A feminist film from the early 1950s???
Thought it might be fun to post a paper I just rediscovered from graduate school. If you can get beyond the five dollar academic words, I hope you come away seeing how categories of power such as gender and race are wonderfully exposed when you reposition them within varying eras and context. So, what we think is feminine now, would often be considered masculine in Louis the fifteenths era, i.e. perfume, hairpieces, heeled shoes, and lace.
Such a Calamity: Troubling Gender
in the Hollywood Western
In Gender Trouble, Feminism
and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Judith Butler suggests a
paradox: “visual representations of gender tend inevitably to contain both the
imprint of dominant ideology and the inherent contradictions of that ideology”
(Butler, 67). In the
promotional trailer for the film Westward
the Women, just such a contradiction emerges. The viewer is presented with
images of pioneer women driving covered wagons, shooting game and handling
horses; meanwhile the voice-over announcer says, “There is nothing that can get
between a woman and her wedding ring.” This too-simple statement is an odd conclusion in
light of what the images project.
It does, however, serve to justify the potentially subversive behavior
of these women within a particular cultural and historical context by neatly
framing their assertiveness inside the confines of normative heterosexuality. The main purpose for this paper is to
examine such contradictions in the
visual representation of gender transgressions within cinema, specifically in
three Hollywood westerns from the early 1950s. Rarely discussed in contemporary
film scholarship is William Wellman’s Westward
the Women. The film, based on
a true story, is often overlooked in place of other queer film classics such as
Calamity Jane and Johnny Guitar. However, all three of these films were produced at major
studios within a couple of years of each other, and all of these films’
narratives incorporate women as central characters within the western
genre.
Many critics,
including Judith Halberstam, have explored
Calamity
Jane and
Johnny Guitar in their
analyses of subversive female representations of gender with a focus on the
functions and meanings of the female masculine or butch character film
history.
The work of these film
scholars informs this analysis.
I
will build on their exploration of gender, with particular attention to
Westward the Women, but with a methodological
approach based on Judith Butler’s
theoretical analysis of gender, especially her foundational
work Gender Trouble. Judith Butler’s work offers an
opportunity to reflect on the origins of gender by highlighting its social
construction within a historical context.
She argues that “gender is performative, and that no identity exists
behind these expressions of gender, and these acts establish-rather than
express-the impression of a fixed gender identity.
Also, if this impression of ‘being’ gender is a result of
social and cultural influenced acts, then there exists no real ‘universal’
gender” (14).
I argue that Butler’s methodology can
be applied to the study of gender outside of feminist/queer discourses and, in
particular, to visual representations of masculinity and femininity within
film. As Robert Shail did with in
his essay on masculinity and British film star Dirk Bogarde, I will borrow
three of Butler’s central methodological concepts: gender construction
with a specific historical context; gender identification as transient; and the
role of fantasy or “masquerade” in reaction to social repression. However whereas Shail stayed in the
domain of masculinity and focused the figure of Dirk Bogarde,
I will navigate the mythic terrain of gender
identification within classic Hollywood westerns.
I propose that the filmic text of
Westward the Women should be included in the same filmic canon as
Calamity Jane and
Johnny Guitar, arguing that
these
three films display subversive gendered representations within the constraints
of Hollywood films of the early 1950s.
Gender within Historical Context
All three of these films can be placed within the conservative climate of early 1950s Hollywood, where beyond the patriarchal structure of the studio system, there is the historical dynamic of the production code as influential in promoting heterosexual norms. Judith Butler emphasizes the importance of historical and cultural context in relation to gender identity, suggesting that when one examines gender identity across historical eras and cultural environments the assumptions about gender inevitably break down. Butler states, “As historically specific organizations of language, discourses present themselves in the plural, co-existing within temporal frames, and instituting unpredictable and inadvertent convergences from which specific modalities of discursive possibilities are engendered” (145). Butler further suggests that the discourse itself is open to the effects of these “temporaral dynamics.”
The Hollywood production code in effect from 1932 to 1962 banned a host of images and discourses labeled amoral. This institutionalized repression included representations of sexual activity outside of
marriage, and any sexual depiction of homosexuality. Halberstam specifically places her analysis of
Calamity Jane and Johnny Guitar within the historical constraints of the production ban:
In Hollywood, films made during the production code, a butch character was a window onto the sexual variance that the camera could not reveal…….Ironically, during the years of most strict surveillance, the production code era, butch imagery signified an often creative tactic for introducing censored material to queer audiences. (Halberstram187)
Beyond the code there were other restraints, such as the patriarchal functioning of the studio system itself,
which influenced the choice of films produced and the manner in which they eventually came to promotion. Western films for instance had historically been a male focused genre; Westward the Women countered
this notion with a narrative composition of 132 women to 15 men.
