The Western and the Eastern

In the description of this class, Denise cites Broken Trail, a recent TV miniseries western, as an example of representations of Asian Americans in recent cultural productions. After Tracey’s comment in class touching on the western genre, I find myself unable to resist posting about genre yet again.

To begin with, I would argue that the western genre is the genre most closely aligned with America/Americanism/the American Dream. In “The Western (Genre and Movies),” Douglas Pye notes that “oppositions of garden/desert, civilization/savagery … are at the heart of ideas about the west [and were] bound up with the western from the earliest times … The western is founded, then, on a tremendously rich confluence of romantic narrative and archetypal imagery modified and localized by recent American experience.”

It doesn’t seem a stretch in terms of usefulness to apply these ideas more broadly—if in a modified manner—in the service of conceptualizing “the eastern,” meaning Orientalist narratives. The relationship between exotic alien land and penetrating outside force is certainly heavily thematized in each. However, whereas in the Western the land is both a dream world full of promise and a rebellious/dangerous frontier, in Eastern narratives the land is a dream world characterized by a promise of danger or menace. The oppositions Pye considers to be so central to the western are merged in Eastern narratives that we’ve read.

For example, The Japanese Nightingale presents the East as having an ancient and mysterious civilization far more fascinating and compelling than that of the West; it is at least in part that blend of mystery and organized ritual that draws Jack towards Japan. Perhaps the earliest or clearest place to look for these narratives, however, might be in the early travel writing discussed in some of our reading. While I haven’t read any of this beyond the examples quoted in the criticism, the feminized / eroticized mode of describing the land seems like a variation on the colonizing narrative of the western. Both lands demand or invite conquering — and while the Western frontier fights back in its masculine, American way, the Eastern land has an eroticized and submissive attitude.

This is, of course, a far more complex issue than is possible to successfully explore in a blog post. One intriguing complication is the tendency in westerns to valorize the domestic—the archetypal western heroes are frequently either domesticated for the purpose of a happy ending or excluded, because of their lack of domesticity, from the happy ending of others (whom they’ve inevitably helped). It might be an interesting line of questioning to see how “the eastern” might be in conversation with that, and particularly the Butterfly genre, which is so concerned with domesticity.