1

The Historical Frame

The values and assumptions built into the American adventure formula are also central to the ideological tradition of the United States; to that body of ideas which form the basis for its political, economic and social system, and which often take the form of unstated and untested assumptions underlying thought and expression. 'Individualism' is a main constituent of American ideology: it postulates that the individual is the foundation of society and that his interests and rights should have priority over those of the society. Ideally, the individual surrenders as few rights as possible to the domain of societal control. Though individualism may take on more socially benign forms of self-realisation, one very important product of individualism can be 'possessive individualism', as C. B. Macpherson has pointed out:

The individual, it was thought, is free inasmuch as he is proprietor of his person and capacities. The human essence is freedom from dependence on the wills of others, and freedom is a function of possession. Society becomes a lot of free equal individuals related to each other as proprietors of their own capacities and of what they have acquired by their exercise. Society consists of relations of exchange between proprietors. Political society becomes a calculated device for the protection of this property and for the maintenance of an orderly relation of exchange. (57: 3)

The self-aggrandisement implicit in the notion of possessive individualism is necessarily competitive where self-interests conflict, and so we have its correlate, 'competitive individualism'.

This last has some disquieting implications. Society becomes a false concept, for, when an individual's first duty is to himself, social responsibility is ignored, and group needs and collective responsibilities are not considered when they clash with an individual's needs of the moment. Indeed, group action comes to be seen as devious, as a contravention of the code, for it circumvents the duty of self-reliance and self-protection.

Disavowal of the group and impatience toward restraints make the ideal society one without law. Lawlessness is a double-edged blessing, however. No assurance is provided that the contest will be fair; the winner may well be the man least troubled by self-restraining ethics. Justice becomes a contest of strength, devoid of abstract notions of guilt, responsibility or compensation. And the weak are left to perish.

The setting of the American adventure formula is an idealised environment which allows competitive individualism free reign. The two crucial attributes of the formula's setting are lawlessness and the maximum opportunity for personal enrichment. Lawlessness grants perfect freedom in the pursuit of self-aggrandisement, but the resulting contest is often brutal. Women and the aged are particularly at risk. Not surprisingly, the lawlessness is often viewed with ambivalence: detrimental to society in general, it tests man's true worth, both morally and competitively. The result is contradictory impulse to perpetuate lawlessness while eliminating it; to take the law into one's own hands, meting out extralegal revenge to reassert the importance of virtue.

The second element of the setting is equally important in the formula: provision must be made for material accumulation, with wealth both abundant and accessible. Property functions as an emblem of power and badge of success, just as it does within the American ideology. This emblematic significance hinges on the correlation between the difficulty of the contest and the value of the compensation. Wealth is also meant to function as a lasting reward. These two symbolic functions conflict, for the former requires the maintenance of free competition, jeopardising the reward by making it impossible to retire from the fray.

Wealth is always present, but material accumulation is not always portrayed favourably. The lawlessness can taint the reward with the sordidness of the contest. Legitimate wealth is the result of an individual's endeavours in a fair contest. The burden of defending even legitimately acquired property may also make its possession less attractive.

The ideology of the American dream shapes other aspects of the master formula. The hero is the archetypal individualist, the 'best man'. The style reflects a democratic insistence that one man's language is as good as another's. The plot allows the hero to demonstrate his superiority. Thematically, a problem is put forward which challenges the viability or universal applicability of American values, then demonstrates that the problem is more apparent than real. American individualism reigns supreme.

The reassurance implicit in this formula's covert argument must have seemed deeply reassuring in 1902 when Owen Wister's The Virginian appeared, setting the mould for a new form of Western adventure writing. The decade preceding the book's publication had been one of acute social, economic and political upheaval aggravated by the worst depression before the 1930s. The schisms within American society became alarmingly apparent.

The violence of Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892 and the Pullman Strike of 1893 showed the bitter antagonism that had developed between capital and labour. Racial tension rose as discrimination became institutionalised through a series of court cases and legislative ploys designed to strip blacks of their voting and civil rights. The lynching of blacks increased. Friction between immigrants and members of the established community became acute in a society which had more than tripled in population in the space of fifty years. Russian Jews fleeing pogroms were greeted with the virulent anti-semitic rhetoric of the Populists. The Reverend Josiah Strong railed against the dangers of alien Roman Catholic traditions.

Sectional interests also clashed. Indebted farmers, squeezed by falling prices and monetary deflation, raged bitterly against the money interests of the industrial East. The tariff provided another forum for controversy. It was higher than it had ever been before, benefiting the East. The South and West, both largely agricultural, complained of the inflated prices on manufactured goods which resulted.

America's very image of itself was threatened. A frontier nation saw its free land broken into to such an extent that the frontier was deemed closed, a rural people had to recognise the economic and political dominance of the city and the flow of its population into urban areas, and a predominantly WASP culture had to acknowledge the impact of massive immigration by those with alien traditions. The city political machine, urban poverty, the domination of the economy by huge corporations and corporate trusts, and the antagonism between capital and labour presented new problems which were inconceivable within the old notions of American identity.

Against this background, the master formula argued for the universality of core American values. Confronted with a rapidly diminishing frontier and deeply felt sectional hostilities, the Western subgenre reasserted a continuity of values between East and West, echoing the arguments of a contemporary historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, who saw the frontier as a certain kind of environment which encouraged especially 'American' character traits.

Turner's thesis was itself part of a larger debate initiated by the 1890 census report, which declared the frontier line an outdated concept. The wilderness had been conquered; the free land which Jefferson, upon the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, had declared adequate for 'a thousand years' had given way to newer frontiers, themselves conquered.

The attention given to the purported closure of the frontier reflected a sense of ending and loss which had little to do with the actual needs of the society at the time for free land. The loss was felt on a deeper level, and it was this symbolic dimension which Turner addressed when he discussed the relationship of the West to the American icons of individualism, self-reliance and the self-made man. 'The West, at bottom, is a form of society, rather than an area', he said in 'The Problem of the West' (1896) (150: 205).

