Outlaw Geography: Place and Masculinity in Desperadoes and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Abstract

The previous two chapters have examined how the consequences of the hegemonic masculinity and racial homogeneity of Westerns are exacted on the bodies of the men who populate contemporary Westerns. Blood Meridian uses the metaphor of violence against male bodies as the consequence of a definition of masculinity based on violent aggression and total domination of others. Ceremony imagines the devastating racial implications of the hegemonic masculinity of Westerns as sickness, a bodily affliction manifested by the novel’s mixed race protagonist. The bodies of the men of Westerns themselves, however, often stand as metaphors for the larger “body” of the West—the geographic territory that defines the frontier and, as the outer limits of a default “home” land (the east coast of the United States), defines the home as well. Using the subgenre of the celebrity outlaw narrative, Ron Hansen’s two historical Westerns, Desperadoes (1979) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983), examine how the outlaws popularized in dime novels are depicted as commodified subjects, personifications of the last “unclaimed” territory, and the embodiment of the darkness in the hearts of those who claim it.

He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.

—Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History