However, the western genre was one potentially liberating influence within these constraints. Beyond
the immediate historical context of these films’ production, these films were symbolic of a specific era.
All of these movies carry the weight of cultural assumptions about the American west, and the role of
women and men within this story. A film viewer most likely brought culturally constructed ideas about
cowboy and cowgirls, such as the notion of cowboy as the rugged individual or as rebel, or the pioneer
woman as persistent and strong. The idea of the rugged pioneer woman is appropriated within these historical myths because the pioneer experience is deemed an extreme state of being. However, the room for
acceptance of an autonomous female within these filmic plots is, in the end, framed within the historical and ideological context of the 1950s studio system and the production codes. As Butler notes, “Even if
representations of gender, like the discourse they reflect, are always unstable and fluid, they nonetheless
operate within perimeters that are historically specific, which can allow them to be used as signifiers of that
context” (148).
In Westward the Women two characters, Patience and Ito, seem to function within these perimeters and
yet also signify gender as unstable or fluid. Patience, a woman, is taller and larger than any man; while Ito,
a man, is smaller than many of the women. Patience is continually presented as stronger than the others,
and quicker to take on a challenge. In one scene where Patience gets a wagon through a treacherous
ravine, the head guy, Buck, runs up to her and says “Patience I’d kiss ya if you weren’t so big and tall.”
Ito, like Patience, is presented as the voice of reason, a trait usually reserved for women in westerns.
His character in general is subversive: he doesn’t wear a cowboy hat, speaks frequently in Japanese, and
shies away from battles. He is sensitive to the feelings of others and offers the counterpoint to Buck.
Buck eventually acquires more feminine characteristics as a result of his relationship with Ito. Yet both of
these characters are deemed suitable because they are useful and keep the journey alive. Butler suggests
that these gender identities are more often characterized both by their variety and by their tendency towards
change and reapplication (Butler 67). I would add that unlike the other two films, Calamity Jane and
Johnny Guitar, where the characters’ masculine or feminine status seems quite rigid for much of the films,
in Westward the Women the transient nature of femininity and masculinity is processed back and forth
through the narrative. These ranges of subversive moments erupt throughout the film, demonstrating the
transient nature of gender identification.
Transient Nature of Gender
Identification
The transient nature of
gender identification contains both the dominant hegemony of a culture and the
inherent paradoxes of these culturally and historically constructed
beliefs. This ambiguity, the fuzzy
nature
of gender, is where transient representations of gender emerge within
filmic text. As Judith Halberstram wrote in her analysis of Calamity Jane:
Doris Day plays a butch cowgirl who has become one of
the guys in Deadwood and shoots, rides, spits, and drinks as well as they do.
..But Hollywood transforms this transgender hero into a rather fluffy character
who eventually settles into a properly feminine form of domesticity with Wild
Bill Hickok. On her way to finding
a true heterosexual femininity, however, Calamity has some seriously queer
encounters: She is mistaken for a
man and cruised by women in Chicago, and in a beautifully ironic scene, she
sets up house with an actress called Kate while they sing a gorgeous Butch
femme duet called “A Woman’s Touch.”
(210)
Halberstram offers this about Johnny Guitar:
The rough cowgirl who needs to be tamed and seduced
into a mature
femininity.
In one scene, she stands tall above her angry neighbors, dressed
all in black, holding a gun and telling them to back
off. “That’ big talk for a
little gun” says Mercedes Cambridge, her archrival and
double, Emma. It is
hard not to hear a Freudian Admonition in here: the little gun, of course, is
the woman’s version of a man’s big gun. (Halberstam, 167)
Both of these
films suggest the malleability of gender performance and the idea that gender
is transient. Although the heroines are eventually feminized
through dress speech and heterosexual marriage, the earlier suggestions of
their masculinity are not fully eclipsed.
