In the 1956 film The Searchers, a Civil War veteran embarks on a harrowing journey across the plains of Texas to rescue his niece after his brother’s family is massacred (“The Searchers”). The protagonist, Ethan, is a hard-edged, rough veteran, the classic hero archetype of the American Western genre. His journey relies on themes of resilience, physical strength, and hardiness–all traditional masculine characteristics. The film largely details Ethan’s relationships and rivalries with men, placing female characters in a secondary position (“The Searchers”). The Searchers remains a classic depiction of Western frontier media, centering survival and endurance against the tough landscape. This film, and countless others, emphasizes a pattern in Western media: painting the Western landscape as masculine. However, Louis Sachar’s Holes paints a different picture of masculinity within the Western landscape, challenging these traditional themes and archetypes. Sachar even decentralizes white masculinity in the story, incorporating vital female characters, race relations, and a detailed history of the land. In Louis Sachar’s Holes, Sachar challenges traditional depictions of the Western frontier as white masculine by highlighting loyal male friendship and acknowledging the history of the Western landscape.
Following the emergence of Western American media, the West is consistently attributed to proponents of masculinity and strength as a gendered space. Despite the West being a concrete landscape, the West depicted in the media historically surrounds traditional views of masculinity. According to Kirsten Mollegaard in “Haunting and History in Louis Sachar’s Holes”, “The Western genre in film and fiction activates the mountains, deserts, rivers, lakes, prairies, buttes, and plateaus of the US West as gendered and cultural spaces for national discourses about masculinity and hardiness, bravery and perseverance” (Mollegaard 140). Each aspect of traditional Western media, particularly films, centers around a sense of bravery and fortitude within its characters. For example, The Outlaw Josey Wales, a Western Civil War film, follows a tale of murder and revenge in Missouri (“The Outlaw…”). Released in 1976, many of the themes in the film center around anti war sentiments from the Vietnam War. However, the film continuously focuses and pushes sentiments of strength and tenacity, relying on traditional ideas of white masculinity. Furthermore, in Masculinities in Literature of the American West by Lydia Cooper, Cooper details this show of masculinity within the literary Western genre: “Even in contemporary literary Westerns that are classified as “New Westerns” or “postwesterns,” the central conflict of the narrative often focuses around the problem of embodying a requisite manliness, that ever-elusive need to “act like a man.” “ (Cooper 3). Cooper highlights patterns within Western media in the contemporary realm, illustrating the theme of masculinity even in current media. Not only the theme, but Western media continues to focus on this “achievement” of masculinity, placing traditional ideals of masculinity on a pedestal.
In Sachar’s Holes, Sachar challenges the idea of the West as a gendered space through Stanley’s friendships with the other boys, emphasizing empathy and loyalty. Throughout the novel, Sachar specifically focuses on Stanley and Zero’s blossoming friendship. Stanley agrees to teach Zero how to read, despite this act of kindness not necessarily being a means of survival: “Stanley had also tried to explain that he needed to save his energy so he could teach Zero how to read, but the other boys just mocked him” (Sachar 117). Stanley prioritizes his friendship and therefore loyalty to Zero, rather than “survival”. Through detailing Stanley and Zero’s friendship and sacrifice for one another, Sachar contradicts this push for masculinity within the Western landscape. Sachar depicts a different view of masculinity and male friendship–one that relies on care and loyalty rather than toughness and survival. Moreover, as Stanley and Zero face the tough Western terrain, Zero sacrifices his own wellbeing for Stanley: “It took him a moment to realize that it was Zero’s blood. Zero had deep gashes in both hands. He had held on to the metal blade of the shovel, keeping it in place, as Stanley climbed” (Sachar 165). Despite injuring himself, Zero stays firm in his determination to help Stanley. Sachar highlights to readers the importance of dedication and selflessness, focusing on healthy male friendship rather than sturdiness or hardiness. Although Sachar acknowledges the tough nature of the Western landscape, his emphasis on the value of compassion and friendship challenges traditional masculine notions of the American West.
