19 pages • 38 minutes read
Margaret AtwoodBackdrop Addresses Cowboy
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1974A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Myth of the Heroic Cowboy
In popular culture, such as Hollywood movies and novels in the Western genre, the cowboy is often presented as heroic, masculine, and noble. The poem deconstructs this presentation to show that the cowboy in popular imagination actually represents thoughtless violence and materialism. It is important to note that Atwood doesn’t satirize the actual historic cowboy but the cowboy as he is romanticized in popular imagination. Further, she goes on to depict that the cowboy’s perceived onscreen heroism is actually meaningless and artificial. Since the cowboy is associated with the myth of nation-building in the United States, the speaker of the poem addresses him as “starspangled” (Line 1), as if he were draped in the American flag. Yet, from the very onset this depiction appears phony, because the speaker describes the West from which the cowboy emerges as “almost-silly” (Lines 3-4). The somber majesty of the western landscape, so often lionized in movies, is undone by the speaker’s use of the adjective “almost silly”. The romanticization of the West’s reality is built on a false understanding and idealization. This superficial romanticization is reflected in the fact that the cowboy’s smile is “porcelain” (Line 4). “Porcelain” invites comparisons to a stony, frozen, doll-like figure. The cowboy is a fake, an impression emphasized by the “papier mâché” cactus he drags behind him on a string. Even the cactus he drags in not real but a prop in a Hollywood movie. Later in the poem, the damage the cowboy causes is not human bodies piled up in the streets but empty beer bottles and dead birds; even the violence he commits is material and meaningless. While the cowboy in many ways becomes the “villain” in the poem, this imagery emphasizes that he himself is barely real; he operates as a character, a flimsy ghost of a beloved archetype who has no real agency or interiority himself. He is a product of the legend he comes from and is therefore, in some ways, as much a motiveless pawn as the beer bottles he leaves behind.
The speaker also deconstructs the myth of the cowboy’s heroism by depicting him as self-righteous and self-important rather than truly righteous and ethical. The cowboy may appear innocent, but in the poem it becomes thoughtlessness masquerading as innocence. He decides who is a villain and guns his targets down, believing in his rightful vengeance. He believes he is superior to his surroundings, which is what makes him particularly dangerous. He may feel he is a hero but he leaves behind ”a heroic/ trail of desolation”. While the papier-mâché, puppet-like cowboy’s onscreen kills are fake, the myth of his heroism is the actual danger. Here, the poem satirizes the notion of self-righteousness that leads colonizers to want to “civilize” a land and its people, or materialism to decide the what is the best model of development for everyone.
The Voice of the Marginalized
In the fifth stanza of the poem, the speaker – the backdrop – introduces itself to the reader in the first person. The speaker says “I ought to be watching/ from behind a cliff or a cardboard storefront/ when the shooting starts,/ hands clasped in admiration” (Lines 20-23). The choice of locations where the speaker “ought to be” (Line 20) shows that popular perception confines this self to the margins. The speaker-self is always supposed to be behind the main players of the story, watching and admiring them passively. By asserting itself, the speaker-self shows that its passivity is a myth. In reality the speaker is not even where they ought to be but “elsewhere” (Line 24). The poem offers a shift in perspective to the reader. If movies are about heroic cowboys, what about the people and natural elements in the landscape they conquer? These elements may be relegated to the backdrop in the cowboy movie, but that doesn’t erase their own reality.
In this sense, the backdrop begins to function as a metaphor for everyone at the margin of the cowboy narrative. From colonized people, such as Native Americans, to women, animals and the environment itself, there are many voices which the mainstream story of the conquering cowboy leaves out. The poem positions itself as an address from all these background elements to the cowboy, showing that they in fact have voices as strong and relevant as that of the cowboy figure. While the cowboy is filled with self-righteousness, the backdrop expresses rightful anger. The backdrop indicts the cowboy for desecrating its very brain “with your tincans/ bones, empty shells,/ the litter of your invasions” (Lines 33-35). The choice of words here invoke both environmental damage (“litter) as well as the damage done by colonialism and sexism (“invasions”).
The Environmental Cost of Development
Margaret Atwood’s writing often engages with climate change and the damage industrial and human development can wreak on the environment. These themes also emerge in “Backdrop Addresses Cowboy,” where the cowboy’s trail of destruction includes evidence of human littering, such as “beer bottles” (Line 16). Other symbols of human interference with the environment include “bird-/ skulls” (Lines 18-19) and “bones.” The bones and skulls refer to how humans harm animals, possibly leading even to their extinction. In the poem’s universe, the cowboy is an emblem of human desire for relentless expansion at the cost of the surrounding landscape. The cowboy’s accoutrements – his starspangled outfit, fake grin, the artificial cactus he drags around - and the “bathtub full of bullets” (Line 8) he represents are all images associated with excess and phoniness. In this, he represents a dubious kind of progress. The cowboy is more concerned with appearances and material accomplishments rather than preserving the environment.
The irony here is that in the movies the cowboy is supposedly emblematic of a man in tune with the rugged, wild outdoors. The poem digs under the surface of this image and critiques the desire to tame the outdoors, which the cowboy often represents; the cowboy doesn’t stop to consider the animals he may have harmed or the trash he leaves behind. He doesn’t want to live in union with the landscape but to conquer it. This is why he races towards the horizon, spurred by the impulse to colonize everything he can see. Here, the cowboy is a symbol of a certain kind of development or progress, such as building a highway through a wilderness, harming the region’s ecology. These notions of progress are linked with a certain vision of the West, as a land of endless expansion and plenty. The poem argues that such progress may be more harmful than people bargain for; it doesn’t happen in a vacuum, as the backdrop notes, but always leaves behind a residue that affects the environment. Thus, the poem calls for a new look at values that make the American ideal.
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By Margaret Atwood