The form of society he describes is one where competitive individualism has free reign:

It followed from the lack of organized political life, from the atomic conditions of the backwoods society, that the individual was exalted and given free play. The West was another name for opportunity.... The self-made man was the Western man's ideal, was the kind of man that all men might become. Out of his wilderness experience, out of the freedom of his opportunities, he fashioned a formula for social regeneration, - the freedom of the individual to seek his own. (150: 212-13)

Turner even goes part way toward acknowledging the essential lawlessness of such a society, but does not admit that it is the strong who are apt to secure 'Justice': 'The frontiersman was impatient of restraints.... There was a reproduction of the primitive idea of the personality of the law, a crime was more an offense against the victim than a violation of the law of the land' (150: 212).

The shaping of society by frontier conditions, Turner argued, had given the United States its unique identity and special strength. Although the frontier had been conquered, the character traits it inspired were still important. He discussed the relevance of frontier virtues to capitalism in a later essay, 'Contributions of the West to American Democracy' (1903): 'Long after the frontier period of a particular region of the United States has passed away, the conception of society, the ideals and aspirations which it produced, persist in the minds of the people' (150: 264). The transition to an industrial economy, he says, was encouraged by frontier values:

The old democratic admiration for the self-made man, its old deference to the rights of competitive individual development, together with the stupendous natural resources that opened to the conquest of the keenest and the strongest, gave such conditions of mobility as enabled the development of the large corporate industries which in our own decade have marked the West. (150: 258)

One can see how Turner's picture of the West would offer a theoretical defence of the key American values given deference in the East, providing an ideal environment for displaying the efficacy of these values while simultaneously arguing for their importance in the development of the American nation. Ironically, as Turner himself recognised, the socio-economic mobility his argument assumed was losing ground in the face of ever-growing conglomerations of wealth. 'The Owners of the United States' had assessed this situation in 1889, concluding, 'The United States of America are practically owned by less than 250,000 persons, constituting less than one in sixty of its adult male population' (62: 273). The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 and President Theodore Roosevelt's later rhetoric attempted to soothe public fears and to reassert the importance of individual competition.

The Western formula reflects this crisis, offering further reassurance on the importance of the individual. It also downplays the significance of sectional rivalries, for thematically, the Western demonstrates that competitive individualism is central to both East and West, civilisation and nature. This demonstration is implicit in the initiation process undergone by hero and heroine. The hero is 'civilised': he accepts the responsibilities and limitations represented by a wife and family, and may even hang up his guns and pursue a more conventional career. Meanwhile, the heroine learns to accept Western ways, making the transition from East to West, civilisation to nature, in terms of the values she accepts as workable. She is likely to discover that lawless individualism is preparing the way for her more civilised, but impractical, values.

Such transitions argue for a revitalisation of American values; for the rebirth of Western zeal, boldness and toughness in the Eastern drawing-room. East and West are easily bridged because they are essentially the same, with differences only a matter of degree: individualism is the predominant social philosophy of both. In the East, where the struggle is more muted, man is seen to have lost his toughness, however. The Western seeks to underscore the continuing need for tough competitiveness. Clearly, the West of the Western is an Eastern creation, wished for within the frustrations and restraints of the East, and located in a theoretical place innocent of these restrictions.

The core of the Western's setting is a society much like the one Turner depicts, with instantly recognisable historical and geographical costuming. The landscape, dress and architecture are close enough to old photographs and to a cultural memory fed by various media to be recognisable as 'the American heritage'. While such historical and geographical attributes are metaphorically important, they are not enough. The focus of attention is a society in the first stages of development. The land is rich with untapped resources, but alien and treacherous, dominated by space and silence.

Space is absence, the civilisation that isn't there; the gap that must be bridged. Space isolates towns, ranches and individuals; it makes the necessity of self-reliance pictorially apparent. Silence is the auditory equivalent of space, and it works in much the same way. Both intensify the presence of anything which holds the foreground, contributing to the drama of the action.

Though the Western is set in a beleaguered, remote place, there is a tendency, especially during this time span, to portray the setting as a virgin land of untapped natural resources abounding in possibilities for exploitation. The land may yield rich mineral deposits, prove fertile farmland or provide lush grazing for cattle. Though rich and starkly beautiful, the landscape is wild, alien, testing seekers of wealth with difficult terrain, vast emptiness and silence.

The settlers are relative newcomers, and their hold on both the land and their own lives is tenuous. A society is just beginning to form, and the Lockean social contract has not yet been endorsed; the institutions which regulate behaviour and protect members' rights are still either non-existent or ineffective. Accordingly, every individual has perfect freedom and absolute responsibility for his own protection. Once the social contract is endorsed, the participant loses a portion of his freedom in return for protection, but this has not yet happened. The individual must prove himself superior to both the hardships of the land and the strength and cunning of others. If he emerges victorious, he is likely to secure material well-being, the esteem of his fellows, and 'get the girl'.

Owen Wister provided the model for this setting in The Virginian, which he described as 'a colonial romance'. 'For Wyoming between 1874 and 1890 was a colony as wild as was Virginia one hundred years earlier. As wild, with a scantier population, and the same primitive joys and dangers' (197: vii). In this Wyoming, the ideal conditions for mobility are re-established:

We had seen little men artificially held up in high places, and great men artificially held down in low places, and our own justice-loving hearts abhorred this violence to human nature.... Let the best man win! That is America's word. That is true democracy. And true democracy and true aristocracy are one and the same thing. (197: 147)

Not surprisingly, the best man does win. The Virginian is tested against a series of adversaries, and is found to be a natural gentleman and an able businessman, the match of any man, Eastern or Western. His victories against all those of suspect integrity give the book a 'high moral tone' and a rather simplistic duality between good and evil. The term 'best man' retains a certain ambiguity, however. A balance is achieved where the moral dimension submerges awareness of the precarious position of the weak, while the practical dimension discourages the enquiry, 'What if the best man morally does not win?'

Moral transgressions emerge as a question of skill: 'You've got to deal cyards well; you've got to steal well; and if you claim to be quick with your gun, you must be quick.... You must break all the Commandments well in this Western country. . . .' (197: 399). Indeed, transgressors are treated more sympathetically than their hapless victims. When captured outlaws and vigilantes breakfast together at the Cottonwoods before the lynching, discussion centres on the failure of the rustlers to outwit their pursuers rather than on their misdeeds.

