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<html> <head><title>Zane Grey</title> </head> <BODY text="salmon" bgColor="#ffffff"> <img src="groove1.gif" width="100" height="100" align="left"> <table align="center" border=0 width="70%"> <tbody> <tr> <td align="center" nowrap>the flaneur</td></tr> <tr> <td align="center" bgcolor="#4FA7A7"> <a href="index.html">home</a>| <a href="contents.html">contents</a>| <a href="sub.html">submissions</a>| <a href="links.html">links</a> </td></tr></tbody></table> <h1 align="center">MYTHOLOGISING THE WEST:RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE ZANE GREY </h1> <h2 align="center">by Albert Schoemann </h2> LANDSCAPE: 'I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America...' (1.) Taking Charles Olson's famous quotation as my inspiration for this examination of the mythologising of the Western landscape in Riders of the Purple Sage, I see 'SPACE' as a central factor in this process. Yet one inescapable fact for Grey and his readers in 1912, with the reverberations of that other great epic of mythmaking, Frederick Jackson Turner's 'Frontier Thesis' still ringing out through the land, was that for many it seemed as if the Old West had all but disappeared. (If it had ever existed in the first place, outside of myth?). This gives most Westerns of any period since an elegaic tone, a mourning for something that was past and could only live now in the individual imagination. Whether Turner was right in the scientific sense is perhaps irrelevant. What is more important to remember for Americans in the early part of the century was the mythic resonance of his work: 'Turner interpreted American westward migration within the tropes of a frontier mythology that began developing when the first European explorers encountered the New World.' (2.). One of the most successful attempts to continue this process of mythmaking was Grey's novel: and one of the most striking feature of that text was and still is, its descriptions of the awesome landscape of Utah. But Grey was attempting more than description in his efforts to create a textual 'space' for his characters; although set in 1871, the novel possesses a free-floating de-historicised quality to it: 'In our mythology, the cowboy era is timeless.' (D, 17) As Mitchell says in his introduction to the novel: '... it could be anywhere in the West in the half-century prior to the novel's appearance.' (I, xivii). This indeterminacy will contribute greatly to the manufacture of the myth. Within this textual space, he will not only attempt to portray events from the last century against this massive landscape, but, more importantly, project upon it many of the pressing public concerns and secret desires from his own times. The backdrop of the landscape and its textual treatment will serve often to mirror the emotions of the characters in a subtle interaction - they are affected by it - and it them. The landscape is depicted as wild, mysterious, threatening - and sometimes benevolent to those who treat it with respect - but it is always imaged on an epic scale that befits its geographical and geological size. Thus, right at the beginning of the novel, the 'purple sage' itself is seen as a vast space in which men can hide, either to conceal their nefarious activities - or to seek protection from the 'bad guys.' Both Lassiter and Venters use it as a place to sleep undisturbed and safe from those who would harm them: 'I'll go to the sage... ' 'Lassiter,' said Venters... 'my bed, too, is the sage. Perhaps we may meet out there.' 'Mebbe so. But the sage is wide an' I won't be near.' (R, 17) 'The sage is wide.' Wide enough to conceal them both - even from each other. It is also a benevolent haven of rest in this manifestation: 'my bed.' Yet some pages later in one of the many panoramic - almost cinematic - sunsets that pervade the text, the sage is figured as large, wild and mysterious: 'It was the moment when the last ruddy rays of the sunset brightened momentarily before yielding to twilight. And for Venters the outlook before him was in some sense similar to a feeling of his future, and with searching eyes he studied the beautiful purple, barren waste of sage. Here was the unknown and the perilous. The whole scene impressed Venters as a wild, austere and mighty manifestation of nature. And as it somehow reminded him of his prospect in life, so it suddenly resembled a woman near him; only in her there was greater beauty and peril, a mystery more unsolvable, and something nameless that numbed his heart and dimmed his eye.' (R, 18-19) Both the 