Marrying Men: Intimacy in Owen Wister’s The Virginian

Abstract

Owen Wister’s The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains is often described as the first “literary” Western, owing in part to Wister’s own pretensions in the novel’s introduction. Throughout the late nineteenth century, Western literature enjoyed marketplace success in both popular and literary forms. However, Wister’s novel stands out not simply because of its immense popularity as fiction and a successful stage play, spawning multiple film adaptations in the first half of the twentieth century, but also, in Wister’s own words, as an authentic “historical novel” that depicts “a vanished world.”¹ Arguing against the novel’s publicity, that it is a “colonial romance,” Wister claims that his work is as historical as William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, or Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a curious catalog of “historical” texts that seeks to implant realism as the dominant form of classic American literature. Wister’s realist aesthetic values novels that “[present] faithfully a day and a generation.”²

Why wasn’t some Kipling saving the sage-brush for American literature, before the sage-brush and all that it signified went the way of the California forty-niner, went the way of the Mississippi steamboat, went the way of everything?… But what was fiction doing, fiction, the only thing that has always outlived fact? Must it be perpetual tea-cups?

—Owen Wister, Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship