Abstract
At the end of Owen Wister’s cowboy classic The Virginian, after the horseman-hero kills the last of the cattle rustlers in a shoot-out, he finally marries Molly Wood, the feisty schoolmarm, whom he has courted and sassed for so long. He takes her on a spectacular horseback honeymoon near the Gran Tetons. They camp on an island in an idyllic mountain stream, and after much sensuous language suggesting a ritualistic deflowering, husband and wife spend an idle afternoon drowsing on a rock by the stream. Interrupting their nuptial, a “little wild animal” swims by, and emerges from the stream to roll and stretch in the sand. As the mink trots away, the Virginian forms a homoerotic parable out of his visit.
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Notes
Wister, Owen. The Virginian. New York: Penguin Classics, 1988, pp. 384–385.
Andy Adams, A Texas Matchmaker. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903, p. 281.
Several critics have analyzed the implied homoerotic relationship between Steve and the Virginian: among them Blake Allmendinger (Ten Most Wanted: The New Western Literature, New York: Routledge Press, 1998)
Jane Tompkins (West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)
William R. Handley (Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary West, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
See Barbara Welter’s article, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” in Locating American Studies, ed. Lucy Maddox (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
See Lee Clark Mitchell’s Westerns: Making the Man in Westerns and Film (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
John Seelye does a good job of outlining the erotic interlude between the narrator and the Virginian during this camping scene in his introduction to The Virginian (New York: Penguin, 1988, pp. vii–xxxiii).
Several good histories of homosexuality in America exist. John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s classic Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)
Jonathan Ned Katz’s Gay American History (New York: Meridian, 1992)
D. Michael Quinn’s superlative Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996)
James Creech theorizes literary codes about nineteenth-century homoeroticism, Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville’s Pierre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)
Ridge, John Rollin. The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854). Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955.
See Robert K. Martin’s excellent Hero, Captain, Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).
See Albert Johannson, The House of Beadle and Adams, Vol. 2 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), p. 289.
For a good discussion of the kind of robust masculinity expected of Harvard graduates during the late nineteenth century, see Kim Townsend’s Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996).
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© 2005 Chris Packard
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Packard, C. (2005). Rehearsing and Ridiculing Marriage in The Virginian and Other Adventure Tales. In: Queer Cowboys. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07822-3_3
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