'beauty' of the sage and its now remote quality are noted here - it is also a 'barren waste.' Yet Venters goes on explicitly to compare it to his inner emotional state. Firstly, to his uncertain prospects: 'the outlook... was in some sense similar to a feeling of his future,' being both 'unknown' and also no doubt 'perilous.' Yet it also resembles Jane Withersteen: 'it suddenly resembled a woman near him.' The landscape, then, changes fast - in a projection of his imaging his own swirling and troubled thoughts upon it. And in this instance it is 'feminised,' with regard to the comparison with Jane. Yet she is seen to possess 'greater beauty and peril,' she is is 'a mystery more unsolvable.' The female is seen as unknowable - 'unsolvable' - and possibly dangerous. Further, as the sage is 'barren,' this passage uses landscape to prefigure his 'barren' relationship with her, about to end as he encounters Bess and she becomes more attached to Lassiter. This identification acts to heighten the emotional power of Venter's broodings - by moving between landscape and human it magnifies the mystery of both, giving both a mythic quality of great emotional charge that is rendered further by the 'lack' of the language itself to describe adequately either the vastness of the sage - or the 'unsolvable mystery' that Jane represents - individually and as a representative of her sex. The western landscape in this passage attains mythic proportions and acts as a complex 'objective correlative' both for Venters state of mind and the object of his thoughts, Jane. Yet, one notes the contrast in another passage when Jane gazes on the 'sage-slopes.' (R, 7) 'Jane Withersteen loved that wild and purple wilderness. In times of sorrow it had been her strength, in happiness its beauty was her continual delight.' (R, 7) Here, the 'wild and purple wilderness' is seen as a solace in 'times of sorrow' to Jane: 'her strength,' and in happier moments as something that reinforces her happiness: 'its beauty was her continual delight.' Is this because the author is making a further identification between wild, untamed landscape and the 'unsolvable mystery' that Jane represents as a woman (to the male)- and that this identification enables her to resonate more sympathetically with the 'wilderness?' The landscape can be seen as harsh and masculine as well, in the description of Balancing Rock, for example: 'It was like a collossal pear of stone standing on its stem.' (R, 83) The phallic juxtaposition with Surprise Valley coincides with the aftermath of Venters meeting (and shooting) Bess: 'Indeed, Venter's discovery of his affection for Bess is directly identified with the exploration of his high country retreat.' (I, xx) An earlier passage demonstrates the eroticising of the landscape even more explicitly: 'When he entered the dense thicket of oaks he was hard put to it to force a way through.' (R, 46) a sentence which seems to need no extra comment in this context. And, as Mitchell states, after his shooting her and during his subsequent attentions: '... every subsequent time he must check her wound, the landscape is suddenly feminized.' (I, xx) And the reverse, perhaps, of the female body being turned into a 'landscape' for the male gaze in this passage where Venters notes: ' a tiny stream of blood winding... down her white breast. (R, 93) Here, her chest seems to have become an erotic landscape, where the 'tiny stream of blood' winds down 'her white breast.' If the landscape seems to perpetually change, often seeming to resist the author's attempts to describe it in his text, then so do the characters reflecting it and reflected back by it. 'One might remark... that the apparent open quality of the Western landscape is often... deceptive.' (3.) Landscape conceals secrets as do humans. The important point about the Western landscape was that it existed as an imaginative backdrop which frames and interacts with the heightened mythic emotions of the characters, and their frequently violent actions, giving them a space where they can change and grow - or perish. This is a landscape of mythic narrative excitement: '... the deserts and prairies can be bleak, but they are never dull when used as setting for the cowboy myth.' (D, 20) One could say that the sheer size of 'SPACE' in the American experience demands a myth - hence the Western? GENDER: COWGIRL JANE: One feels (understandably) that Grey's attitudes are heavily inflected by his own times of social, political and cultural turmoil, and especially in the area of gender relations, where the roles of women were