The Western and Western Drama: John Ford’s The Searchers and the Oresteia
A wanderer, a fugitive
driven off his native land, he will come home
to cope the stones of hate that menace all he loves.
--Aeschylus, Agamemnon
your murdered kinsmen
pleading for revenge. And the madness haunts
the midnight watch, the empty terror shakes you,
harries, drives you on – an exile from your city.
--Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers
When critics praise John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), they frequently reach for the words epic and tragic to describe it.[1] In the documentary that accompanies the film in the DVD Ultimate Collector’s Edition, the director John Milius says of Ford: “He’s a storyteller like Homer.”[2] Critics quite rightly sense an affinity between the film and the literature of classical antiquity. They suggest that Ford is working on a Homeric scale, and capturing the spirit of Greek tragedy in the way he shapes his characters’ encounters with elemental forces and a cruel destiny. But few have systematically compared The Searchers with a particular ancient epic or tragedy.[3] I will use a detailed comparison with Aeschylus’ Oresteia to bring out the thematic core of Ford’s film. If The Searchers is a tragedy, it is specifically a tragedy of revenge, fundamentally the story of how its hero, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), implacably pursues the Indian tribe that nearly wiped out his brother’s family and kidnapped his niece, Debbie (Natalie Wood). As a revenge tragedy, the film has a venerable pedigree that includes many literary masterpieces, not the least of which is Hamlet. But to understand Ford’s greatest Western, we can learn the most by going back to the very origin of Western drama and the earliest known revenge tragedy, Aeschylus’s sole surviving trilogy, consisting of Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides. One advantage of viewing The Searchers against the background of Greek tragedy is that it will allow us to move beyond the simplistic good guy/bad guy opposition of the conventional Western and view Ethan Edwards as a genuinely tragic hero, with all the moral complexity that implies.
Revenge Tragedy
Revenge is a perennially popular subject in both epic and tragedy. It is at the core of the first masterpiece of Western literature, the Iliad,[4] and can still be found in innumerable motion picture and television dramas today. Why is revenge so prevalent as a subject for drama? The pursuit of vengeance obviously provides the basis for an action-packed plot, but, more importantly, it raises serious issues of a particularly dramatic—and tragic—nature. Revenge is ultimately a political subject, or rather it allows an author to stage the confrontation between the pre-political and the political, and thereby helps reveal the origin of politics, as well as its limits.
Both the Oresteia and The Searchers focus on the story of a single family and how it generates the demand for vengeance, how it plunges the people involved into a potentially unending cycle of revenge. Revenge and the family are inextricably bound together in human history. As both the Oresteia and The Searchers show, the fundamental obligation of vengeance is to right a wrong against a kinsman (or kinswoman). Revenge is rooted in the historical moment when the family—or at most the extended family, the clan—was the basic unit of social organization. When families must rely on their own members to protect them, revenge assumes its paramount importance as an ethical imperative. If you can reach for a phone to call the police, you no longer have to reach for a sword or a gun to right a wrong against your family. That is why the revenge ethic is characteristic of pre-political situations and appears so often in the foundational literature of archaic peoples, from the Homeric epics to the Icelandic sagas, which generally chronicle heroes who have to make their own justice and become a law unto themselves. The issue of revenge takes us right to the heart of the difference between political and pre-political association.
Very few of us today would react to the murder of a loved one by saying: “I have to go out and kill the person who did that with my own bare hands.” The reason is that we have almost all been brought up to leave such matters to the law. We have been taught that to live in society is to accept the principle of civic justice. We have a legal system in place that is supposed to deal with crimes like murder. The police are supposed to arrest murderers, prosecutors are supposed to bring them to justice, the courts are supposed to convict and sentence them, and the prisons are supposed to punish them, perhaps even to execute them. Our very notion of being civilized has become bound up with the need to renounce revenge. We think of the cult of vengeance as characteristic of primitive societies; the impulse to take revenge seems positively atavistic in the contemporary world. For revenge, we might look to the blood feuds in the backlands of undeveloped countries or to the vendettas among criminals and mobsters in the underworld of our own society.
In short, in the modern political world, in which legal institutions have been fully developed and are firmly in place, revenge seems like a throwback to the distant past. Why, then, are we still so interested in the subject that it continues to fill our movie and television screens? How was Ford able to create one of the great revenge tragedies of all time as recently as 1956? The answer seems to be that our sophisticated legal system can provide us with civic justice, but it cannot provide us with poetic justice, and we sense the gap between the two. The very notion of poetic justice points to the potential inadequacies of civic or legal justice; poetry must make up for the deficiencies of politics. The issue of revenge is one of the many areas where we have paid a price for the civilization we have embraced in order to avoid bloodshed and social chaos.[5] We have to renounce and suppress an impulse that is evidently deeply ingrained in human nature, or at least in human culture, and difficult to eradicate—the desire for swift, direct, and personal vengeance. To have an impersonal legal system deal with a crime against kinfolk may fail to satisfy the emotional needs of the injured parties. That is why even today we often hear of family members complaining bitterly about the procedural delays, the plea bargaining, the reduced sentences, the appeals, the pardons, and all the other compromises inevitably involved in the operation of any legal system.[6] Even in the most civilized society, aggrieved people will sometimes still cry out for an eye for an eye; they still want blood. It seems impossible to stifle completely the call for vengeance, which still lurks beneath the surface even in our modern world with all its legal institutions. And if civilized society is no longer willing to satisfy this primal call for vengeance, literature, and, more generally, the arts can recognize its force and acknowledge its claims in the symbolic form of stories and images.
That may be why we continue to use the phrase poetic justice.[7] Poets can still give us what civilized society denies us—images of a personal justice, a kind of elemental justice unmediated by modern legal institutions. Locked as we are into a world of impersonal justice, our culture, especially our popular culture, keeps offering us images of an old-style personal vengeance. Two of the most successful cinematic genres—the Western and the gangster movie—frequently focus on characters who take the law into their own hands or operate outside it, indulging their vengeful impulses often with great gusto, if not impunity. Perhaps the two greatest movies of all time, Godfather I and II, chronicle a grand cycle of revenge much as the Oresteia and The Searchers do. The revenge tragedy epitomizes the cathartic function of tragedy. By offering images of the kind of personal vengeance we have had to renounce in order to live in civilized society, revenge tragedy calls up and perhaps allows us to purge the powerful emotions we are continually forced to hold in check in our daily lives. Better to experience vicariously Charles Bronson acting out his vigilante impulses in the various Death Wish movies than to give vent to our own frustration in a world in which the police do not always do their job well. Over the centuries, the revenge tragedy has served as a kind of emotional safety value, allowing audiences to release in the safe and controlled environment of the theater the kind of emotions civilization requires them to suppress in real life for the sake of peace and social harmony.
