“Men Have Tears in Them”: The Other Cowboy Hero

With the exception of the word I have italicized, the following characterization of the Western is acceptable: the Western "makes an absolute and value-laden division between the masculine and feminine spheres," linking masculinity with such things as "activity, mobility, adventure, [and] emotional restraint," and "femininity with passivity, softness, romance and domestic containment" (Buscombe 181). "Absolute" is too extreme, though I doubt that many people will balk at its use in this passage. Most people accept the description of the Western hero as taciturn, macho, and generally aloof. In her well-received book, Jane Tompkins even goes so far as to say that Westerns celebrate "the suppression of the inner life," that they "stamp out" the male hero's "interior consciousness" (Tompkins 66, 64). Indeed, she regards the cowboy hero's supposed silence and willfully controlled emotions as the most salient manifestation of his trying to prove "his manhood and trueheartedness" (Tompkins 54, 56-57). So intent on this is he, she argues, that even when he is suffering he "is forbidden to register his pain" (Tompkins 126). Thus, the Western teaches us "not to cry out or show that we care. For to show that your heart is not hard, to cry when you feel pain, your own or someone else's, is ... soft, womanish, emotional, the very qualities the Western hero must get rid of to be a man" (Tompkins 121). Consequently, she continues, Western heroes are 41 awkward.. around women," can't "read or dance or ... play ... [or] look at flowers... [or] carry on a conversation of more than a couple of sentences... [or] daydream or fantasize or play the fool [or] make mistakes" (Tompkins 127). The most serious result of all of this, she concludes, is that the hero cannot enjoy "living with himself or other people." In what follows I intend to show that these generalizations about how Western heroes think and behave do not apply in a significant number of Westerns, in almost every case films that critics-including Tompkins-have singled out for analysis or praise. In so doing, I will offer a more balanced picture of how cowboy heroes feel, think, and act. Anyone with even a casual familiarity with Westerns will automatically reject Tompkins' extreme statement that the hero of Western films cannot enjoy "living with himself or other people." But what about the common belief that the heroes of Western films are silent or taciturn, their vocabulary largely characterized by "Yep" or "Nope?" Many Western heroes fit this stereotype, but the majority exhibit a wide range of behavior. Gary Cooper's Virginian in The Virginian (1929) is one of the most loquacious cowboys ever to appear on the screen, and the shrewd character Cooper plays in The Westerner (1940) is almost as talkative; in High Noon (1952), by contrast, his Marshall Kane is considerably more reticent with words-as befits an older man, especially one increasingly aware that he may have only a few more hours to live. Though sullen in some Westerns, in Man Without a Star (1955) and The Gunfight at the OX Corral (1957) Kirk Douglas' characters love words. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), John Wayne's Tom Doniphon is not at all a reluctant talker but his Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956) is far more spare with words. Of all his cowboy roles, Henry Fonda is probably least talkative as "Earp, Wyatt Earp"; his Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) takes some pleasure in using language. Then again, there are some cowboys who are taciturn because of the star's persona. Alan Ladd is one of these, most famously in Shane (1953). Speaking slowly, distinctly, and without a Western accent in his rich, bass-baritone voice made him stand out in Westerns, but the fact of the matter is that is the way he spoke in virtually all his roles, whether as a Western gunfighter (Shane), a railroad detective out West (Whispering Smith, 1948), or a professional killer in a modern urban setting (This Gun for Hire, 1942, the film that made him a star). …