Writing in Salon in May 2000, Camille Paglia said, “although I don't own guns, I respect those who do.” She explained her admiration for “the armed woman as a transcendent symbol of independent female power— from ancient goddesses like the Venus Armata or the knife-wielding Hindu Kali to the pistol-packing babes of ‘Charlie's Angels.’” Paglia was not only speaking of the functionality of guns but of their aesthetic, and of the undeniable charisma of combining a feminine presence with the potential violence of a weapon.
This charisma was on display in images of Winsome Sears, the lieutenant governor-elect of Virginia and former Marine, that made the rounds on Twitter after her victory in the November 2nd election. It can be seen in westerns and neo-westerns such as “The Secret of Convict Lake” and “The Quick and the Dead.”
It can be found in populist art of the internet era, such as a piece by digital painter Daniel Eskridge who describes his subject as a woman "hold[ing] a rifle and look[ing] off into the west. There seems to be some threat approaching from the direction of the setting sun, yet she seems perfectly prepared to handle it. With a look of confidence and determination, she stands with with one foot on a large boulder and starts to raise her weapon.” A spirit of capability is indeed linked to self-defense, as Paglia notes: “It's no coincidence that [the] most heavily armed nation in the world is also the most individualistic and entrepreneurial.”
The freedom aesthetic shows up not only in clothing and personal adornment but in the names of trucks such as the Ford Ranger and the Nissan Frontier. The design and logos of such vehicles communicate a similar ruggedness and forward motion.
American style is perhaps not primarily defined by sportswear as is commonly thought, but by the interface between person and nature, and the bravery it takes to confront anything that is wild, unknown, or dangerous. In leaving behind the comfort and elegance of civilization, the wearer does not need to overcome or conquer wilderness so much as incorporate it, inherit it, and internalize it. Rodarte’s “Great Plains” collection of Fall 2011 showed women in silk dresses with wheat printed at the bottom of their hems, as if the prairie had become part of them in the process of crossing it.
The energy of the prairie did inhabit many women pioneers in the nineteenth century, and not always in a positive way: there were numerous documented cases of “prairie fever” or “prairie madness,” a condition thought to be influenced by the ceaseless wind of the American expanse.
The main cause of prairie fever, however, was isolation. Women were often left without the family structures that accompanied them back east, and separated from their husbands, who had gone to procure resources. While displacing Native Americans, the Homestead Act made land available to immigrants, the formerly enslaved, and even single women. Self-sufficiency was a necessity. Feminist essayist Dawn Lander noted that on the frontier, women who refused to “restrict their behavior to what society intends for them [found] the wilderness a natural habitat for a forbidden sexuality.” And although their isolation was geographically rather than socially imposed, comparisons to Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” are fitting. Like Hester Prynne’s, a prairie woman’s experience of being alone may have had “the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.” It was through this solitary encounter with untamed earth that a new sense of the American character was forged.
Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” of 1893 outlines many of these ideas. For the historian, the expansion was not only a way to claim land, but to cast off European ideals and influences. It produced “antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control.” It was characterized by a profound anti-authoritarianism, a “restless, nervous energy,” and a favorability to violence. It changed the way people dressed as it “stripped off the garments of civilization.” The outcome: “a new product that is American.”
It could be argued that the pandemic of the past year and a half has been its own frontier, one that has produced a prolonged sense of isolation and forced an encounter with nature and its harrowing realities of illness and mortality. Has the COVID era served as a modern crucible for a new sense of what it means to be American?
An article on CNN during the summer of 2021 argued that health and vaccine passes would be difficult for a “nation born in an act of rebellion” to accept. The “individualist streak,” it said, “is one of the defining differences between the United States, in many ways still a conservative, frontier nation, and the social democracies of Europe with their greater embrace of communitarianism.” And yet we have now seen many of our major cities submit to this very imposition.
Classic American values such as embrace of risk and a regard for the rights of the individual can seem all but lost in areas of progressive rule. In an excellent piece in The Intercept, Ryan Grim writes that strategists have identified issues important to cultural traditionalists of various races such as “love of freedom,” “belief in personal responsibility, character, and hard work,” and “the right of individual self-defense.” In attempting to explain the Virginia election results, Grim notes the memo’s conclusion that “Republicans have become adept at exploiting” these issues. A more plausible explanation is that the Democratic Party has abandoned them completely.
America, like the frontier, is a process, rather than a mere place. It is the process of continually casting off that which has become stultifying and entrenched— that which no longer allows for liberty. American culture is defined by “people leaving settled areas” and “the struggle to find new ways to live in new lands.” It began as the impulse to forsake British rule for sovereign independence. It continued as pioneers moved West in the nineteenth century. It is happening now in media as major writers leave publications like The New York Times and Rolling Stone. It is happening in intellectual life as projects like Free Black Thought assert their right to think differently from the expected positions of their community. An essay from The Augustine Collective exhorts us to “remember that living a life without passion, to be afraid of risk and suffering and to desire no more than comfortableness, leads to spiritual decay.”
Attaining freedom is more than a one-time act. It is a commitment that must be continually renewed, and America is about that renewal. May we be as brave as those women on the frontier, surrounded by winds that whispered of what was to come.
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