But revenge tragedy can operate on an intellectual as well as an emotional level. In the hands of a great artist, it can help us think through the issue of revenge, which stands at the very foundation of political life. As we will see in the Oresteia, the polis, the political community, comes into being to end the cycle of family vengeance.[8] Revenge tragedies can pose anew for us and allow us to rethink the fundamental political question—the choice between a life of personal vengeance and a life of communal justice.[9] That may be the deepest ground of the dramatic power of the issue of revenge, and why it time and again proves to be a rich source of tragic subject matter. In Hegel’s view, a tragic situation involves the conflict of two goods, one legitimate ethical principle clashing with another.[10] In such an ethical dilemma, the tragic hero has no way out without incurring guilt—no matter which course of action he chooses, he will violate one legitimate principle or another. Hegel’s prototype of tragedy is Sophocles’ Antigone, in which Antigone stands up for the principle of the family in her insistence on properly burying her brother Polyneices, while Creon stands up for the principle of the city in denying him burial as a traitor to Thebes.[11] Once both Antigone and Creon commit to their principles with stubborn integrity, a tragic outcome becomes inevitable in their conflict. We can see why in Hegel’s understanding, revenge is tailor made as a subject for tragedy. It virtually calls for an author to dramatize the conflict between the unyielding revenge ethic and alternate principles, whether the Christian rejection of revenge, as in Hamlet,[12] or the turn to judicial solutions for righting wrongs, as in the Oresteia.
In Hegel’s view, the most fertile ground for tragedy is a moment of historical transition, when a community is undergoing a fundamental change, and an emerging ethic is poised to clash with the one it is displacing. The movement from a family- or clan-based society, with its revenge ethic, to a polis or political community, with its new notion of civic justice, is a perfect breeding ground for tragedy in Hegel’s terms. The Oresteia portrays just such a historical moment.[13] And this may be its deepest point of contact with The Searchers. As in many of his films, Ford portrays the American West in The Searchers as a world in process, moving from a more primitive to a more civilized state, and that means from a world of families isolated and scattered on a savage frontier to a world of larger communities, in which law and order—civilization—may finally prevail.[14] In truly Hegelian fashion, the film turns on the confrontation and clash between fundamentally opposed ways of life, and focuses on liminal figures torn between the two, struggling to bridge them but at the same time exposing the gulf between them.
The Oresteia similarly centers on the conflict between civilization and barbarism, or as Aeschylus formulates the polarity in the terms of his day: Greeks versus barbarians. Cowboys versus Indians in Ford turns out to be a reprise of Greeks versus barbarians in ancient epic and tragedy, and involves a similar degree of complexity in the opposition. Although The Searchers often falls into unfortunate Hollywood stereotypes of cowboys versus Indians, we will see that Ford rises above these conventional images and calls them into question, especially the sharpness of the opposition, much as Aeschylus does with Greeks versus barbarians. Both works deal with the establishment of boundaries, but also with the dangerous crossing of thresholds. The Oresteia famously does so in the scene of Agamemnon fatally entering his palace. The Searchers does so equally famously in its opening and closing shots of a domestic portal opening onto a vast and potentially threatening wilderness. The problematic conflict between civilization and barbarism that lies at the heart of the Oresteia is also the thematic core of The Searchers. Only by taking seriously the genuinely epic and tragic elements in The Searchers can we fully appreciate Ford’s achievement in the film and what sets it apart from conventional Westerns. As a Western, the film is, of course, a part of American culture, but viewing it in the larger context of world literature reveals its roots in the kind of perennial human dilemma we associate with the peaks of Greek epic and tragedy.
From Barbarism to Civilization
The Oresteia rests on the most spectacular and productive anachronism in the history of literature.[15] The trilogy asks us to believe that the heroic kingdom of Agamemnon is contemporaneous with a fully developed Greek polis in the form of Athenian democracy. In the course of three plays, we are swept from a palace in the twelfth-century BCE Mycenaean era to a fifth-century BCE Athenian courtroom, complete with a jury system, and we are evidently supposed to accept this mixing up of centuries without question.[16] We are so familiar with the Oresteia that it may be easy to overlook the audacity of Aeschylus’ conception. But the very meaning of his trilogy lies in the huge temporal leap it both makes and tries to conceal. Aeschylus takes us in one jump from the archaic world of Homer’s heroes to what for him was virtually the present day and hence a world of civilized institutions. Indeed, the Oresteia portrays the process of civilization itself, in its etymological sense of the movement of life into the city. The point of Aeschylus’ grand anachronism is to bring into close conjunction what were for him Homeric antiquity and Athenian modernity, and thereby to show the superiority of the latter to the former. The Homeric heroes, who have lived as marauding lone wolves, must be herded into association with ordinary human beings, who will then get to decide the heroes’ fate by the democratic principle of casting ballots. Tragedy emerges out of epic by placing the epic hero in a different ethical framework and forcing him to confront its new imperatives. The mythic heroes have been a law unto themselves, but in The Eumenides they must learn to accept the legal judgment of Athens. In an even more audacious move, Aeschylus brings the gods themselves within the jurisdiction of the city and shows them having to abide by its political authority. The Oresteia moves from the rule of the family clan to the rule of the polis. In the terms of the play, that means moving from the barbarism of the revenge ethic (championed by the old gods of the earth, the Furies) to the civilizing power of a law court (championed by the new gods of Olympus, Athena and Apollo). The city and its legal institutions come into being to bring a violent cycle of revenge to an end.[17]
The story of the House of Atreus that Aeschylus portrays in the Oresteia is not exactly the best advertisement for the family as a principle of human organization. In fact, the household descended from the generations of Tantalus and Pelops may well be the all-time dysfunctional family. As Aeschylus’ imagery forcefully reminds us,[18] the House of Atreus is haunted by incidents of cannibalism in previous generations—a potent symbol of the way a family can turn in upon itself in a self-consuming and destructive manner. In the Oresteia, Aeschylus portrays the ongoing self-destruction of this family. In the background of the action lies the fateful step Agamemnon took as leader of the Greek expedition against Troy. To secure favorable winds for the voyage, Agamemnon was willing to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, to the gods. As the trilogy opens, and Agamemnon finally returns home from Troy, his wife Clytemnestra is waiting to kill him in revenge for his having killed their daughter. This brutal act places their son Orestes in a tragic dilemma in the second play, The Libation Bearers. As Agamemnon’s son, he is called upon to avenge his father’s murder and uphold the paternal principle. But to avenge his father, he must murder his mother and thereby violate the maternal principle. Orestes’ situation is a textbook illustration of Hegel’s concept of tragedy, and, in fact, the Oresteia was central to his formulation of the theory.[19]
Aeschylus shows that the family, left to itself, cannot solve its own problems. It seems only capable of producing an unending cycle of revenge, in which each new generation is doomed to repeat the crimes of its predecessors.[20] By the second play of the Oresteia, we have encountered a father who killed his daughter, a wife who killed her husband, and a son who killed his mother. The story of Agamemnon and his family highlights the defects of the heroic world Homer portrays so nobly in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Homeric heroes live in a largely pre-political world. They come from different communities and therefore are not subject to a common law; ultimately they do not recognize any higher authority that could peacefully adjudicate their disputes. To be sure, the heroes often hold councils and engage in public debate; they appear to have procedures for arriving at mutually acceptable decisions. But it is striking how often their failure to agree threatens to erupt into violence. There is, of course, talk of kingship in the poems, but generally what we see is not the well-defined relation of a king to his subjects but the volatile relation of one king to another, “foreign” rather than “domestic” policy. Although Agamemnon is acknowledged as the leader of the expedition, and thus is a sort of king of kings, each Greek king has his own troops loyal to him and is therefore willing to go his own way if need be. That is the point of the dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles that begins the Iliad and that almost leads to disaster for the Greek cause when Achilles indignantly withdraws from battle as a result of being slighted by Agamemnon.
