Wynonna Earp: An Atypical Western Representation

Wynonna Earp: An Atypical Western Representation Ana Beatriz da Piedade Simão Dissertação de Mestrado em Literaturas e Culturas Modernas Estudos Ingleses e Norte-Americanos Novembro, 2021 Dissertação apresentada para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários  obtenção do grau de Mestre em Literaturas e Culturas Modernas – Estudos Ingleses e Norte-Americanos, realizada sob a orientação científica da Professora Doutora Isabel Oliveira. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A heartfelt thank you To Professor Isabel Oliveira, a huge thank you for the guidance and support throughout this period of constant self-doubt. To my parents, for the constant support and guidance throughout this period, and overall, my entire life. It is with parents such as mine that one grows to being able to dream and to believe that we can do what we want if we put our minds to it. To my sister, Ana and brother-in-law Ricardo, for their constant support and belief in my capabilities. A thank you is not enough. To my nephew, Xavier, for keeping it simple and fun, something that only a child can do. To my boyfriend, Valério, for supporting me and keeping it easy throughout the exciting as well as hard path of writing. To the friend I grew up with, Ana, and also to the new ones, for always making me laugh and supporting me even when I felt that I had too much going on. The pandemic made it difficult, but with each of you, we made through with light in our eyes. Nothing can take that away. Wynonna Earp: An Atypical Western Representation Ana Beatriz da Piedade Simão ABSTRACT This dissertation deals mainly with Beau Smith’s Wynonna Earp (1997), a comic series, as part of the reevaluation the western genre has been going through. The American West, a space where men dominate and very few women have been allowed in, is also a main focus, since some female characters who have been undermined and others who have thrived will be scrutinized in works such as The Virginian (1902) by Owen Wister, Westworld (2016) by Jonathan Nolan and more extensively, Wynonna Earp, in mediums such as comics and television. Likewise, the social and political changes brought on with time will be at the core of this work as they help to elucidate and describe how the western has been evolving in the way it represents women and allowing them to become heroes in a space and narrative where the figure of the cowboy has been idolized and mythicized in American history. Wynonna Earp demonstrates the progressive ideas of our time and shows how persistence might be central to change. KEYWORDS: Wynonna Earp, western, comics, American literature, cowboy, myth, stereotypes, change. Wynonna Earp: Uma Representação de um Western Atípico Ana Beatriz da Piedade Simão RESUMO Esta dissertação analisa primordialmente Wynonna Earp (1997), uma banda desenhada da autoria de Beau Smith, como parte da reavaliação de que o western tem sido alvo. O Oeste americano, um espaço maioritariamente representado como masculino, onde poucas mulheres têm sido deixadas entrar, vai ser igualmente um dos enfoques, visto que será analisado como algumas das figuras femininas têm sido estereotipadas e outras conseguiram desenvolver-se em obras como The Virginian (1902) de Owen Wister, Westworld (2016), de Jonathan Nolan, e principalmente Wynonna Earp, em géneros como a banda desenhada e a televisão. Além disto, momentos políticos e sociais considerados fulcrais vão estar presentes, sendo analisados em conjunto com o mencionado anteriormente, pois elucidam e ajudam a descrever como é que o western tem vindo a evoluir na forma como representa a figura feminina e como tem criado, cada vez mais, narrativas com heroínas. Assim, Wynonna Earp vem, ao mesmo tempo, revelar ideias inovadoras do nosso tempo e mostrar que a persistência tem sido fundamental para a mudança. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Wynonna Earp, western, banda desenhada, Oeste Americano, cowboy, mito, estereótipo, mudança. Table of Contents Introduction p. 1 Chapter I. The Classic Stereotypical Female Character Out West p. 6 1.1 The Virginian (1902) by Owen Wister: The Model p. 6 1.2 Shane (1949) by Jack Schaefer: The Stereotypical Woman with a Rebellious Side p. 13 1.3 Westworld (2016-2020): The Liberation of Chained Women in the Imagined West p. 20 1.3.1 Dolores Abernathy: From the Damsel in Distress to the Leader of her Species p. 23 1.3.2. Maeve Millay: From the Brothel’s Madam to Warrior Mother on a Mission p. 27 1.3.3 Portrait of Women in Westworld p. 30 1.4. The Mandalorian (2019-2021): Carasynthia Dune the “New Soldier of Women” p. 33 CHAPTER II: Western Comics: Women in and out of Refrigerators p. 38 2.1 Image Comics: Wynonna Earp p. 40 2.2 IDW Publishing: The New Wynonna Earp p. 47 CHAPTER III: Out of the Refrigerator: Television Adaptation of Wynonna Earp p. 56 3.1 From Reluctant Hero to Rightful Hero of an Imagined Western Space p. 61 3.2 Readaptation of Wynonna Earp from Showing to Telling p. 89 CONCLUSION: The Persistence of Female Heroes in the Western p. 95 Works Cited p. 99 1 Introduction The Emergence of a New Western Hero: Women as Heroes The ‘ultimate structure’ or metanarrative, in terms of the West, has been a series of dominant stories or myths told over time and endowed with massive cultural power, such as the Promised Land, Manifest Destiny, Turner’s frontier thesis, each of which sought to encompass and define the West. Taken together and over time, these myths contribute to the construction of a discourse that defines the West in the consciousness. Neil Campbell, The Cultures of the American New West (2000), 6. The discourse of the western genre has always been immersed in myths, encoding its narratives with a powerful symbolism which popular culture consumes avidly. Whatever the media through which the western is presented – movies, television, literature, music, among others – the mythical western that became famous and extremely successful and valuable almost always involves the figure of the male hero, the cowboy. Richard Slotkin, in Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1993), refers to the use of myth as follows: [Myth] [o]ver time through frequent retellings and deployments as a source of interpretive metaphors, the original mythic story is increasingly conventionalized and abstracted until it is reduced to a deeply encoded and resonant set of symbols, “icons,” “keywords,” or “historical clichés.” (5) The main hero of the American West, the cowboy, became a famous icon whose set of values and morality echoed throughout popular culture, rooting itself in American history. With the cowboy as an icon, the narratives about the West turned this imagined space into a masculine dominated area where few women were allowed, according to the most generalized western stories. Viewing the western as limiting women is a common idea when one talks about the western and its heroes. However, if the western is mostly a male 2 dominated genre and space, it has also been a space for women, even if it portrays mainly two types of