Irvine Valley College:  Online Literature Study of the School of Humanities and Languages

Literature 110 - Popular Literature

Spring 2013 - Ticket #62740  // Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, MFA, Instructor

Unit 6grey: Cowboy Jamboree

Showdown at Yellow Butte, Louis L'Amour

Zane Grey and his Purple Western Frontier

When we begin to read Grey's novel, we see many of the Western Genre elements that we recognize from TV shows and movies (both new and old).  Yet, this is primarily a "captivity" narrative - a form definitely borrowed from the earlier Eastern frontier stories!

However, Grey's approach is radically different in that it places "The Mormons" in the role of both kidnappers and criminals [no "wild Indians," no "wild Outlaws"]!  While this particular feature of the story fixes it in a specific historic and social niche, it makes a good example for us to study.  Because, today, we would scarcely rise to the bait of demonizing the Mormons, the story becomes a more neutral canvas of "role" playing for us to examine.

Cowgirls?  Or Coooowgirl?  Just a reminder of what modern cultural media has done to the Cowgirl image!

Many scholars that we have read in earlier lectures have pointed out the ways in which Popular Literature embraces the concerns and fears of an era.  We saw this with Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein* [the concerns about science and life] and also with Marie Lowndes' *The Lodger* [the fear of anonymous criminals in bigger cities].  

Zane Grey's innovations - his transformation of the frontier narrative into the Western Novel Genre, while it seems so particularized with its cowboys and Indians and western locale, can be seen to come, as well, from two main concerns of the early 20th Century.  

One is the loss of the Frontier altogether and what that might mean for the American imagination.  The other can be seen as a heightened sense of conflict about community, family, and sexual roles in an increasingly urban and industrial society. 

My copy of *Riders* has an excellent introduction by Lee Clark Mitchell of Princeton University.  [See his book - *Westerns:  Making the Man in Fiction and Film*, 1998]

I am going to quote from that Introduction here - 

The Loss of the Frontier:

The Landscape Itself -

Grey deliberately invokes a specific historical time and space, the
landscape of southern Utah where small Mormon towns were already
well established in the summer of 1871. And, although Lassiter has
been on the trail of his sister since her abduction in 1853, the novel is
all but silent about recent transformations. Never, even indirectly, are
the ravages of the Civil War apparent, or the advent of the railroad, or
the astonishing emergence of the cattle industry in the years immedi­
ately following. Indeed, the landscape id depicted in terms so

unhistoricized that it could be almost anywhere in the West in the
half-century prior to the novel's appearance.

By eliminating actual history from the Landscape details, Grey is able to diffuse the idea of the Frontier into a generalized West.  And, Since the Frontier, in earlier narratives was always a place of Transformation, Grey employs motif of self-realization as part of this ambivalence about the West:

Self-transformation in itself is hardly a process to be disparaged--
certainly according to Grey, whose innumerable novels self-con­
sciously celebrate Western life and its transformative potential.
Removed from the oppressive climate and the artificial constraints of
the East, his characters typically discover renewed health, resurgent
happiness, and appropriate social roles. Riders of the Purple Sage forms
no exception to this social Darwinist pattern in depicting the arduous
metamorphosis of each of four main characters, each achieving full
manhood or womanhood through sustained resistance to the closed
room of Mormonism. And that resistance is explicitly allegorized as
an escape into unlimited landscape, a turn from claustral confines into
the prospect of psychological openness and sexual health.

Yet in apparent opposition to its own plot exertions, the novel itself
oddly relies on occult narratives and clandestine spaces, sharpening
suspense through the promise of secrets revealed about characters'
pasts--secrets that seem to hold the key to former identities and that
should explain the nature of various characters' relations to
Mormonism. Everyone is driven by secrets, wanting first to know who
the mysterious Lassiter is and of his relation to Milly. He, likewise,
has pursued the mystery of his sister's abductor for eighteen years and
must continue to wait through most of the novel to have that mystery
resolved. Venters as well is mystified at first by the motives of those
who steal Jane's cattle, and later wants to be fully informed of Bess's
life as the Masked Rider. Bess playfully withholds from Venters her
discovery of gold, just as Oldring refuses to speak of his relationship
with Bess.

Surprise Valley

A powerful irony is none the less concealed in this stock fictional
metamorphosis, which represents less an attenuation of earlier strains
of ambivalence than their partial confirmation. The simple reason for
this is that genuine transformation rarely occurs in Grey, if only
because he envisions the process in terms of narrowly conceived
gender roles. While characters are led to appreciate the behavior
appropriate to their sex, then, and to discover the sexual nature of
desire, their recognition differs only nominally from what they have
ostensibly known all along. Transformation occurs as little more than
a redemption of what one already is, despite the energy invested in
dramatizing the mystery of becoming true men and women. Or to put
it conversely, that mystery is sustained by the very attention devoted
to masking desire, to keeping secrets secret from a narrative that
continually demands to know. Even though desires remain the same
(and largely hidden), the increasing pressure to reveal them makes it
seem as if one is being transformed.