The fully developed polis—a community in which disputes are resolved by legal arbitration in an institutional setting—is virtually absent from the Iliad and only begins to emerge in the Odyssey.[21] Just as in the Oresteia, in Book XXIV Athena must intervene to put an end to a cycle of revenge that is beginning to emerge between Odysseus’ clan and the families of the suitors he has violently slain upon his return to Ithaka. Homer’s heroes are glorious in their willful independence and self-reliance, but they are consequently too quick to think of resolving their differences by resorting to force of arms; in an argument, their first impulse is to reach for their swords. The result, as Homer chronicles in the Iliad and the Odyssey, is that they bring down destruction upon themselves and their whole world. Odysseus alone manages to escape the cycle of destruction, but only because he is a different kind of hero--a more political one, someone who is intelligent and self-controlled enough to make the compromises necessary to survive in a hostile and violent world of proud and spirited warriors. The political character of Odysseus is shown by the fact that, unlike Achilles, he knows how to lie and to lie well.[22]
The story of Agamemnon shadows the story of Odysseus in the Odyssey.[23] Aeschylus seems to have developed his Agamemnon as a kind of alternate Odyssey, the story of a disastrous return from the Trojan War to counterpoint Odysseus’ successful return. Aeschylus uses Agamemnon’s story to launch a critique of the revenge ethic that is characteristic of Homer’s heroes, especially in the Iliad. The self-destruction of Agamemnon’s house mirrors the self-destruction of the larger heroic world in Homer. In Homer’s portrayal, Agamemnon is already not completely admirable, but Aeschylus works to darken the figure further (Homer, for example, never speaks of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia).[24] Above all, Aeschylus associates Agamemnon with the barbarian forces from the East he has been fighting against in Troy. To link Agamemnon with Asia, Aeschylus pairs him with the Trojan woman Cassandra when he returns home. The fact that he has brought a Trojan concubine with him back to Argos may be one of Clytemnestra’s motives for killing him.[25] With Cassandra’s wild, nearly hysterical outbursts, she produces the most “Asiatic” notes in the Agamemnon. It is she who speaks most vividly and extensively of the cannibalistic past of the House of Atreus and in general injects monstrous images into the play (152, ll. 1224-27). She recalls with horror being raped by Apollo (155, ll. 1286-91), thus introducing a powerful current of sexuality into the dialogue. She is the one who first speaks at length about the Furies, who come to represent the blood-lust of vengeance in the trilogy (150, ll. 1189-99). Cassandra’s truly prophetic character emerges in the way she speaks for all the irrational forces that threaten the discipline and order of civilized life and that are soon going to bring down Agamemnon. By companioning Agamemnon with her, Aeschylus suggests that the conquering hero has brought back an equivocal treasure from Troy and may have been fatally tainted by the very act of conquest.
The fact that Aeschylus gives these Asiatic associations to Agamemnon is very important in light of the larger patterns of ancient Greek thinking. The opposition between West and East, Occident and Orient, Europe and Asia appears frequently in ancient Greek texts, and corresponds to the opposition between Greek and barbarian.[26] This polarity appears as early as the Iliad, which stages a confrontation between the Achaeans, a European people, and the Trojans, an Asiatic people.[27] To be sure, the Iliad shows its true nobility as a war poem in the sympathy and admiration it displays for the “other side.” Homer shows the Trojans worshiping the same gods as the Greeks,[28] and in general works to bring out their humanity and, indeed, their nobility, so successfully that some have argued that the Trojan Hector is the true hero of the Iliad.[29] Nevertheless, sometimes Homer contrasts the Trojans unfavorably with the Greeks and begins to articulate what was to become the stereotype of the barbarian.[30] Take, for example, the moment in Book IV when Homer juxtaposes the way the Greek and Trojan armies conduct themselves, beginning with the Greeks:
You’d never think so many troops could march
holding their voices in their chests, all silence,
fearing their chiefs who called out clear commands,
and the burnished blazoned armor round their bodies flared,
the formations trampling on.
But not the Trojans, no. . .
like flocks of sheep in a wealthy rancher’s steadings,
thousands crowding to have their white milk drained,
bleating nonstop when they hear their crying lambs—
so the shouts rose up from the long Trojan lines
and not one cry, one common voice to bind them
all together, their tongues mixed and clashed,
their men hailed from so many far-flung countries.[31]
It is remarkable how much of the Greek versus barbarian stereotype is already contained in this single passage. It is even more remarkable how much this contrast resembles the cowboys versus Indians stereotype in American Westerns. The European Greeks represent rationality; the Asiatic Trojans represent irrationality. The Greek troops prove their disciplined character in the orderly way they march, silently obeying their orders and holding their emotions in check. The Trojans, by contrast, are presented as subhuman in their emotional outbursts and lack of order. The epic simile compares them to animals, and all the noise they make suggests that they cannot be organized into a disciplined fighting force. The subhuman character of the Trojans is emphasized by the suggestion that they even lack language. They come from so many different places that they cannot communicate in a common language and are reduced to barking and grunting at each other like animals. The whole idea of the superiority of Greek to barbarian is summed up in this single image of Achaean order versus Trojan disorder. And to jump ahead for a moment to The Searchers, the same polarity prevails in the way Ford contrasts the disciplined charges of the U.S. cavalry and the Texas Rangers with the haphazard, hit-and-miss attacks of the Comanche Indians (accompanied by their inarticulate war whoops).[32] The tendency of Westerns to present Indians as virtually subhuman in their language is notorious. They are commonly presented as speaking a pidgin English, and their native languages are seldom treated with any respect (the Comanches in The Searchers, for example, speak Navajo simply because Ford’s extras were Navajo). The ways in which the cowboys in the Western are presented as superior to the Indians are virtually identical to the ways in which Greeks are presented as superior to barbarians in Homer and in ancient Greek literature in general.
This negative stereotyping of the barbarian in Greek epic and the Indian in the American Western is understandably very distasteful to contemporary sensibilities, but we should pause and reflect before simply condemning either Homer or Ford as a kind of racist. As I have suggested, Homer actually admires the Trojans, and sometimes portrays them as superior to the Greeks.[33] We will see something similar in The Searchers; for the moment, note that Ford does not uncritically accept the traditional stereotyping of Indian linguistic inability, and, in fact, raises doubts about it. He supplies a pointed exchange between his hero, Ethan Edwards, and Scar (Henry Brandon), the Indian chief Ethan has been hunting down for years—an exchange that emphasizes their equality when it comes to language. In their first face-to-face confrontation, Ethan says to Scar: “You speak pretty good American for a Comanch.” Moments later Scar comes back with: “You speak pretty good Comanch for a white man.” Here cowboy and Indian are mirror images of each other.[34] As elsewhere in the film, Scar is presented on the same heroic level as Ethan; if they are not quite equals, they are legitimate rivals in the way that Achilles and Hector are in the Iliad. As we will see, Ford works to deconstruct any simple opposition between cowboys and Indians, and much the same can be said of Homer’s treatment of Greek versus barbarian. And something similar is obviously happening in the Oresteia, where Aeschylus brings out the barbarian elements in Agamemnon.[35] If the titular leader of the Greeks in the Trojan War is revealed to have barbarian characteristics, then the standard opposition of Greek versus barbarian cannot be as hard-and-fast as it may at first seem. Even a great Greek hero carries the barbarian within him (much as Ethan does in The Searchers).