undergoing such a drastic overhaul. He mythologises to a great extent in this area by building upon the old captivity narratives that stretched back to Puritan times. But his myth contains much that is ambiguous and enigmatic, no doubt an unconscious sublimation of contemporary problems. Yet, perhaps this was always so: Mary Rowlandson, despite her contemporary pieties, often displayed certain textual instabilities in her narrative of captivity, as if she has been shown some intrinsic wildness in the wilderness that matched the repressed desires held in check by her Puritan culture. Writing at a similar time of even more massive change and social unrest, one finds similar confusions in Grey's male perspective of the female. Partly impelled, no doubt by '... that particular frenzy with which Americans in the Progressive Era felt that standards of sexual behaviour were being threatened.' (I, xxx) Thus, one sees ambiguities pile up: on the one hand, Jane is depicted as a powerful woman in charge of her late father's ranch and wealth: 'She owned all the ground and many of the cottages. Withersteen House was hers, and the great ranch, with its thousands of cattle...' (R, 3) Yet, what is this power when set against her beliefs which impel her to obedience with the patriarchal Mormon religion? And which lead her continually to defend her people and their leaders, in reply to Venters' bitter accusations, for example: ''You wrong Bishop Dyer. Tull is hard, I know. But then he has been in love with me for years.' (R, 18) With regard to the fact that Dyer is a villain (who will be gunned down at the end of the book for his crimes), Venters is not 'wronging' the Bishop. And her statement that 'Tull is hard' to a man whom the former was about to have savagely whipped is hardly excused by the fact that 'he has been in love with me for years.' Yet Jane reaches a climactic point which registers a change in herself that shores up her defiance after going through a 'storm of wrath and prayer' (R, 59) - the myth of self-change that the Western environment promises even for women, where one has to confront oneself honestly. She decides that she is 'a changed woman' (R, 59) who will never allow the Mormons to 'force her to marry Tull,' (R, 59)or to 'break her spirit.' (R, 59) Yet, as her tribulations gather force and her patrimony is slowly stripped from her by the Mormon's machinations, she will still try to stop Lassiter's search for vengeance. This takes the symbolic road of her asking him to give up his guns: near the end of the novel, when he eventually offers her his weapons, he seems suddenly diminished: 'Without them he appeared shorn of strength, defenceless, a smaller man. Was she Delilah?' (R, 215) If the guns define Lassiter's masculinity, it seems as if her attempts to disarm him define her femininity, to a certain extent. And her sudden recognition that he has left himself defenceless, expressed in the terms, appropriately enough, of the Old Testament: 'Was she Delilah?' Grey is ventriloquizing her as being aware of the effect of her actions - a symbolic castration. At this point in the text, having all but escaped from one patriarchy represented by her church, she acquiesces to the male authority that the Westerner Lassiter represents. She 'buckled the belt round his waist where it belonged.' (R, 215) After this gesture - and, more importantly, the catalyst of little Fay's abduction - Lassiter is locked down on course for the confrontation with Dyer. Jane escapes the implications of her changing sides and the tacit acceptance of Western male violence that she has tried so hard to resist throughout the novel - by embracing the old Victorian tradition of the swoon and fainting. The final message seems to be that only by killing Dyer and escaping with Jane - will their relationship have any chance of success. A vindication of the male standpoint that Lassiter as Western gunfighter represents: regeneration through violence? For all sorts of hidden reasons - to protect her father and because of the residual power of a faith that she knows rationally is discredited - she has dissembled with him throughout the text. As he says: 'Jane, you never played fair with me.' (R, 227) But at the end of the book, with its curious message of closure - 'Roll the stone! ' (R, 264) Lassiter the killer of Mormons has won the heart - and the body - of Jane. They have escaped to a certain sexual freedom - yet an unequal one still, defined by Grey's mythologising the role of the woman as still subservient to the Western man. The author appears to be