origin of America coincide with its turn-of-the-century corporate end. In contrast to Brand, who ignores -369- the 'modern world,' Wister implicitly confirms it, and Zane Grey, who did more than anyone to establish the popularity of the genre, confronts the problem of modernization explicitly, and most compellingly in those novels where the West serves to rejuvenate an individual from the misery of modern warfare. In The Call of the Canyon (1924), The Shepherd of Guadaloupe (1930), and 30,000 on the Hoof (1940), shell-shocked soldiers return to America physically and emotionally depleted, ignored by their government, misunderstood by their friends. But despite grim prognoses from their doctors, a trip West initiates a slow recovery, one in which men learn above all the pleasures of physical work and the superficiality of Eastern life.
The very sight of the Western landscape can inspire change, but the fact that such sights had become a part of Eastern culture turns visualization itself into a point of contest. By 1900, William Henry Jackson was mass- marketing his photographs of Yellowstone; in 1910, D. W. Griffith shot Ramona in Ventura, the very locale of Helen Hunt Jackson's novel (as the film reminds us); in 1917, John Ford included a dramatic mountain pass in Straight Shooting and closed the film with his signature shot of the sunset. But while modern technology had brought the West to the East with an 'authenticity' that surpassed the paintings of Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt, for Grey such representations would not do. In The Call of the Canyon, Carley Butch, having ventured to Arizona to see her fiancé, but returning East without him, finds that she hates 'the motion pictures with their salacious and absurd misrepresentations.' In The Vanishing American (1925), Marian Warner finds that motion pictures have little to do with the truth of the West. The dichotomous imagination of the Western novel here incorporates the Western film into its schemata — East vs. West can be read, likewise, as Western film vs. Western reality — and literature's Sisyphean task of debunking the literary (hardly a task confined to realism) is now compounded by the job of having to debunk the cinematic. And yet, by 1922, when the novel was first serialized, Grey had written sixteen Westerns, and already twelve of these had been made into movies, beginning in 1918 with Samuel Goldwyn's six-reel version of The Border of the Legion. Which is to say: Marian Warner's 'impressions of the West' are, in the plot's historical moment, impressions most likely derived from Grey. This irony extends somewhat further: while the cinema, -370- like jazz, can typify the 'speed-mad, excitement-mad, fad-mad, dressmad' decadence of the East in The Call of the Canyon, Grey himself was introduced to the far West, in New York in 1907, when he saw the films of Yellowstone produced by 'Buffalo' Jones. He then accompanied Jones on a trip to Arizona, recounted in The Last of the Plainsmen (1908), during which he himself served as cameraman.
The Call of the Canyon, for all its romantic antimodernism, situates itself within this modern visual culture, trying to share in what Griffith called the 'universal language' of moving pictures. Appearing serially in the Ladies' Home Journal (1921-22), in the midst of full-page ads for Paramount Studios and articles on Griffith's latest success (Way Down East), the novel tries to teach 'modern woman' the Western lesson of antimodernity through the image alone, restricting the meaning of the West to the 'visual.' It is 'mere heights and depths, mere rock walls and pine trees, and rushing