women: the damsel in distress or the prostitute with the heart of gold. These two portraits of women are the most common in western narratives, and although they are restrictive and detrimental, there have been other roles given to women throughout time and some stories of real women out West resurfaced, which have been helping to question the western as a male dominated space. Mark Wildermuth, in Feminism and the Western in Film and Television (2018, 37), mentions several female characters who appeared in television series and movies, such as Annie Oakley (1935) and Calamity Jane and Sam Bass (1949). Neil Campbell also noticed how the western has multiple narratives which in the end tell the same story, that of male heroism and female undermining: This mythic discourse, produced by selective history, literature, visual arts, and popular culture, constructs an ideological framework or grid that authorizes and privileges the dominant stories of the West. Such myths have to be examined closely because they distort by naturalizing history, hollowing it out into a neat, closed, unambiguous process. (2000, 6) Through Campbell’s words about how the genre picks, closely and selectively, the stories it tells, it can be argued that when it comes to telling women’s stories in the West, the genre still has a long way to go in allowing space for women to explore and to have roles in narratives in which they are more than secondary characters used for male heroes to enrich their heroic adventures and personalities. Hence, even if the western continues to have problems when it comes to the way it addresses female roles in its narratives, especially from the twentieth century until today, there have been important developments in this genre which have accompanied important fights for equal representation between the sexes and racial equality in media such as cinema and television. Therefore, movements, as The Women’s Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Movement, helped American culture become more willing to reflect on its inner problems and in the image, it portrayed of its people. These movements impacted other mediums, such as comics in which the superhero genre was, and still is, cherished by popular culture. Paradoxically, movements such as Feminism both prized and criticized female heroes like Wonder Woman (1941). Female heroes were loved and criticized simultaneously because, on the one hand, they embodied traits like independency and strength, which feminists were fighting for, and on the other hand 9 "Why, there's a skunk," said I, noticing the pretty little animal trotting in front of us at the edge of the thickets. “Oh, where is it? Don't let me see it!" screamed Molly.” And at this deeply feminine remark, the Virginian looked at her with such a smile that, had I been a woman, it would have made me his to do what he pleased with on the spot. (158) Again, as in the first example, she acted accordingly, and so did the Virginian, demonstrating how he was superior to her by acting unsurprised and unafraid. As a man from the West he acted as the strong protector, and Molly, a woman from the East, with little contact with nature, acted as if she needed protection. He was the hero and the protector of Molly, the woman in need of help. Notice the narrator’s wording, such as “deeply feminine remark” and particularly the sexual innuendo of the rest of the sentence. Furthermore, another important moment from the novel that demonstrates how women were portrayed in the western always in need of protection, even from harsh words and the truth is when the quarrel between the Virginian and Trampas, the villain, is explained: “It was his code never to speak ill of any man to any woman. (…) In his scheme, good women were to know only a fragment of men’s lives (…) She should know the story of his quarrel in language as light and casual as he could veil it with” (282). While he tries to find the right and lighter words, he talks about the difference between men and women by giving an example of a restless night he spent at a hotel because of the temper of the woman in the room next door: “Once I had to sleep in a room next a ladies' temperance meetin'. Oh, heavens! Well, I couldn't change my room, and the hotel man, he apologized to me next mawnin'. Said it didn't surprise him the husbands drank some.” (283). Thus, once again, Molly is the sheltered woman who should only know about a certain part of the life of the man she was going to marry, and even if the Virginian is telling her about his troubles with Trampas, he chooses his words carefully, so as not to disturb her fragile and precious mind. Additionally, there are other two examples that contribute to the view of Molly as a classic example of the stereotypical western woman. The first example is when the Virginian is told not to go change his clothes to his wedding attire and to keep the ones he had on, because he would need the most freedom of movement in the duel with Trampas. Molly does not understand the meaning behind this seemingly simple request since she is innocent and unaware of the true and violent reality 10 of the West, even if she had already seen the kind of justice and law that existed in the West, the kind of taking justice and the law into one’s own hands. The example is: But the Virginian had taken Scipio's meaning. "DON'T CHANGE YOURS CLOTHES." Innocent Molly appreciated these words no more than the average reader who reads a masterpiece, complacently unaware that its style differs from that of the morning paper. Such was Scipio's intention, wishing to spare her from alarm. (286) The narrator’s description of how Molly was oblivious to the real intent of those words, further helps to lower female characters in the western, demonstrating that women in the West tend be left out of the violence that exists in everyday life of the men, and that they as superior beings only want to protect women. The western by leaving women in the periphery of public life, demonstrates that there are two spheres — the private and the public — and a frontier between them, which women rarely leave. If they ever put a foot in the violent public space, it is only to behave as the cliché woman who, at first, surprisingly, stands up to the violence and the need of men to resolve things with their guns, and decide that if the male hero wants to use violence, then they would not continue to be romantically involved with the male hero. But, when women finally take a stand, and decide something by themselves, often their initial resolve crumbles, and they accept back the male hero. This is what happens in the second example when the Virginian and Molly argue about the upcoming fight with Trampas, and Molly wants the Virginian to flee. However, she finds out that the Virginian cannot leave town because of his arrogance and manliness, and she decides she cannot marry him after all, since she does not understand the need for violence and murder: "Can't yu' see how it must be about a man?" he repeated. "I cannot," she answered, in a voice that scarcely seemed her own. "If I ought to, I