This is no country for a lady.
Today I'm going to talk about The Ideal Man.
Now, this is not my ideal man, but I mean the concept of an Ideal Man. I just finished reading aloud to my aged mother* Owen Wister's 1902 novel The Virginian, which invented the Western, and strove to show through its title character an exemplar of the archetypical New American Man of Wister's day. Now, it's not that good of a book, in fact I found it quite objectionable in many ways, but it illustrates beautiful just what I've been trying to say about our modern Kyriarchy, its origins, and our culture.
You see, I think every society has a goal, shown by what it values, and helped by its cultural moral code. A people constantly at war, for example, will create a society they believe will produce individuals who can successfully defend the nation or conquer its neighbors. A people constantly in danger of famine will create a society that ensures that the population does not grossly exceed the food supply. And, when a nation's goal ceases to be in line with its stated values, it sets itself up to fail.
Wister spends inordinate amounts of time describing the Virginian's beauty and manliness, the latter seemingly represented by his clothes--if I had a dollar for every time the phrase "leathern chaparreros" appears, I'd, er, have a fistful of dollars, ahem. Apart from being laughable at times, it reminded me of Twilight, and how Stephenie Meyer constantly reiterates Edward Cullen's "body like a Greek God (ooh! More on that in a second!) with rainbow sparkles." Besides the Virginian's oft-repeated black hair and variable grey-green eyes, Wister explicitly tells us things like, "no one saw him but they loved him"--indeed who loves the Virginian is a mark of their virtue; every decent person admires him, every good person adores him, and the only one to dislike him even remotely is Trampas, the cardboard villain of the whole book.
Because Wister has the same object as Meyer in mind. He hopes that if he can just repeat often enough that the Virginian is beautiful and good and lovable, we readers will eventually believe it, even if he never shows us how. And, like Meyer, it's because Wister wants us to know that the Virginian is not really a man, he is the personification of The Ideal Man.
And when I think of The Ideal Man, I think first not of the riders of the purple sage, but of Athens. The Greeks were quite obsessed with The Ideal Man and many Athenian philosophers wrote many discourses on who and what he was. Athens, of course, had a form of government it called a Democracy, whereby every Athenian man (not women, not slaves, and not foreigners) was a citizen and had a part in governing his country. The Ideal Man, therefore, was well-educated at least, and preferably wise (which is also why a man couldn't be a citizen until he was 30). The geographical area we now think of Greece was also in a state of frequent warfare between the various city-states within it, so the Ideal Man was also (or had been, by the time he was a citizen) a warrior. They praised physical strength, athleticism, and skill at arms--hence many of their sports (such as in what we think of as the precursors to the Olympic Games) had a military origin and use. But religion and the favor of the Gods was also vital to the health of the state, so the Ideal Man must also be virtuous, pious, and not inclined to excesses, either in wealth, temper, or behavior. (Eating fish too often was a sin in Athens) And, because the Greeks believed that internal virtue was reflected in external beauty, the Ideal Man also had to be physically beautiful.
These ideas of the good, the bad, and the ugly are familiar to us today because of the Roman Empire. In Athens, the Ideal Man was a citizen, but he was also a kyrios--the lord/head/protector of his household. He had a duty to the polis in being a good citizen among citizens, but he also had a duty to be a good man in charge of his family (including slaves). He had to treat those under him in particular ways, be a good role model to the boys and young men who would become citizens, and protect his women (who were incapable of thinking for themselves, of course) from falling away from virtue. All of these ideas were admired and adopted by the Romans, who, thanks to the Emperor Constantine and the continued success of the Christian Church, left this legacy to us.
Rome was also a nation constantly at war, and though the government of the Empire was very different from Athenian democracy, the Ideal Man was still a "common" man, not an aristocrat. Rome believed its greatest strength was its citizen-soldier-farmers. This salt of the earth were men who owned small farms that provided the staple foods of existence, who worked alongside their slaves in the fields, and who were prepared to drop the tools of agriculture in favor of swords to defend (and later expand) the empire. And, like the Greeks before them, they saw one of their greatest responsibilities as producing the next generation of citizens to carry on their culture.
