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Book Club: Discuss/find out about a Classic Tale Set in Wyoming: The Virginian
Front-Ranger:
I am missing my own Ennis very much tonight....and it is comforting to read The Virginian, because it reminds me so very much of him.
Front-Ranger:
Here is what the historian John Nesbitt (who appeared with Annie Proulx at a literary panel in Casper, Wyoming) has to say about The Virginian:
--- Quote ---First, on the myth of the cowboy: yes, I think the mystique of the cowboy has to do with his association with fertility and virility, but I think in more modern terms (say, from the 18th century onward), his kind of character in fiction and legend has much to do with chivalry and horsemanship as those honorable pursuits are carried out (in more egalitarian times) by the common man, or, as he was called in the nineteenth century, nature’s nobleman.
As for The Virginian, I see the novel as many do, as a literary attempt to pull together or harmonize cultural values of the late nineteenth century. First, the Virginian is a horseman; we see that in the subtitle, and we see it in the opening scene when he catches the horse in the corral (end of first paragraph: “That man knows his business.”), and as I said during the panel discussion, horsemanship is a defining characteristic of the cowboy. As a cultural emblem, he is the embodiment of southern chivalry and natural nobility; his courtship of and eventual marriage with the schoolteacher is a blending together of east and west with north and south, in a kind of vision of a unified nation. In my interpretation, the novel itself is a blending together of the novel of manners (in the style of Jane Austen and Henry James) and the historical romance (in the style of James Fenimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott, the latter being a source of Wister’s ideology of the cow-puncher as a latter-day Ivanhoe). The main character’s being from Virginia is, as I see it, representative of the South, as Virginia was the seat of the Confederacy. The one time someone calls him by a given name, the name is Jeff, as in Thomas Jefferson (the first great Virginian) or his namesake Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. I have never gotten any virginal connotations from the title, although there is an interesting view of virginity and sexuality in the chapter on Em’ly the hen, which is referred to later in the book.
--- End quote ---
Front-Ranger:
Here is a quote which illustrates what Nesbitt was saying, above. This is from page 23 of the Pocket West edition:
--- Quote ---Truth untamed sat here for an idle moment, spending easily its hard-earned wages....More of death [this Rocky Mountain place] undoubtedly saw, but less of vice, than did its New York equivalents. And death is a thing much cleaner than vice. Moreover, it was no means vice that was written on these wild and manly faces....Daring, laughter, endurance--these were what I saw upon the countenance of the cowboys.
--- End quote ---
--- Quote ---In their flesh our natural passions ran tumultuous; but often in their spirit sat hidden a true nobility, and often beneath its unexpected shining their figures took a heroic stature.
--- End quote ---
Ellemeno:
Lee, I bought The Virginian a couple of days ago, but then left home yesterday for two weeks, and didn't bring it with me. I'm looking forward to it. The copy I bought has a very oldtimey font, that I think will enhance the experience.
Front-Ranger:
Okay, Clarissa, but if you get some free time, Toast has posted a link to two sources of the online book, above!
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