View “The Searchers” and Write the Short Essay

Please view the 1956 Western film, The Searchers, starring John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, and Natalie Wood. Make sure you are using either Chrome or Firefox as your browser before you watch the film. After you watch the film, please answer the question that follows below with a short essay four to six paragraphs in length. 

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Question to Answer in a Short Essay: In “Western Values” (chapter four in Popular Culture in American History) author Jane Tompkins argues that the Western genre portrays women as talkative and weak, men as strong and silent:

The position represented by language, always associated with women, religion, and culture, is allowed to appear in Westerns and is accorded a certain plausibility and value. It functions as a critique of force and, even more important, as a symbol of the peace, harmony, and civilization that force is invoked in order to preserve. But in the end, that position is deliberately proven wrong–massively, totally, and unequivocally–with pounding hooves, thundering guns, blood, and death. Because the genre is in revolt against a Victorian culture where the ability to manipulate language confers power, the Western equates power with “not-language.” And not-language it equates with being male (101-102).

Do you see Tompkins’s thesis of female weakness and talkativeness, on the one hand, and male strength and silence, on the other, present in The Searchers? If so, wherein the film do you see it present? Consider in particular the characters of Mrs. Jorgensen (Olive Carey) and Laurie Jorgensen (Vera Miles), on the one hand, and Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), and Scar (Henry Brandon), on the other.