Philosophy + Literature Workshop: Nir Evron - "This Hyeh is a Mighty Cruel County," on The Lives and Deaths of Animals in Owen Wister's The Virginian

Owen Wister's 1902 The Virginian is often described as the first proper Western, yet the novel's serious attention to the question of animal cruelty sharply distinguishes it from the blanket indifference to animal welfare that characterizes later iterations of this popular genre. Evron's talk will make sense of this difference by setting The Virginian in the context of a set of dramatic socio-economic changes in the way Americans experienced and understood animals. Straddling this transitional moment, The Virginian presents a highly conflicted field of representation, in which nonhuman creatures signify many and often incompatible moral and cultural attitudes. Wister’s novel is both cognizant of these internal contradictions and struggles to resolve them. Its fictional “solution” represents an early version of the kind of moral bookkeeping that twentieth-century American culture at large would go on to adopt with respect to animals.