The link between lawlessness and deprivation is underplayed while the ineptitude of the victimised is emphasised. The Virginian tells Shorty that as a reckless youth he often made, then lost, large sums at cards: 'The money I made easy that I wasn't worth, it went like it came. I strained myself none gettin' or spendin' it. But the money I made hard that I was worth, why I began to feel right careful about that' (197: 272-3). In part, this represents a moralistic distinction between rightful earnings and the ill-gotten gains of speculation, but Wister's failure to distinguish between the practical problem of defending property and the moral justification for possession also provides a useful sleight-of-hand. Existing property-holdings are justified, the impartiality of tenuous ownership is affirmed, and the illusion of fluid distribution is retained.

The Western also pays homage to the need for progress. It seems to have its eye firmly upon the glorious future toward which it is inevitably moving: after the lawlessness is crushed, after this land is tamed and its riches are realised, the glorious future will dawn. Hence the general note of optimism which characterises the Western of this period.

The euphoria is in fact generated by ignored contradictions and a retrogressive notion of progress. Once society is fully formed, material holdings are no longer an infallible indicator of individual worth. When for example, unearned wealth can be inherited with the protection of the law, competitive individualism is circumvented. The ideal society exists only in a moment of transition. What follows is anti-climactic, a world dominated by social institutions rather than by individuals. The epic movement of the Western, its great thrust toward progress, is really the illusory movement of running in place. This is the irony of the Western setting, and, as Marcus Cunliffe has pointed out, it threatens to make the whole exercise ridiculous.

Wister manages to turn the transitory nature of the Western setting to good advantage by using it to emphasise the continuity of American values. East and West, past and future, become hopelessly ensnarled. The East is what the West will become, but is itself an older West. The West represents a living past and emerging future. These interconnections help to emphasise continuity, as do the movements of characters between East and West. The Virginian, the keystone of unity, is seen finally as a man in the American mould, transcending differences between East and West.

He makes the transition from Western cowpuncher to Eastern-style capitalist, becoming 'an important man, with a strong grip on many various enterprises, and able to give his wife all and more than she asked or desired' (197: 503). By the end of the book, he is esteemed in both Bear Creek and Dunbarton.

Molly Wood, the young Eastern schoolmarm, undergoes a parallel transformation, learning Western ways. Superficial differences are easily accepted, but acquiescing to competitive individualism in its balder forms requires a sterner choice. Indeed, Molly Wood's initiation differs in kind from the Virginian's; in accepting her hero, she denies herself and her conscience. When she throws her arms around this dusty victor, she accepts him as husband, but also as killer.

The narrator is also initiated into the ways of the West; his wary fascination with the picturesque gives way to admiration for the hero's skills and respect for the egalitarianism of the West. He comes to realise that the West is purer in its regard for American values than the East. Although the narrator attains a degree of self-sufficiency, he never becomes fully integrated into Western ways, for he cannot accept vigilante justice.

For Wister, a member of the Philadelphia Bar Association and one-time practising lawyer, this 'rough justice' was difficult to accept. Wister evinces little sympathy for the underdog, however. The losers, the weak, are simply dismissed as unimportant. It is disturbing that such callous indifference has been preserved in such a popular formulaic construct.

Wister's personal indifference is more understandable. His sympathies and attitudes are those of the upper-class Eastern establishment. He was born into an upper-class Pennsylvania family of distinguished ancestry. His private schooling in Switzerland, England and the United States, his Harvard degree, and his membership in the prestigious university clubs, the Dickey and the Porcellian, provided him with further credentials appropriate to his family's social sphere. Wister was known to Theodore Roosevelt as 'Dear Dan' throughout a long correspondence, and was a member of the inner circle of the President's friends, a group which included Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr; writer Henry Adams; Senator Henry Cabot Lodge; and Elihu Root, then Secretary of State.

It is no wonder that, when Wister caught a glimpse of Coxey's army of unemployed marchers, the sight merely amused him, for, as he explained later, 'I did not live in coal mines or railroad yards; the talk I commonly heard was the talk of powerful people, well-to-do, sheltered by their own ability and the success which it had brought them . . .' (194: 200). He was much less amused by the Pullman Strike of 1894, which caused him considerable personal inconvenience. While he could forgive a capitalist such as Averill Harriman, whose offences were 'those of his era', he considered the labour-leader Bill Haywood to be 'a malignant public enemy' (194: 235). One sees these attitudes in Wister's comments about the West, as when he says of the cowboys, 'They are of the manly, simple, humorous, American type which I hold to be the best and bravest we possess and our hope in the future. They work hard, they play hard, and they don't go on strikes' (183: 246).

The contempt Wister shows for the weak was enshrined in the social theories of his day, especially in social Darwinism. As popularised in the United States, this creed provided a justification for the brutality of competitive individualism. It could readily embrace the reality of slums and urban poverty and the brutality of capitalistic competition: 'We accept and welcome ... as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves', wrote Andrew Carnegie in 1889, 'great inequality of environment; the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few; and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential to the future progress of the race' (37: 16-17). These conditions, while 'sometimes hard for the individual', were 'best for the race', because they ensured 'the survival of the fittest in every department' (37: 16).

This struggle for survival was seen as both inevitable - evolution being an in-built principle of the universe - and desirable, in that improvement over time was assumed. Competition was not merely justified, but promoted as a positive good. As Richard Hofstadter has pointed out, social Darwinism, especially in its American forms, was a body of belief 'whose chief conclusion was that the positive functions of the state should be kept to the barest minimum, it was almost anarchical, and it was devoid of that center of reverence and authority which the state provides in so many conservative systems' (48: 7).

Such was the particularly American synthesis of the ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer which Carnegie helped to popularise during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The appeal of the notion is not surprising. It justified the poverty and misery which were becoming increasingly visible in the industrial labour pools of American cities, and provided a seemingly scientific basis for the old-style individualism which was increasingly under attack. Furthermore, it was able to subsume very neatly the older icon of the 'self-made man', whose fortunes were dependent not on the prior advantages of inherited position or wealth, but on his character, skills and ability. The success of the self-made man demonstrated the fairness of the contest, and served to highlight the more positive aspects of social mobility by espousing 'self-improvement'. Horatio Alger's hugely successful juvenile stories, from Ragged Dick (1868) to A New York Boy (1898), helped to fix the image of the self-made hero in the American consciousness.

