The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains was written by Owen Wister and first appeared as a series of short stories in Harper’s Monthly from 1892-1901 before being fixed up into a novel. Wister (1860-1938) wrote in several different genres, from Society novels to biographies, and was friends and correspondents with writers as varied as Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton, and Ernest Hemingway. But he will always be best-known for The Virginian, the first modern Western and an enduring classic of the genre.

The Virginian begins with the arrival of the nameless narrator into Medicine Bow, a small town on the Wyoming frontier. The narrator, an Easterner, has no experience on the frontier and is struck by everything he sees, especially a tall, competent cowboy who easily tames a cunning and defiant pony. The narrator is a guest of Judge Henry, and is expected in Medicine Bow, but his luggage has been mislaid during the train trip to Medicine Bow. The narrator is met by the man Judge Henry sent to collect the narrator: the pony-taming cowboy. The narrator makes the mistake of trying to be too familiar too quickly with the cowboy, who is from “old Virginia,” and the cowboy (who is only ever called “the Virginian”) coldly but politely corrects him. They decide to stay an extra day to collect the narrator’s luggage. The narrator is struck by the different customs of the frontier: when the Virginian’s friend Steve calls him “a son-of-a ----“ the narrator expects the Virginian to strike him down—“he had used to the Virginian a term of heaviest insult, I thought”¹—but the Virginian only smiles at it. However, that night, during a poker game, a cow-puncher of ill-intent named Trampas uses the same term to the Virginian with much different results:

The Virginian’s pistol came out, and his hand lay on the table, holding it unaimed. And with a voice as gentle as ever, the voice that sounded almost like a caress, but drawling a very little more than usual, so that there was almost a space between each word, he issued his orders to the man Trampas:---

“When you call me that, smile!” And he looked at Trampas across the table.²

Trampas backs down, but it is clear that he hates the Virginian. And the narrator is struck again by the difference between the reality of the frontier and its inhabitants and his own experience.

The narrator and the Virginian leave Medicine Bow for Judge Henry’s ranch, over 260 miles away, and on the ride to the ranch the narrator learns a little about the Virginian and life on the frontier and a lot about what not to say and do. Once they reach Judge Henry’s ranch the Virginian is told that the nearby town of Bear Creek has hired a new schoolmarm, Mary Stark Wood, from Bennington, Vermont. The narrator spends his time at the ranch and becomes friends with the Virginian, and then returns home. The Virginian discovers that Steve has been rustling cattle, and they fall out. And Miss Wood arrives at Bear Creek. She is young, of good New England descent, and is pretty, and she has come to the frontier to escape her family and their wishes that she might marry a man in Bennington who she does not love. When Wood comes to the frontier she is momentarily stuck in a river, and the Virginian rescues her and puts her on her way. He is attracted to her but does not introduce himself.

After Wood has been at Bear Creek for a short time she has attracted the romantic attentions of a number of cowboys and has turned them all down. At a barbecue, which the Virginian attends, Trampas makes a coarse joke about Wood and the Virginian forces Trampas to admit that he was lying. The Virginian introduces himself to Wood, and it is not a promising introduction, but he is more attracted to her than ever, and he lets her know his feelings for her in his usual understated way, although she smoothly makes it clear that she is not interested in him like that. But they become friends. She starts lending him books, and he enjoys them and enjoys discussing them with her. But she continues to discourage his romantic comments.

The Virginian successfully leads a difficult cattle drive to Montana, although Trampas proves himself more of a nuisance than before. Judge Henry rewards the Virginian by making him foreman, which prompts Trampas to resign from the judge’s ranch and ride away. Some time later the Virginian is riding back from another ranch by himself—his companion, a brutal man named Balaam, mistreated a good horse, which provoked the Virginian so badly that he beat Balaam senseless—when he is ambushed by some Indians and left for dead. Wood, who cannot bring herself to accept the Virginian’s love or to admit that she loves him, is about to return home to Bennington when she finds the badly wounded Virginian passed out near a spring. She takes him home and nurses him back to health, and she eventually gives in to her feelings for him. He writes to her mother to ask for her hand in marriage, but Wood’s family (with the exception of her wise great-aunt) are appalled at the notion of Wood marrying someone so far beneath her.