So, the landscape of the novel gives us both sublime inspiration and freedom and the possibility (ambiguous) of transformation.

But!  But!

Look carefully when you come to the end!  Jane and Lassiter have entered Surprise Valley - and Jane begs Lassiter to roll the rock down into Deception Pass.  And [notably with his hand bleeding, a stigmata of sorts], he does!  Surprise Valley is a box canyon, and we can only believe, within the confines of the novel, that they are sealed in there forever!  In fact, the last word of the text is "forever."  This might not be quite the kind of unending "west" that we had hoped for - in fact, we could read it as a foreshadowing of the end of the frontier - the last escape to the west [Venters and Bess have gone East] is a closed canyon.  We can surely discuss this on the Boards!

The Captivity Narrative:

One of the standard ploys invoked by many of Grey's novels is to
have Mexicans, outlaws, Mormons, or other supposedly unsavory
groups succeed in enslaving white women. Drawing on the long
tradition of the captivity narrative, he offers elaborate plots, dark
secrets, and powerful conspiracies that invariably threaten his inde­
pendent-minded heroines. And it is the risk of being captured (with
the ever-present injunction to 'save the last bullet for yourself') that
lends a perversely erotic charge to this basic narrative line--one
borrowed from James Fenimore Cooper and the dime novel (with
their ineluctable cycle of escape, pursuit, and capture). Riders of the
Purple Sage, in fact, brings two captivity plots together. The first
involves Lassiter's eighteen-year search for his sister, Milly Erne, who
has been seduced by a mysterious Mormon, abducted and 'chained in
a cave' (P. 172), had her own child captured from her in turn, and died
in sheer despair two years before Lassiter comes to the rescue. He
now decides to help the rich rancher Jane Withersteen resist similar
attempts to force her to marry a Mormon against her will--including

at last the abduction of her own adopted daughter, Fay. The novel
ends with Jane brutally dispossessed of her ranch, having barely
escaped with her life, her virtue, and her newly constituted family
(Lassiter, Fay) into a mountain stronghold.

At the same time, the second captivity plot emerges, involving the
rustler Oldring, who has raised Milly's daughter, Bess, as his own and
forced her to become a masked bandit. Wounded by a gentle gunman
named Bern Venters (who shoots only in self-defence), she is carried
by him to a secluded valley where she thinks she is once again a
captive. Their Edenic experience develops in tandem with the re-
lationship between Jane and Lassiter, and at the novel's conclusion
this second couple likewise eludes the Mormons by racing 'back to
my old home in Illinois' (p. 252). Tellingly, however, and despite
these separate escapes to freedom, the Mormon conspiracy remains
fully in place, undeterred by the plot's happy end. Indeed, the con­
spiracy itself escapes the novel's conclusion to re-emerge in a sequel
set a generation later, when the Mormon cabal looms larger than ever.

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. The narrative is driven by the
insistent threat of an inaccessible conspiratorial power (marked with
a strong sexual bias); Jane Withersteen is cut off from friends, her
riders are suddenly 'called in', and finally her own women servants
are set to spy on her. Even more important than this insidious, ubi­
quitous power of the Mormon conspiracy is the representation of the
Church of Latter-day Saints as always 'binders' of women, enslaving
them in efforts to exact submission to a creed--whether the woman
is Jane's ward, Fay, or Milly Erne, or Bess Oldring, or Jane herself.
Physical enslavement offers a straightforward analogy to the alleged
social condition of women in Mormon society, revealed in one of the
few explanations they ever offer: 'You haven't', the leader Tull sternly
explains to Jane, 'yet come to see the place of Mormon women'
(p. 6).

Oh!  My Stars!  Women Riding Bicycles.  Shocking!

We have many clues about the relationship between this captivity narrative and the conflicts that were just beginning to be felt in the 20th Century about community, women, and family.  The era in which Grey wrote was one in which the US saw unprecedented urban unrest, growing numbers of women in prostitution (seen in *The Lodger,* as well), disparity of wealth, and rampant industrial development.  Along with those changes came a deep distrust of new social and sexual roles.  Women, now entering the workplace in great numbers, were seen to be particularly at risk.  People worried a great deal about "white slavery," "working girls," "career women," and "the problem of the New Woman."