registering some approval of a freer, more open sexuality for women, while still limiting it under the rule of the male. A strategy of 'thus far and no farther, perhaps': 'The novel encourages a new era of open sexuality, of experimentation with gender roles, at the same time that it confirms the traditional stance of women standing by their men.' (I, xxxiv). Thus, the text offers contradictory messages: Jane is depicted in thrall to the Mormon religion, and ends up subservient to Lassiter. (And in the mirror plot, Bess escapes the outlaws only to end up subservient to Venters). The distance between the two positions will determine the degree of freedom that the Western myth, as redefined in the early twentieth century by Grey, offers women: 'The question at the end is whether Jane and Bess are less bound by the men they than by those they elude.' (I, xxxiv) . MORMONS: THE BAD GUYS... Who and/or what do the Mormons represent within the myth that Grey is creating? The obvious initial response is that of the old enemy: 'In short, the novel organizes materials according to a conventional captivity plot, with Mormons and outlaws replacing the traditional villainous Indians as the alien Other.' (I, xiii) The Mormons are represented as a sinister, powerful force of evil, and in this respect, the comparison with earlier myth - 'conventional captivity plot' - is again noticeable. Their sadistic cruelty, for example - as depicted in the foiled attempt at whipping Venters. Or another passage which mentions the gratuitous blinding of Lassiter's horse: 'To take revenge on a horse! Lassiter, the men of my creed are unnaturally cruel... They have been driven, hated, scourged till their hearts have hardened.' (R, 13) One feels that these remarks, transposed to a decription of Indians, would fit equally well. Especially with regard to the fact that they 'are unnaturally cruel' because of the wrongs inflicted on them: 'driven, scourged, etc.' Yet I feel that there is a sense in which Grey has transcended the Indian as 'alien Other,' to present a forerunner of many later Westerns (both literary and cinematic) where towns are run by sinister and mysterious combinations of outlaws and outwardly respectable businessmen. In these cases, the outlaws are seen as more honest, in a sense, because they do not hide behind hypocrisy to the same extent as the 'respectable' criminals. If one reads the novel back into its time of conception, one can see, perhaps, a transposed fear of dark, alien forces such as immigration and socialism with their perceived connotations as representing a corrupt European set of values inimical to traditional White American individualism. Or the massive growth and power of big business, leaving its individualistic robber baron phase to a great extent at the time of Grey's writing to give way to vast new corporations. A faceless corporation that was also the target of many during the Progressive era who felt threatened by these economic developments and the all-too -possible political corruption that they brought with them. In the power struggle that raged between many native-born White Americans who felt that their culture was in jeopardy from both wings of an urban class struggle, labor and capital alike, one can detect here a composite mythologising of these conflicts onto the Western landscape which represented so much of what people felt they had lost by the beginning of the Twentieth Century. This has continuing resonances of a populism which I feel is a strong thread still in many Westerns. This inscribing of an evil that is all-powerful, mysterious and deceitful seems to go beyond any sublimation of the Indian threat - especially by the historical time that the novel was set in: 'If that secret, intangible power closed its toils round her again, if that great invisible hand moved here and there and everywhere, slowly paralyzing her with its mystery and its inconceivable sway over her affairs, then she would know beyond doubt that it was not chance, nor jealousy, nor intimidation, nor ministerial wrath at her revolt, but a cold and calculating policy thought out long before she was born, a dark, immutable will of whose empire she and all that was hers was but an atom.' The 'secret, intangible power,' imaged by the 'great invisible hand' appear to signify some process of unimaginable power that holds Jane in its clutches. What is this 'cold and calculating policy thought out long before she was born,' this 'empire' where 'she and all that was hers was but an atom?' Grey seems to indicating both some intrinsic evil and a