Essay Questions

How is Shane’s violent solution to the conflict between ranchers and homesteaders a distinctly American myth celebrating its very origin story?

America was founded on a criminal action committed for the greater good of throwing off the oppression of the official system. The result of that criminal overthrow of a ruling sovereign was for perhaps the first time in the history of the modern world not the mere replacement of one tyrant for another. The result was, in fact, a brand new country with a constitutionally legislated system of laws designed with inherent flaws, but with the capacity for those laws to be changed through unofficial action. In other words, America was forged by and designed to become a place where people have faith in a system that when found not to be working as designed allows change to come about outside the official mechanism of that system. Corrupt to the core Fletcher may be, but his corruption has the backing of the law on his side so technically Shane is really the one operating outside the strict rule of law here; Shane is the “bad guy” from a judicial perspective. But so were the American revolutionaries fighting against the guy who had the law on his side: King George. That Shane is a reluctant hero operating outside the strict letter of the law for the greater good most assuredly makes him an American mythic figure.

A direct line can be traced from Shane to Batman to Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name in his Spaghetti Westerns as a representative of the Reluctant Hero. How is Shane an iconic for this prototypical anti-hero?

The reluctant hero stands in opposition to what might be termed the active hero (or, more precisely perhaps, the “committed hero”). That guy—the hero who is never termed an antihero—is driven by culturally codified modes of responsibility and respect for the letter of the law as the foundation of civilization and is therefore moved to action in order to achieve the goal through collaborative efforts infused with an underlying, unspoken goal of justifying faith that “the system works.” The reluctant hero as embodied here by the Shane the outside represents the dawning awareness that the system does not work—at least not equally for everybody—and is infused with the underlying, unspoken justifying faith in the general populace that even when the system doesn’t work, it still is the best there precisely because working outside to affect change doesn’t automatically end by hanging from a noose. Shane’s brief but certainly eventful stay-over with the Starretts remains one of the defining and most iconic realizations of how the reluctant hero becomes a cross-pollinated hybrid of the hero and the outlaw. Shane accomplishes this by virtue of his reluctant commitment to becoming an active and engaged heroic figure fighting for the just cause of equality and fairness as a necessary component for democracy to work. The reluctant hero usually recognizes the existence of a broken system, but paradoxically must be brought into the sphere of helping to fix it by sacrificing his individualist slant to the collective need of collaboration.

In her article “Creating the American West” Cheryl Miller asserts that the writers who mythologized the frontier “sought to create a national myth that would shore up the American character against the debilitating effects of the new commercial age.” Does Shane fulfill this premise?

The one absolutely vital component in the establishment of a mythic identity is a protection against that identity being sacrificed and forgotten when the crucible in which it is forged no longer exists. For the American identity that is so inextricably linked to the opening of the west, that crucible was the inevitable taming of the wild frontier. The figures most closely associated with the unique American myth of the Wild West are those that have been capable of transcending the closing forever of the aspect of that myth most closely associated with it: a sense of exuberant freedom tempered by the inherent danger of lawlessness in which equality and fairness was always at the mercy of who had the fastest gun. Shane remains perhaps the most iconic character in the entire western genre because he successfully bridges the gap between exuberance and danger, freedom and lawlessness. Part of his mystery is bound up with his status as metaphor for the freedom offered by frontier life: what he was and the things he may have done before arriving on the Starretts' doorstep is never fully explored nor is there any guarantee that his life after leaving the family is going to be quite so heroic. Gunslingers like Wilson and land barons like Fletcher are far removed from the class-based aristocratic system of Europe, but they were also not meant to last long. They lived in fear of the frontier being tamed because they knew once it happened, their days were numbered and they were subject to either being forgotten completely or recast as the villains in America’s mythology. By contrast, Shane—or at least the Shane that Bob got to know—has become a positive representation of the American character which tamed the west without fear of obsolescence or loss of influence and power.