The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

222 chapter 17Such a fiction does of course a cultural job. Especially it fueled in an ageof democracy the occasional explosions of mass armies, 1861–1865,1914–1918, 1939–1945. In peacetime it gave the overcivilized man of the lateRoman Empire or of Enlightened Europe before the Revolution or of latenineteenth-century America a way out, at least in imagination, from underthe skirts of women and the domination of priests—and an escape fromunder an urban, unheroic, international market which took his manhood ina moment’s beastly roaring on the floor of the Bourse.Like the highwaymen or the Rob Roys of earlier British romance, “DeadwoodDick and [the fictionalized] Jesse James,” writes Bill Brown (agreeingin this with Michael Denning), “contested the dominant ideology, theencroachment of advanced capitalism. ...The James brothers achievediconic status as a force that could interrupt the success of capitalists (thebanks) and the institutions of modernization (the train)”—though the heroof the later bourgeois version of the Western initiated by Wister’s The Virginianbreaks a strike and protects the owner’s capital, in the style of JohnWayne in Red River. 23