Aeschylus makes the plot of Agamemnon turn on the way the barbarian elements in Agamemnon come to the surface. Clytemnestra stage manages his welcome to Argos so that he will publicly behave like an oriental despot according to Greek stereotypes.[36] She induces him to tread upon a luxurious tapestry, she prostrates herself before him in a kind of Asiatic slavishness, and she treats him like a god. Agamemnon himself comments on the barbarian character of his behavior in response:
you treat me like a woman. Grovelling, gaping up at me—
what am I, some barbarian peacocking out of Asia?
Never cross my path with robes and draw the lightning.
Never — only the gods deserve the pomps of honour.
and the stiff brocades of fame.[37] (137-38, ll. 912-16)
As if to clinch her casting of Agamemnon in the role of a barbarian ruler, Clytemnestra compares him to Priam, the King of Troy, and presents him as acting in contempt of the common people (138, l. 930). In an effort to justify the murder she is about to commit, she successfully maneuvers Agamemnon into publicly committing an act of hubris.[38] Although Agamemnon protests against the way Clytemnestra treats him in barbarian fashion like a god, clearly something in him warms up to the role, exposing Asiatic tyrannical impulses in a Greek ruler.[39] Aeschylus goes on to portray Clytemnestra together with her lover Aegisthus acting like tyrants once they come to the throne, behaving with contempt for the law and all conventional restraints.[40] The fact that Aesgisthus appears with bodyguards is in Athenian terms a clear marker of his having assumed the role of a tyrant.[41] He behaves impudently and tyrannically to the chorus at the end of the play, threatening them, calling them slaves, and flaunting his power over them. Evidently it was not just Troy that fell apart as a result of the ten years’ war. Back in the Greek heartland, law and order have broken down, and murderous passions have been unleashed. The barbarism of the East has erupted within the palaces of the West, putting despotism in place of the rule of law.
Thus, at the core of his strategy of criticizing the ethos of revenge, Aeschylus associates murderous impulses with the non-Greek world, and, indeed, he presents them as the very antithesis of civilization and rational behavior, a holdover from a primitive stage of human development.[42] It is therefore appropriate that the chthonic deities, the Furies, emerge as the champions and patrons of the vengeance principle. Swarming over the stage, they are the wildest and most irrational forces that appear in the trilogy. They are opposed by Apollo, the god of light, and Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Aeschylus sets up a polarity that resembles Nietzsche’s famous dichotomy in his The Birth of Tragedy between the Apollinian and the Dionysian, the rational versus the irrational.[43] As the new gods, the gods of the future, the Olympians Apollo and Athena stand up for civilization, while the old gods, the gods of the past, the Furies, stand up for the irrational impulses that need to be restrained for civilization to prevail.[44] Apollo associates the Furies with the cruel and primitive justice of the East:[45]
Go where heads are severed, eyes gouged out,
where Justice and bloody slaughter are the same. . .
castrations, wasted seed, young men’s glories butchered,
extremities maimed, and huge stones at the chest,
and the victims wail for pity –
spikes inching up the spine, torsos stuck on spikes. (239, ll. 183-88)
The divine conflict comes to a head over the issue of whether Orestes must die for murdering Clytemnestra to avenge his father, with the Furies calling for Orestes’ blood and Apollo seeking his pardon. But the gods seem incapable of arbitrating this issue among themselves. The Furies insist on the maternal principle and Apollo insists just as adamantly on the paternal principle. The story of Agamemnon’s murder by Clytemnestra and Clytemnestra’s murder by Orestes thus seems to show why the family fails as a principle of social organization. It cannot settle its disputes except through bloodshed, and even then, its divisions lead to unending violence, not a peaceful society.
In an Athenian drama, Aeschylus offers an Athenian court as the solution to the tragic dilemma created by the ethos of revenge and the contradictory divine commands it inspires.[46] The city is the successor to the family or the clan as the principle of social organization, and by providing an impartial form of justice, it promises to bring peace where the personal vendetta threatened to result in a war of all against all.[47] Aeschylus stresses the institutional aspects of civic justice.[48] Procedures are in place and, above all, the contesting parties agree to abide by the verdict of the court, acknowledging the power of a higher authority that is impersonal and presumably impartial. The procedural aspect of the trial is emphasized by the casting of the ballots, especially by the fact that in the tie that results, Athena settles the dispute—according to an agreed upon convention--by casting the deciding vote.[49] Moreover, the law allows for compromise.[50] Whereas a blood feud is a zero-sum game—the ultimate case of either winning or losing—civic justice tries to offer something to everybody. Orestes will not have to die to satisfy the Furies’ thirst for vengeance, but they will not leave the court empty handed. Athena promises that they will be accepted within the precincts of Athens and honored by the city.
The Oresteia portrays the family as failing in the act of incorporation. When Agamemnon attempts to re-enter his home, he is destroyed, and the only successful acts of “incorporation” in the House of Atreus are typically acts of ingestion, the horrors of cannibalism that haunt the family. The city, by contrast, is a master of incorporation, finding a place for even the gods within its limits.[51] It is a sign of Aeschylus’ wisdom that he realizes that the city cannot simply reject the irrational forces the Furies represent and try to expel them from its ranks. Rather, Athens must find a way to incorporate the Furies within its boundaries and make their power work for the city, not against it.[52] The fear they inspire must be channeled into awe for the power of the law.[53] Mera Flaumenhaft cleverly speaks of the movement “from Furies to juries” in The Eumenides.[54] The Furies will supply the emotional basis for the rule of law that restrained their own murderous impulses. And bringing the gods within the jurisdiction of the city also helps to supply a divine sanction for its laws.
In Athena’s grand speech about the founding of the court of the Areopagus, the Oresteia culminates in a vision of the triumph of civilization over barbarism, the rule of law over savagery:
Now and forever more, for Aegeus’ people
this will be the court where judges reign.
