B.M. Bower: The Poor Man's Wister

Meyer, Roy W.

doi:10.1111/j.0022-3840.1973.0703_667.x

The J of Popular Culture

1973

DOI: 10.1111/j.0022-3840.1973.0703_667.x

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B.M. Bower: The Poor Man's Wister

Roy W. Meyer¹

Abstract: B.M. Bower: The Poor Man's W i s t e r B~ Roy W. M e y e r hen Owen Wister published The Virginian in 1902, he set off a major detonation, the rever-

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“Truer ’n Hell”: Lies, Capitalism, and Cultural Imperialism in Owen Wister’s The Virginian , B. M. Bower’s The Happy Family , and Mourning Dove’s Cogewea

Humphreys¹

2010

wal

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This essay investigates the social and national implications of lying in the popular Western formula through a close reading of three works that cross gender and cultural lines: Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), Bertha Muzzy (B.M.) Bower’s The Happy Family (1907), and Mourning Dove’s Cogewea (1927). In the popular Western formula, lying is a narrative convention with a didactic purpose. The liar is usually a cowboy, whose acts of linguistic deception perform specific cultural work, organizing characters into economic and racial strata. The cowboy liar can legitimately lie only to certain groups or social members within specific contexts, thus defining those who either possess or lack the cultural capital to demand honesty. In contrast, Mourning Dove reconfigures the convention of lying in the popular western to support an Indigenous worldview, in which each individual in the collective community of the ranch has value beyond capitalist, neo-colonial definitions of worth. As such, Mourning Dove’s Western opposes the discourse of capitalism—with its requisite social disparities—that underpins both Bower’s and Wister’s Westerns.

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“Truer ’n Hell”: Lies, Capitalism, and Cultural Imperialism in Owen Wister’s The Virginian , B. M. Bower’s The Happy Family , and Mourning Dove’s Cogewea

Humphreys¹

2010

wal

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Annual Bibliography of Studies in Western American Literature

Bullen¹,

Alsmeyer²,

Brunvand³

et al. 1971

Western American Literature

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William S. Hart's Hells Hinges: An Ideological Approach to the Early Western

Palmer¹

1985

Canadian Review of American Studies

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For the last decade an allegoresis that reads both character and story as expressions of psychic or social conflicts has dominated the contextual criticism of the film Western. One of the central assumptions of this approach is that popular narratives, because they are products of so-called mass culture, are escapist in the sense that their various discourses are largely esthetic (i.e., symbolically significant) rather than mimetic.1 Speaking of formulaic story types like the Western, John Cawelti, for example, observes that their ''purpose is not to make me confront motives and experiences in myself that I might prefer to ignore but to take me out of myself by confirming an idealized self image." While Cawelti concedes that such patterns do exist "in a complex dialectic with other aspects of human life," he maintains that the escapist functions of popular story are indeed dominant, effective only when presented, of course, "within a framework that the audience can still accept as having some connection with reality."2 In The Six-Gun Mystique, his influential study of the genre, Cawelti therefore emphasizes that the continuing appeal of the Western lies less in its evocation of certain aspects of historical discourse about the West and the frontier than in its various psychological dynamics: "the Western's capacity to accommodate many different kinds of meaning—the archetypal pattern of heroic myth, the artistic imperatives of dramatic clarity and unity, the influence of media, the tendency of popular forms to assume a game-like structure, the need for social ritual and for the disguised expression of latent motives and tensions—as well as its ability to respond to changing cultural themes and concerns- have made the formula successful as popular art and entertainment over many generations."3

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B.M. Bower: The Poor Man's Wister

Abstract: B.M. Bower: The Poor Man's W i s t e r B~ Roy W. M e y e r hen Owen Wister published The Virginian in 1902, he set off a major detonation, the rever-

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

“Truer ’n Hell”: Lies, Capitalism, and Cultural Imperialism in Owen Wister’s The Virginian , B. M. Bower’s The Happy Family , and Mourning Dove’s Cogewea

“Truer ’n Hell”: Lies, Capitalism, and Cultural Imperialism in Owen Wister’s The Virginian , B. M. Bower’s The Happy Family , and Mourning Dove’s Cogewea

Annual Bibliography of Studies in Western American Literature

William S. Hart's Hells Hinges: An Ideological Approach to the Early Western

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