The Virginian too is an outdoorsman. His vocation is one that requires manual labor in the sun and brush, an indifference to physical comforts (luxury it is indeed for the cowboy to sleep in a tent when he's got his bedroll and it ain't rainin'!), and a malleable intellect that can outmaneuver horse, beeve, and man alike. And, like the Greeks and Romans, he is also a man who protects the virtue of his nation's women.
It is not specifically in the text as such, but the insult that is the initial start of the feud between the Virginian and Trampas (and source of the famous line, "When you call me that, smile!"), is in fact an insult against a woman as much as a man, in this case the Virginian's mother: "you son-of-a-___"**. The explicitly named "original insult" retroactively decided by Molly Wood after the Virginian's final confrontation with the villain Trampas (setting up the trope of the showdown, though not at high noon, determining the quick and the dead, where of course the Virginian is quick and Trampas is dead) was when Trampas had seen the then schoolmarm Molly before the Virginian had met her, and questioned her virtue, which the Virginian had then defended ("stand up you polecat and tell them that you're a liar!"). It's important to note that Molly then "meant nothing" to the Virginian (though Wister actually undermines that earlier when the Virginian reads a letter of Molly's (not addressed to him) and the narrator tells us "the seed of love was planted in his heart."), though the Virginian explains after Trampas is dead that "every woman should mean something to a man."
Because from Laramie to Lonesome Dove, and places beyond, there had (as shown in Wister's account) already developed a distinct culture (more on that in a second), a cowboy logic, in which the realms of men and women were separate, and the Ideal Man (or cow-puncher) was duty-bound to treat a lady in a way that would uphold her special feminine dignity and virtue. Just as an Athenian husband had the duty to protect his wife from the indignity of leaving her house (and either buying her a slave to do it, or shopping for the family provisions himself, lest a virtuous woman be seen by men in the agora), and just as a Roman father protected his daughters from the indignity of having personal names, ahem.
I'm going to talk about this again near the end, but now is also the time to mention the language of conquest regarding the relationship between Molly and the Virginian. Their courtship is described always in violent, dominating imagery--they don't have a conversation, they "exchange broadsides."*** As a swain, the Virginian is trying to win Molly's heart by doing what she wants (reading the books she gives him), where Molly is presented as a fortress defending against his advances. As their relationship continues, however, the Virginian rejects Molly's assignments and she becomes more and more submissive to him, until at last accepting her place with him as her "lord and master." To which I must ask, has anyone ever found this ever even remotely sexy, ever? And also, how very 12th Century Aquitainean is all is. :P
Meanwhile, the Virginian determines to "protect" Molly from the knowledge of his past and various "bad" things he's done--things he mostly seems to tell the Narrator (a character in the story, and something other than a strict authorial stand-in), who believes them only to be "natural" (as in the case of prior sexual experience) or even justified (as in the case of killing people), and reiterates for the readers the Virginian's "purity of thought." He says specifically he values Molly's "innocence", or in this case ignorance, and strives to preserve it, because there are some things a lady should not know. And Molly seems to agree with this--when the Virginian is part of the vigilante posse that kills Steve (more on him in a second), Molly is horrified, naturally, but determines in the end that the men know better than she does (though she is on the side of Law and Order and the Constitution, and the Virginian and Judge Henry are on the side of some kind of vaguely defined vengeful chivalric code without a moral leg to stand on, either in terms of Universal Morality, or in terms of Christianity, though it certainly is of a piece with ancient Greek and Roman tradition.), and that she really shouldn't know. LIkewise, when the Virginian goes to kill Trampas, Molly stands on her principles and declares she will leave him if he does it...but then is so relieved he isn't dead, she puts all that aside and seemingly forgets she ever had a brain of her own.
It is interesting to note that the Virginian is not a devout Christian, indeed, he is not religious at all. He sees nothing wrong with playing a prank on a traveling clergyman--incident we readers are supposed to sympathize with wholeheartedly as the preacher is pompous, obtuse, and unsympathetic to his cowboy audience. Yet his "purity of thought" is laughably reiterated in two incidents near the end of the book: In the first, the bishop (they are apparently all Episcopal) is talking with the Virginian about the immorality of killing Trampas. The bishop is so taken by the Virginian's... I don't know, charisma? Logic? Manly leathern chaparreros? he "almost loved him," and when the Virginian explains why killing Trampas is necessary, Wister gives us this: "His [the bishop's] heart was with the Virginian. But there was his Gospel [that pesky Gospel! Always keeping bishops from agreeing with wanton murder!], that he preached, and believed, and tried to live." So he makes some half-hearted arguments against it, and ultimately says, "God bless him!" of Our Hero. The other is sillier, and perhaps more forgiveable--in their first camp after their marriage, the Virginian has divided the island into His and Hers sides, so that they might bathe separately without seeing each other. Not that couples shouldn't have privacy, mind you, just that it seems to me to be strangely prudish, that it's wrong to feel sexual attraction or even lust toward your spouse, you must instead have some kind of higher, sacred, "pure" emotion called "love"--the one thing, incidentally, that is "feminine" about the Ideal Man, for ladies, you know, do not have base animal instincts. :P
And this is rather long, so I'll break it up into two parts. Part two will be HERE when I write it and edit this entry to reflect its existence. ;)
*Back when The Homeless Person was living with us, she told me she thought this reading aloud thing was "kind of romantic." I don't think she meant in the sense that reading aloud was a valuable social skill in the 19th Century. And, I don't know. I have a tendency to do things other people think are romantic (not just [not] starving in a garret basement dungeon lower level for my art), but I enjoy reading aloud and I'm good at it so I'll keep doing it anyway.
**Because the book was published in 1902, it is written that way, though I personally enjoyed reading out loud, "you son of a blank!" ;) Interestingly, he mentioned Bitch Creek by name, presumably because a) it's a proper name, b) it's not a slur as used, indeed, the geographical and historical information in the Wyoming State Archives suggests the name was originally "biche," which seems plausible enough in Teton County, with its number of French names for things... though the surviving ones are certainly slangy--Teton, Gros Ventre, etc. See here.
***Despite the nautical knowledge requirements of L&W, I remain a writer first. It took me until this moment to realize they are metaphorically firing cannons at each other and not handing each other newspaper editorials. Ahem.
Now, this is not my ideal man, but I mean the concept of an Ideal Man. I just finished reading aloud to my aged mother* Owen Wister's 1902 novel The Virginian, which invented the Western, and strove to show through its title character an exemplar of the archetypical New American Man of Wister's day. Now, it's not that good of a book, in fact I found it quite objectionable in many ways, but it illustrates beautiful just what I've been trying to say about our modern Kyriarchy, its origins, and our culture.
You see, I think every society has a goal, shown by what it values, and helped by its cultural moral code. A people constantly at war, for example, will create a society they believe will produce individuals who can successfully defend the nation or conquer its neighbors. A people constantly in danger of famine will create a society that ensures that the population does not grossly exceed the food supply. And, when a nation's goal ceases to be in line with its stated values, it sets itself up to fail.
Wister spends inordinate amounts of time describing the Virginian's beauty and manliness, the latter seemingly represented by his clothes--if I had a dollar for every time the phrase "leathern chaparreros" appears, I'd, er, have a fistful of dollars, ahem. Apart from being laughable at times, it reminded me of Twilight, and how Stephenie Meyer constantly reiterates Edward Cullen's "body like a Greek God (ooh! More on that in a second!) with rainbow sparkles." Besides the Virginian's oft-repeated black hair and variable grey-green eyes, Wister explicitly tells us things like, "no one saw him but they loved him"--indeed who loves the Virginian is a mark of their virtue; every decent person admires him, every good person adores him, and the only one to dislike him even remotely is Trampas, the cardboard villain of the whole book.
Because Wister has the same object as Meyer in mind. He hopes that if he can just repeat often enough that the Virginian is beautiful and good and lovable, we readers will eventually believe it, even if he never shows us how. And, like Meyer, it's because Wister wants us to know that the Virginian is not really a man, he is the personification of The Ideal Man.
