Daisy Miller died of Malaria, contracted during one of her evening outings to the Colosseum. I think I made the point already clear that Daisy Miller cannot be regarded as a tragic character. Her death is, well, melodramatic at best, because there is not a tragic flaw; it is more adolescent irresponsibility. Her reaction to being cut by the society in Rome was certainly overdrawn. It is a teenager reacting to something that he or she does not understand. But it is certainly in no way justified as a reaction. I hasten to add, though, that Daisy Miller does not end with Daisy’s death; there is a section that focuses on the account of her death, and then also on her funeral which Winterbourne attends. And then what we get is basically clarifications to the point that Daisy was indeed innocent. I will talk about this matter of innocence in a while. And Winterbourne is in fact the guilty person. Winterbourne’s constrictions sent Daisy Miller to her grave. Winterbourne, after attending the funeral, returns to Geneva, which is the place where he began as a student. Now note that Geneva is for Mr. Winterbourne an entirely appropriate place to be. Why? Geneva as a city associated with, with which man? A very important person in terms of American culture. – John Calvin. That is, Geneva can be seen as the city of Calvinism, and it is of course entirely fitting that Mr. Winterbourne would return to that place. John Calvin is the spiritual forefather of Puritanism, which incidentally, a kind of Puritanism also looms large in the whole self-condemnations of memorable American critics of the tale.

Readers today are puzzled, but puzzled less by the degree of Wintebourne’s male complicity in Daisy’s death, than by the innocence that is ascribed to Daisy Miller so insistently. In the text innocence is never really explained it is just ascertained. Leslie Fiedler claims that Daisy’s innocence is difficult which helps but does not really explain a lot, does it? Certainly that explanation does not go far enough and also I think it is misguiding, because that assertion is that Daisy’s fundamental American innocence is also ideological that is she is somehow innocent, because she is American, a good American girl. Now American exceptionalism was certainly standard in the 19^th and also in the 20^th century, from Manifest Destiny onward to all the American Adams. The American Adam as a concept of the innocent American male—most prominent is Melville’s one exemplary American Adam, innocent, good, the only problem is he stammers—who is the young man? Billy Budd—and think of also of Natty Bumppo; he is also an innocent American and because America’s East coast is no longer innocent he moves out West, embedding civilization.

James made fun at American exceptionalism; he poked fun at American exceptionalism by pointing out that Daisy Miller, once finished, she is not cultivated enough. She is a little rough on the edges, in her behavior, in her manners, but fundamentally her innocence is never questioned by James. So much for Daisy Miller; let me now talk about The Portrait of a Lady.

The Portrait of a Lady, first of all, develops along the same fundamental talk lines as Daisy Miller, that is you have an American girl, innocent, because American. Her name here is Isabel Archer. Everybody speculated of course about the name, not so much about Isabel but Archer—trying to bridge whatever. She is from Albany, New York, that is, not so far away from Daisy Miller who came from Schenectady, New York. Isabel Archer goes to Europe accompanying her aunt Mrs. Touchett. And the first stop is England, and that is where the novels opens; it opens on the garden scene in all of James’s fiction: a huge country house; the scene is in the afternoon, a summer afternoon, that one day it does not rain in England in the summer. It’s pretty, the weather is good, and tea is served on the lawn, that is clearly as idyllic a scene as there is. Note again the reliance on the class that owns large country estates in England. Here it is the Touchetts, a family that has strong roots in England, but one of the Touchetts apparently had moved over across the Atlantic. Mr. Touchett and his son Ralph are extremely wealthy, but they don’t know what to do with their money, because Mr. Touchett is already very old and Ralph suffers from tuberculosis.

