My last paper of my undergraduate career....

and I plastered it together in about 6 hours and handed it in with an apology. Hopefully Andrew will understand. I think J may have talked to him, because he was really nice to me today. I needed it.

Weakly Wayward Women:
The Harlots and Cross-Dressers of Revisionist Westerns

Time magazine calls Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, the first “revisionist” western, a movie that sought to subjugate and then revise the types and themes of the traditional western that dominated the first half of American film history. It was critically acclaimed as having truly revised the western genre in a way that none before it had. Unforgiven reveals the face of the Western imagination that other westerns had not dared to show. The gruesome realities of life on the frontier and the consequences of lawlessness are presented without filter. In Unforgiven, whores get beaten and cut up, horses get shot, pistol-whippings cause long-lasting and live-threatening injury, people die slowly without dignity, killers have consciences, and heroes cry.
Especially noteworthy in this film is its women. Unforgiven’s whores in Skinny’s saloon are at once brutally victimized and yet hold a very important, albeit shaky power over the events of the film. These “wayward” women do not reap the benefits of their waywardness, nor do they hold any hopes of being able to be accepted as “proper” women. This is very different from the roles of wayward women in previous films, where waywardness is generally a quirky accessory to an ultimately feminine and moral persona. Unforgiven breaks ground for a new Western, one that follows the familiar, beloved plot-lines while simultaneously depicting more complex themes and essentially upsetting the hegemony of white males in the frontier myth.
Unfortunately, the ensuing revisionist Westerns following in Unforgiven’s wake have generally been disappointing in comparison. These films tend to concentrate on people who aren’t typically included in Westerns, or dramatically revise the traditional narrative climate of the Western. Some of the revisionist westerns to follow Unforgiven were Posse and Tombstone ( both in 1993), the former including an almost entirely black cast, and the latter highlighting the modern gang-like qualities of two sets of villains. In finding marginalized subject matter for the “new” Western, the most obvious was to create a film about women in the West. The early nineties saw the production of several mainstream Westerns representing the lives of women on the frontier. This paper focuses on three of these movies: Maggie Greenwald’s The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), Jonathan Kaplan’s Bad Girls (1994), and CBS’s Emmy award-winning Buffalo Girls (1995). Primetime television picked up and profited greatly from this new Women’s Western trend, as evident in the enormous (and lengthy) success of CBS’s Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman in 1993 and (though less “Western”) Christy in 1994, as well as popular mini-serieses like Buffalo Girls (1995) and True Women (1994).
This paper examines these “new Westerns,” all written in the shadow of feminism and women’s rights, and featuring women in leading roles. In analyzing these films, I attempted to uncover what these films are doing differently from their Hollywood Western counterparts of the first two-thirds of the century. My answer, in looking at these three large-budget theatrical endeavors is…precious little. Many of these earlier Westerns which feature interesting female characters at a time when audiences and filmmakers were not particularly interested in addressing modern feminism are equally if not more complex given their audiences than the new feminist Westerns of the nineties. Although these recent films do succeed in expanding the station of women in the form, the characters themselves are less interesting and at times repulsive to a post-women’s liberation audience. The following section, “No Town for a Girl Like Her,” briefly examines three classic Westerns with compelling female characters: John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949) and David Bulter’s Calamity Jane: the musical (1953). While still unabashedly maintaining feminine stereotypes, these three films comment on the “wayward” possibilities of the Western women in credible (at least to their audiences) ways. Their contemporary counterparts, The Ballad of Little Jo, Bad Girls, and Buffalo Gals, seek to highlight the realities of Western waywardness, and yet seemingly return to the same feminine stereotypes of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.
The essentialist view concerning women of the American frontier (i.e. all women are naturally good and moral, all women have a primal inclination to be mothers, all women want to be loved and cared for by men) manifests itself in all of these earlier films’ female characters, and is taken for granted by their original audiences. The feminist movement, which coincided with the demise of the traditional Western in the 1970s, began to dispute these assumptions. It has gradually become possible (though the process is incomplete) for women to be judged on the same moral scale as men. Woman’s place as the keeper of the moral flame has been demystified to some extent. It has become somewhat acceptable for a woman to say, “No, actually I have no interest in being a mother.” Equal relationships between women and men have begun to replace prevailing “Breadwinner/Homemaker” relationships. It has now become possible for a women to assert that not only does she not want to be taken care of by a man, but that she wants to transfer her sexual desire to another female, or to reject her own biological sex altogether. So with many of these assumptions laid bare by feminism, and an audience that is already well aware that women can be just as important or strong as men, why do these films persist in exploiting these earlier essentialist assumptions? With exceptions and complications, all the Wayward Women of these three contemporary films reinforce the statement that in every “bad girl” waits a housewife, waiting to be let out.
I have no answers, only hypotheses. The first is that American feminism has not, in reality, transformed traditional gender roles as much as it seems. Audiences of the past and the present alike have put stipulations on waywardness. Women are allowed to be wayward as long as they are feminine on a deeper level, just as audiences have a hard time identifying with a adulteress/adulterer unless the offended spouse “had it coming.” My second or additional theory is that the American West as a myth (created in part by these earlier films) is much harder to revise or undermine, than other aspects of American culture. So much of American identity is based within this frontier myth. These contemporary filmmakers have encountered the problem of, as Richard Slotkin writes, creating “the West as both an actual place with a real history and as a mythic space populated by projective fantasies.” The frontier, populated by headstrong men and the women devoted to them, is a hard myth to debunk.

and it goes on from there, except the spelling and grammar gets worse...

You can’t make an interesting feminist revisionary Western by simply featuring women instead of men. The concept that women can be both wayward and acceptably feminine was fairly novel in 1939 or 1949 or 1953. It isn’t as compelling or interesting to today’s audiences. Two choices present themselves. We can accept the demise of the Western as a genre, a difficult task considering the lingering prevalence of the Western myth in nationalist discourse. Or, we can create a new way of talking about the West that revises more that just the names, places, and genders, but the form of the Western itself.