The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

18taciturn courage againstthe “feminine”Beauvoir articulates the process whereby women, by agreeing to live in comfort inside thefantasies of men, put themselves in a permanently false position....Men are forever feelingbetrayed, not supported,...because when fantasy is governing perception, the truth appearsas a blasphemy....Woman as Object may be spared the heavy burden carried by primarySubjects only by suffering the dishonor of constant two-way self-betrayal....[She] oftenmeekly accept[s] every form of raw deal in punishment for representing falsity and weakness.—Anne Hollander, 1999.Jane Tompkins argues that one enemy is language itself: “Westerns treatsalesmen and politicians, people whose business is language, with contempt.”1 This is the case even though the occupation of the implied readerof the westerns is in fact a man who earns his living in talk-work. The comicalRebel in the movie of Shane boasts loudly, drunkenly, with a couragelacking temperance; and we know, Tompkins observes, that he is doomed(in the book from which the movie derived he is less central, and his lack oftaciturnity is less emphasized). “It’s Shane,” she writes, “the man who clipsout words between clenched teeth, who will take out the hired gunman.” 2Taciturnity is not noticeable in Homeric heroes. After all, they are Hellenes,addicted to persuasive talk. The index of speeches in Stanley Lombardo’stranslation of the Iliad contains about six hundred items, and thesenot mere bright quips (“A crippled newsie took them away from him”), butfull-blown exercises in persuasion, about twenty-five per book, a long interludeof yammering every thirty lines or so. 3 The knights of the Round Table,according to Mallory, yammered a good deal, too. Maybe it is specificallyRoman, and romanizing, revived in a particular sort of haut-bourgeois