Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 126

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Popular Culture Review

speaking, the Western is a sub-genre of the costume picture; its narrative focus is
as much about history as it is about action and adventure.) John Cawelti, in his
seminal monograph on popular fiction, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: For
mula Stories as Art and Narrative (1976), in fact, claims that the Western, unlike
the detective story, “is not defined by a fixed pattern of action.” ^Richard W. Etulain
adds to Cawelti’s contention by outlining the broad scope of the Western’s plot:
In their [the Western’s) narratives the good man always wins. In doing so,
he defeats his weak or evil opponents, and he is rewarded for his dili
gence — most often by winning the thanks of the community he saves
and/or the hand of the heroine, or by gaining wealth. At the opposite end
of the spectrum one would place the work of such western writers as Ken
Kesey, N. Scott Momaday, Wright Morris, Richard Brautigan, and Larry
McMurtry, whose plots are not predictable and who rarely utilize all the
ingredients of the Western^.
What defines the Western, then, if not exclusively the action of its story, is its
setting, that historically specific time and place located in America’s past and on
America’s frontier. As to the identification of the specific time, in their introduc
tion to The Western Story: Fact, Fiction, and Myth (1975), editors Philip Durham
and Everett L. Jones state that “Western stories ordinarily describe a part of the
comparatively recent past, a time that lies somewhere between the Civil War and
the invention ofthe automobile\ And, as to the specific locale of the Western,
American historian Frederick Jackson Turner has provided the theoretical basis
for many discussions of the Western in his 1893 essay, “The Significance of the
Frontier in American History,” in which he articulates his now famous (and infa
mous, in some circles) proclamation: “The existence of an area of freeland, its
continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain
American development.”^
Turner’s thesis is that the frontier, over time, has historically been punctuated
by various “fail lines,” which are the borders between civilized and uncivilized
lands - the frontier, if you will — and as each frontier area becomes settled, the
“fall line” moves relentlessly westward across the continenf. Thus, for Turner,
and for the myth/symbol scholars of the Western whose work has been defined by
Turner (from Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and
Myth, to John G. Cawelti’s The Six-Gun Mystique, to Richard Siotkin’s Gunfighter
Nation: The Myth ofthe Frontier in Twentieth-Century America), the historic fron
tier in America was West, and was always moving west.
I would point out, however, that the frontier adventure story in popular film
and literature is not solely defined by the west or by Westerns. History itself has