Horse and Class in True Grit

Abstract

This essay returns to Jane Tompkins’ original theory of horses in her 1992 book West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns as a means of analyzing Charles Portis’ 1968 novel True Grit, a work which Tompkins does not address. Arguing for a Marxist ideology critique of True Grit with a focus on the main character (and narrator) Mattie Ross and her horse named Little Blackie, the essay offers a critique of Tompkins’ idea of the “material presence” of horses in American Western narratives.