“This Hyeh Is a Mighty Cruel Country”: Owen Wister's <i>The Virginian</i>, the Western Genre, and the Question of Animal Cruelty

Abstract Owen Wister's 1902 The Virginian is often described as the first proper Western, yet in stark contrast to the popular genre it helped establish, Wister's novel is continuously preoccupied with the question of animal cruelty. To explain the novel's solicitous concern with animal suffering, as well as the later Western's blanket indifference to this theme, the essay sets The Virginian in the context of a profound late nineteenth-century transformation in the way Americans experienced and understood animals. This transformation, it argues, was occasioned by three important cultural-economic developments: the removal of livestock from the American city, the postbellum incorporation of America's food industry, and the rapid expansion of middle-class pet ownership. Wister's novel, the essay concludes, anticipates this cultural realignment with respect to animals and offers (even if only intermittently) an alternative moral horizon, one that the midcentury Western and the society it catered to would largely ignore.