Social Darwinism, in concert with the Turner thesis, eased Eastern fears, and each doctrine helped to bolster the other. Projecting the brutality of current social conditions backwards onto a frontier setting demonstrated the universality of social Darwinism, while the applicability of social Darwinism to current conditions provided further evidence of continuity. The Western formula embraced both constructs, together with the ideal of the self-made man.

The prototype for the self-made Western hero is to be found in The Virginian. His triumph may be interpreted in social Darwinist terms, but Wister did not advocate this philosophy directly. That advocacy was left to Zane Grey. In Grey's work one plainly hears the echo of Darwin rather than Jefferson: 'Here at last was revealed the deepest secret of the desert, the eternal law men read in its lonely, naked face - self preservation and reproduction. The individual lived and fought and perished but the species survived' (222: 220).

For Grey the focus is no longer triumph, but survival. What Wister developed as social doctrine, Grey acknowledges as universal law. To a degree, this inflation makes the brutality of the principle more acceptable because it seems inescapable. But Grey also makes it clear that the individual is apt to regress to instinct and bestiality when the battle reaches its highest pitch. In Wanderer of the Wasteland (1923), the starving hero battles with a snake, hoping to kill it for food. Grey's description dramatises the atavistic streak in man:

Adam let out a hoarse yell. Something burst in him - a consummation of the instinct to kill and the instinct to survive. There was no difference between them. Hot, and mad and weak, he staggered after the crippled snake. The chase had transformed the whole internal order of him. He was starving to death, and he smelled the blood of fresh meat. (222: 79-80)

The confrontation ends when Adam falls and lies spent on the sand, literally face to face with the rattlesnake. Waiting for the snake to strike him, Adam is 'only a fearful animal, fascinated by another, dreading death by instinct' (222: 80).

This is a danger of the desert, the West. The strife by which the fittest survive tests the individual spiritually as well as physically: only those who acknowledge some form of idealism survive as men:

When the desert claims men it makes most of them beasts. They sink to that fierce level in order to live. They are trained by the eternal strife that surrounds them. A man of evil nature survivin' in the desert becomes more terrible than a beast. He is a vulture.... On the other hand, there are men whom the desert makes like it.... I've met a few such men, an' if it's possible for the divinity of God to walk abroad on earth in the shape of mankind, it was invested in them. The reason must be that in the development by the desert, in [the] case of these few men who did not retrograde, the spiritual kept pace with the physical. (222: 64)

Here Grey carefully separates physical strength from spiritual worth, raising the disquieting possibilities Wister submerged by blending the two. The distinction allows Grey to insist on the claims of a higher morality, however. He attempts to combine social Darwinism with a more compassionate philosophy, that of 'Christian humanism'. In doing so he attempts to bridge a rift within American values themselves.

At first, Christian humanism seems to provide an antidote to the disquieting implications of competitive individualism and the harsher aspects of social Darwinism. Divine law provides guidance in a lawless state. Social responsibility is reasserted as a positive good. The identity crisis is assuaged by following one's 'calling'. The professional ethics implicit in the notion of calling replace the amorality of the main chance. Social status is shown to be illusory, unimportant when viewed beside the salvation of the worthy.

Unfortunately, while this value set provides answers to many of the objectionable features of social Darwinism, it raises more problems than it solves. Although both doctrines spring from an individualistic outlook, they are incompatible. In so far as Christian humanism promotes the virtues of mercy, charity, fellowship and humility, it is diametrically opposed to the aggression of social Darwinism. Since Christian humanism emphasises the importance of every person's soul equally and stresses a common humanity, social Darwinism appears selfish and brutal when viewed from its vantage point. Looking the other way, Christian humanism seems impractical if not suicidal. Social Darwinism demands freedom from restraints, while Christian humanism pleads for equality of circumstances.

The gap between the two can be seen most clearly where Grey attempts synthesis. For example, The Heritage of the Desert (1910) raises the problem of the strong, virtuous man, Hare, who will not fight to defend his rights because he believes that it is wrong to use violence. The book makes it clear that no one can escape from the struggle to survive.

Hare knows a special trick that makes him very fast on the draw, but hangs up his guns to avoid bloodshed when trouble comes. He is shot for his scruples. As a result, he learns that 'he had come to the somber line of choice. Either he must deliberately back away, and show his unfitness to survive in the desert, or he must step across into its dark wilds' (207: 193). In the course of the same book, Augustus Naab learns a similar lesson. His reluctance to use his formidable strength is demonstrated in his confrontation with Dene, an outlaw gunman. Naab displays his fast draw, then shows Dene a huge fist: 'One blow would crack your skull like an egg-shell', Naab declares. 'Why don't I deal it? Because, you mindless hell-hound, because there's a higher law than man's - God's law - Thou shalt not kill!' (207: 30). Augustus Naab follows the dictates of his conscience, hoping that his enemies will be satisfied with what they have already taken, but they are not. He gives up one range with a valuable spring, then another complete with stock. Finally the rustlers attack his home, kill his son, and carry off his adopted daughter. The final outrage is too much; he denounces his creed and prepares to fight back, but Hare, out of gratitude for Naab's many kindnesses, takes the burden of revenge upon himself. Naab rides into town to find his enemy already dead:

'Eighteen years I prayed for wicked men', he rolled out. 'One by one I buried my sons. I gave my springs and my cattle. Then I yielded to the lust for blood. I renounced my religion. I paid my soul to everlasting hell for the life of my foe. But he's dead! Killed by a wild boy! I sold myself to the devil for nothing!' (207: 291)

Here in all its starkness is the contradiction involved in pairing social Darwinism with Christian morality. The last chapter of The Heritage of the Desert is an attempt to reverse the pessimism, to cover over the hollowness of Naab's victory with the happy ending of Hare's and Mescal's honeymoon. But Grey cannot easily submerge the issues he has raised, for he has introduced a problem central to both the Western formula and the ideology that stands behind it.

In this as in other respects, Grey is an almost perfect mirror of the contradictions of his society. He came from the Midwest, from the middle class, and grew up on baseball, adventure tales and small-town shenanigans. He absorbed the values of conservative, small-town America completely and uncritically, and swallowed the myths of his culture whole. Grey's fiction is an attempt to put forward a simplified version of life, a reconstruction better able to support his self-image and values. Grey escaped from the complexities of life into fiction, but he could not evade the contradictory tendencies within his small-town values. These he worries at and exposes, seemingly unaware of their true nature.