The cattle rustling in the area around Judge Henry’s ranch becomes widespread and the Virginian and his men are forced to put a stop to it. They catch two of the men, one of whom is the Virginian’s former friend Steve. The Virginian and the others know that Trampas is another of the rustlers, but neither Steve nor the other man will inform on Trampas or the other rustlers. Steve and the other rustler are hanged, something that hurts the Virginian deeply, but he eventually reconciles himself to what he was forced to do. Wood is shocked by the hanging of Steve, which she thinks of as a lynching, but she is eventually persuaded that it is an accepted and even correct part of the frontier. However, just before the Virginian and Wood are to be married Trampas reappears and calls the Virginian out. Wood tells the Virginian that if he kills Trampas she and he are through, but the Virginian knows that a shoot-out is necessary and he guns Trampas down in a fair fight. Wood takes him back, and they marry, find an idyllic, secluded area to honeymoon in, and live happily ever after.

Although The Virginian has never been out of print and remains widely read, its residence in the ghetto of the Western (a more cramped and disrespected location than even that of superhero comics) means that large numbers of modern readers have not read it or read it only as children or teenagers. This is unfortunate, as The Virginian is considerably more thoughtful, interesting, and contrary to expectations than modern readers might anticipate or predict.

Simply as a reading experience The Virginian is surprisingly good. Although the novel is told in a leisurely fashion, it reads quickly and easily. The prose is not dated, the dialogue is naturalistic–if the men of the Western frontier didn’t really talk the way they do in The Virginian the reader will be convinced that they should have–and the characterization is surprisingly solid. Although the characterization is of the epic/mythic variety, and the Virginian is a paradigm for later cowboy protagonists, Wister admirably refrains from romanticizing the frontier life. Most of the novel concentrates on the day-to-day realities of frontier life, the danger, hard work, long hours, and bad food; Wister’s portrayal of the West and its inhabitants is far more realistic than his predecessors’ (see: The Deadwood Dick Adventures). Wister includes the sorrows of the frontier, such as the death of Pedro the horse, caused by the stupidity of his former owner and the cruelty of his new owner.

The reader knows that the romance between The Virginian and Miss Wood is destined to end happily, but its development is realistic; by the end of the novel they have worked for and earned their happily-ever-after. Although the narrator is prone to rhapsodies about love and emotion, the characters themselves speak in a realistic way and are not melodramatic in their expressions of emotion. Wister fits his characters to archetypes, but they remain relatively realistic. The characters and their interactions are credible; the reader believes that there is someone as capable as the Virginian on the frontier and that Wister accurately captures the way in which the men of the frontier interact. Trampas certainly qualifies as a typical Western black hat, but Wister makes him an individual. His is not the gloriously over-the-top wickedness of a Gothic Hero-Villain, but rather the tawdry, low, petty, and almost inarticulate cruelty of a small, mean man.

Beyond the enjoyment of the story and the appreciation of Wister’s authorial choices, the modern reader will be struck by Wister’s treatment of the idea of the frontier and by the ideal of masculinity presented in the novel.

The romance between Miss Wood and the Virginian occupies the majority of the novel’s space, but the true plot of The Virginian is the Romance of the Frontier, the Matter of the West. Although Wister began writing the stories which compose The Virginian in 1891, the finished novel, with the stories rewritten so that they were linked together, appeared in 1902, ten years after the closing of the frontier. The Virginian is the culmination of the ideological treatment of the frontier which began with the earliest Westerns (see: The Last of the Mohicans, Tokeah, or the White Rose) and was perpetuated by the dime novel Westerns (see: The Deadwood Dick Adventures, The James Brothers Adventures). With the frontier at last settled and the natives finally driven on to reservations, the West could be re-imagined as a desolate, empty land, ready to be conquered by settlers and cowboys. Wister’s frontier lacks blacks, lacks Mexicans, lacks Chinese, and presents the natives as an abstract threat on the level of elk and bear. The Virginian not only shows no guilt for the destruction of the native peoples of the frontier, but displays no consciousness that their destruction is in any way important. Although the actual Western frontier was a multicultural area, full of former slaves, Mexicans, Canadians, French-Canadians, and Chinese in addition to Anglo settlers, the dime novels created the idea of a frontier populated only by white men and women, and The Virginian reifies this notion.

