The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

taciturn courage against the “feminine” 227truly a knight of the twentieth century.” 9 That “reckless” should worryAmericans. Anyway, not a capitalist.For the self-dubbed knights of the bourgeois world the other enemies, asidefrom the talk-talk capitalists, were those tiresome, Bible-reading, churchgoing,water-drinking, talk-talk women. As Peter French notes, “Women do alion’s share of the talking in westerns,” and gain no honor for it. 10 Tompkinsobserves that the female lead in the 1957 version of The Gunfight at the O.K.Corral, the Jo Van Fleet character, is merely an absorber of dishonor to purifyher male lovers in preparation for battle, Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp andKirk Douglas as Doc Holliday. “Her [pacific] words are always in vain, theyare chaff, less than nothing, another sign of her degradation.” 11 Words andwomen, say the cowboys, are a lethal combination. Guns first, talk later.The sentiment is old, right from the beginning of the modern story ofemancipation alternating with reaction. The Magic Flute, again, is relentlesslymisogynistic on this score. The gendering of aristocratic nostalgiacould not be more explicit in the scripting of low-born Papageno’s failure asa man, except as one of inferior appetites. Papageno is unable to meet theMasonic/Shane standard of being “steadfast, tolerant, and discreet”: at onepoint he blurts out, startlingly, “Ich wollt, ich wär ein Mädchen”: “I wish Iwere a girl.” Later he asks Tamino plaintively, “Can I not be quiet whenI must? Yes! When it comes to business [Unternehmen, undertakings], I’m aman.” 12 But he’s not. Compare Sancho Panza—though the nonaristocraticcharacter in Mozart carries no hint of antiaristocratic irony, and Sancho in1614 certainly has nothing feminine about him. By 1791 the gender world ofEurope had shifted.A century later it had shifted again. American literature after 1900embodies a bourgeois and masculinist reaction to female religiosity andfemale rights. You can see it in the westerns, the hard-boiled detective stories,the literary imitations of journalistic pith: Zane Grey, Dashiell Hammett,Ernest Hemingway. “I don’t like eloquence,” says Hammett’s firsthard-boiled hero in 1924, the Continental Op (operative, that is, for theContinental Detective Agency). “If it isn’t effective enough to pierce yourhide, it’s tiresome; and if its effective enough, then it muddles yourthoughts.” An antirhetorical rhetoric was the imagined tough guy’s way ofeluding, as Claudia Roth Pierpont puts it, “the feminine imperative against