cannot. To shed blood in cold blood. When I heard about that last fall, — about the killing of those cattle thieves, — I kept saying to myself: 'He had to do it. It was a public duty.' And lying sleepless I got used to Wyoming being different from Vermont. But this — she gave a shudder — "when I think of to-morrow, of you and me, and of — If you do this, there can be no to-morrow for you and me." (297) However, as mentioned before, this does not last, and Wister, through the narrator’s voice, turns her into a cliché, because once she saw that the Virginian was safe, she forgot about 11 their different opinions about violence: “Thus did her New England conscience battle to the end, and, in the end, capitulate to love. And the next day, with the bishop’s blessing, and Mrs. Taylor’s broadest smile, and the ring on her finger, the Virginian departed with his bride into the mountains” (302). In the end, the cowboy and the West were superior to the woman’s ideals from the East, meaning that masculinity and violence as a means for justice and law were superior to the Eastern notions of justice and law. Additionally, the West is a space where men’s ideals are above the women’s, since men act on both private and public spheres. Women rarely had that option or rarely did they take it upon themselves to be part of both areas. Regarding Wister’s opinion of the West and of women, Tompkins wrote about the influence of women in Wister’s life, especially his mother, Sarah Butler Wister (1835-1908). Interestingly, their complicated relationship had evident consequences on his view of women, because her constant scrutiny and judgement together with the detriment of his health, led Wister to the West, a space free of women’s control. As Tompkins argues, the West “was the place where a new breed of men was coming into being, where tradition meant nothing and the weak were being winnowed out by the processes of evolution.” (137). Furthermore, besides his problematic relationship with his mother, his unhappy married life also might have contributed to his view of women, and consequently to the creation of Molly Woods as a woman who matched the classic stereotype, and did everything according to the desires of the male protagonist. Ultimately, Molly was created in accord with Wister’s opinion. Tompkins even relates the character of Molly to Wister’s mother, and argues: His mother was everything the West was not: society, art, manners, taste, inherited wealth, good breeding, a life of leisure in exquisite surroundings — everything exclusive, discriminating, and genteel. The Virginian’s triumph over Molly — their “exchange” of “positions,” her “surrender,” his becoming “master” — makes sense when one considers Wister’s need to be independent of his mother, without losing her regard. (143) Therefore, through Tompkins connection between Wister’s mother and Molly, it seems clear that the latter character would be based on the women he knew. Hence, another example from the novel that demonstrates Wister’s opinion of women, and consequently their representation in the western is seen in the last paragraph of The Virginian: 12 Sometimes she missed the Bear Creek days, when she and he had ridden together, and sometimes she declared that his work would kill him. But it does not seem to have done so. Their eldest boy rides the horse Monte; and, strictly between ourselves, I think his father is going to live a long while. (314) In the last paragraph of the novel, Wister focused on the longevity of the male hero and on the worries of Molly about her husband’s work. The last information the reader has of the main hero is that he will live long, and there is no information about Molly’s longevity. There is only reference to the children that she gave birth to and her worries. From this last paragraph the idea of women as motherly, docile, and subservient is still at work, and what matters for many of western writers and their admirers is the male protagonist. However, there is an example in the novel that demonstrates a different side of Molly, a side that should have, and could have been more explored if the writer saw women differently. Molly in this example could be described as selfless, resilient, and strong because she saved the Virginian from certain death after Indians attacked him. But, as this could have been her glorious moment in the western, when the main hero was saved, it was ruined because he said that Molly had to be the man in charge: “You have got to be the man all through this mess.” (207). So, there is a reversal in roles, making Molly the female hero, and the Virginian the one needed saving. But, in her heroic moment, she had to be a man, because only men could be tough, strong, smart and endure, making hard decisions to survive in the West. In addition, Molly falls into the stereotypical female behavior by nursing the Virginian back to full health, making Molly the classic nurturing and docile example of women who take care of other people’s health. Moreover, this was the moment in the novel when the female character saved the male protagonist all on her own, and it could have been the moment that made Molly step out of the domestic sphere into the public western space where men like the Virginian dominate. She did step out of the safe and protected domestic space into the dangerous West, but she did it as a man, not as a woman. Wister makes that clear when the male protagonist associates Molly’s courage and strength to men’s qualities, as if women were not able of heroic and selfless acts themselves. Will Wright, when analyzing love in the western, argues that “(…) independent women are attractive to men, but too much independence is dangerous. Society can only be civil if love makes women dependent, so decent women must want 13 love more than independence.” (2001:153). In The Virginian, this is what occurs, since in the end Molly wanted love more than her own freedom and independence. In addition, as it was referred before about the Victorian novel and the restriction of women to the domestic space, it should be said that most of the westerns created in the twentieth century (and even nowadays) reflect this image of women that has, from Wister’s novel and other western works by authors such as Louis l'Amour, developed into the classic image of women in the West. Wright argues that continuously restricting women to the private and domestic sphere is the way of keeping a balanced social order. Nevertheless, he also admits that women in reality cannot stay only in one sphere, and when they leave it, they threaten that social order. Thus, according to Wright, the western always tries to keep women in check. When they step out of that space, normally: 1they are pushed back by the male hero; 2the woman is the villain, and is killed; 3finally, she admits that she made mistakes and dies in the hero’s arms. Whatever the end, as Wright argued “(…) market assumptions require women to admire and obey men, not to threaten them. (…) Women should stay in the family, in their view, while men compete in the market, so the family can be stable, and the market can be civil.” (151). The Virginian set the course for the western to grow rapidly, and as it became the western’s model to follow for the rest of the twentieth century, women like Molly Woods appeared massively throughout time, becoming the model for female characters in the West. There would be exceptions like Wonder Woman and Annie Oakley who were independent and powerful protagonists in the western public space. But the exceptions are few, and there would still be a long time until other interpretations of womanhood appeared and left a mark in the West. Nonetheless, it was from exceptional women like the ones mentioned before that the western developed and started to accept and incorporate important female narratives. 