Future writers of Westerns were influenced not only by The Virginian’s Whites Only frontier but also by its development of the idea that the Western frontier was a clean, vigorous place to escape to, a refuge from the decadence of urban civilization. Wister was hardly the first to articulate this position, which was a staple of the dime novels (see: The Deadwood Dick Adventures), but Wister added to it the element of masculinity–Northerners and city folk are the effete products of the “pale decadence of New England,”³ while men on the frontier are healthy and strong–as well as a pro-South attitude. Wister’s frontier is for men, not for weaklings: “In the East you can be middling and get along. But if you go to try a thing on in this Western country, you’ve got to do it well.”⁴ And while the men of the frontier are superior to Easterners, the Virginian is the superior of his fellow Westerners. Wister spent his adult life in South Carolina, and his sympathies are clear. The Virginian is from the South, is a gentleman and is chivalrous, and is the brother and son of men killed fighting for the South during the American Civil War. Northerners and Westerners, because they are not from the South, are unable to equal the Virginian. Wister is too honest to entirely exempt the South from criticism, however, and comes out against lynching: “I consider the burning a proof that the South is semi-barbarous...we put no such hideous disgrace upon the United States.”⁵ In this case, however, Wister is referring to mobs dragging black men out of jail and burning them, rather than what the modern reader will think of as lynching.

The issue of masculinity in twentieth century frontier literature has come under increasing amounts of critical scrutiny in recent decades, but The Virginian is not usually included in discussions of the subject. This is unfortunate, because the novel’s version of masculinity is surprisingly different from that of later Westerns. The masculinity of The Virginian is not the taciturn, grim masculinity of later Westerns. There is a streak of humor and mischief in the novel, modest but sly. Men can laugh and tease each other and joke and still be men. Although violence is used to resolve matters, it is emphatically the final option, to be resorted to only when a man is pressed beyond all ability to resist or when he is forced to be violent. The Virginian continually tries to find ways to avoid killing Trampas, and though the other characters believe that killing Trampas as soon as possible would be the easiest and best thing to do, the Virginian is respected for his unwillingness to kill.

When the Virginian does kill, he does not treat it lightly. Violence in The Virginian is a serious business, and there is no humor in it except of the grimmest variety. And what humor there is, while grim, is ultimately kind–plying Steve with compliments when he is about to be hanged–and not cruel. There is none of the gloating of later Westerns and action movies, no glib one-liners, only realistic emotions. The Virginian’s reaction to his execution of Steve is true-to-life. The Virginian knows that, morally, he was right to do so, and he knows that he would do so again, but the hanging bothers him, and he keeps returning to it, worrying at it before the hanging. The Virginian is hurt that Steve did not say goodbye to him, and the Virginian eventually breaks down and cries. The Virginian is not embarrassed to cry in front of the narrator, nor does he reject the narrator when he puts his arm around the Virginian so that he can lean on the narrator and cry. Displays of emotion in The Virginian are not discouraged; on Wister’s frontier men should not express their true feelings among strangers, but between true friends, those one trusts and respects, those feelings will eventually emerge, and it is a good thing when they do.

Choose a history of the formula western, and Owen Wister's Virginian will invariably be cited as the transitional text-responsible all by itself for the emergence of the soft-spoken, sure-shooting cowboy hero. Hundreds of subsequent novels by authors like Zane Grey, Max Brand, and Louis L'Amour, along with scores of cinema and television westerns, have simply embellished the image of quiet violence introduced in Wister's runaway bestseller.⁶

To understand the novel's impact, we need to appreciate its extraordinary reception and continuing sales. "It is not only the most widely read of western novels," Donald E. Houghton has observed; "it well may be the most widely read American novel ever published.”⁷

