Revenge Westerns

Revenge Westerns

This article relates to Chenneville

Revenge is an arduous task, and tales of retribution are especially suited for the western setting. In the popular imagination, the American West is lawless and brutal, besotted with everyday bloodshed, and so revenge seems like an appropriate goal. Nearly every writer of westerns has a vigilante or two somewhere in their lineup. It's a setting so far gone it seems like myth, and that is often how it is written: epic in both landscape and feeling. Paulette Jiles has plenty of experience with revenge westerns, and in her novel Chenneville, she does the genre justice, echoing its romantic roots with an odyssey of body and mind.

They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but the revenge western can be warm in surprising ways, and often they are complex character studies. One example is Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), considered by many to be the first western novel, in which the hero maneuvers a close betrayal, new love, and the crime of "cattle rustling," showing the internal struggles tied to a lonely path of justice.

Ten years later, Zane Grey published Riders of the Purple Sage. In that novel, much like Chenneville, a man seeks to avenge his sister while discovering his heart.

The mid-21st century heralded a golden age for the revenge western. Four men go up against a mountain lion and a frozen wilderness in The Track of the Cat (1949) by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. And in Alan Le May's The Searchers (1954), two men join forces to rescue a girl from her captors, but find themselves drained of hope and meaning.

Vardis Fisher's 1965 gem Mountain Man sees the hero exact his revenge, but he then finds himself longing for an unattainable peace. In Charles Portis' True Grit (1968), spunky Mattie Ross hunts her father's killer alongside grizzled Rooster Cogburn, both finely displaying the book's title while navigating personal quests. These characters are all gray and battle-scarred in some way. But that is another appeal; they are deeply flawed and realistic, even in seemingly impossible circumstances.

Recent revenge westerns have injected life into the genre with new layers of intrigue. In Cold Mountain (1997) by Charles Frazier, vengeance surrounds but never motivates W. P. Inman, the quiet soldier who just wants to get home to his beloved Ada. Michael Punke's The Revenant (2002) shows us a man mauled and left for dead, living again for payback.

Then there's Paulette Jiles' novel The Color of Lightning (2009), a violent outing that deftly explores contrasting cultures while a man searches for his children. The Sisters Brothers (2011) by Patrick deWitt is filled with dark humor and self-reflection, as assassin siblings face their differences.

In film, too, the genre is a fan favorite, and the mediums have been tied together since nearly the beginning. One of the first western films, Revenge (1918), was released in the silent era. Most of the aforementioned books have adaptations, but some other classics include Winchester '73 (1950), starring Jimmy Stewart, and the Clint Eastwood films High Plains Drifter (1973) and Unforgiven (1992).

Often introspective and frequently bloody, the genre's appeal lies in simplicity and catharsis. It's typically straightforward: Someone commits a crime; the victim's loved ones set out on a long journey to ensure a reckoning for said crime. There are stark consequences for everyone involved, but many times the hero pulls it off. We know how rare this is in real life. Many of us secretly fantasize about justice being served, even if under the table. Revenge may be futile, but we still want to see the baddies get their just deserts.

Filed under Reading Lists

This "beyond the book article" relates to Chenneville. It originally ran in October 2023 and has been updated for the September 2024 paperback edition. Go to magazine.

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