Publication Date

2025

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

First Advisor

Balcerzak, Scott

Degree Name

Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy)

Legacy Department

Department of English

Abstract

In this project, I consider the post-WWII Western film as a site that represents and navigates war traumatized American masculinity. Through a discussion of the significance of the Western as a national myth that speaks directly to American masculinity and nation-building through individual violence, I situate the genre as an ideal vehicle to reframe war traumatized masculinity and analyze seven Westerns through a threefold analysis: metaphoric (a cinema of trauma), psychoanalytic (the traumatic gaze), and therapeutic (recovery and reintegration). In Chapter One, I track anxieties and preoccupations signaling the cultural concern with war trauma in genres more routinely associated with post-World War II trauma such as psychoanalytic war films, family melodramas, and Film Noir – identifying tropes common to the cinematic archetype of the returning veteran. In the second chapter, employing Anton Kaes’ notion of a cinema of trauma, I trace how these anxieties and preoccupations undergo a metaphoric transference and transformation into the tropes of the Western by analyzing aspects from three classic postwar Westerns, High Noon (Fred Zimmerman, 1952), Shane (George Stevens, 1953), and The Searchers (John Ford, 1956). Shifting my focus to the cinematic collaborations of director Anthony Mann and actor James Stewart, my last two chapters consider the Western in dialogue with psychoanalytic theories of Christian Metz, Kaja Silverman and with trauma specialists Judith Herman, Peter Levine, and Bessel Van der Kolk. The third chapter considers the psychoanalytic aspects of the veteran as spectator in terms of identification and fetishization, suggesting a “traumatic gaze” at work in Winchester 73 (1950) and The Man from Laramie (1955), while my fourth and final chapter investigates the presence of a therapeutic trajectory in Mann’s films The Naked Spur (1953) and The Far Country (1954). In total, my project examines how a WWII-traumatized American masculinity shaped and, possibly, was shaped by the postwar Western in the national consciousness.

Extent

215 pages

Language

en

Publisher

Northern Illinois University

Rights Statement

In Copyright

Rights Statement 2

NIU theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from Huskie Commons for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without the written permission of the authors.

Media Type

Text

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