Isabel Archer is extremely attractive, so attractive that she very soon catches the eye of Lord Warburton. Clearly, we needn’t talk about his social background, but what we can say of him is that he is at the start of a very promising career, probably politics. Lord Warburton is so taken by the looks of Isabel that he proposes to her. Then the first strange thing happens; Isabel Archer rejects the offer. She refuses to marry Lord Warburton. As she had already refused another offer by one Caspar Goodwood. Caspar Goodwood is an American friend of hers and a case of nomen est omen, is basically a good character but a little wooden in his behavior. She rejected him as well; instead, Isabel agrees to join her aunt on her trip to Italy. In Italy, more precisely, Florence, Mrs. Touchett and Isabel settle with a group of Americans, two of whom are most noteworthy. One of them is Mme. Merle, note the name—she hardly is American any more. The other is Gilbert Osmond. His name also does not quite sound American anymore, does it? Gilbert Osmond also has another taint as an American which somehow does not quite make him a real true American; he is Catholic. Gilbert Osmond and Mme Merle both of live in the group of Americans in Florence. But both of them seem to be a little in dire straits in terms of money. When it is known then that Mr. Touchett has agreed to give as inheritance half of his money to Isabel, she suddenly becomes highly attractive, especially attractive to Gilbert Osmond. He has a daughter, about twelve years old and brought up in a convent; her name is Pansy, again a telling name of course. So Isabel is in her early twenties, Gilbert Osmond with a teenage daughter probably around forty. We don’t know, we are not told the details, the background of where that daughter came from. Mme Merle, who is a friend of Mrs. Touchett, begins to make friends with Isabel and introduces her to Gilbert Osmond. Gilbert Osmond is not too wealthy but on first appearance he seems to be extremely cultivated—he seems to be really informed about architecture and those things and is cultured in a European way. And Isabel is immensely attracted to that. And when Gilbert Osmond proposes to her, she accepts. It is only then, when Isabel accepts or when they are married, that step by step Gilbert Osmond reveals himself. He comes across as somebody who is all refinement, but all superficial refinement. Under the cultivated surface there seems to be nothing—cold, unemotional, formal, entirely led by etiquette. Thus the marriage turns increasingly sour.

Eventually, Isabel learns that Pansy is in fact Mme. Merle’s and Osmond’s daughter, but they could not marry because they did not have the money, and that in way it was all a set up by Mme Merle to provide Gilbert, herself and their common daughter with enough money to get along. Now, what would be the reaction? What would you expect as a reaction, if a woman like Isabel learns that she was framed, set up nastily? How would you expect her to react? Going back to America would have been probably the wisest choice, that is also what Henrietta Stackpole, an independent American woman, who is as a journalist frequently in Europe. She is also a friend of Caspar Goodwood, not just a friend, but she is also the one who has to listen to Caspar’s lamentations about how unlucky he was with his proposal. Henrietta Stackpole also tells Isabel to quit Florence and Italy and to go back to the States. But no such thing happens. Quite on the contrary, Isabel decides to stay in Italy, to remain faithful to her husband, and to live by his side. Now that is of course a little odd; it becomes even stranger when we take a look at the narrative strategy that James employs in the novel.

Now remember Daisy Miller is told largely almost exclusively from the perspective of Mr. Winterbourne speaking about Daisy Miller. That is, the male character is the focus. In The Portrait of a Lady we have first a third-person authorial narrator who tells us about Isabel, but as the narrative goes on, the focus becomes more and more set on Isabel Archer—to the point that when she ponders her situation (chapter 42). Here she ponders her misery, what is she going to do, feeling betrayed by her husband? which alternatives does she have? And that is the first time in Jamesian fiction that the narrator actually moves inward, that is, in a way we no longer have a narrator speaking about a character but it is a narrator rendering the character’s words and thoughts. That chapter in The Portrait of a Lady is really what might be called a milestone in narrative technique, because it is this moving inward, Presenting the character’s, i.e. Isabel’s thoughts, emotions as she weighs her situation, what she is going to do, pondering her options. And this is all told from an inner perspective, that is, the narrator receding behind the character. So what we have here is really a step towards Modernism. From pre-Modernism to something like Proto-Modernism. Yet at the end of the chapter, the narrator—we might even say here, James—seems to have been really shocked by the revelations opened to him, because he withdraws and lets Isabel again stay out there. He will not return to that kind of inner perspective; rather the narrator writes about her or writes her, it is not that the narrator writes her thoughts but writes her actions. Thus, what we have in the end is a glimpse into Modernism and a hasty withdrawal to traditional techniques, as if James had been scared by the vision of an independent female character. This ending, that Isabel in a way decides to stay within social norms, within the marriage, becomes a classic move of the late 19^th century. It is a withdrawal, that is she remains or James keeps her in a way tied in that world from which there is no escape. There would have been a possibility for escape. But the narrative technique did not allow for it. So in the end The portrait of the Lady is finally not a modernist novel. There is no such a thing yet as the autonomy of the character; truly an exploration of a character’s psychological frame or mind, options. In a way Isabel remains emplotted by James.