1.2. Shane (1949) by Jack Schaefer: the stereotypical woman with a rebellious side (…) the independent women found in other post–World War II westerns initially appear to be throwing off the shackles of traditional gender roles, but in the end (…) they have to be rescued by men, they follow the male’s lead, and ultimately they wind up accepting domestic bliss. Richard Aquila (2015) 14 The Cold War (1947-1991) was an era that marked almost every aspect of the USA. Consequently, it affected the discussion of gender in American society challenging the typical roles of men and women. Mainly, men continued to take the role of protector and women the role of the domestic docile nurturer, but as Aquila argues this period of the Cold War saw a revision of “(…) women, minorities, immigrants, and youths; they reinterpreted the roles played by individuals, families, society, and government” (167). It was a period when women worked and studied more, making part of the labor force, and enrolling in colleges and universities. Hence, western novels and films during this time continued to have traditional topics of family and marriage, but they also reflected on these changes in the way men and women were perceived. Therefore, as Aquila summarized this era was “(…) characterized by powerful and contradictory forces swirling within the culture of the Cold War. Postwar westerns provide evidence of consensus and conflict, as well as continuity and change.” (167). Subsequently, a western novel that left its imprint and modeled the figure of the cowboy was Jack Schaefer’s Shane (1949), which established a change and growth in the stereotypical vision of the female characters in the West. Schaefer’s Marian Starrett shows, with some traits that will be discussed further, a development from Wister’s Molly Woods. The two author’s livesWister and Schaefer - are socially and historically different, and that has to be taken into account. Nevertheless, as much as Wister and Schaefer lived in different times with active changing ideas of the role of women in society, the truth is that before Wister there were already female writers that were ahead of their time by the way they saw themselves and what they could do for the society and culture they lived in 2 . Thus, we can say that Wister’s perception of women could be somewhat justified. Maybe because women writers felt the lack of rights and opportunities themselves, they tended to be more liberal to their female characters, and male writers did not know how it was realistically. Shane is set in 1889, in Wyoming, but it was influenced by the change brought on by the Cold War. The first example that will be used is the moment when the woman 2 Female writers such as Mary Austin Holley (1784-1846), and Eliza Farnham (1815-1864) wrote about the way of life in the West. Holley’s Texas (1833) and Farnham’s Life in Prairie Land (1846) talked about the western’s way of living, and often times reflected on real issues of the West such as the severe exploitation of the land and the ways of life in the West for recently arrived emigrant women. (Kolodny: 98) 15 character is introduced, after the mysterious Shane arrived at the Starrett homestead, and he is invited to dinner: She was proud of her cooking, was mother. That was one thing she learned back home (…) that was of some use out in this raw land. As long as she could still prepare a proper dinner, she would tell father when things were not going right, she knew she was still civilized and there was hope of getting ahead. (1975:11) From this description, Marian’s cooking is introduced to the reader, and it is important to refer to this example because as her skillfulness is in the kitchen, the woman in the West is once again put in her place, the domestic sphere. More than that there is an almost humorous intent when the narrator (Marian’s son Bob who is telling the story when he is already an adult but remembering what had happened when he was a young boy) states that Marian’s cooking would be a kind of warning to something changing. As this is the moment in the novel when the reader is given some information on who she is, the first thing that it is said is that her best skill is domestic, and it is in the kitchen where she decides how life is going for her family. She could have been introduced in other ways that made her character look less as the stereotypical western prototype of women and more like a capable western woman that had skills as the motherly figure, but also was more than that, an intelligent woman capable of making her own mind and advising the men around her. Consequently, this example does put Marian in the female space of the western and contributes to the stereotypical image of women in the West. However, Schaefer gives Marian a few instances in the novel when the reader can see that she was more than the classic woman in the western space. These moments will be discussed later on, but first it is important to notice that Schaefer allows her more spotlight than other female characters, although she was also often refused from further contribution to the men’s discussions and diminished as the woman who had some wise reasoning behind her arguments, but as she was not a man, her opinion would not be given more credit. Another example when it is demonstrated that Marian only roams in a restricted safe space can be seen in Joe Starrett’s words: “Marian’s right. Only she doesn’t go far enough. These rains are short. But they sure mess up the road.” (Schaefer:17). From this example, it can be noticed that the place where she wanders is the safe restricted space of the West that has been transformed from the wilderness into civilization. She does not go 16 into the unpredictable and dangerous space that Shane seemed to be used to. She would always stay in the western space that was civilized by men. Additionally, another instance that puts Marian in the box of the stereotypical woman is when she asks Shane about the new fashion trends, and then appears with her new hat proudly in front of the men: She was the freshest, prettiest thing I had ever seen. She had taken her hat and stripped the old ribbon from it and fixed it as Shane had told her. (…) She had cut slits in the brim and the sash from her best dress (…). She was stepping along daintily, mighty proud of herself. (32) From this example, women in the western