Abstract
This study interprets Sam Shepard’s plays Buried Child, True West, and Fool for Love as both evocative and critical of the spirit of Americanness captured by Western history and the western genre. Westward expansion and the ideology of Manifest Destiny encouraged an aggressive and domineering type of masculinity called Martial Manhood. The men in Shepard’s re-imagined western landscape compulsorily resort to senseless violence to the point of self-destruction. The nexus between the myth of the West and male perpetrated violence is highlighted, critiquing the conquest of the frontier and, further, critiquing the conflation of national and personal identity. At the same time, Shepard’s women have an understated presence in the plays’ narratives, emulating women in the West who Western historians have often omitted from historical narratives. Counterintuitively, however, the women being sidelined in the plays is to their benefit and Shepard suggests they possess a distinct type of savvy, a form of feminine resistance, that allows them to avoid the seemingly doomed fates that the men are subject to. Finally, using conventions of the Western and postmodern genres, Shepard questions the reliability of metanarratives and undermines the notion of authenticity, suggesting that identity is transient and manufactured, rather than based on an invariable truth. In doing so, Shepard deconstructs the myth of the frontier and destabilizes the American tradition of rugged individualism and masculine violence.