James would only make the step with his great novels at the turn of the century, The Ambassadors, The Wings of a Dove and The Golden Bowl. There he would make the transition and would no longer be moving back to write on his characters. But those books came out after 1900. The critique of course that James aims at America seems quite clear at that point: Americans going to Europe should not fall for Europeans trappings. Now what are those Europeans trappings? Basically, what James considers as trappings for Americans in Europe is personified in the Europeanized American Gilbert Osmond. That is superficial culture, superficial refinement; it’s all those things that James warns his countrymen of when they go to Europe. How effective as a critique of America that is, may be questioned, because the segment of Americans that James really depicts is very narrow.

It will take us three steps to make the shift from Henry James in Italy to The West. And when I want to talk about the West today, it is the West between 1880 and about 1900. It is the West of railroads that were being built, it is the West as it’s being fenced in, turned into the white man’s land. Remember what Frederick Jackson Turner said about the West in the early nineties: the frontier was closed. Appropriately, F. J Turner was elected president of the American historical association during their meeting at Chicago in 1893. And why is that so significant? What about Chicago 1893, what was there? The year 1893 was a year of economic depression, in the summer banks crash in large numbers all over the East Coast. At the same time in Chicago there was a world’s fair, the grandest world’s fair America and Europe had ever seen. A whole new city, the white city, was build. And since Chicago is always considered as one gateway to the West, this huge white city at the entrance of the West becomes also symbolic of what the West had become. Incidentally, the next major world’s fair in the US was in 1903 and again at a gateway to the West: St. Louis, also a very gaudy show. Now what about the conquest of the West?

First of all, we need to clarify one term. What is meant when we speak of the Western in literature or in culture? It is only partly literary. (Maybe my colleagues in the English department would say it is not literary, at best it is sub-literary.) What about the Western as a genre, when did come about? The common saying is the first real Western, now careful real Western not reel (= film) Western, was The Virginian by Owen Wister. That book came out in 1902, written largely in 1901, the first novel that really established the genre, that is the conventions of the genre. What are some of the conventions of the genre? First of all, the protagonist, named here the Virginian, we don’t get any more of the name of his. What does that tell us? Clearly, it would refer to anybody. What is the major indication? Was he a poor white from the mountains of West Virginia? Of course not, he was, although we never learn explicitly about him, it is clear that he must be one of a good family, dispossessed in the Civil War. (Who is the most famous Virginian dispossessed of in the war? They built a cemetery on his land. The land was owned by Robert D. Lee.) Now the point is, he is an aristocrat dispossessed and he had to move out West. It has clear implications. What those implications are, I will point out as I continue. What else are ingredients of the Western? There must be some kind of villain, more about the villains later on, because there are certain prerogatives. What else? Some sort of conflict – this is important, the nature of conflict, what would that be? Think about the Virginian what would be the qualities that he stands for? In a way he is nothing but a relocated Southern aristocrat, i.e. class-conscious. And with class consciousness something else becomes important: propriety, i.e. you have to know what you are supposed to do and what you are not supposed to do. In the West nobody will tell you, because Westerners don’t talk much, this is another stereotype. If you ever have somebody talking too much in a Western, that is a character from the East. And this character will not live long, because somebody will stuff his mouth. Now the issue is usually not over moral right or wrong, but it is a case of propriety or impropriety, proper behavior or improper behavior. So much for the conflict; we still need something else. In a real good American Western there is, what is she usually by profession? A schoolmarm, in The Virginian we have a schoolmarm. Now note her background, she comes from the Starks of Vermont. The most famous Stark was one Molly Stark, incidentally, she is also called Molly Stark and that Molly Stark had a significant role in a battle in the American Revolution. So in a way Molly Stark, the one out in the West, is clearly somehow also an aristocrat. Because if you have a long line going back to the American Revolution, and your name was distinguished in the American Revolution, you have a proper background. Notice that she is from Vermont, and he is from Virginia. Of course they marry at the end and they travel to Vermont right away, what is happening here is a re-writing of American history all the way. That is North and South, the best of North and South, will come together in a happy union. That union came about out West, which is in itself an ideological explanation. It explains why they went out there, because that is neutral territory, you can’t have a Southern go North or a Northerner go South. There are a couple of things that are interesting here in this novel. They go out West—the Virginian after the war, the schoolmarm on her mission to improve civilization. That is really the history of the West. And what’s missing here in this history of the West? The native Americans, they only are mentioned in The Virginian. There is actually one attack, one Indian attack, but it is not told, i.e. it is not presented in a scene; it is only referred to as having happened in the off. That is one instance in which westerns were re-writing Western history. This kind of re-writing was of course also a whitewashing of history. The whitewashing worked to the effect that native Americans hardly ever function in written westerns or in westerns written after 1885. Why that is so I’ll explain in a moment. A few Easterners had their fingers in that matter.

