‘A kind of wild justice’: revenge and constitutional commentary in the Western

Abstract

This chapter engages with interdisciplinary scholarship on legal systems and revenge in order to argue that the Western, like other genres which seek to provide justifications for violence, has informed and been influenced by paradigmatic shifts in the American legal system. A fuller investigation into the style of the gunslinger's vengeance, this chapter argues, suggests a rather different relationship between cultural products and legal apparatuses than that suggested by critics who portray the Western revenger as a reactionary figure. The Western gunslinger is presented here instead as a progressive figure by reading the cultural work of the Western genre as a rhetorical thinking through of a set of interconnected conflicts and inconsistencies in American legal paradigms related to justifiable homicide and gun possession.