Why Is He a Southerner？: The Imperial Body of the Hero of The Virginian

概要

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An acclaimed classic Western, Owen Wister's The Virginian（1902）is conceived as a historical romance by the author, and the Western hero is a chivalric man from the South. To clarify the meaning of a Southern hero in the West, this paper examines the story in terms of U.S. imperialism, masculine crisis, and the gendered image of the South after the end of the Civil War. Wister's romance is a cultural text and expresses the interconnections of white men's anxieties over race, class and gender in the national imagination at the turn of the century. The setting of the colonial West, a Southern hero and his romance with an Eastern lady as well as his friendship with an Eastern man is a vehicle to dissolve those anxieties. The West is an ideological place for nation building and the spectacular masculine Southern body is incorporated into the imperialist discourse to be shown as an idealized national body. The process revolves around middle-class Anglo-Saxonism, involving a reconfiguration of gender relations based on the modern heteronormativity. The Virginian is an attempt to re-embody the nation by transforming the homosocial reunion of men of the East/North and the West/South into the heterosexual romance of a Northern/Eastern lady and a Southern/Western man, thereby representing the nation.