The Western had been clearly political for twenty years in terms of dime novels and so on. But as a genre developing conventions it only came after The Virginian in 1902 and the author Owen Wister. And that the author was somebody like Owen Wister would be a paradox. He was one of the closest friends of Theodore Roosevelt. In fact, Owen Wister was the official biographer of Theodore Roosevelt after Teddy’s death. The book is dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt. We might even wonder what is Theodore Roosevelt doing in all this? The case is fairly simple; Theodore Roosevelt at age 25 suffered two terrible personal losses. Within 12 hours both his wife and his mother died. When he was just 25 going on 26. Theodore decided to go out West for a couple of years. He could afford to go out West because he had been a clever man, for at age 26 he had already invested money in Western ranches. Actually in only three ranches in South Dakota, and Theodore at age 25/26 could go out there and be ranch-boss on his own ranch, which is of course nice, it’s better than to have to find yourself a job. Theodore also liked what was called the strenuous life. What does it mean? Young Theodore as a teenager suffered from asthma, short-sighted, overweight, and generally not the physical type. When he was in Harvard, he began to exercise, boxing and all sorts of physical activities on the side, and it is this excessive physical activity that is meant by the strenuous life. The West was of course the best place to do it, go out and ride and ranch, and this is what Theodore did. When Theodore Roosevelt came back from the West, he was sufficiently animated by his experiences out West to write a whole bunch of books. The first book that he wrote was Hunting Trips of a Ranch-man, published in 1885. Ranch-life and the Hunting Trail (1888). More ambitious still, in 1889, The Winning of the West. Four novels, a big history; the book of history had a few problems, namely he never really got far beyond the American Revolution, i.e. practically all the 1800s is left out. One might ask of course, now, why is that so? Did he just lose interest or can be described an under meaning to this leaving out the 19^th century? Clearly, one could say that Theodore Roosevelt’s The Wining of the West was already so far gone that by the time he wrote the book the West was gone. So the temporal gap would only emphasize that it is history we are talking about. That this is something that’s gone; the West is gone. Also, I would like to read out a few passages from that book to you, just to give you an idea of Theodore’s attitude towards the West and its inhabitants. In 1900 the book was much in demand because Theodore had become a war hero in the Spanish-American war. And there he wrote the new preface for his book, where he explained that the invasion of Cuba was really just an extension of the winning of the West—only this is in the East, but it essentially evinced the same attitude and what it was: Western, continental expansion. Theodore Roosevelt said (quote) “It has been the central and all important feature of our history.” (This in 1890, before Turner’s thesis said basically the same.) And then Theodore comes to talk about motivations and he says that the issue is for him race-expansion, i.e. space for this new race of Americans. What he means by that in a moment. He talks about the morals of Western expansion.

It is indeed a warped, perverse and silly morality which would forbid a course of conquest that has turned all continents into the seats of mighty and flourishing civilized nations. … In its results, and viewed from the standpoint of applied ethics, the conquest and settlement by the white of the Indian lands was necessary to the greatest of the race and the well-being of civilized mankind. … This great continent … could not have been kept as nothing but a game-reserve for squalid savages.

Then he talks about the Western conquest in a larger ethics code.

The warlike borderers who thronged across the Alleghenies … and the restless and reckless hunters, the hard, dogged frontier farmers, by dint of grim tenacity, overcame and displaced Indians, French, and Spaniards alike, exactly as 1400 years before Saxon and Angle had overcome and displaced the Cymric and Gaelic Celts.

