The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

taciturn courage against the “feminine” 225repeatedly to display. Tamino is a prince of the blood, again emphasized. Bycontrast, a man of mere commerce must talk if he is to do business.Shane a century and a half after Mozart still looks longingly back to animagined aristocracy of taciturn and noncommercial Romans. E. Countrymanand E. von Heussen-Countryman note that the movie “renders commerceproblematic.” The lone knight Shane himself is willing to join thefarmer Joe Starrett, a Cincinnatus finally driven to take down his weapons, ina stirring scene of stump-removing, “bonding on Joe’s ground, literally.” Butit is honest, wordless toil—direct production for subsistence, not the schemesand weaselwords and endless bargaining of Ryker and his capitalist gang. 6To Ryker’s suggestion early on in the movie that Shane join the commercialside, the knight replies, No deals. Jack Schaefer’s novel of 1949 is onsome points less anticapitalist than George Stevens’s movie of 1953. Theoffer from Ryker to Shane comes later in the novel than in the movie, inchapter 12 out of sixteen, and therefore is less temptingly corrupt: Shanehas long since become a Lancelot for the homesteaders. Starrett in the novelis more persistent than in the movie about his economic schemes for thefarm, and as a petit bourgeois man is more critical of the Ryker figure.Ryker, by the way, is called “Fletcher” in the novel. One wonders if the Dutchword rijker, “richer,” spelled in handwriting exactly ryker, is being evoked bysome sly script doctor of recent Dutch ancestry. Anyway, Ryker/Fletcherengages, says Starrett, in “poor business” and is “wasteful,” the sort of prudentialtalk that would be read with pleasure by an American bourgeois in1949. 7 Compare John D. MacDonald’s detective novels, with their obeisanceto the businesslike.Middlemen are featured in both novel and movie. The owner of thesaloon and general store is a Good Bourgeois. But there are bad ones, too.The novel has a five-page scene of the aristocratic Shane and the petit bourgeoisStarrett outwitting “a peddler or trader” who tries to overcharge for anew plow. The peddler in cruder novels would have had a Jewish name orwould have been from the East, or both.Shane is uninterested in becoming permanently a laborer for wages, orwhat is perhaps more to the point, temperately restrains his desire tobecome an adulterous Lancelot to Marion Starrett’s Queen Guinevere. Inthe end he rides on to further knight errantry—he tells Joey, “A man has tobe what he is”—leaving the peasantry in possession. So do the survivingthree in the Japanese cowboy movie, Seven Samurai (1954), based, the