This is the Crag of Ares, where the Amazons
pitched their tents when they came marching down
on Theseus, full tilt in their fury, erecting
a new city to overarch his city, towers thrust
against his towers — they sacrificed to Ares,
raised this rock from that day onward Ares’ Crag. (262, ll.695-702)
Once again, Aeschylus harks back to the distinction between Greek and barbarian, as he recalls a mythic time when an invading force of Amazons from the Black Sea region had to be repulsed by the Athenian hero Theseus. This victory of the forces of light over the forces of darkness will be repeated every time the power of the law prevails over the power of violent passion in an Athenian court. The Oresteia is a hymn to the civilizing power of the city and especially its legal institutions. But its vision of the triumph of the law over the violent passion of revenge is not naïve. The Furies may have given up on obtaining Orestes’ blood, but they will remain in the city, a constant reminder that barbarism is not something to be found only outside its gates; rather barbarism is incorporated into its foundations, ultimately dwelling in the human heart.[55]
The tragedy generated by the contradictory demands of the paternal and maternal principles within the family can be resolved in true Hegelian fashion only by lifting the issue to a higher plane, where the city as a more comprehensive community offers to mediate the conflict. The city achieves a higher synthesis than any god can provide on his or her own. Athens brings together the Furies and Apollo, the old and the new gods, all of whom are now to be honored by the city. The city is thus capable of offering a higher justice than the personal vendetta can ever provide. Athena emphasizes the importance of founding the city on the civilized principle of the rule of law, not the barbarian rule of violent force:
The stronger your fear, your reverence for the just,
the stronger your country’s wall and city’s safety,
stronger by far than all men else possess
in Scythia’s rugged steppes or Pelops’ level plain.
Untouched by lust for spoil, this court of law
majestic, swift to fury, rising above you
as you sleep, our night watch always wakeful,
guardian of our land — I found it here and now. (262, ll. 714-21)
In the Oresteia, Aeschylus shapes the foundational myth of modern civilization. The grand dramatic sweep of the trilogy ultimately has one purpose—to drag the Homeric hero before a jury, to show that the seemingly irresolvable tragedies of the ancient heroic world can finally be settled only in a civilized court of law.[56]
“What Makes a Man to Wander?”
To bring the archaic heroic world into juxtaposition with the modern civilized world, Aeschylus, as we have seen, has to commit an almost grotesque act of anachronism in the Oresteia. All John Ford has to do in The Searchers is to move his cameras west. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the United States was one gigantic “geographic anachronism.” The East was living in the world of Henry James; the West was living in the world of Homer (at least as popular culture portrayed it). The journey west in American literature has always been a journey into the past, into a more primitive world, a world that lacks both the advantages and the drawbacks of modern life. Western movies continue to present the West as the frontier between civilization and barbarism, and thus as a site where opposing ways of life clash—often tragically. The Searchers is the classic embodiment of this theme. Set in West Texas in the late 1860s and early 1870s, it portrays pioneers trying to establish a civilized community in the face of a harsh nature and hostile Indian tribes. But the barbarism the settler families confront is not simply a force external to their community. As in the Oresteia, barbarism is at work within the civilized community in The Searchers; indeed, it turns out that civilization needs a form of barbarism to defend itself against its enemies.
That is why Ethan Edwards has to be a rugged hero in the Homeric mold, with a strong streak of cruelty, an implacable will to revenge, and a well-developed capacity for killing his fellow human beings in cold blood. He has work to do, the work of protecting civilization, and that can be a nasty job. Much to the dismay of many critics, Ethan is not a nice guy, although he can be gentle with children and has an avuncular sense of humor. Ethan has been hardened by his experiences, particularly in war and in frontier combat. But he needs that hardness to deal with a harsh and hostile world. Homer’s heroes are not nice either, because their world also does not allow them to be so. Ford’s Western frontier is Homeric precisely because it is a world in which a man survives only by the strength of his own arms.[57] Like Homer and Aeschylus, Ford portrays a pre-political world in all its epic and tragic grandeur, a world whose heroes can be savage in their self-reliance, while at the same time providing the only bulwark against the triumph of barbarism over civilization.
If Ethan has a dark side as a hero, Ford is working within a very old tradition that stretches back through Shakespeare to the ancient Greeks. The critics who insist on referring to Ethan as a villain have evidently forgotten what a tragic hero is.[58] Because the tragic hero is positioned at the flash point between conflicting ethical principles, from the perspective of one of the moralities he will inevitably appear to be flawed. If Ethan is torn between civilization and barbarism, and must incorporate some of the latter to defend the former, he is not going to appear perfectly virtuous according to the ordinary standards of domestic life. Even as a tragic hero is inevitably condemned by the standards of conventional morality, he raises doubts about the universal applicability of those standards by revealing dimensions of life beyond the conventional. You might not want to invite Ethan to the church picnic, but, then again, the same is true of Achilles or Agamemnon. But if you and your family felt threatened on the frontier, Ethan is exactly the kind of character you would want manning the barricades. As his nephew says when the Comanches are gathering to attack the homestead: “I wish Uncle Ethan was here.”[59] Like Homer and the Greek tragedians, Ford understands that the tragic hero is a lion, not a pussycat, and a lion can create a lot of havoc if let loose in a city. Aeschylus uses exactly this image of a lion ravaging a peaceful community to suggest the problematic character of the tragic hero.[60]
By focusing on the issue of revenge, Ford highlights the pre-political character of the world of The Searchers.[61] Ethan’s unrelenting pursuit of the Indians who massacred his kinfolk must be understood in the context of the total absence of all the legal institutions we take for granted in modern communal life.[62] Ethan cannot expect Scar to be tried for rape and murder by a jury of his peers, because the chief’s peers, rather than punishing him, would likely applaud him for what he did to Ethan’s family. It may seem obvious, but it is important that Ethan and Scar do not belong to the same community and do not acknowledge any authority to whose higher jurisdiction they are both subject. If Ethan is going to bring Scar to any kind of justice, he has every reason to believe that he will have to be the one to do so.
Critics are correct to speak of the obsessive character of Ethan’s quest for revenge, but they go wrong when they begin to speak of him as mad, even as clinically insane.[63] Ethan is no more—and no less—mad than Achilles. If, for example, we are seeking a precedent for Ethan’s cruel treatment of fallen Indians (shooting out their eyes, scalping them), we need look no further than Achilles’ humiliation of Hector’s corpse.[64] The fury that grips heroes in Homer, as well as in Greek tragedy, is a precise analogue for the obsession with revenge that takes possession of Ethan.[65] Although his behavior often seems mad in the eyes of men who are too prudent—or too cowardly—to follow him into danger, most of the time Ethan behaves quite rationally in his quest, often displaying cunning and shrewd calculation. He clearly cares about the amount of money he is expending on the search, and keeps a careful account of it (think especially of the scene where he retrieves his gold piece from Futterman [Peter Mamakos] after killing him).[66] When he realizes that the Comanches have tricked him and his friends into leaving their families defenseless, he does not rush back home at once as the others do, but instead has the foresight to pause and refresh his horse for the long ride ahead. In this regard, he seems more like the thoughtful Odysseus than the rash Achilles. Unlike other characters in the story, Ethan rarely plunges into a situation without carefully thinking over his options and the odds of his surviving.[67] If he is in the grip of fury, it is almost always a controlled fury. His capacity for self-control culminates in the moving moment at the end when he decides to save Debbie instead of killing her.