And when I think of The Ideal Man, I think first not of the riders of the purple sage, but of Athens. The Greeks were quite obsessed with The Ideal Man and many Athenian philosophers wrote many discourses on who and what he was. Athens, of course, had a form of government it called a Democracy, whereby every Athenian man (not women, not slaves, and not foreigners) was a citizen and had a part in governing his country. The Ideal Man, therefore, was well-educated at least, and preferably wise (which is also why a man couldn't be a citizen until he was 30). The geographical area we now think of Greece was also in a state of frequent warfare between the various city-states within it, so the Ideal Man was also (or had been, by the time he was a citizen) a warrior. They praised physical strength, athleticism, and skill at arms--hence many of their sports (such as in what we think of as the precursors to the Olympic Games) had a military origin and use. But religion and the favor of the Gods was also vital to the health of the state, so the Ideal Man must also be virtuous, pious, and not inclined to excesses, either in wealth, temper, or behavior. (Eating fish too often was a sin in Athens) And, because the Greeks believed that internal virtue was reflected in external beauty, the Ideal Man also had to be physically beautiful.
These ideas of the good, the bad, and the ugly are familiar to us today because of the Roman Empire. In Athens, the Ideal Man was a citizen, but he was also a kyrios--the lord/head/protector of his household. He had a duty to the polis in being a good citizen among citizens, but he also had a duty to be a good man in charge of his family (including slaves). He had to treat those under him in particular ways, be a good role model to the boys and young men who would become citizens, and protect his women (who were incapable of thinking for themselves, of course) from falling away from virtue. All of these ideas were admired and adopted by the Romans, who, thanks to the Emperor Constantine and the continued success of the Christian Church, left this legacy to us.
Rome was also a nation constantly at war, and though the government of the Empire was very different from Athenian democracy, the Ideal Man was still a "common" man, not an aristocrat. Rome believed its greatest strength was its citizen-soldier-farmers. This salt of the earth were men who owned small farms that provided the staple foods of existence, who worked alongside their slaves in the fields, and who were prepared to drop the tools of agriculture in favor of swords to defend (and later expand) the empire. And, like the Greeks before them, they saw one of their greatest responsibilities as producing the next generation of citizens to carry on their culture.
The Virginian too is an outdoorsman. His vocation is one that requires manual labor in the sun and brush, an indifference to physical comforts (luxury it is indeed for the cowboy to sleep in a tent when he's got his bedroll and it ain't rainin'!), and a malleable intellect that can outmaneuver horse, beeve, and man alike. And, like the Greeks and Romans, he is also a man who protects the virtue of his nation's women.
It is not specifically in the text as such, but the insult that is the initial start of the feud between the Virginian and Trampas (and source of the famous line, "When you call me that, smile!"), is in fact an insult against a woman as much as a man, in this case the Virginian's mother: "you son-of-a-___"**. The explicitly named "original insult" retroactively decided by Molly Wood after the Virginian's final confrontation with the villain Trampas (setting up the trope of the showdown, though not at high noon, determining the quick and the dead, where of course the Virginian is quick and Trampas is dead) was when Trampas had seen the then schoolmarm Molly before the Virginian had met her, and questioned her virtue, which the Virginian had then defended ("stand up you polecat and tell them that you're a liar!"). It's important to note that Molly then "meant nothing" to the Virginian (though Wister actually undermines that earlier when the Virginian reads a letter of Molly's (not addressed to him) and the narrator tells us "the seed of love was planted in his heart."), though the Virginian explains after Trampas is dead that "every woman should mean something to a man."
Because from Laramie to Lonesome Dove, and places beyond, there had (as shown in Wister's account) already developed a distinct culture (more on that in a second), a cowboy logic, in which the realms of men and women were separate, and the Ideal Man (or cow-puncher) was duty-bound to treat a lady in a way that would uphold her special feminine dignity and virtue. Just as an Athenian husband had the duty to protect his wife from the indignity of leaving her house (and either buying her a slave to do it, or shopping for the family provisions himself, lest a virtuous woman be seen by men in the agora), and just as a Roman father protected his daughters from the indignity of having personal names, ahem.