are always linked with civilization, and Marian is no different. Again, just as Molly, she was a schoolteacher who married and came West because her husband promised a better life for them, and a place that was their own. She personifies civilization by being the symbol of motherhood and taking care of the house while the men work outside trying to tame the wilderness of the West. She tries to stay connected to what women do and wear in other places, trying to keep a part of herself that in the West would progressively be forgotten, since fashion was not the most important thing, survival was. Nevertheless, there are a few instances that make Marian a more complex character than Molly Woods in The Virginian. The first example occurs when the men are discussing the fight between Shane and Chris, the man who works for the villain, Fletcher, and Marian calls her husband out for being wrong: Before anyone else could push in a word, mother was speaking. I was surprised, because she was upset and her voice was a little shrill. “I wouldn’t be too sure about that, Joe Starrett. I think you’ve made a bad mistake.” “Marian, what’s got into you?” “Look what you’ve done just because you got him to stay on here and get mixed up in this trouble with Fletcher” Father was edging toward being peeved himself. “Women never do understand these things.” (…) “Oh Joe, can’t you see what I’m talking about? I don’t mean what you’ve done to Chris. I mean what you’ve done to Shane. (102-103) Thus, Marian gives her own opinion about the matter being discussed, despite what the men thought of her, making her husband understand the change that was brought to Shane by the quarrel in the community. Joe Starrett had not seen it yet, but Marian did, demonstrating that women are more than pretty faces and motherly figures in the western. She showed that she was intelligent and able to stand over the men’s opinions. Furthermore, another example occurs when her husband and Shane were fighting 17 Fletcher’s men, and she decided to stay and see it to the end, despite her husband telling her to leave: “You wait out at the wagon, Marian. Morgan’s had this coming to him for quite a long time now and it’s not for a woman to see.” Mother shook her head without moving her eyes now from Shane. “No, Joe. He’s one of us. I’ll see this through.” And the three of us stayed there together and that was right, for he was Shane. (122) Marian is still in the side-lines, not participating in the fight, but her behaviour toward danger and violence and her refusal to do what her husband said, demonstrates a development for women in the western. This might have to do with the social changes brought on by World War II and the Cold War in which women became much more active and involved in their communities and in American society and culture. Thus, while in The Virginian Molly did not even leave her hotel room to see if her fiancé was okay when he went to fight Trampas, in Shane, Marian went a bit further and stayed, watching the fight unfold in front of her eyes. Molly was protected from all the violence, and Marian while still being protected by Joe and Shane, was able to demonstrate that women can step out of the domestic sphere. Schaefer did not take her into the unexpected wilderness of the West alone, she was surrounded by men, and thus that does bring into question how much she distanced herself from other stereotypical female characters in other novels and films, but it is an improvement from other female characters that do not get the chance to decide to stay or step out of the civilized and safe space of the domestic sphere. Additionally, there are other instances in the novel that demonstrate the influence of Marian on the two men around her, and one of those can be seen when she is talking to her husband Joe: “Bob’s right, Joe. We can’t let Shane down.” It was queer hearing her say the same thing to father she had said to Shane, the same thing with only the name different. (…) “I know Joe. But you don’t see far enough.” (…) “I can’t really explain it, Joe. But I just know that we’re bound up in something bigger than any of us, and that running away is the one thing that would be worse than whatever might happen to us.” (149-150) Marian’s reasoning is used by her to remind Shane and Joe of what was important in their fight to save the community. It is her influence on the male figures and her capacity to decide on her own that puts Marian with a foot out of the stereotypical category of the 18 female figure in the western that exists basically to be the romantic partner of the male protagonist and to be the woman that nurtures the house. She represents the classic woman in the western that nurtures the domestic sphere, and the figure that represents civilization and reason, but Schaefer made her a bit more rebellious than the stereotypical female figure, by making her be certain of what she wanted, loved, wanted to protect, and her own beliefs. Then, although she still embraces the stereotypical behaviour of women in the western, she also shows new attributes like frustration and anger when she sees that the men around her were not thinking reasonably. As already mentioned, this might have to do with the changes brought on by the Cold War, in which gender and sexuality started to be perceived differently. Richard Aquila refers to this change, when he talks about Marian in the movie Shane (1953): (…) Marian Starrett does not fit the fifties stereotype of the content housewife. (…) something is missing in her life. Her restlessness anticipates by a decade or more similar frustrations that were implicit (…) and unleashed by the sexual revolution of the late sixties and seventies. (168) The same happens in the novel even if it was published four years earlier, since after the Second World War, women were much more active in society, and consequently they slowly started to change it, making it more equal for men and women. Marian’s personality demonstrates an evolution and a somewhat rebellious character different from other female characters like Molly Woods, and also because one can argue that she was in love or at least divided between two men, which is different from other novels and films in which the female character is in love only with the male protagonist. When Shane knocks out Joe to prevent him to go and fight the villain, it is interesting to notice that Marian does not immediately go take care of her husband. She stays to talk with Shane before he goes to meet Fletcher: “She had not moved since he appeared in the doorway, not even when father fell, and the table teetered under her hands on its edge. She was watching Shane, her throat curving in a lovely proud line, her eyes wide with a sweet warmth shining in them.” (168). Marian’s attention was not on her husband even when he fell after Shane beat him with his gun; her attention was centered on Shane, the other man she seems to have fallen in love with, after her husband. Aquila again refers to the same incident in the film saying: Starrett’s wife is equally complex. No doubt, female viewers in the fifties, an