The Western Formula

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

white of the West. There is an unequivocal struggle between good and evil—and guns and violence can only solve that. Jane Tompkins standpoint on a Western seems to be a middle ground between Cawelti and Crane. She recognizes that violence is a central theme to a Western, but as well explains how we think of violence. In this day of age, we as a society have prohibited violence as a means of solving problems—Crane does not directly follow this in his stories, but definitely questions it. Cawelti on the other hand marks violence as the only answer—another black and white circumstance.
“This radical discrepancy between the sense of eroding masculinity and the view of America as a great history of men against the wilderness has created the need for a means of symbolic expression of masculine potency in an unmistakable way. This means is the gun, particularly the six-gun” (Crane 299).
Tompkins makes us aware that a stereotypical Western will hold ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

is his main concern. “The story can climax, and desire be sated, only if the moral applause meter reads way of the scale in the hero’s favor” (Tompkins 236). Crane describes Scratchy Wilson as a man when sober cannot hurt a fly, but while intoxicated will hurt anything. The black and white issue turns gray by giving the villain a heart.
Throughout the entire story, the ideas of violence arise, but the actions upon them do not. This is a very bad path Crane chose if he was looking to depict a formula western. If this story was to follow the standards Cawelti has set forth, Potter would most likely be dead and Scratchy Wilson would be marking another notch on his gun ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: