Still Haunted by Fiedler’s “Montana Face”

Fiedler in his early teaching days

Seventy-five years ago a brilliant, edgy English professor at the (then) Montana State University (now the University of Montana) published an essay with the gaudy title: “Montana; or The End of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” Having arrived eight years earlier from “the East” (he grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison), Leslie Fiedler proclaimed the state a “Tertiary or pseudo-Frontier” in which the non-Indigenous locals bought into the Romantic myth that portrayed them as noble pioneers.¹ Here’s the money quote:

I was met unexpectedly by the Montana Face. What I had been expecting I do not clearly know; zest, I suppose, naivete, a ruddy and straightforward kind of vigor— perhaps even honest brutality. What I found seemed, at first glance, reticent, sullen, weary—full of self-sufficient stupidity; a little later it appeared simply inarticulate, with all the dumb pathos of what cannot declare itself: a face developed not for sociability or feeling, but for facing into the weather. It said friendly things to be sure, and meant them; but it had no adequate physical expressions even for friendliness, and the muscles around the mouth and eyes were obviously unprepared to cope with the demands of any more complicated emotion. I felt a kind of innocence behind it, but an innocence difficult to distinguish from simple ignorance.²

It’s tempting to dismiss this put-down as an outlander’s superficial take based on a limited sample size—the classic hasty generalization. But since I first read Fiedler’s essay some thirty-five years ago it’s echoed through my thoughts, writing, and teaching. Was his claim true at the time of its publication, the year my parents were married in Helena’s beautiful Cathedral? Was it true during the ‘90s when Montana hosted frightening right-wing militants such as the Freemen and Militia of Montana? Is it true today as the state has gone starkly red in its elected officials?

Fiedler has long been one of the engaging bad boys of American literary criticism, whose Love and Death in the American Novel remains a go-to study (he argued homoerotic themes are far more central to the American canon than anyone had previously noticed). His writing bristles with intuitive leaps and startling guesses. While not always anchored in “big data,” his insights have a way of lodging deep in memory. His depiction of the Montana Face is not easily sidestepped.

In some ways my book about the state’s literary history, Hope and Dread in Montana Literature (2003), attempted to counter Fiedler’s caricature by anatomizing a sophisticated literary tradition that showed a complex understanding of the region’s past and a hopeful if tempered vision of the future. But the current turn toward crude, even cruel stereotyping of “others” and the increasingly radical attacks on social institutions have me wondering if Fiedler wasn’t right all along.

As I move forward with “Running Away to Montana,” I’ll test Fiedler’s thesis by applying it to diverse lives and writings encountered along the research way. John Clayton offers a helpful example by showing how one emigrant to the state adopted the Western myth as her identity and point of pride. Cowboy Girl: The Life of Caroline Lockhart tells how a daughter of affluence took up residence in Wyoming and Montana to claim her place as a true cow girl, an embodiment of Western freedom and daring. After a successful career as a newspaper reporter “back East,” Lockhart moved to Cody, where she wrote bestselling Westerns and managed a newspaper designed to promote her vision of the free frontier life. She later purchased a ranch in the dry, unyielding terrain of south-central Montana, seeking to expand her land base, dominate her neighbors, and exemplify the full-blown cowboy ideal.

What makes these maneuvers even more striking is that they took place from the early 1900s to the 1930s, well after the frontier had presumably closed. Like many an emigrant to Montana, then and now, she was chasing an evanescent dream already receding. But as Clayton reveals, her belatedness, her arriving after the fall, only compelled her to assert her Western identity with greater audacity:

Around the time of Lockhart’s birth, “the West” and “the frontier” became synonymous. Throughout her life Americans became fully vested in a mythology that married the huge landscapes of the West to “regeneration through violence” . . . that represented this frontier nature of the national character. Perhaps the greatest hunger for such myths came from the West itself. The romantics who had come to the frontier (perhaps even originally seeing it as an economic or self-reliant frontier) soon fell in love with a set of stories and interpretations that called them cowboys, that allowed them to brandish six-guns and talk of vigilantism. They reinvented themselves in the image that Owen Wister [author of The Virginian] had given them.³

Lockhart’s life story lends credence to Fiedler’s startled claim that “[Montanans] believed it all—not only that the Good triumphs in the end, but that the authentic hero is the man [or woman] who herds cattle” (loc 293). Score one for the good Doctor.

Another way to test and refine Fiedler’s argument is to unpack his central interpretive concept, Rousseau’s vision of life in a state of nature. He opens his essay with the memorable assertion: “There is a sense, disturbing to good Montanans, in which Montana is a by-product of European letters, an invention of the Romantic movement in literature” (loc 238). He argues that “Montana” could only become a locus of desire for outsiders once concepts such as the sublime had taken root in the Euro-American imagination and Romantic writers on both sides of the Atlantic characterized nature as the site of personal rebirth and ecstasy.⁴ Fiedler suggests Rousseau’s claim that human beings are innocent in a state of nature powered that shift, enabling emigrants to the northern Rockies and plains to see these grand landscapes as symbols of their own virtue. This allowed the newcomers to bracket or repress violent treatment of Native Americans, even if at times the locals grudgingly acknowledged guilt about that brutal history.

In this way, following Fiedler’s line of thought, Montanans attempt to live out the pastoral dream, a vision that holds individuals and communities can retreat to a rural natural place to realize a better self, a better community. That dream is as old as European culture, originating with Greeks such as Theocritus. It’s part of the American ideological DNA, carried over from English culture and given a peculiarly aggressive cast by emigrants’ desire to break free from restrictive institutions such as the Church of England.⁵

But pastoralism is far more complex than this simple gloss allows. Emigrants to “the New World” actually asserted at least three types of pastoralism: pleasure, innocence, and experience.⁶ The first holds that colonists could leave behind the moral strictures of established faith and tradition to indulge their carnal desires. An amusing if often forgotten example is Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan (1637), which argued for an egalitarian community and rituals dedicated to sensual delight rather than spiritual discipline. The Montana Gang living in and near Livingston during the 1970s exemplified this tradition. While relishing the natural beauty of Paradise Valley, these writers, artists, actors, and musicians could indulge their desires for liquor, food, sex, and drugs. The film Rancho Deluxe (1975), written by Thomas McGuane and starring Jeff Bridges, Sam Waterston, and Elizabeth Ashley, provides a graphic impression of this scene. Ashley’s memoir takes us inside this louche set as she offers a particularly lurid account of her affair with McGuane and the flexible ethical codes at play in their Montana.⁷

The pastoral of innocence conforms to the Romantic ideal critiqued by Fiedler. This dream only became possible once Wordsworth, Emerson, and others asserted innate virtue in human beings that could be liberated and realized in a pastoral setting. The many hyper-affluent migrants who buy expensive homes and donate to local environmental nonprofits claim this status. A nuanced study of the millionaires and billionaires moving to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and the Yellowstone Club near the Big Sky Resort in Montana reaches the striking conclusion:

[B]urdened by social stigmas, status anxiety, and feelings of inauthenticity or guilt, the ultra-wealthy use nature and rural people as a vehicle for personal transformation, creating versions of themselves they view as more authentic, virtuous, and community minded. . . . By living in such rural and nature-oriented communities, they are literally buying into the idea and experience of a primordial America that offers salvation from the careerist rat-race and the moral temptations of high society where life is simpler, and the honest rural values of the dusty cowboy, noble native, and nature-loving bohemian prevail.⁸

The author uses the term “green washing” to characterize these mythic maneuvers to conceal the overwhelming wealth disparities, environmental degradation, and often difficult lives of the working poor in the richest Americans’ western enclaves.

The third type, the pastoral of experience, complicates both the pleasurable and innocent versions. It holds that a retreat to a rural environment to “improve” the self is possible, but such alteration is only attainable by acknowledging selfishness, bad faith, and violence. Rather than naively assuming innate virtue, this tradition confronts the challenges to human cooperation and decency and shows how communities can overcome those barriers. William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation (1651) exemplifies this tradition as the Separatists battled agents of ill internal and external to create a community in forbidding terrain. Lockhart tried to live out the cowboy and ranching version of that vision since she confronted recalcitrant neighbors and unforgiving ranching economics, but arguably reality overwhelmed her hopes. Environmentalist thinkers and activists often operate within this pastoral tradition, for they aspire to protect a natural world threatened by rapacious developers, resource extractors, and “multiple use” advocates.

Billo “Mike” Comola represents an emigrant’s discovery of environmentalist fervor and the threats to his person and beliefs. After serving in the Marines and CIA and living part-time in British Columbia, Comola experienced an epiphany while driving through Montana on his way to Canada. Approaching Noxon on Highway 200 he was so overwhelmed by the region’s pristine peaks that he immediately bought a small place near the Clark Fork River. What he did not realize was that extensive clearcutting out of view of the road threatened the natural beauty and ecosystem that took his breath away. He went on to help found the Northwest Citizens for Wilderness that advocated for protection of the nearby Scothman Peaks and surrounding habitats. That commitment led to ongoing legal and physical battles, culminating with an attempt to dynamite Comola’s cabin. Despite the multiple threats, he persisted and his group sheltered their beloved mountains from mining and development. That effort has been succeeded by a sophisticated nonproft that continues the conservation work to this day.⁹

With these competing pastoral traditions in mind, Fiedler’s “Montana Face” must be shown to have more lines, more expressions, more nuances than he allowed. Even at the time of his essay’s publication, poets such as Gwendolen Haste and Grace Stone Coates and novelists such as D’Arcy McNickle had already offered a realistic take on Montana lives, sometimes bordering on the pastoral of experience, sometimes denying the possibility of any pastoral outcome in the forbidding climate and brutal racial politics. A. B. Guthrie Jr. published his iconic The Big Sky, an effort to represent a more realistic take on the region, two years before Fiedler’s essay appeared, marking a self-conscious effort to critique the Romantic myth.

But I have to acknowledge that these are instances of “high” culture, not the popular films of the late 40s, and so I must allow that at least some Montanans may have fallen for the Romantic myth. I can glimpse Fiedler’s condescending version of the Montana Face today as many recent arrivals have fallen under the spell of the Yellowstone television series and adopt the melodramatic but dangerous persona of the show’s protagonist, John Dutton. Contemporary politicians often exploit the cowboy myth to convince voters of their Western bona fides. This may be a more disingenuous, even cynical use of the frontier story than Leslie Fiedler observed during his exile in America’s northern latitudes.

Perhaps many Montanans have moved beyond the pseudo-Frontier to the postmodern version where gesture and symbols are all and the gap between self-presentation and reality grows ever wider. A scene in McGuane’s Rancho Deluxe captures that possibility as Elizabeth Ashley’s character attempts to seduce her ranch hands with the plea, “I want some Gothic ranch action around here.” Are white Montanans now living on an elaborate movie set, complete with sweeping vistas and lurid legends, waiting for some explosive action to break the spell of contemporary ennui?

1. See Brady Harrison’s excellent account of Leslie Fiedler’s life and teaching at https://mtprof.msun.edu/Fall2008/harrison.html

2. “Montana; or The End of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” ca. 1949, in The New Leslie Fiedler Reader (New York: Prometheus, 1999), digital version, loc 280. All further excerpts will be cited in the text.

3. The Cowboy Girl: The Life of Caroline Lockhart (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), p. 250.

4. Gary Ferguson shows this unfolding paradigm shift from nature as fallen and evil to nature as revelatory and good in his lively The Great Divide: A Biography of the Rocky Mountains (Woodstock: Countryman Press, 2004).

5. For the most influential and still informative account of American pastoralism, see Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). The pastoral tradition must be placed in context of contemporary Native American critiques of Euro-American interpretations of the natural world. See, for instance, Rosalyn R. LaPier’s Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017).

6. For a far fuller discussion of these competing pastoral traditions, see my “Apocalypse against Progress: Gothic and Pastoral Modes in the American Romance,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1984. (Please forgive an aging scholar’s desire to recover and repurpose his earlier writings.)

7. Actress: Postcards from the Road, with Ross Firestone (New York: M. Evans, 1978).

8. Justin Farrell, Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), pp. 7-8.

9. This account of Comola’s conservation efforts is based on his memoir, Wackos, Or: Damning two wannabe dams, wilderness mining, Montana U. S. Congressional pygmies—and Elvis (Bend: Maverick Productions, 2023).