In The Heritage of the Desert, Grey uncovered the value rift between social Darwinism and Christian humanism. Later books display a solution typical of his culture: he assigns the seemingly passive moral perspective to women, the moral guardians of society, while allowing men to be active, aggressive and 'practical'.

Structurally, this solution is built into the formula itself. The plot conventions of the Western, as established in The Virginian, 'marry' the two by bringing hero and heroine together. This marriage requires the heroine to surrender her conscience in the name of practicality. In The Virginian this is obscured by the greater prominence given to the hero's less problematic initiation. Grey explores the dilemma of the heroine more explicitly. In the process he necessarily exposes the gulf between the value sets she must bridge: 'If you go deliberately to kill Beasley - and do it - that will be murder.... It's against my religion. . . .', pleads Helen in Man of the Forest (1920). 'But, child, you'll be ruined all your life if Beasley is not dealt with - as men of his breed are always dealt with in the West', Dale replies (212: 351, emphasis added).

Helen, like Molly Wood, must deny her self, but in Helen's case this surrender is worked through in a series of interior monologues. Discussion of the 'forces' at work on her personality is intermixed with the acknowledgement of newly perceived marital inclinations, making her thinking conveniently cloudy: 'Helen did not analyze that strange thought. She was as afraid of it as she was of the stir in her blood when she visualized Dale' (212: 222-3).

Even before she falls in love, Helen feels the impact of her new environment, and wonders whether she might succumb and drift toward primitivism. Dale, her hero, provides Grey's answer: 'There must be a great change in either you or me, accordin' to the other's influence. An' can't you see that change must come in you, not because of anythin' superior in me - I'm really inferior to you - but because of our environment?' (212: 158-9).

Grey's heroines must not sink too far, however. They are civilisation's missionaries, pointing the way toward a more humane society which it is men's duty to fight to establish. Women provide the rationale for men's violence. The proper feminine role is a projection of male needs, just as the West is a projection of Eastern needs. In the end, the heroine becomes a housewife. Helen accepts this, her true role, and with it her husband's superior wisdom: 'How full and perfect her trust, her happiness in the realization that her love and her future, her children, and perhaps grandchildren, would come under the guidance of such a man!' (212: 382). Helen is revealed as a male-ego prop on a number of different levels.

This ideologically convenient definition of sex role implies severe social constraints. Grey accepted these wholeheartedly: the 'modern woman' seemed vulgar and unfeminine to him, and he was shocked by the loosening social and sexual mores of the interwar years. The Tahitian girls were more to his taste; 'They wore their hair in braids down their backs, like American schoolgirls of long ago when something of America still survived in our girls', he noted wistfully (229: 171).

Grey's stance is always essentially conservative. He was baffled and repelled by many aspects of twentieth-century America. His books were written in conscious opposition to the literary standards of the day, to counter realism:

In this materialistic age, this hard, practical, swift, greedy age of realism, it seems there is no place for writers of romance, no place for romance itself. For many years all the events leading up to the great war were realistic, and the war itself was horribly realistic, and the aftermath is likewise. Romance is only another name for idealism; and I contend that life without ideals is not worth living. Never in the history of the world were ideals needed so terribly as now. (218: Foreword)

Had Grey been a true believer in social Darwinism, realism would have been his narrative mode of choice as the stance best able to cope with the Darwinian struggle descriptively. Grey's championship of the philosophy was decidedly ambivalent. He took it in as part of his intellectual heritage, welcomed the excitement which nature 'red in tooth and claw' could produce, but was troubled by the spiritual vacuum at its centre. Social Darwinism could provide no aura of heroism, nor could it support the old morality of small-town America.

Like the segment of society whose views he reflects, Grey rejected the amoral perspective. His answer to the decadence and corruption of the present, as sketched in such books as Majesty's Rancho (1942) and The Code of the West (1934), was to return to the simple virtues of the past. Whether his books pose the contrast between the scatter-brained college youth and the noble cowboy, between the immoral flapper and the true heroine of the West, directly or not, almost all of them are an attempt to turn the clock back, and to place before the reader the nobility of a former time. In this sense, Grey's revolt was essentially conservative, though Grey himself would no doubt have preferred to see it as idealistic.

Grey acknowledged that he was a romantic, an idealist, a dreamer; indeed he dignified his idealism as a generalised human need: 'I have yet to know anyone who has not some secret dream, some hope, however dim, some storied wall to look at in the dusk . . .', he wrote in the Foreword of To the Last Man (1922), 'We are all dreamers, if not in the heavy lidded wasting of time, then in the meaning of life that makes us work on.'

Grey's longing to return to a simpler time and less complex society, his distrust of the new-fangled, his sentimental idealism and his compassion for the victims of life's struggle all reflected his deep links with small-town, middle-class America around the turn of the century. His unease with the current direction of American social and economic trends was also typical, as was his faith in the essential goodness of the American way of life and his optimistic view of the future.

Up until the end of the First World War, much of American society, including the social theorists, shared this optimism. Progress was assured. The utopian writers of the 1890s, the turn-of-the-century muckrakers and the Progressive reformers all assumed that America's current problems were growing pains which could and should be overcome. By the end of the First World War the mood of the country had changed. The extent of the reversal can be judged by contrasting the difference in stance of the Western, forged at the turn of the century, and the hardboiled detective novel, developed in the 1920s. The latter typifies the big-city weariness and wariness of this post-war period; tired of idealism, cynical of reform, it mingles acceptance with outrage as it looks around at a world brutalised and morally bankrupt from a dirty, unheroic war and widespread corruption. This new cynicism was largely an urban phenomenon. Grey, like many of his readers, kept the faith long after it had become unfashionable to be sentimental, idealistic or optimistic; and he continued to enjoy a wide readership.

The size and sympathies of rural, small-town America, even during the 1920s, should not be underestimated as they affected the attitudes of the city dwellers themselves, many of whom had grown up in a less urban environment. The uncomplimentary portrait of the city in hard-boiled fiction reflected this continuing agrarian bias, as George Grella has pointed out (296: 11). The same bias gave the Western its aura of impending well-being.