era that glorified female domesticity, could relate to Marian, who appears to be the 25 in distress, and consequently needed to embrace attributes normally seen in men such as violence and leadership. This demonstrates at least two aspects: 1— she chose to incorporate a male persona into her own mind, even after all the trauma that other male figures like Ford had inflicted on her; 2— Dolores incorporating a male persona to be able to fight back and kill, questions to what extent Dolores’s choices can be regarded as primarily female, and ultimately Westworld as having a feminist perspective. In Season Two, Dolores is still playing a narrative created by Ford called “Journey into Night” in which she plays the leader of the rebellion. Thus, even if she was able to free herself in Season One, she is only slowly gaining the capacity to achieve free will. She is still partly following the last narrative Ford created before he was killed. Ford was not able to incorporate free will into the host’s program, so he created a narrative with elements that would structure the host’s evolution to free will. It was still up to hosts like Dolores to choose, making mistakes along the way, as Ford told the guests in the last episode of Season One: “So I began to compose a new story for them. It begins with the birth of a new people... And the choices they will have to make... And the people they will decide to become.” Subsequently, in Season Two the spectator sees the actress who plays Dolores, Evan Rachel Woods, switch throughout the season from one expression to another, meaning that in certain instances Dolores is present, while in others it is Wyatt when violence is needed. Dolores’s narrative in Season Two is an important one to analyze because even if there is the use and influence of a male persona in her actions, Dolores is the one who looks for an escape from slavery for her species. Throughout the season, she fights and kills a big number of hosts (except Maeve) that do not see the same outcome as she does, and even if her use of violence and killing might seem excessive, Dolores just wants a chance for her people to survive. More than that, in this season there is a broader question: to thrive and decide who they want to be without any scripts and narratives that decide their faiths. Contrary to the other two female characters previously analyzed who were confined in the tamed western space and under the dominance of masculinity, Dolores fights patriarchy and explores new territories, leaving her mark in the world where she was created and wants to leave behind. While Molly claimed that she would not accept the Virginian if he fought Trampas, but in the end she did, and Marian never thought about leaving the Starrett homestead, Dolores went further by killing her creator, and by trying to leave the space that had been created for her species to be explored and enslaved. 26 In some ways Dolores’ character explores the misrepresentation of women in the western space, creating and reimagining a space in the West where women stand on their own feet and are in the spotlight. In addition, in Season Three, Dolores finally leaves the park and moves to the human world where humanity lives controlled by a machine called Rehoboam, and a human Serac. Dolores’ objective is now to help liberate humans from that control. Season Three will be the last analyzed since the setting changes from the western space to the city landscape, demonstrating a bigger influence of science fiction. What is important is the growth shown in Dolores’ character of using free will in Season Three. In the previous season, she did not believe humans deserved a chance to change and be better, but in Season Three she lets humanity choose their own future because of one human, Caleb, who creates hope in Dolores’ mind for a brighter future. Then, she helps liberate them since she believed that there was still hope for them. She shows personal growth and that she had free will to change her mind about humans. Actually, that is made clear in episode eight “Crisis Theory” when Dolores states that “Free will does exist, Caleb. It’s just fucking hard,” demonstrating that she struggles with her decisions just as humanity does, but that she truly had free will or at least believed in it. The closest in Season Three that we see Dolores back in the western space is when in episode seven “Passed Pawn” she reminisces about the park of Westworld: “I lived in hell. But there was beauty in it. The park was modelled after this place. The West was... cruel, unjust, and chaotic... but there was a chance to chart your own course. I want a place for my kind... and for all of us... to be free.” In the same episode, she talks about her first role in the park: “For the first 35 years of my life, I was a bit player. A rancher's daughter. And when the time came, I knew I had to be more.” Subsequently, from these two quotes the West was hard, and her life was restricted and controlled, until she was able to break free from her cage. Dolores evolved from the damsel in distress to the leader of the rebellion against Delos, the company that owned Westworld, and finally in Season Three she became a character the spectator saw as neither hero or villain, a character who had nothing out of the ordinary either physically and mentally, but just someone who knew that the faith of the world should not be in her hands. As Dolores says in episode six “Decoherence” speaking to Maeve: “You want me to be a saint. But you're no saint. You're not a villain, either. And neither am I. We're survivors.” Dolores is shown to be a flawed character, neither a saint nor a villain, just a survivor who had to evolve to be able to escape the life that was programmed into her mind. 27 Throughout the three seasons of Westworld Dolores changes from the classic role of the rancher’s daughter who only roamed in the Abernathy homestead and the town of Sweetwater into the strict, vengeful, rebellious cowgirl and leader of the hosts’ rebellion. In Season Three she even acknowledges that there was more to humanity, and thus evolving into a more caring character. She is still rebellious and capable of violence, but she tries other paths before slaughtering everyone who stood in her way. This evolution throughout the three seasons, demonstrates that Westworld questions the gap between male and female narratives told in the western space. The series attempted to equally represent both male and female stories, but what is interesting to notice is the way they developed the female liberation of characters such as Dolores and Maeve from classic, and at first banal personalities in the western, to fully complex hosts that made the spectator question how treacherous humanity can be. By exploring female narratives in the western space, the series helped in the revision and reinvention of the mythical West where masculinity and men were fully represented, and women and feminism were silenced and mainly used as secondary to adorn the males’ narrative. Maeve Millay’s character, a brothel madam, also helps the series question the role of women in the western space. 