Even so, no priority need be claimed for this reading, especially given the novel's strong history of alternative interpretations. It may be more productive, in fact, to attribute the novel's initial popularity to its openness to contrary interpretations-as the first western and yet, at the same time, something like an antiwestern. On the one hand, the fabled world of the cowboy that Wister claimed "will never come again" represented the past as Americans longed to conceive it: a time of supposedly staunch individualism and a place where problems were physically resolved. On the other hand, the setting of the novel drew attention less to the past than to the future-and to an un- certain future at that. Wyoming's pioneering on behalf of women's suffrage had led to the nickname of "Equality State," and by turning from text to context we can locate another source of the novel's appeal. The thesis of sexual inequality that weaves through The Virginian seems at odds with the implications of its locale--a contrast of which neither Wister nor his readers were unaware. In a region becoming rapidly easternlike, at a time when the suffrage movement was regaining strength, Wister offered an elegy for the old West that was also a defense of male hegemony. Indeed, more important than any action performed is the Virginian's careful rationale for women's subordination. The melancholy vision of his retirement from the saddle and from the active western life it denotes is offset at the end by a celebration of woman's narrow "place" in the home. The novel's extraordinary appeal lay in its ability to do two things at once--to recall and yet anticipate history in ways that calmed middle-class uncertainties.⁸

Finally, although Wister wrote The Virginian as a bildungsroman, with the narrator learning how to be a man under the tutelage of the Virginian, Wister also unconsciously included a gay subtext. The narrator moves from admiring the Virginian to having a sublimated crush on him, but the narrator’s true feelings emerge when the Virginian is speaking with his future wife: “The Virginian looked at her with such a smile that, had I been a woman, it would have made me his to do what he pleased with on the spot.”⁹ Nor is the narrator the only male in the novel to have romantic or sexual feelings for other men: the Virginian’s feelings toward history with Steve are representative of the historical relationships between cowboy partners, a relationship that, sexual or not, were a kind of gay marriage. It has been argued that the core of this type of same-sex marriage is a fear and hatred of women, specifically their ability (via marriage) to disrupt homosocial relationships:

In the startling words of Walter Benn Michaels, male-male sexual and affectionate pairing in American literary culture offers "a solution to the problem of heterosexuality." The problem he speaks of is the threat of reproductivity through miscegenation in a period when fear of ethnic mixing through marriage or sex was especially keen in American culture. This fear contends with nationalistic rhetoric conceiving citizenship in terms of a single idealized family. The solution, Michaels argues, appears in several literary idealizations of incestuous interracial bachelor families that explore erotic relationships but never produce children through conventional channels. These relations are fantasies that permit total intimacy along with total ethnic purity, "independent of and so unthreatened by the deracinating potential of femininity.”¹⁰

In The Virginian, “from the very first page...marriage between men and women is the subject of derisive mockery, while homoerotic bonds reveal deeply held personal truths.”¹¹ Whether between the Virginian and Steve or the Virginian and the narrator, both speech and behavior reflect this, leaving The Virginian–however knowingly Wister wrote it thus¹²–as the outstanding example of the literary queer Western.¹³

Melody Graulich and Stephen Tatum, eds., Reading The Virginian in the New West. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

¹ Owen Wister, The Virginian (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1902), 15.

² Wister, The Virginian, 29.

³ Wister, The Virginian, 346.

⁴ Wister, The Virginian, 399.

⁵ Wister, The Virginian, 434.

⁶ Lee Clark Mitchell, “‘When You Call Me That...”; Tall Talk and Male Hegemony in The Virginian” PMLA 102, no. 1 (Jan. 1987): 66.

⁷ Mitchell, “‘When You Call Me That,’” 75.

⁸ Mitchell, “‘When You Call Me That,’” 67.

⁹ Wister, The Virginian, 251.

¹⁰ Chris Packard, Queer Cowboys and Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 6.

¹¹ Packard, Queer Cowboys, 44.

¹² Wister eventually married, but his bachelor behavior among cowboys, and his experiences with and written statements to his close friend George West, who he described as “much too good looking,” match the behavior and statements of the Virginian, Steve, the narrator and the other men in The Virginian. See Packard, Queer Cowboys, 50-53. There’s no direct evidence of same-sex sexual experiences in Wister’s life. But such experiences are so rarely recorded. The evidence, in other words, can be interpreted however one wishes. But it is indisputable that he had homosocial relationships with other men that were filled, consciously or unconsciously, with a kind of erotic energy.

¹³ I lack the space to do this argument justice, but curious and contrary readers are advised to read Packard’s Queer Cowboys and Blake Allmendinger’s “Queer Frontier” in Patricia Juliana Smith, ed. Queer Sixties (Abingdon: Routledge, 1999).