We can see some of this in the complicated weaving of what are really three captivity narratives in the novel.  For example, although they are under "Mormon" control, both Jane and Bess are seen wearing men's clothing the first time we see them.  And, finally, both Jane and Bess are "rescued" and transformed - but the question remains to what extent they are liberated.  They are certainly transformed into "real women" - but they were women (biological) in the first place.  At the end of the book, each of these women has been "liberated" from captors and oppressors - and that seems to entail that they have now become proper wives and dutiful consorts.  Despite the seeming objective of freeing these women, it is hard to tell whether *Riders* supports or subverts a forward-looking version of female sexuality.  

Barbara Stanwyck in *The Furies.*

Barbara Stanwyck was a familiar sight as feisty, can-do frontier women -- as Annie Oakley and in the big-ranch based Westerns Forty Guns, and the TV series The Big Valley.

Similarly - while family values are honored and espoused - especially biological ties - throughout the novel, the characters actually go forward to create different and new kinds of family units.

And, of course, the notion of community harmony comes into question all along.  The exploitation of the Mormon leaders, the purported discontent of the flock, the need, nonetheless to keep the unit together - all of these elements echo the kinds of struggles that families were beginning to face in the new century.

_________________________A bit of an aside about Women of the West

Calamity Jane

From Literary Traveller:

Hell raisers, another common female stereotype, were the outrageous cowgirls of the Old West.  These women could shoot, rope, and herd as well as any cowboy on the plain, yet were considerably more scandalous because they lacked manners and a supposedly feminine concern for propriety.  This selection of females shunned the role of a woman as a pillar of morals and manners, choosing to continuously violate the standards of proper society with their clothing, behavior, and activities.  They were the Calamity Jane's and Bell Star's of the time period, fighting in violent battles and well educated on how to use a gun among other things of which women were typically ignorant.  Clearly, Wilder's women did not have a flagrant disregard for morals and manners, as seen in her book series.  In fact, these women had a genuine concern for propriety and lady-like behavior unlike the hell raisers of other western-based literature.

The final woman in literature is simply referred to as the "bad woman."  This sort of female creates an association between men and sex, raw human nature, and desire.  She was most often portrayed as the prostitute or dancing girl that was found in the saloon or dance hall.  Contemporary versions of this woman often depict her as sloppily dressed and potentially drunk, continuously carrying a flask somewhere on her person.  Her only purpose in literature was to temporarily provide a man with a somewhat feminine retreat from the treacherous outdoor environment and illustrate the carnal, raw attitudes of the Old West.   

Nevertheless, historically accurate depictions of the women in unsettled western territory illustrate a different sort of woman.  Following the Homestead Act of 1862, women could claim land as long as they adhered to certain stipulations--build a house and live on and improve the land for five years to earn the full title to the land.  Upon completing the five-year stay, in which six months of each year were spent on the property, the woman was given the full title to the land.  In 1907, it was recorded that 11.9% of homesteaders were women.  Records also indicate that 42.4% of these women successfully cultivated their land for five years and earned the title, more than the 37% of men that succeeded in completing the same task.  Additionally, the literary compositions of women during this time, namely their journals, letters, and other private documents, indicate that, as western pioneers, they had a number of chores and tasks that were absolutely necessary for them to complete to ensure survival.  They were responsible for tending gardens and poultry, cooking meals, sewing, and bearing and educating their children.  A western woman's contributions were directed toward the family economy, as opposed to the male's economic contributions, which took place primarily outside the home.  Nevertheless, typical literary presentations of this gender clearly do not do justice to the hard work and tenacity of these successful female pioneers.

Frontier Trouble

Given the range of social issues that are confronted and/or hinted at in the novel, we might begin to think that a retreat to a box canyon or a trip to the past (the East) could be in order [many of these conflicts have not yet been solved, and we are now well into the Twenty-First Century).  Venters and Bess have gone East to face "the big outside world with its problems of existence."  And Jane, Lassiter, and Little Fay have gone into a place where no change is possible.

The combination of the End of the Frontier and The Captivity Narrative give us some good ideas about what to look for in *Riders of the Purple Sage."

Despite the relevance that *Riders* must have had to his own, contemporary audience, the novel went on to have an avid readership for decades.  Perhaps it is that narratives pertinent to one set of concerns can go on to comfort readers in later generations! 

Now that you are more used to analyzing Popular Literature texts - you can fill these in and post them as you see fit!

"Readable" Characters

Patterned Structure

Reassuring Plot

Clear-cut Value System

Mythological and Folk Referents

Intimacy of Style and Tone

Return to Lecture Schedule

Western:

Louis L'Amour.  Here is his bio page:  http://www.louislamour.com/aboutlouis/biography.htm.  The page includes links to lists of titles.