1.3.2. Maeve Millay: from the brothel’s madam to warrior mother on a mission In contrast with Dolores’ character, Westworld had Maeve Millay play the brothel’s madam in Sweetwater, the opposite role to Dolores. Just like Dolores, Maeve was one of the first hosts to awake and understand her nature. However, differently from Dolores who wanted to escape and save her species from extinction and control, Maeve was only interested in her own story. She wanted to save the daughter Delos had scripted into her, even if she knew that her emotions and memories towards the girl were all part of an incorporated narrative, as she acknowledges, in the last episode of Season One, “The Bicameral Mind”: “She was never my daughter... Any more than I was... whoever they made me.” Maeve’s character is important to analyze just like Dolores’ because she also evolves from the role of the prostitute to a mother and warrior, questioning the classic role of the prostitute with the heart of gold in the West. Maeve’s narrative, her escape from a predetermined life and Delos Park distinguish her from other western narratives in which women are completely dominated 28 by men and the masculinized West, like Marian and Molly, who did not even want to escape the stereotypical roles of the docile and subservient woman. Thus, in Season One, Maeve started to question the existence of some of her memories about figures whom she believed to be gods. Eventually, she discovered the truth about her nature and that those who she thought were gods were only memories of people who worked in the park when she was taken out of service to be repaired. Like Dolores, she had a predetermined role, and even before Dolores discovered consciousness, Maeve had several moments that showed the spectator that she too was developing a conscience. One of those moments occurs when Ford was about to erase her memories of her motherhood and her child’s assassination. Even after he erased them, Maeve, not knowing that she cannot actually die, and will be later be brought back online, kills herself in episode eight “Trace Decay”, so that they would not take her memories away: “No. No, no, no, please. This pain... it's all I have left of her. Please.” Furthermore, in the final episode of Season One, when she was about to escape the park she decides to stay behind and save her daughter, even if she knew that her memories of her were all constructed. Maeve’s transformation from prostitute to mother, and from unconsciousness to awareness were made with the use of violence and calculated choices. Her escape from the park was still part of Ford’s narrative for her. However, she decides on her own that motherhood was more important to her than her own escape and survival. Thus, her use of violence, manipulation, and her active role in saving her daughter are interesting to be noticed if she is compared to other female characters in the western that did not have active roles in the most important matters of the narrative being told. Besides Maeve actively participating and putting her survival at risk, she assembled a group of hosts of which she was the leader to save her daughter, and she brought them together by giving them the chance to choose freely if they wanted to join her or not. With Maeve’s character, Westworld turns upside down the classic categories that most women fit into either as the mother or the prostitute, and joined them together subverting these stereotypical types, and demonstrating that though motherhood is Maeve’s cornerstone, it does not make her the submissive woman afraid of using violence. It is obvious that her role of running the brothel gave her more audacity and less constriction in her words and actions, but the series ended up creating a complex character that agitated and tried to negotiate the lack of spotlight given to women in the western genre. 29 Moreover, in Season Two, Maeve continues to fight for her daughter, and throughout the season she learns to control other hosts and change their code, all with her own mind, her program. Maeve fights for her daughter, saving her, and ultimately sacrificing herself. Her self-reliance in her abilities to save herself without her group are important in her growth as a free host. Though Maeve being a mother could be seen as a cliché, and her caring for her daughter fitting into the common personality of women in the western, it is her capacity for violence, survival and active participation in her mission that separates Maeve from other female characters that are passive and always stay in the side-lines. Maeve is full hands on, and her sacrifice in the final episode of Season Two, demonstrates her humbleness and love towards a daughter that was hers only as part of a story. In episode five, season? “Akane No Mai”, Maeve talked about their constructed memories and her ability to love other hosts even if those memories and feelings were just code, saying “You can't keep doing this to us, giving us people to love and then getting upset when we do.” Additionally, she is much more complex than just being a mother, since throughout the second season she chooses to sacrifice other hosts, and some of them choose to sacrifice themselves for her. She is able to be violent and ruthless in sacrificing others to make sure that her daughter makes it, even if others and herself do not survive along the way. Furthermore, in Season Three, though it is not in the West, Maeve is woken up by the villain Serac, and she fights Dolores because he promised Maeve, she would be able to get her daughter back. What is mainly important in this season is that in the final episode “Crisis Theory”, she finally understood what Dolores had been fighting for, and it was not the annihilation of humanity. When everything Dolores had been fighting for could have been lost, Maeve stepped up and understood that her search for her daughter would have to be postponed, making the decision to save Caleb, the human who would either choose to erase the machine that controlled the human race or control the machine himself and prosper with it. In the last episode, Maeve finally chose a side in the fight, a choice that she had not made in the previous seasons. She chose to participate in something bigger than herself and her own problems, demonstrating her capacity of free will. Though motherhood was her primary trait, the series made her much more than a simple mother who wanted to protect her child, because she was also capable of using extreme measures of violence, such as killing other hosts and herself, and also, 30 she was able to put the survival of her species and of humans above her own desires of finding her daughter. Maeve has many layers within herself, making her a woman that stands out as independent and a leader, a woman like Dolores who questions and tries to revise the narratives told in the West. Furthermore, when Maeve finally understands Dolores’ plight is through a memory of the park of Westworld. At the time, both characters talked, and Dolores told Maeve that she had focused on revenge and anger toward