By 1920 the intrusion of the city on American life could not be ignored: less than half of the population lived in small villages or on farms (53: 225). While cities were becoming more important politically and economically, they often seemed the repository of all that was evil. The city housed many of the vast wave of foreign immigrants who threatened, in the eyes of many, to dilute true Americanness. This was also the world of the flapper, the gangster and the party machine - each a travesty of some aspect of American values. The flapper was an assault on traditional concepts of sex role, especially on the notion of women as the moral guardians of society. The gangster's illicit success sullied the character of the self-made man, while the party machine stood as a contradiction of America's democratic self-image. The hard-boiled detective novel comes to terms with these troubling urban phenomena; its violence is an act of exorcism.

The urban setting of the hard-boiled detective formula stands in stark contrast to that of the Western. Resources and space are limited. The inhabitants are dwarfed by the buildings which block their horizons and intrude, drab and ugly, on their lives. The streets are labyrinthine and menacing, a world of shadows; indeed, the argot term 'to shadow' connotes this aura of unknown danger.

The city is a conglomeration of individuals without a sense of community, where people become lost or lose themselves among the faceless. The rich and the slum-dweller coexist; the majority compete to 'get by'. Even women have joined the fray. The fastest, easiest road to wealth is an illegitimate one: the wealthy mobster demonstrates the contrast between the relative stasis of the socioeconomic structure as a whole and the booming extra-legal economy. Hence the temptation to which everyone, including the guardians of law, is exposed. Almost everyone crosses the line at some point, but there are many gradations of self-indulgent criminality, from drinking or selling illegal whisky to killing for personal gain. This vast spectrum of law-breaking contributes an aura of corruption which pervades the hard-boiled novel. The deference paid to success, however achieved, makes this lawlessness provocatively troublesome. Societal values appear hypocritical at best.

The impetus toward progress which characterised the Western is lost; the city is a world locked into the present, without a sense of future. If the perspective is not ahistorical, it is nostalgic. A loss of certainty is manifest, and, for many, wealth fills the vacuum left by less tangible values. Wealth allows one to buy things, people, power, and often dispensation from justice. The tie between material well-being and happiness is broken, as is the connection between riches and worth.

The more critical attitude to wealth and the wealthy found in the hard-boiled formula mirrored changing social attitudes. Before the turn of the century, the great industrialists had been national heroes celebrated at length in the popular periodicals of the day. The muckraking years dethroned them, exposing much greed, dishonesty and corruption, as well as highlighting the poverty and misery caused by business policy and practice. The behaviour of the Harding administration seemed to confirm this view of the dirty dollar, as did, in later years, the findings of the Pecora committee on unethical Wall Street practices. The speculative fever, conspicuous consumption and tawdry materialism of the twenties, especially when viewed in retrospect from the Depression, further discredited the notion of wealth as an indicator of worth.

The private eye's refusal to accept a monetary reward reflects this awareness of the corrupting power of the dollar. The generally unsympathetic portrayal of the wealthy in the hard-boiled novel also reflects this view: they are empty souls who hide behind a showy facade, or manipulative brokers ready to consider any commodity as a medium of exchange, or they are outright hoodlums.

Dashiell Hammett's depiction of Personville in Red Harvest (1929) is an extreme example of this physical and moral squalor. The narrator's first impressions set the scene: 'The city wasn't pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness.... Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess.' The inhabitants are equally shabby: 'The first policeman I saw needed a shave. The second had a couple of buttons off his shabby uniform. The third stood in the centre of the city's main intersection Broadway and Union Street directing traffic, with a cigar in one corner of his mouth. After that I stopped checking them up' (352: 1). It does not take Hammett's nameless detective hero, the Op, long to learn why Personville has become known as Poisonville. Rival gangs battle for control of the town, which had been owned, mayor, police force, patronage and party machine, by a local industrialist. Not surprisingly, the police force is corrupt and partisan. The townspeople are a villainous lot. The bank clerk embezzles from his employer and kills his ex-girlfriend; the boxer has orders to throw his fight, but is forced to win because he is blackmailed; and both the town prostitute and the local lawyer indulge in extortion to supplement their incomes. The cleansing of Poisonville produces a bloodbath notorious in detective fiction, and in the end what is left is a city as essentially corrupt as when the Op started.

Personville is an extreme case, a concentration almost to absurdity of the horrors of the city. Through magnification, Red Harvest attacked the present directly, describing a social mileu recognisably close to that of the tumultuous cities. In doing so it represented a response which was different in kind to that of the Western, where the social mileu depicted was already an anachronism. The Western spoke to the present through the mythical past it created, providing a reassuring ideological framework for interpreting the bewildering problems of the present.

The ostensible realism of the hard-boiled detective formula provided a means of mythologising the present directly, as Hammett quickly realised. Conscious of the instant credibility awarded him as an ex-Pinkerton operative, Hammett took full advantage of public gullibility in this respect. His work displays his awareness of the re-formation - the alteration and intensification of meaning - of the 'real' detail reproduced in an arbitrarily ordered fictional framework. J. Edgar Hoover came to a similar realisation from a slightly different perspective when, during the 1930s, he used the fictional detective formula to remake his life: 'Hoover managed to persuade the public that the FBI agent was a real life version of the fictional detective hero Americans idolized in their magazines, comic strips and radio shows. Therefore as the head of the G-Men Hoover must be the greatest of them all, the archetypal detective' (315: 218).

Richard Gid Powers describes the way Hoover used the realistic social costuming of the hard-boiled detective formula as a bridge between life and fiction. On the one hand, Hoover made himself look the part of the heroic fictional detective by having himself photographed in 'typical action poses', and by drawing parallels between the exploits of his men and those of fictional detectives. On the other, he encouraged writers to take details from life, using the FBI and Hoover as heroes in works of popular culture (315: 218).

The private-eye hero of the hard-boiled detective formula is a much more marginal figure than Hoover's exploitation of the image would imply. The much-admired toughness of the hero is not what it initially seems to be. Far from being swaggering bravado, it indicates vulnerability, and is the tight-lipped response of the potential victim. The private eye lives in jeopardy, physically, socially and metaphysically.

