THE VIRGINIAN: NOVEL OF THE FRONTIER


A SENSE OF LOSS

"The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. . . . [B]reaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever-retreating frontier has been to the United States . . . . And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history."
Frederick Jackson Turner
"The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893)


"Had you left New York or San Francisco at ten o'clock this morning, by noon the day after tomorrow you could step out at Cheyenne. There you could stand at the heart of the world that is the subject of my picture, yet you would look around you in vain . . . . It is a vanished world. No journeys, save those which memory can take, will bring you to it now. The mountains are there, far and shining, and the sunlight, and the infinite earth, and the air that seems forever the true fountain of youth,- but where is the buffalo, and the wild antelope, and where is the horseman with his pasturing thousands? So like its old self does the sage-brush seem when revisited, that you wait for the horseman to appear. But he will never come again."
Owen Wister
The Virginian (1902)


"At the heart of the story there is quite a bit of pain and a sense of loss; a sense of loss about the country and the changing times. The loss of the land; a loss of personal responsibility; a loss of integrity. Nature becomes compromised by the need for civilization and what civilization asks us to do; we step away from the natural elements. It's an unavoidable progression. By 1885, Wister felt like 'We got to get this down in writing now because it's slipping away from us.'"
Bill Pullman
TNT'S THE VIRGINIAN (1999)


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