This is a nice historical analogy: in the way that Anglo-Saxons conquered England, so white Americans conquered the continent. We could go on like that on American race, but the strange thing is really that it is all removed into the 18^th century, very little of that in the 19^th century. And note also of course, Theodore Roosevelt was upper-class white, an aristocrat, who on the mother’s side descended from Georgia planter aristocracy and on the father’s side descended from a New-York Dutch upper-class family.

Owen Wister’s mother was a good friend of Henry James, his grandmother was a good friend of Henry James, the grandmother was Francis Kemble, Fanny Kemble, the actress, the writer who wrote Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839. That is on the maternal side Owen Wister was solid Southern plantation aristocracy; on the father’s side, on the Northern side, the family was solid Pennsylvania old-stock, going back probably as far as Benjamin Franklin or even further than that. Owen Wister, incidentally, also made one of the funnier statements about himself when he positioned his pride. When he was invited to the White House by Theodore Roosevelt, he noted with a certain touch, ‘Now this is the fourth generation of my family that has been invited to a White House dinner.’ That tells us something about his class-consciousness, and note also that both Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister had this pairing up of North and South in their families and what they thought of the West.

Now who are by that definition the enemies of those civilizing the West? Clearly, those civilizing the West are people like the Virginian Vermont daughter of the Revolution, that is upper-class. Who are the proper American race, settling the West? Who are they? Anglo-Saxon, quite clearly. Who are the opponents?

I will take a look at a series of novels where the hero is called Deadwood Dick, just as a representative. The author, Edward Wheeler, did a whole series of novels. Edward Wheeler has a curious distinction as we don’t know how many books he wrote. Estimates go between 600 and 700 hundred. He had an average of 60 000 words a month. How much is 60 000 words? ( 6 seminar papers) This guy wrote faster than normal people can read. But he was no exception, there are several others who wrote 300, 400 books.

Now Deadwood Dick, as an example, for those interested in road shows, incidentally, the first is called Prince of the Road; it’s a Western but it came out in 1887, when the genre of the Western had not yet formed. It was still in the formative stage.

How is the opponent of Deadwood Dick immediately realized, characterized? Accent is a classic case, in the first novel of Deadwood Dick, which is set incidentally in Northern Mexico, Cobota. And here is the description of the opponent: “A short fat man with bushy red hair and a beard of the same hue. His eyes were small, pig-like in their appearance and his nose was enormous in size.” We know of course right away that with such a picture, such a guy is no good, he hasn’t opened his mouth yet. Now he opens his mouth and that’s what happens. “Goot-evening—goot-evening, my tear sir! v’at can I do for you, my frent, dis evening?” And then we get the name of the character, Aaron Mosenstein, talk about a racial slur! This is not an isolated fact in the early westerns. In the early Westerns you have those slurs very frequently, and the early Westerns in the 1880ies had an incredible interest also in political affairs in the East. That is, in one of those westerns you have a description of a scene around a campfire of cowboys. What do you think the cowboys are talking about? You’d never guess it. They’re talking about the political situation after the Haymarket Riot in Chicago. Whether those anarchists should be executed or not. Note those anarchists were foreigners. So what do you think the cowboys said? They were decidedly in favor of execution. It is usually foreigners with heavy accents and you can tell the accent is undesired in the West. Of course it also that the civilization of the West was entirely a WASP matter; all others, those with thick accents, they only interfered. So it is always a positioning of WASP versus European invaders who are very often Jewish; several times also they are called Dutchmen, which means of course German, and not from the Netherlands, it was a deprecatory word denoting Germans.

Another Deadwood Dick novel: here the negative character is identified, nicknamed, Limburger. And well of course, any character with such a nickname is to be ostracized in a good Western town, and very much so because of his language, for he talks like one of those recent immigrants and of course he is a recent immigrant, or a Vaudeville version of that recent immigrant, more likely. Here is another quote of Linburger. “Ve all go deadt, und den ve go—vere der tyfel ve go, anyhow? Oh! How I vish I was pack in Yermany, vere der vas no Deadwood Dicks.” Well, that clearly makes a case.