In part, the hero's marginality is a product of his loss of faith. Unable to trust society, he must look to his own resources. The detective, a man of conscience, becomes judge and executioner, upholding his personal vision of justice in much the same way as the Western hero, but for very different reasons. As John Paterson has pointed out in his fine essay 'A Cosmic View of the Private Eye', this role, with its 'dangerous power and terrible kind of freedom' reflects the individual's isolation, disillusionment and uncertainty (313: 31). This situation can produce two very different types of hero: the man aware of the existential ambiguities in which he must survive (Hammett) and the hero who rejects uncertainty and becomes a crusader (Chandler):

Dashiell Hammett is, I think, with so many of his literary contemporaries, protesting the horrors of a savagely competitive society, the horrors of an urban-industrial civilisation. For when we scrape away the tough exterior of his hero we find not heart of stone and nerves of steel but the tortured sensibility of the Nineteen Twenties, its romantic isolation and its pessimism, its inability to find grounds for action. With Chandler's Philip Marlowe, however, we pass into another world, the world of the Depression.... For he represents the moral and social ardor of the Depression years, the impulse toward reform; and he is frequently prone to feelings of boyish optimism. (313: 32)

Paterson does not address the central irony of the situation: that both responses represent an individualistic response to a crisis in competitive individualism. One can no longer gain nobility and mobility by pitting oneself against a hostile wilderness. As a result, the focus is shifted to the conflict between persons, and this struggle is often brutal, cruel and stealthily dishonest. Success is problematical: one cannot win a loyal wife, wealth is suspect, and the participants are tarnished by the combat. However, even at its bleakest, the hard-boiled detective formula does not utterly abandon the individualistic ethic. The same ideological assumptions are defended by it as were supported by the Western; only the focus of the thematic argument has shifted.

The hard-boiled detective formula deals with the problem of corruption and criminal conspiracy, an interest created, to some extent, by the national press's lurid reporting of 'the crime problem'. Public concern for this 'new' problem developed in the 1890s when a fledgling network of nationwide news media publicised local offences, and when their search for the sensational meant that demand for crime exceeded the local supply (315: 206). The virulent nationalism of the war years, the Red Scare of 1919 and the union-bashing of both Harding's administration and Coolidge's fuelled a public concern with criminal conspiracy. The machinations of big-city politics and the scandals of the Harding administration, most notably Teapot Dome, made it clear that corruption and hypocrisy had penetrated to the very core of American government.

Prohibition merely added to the problem, much to the dismay of those who had expected it to improve public morality. Public awareness and concern over crime, especially over the violence and corruption associate with Prohibition, became so great that Herbert Hoover's acknowledgement of the problem in his inaugural address was the aspect of his speech which made headlines. Not only did Prohibition create a violent, but booming, extra-legal economy, it also defined a large new class of criminals who had little respect for the law they broke when purchasing bootleg whisky, thus giving America's traditionally ambivalent regard for law a new twist. The hard-boiled detective formula met the threat of criminal conspiracy and punished political corruption while maintaining this ambivalence.

In attacking the issue of criminal conspiracy, the hard-boiled detective novel also dealt covertly with the threat of collective action. Socialism and trade unionism had long acted as bogeys within American society. Both were despised as vices imported by a subversive alien community. After the First World War the distrust of foreigners and foreign ideas was heightened by the feeling that European machinations had drawn Americans into the mire of the trenches. The foreigners whom America had sheltered were not to be trusted. Zane Grey used the 'Wobblies', the International Workers of the World, as a villainous force in The Desert of Wheat (1919), hinting darkly that they had worked for the enemy throughout the war. 'Shall We Let the Cuckoos Crowd Us Out of Our Nest?' asked Owen Wister in a 1921 article in the American Magazine: 'They tell each other that private property is highway robbery. That is merely because they haven't any, and want yours and mine without working for it' (195: 47).

The hard-boiled detective novel tackled the problem of collective action by placing the conflict between an individual and a conspiracy at the centre of its plot. Collective action is discredited at the outset; group action is defined as criminal. The hero's demonstrable ability to deal with a collective adversary despite the unequal nature of the contest defends the efficacy and desirability of the individualistic ethic. Sleights of hand are employed here, as in the Western: the conspiracy sometimes dissolves on closer examination, or falls apart into its component individuals due to infighting or mutual suspicion. The unequivocal success of the Western hero is not enjoyed by the private eye. The detective cannot enjoy the personal benefits of his success, and his victory is at best temporary.

Even with these provisos, the strength of the individualistic bias is impressive. Hammett, the avowed Communist and perceptive critic of competitive individualism could not rid the formula of this premiss. His heroes are isolated despite the presence of associates. In Red Harvest, the Op dismisses one aide because he can not trust him; the other complains, 'Don't tell me anything that's going on

I'm only working with you' (352: 153). The unreliability of Effie Perine's woman's intuition becomes a running joke in The Maltese Falcon (1930). And it is Nick's wife who, out of boredom, gets him involved in a dangerous murder case. The need for self-reliance is emphasised by the failure of these allies. The individual is shown to be the only source of positive social action.

At first sight, the criminal conspiracies appear to provide more successful examples of group action. While they last, they circumvent the competitive code and subjugate the individual to a group outside his control. Each of Hammett's novels has such a conspiracy: there are the warlords of Personville in Red Harvest, Fitzstephan's web of criminal alliances in The Dain Curse (1929), the rather shaky Cairo-Gutman-O'Shaughnessy partnership in The Maltese Falcon, the political camps of The Glass Key (1931) and the Macaulay-Wolf conspiracy in The Thin Man (1934). These alliances are short-lived, however; they disintegrate as much from the strains placed on them by greed, distrust, and ambition as from the actions of the hero. As the conspiracies dissolve, the basic social unit of the competitive individual comes to the fore.

Hammett appears to be caught in a philosophical 'Catch-22': competitive individualism is bad because it is divisive, but collective action is impossible because individuals are competitive. Hammett cannot get past the basic ideological assumption of the primacy of the individual, and can pose no alternative. In this respect, the later condemnation of Hammett's work as subversively Marxist must be considered wryly ironic.

Competitive individualism triumphed in the formula, but within American society the plight of the individual provoked increasing anxiety. Such social theorists as Herbert Croly and Richard T. Ely attempted to reconcile individualism with the needs of an increasingly complex society. The Progressive movement as a whole reflected anxiety over the endangered autonomy of the individual. 'At bottom', notes Richard Hofstadter, 'the central fear was fear of power, and the greater the strength of an organised interest, the greater the anxiety it aroused' (46: 241). In the political sphere it was the party machine which threatened to disenfranchise the individual. Within the economy, it was the swollen power of the corporate interests.