In counterpoint to these
previous analyses, I suggest that Westward
the Women offers a fuller representation of gender transient behavior in
its narrative closure and the range of female representation offered: teacher,
farmer, rancher, nurse. The
relationships and characters do not narratively follow typical gender norms;
the idea of what is a good or bad gender is much more nuanced. At the end of the film, the marriages
are for the most part set up as relationships based on companionship and
economic cooperation. These are
not romantic fantasies per se; these women are not defined by their
relationship to men, and only two were widows. Film historian Jeanine Basinger offers this in one of
the few critiques of Westward the Women:
“It is almost a casebook of traditional attitudes toward women that will be
refuted by the visual presentation.
These ‘masculine things that the women acquire now become absorbed into
them” (TCM 2008).
The transient
nature of gender is also carefully articulated in the films overall narrative
arc. From the
start we come to
know these women through their dress, bodily presentation and actions; by the
film’s end, when they put on more “feminine” clothing, there is a sense that
the clothing is an artifice.
Two scenes explicitly show the fluidity of gender and gender as a
construction. The first scene is
when the women are meeting Buck the wagon master and he starts to question them
about their skill level. The women
that show ability in this scene will come to represent a range of female
masculinity throughout the film.
Scene one:
Buck: Any of you
handle a horse?
(Several women
stand; they are dressed in bonnets and dresses)
Buck: I don’t mean
ride. I mean handle a horse.
(Several sit down, four remain standing)
Buck: Can any of you handle a team of
mules; I mean a team
of
four iron mouthed mules?
(The
four remain standing)
Buck: Can any of you handle a gun, I mean
shoot it and hit
what
you’re aiming at? (Two of the four
remain standing)
(He
throws gun, one of the women look around and see a poster for a sheriff’s election. Each of the
women consequently
shoot out one of the eyes on the poster)
O’
Malley: Is that what you meant?
(sarcastically)
Giggles
(she tosses back and he can barely catch)
Buck: (amazed) That is what
I mean.
Giggles
(the women in response seem pleased)
(Then
Buck begins to address their attire)
Buck: By the way I wouldn’t wear those
frilly fluffy feminine
things
you’ve got on now or those high heels. You’ve got a long
way to walk, sometimes you’ll ride but most of the time you’ll
walk. We are not going to overload
our wagons; we’ve got
enough to haul and get yourself
clothes that are rough tough
and comfortable to wear. It
wouldn’t hurt you to wear pants,
(giggles) I mean pants (he points to his).
Buck: You four, Jones Brent, Johnson and
O’Malley You will have
to
teach these good women how to drive mules.
Throughout the film these women who can
shoot are referred to by their more masculine sounding last names, a similar
signifier to Halberstram’s take on the presentation of butch women: “The
masculine woman…is often associated with clear markers of a distinctly phallic
power. She may carry a gun, smoke
a cigar…she often goes by a male moniker: Frankie, George, Willy” (186).
Scene two
The second
scene brackets the last in almost perfect parallel as Buck now queries the
men. Here he specifically picks on
one man, the smallest of the group. As Buck is talking he notices someone among
the group of men and says:
Buck: Move aside
there...what are you doing here?
Ito: I go to
California.
Buck: What is your name?
Ito: (says his very long
Japanese name)
Buck: What was that?
Ito: (he repeats long
Japanese name)
Buck: Stand up, Ito.
(He stands)
Buck: Are you standing or
sitting? (men around him laugh)
Ito: I stand.
Buck: Where is the rest of
you? (laughter)
Ito: There isn’t much of me
but I fight anybody here. I
fight
you too big boss. I get
licked but I fight.
(Buck smiles and asks)
Buck: Can you cook? You
keep the coffee hot and handy.
I hate women’s
cooking.
Ito: (Speaks in Japanese)
Buck: What did you say?
Ito: Enough already lets
go
Buck; You heard the man
let’s go
As they walk out
Ito tries to copy their swagger, mimicking their walk, trying to play
masculinity. Ito does this almost
in fun. This role playing can
sometimes take the form of masquerade.
Fantasy and Masquerade
In Butler’s third strand, she considers
the role of fantasy or “masquerade” as an expression of socially-repressed
desires, and also its purpose within the construction of gender notions. For Butler the breakdown of gender
stereotypes is the inevitable outcome of suppression. Fantasy therefore serves as a means for expressing ruptures
within gender stereotypes; fantasy functions as a release from the bounds of
conformity. Butler suggests that role playing, which points to the nature of
constructions, is an aspect of masquerade. For instance, some of the women clearly like their new role
as female masculine, relishing their ability to shoot and protect others, such
as when O’ Malley shoots a snake that scared another woman. O’Malley is driving a wagon, while
another woman has wandered too far
from the wagon. The woman screams
when she sees a snake. We cut to
medium long shot of O’Malley still driving the wagon and then reaching for her
gun. She shoots the snake in one
shot and says: “Honey, if they scare ya, then stay closer to the wagon.” There
is also one woman who seems to enjoy spitting tobacco and using a bull whip
throughout the film; her behavior is clearly subversive yet the narrative never
redeems this woman into an appropriated femininity.