Furthering the idea of masculinity within Western media, Sachar challenges the importance of not only masculinity but savagery through his depictions of male friendship. In Julia Grant’s “A Real Boy Not a Sissy: Gender, Childhood, and Masculinity”, Grant emphasizes a push for savagery in masculine ideas, spearheaded by Roosevelt’s influence: “Roosevelt and Hall, who attempted to salvage American manhood from the perils of over-civilization through their calls for a return to the ‘strenuous life’” (Grant). In the wake of World War II, Roosevelt connected his push for hardiness and masculinity with savagery and vigor. Masculinity, specifically within the Western genre, became catalysts for pushing this American masculine ideal, highlighting the idea of masculinity strongly connecting to an uncivilized nature. Sachar evidently acknowledges this specific view of masculinity, as he emphasizes the hardiness needed to survive in the Western landscape: “If you get bitten by a yellow-spotted lizard, you might as well go into the shade of the oak trees and lie in the hammock. There is nothing anyone can do to you anymore” (Sachar 4). Through the diction choice “to”, Sachar highlights the brutality of the West, suggesting that not only toughness but survival skills are needed to stay alive. Sachar suggests that the worst event possible could be encountering the brutalities of the Western landscape, incorporating ideas of uncivilized masculinity into Holes. While Sachar acknowledges this specific aspect of masculinity in the West, he in fact challenges the importance of this masculinity, through layering his characters with emotional complexities and loyal friendships: “He went over to his hole and to his surprise it was nearly finished…Zero’s hole was smaller than all the others” (Sachar 94). Zero’s sacrifice and selfless act to help Stanley finish his hole, despite the potential punishment and negative effects on himself, acts as an opposition to savage masculinity. Zero clearly displays traits of empathy and care within his friendships–traits opposing aspects of survival skills and brutality. Through crafting emotionally complex characters with loyal friendships, Sachar challenges the notion of savage masculinity as an important factor in Western media.
In addition to savagery, Sachar shows a rejection of traditional white masculinity in the Western landscape, as he incorporates race relations into friendships and racial injustice within the history of the Western landscape. Mollegaard emphasizes the use of white masculinity within the Western frontier: “The Western genre has contributed immensely to the formation of a geocultural imaginary, which represents and imagines the West’s natural geography through a cultural filter that assigns and invests values to land features beyond their physical concreteness. In traditional Westerns, the landscape is represented as white, masculine space” (Mollegaard 140). Not only does the Western landscape remain riddled in masculinity, but Mollegaard takes this a step further, accentuating the description of the West as a predominantly white space, excluding women and minority groups. Sachar challenges this notion through not only his incorporation but his emphasis of race relations within the boys’ friendships: “X-Ray, Armpit, and Zero were black, He, Squid, and ZigZag were white. Magnet was Hispanic. One the lake they were all the same reddish brown color–the color of dirt” (Sachar 84). Through depicting all of the boys as one, or equal, within the Western landscape, Sachar insteads paints the West as an entirely inclusionary space, challenging traditional notions of Western white masculinity. Sachar precisely incorporates the diversity of the characters within the landscape, comparing them directly to the ground. Moreover, Sachar’s historical context of the land, rooted in a history of racial injustice, plagues the current land, consistently impacting the lives of each character. As Kissin’ Kate Barlow is deemed a haunting outlaw of the Western landscape, Sachar exposes to the reader her history: “Sam was shot and killed in the water. Katherine Barlow was rescued against her wishes…For the next twenty years Kissin’ Kate Barlow was one of the most feared outlaws in all the West” (Sachar 115). Sam, a black man, is killed for kissing Kate, a white school teacher (Sachar 114). This initiates Kate’s famed reputation as an outlaw, impacting the characters of the current, such as Stanley and Zero. By detailing the history of the Western landscape, Sachar challenges the idea of the West remaining a particularly white, masculine space. Sachar even exposes the discrepancies and injustices of this idea through the figure of Kate Barlow, as her need for revenge produces a sense of justice for the landscape. Through Sachar’s characterizations and use of historical context, he challenges traditional views of the Western landscape as primarily white masculine.
Sachar’s Holes contradicts patterns in Western media that depict the West as a white, masculine landscape through his exploration of male friendship and historical context. Although portrayals of a Western landscape habitually center around themes of hardiness and savagery, as well as primarily white, male characters, Holes offers a new perspective, centering the story around childhood male friendship and incorporating race and gender relations. Sachar’s narrative explores nuances rarely portrayed in Western media, granting young readers a contemporary and innovative view of a traditionally rugged landscape.
References
Cooper, Lydia R. Masculinities in Literature of the American West. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Grant, Julia. “A ‘real boy’ and not a sissy: gender, childhood, and masculinity, 1890-1940.”
Journal of Social History, vol. 37, no. 4, summer 2004, pp. 829+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A119022986/AONE?u=loym48904&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid =3a73a914. Accessed 19 Nov. 2024.
Møllegaard, Kirsten. “Haunting and History in Louis Sachar’s ‘Holes.’” Western American Literature, vol. 45, no. 2, 2010, pp. 138–61. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43025212. Accessed 20 Nov. 2024.
Sachar, Louis. Holes. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
“The Outlaw Josey Wales.” The Home of Civil War History at Virginia Tech,
civilwar.vt.edu/the-outlaw-josey-wales-1976/.
“The Searchers.” IMDb, www.imdb.com/title/tt0049730/plotsummary/.