Tea at Trianon: The Western Reinvented. Again.

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, March 28, 2022

The Western Reinvented. Again.

I actually thought The Power of the Dog was an excellent film, and not so much about a gay cowboy as about a brave young man who uses his intelligence to protect his mother from a bully. From Quillette:

Violent psychopaths are a mainstay of Old West fiction. The directors of classic Westerns like John Ford and Anthony Mann filled their films with morally ambivalent characters. Some reviewers seem to think that The Sisters Brothers is revolutionary simply because it treats the Old West with humor and irreverence, which suggests that they’ve never read Charles Portis’s True Grit, or Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, or Darryl Ponicsan’s Tom Mix Died For Your Sins, or Clair Huffaker’s Flap, or, for that matter, any cowboy poetry.
In 2021, Tom Lin, a graduate student at UC Davis, published his first novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu. In an interview for the Big Thrill website, Lin said, “The idea for the book came to me as a one-line pitch, intense and inchoate: a Western, except the protagonist is Chinese American.” In an interview with UCDavis magazine entitled “Reimagining the Outlaw,” Lin added, “I think the Western as a genre is so powerfully integrated with the United States and cultural concepts of Americanness. I decided to lean into it and see how the myth-making machine of the Western genre might be repurposed.”
Lin was born in Beijing in 1996, so he can be forgiven for the assumption that this is a new idea. Baby Boomers will recall the same concept from the TV series Kung Fu, which starred David Carradine and ran from 1972 to 1975, for a total of 63 episodes. It inspired several feature films and TV series re-boots, as well as a handful of tie-in novels. But even in the 1970s, this concept was not new. Asian characters, and even Asian protagonists, had been showing up in Western novels for years. One of the best-executed novels dealing with this theme is The Land of the Golden Mountain, published in 1967 and written by C.Y. Lee, better known for his novel, The Flower Drum Song, which became a Broadway (and then a Hollywood) musical. The Land of the Golden Mountain is the tale of a young Chinese woman who comes to California as an indentured servant during the Gold Rush era. She has to disguise herself as a boy to avoid sexual harassment. But even while she is passing as a boy, she attracts her share of sexual interest from other men—further evidence that the Western novel was dealing with race and gender issues long before anyone felt the need to repurpose it.
A nearly identical set-up gets a more frank treatment in Gillian Stone’s 1980 Western novel, also entitled Land of Golden Mountains (the Chinese referred to America by that name, so it appears in the titles of several novels about Chinese immigrants to the US). Li-Li, the protagonist of Stone’s novel, also comes to California during the Gold Rush, but she doesn’t hide her femininity and ends up employed in a brothel. Ching Yun Bezine’s excellent 1991 novel, Children of the Pearl, tells a similar tale about a group of Chinese indentured servants who come to California in 1911 and are forced to make their way in a hostile environment not much different from the one that awaited earlier arrivals. One of them ends up working as a prostitute. Sex work has long been a factor in Western fiction (one of the main characters in the long-running Western TV series Gunsmoke is a former prostitute). Red Lights on the Prairie, James H. Gray’s 1971 exploration of sex workers in the Old West, was published as a mass market paperback by Signet and sold on the same supermarket spinner racks as the works of Louis L’Amour and Elmore Leonard. The Asian-immigrant-comes-West theme existed long before anyone ever thought of re-inventing the Western. (Read more.)