The brute power of the trusts was not the only aspect of the developing industrial organisations which threatened the integrity of the individual. Henry Ford's introduction of the first assembly line in 1914 made the individual attendant to the productive machinery. The continuing trend toward rationalisation within industrial management made employees keenly aware of their subordination to the corporate structure.

The First World War undercut the position of the individual further. It justified more centralised political control, and accelerated changes in the industrial sphere. The scale of operations within a global theatre dwarfed individual ambitions. And on the battlefields the individual soldier was gassed or mortared by an unseen hand, undistinguished and indistinguishable from his fellows. John Dos Passos's tribute to the unknown soldier in 1919 powerfully captured this terrifying anonymity.

As if these attacks on the male model of the competitive individualist were not enough, the changing social ambitions of women threatened to undermine their ideological role of moral guardianship. Although women had used this very concept of inherent moral superiority to argue for the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, and had succeeded in gaining the vote in 1920, the suffragettes had shown a militancy which was not soon to be forgiven them. Women had sinned in other ways as well. They had been active in the trade-union movement, and now public sentiment had shifted away from the unions. Having joined the workforce in increasing numbers, entering new fields of employment during the war, women were now viewed as usurpers. Women's organisations had been active in pushing for reforms during the Progressive era, but with the campaign for Prohibition successfully concluded, reform was in disrepute. The increased personal freedom enjoyed by women, including the much announced new sexual freedom of the 1920s, also stirred resentment; their search for personal fulfilment socially, sexually and intellectually was seen as a direct abdication of their guardianship of Christian humanism.

The hard-boiled detective novel reflects the changing status of women as well as this reservoir of resentment, often portraying them as competitive, devious, wily and morally degenerate. This changed image conveys the impression of a society fragmented and embattled, and invites a pornography of violence which was not exploited until after the Second World War. Women's changing role, as reflected in the hard-boiled detective novel, raises problems not found in the Western. Women not only compete, but prove to be dangerous contenders, able to use their sexuality to trap and weaken men. Even the detective is at risk; his need for love and sexual fulfilment leaves him vulnerable to their allure. Women become adversaries, and are often among the criminals the detective seeks.

A particularly jaundiced view of the 'new woman' can be found in Raymond Chandler's work, where old concepts of sex role meet the new social reality head on. Chandler's detective hero Philip Marlowe approaches women with an outmoded chivalry, treating them with an elaborate courtesy and protective attentions. Marlowe's, and Chandler's, image of the proper feminine role is not far removed from that of the Zane Grey heroine. The virtues of the traditional homemaker-helpmate are expected: chastity, cloistered unworldliness and moral purity, ultimate obedience, and the abnegation of an independent self in the service of husband and family.

Such expectations contrast sharply with the social realities of The Big Sleep (1939). Carmen Sternwood stands as the nightmare version of the new woman: she is a psychopath, selfish and selfwilled enough to murder men who refuse her sexual advances. She is the exact inversion of old-style femininity; instead of servicing men, she is serviced by them. Where the myth demands wholesomeness, she is physically degenerate; where it seeks homely wisdom, she is intellectually blighted; where it asks for guidance, she is morally abhorent; where it requires providence, she is profligate.

Carmen Sternwood is an extreme example, however. Anne Riordan, the good girl of Farewell, My Lovely (1940) shows just how narrow the acceptable limits of female behaviour are. Anne's attempts to compete with Marlowe intellectually meet with resentment, as do her attempts to direct his behaviour. What Marlowe approves of wholeheartedly is her domesticity. It is when she provides a comfortable, peaceful refuge for him, when she acts the part of homemaker that she awakens in him an alluring vision of peaceful and supportive comfort: 'She came back with the glass and her fingers cold from holding the cold glass touched mine and I held them for a moment and then let them go slowly as you let go of a dream when you wake with the sun in your face and you have been in an enchanted valley' (379: 162). Woman's place, clearly, was still in the home.

The image of proper feminine behaviour displayed in Chandler's work is a projection of both masculine wish fulfilment and cultural utility. It represents a reaction against newly won rights, opportunities and freedoms, and is particularly critical of the active, competitive woman who would presume to take advantage of them. However, Chandler's portrayal of women has a vehemence which can not be fully explained by current social attitudes and anxieties; it shows a terror of sexuality which is characteristically his own. Even this has a wider significance, for it is expressed in terms of the conventional image of woman as a temptress.

Mrs Grayle's portrayal in Farewell, My Lovely is an exploration of the allure and terror inspired by the female as sex object. Mrs Grayle's picture leads Marlowe to see her as the ultimate temptress: 'A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. She was wearing street clothes that looked black and white, and a hat to match and she was a little haughty, but not too much. Whatever you needed, whatever you happened to be - she had it' (379: 84). She is the sought-after vessel, both black and white. Her allure is associated with her moral ambiguity. On the one hand, she is Eve, weak and ready to fall; on the other, she is the keeper of the faith. She is a temptress whose allure is related to her weakness and a saint by virtue of her mortification to the needs of society.

Such a role requires a fine balance which is virtually impossible to maintain. Mrs Grayle's progress traces her fall. By the time Marlowe confronts her with the full range of her crimes, she is no longer even pretty: 'She looked merely like a woman who would have been dangerous a hundred years ago, and twenty years ago daring, but who to-day was just Grade B Hollywood' (379: 242). It is not until she sacrifices her life for the man who loves her that her essential ambiguity, and her allure, are restored.

The image of womanhood in Chandler's fiction shows how much had changed, and how much had stayed the same, over the four decades from the publication of The Virginian to that of Farewell, My Lovely. Molly Wood and Mrs Grayle are at first unrecognisable as sisters, but the ideological genes are there. Over these decades expectations had lowered significantly, while the ideal remained, perhaps honoured in the breach rather than in the observance, but recognisably the same. The Virginian and Philip Marlowe are more easily discernible as brothers, though the easy confidence and optimism of the former have clearly been ground out of the detective. Forty years had taken their toll, but the self-made individualist and his idealised, humble helpmate remained central to America's dreamscape.