massive force that is its expression, and I would speculate that the Mormons stand as a composite symbol within his myth-making of the hard-faced capitalism with its attendant industrial/urban ills and labor unrest which had been gaining force for so many years - as the promise that the West seemed to offer, of individualism and freedom, receded slowly into memory. THE GOOD GUYS... ? If the Mormons are presented throughout as thoroughly evil, what of Lassiter, the gunman and killer who comes to avenge his family wrongs and eventually to take Jane away with him to the wilderness fastness of Surprise Valley? His arrival in the text seems to take on a mythic resonance almost immediately, and provides a point of linkage where all the other individual aspects of myth that I have discussed come together: 'In her extremity she found herself murmuring, "Whence cometh my help!" It was a prayer, as if forth from those lonely purple reaches and walls of red and clefts of blue might ride a fearless man, neither creed-bound nor creed-mad, who would hold up a restraining hand in the faces of her ruthless people.' The restless movements of Tull's men suddenly quieted down. Then followed a low whisper, a rustle, a sharp exclamation. 'Look!' said one, pointing to the west. 'A rider!' (R, 7) The explicitly Christian prayer 'Whence cometh my help!' is answered, as if by magic. From out of 'the West,' that symbol of such significance for the American myth of frontier, the place of mystery and promise, does indeed 'ride a fearless man.' Lassiter is 'neither creed-bound nor creed-mad,' in this sense imaging some individualistic mythic notion of an archetypal American, unbound by the extremes of religion that the Mormons represent in this instance: '... the cowboy ideal registered both a protest against orthodox creeds and a faith that man needs no formal religion, once he finds a pure and natural environment. It is the extreme end of a long evolution of individualism.' (D, 26) He is also someone whom Jane desires to 'feminise' in that she wants someone 'who would hold up a restraining hand.' Thus, their will be conflict, between a compromising process that Grey signifies as 'female' and that will threaten the Westerner's 'manly code.' But Lassiter, in the end, will stay true to his mythic code - that of the Westerner who will take it upon himself to right the wrongs he sees by violence and killing if necessary - not in the sadistic way of the Mormons, the alien Other, but by his own internal sanction that sees violence as necessary but takes no pleasure from it. He will win out over both the Mormons (for the immediate moment - they are not presented as defeated completely, a point I will deal with further) and Jane's feminine perception of right and wrong. Thus, in this passage, one can see landscape - from which 'cometh her help - as Lassiter suddenly appears riding out of it; gender relations - Jane's answered prayer and her hopes for a restraint that the text will present as impractical; the presence of the alien Other - the Mormons about to whip Venters; and the iconic Western hero, personified here by Lassiter, the gunfighter whose weapons present their own interpretation of law when the order is conmtrolled by evil manipulators. Grey invented an iconic paradigm that has stood the test of time, as countless Westerns have evidenced. '... he wears black leather,' (R, 8) 'He packs two black-butted guns - low down... black agin them black chaps.' (R, 8) The image of the Western gunfighter encased in leather and equipped with his weapons of power, the revolvers, is one of the enduring (and troubling?) myths of the century. RIDING OFF INTO THE SUNSET OF MYTH... Both pairs of characters ride away at the end of the novel, escaping the oppressive power of the Mormons who have been temporarily defeated. Venters goes to Illinois with Bess - a strange journey for a Western, perhaps, which probably signifies further the contemporary impact of Turner's 'Frontier Thesis.' The West of Utah seems to represent a no-go area - except for the isolation of Surprise Valley, the location for the union of Jane and Lassiter. As the stone is rolled over to seal them in, significantly, the sun is setting. They have all ridden off into the sunset: Venters and Bess: 'Oh! Bern!... But look! The sun is setting on the sage...' (R, 254) And Lassiter and Jane: 'Dust shrouded the sunset red of shaking rims.' (R, 265) The elegaic mood of a lost West seems all-pervading here. Yet the rolling of the stone, which acts to seal the action off into a mythic topos, does not totally enclose