Abstract
Abstract Jane Tompkins has argued that a deeply conflicted relationship exists between men and language in the Western. Deploying too much language emasculates Western heroes, men who privilege action over talk. For support, Tompkins turns to a number of moments in Shane, the 1953 film adaptation of the 1949 novel of the same title by Jack Schaefer. Tompkins argues that the film constructs a model of masculinity that wholly rejects language, a move that is destructive and exploitative to self and others. However, a close reexamination of the novel reveals a model of masculinity that is more positive and flexible towards language and gender than Tompkins’s views on the Western suggest. A close rereading of the novel shows that men in Westerns do not always use talk and silence to subjugate women and others, and that the valuing of language over action does not always end in violence or exploitation. Furthermore, the film adaptation of the novel will be examined, a work that occupies a more cherished place in American culture than the novel, a situation that is the reverse of traditional cultural hierarchies in which the literary source material is privileged over the film adaptation. Ultimately, the novel and film are engaging in different ways, yet Schaefer’s novel, rather than being relegated to middle school literature classrooms, rewards serious critical and scholarly attention, particularly in the context of the film adaptation and critical discourse on the representation of masculinity in the Western.
Highlights
Though nearly seventy years old, the Western Shane continues to occupy a visible and viable position in American culture
Jack Schaefer’s novel, which deals with a young boy coming of age on the frontier and his relationship with a mysterious stranger that defends the community against a corrupt cattle rancher, has been translated into over thirty languages, has appeared in over seventy editions, and Corresponding author: Jesse Gerlach Ulmer, Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, P
Shane moves closer to Joe and away from Marian, paralleling an attending shift in Shane’s verbal behavior away from the more open and flexible kind he speaks in the early chapters
Summary
Shane has even managed to transcend national borders to form part of the global imagination of the American West – a special edition of Shane was produced to help Japanese speakers learn English, and the United States Information Agency published an edition as an approved export of American culture (Marsden 340) Despite this broad popular appeal, some critics have been less than impressed with Shane. As enumerated by Matthew Costello in “‘I Didn’t Expect To Find Any Fences Around Here’: Cultural Ambiguity and Containment in Shane,” Shane has been characterized by a number of critics as a conventional, paradigmatic, “classic” example of the genre, one that perpetuates ideological orthodoxy and reinforces the social status quo (269) While this line of criticism applies to the novel, more often than not, it is, implicitly or explicitly, directed towards the film adaptation. Reconsidering curious moments within particular Westerns like the novel version of Shane can reveal surprising and interesting generic variations that complicate oversimplified, dogmatic, binary views of the relationship between gender and language
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