Abstract
Since colonial times, the American frontier has provided New World artists and literati especially those in what has become the United States with a rich source of narrative material. Frontier themes and motifs have been a primary focus especially for Euro-American artists and writers in search of a distinctly American experience. Even as events associated with the settlement of the western frontier have slipped further and further into the past, the impact of western frontier imagery on how Americans define themselves has remained. There are numerous instances of the lingering power of the frontier mystique. One might note the periodic resurgence of Western movies exemplified in the early 1990s by such popular and well-received films as Dances with Wolves (1990) and The Unforgiven (1992), as well as the two versions of the Wyatt Earp story, Tombstone (1993) and Wyatt Earp (1994), and in the new century by such highly praised movies as Open Range (2003), 3:10 to Yuma (2007), Appaloosa (2008), and True Grit (2010). One might also consider the successful HBO television series Deadwood, launched in 2004.
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Notes
See Elliott West, “Selling of the Myth: Western Images in Advertising,” Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture, ed. Richard Aquila (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 283.
Regarding this campaign, see, for instance, Loren Stein, “How to Fight Big Tobacco and Win,” A Healthy Me, 2001 Consumer Health Interactive, June 10, 2009, http://www.ahealthyme.com/topic/bigtobacco.
See Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).
Leslie Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American (New York: Stein and Day, 1968).
Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973).
Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985).
Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992).
Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975).
John G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique, 2nd ed. (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1984).
Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Rosemarie Katherine Bank, “Rhetorical, Dramatic, Theatrical, and Social Contexts of Selected American Frontier Plays, 1871 to 1906,” diss., University of Iowa, 1972.
Roger A. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 1870–1906 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Discussing this turn-of-the-century popular melodrama, especially of “the 10. 20. 30.” variety, Montrose J. Moses referred specifically to the American Theatre on Eighth Avenue and the Thalia Theatre in the Bowery. See, The American Dramatist (Boston: Little, 1925; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964), 298.
For instance, see Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987).
Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
Robert Rogers, Ponteach: Or the Savages of America, A Tragedy, with an introduction and a biography of the author by Allan Nevins (Chicago: Caxton Club, 1914), 201.
The significance of Pocahontas for the early American sense of national identity is explored in Susan Scheckel, “Domesticating the Drama of Conquest: Pocahontas on the Popular Stage,” in The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 41–69.
Richard Moody, America Takes the Stage: Romanticism in American Drama and Theatre, 1750–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), 105.
The complex relation between the representation of the Native American in Euro-American culture and the “true nature” of Native Americans is the subject of landmark studies like Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1953, 1965).
Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
In this regard, also see Rosemary K. Bank, “Staging the ‘Native’: Making History in American Theatre Culture, 1828–1838,” Theatre Journal 45.4 (1993), 461–486.
Bank, “Representing History: Performing the Columbian Exposition,” Theatre Journal 54.4 (2002), 589–606.
For instance, see Arthur Hobson Quinn, A History of the American Drama: From the Civil War to the Present Day, vol. I (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1936), 105; Moody, 174.
At least this was the view of audiences in the 1830s. In this regard, see James Tidwell’s introduction to James Kirke Paulding, The Lion of the West, revised by John Augustus Stone and William Bayle Bernard and edited by James N. Tidwell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1954), 7–8.
In this regard, see Rosemarie Bank, “Frontier Melodrama,” in Theatre West: Image and Impact, Dutch Quarterly Review Studies in Literature 7, ed. Dunbar H. Ogden with Douglas McDermott and Robert K. Sarl ós (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 152, and Bank, “Historical, Dramatic, Theatrical, and Social Contexts,” 105–6.
Regarding “dry land farming,” see Frieda Knobloch, The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the American West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 62–66.
See Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic, vol. II, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University, 1962), 133–35, 152–58. For another and somewhat more recent discussion of Western migration in the nineteenth century, see Richard White, 183–211.
This fact not only is noted by Frederick Jackson Turner, but also inspired his famous essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986), 1.
In this regard, Turner wrote in a letter to Merle Curti that “[A]s you know, the ‘West,’ with which I dealt, was a process rather than a fixed geographical region: it began with the Atlantic Coast; and it emphasized the way in which the East colonized the West, and how the ‘West,’ as it stood at any given period affected the development and ideas of the older areas of the East.…” [quoted by Wilbur Jacobs in “Frederick Jackson Turner,” The American West Magazine 1.1 (1964), 32].
Various scholars have explored the significance of the fact that both Turner and Buffalo Bill were associated with the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. See Ann Fabian, “History of the Masses: Commercializing the Western Past,” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, eds. William Cronon, George Miles, Jay Gitlin (New York: Norton, 1992), 223–238.
Richard White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” in The Frontier in American Culture, ed. James R. Grossman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 6–65; and Bank, “Representing History: Performing the Columbian Exposition.”
Regarding Turner’s reviews of Roosevelt’s Winning of the West, see Ray Allen Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 83–84 and 176–77.
Allan G. Bogue, Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 87–88 and 137–39.
Augustus Thomas, The Print of My Remembrance (New York: Scribner’s, 1922), 336, 344.
Darwin Payne, Owen Wister: Chronicler of the West, Gentleman of the West (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985), 163–4.
Frank P. Morse, Backstage with Henry Miller (New York: Dutton, 1938), 277.
While Gramsci does not abandon Marxist materialistic determinism, he uses the concept of “hegemony” to explain and explore the problematics of “political consciousness” and “progressive self-consciousness.” For instance, see Antonio Gramsci, “The Study of Philosophy and of Historical Materialism,” in The Modern Prince and Other Writings, trans. Louis Marks (New York: International Publishers, 1957), 66–67.
The shift from late-nineteenth-/early-twentieth-century frontier discourse to late-twentieth-/early-twenty-first-century frontier discourse is exemplified by the tension between the “old triumphal frontier history” and the “New Western History” expressed by the likes of Patricia Limerick and Richard White in Trails: Toward a New Western History, ed. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Ranken (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992).
The way in which the “New Western Historians” restructured the field of Western history is most obvious in how they address the concept of “frontier,” which Limerick humorously called the “F-word” (“The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century,” in The Frontier in American Culture, 72). Understanding Turner’s “frontier” as a process, Limerick changes the parameters of the field by “choosing to stress place more than process” (Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest, 26). Replacing the term “frontier” with a term like “region” only begins to suggest the paradigm shift underlying the new discourse. Also see Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). For a discussion of various aspects—both pro and con—of New Western History, see The New Western History: The Territory Ahead, ed. Forrest G. Robinson (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997).
Richard Slotkin, “Myth and the Production of History,” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 82.
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 8.
Bruce McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), xii.
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© 2011 Richard Wattenberg
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Wattenberg, R. (2011). Introduction. In: Early-Twentieth-Century Frontier Dramas on Broadway. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119147_1
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