I often wonder what some of Ethan’s harshest critics think that he should do when he returns to his brother’s homestead and finds his only relatives slaughtered, above all, his brother’s wife Martha (Dorothy Jordan), the woman he evidently was in love with in earlier days—as well as his two nieces kidnapped by the Indians who have already raped Martha. Should Ethan dial 911 and tamely report the crime to the police like a good citizen? There are no police in the world of The Searchers because there are no cities. The only authorities Ethan could appeal to are the U.S. cavalry and the Texas Rangers—neither the best representative of civic justice.[68] As we learn in the course of the film, the U.S. cavalry is a good killing machine, but it is rather indiscriminate in whom it kills, and, contrary to motion picture tradition, it can rarely be counted upon to show up when and where it is needed.[69] The Texas Rangers are more Ethan’s style. He becomes deputized as one of them and rides off with them initially to rescue his nieces Lucy (Pippa Scott) and Debbie and to punish the Comanches. But like Achilles, Ethan has a hard time taking orders from anyone,[70] even his old comrade Captain Clayton (Ward Bond) of the Texas Rangers, who has a lot in common with him but refuses to pursue revenge with the same intensity and singlemindedness (perhaps because it was not his family that was massacred). Clayton himself acknowledges the difficulty of Ethan’s situation when he admits that the pursuit of the Comanches is a job for more men than a company of Rangers—or fewer. In the absence of a frontier pacified by a massive military force from the federal government, the Homeric lone wolf has the best chance of tracking down the nomadic Indian tribe. Accordingly, Ethan sets off basically on his own, accompanied only by two young men, Martin Pauley (Jeffrey Hunter) and Brad Jorgensen (Harry Carey, Jr.), who, as Ethan makes clear, will either follow his orders or return home.
Samuel Johnson Clayton is one of several liminal figures in The Searchers, who help to define the border between civilization and barbarism. He is both a captain in the Texas Rangers and the local reverend. He can be heroic, courageous, and even bloodthirsty when he leads a troop into combat—he loves a good fight as much as the next man—but he also conducts funerals and weddings, presiding over the civilized rituals of domestic life and sanctifying them. With one foot in the realm of war and one foot in the realm of peaceful domesticity—symbolized by his quick changes of wardrobe—he embodies the ambivalence of the world Ford creates in The Searchers.[71] The fact that this admirable man respects Ethan is a clear indication of the truly heroic status Ford accords his protagonist. But Clayton’s moderation—his unwillingness to take revenge as far as Ethan wants to—serves as a measure of the hero’s extremism.
The figure of Captain Reverend Clayton sums up everything Ford is saying about the West in the process of being civilized. Even as Clayton is willing to resort to violence when necessary, he is a man of God and represents the pacifying power of religion and Christianity in particular. By contrast, Ethan twice interrupts Clayton’s religious services, at the funeral for his brother’s family (“Put an amen to it”) and at the ill-fated wedding of Laurie Jorgensen (Vera Miles) and the hapless Charlie McCorry (Ken Curtis).[72] Ethan is not a man of peace—he openly says that after the Civil War ended, he refused to beat his sword into a ploughshare.[73] Unlike Reverend Clayton, Ethan displays a remarkable knowledge of Indian religion. In a gripping moment early in the film that helps define his character, Ethan shoots out the eyes of a dead Indian because he knows that a Comanche would believe that this act will condemn him to a life of wandering in the spirit world.[74] This is our first clue that Ethan is the right man for pursuing the Indians because he has so much in common with them.[75] Only because he understands their customs and beliefs will he be able to track them down. In the larger symbolic pattern of The Searchers, Ford is thus calling into question from the start any simplistic identification of cowboys with civilization and Indians with barbarism. Ethan must share in the barbarism of the Indians he opposes in order to deal with them successfully, and this “barbarism” turns out to be largely indistinguishable from the heroic life of the warrior that Ethan represents.
Another liminal figure who contributes to blurring the conventional line between cowboys and Indians, between civilization and barbarism, is Mose Harper (Hank Worden).[76] As a kind of Holy Fool, Mose stands outside normal social categories. When Ethan is explaining why he shot out the dead Comanche’s eyes, Mose acts out his words in pantomime, and earlier he performs an abbreviated Indian dance when Ethan has figured out the strategy behind the Comanche cattle raid.[77] Mose wears a feather in his cap in imitation of Indians, and at a key moment in the story, he is able to go among the Comanches and obtain the information Ethan needs to track them down.[78] Half-crazed, Mose has a hard time fitting into polite society, but that is precisely his value for the settlers. An outsider himself, he has some kind of secret sympathy with the Indians that gives him insight into their movements. He is almost as nomadic as the Comanches themselves. But his ultimate dream is to settle down. All he asks in return from Ethan for his information about the Comanches is a place to live and a rocking chair in which he can, in true Western fashion, sit a spell. Mose reveals in comic form the poles between which the Western hero alternates—motion and rest. He is a man in perpetual motion who wishes only to settle down. As such, he is the comic equivalent of the tragic Ethan, who is torn between the attraction of home and the compulsion to avenge his family that keeps him moving on his quest.[79] Like the Indians he relentlessly pursues, Ethan seems condemned to a life of wandering forever.[80] In the dialectical terms of The Searchers, Ethan must always be on the move so that other people may eventually settle down and take possession of the land.[81] That is the deepest reason why in the famous ending of the film, Ethan cannot enter the Jorgensen home with his friends and kinfolk, but must walk off to become once again an isolated figure in the empty landscape out of which he emerged in the beginning.[82]
As a revenge tragedy, The Searchers, like the Oresteia, poses the question of the value of civilization in the starkest terms—the choice between personal vendetta and civic justice. Although Ford presents the search for vengeance as a heroic quest, he does not glamorize or glorify it. He leaves no doubt that it can become an obsession, poisoning a man’s existence, and it ultimately must be renounced as a way of life. Like Aeschylus, Ford highlights the cyclical character of revenge. We learn that Scar’s raid on the Edwards homestead was in revenge for the murder of his two sons by white men. Thus, again like Aeschylus, Ford suggests barbarian origins to the revenge ethic. And who knows what the Comanches might do in retaliation for the murder of Scar? As long as we remain in the world of isolated families, clans, or tribes, the violence threatens to go on forever and to deny a safe and secure life to anyone on the frontier, cowboy or Indian. As much as this chaotic world brings out the heroism in people on both sides, Ford clearly suggests that the chaos must be brought to an end, if only for the sake of the women and the children, who unfortunately fall victim to masculine violence throughout the film—again on both sides. Like the doomed and self-destructive world of the Homeric epics, Ford’s West has no future as long as it remains mired in the vendettas of the past. Ford follows Aeschylus’ formula: the quest for revenge is heroic, but there is also something barbaric about it, and human beings must learn to rise above it.
