Peckinpah’s Women: A Reappraisal of the Portrayal of Women in the Period Westerns of Sam Peckinpah by Bill Mesce Jr. (review)

B o o k R e v i e w s 3 1 5 tastefully muted offstage incident, The Rustler emphasizes the violent out­ comes of rustling on those who practice it, as well as their families. The Rustler features a cast of mavericks, human as well as bovine, includ­ ing Mavvy, a heroic orphan girl; Tips, a child-cowboy adopted by Jim; Hazel, a newly orphaned elite woman unsure of her inheritance; and Jim, who has fled an abusive childhood home for life on the range. Unlike The Virginian’s marriage plot, which promises to reunite the divided postbellum nation in the open spaces of the West, The Rustler’s denouement is fragmented. The epony­ mous Jim dies a slow and excruciating death, the result of vigilante justice, nursed by the repentant Hazel, whose dissembling flirtation is at least partly the cause of his flawed decisions. Horace, Hazel’s erstwhile eastern suitor, mar­ ries Mavvy instead. Hazel ultimately refuses to be rounded up and branded as any man’s wife, choosing to devote her life to educating and bettering the social position of the children of Jim’s band of rustlers. Victoria Lamont, who first brought this novel to the attention of western scholars in her award-winning essay “The Bovine Object of Ideology” (Western American Literature 35.4, Winter 2001), provides a brief but highly useful introduction to this edition that sets out these issues in clear terms, summariz­ ing, as well, the scant history of the novel’s publication. That introduction, coupled with Lamont’s earlier essay in Western American Literature, make this accessible and fascinating novel an intriguing choice for classroom use, either paired with The Virginian or, taught singly, as an important counterpoint to the conventional Western novel. Peckinpah's Women: A Reappraisal of the Portrayal of Women in the Period Westerns of Sam Peckinpah. By Bill Mesce Jr. Lanh am , M d.: Scarecrow Press, 2001. 224 pages, $45.00. Reviewed by Matt Wanat D enison U niversity, G ranville, O hio Sam Peckinpah’s treatment of female characters is infamous. Nonethe­ less, whereas equally infamous directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick have attracted a number of gender-oriented readings, discussions of “Peckinpah’s women” remain mired in an opposition between virulent dis­ missal and defensive apology. On one hand, Molly Haskell in From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (1974) dismisses Peckinpah as “an old geezer” who wishes to “bathe his twilight years in the blood of ‘macho’ fantasies” (Haskell 364). On the other hand, a typical apology for Peckinpah can be found as recently as Richard Luck’s Sam Peckinpah (2000), which glosses the director’s sexism in favor of male friendship, as though male bond­ ing has nothing to do with women. For its attempt to face Peckinpah’s gender politics head on, Bill Mesce’s Peckinpah’s Women is groundbreaking. Mesce begins by analyzing his own initial, misguided intensions to “defend” the direc­ 3 1 6 WAL 3 8 . 3 FALL 2 0 0 3 tor. He then situates the “air of a woman-hating macho fantasist” surrounding Peckinpah in “a unique confluence of industry and social trends” (8). Mesce’s thesis, then, is that Peckinpah’s gender politics are best read in the context of trends in the film industry, film criticism, and politics. Mesce pays special attention to the film industry and auteur theory. He presents the studio system as a world of “Second Billing” for actresses (15). Nevertheless, the sexism of “old” Hollywood is presented as tame in compari­ son to Peckinpah’s Hollywood, wherein talent scrambled for a piece of the decreasing market. According to Mesce, female roles suffered most in the lat­ ter, “infinitely more competitive, hostile, and economically volatile” Holly­ wood, where, among other gimmicks, lucrative action films reigned supreme (21). Mesce argues that to hold Peckinpah— who, he claims, was “neither sin­ gular nor unprecedented”— completely accountable for this material is to ignore industry demands (32). Moreover, auteur theory exacerbated the issue by misapplication to Peckinpah, who rarely controlled the type of material he was offered. In short, Mesce argues that many of the least developed female characters in...