The Last Frontier of the Quixotic Cowboy: Arthur Miller's “The Misfits” and America's Midcentury Gender Crisis

Abstract

abstract: In 1956, Arthur Miller wrote the “The Misfits” out of his experience in Nevada obtaining a divorce to marry Marilyn Monroe. When the short story was published in Esquire in 1957, it was surrounded by advertisements whose imagery and ethos were incongruous with Miller's story's imagery. This article offers a rhetorical analysis of the story in context with the original images that accompanied it. Miller's story, a fable of cowboys dreaming of a life independent of capitalism, women, and society while ultimately proving the futility of that dream, is visually surrounded by ads selling comfortable domestication along with fantasies of adventure / chivalrous independence safely enjoyed from a white suburban domestic setting. The tension between domestication and freedom aligns with the widespread gender panic of the 1950s, during which the image of the western cowboy was a comfort to American men struggling to find a reliable masculine role to admire, and underscores the themes in Miller's story.