Women and the Taming of the Frontier
Ford thus shows that the West must pursue the path of civilization, specifically the path of education, and in this process, women—with their devotion to their children and the next generation—have a great deal to contribute. Ethan’s brother Aaron (Walter Coy) gives Martha credit for preventing him from abandoning their homestead in the face of all the threats to their lives: “She just wouldn’t let a man quit.”[83] Lars Jorgensen (John Qualen) points with pride to the fact that his wife used to be a schoolteacher. The men in the film, however heroic their stature, are noticeably deficient in education. Clayton spells mount “M-O-N-T-E,” and Laurie Jorgensen points out that Martin Pauley spells her first name incorrectly with a “y.” Martin can produce only one letter to Laurie in several years, a low level of literacy that nearly costs him her hand in marriage. He can barely read, and Laurie has to help him decipher an important note to Ethan. Throughout the story, women exert a civilizing influence on the men. Early in the film, Mrs. Jorgensen (Olive Carey) warns Ethan as he sets off on his search with Martin and her son Brad: “Don’t let the boys waste their lives in vengeance.”[84] And at the end of the film, Debbie brings out the civilized side of Ethan.[85] Women may seem helpless in the face of the violent world of The Searchers, and wholly dependent on heroic men to protect them. But Ford presents a number of strong female characters in the film, and has them speak out against irrational violence and in favor of a civilized way of life. As in many of his films, Ford suggests in The Searchers that if the West is ever to be civilized, women will play a major role in the process (as did, in fact, happen). In many respects, women stand for civilization in The Searchers, while the force of barbarism is represented exclusively by men.[86]
Nevertheless, the women in The Searchers are sometimes confronted by the choice between civilization and barbarism in a distinctively feminine and very practical form—when it comes to choosing their husbands (and women do appear to have that choice in this world). The fact that they almost of necessity prefer a peace-loving, tractable man over a warlike, violent man as a husband is perhaps the chief reason they exercise a civilizing force in society. Marriage is the most basic domestic institution and requires on the man’s part a willingness to settle down and help raise a family that is often incompatible with the kind of heroic quest that leads him away from hearth and home. That is why the hypermasculine hero, who holds many attractions for women, is not simply—or even regularly—preferred when it comes to the serious business of matrimony. This principle is illustrated in the backstory of a romantic triangle in the Edwards household that Ford hints at in the opening scenes. Evidently Ethan and Martha were once in love, if we are to judge by the way they still look at each other when he returns, and a number of other visual clues Ford supplies, such as Martha’s tender caressing of Ethan’s coat when she thinks that she is alone.[87] We cannot know for sure what really happened in the past, but from what we see of Ethan and Aaron, we can reconstruct a plausible explanation for why Martha chose the less impressive brother as her husband. Although she was more attracted to Ethan as a strong, heroic man, she realized that she could not get him to settle down to domestic life and that therefore Aaron, even though less of a man, would make the better domestic partner for her. As we see throughout The Searchers, Ethan is always running off to perform one heroic deed after another, whereas Aaron is the kind of man who stays with his family. In the story of Ethan, Aaron, and Martha, we see how women work to tame the men of the West. If a man wishes to marry and have a family, he will have to give up his heroic aspirations, or at least learn to moderate them and act in a more civilized, and less violent, fashion.
The story of Martin Pauley and Laurie Jorgensen develops this point more fully. By the end of the story, Martin is finally in a position to marry Laurie, but only because he has proven that he is different from Ethan, less violent and more domestic by nature. Laurie has been in love with Martin since childhood, and clearly wants to marry him. But for much of the film, he is too eager to leave her and accompany Ethan in the search for Debbie, thus time and again disappointing Laurie’s hopes for their future together. Martin, although callow and naïve, is in his own way a heroic figure, and repeatedly shows that he is worthy to be Ethan’s companion on the dangerous quest. It is after all Martin, and not, as we might have expected, Ethan, who finally kills Scar. But all along, Martin differentiates himself from Ethan as a searcher. For much of the movie, Ethan is more interested in killing Debbie than Scar; he cannot bear the thought of his niece becoming a savage. Martin, by contrast, makes it clear to Laurie that he has to go along with Ethan on the search precisely to prevent him from killing Debbie. A domestic motive—specifically the protection of a woman—is built into Martin’s conception of the search. That shows his ultimate suitability as a husband for Laurie, even though the search forces him several times to leave her in the lurch.
Still, Martin faces an obstacle to his marrying Laurie, a rival in the person of Charlie McCorry. Ford brilliantly recreates the Ethan-Aaron-Martha triangle in the form of the Martin-Charlie-Laurie triangle.[88] A very serious and sad story from the past gets reconfigured into a very funny romantic entanglement in the present, a perfect example of how Ford mingles tragic and comic motifs in the story.[89] Laurie appears to be repeating Martha’s original choice when she agrees to wed the oafish McCorry.[90] Everything tells her that Martin is the better man, but she obviously gets tired of waiting around for him and chooses Charlie simply because he is available and at her beck and call. The scene of the wedding offers all of Ford’s regular symbols of civilized order—music, song, dance, ritual. As the presiding minister, Clayton even performs a quick change into formal clothes, and shuts down the bar. The way Ethan and Martin interrupt all this proper behavior confirms their status as borderline figures, who barely fit into polite civil society. As soon as Ethan shows up, the bar is once again open.[91]
With a chance to compare Martin and Charlie directly, Laurie realizes the error of her choice, and cannot go through with the wedding. This abrupt decision leads to the most extended comic sequence in the film, the fight between Martin and Charlie. But given the way this romantic triangle resonates with the backstory in the Edwards household, this scene has serious undertones as well. We see civilization and barbarism mixed together.[92] On the one hand, there is a ritual quality to the way Martin and Charlie fight. Like adolescent boys in a shoving match, they observe the proper etiquette of the situation, as Charlie challenges Martin to step over a log. We sense that neither one is really going to get hurt. On the other hand, they both resort to dirty tactics, and the fight keeps threatening to get out of hand and lead to real injuries. The ritual barely contains the violence. Ford allows the very serious tensions between aggressive males that often lurk beneath the surface in The Searchers to break out in a relatively harmless and therefore comic environment. But as funny as the scene may be, at the same time it presents the primal struggle—two men fighting over a woman. The Searchers portrays a remarkable sequence of masculine rivalries, mostly involving Ethan: Ethan versus Aaron, Ethan versus Scar, Ethan versus Martin, Ethan versus Clayton—the list goes on.[93] These rivalries run deep, often involving a sexual component, and they sometimes have tragic results. The simmering rivalry between men—often over women—that runs throughout The Searchers finally erupts into open violence in the fight between Martin and Charlie.
Ford cannot resist showing that women just love this kind of scene. Ethan has to restrain Mrs. Jorgensen as a spectator, admonishing her: “Don’t forget you’re a lady.” Then, in one of the most psychologically revealing moments in the film, Ford gives a full-face close-up of Laurie simply beaming at the sight of two men fighting for her hand in marriage. In Ford’s presentation, women may generally seek to restrain the violent behavior of men, but at times they egg it on. This is the paradoxical position of women on the frontier—they want their men to be both violent and non-violent. They need aggressive masculinity to protect them against hostile forces, but they also feel a need to tame that heroic disposition for the sake of raising children. Fortunately for Laurie, she is able to have the best of both worlds. The rival men in her life do not fight to the death over her and are willing in a non-heroic and non-tragic way to let bygones be bygones. And in the long run, Martin turns out to be the happy medium between the violent hero and the peaceful domestic man. The domestic impulses that make Martin ultimately suitable as a husband for Laurie are no accident, but are, in fact, largely the product of her influence. As we see at several points in the film, Laurie has worked to domesticate Martin, to bring out his civilized side. His love for her forces him to become the tamer man she desires. This, Ford suggests, is one of the ways women contribute to making the West safe for civilization.
