“All That Glitters …”: Problematizing Golden-Age Narratives in Vergil’s Aeneid and the Western Film Genre

Abstract

In the first of two chapters that treat promises of an imperial golden age in Aeneid Book 6 in relation to American expansionism as portrayed in the Western film genre, Kirsten Day compares the production contexts of Vergil’s epic, during the “golden age of Latin literature” in the wake of epochal civil wars, to the Westerns produced after World War II during the “golden age” of Hollywood. So too the dramatic settings of the Aeneid, after the Trojan War, and of Westerns, after the American Civil War, enshrine these trailblazing pioneers in the pantheon of founding heroes whose struggles (re)built the nation of the narrative’s audience. Through a wide-ranging survey of many of the genre’s most famous films, such as Red River and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Day examines several key themes, including nation-building as divinely driven labor; the laconic characterization of the Western male hero and his troubling resemblance to the villain; and the sacrificial role assigned to female characters. Day concludes that these ancient and modern texts also share an undercurrent of anxiety about the moral ambiguities of these projects, which belies their superficial optimism.