[See cartoon at the foot of the page]
The Fiction of the Wilde West
Better the Far West with its grizzly bears and its untamed cowboys, its free open-air life and its free open-air manners, its boundless prairie and its boundless mendacity!
Oscar Wilde, The American Invasion.1
The American expression “horse feathers” is a quaint riposte of contemptuous disbelief to foolish or untrue claims deemed to be as unlikely as feathers on a horse.
Much the same could be said about accounts Oscar Wilde’s visits to various one-horse stops on his American lecture tour—and not least by Wilde himself who acknowledged the West’s “boundless mendacity” in the quotation above.
Oscar meant this kindly—he favored the folklore of the American frontier, and as we know, often welcomed the opportunity for the facts and fiction of his life to become conflated. As Jan Wellington observed in the article Oscar Wilde’s West: “Wilde and the West were myths in process.”
In this article we shall see how those old myths were eventually processed into modern fiction.
Continue reading “Horse Feathers”