Accordingly, as Aeschylus does with Athena, Ford gives the great speech on the civilizing process in his story to a woman, Mrs. Jorgensen:[94]
It just so happens we be Texicans. A Texican is nothing but a human man way out on a limb. This year, and next, maybe for a hundred more. But I don’t think it’ll be forever. Someday this country is gonna be a fine good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.
This is the tragic vision that unites the understanding of history in the Oresteia and The Searchers. One does not have to go as far as equating Dallas or Houston with Athens to see that Aeschylus and Ford are dealing with fundamentally the same process, the emergence of the peaceful civic community out of the violent and chaotic reign of the clans. The blood of several generations may have to be sacrificed to make this goal possible, but in both Greek tragedy and the American Western, the end ultimately justifies the means. Civilization is built on the bones of the heroic pioneers who struggle against and out of barbarism. That is the fundamental tragedy of civilization.
To be sure, both Aeschylus and Ford shape a happy ending for their stories. The Oresteia is a good reminder that, contrary to popular opinion, Greek tragedies did not always end with the deaths of their heroes. Orestes survives in The Eumenides, even though he is a tragic hero. If other complete trilogies had survived from ancient Athens, we might be more used to the idea of a reconciliation of opposing forces taking place in Greek tragedy (Aeschylus’ Prometheus trilogy evidently ended with Zeus and the suffering Titan somehow reconciled).[95] But although technically the Oresteia ends “happily,” the conclusion of the trilogy hardly leaves the audience whistling a happy tune as they go home from the theater. The issues Aeschylus raises are so serious that we come away from the play, not elated and overjoyed, but sobered and chastened. Aeschylus has laid bare the profound tensions and contradictions that lie at the core of civilized life, and no amount of reconciliation at the end can make us forget these tragic insights.
Similarly, the conclusion of The Searchers may look like a conventional Hollywood ending, incorporating many elements of reconciliation and even of romantic comedy. Debbie has been restored to her friends and relatives, to her people, and a marriage between Martin and Laurie may well be in the offing. Even Ethan has survived. One can easily imagine him being killed in one way or another. In the novel on which the film is based, the Ethan character does die at the hands of a Comanche woman and Martin is left to rescue Debbie. Still, like the Oresteia, The Searchers is a sobering experience for the audience, and the way Ethan walks off alone at the end ensures that any cheering at the fates of Debbie, Martin, and Laurie will be muted. Like any real tragedy, The Searchers has given us a disturbing look into some of the fundamental dilemmas that lie at the heart of human life. The mere absence of the hero’s death does not mean that we cease to be deeply troubled and unnerved by what we have seen happen in his story.
If anything, Ford’s vision may be more tragic than Aeschylus’. He seems more troubled by what is lost in the civilizing process, as shown by the painful image he creates of Ethan’s exclusion from the very world he has labored so hard to protect.[96] Ford seems more nostalgic for his heroic figures--he knows that they must be left behind, but at the same time he admires and celebrates them.[97] A sense of “there were giants in those days” pervades Ford’s Westerns, even The Searchers, which gives perhaps his most uncompromising view of the violence and cruelty that went along with frontier heroics. And to his credit, Ford sees this heroism on both sides of the conventional divide between cowboys and Indians. As we have seen and many commentators have noted, Ethan and Scar are doubles, virtually mirror images of each other.[98] This becomes evident when they finally meet. As much as they hate each other, they feel a kind of grudging admiration as well, sensing that as heroic warriors they have more in common with each other than they do with the ordinary men in their respective “tribes.” Despite this identification, Ethan takes a cruel satisfaction in working to wipe out the Indian culture he despises. In one particularly disturbing scene, he glories in killing bison just so the Comanches will have less to eat. In the deepest irony of The Searchers, Ethan does not realize that, if he succeeds in exterminating the Indians and their warrior way of life, he will simultaneously destroy his own reason for existence and end his career as a frontier hero. But Ford is, of course, aware of this irony and of the fact that he is pursuing what amounts to a Homeric theme, the self-destruction of an age of heroes. As Ethan walks off into the distance at the end of The Searchers, he is marching into the annals of history and legend, thereby bringing an entire era to a close.
I have tried to show the ways in which Ford shares Aeschylus’ vision as a tragedian, with his similar understanding of the complex dialectic of civilization and barbarism—a vision that ultimately embodies a progressivist perspective, looking forward to the eventual emergence and triumph of civic life.[99] But, in the end, The Searchers is more elegiac in tone than the Oresteia. Especially in visual terms, it seems to be a melancholy reflection on the passing of a generation of heroes. As an elegy for a doomed but noble age, The Searchers is in some respects more like the Iliad than the Oresteia—an important reminder that Ford’s greatest film is as much an epic as it is a tragedy. With its affinities to both the Oresteia and the Iliad, The Searchers is a true American classic, revealing what a high level of artistic achievement is possible in pop culture, even in one of its least respected genres. The Searchers is, indeed, a classic Western, but not a typical one. It tells the classic Western story of the hero as rugged individualist, battling elemental forces on the frontier. But Ford rejects the neat and comfortable ending of the typical Western, in which the lone wolf hero eventually becomes tamed by the domestic community he is called on to defend. By isolating Ethan at the end of the film, Ford presents him as a tragic figure. Ethan represents the Western ideal of freedom in its purest form. Perpetually on the move, pushing the limits of the frontier, he charts his own course. But the self-reliance and gritty determination that make him a Western hero tragically leave him without a home at the end of The Searchers.
Like an ancient Greek playwright, Ford lays bare the tragic tension between the solitary hero and the political community. The critics who view Ethan as a villain or a madman have lost sight of the distinctive nature of the tragic hero. When they find that he has violated one ethical principle or another, they forget that, according to Hegel, the tragic hero by definition must violate an ethical principle—that is inevitable, given Hegel’s conception of a tragic situation as involving a conflict between two goods. Tragedy teaches us the incompatibility of ethical principles that we would like to think can be simply harmonized. Ethan is trapped on the borderline between civilization and barbarism. He finds that he cannot defend civilization without resorting to a form of barbarism disturbingly akin to what he is fighting. He pulls back from a complete plunge into barbarism when he refrains from killing Debbie, but he has been too tainted by his prolonged experience as a brutal avenger to be re-integrated into conventional domestic society. His freedom as a frontiersman is a double-edged sword. He does what the frontier hero must do to save the day, but he becomes emotionally and psychologically scarred in the process. In the story of Ethan Edwards, Ford shows that freedom is integral to the heroic character, but it can be his curse as well. The Searchers leaves us with a troubling sense of how deeply problematic freedom can be, even—and especially—on the American frontier.
Notes
My epigraphs are taken from Aeschylus, The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking Penguin, 1975).