The next point: what about women in the West before the West was taken over by the wives of Gary Cooper. The original West, what about women there? They function no more prominently than native Americans, because the West was male, women functioned only peripherally in the major westerns. And yet, in the earliest Westerns there is a sub-genre that has female protagonists; a whole bunch of those novels had women protagonists following the line of Calamity Jane. Calamity Jane is a character who actually lived; she is drawn on a live model (Martha Jane Cannary), as it were. And Calamity Jane is a major character in the first Deadwood Dick novel, and when the author realized her potential, she was in for a few other guest appearances, and then she even got a couple of novels by herself. The same Wheeler that published the first Deadwood Dick novel, he also come out with a novel entitled Hurricane Nell, the Girl Dead Shot or The Queen of the Saddle and Lasso (dead-shot, i.e., one shot at 600 feet away – the nail on the head) And while Edward L. Wheeler continued turning out Deadwood Dick novels, he wrote also a series on “Denver Doll.” (Another western writer invented “Captain Rachel, the Female Outlaw; others came up with “Colorado Kate” and “Lariat Lil” and “Santa Fe Sal”) Of Calamity Jane, it is said, “She was a good woman, only she drinked.” And if there was covert sexual meaning in all of this, perhaps it was confirmed by the would-be lover of Colorado Kate, named “Limpy Dick.”

By the 1890ies, however, the women protagonist more or less died out. By the 90ies the genre seems to have gradually settled down and because of politics making the West male, which leads up to The Virginian.

Some fundamentals are worth mentioning. When Deadwood Dick talks about the anarchists of the Haymarket Riot—this is, remember, a Westerner sitting out at a campfire, talking

We Americans don’t believe in that sort of thing of cowardly and barbarous thing. It is only the foreign element, who can’t get along in our country, that come over here with the idea that they can run and regulate matters pretty much as they please. By the time a few more of them are cared for the sheriff, perhaps they’ll know enough to stay at home or else conduct themselves as peaceable citizens.

Incidentally, when Dick says this at the campfire, he gets a response, he is knocked on the head with a beer bottle by one Jakob Steinmetz. So much for that.

But there is one other thing in Deadwood Dick. The novelist somehow realizes in the late 1880ies that his material was getting thin and he came up with Deadwood Dick, Junior, the son of Deadwood Dick. What do you think Deadwood Dick, Junior, did? We went East, literally to Gotham. What does he do there? He changes he job, he becomes private investigator, a forerunner, culturally at least, of the private-eyes. But clearly there is a line from Deadwood Dick to Deadwood Dick, junior, to all the private-eyes that populate popular American fiction in the 20^th century and also Hollywood, from Dashiell Hammett to Dick Tracy and those things.

Clearly when we talk about the western in the 1890ies, we are talking about a genre that had not yet really formed its full quality. But at the same time and this I think attests to the popularity of the genre, there were already the first parodies on that genre. And the first great parodies of the genre were young Stephen Crane’s two stories, especially, “The Blue Hotel” and “The Bride Coms to Yellow Sky.” Before the genre as such had actually settled and developed its archetypal structure, Stephen Crane was already making fun of all its conventions. I will only take a look here at “The Blue Hotel”, because that is on the reading list, but what I say about “The Blue Hotel” applies also to “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” The difference is only that “The Blue Hotel” has dark overtones while “Yellow Sky” is comic form the very beginning.