Oddly enough, the narrative
sense of gender masquerade also emerges as we see the women dress in more
traditional feminine clothing again. The viewer has spent the majority of the
film watching these women in comfortable, functional clothes while they
accomplished a range of physical feats; seeing them adapt back to these clothes
is strange and appears forced. There is a wonderful moment of masquerade
expressed in a scene with Patience.
This is near the end of the film as Patience drives the wagon into town
with all the women behind her. She
shouts but then quickly changes her tone to a softer delivery as she realizes
she need to play female again. The
fact that it is funny speaks to the acknowledgment of gender as a construction
within this filmic text. As
Patience reconstructs her female role she will have relearn its rules and
customs, suggesting that, for her, this performance of the female is not
organic or natural:
Patience:
Come on, Rosie, get up! (shouting)
Patience
(after a beat, smiles and says softly and sweetly): Come on, Rosie
darling.
(The
other women smile)
William Wellman, the
director, also does some cinematic role playing with viewer’s point of
view. Throughout the film, women
and men equally objectify the other; we see the men looking at the women and
visa versa. We also as an audience
then become voyeurs of both genders.
In a sense Wellman is troubling our notion of binary categories by
offering us multiple points of view, with one not favoring the other. This counters traditional cinematic
norms which tend to reinforce heterosexual power through the framing of women
as passive sexualized object.
Conclusion:
Butler writes:
. . . the possibility of subverting
and displacing the naturalized and redefine notions of gender that support
masculine hegemony and heterosexual power…[arise] not through
strategies that figure a utopian beyond, but through the mobilization,
subversive confusion, and proliferation of precisely those constitutive
categories that seek to keep gender in its place by posturing as the
foundational illusions of identity. (33-4)
Deconstructing
these “foundational illusions” of gender constructs was a key theme in this
analysis. For
my methodology, I employed three of Judith Butler’s specific
analytical tenets from her work in Gender
Troubles: historical placement of gender, gender as transient, and
masquerade as an expression of varying gender identities. This method offered me a rigorous yet
adaptable method for exploring the functions of gender within three Hollywood
westerns from the early 1950s. I
paid particular attention to the film Westward
the Women for a few key reasons: firstly, the extreme spectrum of gender
representations within the filmic text warranted a feminist textual analysis,
and, secondly, this film has been oddly overlooked within film and gender
studies scholarship. My analysis
helps demonstrate that the film deserves further critical attention. Butler’s methodology provided tools to
deconstruct the range of gender representation within all three films, and also
provided the nuances necessary to compare them effectively. Here we can observe the process of heterosexual promotion, and yet also
discover within the cracks and spaces of repression, subversive moment of
transient, masquerading gender; which challenges the very nature of gender
identity and our own gendered selves.
Bibliography
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Troubles: Feminism and The Subversion of Identity. New York
Halberstam, J. (1998) Female Masculinity. Duke University Press.
Shail, R. (2001) Masculinity and Visual Representation: A Butlerian Approach to Dirk Bogarde. International Journal of Sexuality and Gender studies, Vol. 6
Films
Calamity Jane. Directed by David Butler, 101 Minutes, Warner Bros., 1953, DVD
Johnny Guitar. Director Nicholas Ray. Republic Pictures., 1954, DVD
Westward the Women. Director William Wellman. MGM, 1952, Video Tape
TCM Website. Turnerclassicmovies.com assessed May 14th 2008
Film Synopses: Westward
the Women follows the journey of 132 women who traveled 2000 miles from
Chicago to Whitman’s Valley in California to get married. The film was made by MGM in 1952. Johnny
Guitar, made by Warner Brothers in 1953, tells the story of rival women who
fight for their place in a small town.
It stars Joan Crawford and Mercedes Cambridge and was directed by
Nicholas Ray. Calamity Jane,also
produced by Warner Brothers in 1953, is a musical story of the western legend
Calamity Jane. The film shows her
progression from buckskinned rough rider to appropriated bride.
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