Dirty Words in Deadwood: Literature and the Postwestern

9. Calamity Jane and Female Masculinity in Deadwood

184 9 Calamity Jane and Female Masculinity in Deadwood Linda Mizejewski While Linda Mizejewski, like other essayists in this collection, considers genre, using revisionist critics of the Western who read “this genre as a space where masculinity, far from being bulletproof and monolithic, has always been unsettled and conflicted,”she also initiates a series of essays that use recent methodologies —the construction and performance of gender, queer studies, spatial geography, disability studies—to examine the spaces and characters of the series. Assuming the concepts about the performance of gender put forth by Judith Butler, she turns to Judith Halberstam’s definition of “female masculinity” to explore “Deadwood’s dismantling of essentialist masculinity in the Western.” However, rather than revisit the familiar figures wrought by John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Clint Eastwood, Mizejewski focuses on the representation of a woman. Offering her own revisionist reading of the genre, she argues that the figure of Calamity Jane points to “the presence of diverse bodies and sexualities within the histories and legends of the West.” Ultimately the representation of Jane serves “as a register of contemporary cultural contentions about gender and sexuality, a dynamic that began in the earliest fictionalizations of this figure.” Mizejewski contrasts Milch’s portrayal of Jane with earlier, more sanitized versions such as Doris Day’s “heterosexual” glamorized Calamity, suggesting that the “first few episodes of Deadwood parody and replay stereotypes of Jane from earlier representations.” She situates Deadwood’s Jane in a long line of masculine women in the Western, women who “made masculinity both visible and highly privileged but also highly unstable—a description that also fits Milch’s Deadwood, where the violent crises of masculinity are unresolved.” While Tolliver, Bullock, and others might still be struggling with their masculinity , Mizejewski sees Jane’s “narrative trajectory” from “abjection” to her partnership with Joanie Stubbs and “her membership in the community” as opening up a new reading of “frontier history” by dislodging “heterosexuality as the only legitimate sexual relationship.” Female Masculinity in Deadwood 185 Early in the 1953 musical film Calamity Jane, Doris Day as Jane sings and dances her way from a stagecoach to a Deadwood saloon, where she shoots her gun to clear a path to the bar. When the survivors of an Indian attack stumble in, she angrily rebukes them as “whitebellied coyotes” because they didn’t stop to see if one of their party had survived. Jane stomps out and mounts her horse to undertake the rescue herself. The first episode of David Milch’s Deadwood makes a telling homage to the 1953 film when a tipsy and infuriated Jane, played by Robin Weigert, similarly berates a saloon full of men who balk at riding out to find a possible survivor of a road massacre. Heading out to join the rescue party, she yells, “I don’t drink where I’m the only fucking one with balls!” (1.1). In contrast to earlier fictionalizations of this figure, Deadwood is fearless in citing the famously obscene language and debilitating alcoholism of Jane’s historical counterpart, Jane Canary (1856– 1903). Both the 1953 musical and the series introduce Jane as a scruffy, cross-dressed figure, but whereas the Doris Day character is headed for a makeover and heterosexual romance, Jane remains filthy and masculinized throughout the Milch series. In its third season, Deadwood was also fearless in following the implications of Jane’s butch dress and demeanor by having her become involved with the show’s femme lesbian character, the former prostitute Joanie Stubbs. Unlike the heavy drinking and the salty language, the lesbian attachment departs from historical documentation about Jane Canary and follows instead the path of imagination that has animated a vibrant cultural life for Calamity Jane beginning with fictionalizations in dime novels of the 1870s. Biographer James D. McLaird points out that Canary’s celebrity waned in the last years of her life, so she was largely forgotten when she died of complications from alcoholism in 1903. But the legend of Calamity Jane enjoyed a huge comeback in the 1920s as the vanishing frontier became an object of nostalgia (221–22). Since then the Jane character has been cleaned up, glamorized, or sentimentalized by a variety of actresses, including Jean Arthur, Ellen Barkin, and Angelica Huston.1 However, no mainstream popular representation has, until Deadwood, scripted the 186 mizejewski possibility that this butch, cross-dressing figure may have been...