I'm going to talk about this again near the end, but now is also the time to mention the language of conquest regarding the relationship between Molly and the Virginian. Their courtship is described always in violent, dominating imagery--they don't have a conversation, they "exchange broadsides."*** As a swain, the Virginian is trying to win Molly's heart by doing what she wants (reading the books she gives him), where Molly is presented as a fortress defending against his advances. As their relationship continues, however, the Virginian rejects Molly's assignments and she becomes more and more submissive to him, until at last accepting her place with him as her "lord and master." To which I must ask, has anyone ever found this ever even remotely sexy, ever? And also, how very 12th Century Aquitainean is all is. :P
Meanwhile, the Virginian determines to "protect" Molly from the knowledge of his past and various "bad" things he's done--things he mostly seems to tell the Narrator (a character in the story, and something other than a strict authorial stand-in), who believes them only to be "natural" (as in the case of prior sexual experience) or even justified (as in the case of killing people), and reiterates for the readers the Virginian's "purity of thought." He says specifically he values Molly's "innocence", or in this case ignorance, and strives to preserve it, because there are some things a lady should not know. And Molly seems to agree with this--when the Virginian is part of the vigilante posse that kills Steve (more on him in a second), Molly is horrified, naturally, but determines in the end that the men know better than she does (though she is on the side of Law and Order and the Constitution, and the Virginian and Judge Henry are on the side of some kind of vaguely defined vengeful chivalric code without a moral leg to stand on, either in terms of Universal Morality, or in terms of Christianity, though it certainly is of a piece with ancient Greek and Roman tradition.), and that she really shouldn't know. LIkewise, when the Virginian goes to kill Trampas, Molly stands on her principles and declares she will leave him if he does it...but then is so relieved he isn't dead, she puts all that aside and seemingly forgets she ever had a brain of her own.
It is interesting to note that the Virginian is not a devout Christian, indeed, he is not religious at all. He sees nothing wrong with playing a prank on a traveling clergyman--incident we readers are supposed to sympathize with wholeheartedly as the preacher is pompous, obtuse, and unsympathetic to his cowboy audience. Yet his "purity of thought" is laughably reiterated in two incidents near the end of the book: In the first, the bishop (they are apparently all Episcopal) is talking with the Virginian about the immorality of killing Trampas. The bishop is so taken by the Virginian's... I don't know, charisma? Logic? Manly leathern chaparreros? he "almost loved him," and when the Virginian explains why killing Trampas is necessary, Wister gives us this: "His [the bishop's] heart was with the Virginian. But there was his Gospel [that pesky Gospel! Always keeping bishops from agreeing with wanton murder!], that he preached, and believed, and tried to live." So he makes some half-hearted arguments against it, and ultimately says, "God bless him!" of Our Hero. The other is sillier, and perhaps more forgiveable--in their first camp after their marriage, the Virginian has divided the island into His and Hers sides, so that they might bathe separately without seeing each other. Not that couples shouldn't have privacy, mind you, just that it seems to me to be strangely prudish, that it's wrong to feel sexual attraction or even lust toward your spouse, you must instead have some kind of higher, sacred, "pure" emotion called "love"--the one thing, incidentally, that is "feminine" about the Ideal Man, for ladies, you know, do not have base animal instincts. :P
And this is rather long, so I'll break it up into two parts. Part two will be HERE when I write it and edit this entry to reflect its existence. ;)
*Back when The Homeless Person was living with us, she told me she thought this reading aloud thing was "kind of romantic." I don't think she meant in the sense that reading aloud was a valuable social skill in the 19th Century. And, I don't know. I have a tendency to do things other people think are romantic (not just [not] starving in a garret basement dungeon lower level for my art), but I enjoy reading aloud and I'm good at it so I'll keep doing it anyway.
**Because the book was published in 1902, it is written that way, though I personally enjoyed reading out loud, "you son of a blank!" ;) Interestingly, he mentioned Bitch Creek by name, presumably because a) it's a proper name, b) it's not a slur as used, indeed, the geographical and historical information in the Wyoming State Archives suggests the name was originally "biche," which seems plausible enough in Teton County, with its number of French names for things... though the surviving ones are certainly slangy--Teton, Gros Ventre, etc. See here.
***Despite the nautical knowledge requirements of L&W, I remain a writer first. It took me until this moment to realize they are metaphorically firing cannons at each other and not handing each other newspaper editorials. Ahem.