“The Blue Hotel” is set in Fort Romper, Nebraska. The place is important. What would that town look like? It has a main street but not much else. The pride of Fort Romper, Nebraska—actually, between Fort Romper and the railroad station of Fort Romper, right in the middle—is the Blue Hotel, an eyesore if there ever was one, a clap-board house, recently built. The proprietor is Pat Scully, who is of course Irish. He owns the place. And there is also his son Johnnie Scully. The time of the year is winter. A train arrives and a load of passengers gets off the train and moves over to Scully’s hotel, just as a snowstorm is coming up. The characters who come are actually only three, one is called Mr Blanc, usually referred to in the story as the Easterner, the name is, of course, nomen est omen, for as a character he is literally blank. Then there is the cowboy, and as a third character the Swede. We don’t get any more names, that’s that typical Stephen Crane type character, you also have that in The Red Badge of Courage, where you have the tall soldier, the pale soldier, no names, only in very special circumstances. The central character of the narrative is the Swede. As he enters Scully’s hotel, he looks rather strangely when he says, “I suppose there have been a good many men killed in this room.” Clearly, the man has read too many Westerns, dime novels, and when Scully reminds him, “This here ain’t Wyoming, this here is Nebrasker,” what is the point? We are in the mid 1890ies. Three times Scully tells the Swede, “This here is Nebrasker, this here ain’t Wyoming, nor one of them places.” What does it mean? Nebraska in the 1890ies was clearly settled, an established civilization, civilization Eastern style. Scully points out that Fort Romper will soon have a tram line running through. So we certainly are on the track to civilization. When citizens are already discussing whether or not to build the tramline going through. But the Swede will not hear it. That nobody in Fort Romper or at least in Scully’s hotel wears any guns, it should have opened the Swede’s eyes; but no it doesn’t. The snowstorm picks up in the outside. So the men are confined to be inside. And what happens is they start a game of poker. But it’s not a real game of poker as played in the Wild West. What are the ingredients of a real game of poker? You play for money, real money. What they do in Scully’s hotel, is that they play for matches. The Swede still does not understand; he still fears for his life. But he joins the card game. And as he begins to win, he gets a little boisterous. And then suddenly he utters the terrible words, “You cheat.” The Swede had caught young Johnnie at cheating. Note the irony of the real Western, what would be the meaning of the words “you cheat” in a real Western? The next scene would be out in the street, let’s have it out. Well, here it’s the parody. Since there are no guns, what do they do? A fist fightis staged outside the hotel in a raging snow storm. And the Swede beats up young Scully pretty badly. And the Swede gets extremely boisterous after that. He thinks now that he has beaten up young Scully—who is a teenager while the Swede is a grown up man—there was not really much to it, beating up that kid. Except, it somehow disturbed the perception of the Swede even more, as he no longer fears that he is going to get killed. It is more like, “Well, he was going to step in my way and I killed him.” And he walks out of the Blue Hotel and goes into Fort Romper. And this is now a nice touch of Stephen Crane. The Blue Hotel, the color blue in the title, should warn us that this place is not real. The Swede does not understand. When he walks through the snowstorm, down the main street of Fort Romper, he sees the saloon, and on top of the saloon a red light. He still doesn’t understand. He goes in and there is also a card game going on, and he begins to comment on the card game. He behaves like a real bully and offends one of the card players. We as readers know that this card player is named just the gambler. He is described, again in supreme Stephen Crane irony, as a nice blend of a family man who looks like some kind of bank clerk. He is small, frail and literally described as having a wife and several kids at home. Only he is playing cards for a living, and he is accepted in the town, because he doesn’t cheat on anybody; he is, in a way, an honest card shark. And the Swede bullies the gambler even more, and grabs him, and even wants him to draw. The gambler draws a knife and stabs the Swede, because he is attacking him. As the Swede falls dead, the cash register on the counter of the saloon says in its display, “This registers the amount of your purchase.” Supreme Stephen Crane irony. But the story is still not over, there is one section after it, saying something like, a year and half later, out on the prairie, where the cowboy and the Easterner meet, and they talk. They hear that the gambler was sentenced to two or three years in jail, for having overstepped the right of self-defense. And then they discuss the issue. And the Easterner says, “We are all guilty.” The cowboy understands nothing. He just says “I didn’t do anything’, did I?” And the Easterner points out that that is precisely the issue. And the Eastern then also confesses that he had witnessed young Scully’s cheating, but hadn’t said anything, and that he didn’t stop the Swede, so in a way they were accomplices in the Swede’s murder.

Note the set-up of the story, it’s Western in its settings, but somehow it does not come across as a western. That is, all the Western assumptions are curiously subversive. You have a similar subversion in “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” which opens in a train compartment, where there is a couple sitting who look a little displaced. The man is not the youngest any more; the woman next to him is also a little past her prime. Until we learn that it is Sheriff Potter of Yellow Sky, Texas, who’d gone to St. Antonio to marry. He married a cook there, and was now on his way to bringing his wife home to Yellow Sky, Texas, but the way the travel is described, it is not that the train moves West, but as if the train were stopped, standing still, while the landscape was being dragged East. This of course is telling in that Stephen Crane really thought that the West no longer was there. It has already become Easternized, and all the clothes the people wear in Yellow Sky, they are always described as made by somebody in New York. Even the so-called Western type of shirts comes from some place in New York. Clearly, the West there is a vision of the West that Easterners want to see. That is also something that many critics point out when they talk about Theodore Roosevelt. That when Theodore Roosevelt described the West he was really describing what he himself wanted to see when going out West. That is, he was recasting the West in Eastern eyes.