all the ambiguities of the novel. (And Grey has cunningly left open the possibility of escape - and sequel - by Venters promised return: 'We'll go back some day...' (R, 253) Perhaps a major part of the continuing popularity of the novel is its mythic quality, that can contain, with its own brand of 'Negative Capability,' all the disjunct shard of plot and character I have attempted to identify. And perhaps this is the 'mythicness' of myth, to coin an awkward phrase, that it has the internal flexibility, if tested by time and found to still possess resonance for its audience, to contain, however uneasily, all its disparate parts. This is nothing new in American culture, shot through with ambiguities from its inception. One finds it in the repressed yearnings of the captivity narratives, and even in the Puritan faith itself, far from monolithic, but continually beset by a bifurcation between the communal will and the Antinomian strand represented famously by such iconoclasts as Roger Williams and the unfortunate Anne Hutchinson. As these strands of American culture unravel and change into a secular register, one can see how uneasily the individualistic ideology of America has always contained both a conservative and a rebel strain. I read Grey's novel as an important contribution to the myth of the American Frontier, and one that is powered by the tensions of its day as much as by the residual power of the tensions that it built upon. This is a conservative Western of the Progressive era, whose Mormons stand for what were seen as the dark forces both within and without the system. Those who felt threatened by this composite alien Other were a ripe audience for the latest instalment of the American myth of Frontier and the West. The continuing popularity of the text proves that the myth still holds a unique power to move people. In his essay, 'Ten Gallon Hero,' David B. Davis states: 'In 1900 it seemed that the significance of the cowboy era would decline along with other brief but romantic episodes in American History.' (D,15) As subsequent literary and cinematic history has proved, especially in the case of Riders of the Purple Sage, the Western myth is still with us, despite many premature obituaries. ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE TEXT: D=David B. Davis: 'Ten Gallon Hero,' in The Western: A Collection of Critical Essays. I= Introduction to Riders of the Purple Sage, by Lee Clark Mitchell: White Slavers and Purple Sage: Plotting Sex in Zane Grey's West, pp. ix-xxxvi. R= Zane Grey: Riders of the Purple Sage. NOTES: 1.) Charles Olson: Call Me Ishmael, London: Jonathan Cape, 1967. (First pub. 1947). P. 15. 2.) David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, Joanne B. Karpinski: Introduction to Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature, ed. by Mogen, Sanders, Karpinski, London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993. P. 21. 3.) James K. Folsom: 'Gothicism in the Western Novel,' in Frontier Gothic, ibid. P. 29. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davis David B.: 'Ten Gallon Hero,' in The Western: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by James K. Folsom, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1979, pp. 15-30. Grey, Zane: Riders of the Purple Sage, introduced by Lee Grant Mitchell, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Folsom, James K.:'Gothicism in the Western Novel,' in Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature, ed. by Mogen, Sanders, Karpinski, London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993, pp. 28-41. Mitchell, Lee Grant:: 'White Slavers and Purple Sage: Plotting Sex in Zane Grey's West,' (Introduction to Riders of the Purple Sage, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. ix-xxxvi. Mogen, David, Sanders, Scott P., Karpinski, Joanne B.: Introduction to Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature, ed. by Mogen, Sanders, Karpinski, London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993, pp. 13-27. Olson, Charles: Call Me Ishmael, London: Jonathan Cape, 1967. (First pub. 1947). <A href="http://flaneur.freeservers.com/noframes.html"> <a href="#top">GO TO TOP</a> <img src="groove1.gif" width="100" height="100" align="left"> <table align="center" border=0 width="70%"> <tbody> <tr> <td align="center" nowrap>the flaneur</td></tr> <tr> <td align="center" bgcolor="#4FA7A7"> <a href="index.html">home</a>| <a href="contents.html">contents</a>| <a href="sub.html">submissions</a>| <a href="links.html">links</a> </td></tr></tbody></table> </BODY></HTML>