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Graduate Work
DEFINING THE CULTURE
OF MANHOOD
IN THE UNTAMED WEST OF LARRY MCMURTRY’S
LONESOME DOVE
By Scott Hays
Summer 2006
Introduction
Nothing prepared me for the experience of
reading for the first time Larry McMurtry’s
masterwork Lonesome Dove, for which
he won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Literature.
I had never before read a “western”
novel, and nothing sounded more boring than
a story about two aging Texas Rangers undertaking
a cattle drive from the Rio Grande to the
Canadian border. But there I sat, hour after
hour, savoring every moment with Augustus
“Gus” McCrae, Woodrow Call,
and the other men and boys of the Hat Creek
Cattle Company.
These were men unlike the mythic cowboy
heroes I had emulated, via television, as
a young boy—Roy Rogers, The Lone Ranger,
Daniel Boone, Rowdy Yates, Marshall Matt
Dillon, the Rifleman, Hoss and Little Joe.
The men in Lonesome Dove were real
men, with real problems. That Gus and Call
were aging Texas Rangers was really beside
the point. For there, in the subtext of
the story, was what I understood to be the
problem of manhood in the American West.
Here were frontiersmen who were physically
strong, loyal, creative, self-reliant, resourceful,
and courageous , who were also occasionally
weak, lazy, unethical, and slow to embrace
love. If I could somehow make sense of it
all, fuse together the best of Gus and Call,
I too might lead my life with dignity and
purpose, with no confusion about what it
means to be a man in contemporary American
society.
It seemed clear to me that Larry McMurtry
had created the secondary character of Newt,
Call’s unacknowledged son with the
prostitute Maggie, as the embodiment of
a young man’s rite of passage. This
teenage boy is initiated into manhood through
the harsh and violent realities of life
on the American frontier. Newt chases horse
thieves, socializes with whores, and wears
a gun for the first time. He comes face-to-face
with hostile Indians, death, and devastation,
and confronts the moral ambiguities of life
out on the plains. He learns about men and
their naturally aggressive impulses, about
how to love women, about how to feel comfortable
and productive in a world of men and savages.
He learns about himself, and about what
it means to be a man among men; although,
by the end of the novel, young Newt’s
formal transition from adolescence to adulthood
turns into more of a failed coming-of-age
story.
What can living men take away
from Lonesome Dove, to help us
better understand ourselves and our nature
as men? My intention here is to help illuminate
the subtext in Lonesome Dove that
helps define the nature of manhood in Western
American myth, at least from the perspective
of author Larry McMurtry. This analysis
is particularly relevant in that in modern
America, it has often been the absence of
a strong male role model that has confused
many teenage boys about their own masculinity,
or so argues child psychologist Michael
Thompson, Ph.D., co-author of Raising
Cain, a book that explores the emotional
development of modern American boys .
Richard Slotkin, author of
Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier
in Twentieth-Century America, states
that myths of the frontier are “arguably
the longest-lived of American myths”
with a “powerful continuing presence
in contemporary culture. ” And James
Oliver Robertson writes that American myths
should be examined by all Americans because
“only those who participate in them
can comprehend their power and their imagery.’
My hope is that by studying the rite of
passage of young Newt within the power and
imagery of the American West, I might be
able to identify that specific thread that
continues to engage me—and many other
Larry McMurtry fans, I suspect—with
Lonesome Dove.
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