humanity, but she had finally understood that there was kindness and beauty in the world and in the human race. This is relevant because it was in the western space Dolores understood that though it was a violent and dangerous space, it was also a space with beauty and good memories of interaction between the hosts and humans. Likewise, this kind of reasoning could be applied to the real world, since this was also a space with violence but with people capable of creating beauty and kindness. In Reading Westworld, Alex Goody and Antonia Mackay state: (…) Westworld is indeed our world, that the hyperreal, mise-en-abyme of the time-travelling, mythic West is the hyperreality of our own violent, greedy, exciting, empowering, careless “consumer culture [in] the twenty-first century”. We can thus move through Season Two and beyond, out, with Dolores, into the real world, knowing that we will never have left and will never leave Westworld. (2019:303) Subsequently, the park of Westworld as a violent and dangerous space of the American West reflects on other spaces outside of that landscape, just like it was shown in the city setting of Season Three of Westworld. The mythical West is at the same time capable of ruthless and kind acts, not much different from other spaces in America. The difference is that the narratives surrounding the West not only show it as the most violent space in America, but also as the space where change (regeneration) can occur, just like it happens with the representation of women. The imaginary West has allowed space for men to dominate and roam free, it was about time to let women do the same. 1.3.3. Portrait of Women in Westworld Dolores’ and Maeve’ characters evolve through the three seasons of Westworld from classic roles normally found in the western of the “damsel in distress” or the prostitute into complex leaders capable of kind and violent acts. Both become multifaceted 31 protagonists loved and hated at the same time. By focusing on the moral and emotional growth of these two characters, the series dealt with issues regarding the lack of female visual representation in the western genre and in television. Dolores and Maeve become dominant and central characters giving women more significance in the western. There is still improvement that can be done with these two characters and the narrative of Westworld itself which would make it more feminist. Critics such as Jacinda Read or Alexandra Fanghanel 4 have referred to the scenes of rape and victimhood of women, arguing that there is a need to revise the way rape is treated not only in television and other mediums, but in society in general. As these two characters grew into leaders and representatives of their species, they acquired traits normally seen in men like Dolores did by integrating Wyatt into her own mind. Being able of extreme violence and even murder, both characters’ personalities became more complex, and prone to gather criticism. In Westworld Psychology: Violent Delights (2019), Marie-Joëlle Estrada argues about this: Women who want to occupy traditionally “masculine” leadership positions have to violate the feminine communal stereotypes to be considered agentic enough to lead. (…) women are in a double bind: Women who violate the feminine stereotype are seen as “too aggressive” and are disliked. This decreased likeability can be seen in the women who occupy leadership positions and the lack of emotionality that the audience experiences with their demise. (203) Thus, Dolores and Maeve grew into complex characters capable of violence and love, and they were easily disliked because they stepped out of their classic and safe roles and embraced leadership and central roles typically seen in men. When that role belongs to men who may kill as much or capable of kind acts, like Dolores and Maeve, they are not normally so disliked, since that behavior is standard for men in the western. Estrada also suggests a possible solution for gender criticism, stating that “(…) it requires a shift in society’s perceptions before it will be recognized as such.” (Ibidem:206). If more characters and female stories like the ones presented in Westworld are created, then maybe the discourse within society will change and the view on strong and complex women will shift as well, embracing a (western) narrative with women that can be as complex and strong as men. Women have always been strong. It is only because of a predominant hegemonic masculine society that women in the western or other genres 4 Jacinda Read’s New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape-Revenge Cycle (2000) and Alexandra Fanghanel’s Disrupting Rape Culture: Public Space, Sexuality and Revolt (2019). 32 have been silenced and seen as secondary. Neil Campbell refers this aspect when arguing about dominant stories in the western: Certain dominant stories, of Manifest Destiny, the ‘Frontier’, masculine assertion, and the Nation formed in the West, no longer provide maps of meaning, but instead offer myths and dead-ends that enclose and cut off from the vibrant possibilities of reimagination and reinvention. (2000, 125) Television series, such as Westworld, might help in reinventing and reimagining a West that has many more possibilities not only for men but for women as well. New voices are being created to demonstrate that the West does not need to be predominantly masculine, it can be feminine as well. 1.4. The Mandalorian (2019-2021): Carasynthia Dune, the “New Soldier of Women” “I wasn’t drawn as a storyteller to very big canvas, big screen blockbuster Star Wars. I was drawn to (…) a few characters making it through the world” (Favreau, Jon. “'The Mandalorian' creator Jon Favreau talks show’s inspiration, 'personal connection' to filmmaking”. Interview by Chris Conelly. ABC News) The western has had its ups and downs throughout the years, and during the 1960s and 1970s, people seemed to have grown tired of the mythical narrative of the West. Probably as a result of the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, as well as the controversial war in Vietnam, the growth of the Civil Rights Movement, Watergate and in general Richard Nixon’s presidency. However, by 1969 and with Ronald Reagan as president in the 80s, the interest in the western grew again, reinventing itself and changing the setting from the old frontier to space. The first Star Wars (1977) created by George Lucas is an example of change, since it can be seen as a western with a mix of other influences. In Myth, Media, and Culture in Star Wars: An Anthology (2012), Douglas Brode and Leah Deyneka argue that “Lucas drew on many elements for his conception of the Star Wars universe, from the high art of Akira 33 Kurosawa’s samurai epics to the lowbrow fun of the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon comic strips and movie cliffhangers.” (3). The Star Wars franchise became a huge success and helped reinvent the western. The way Princess Leia was portrayed, especially in the first movie, helped shift the way women were seen, and represented in the West. A few decades later in 2012, the Walt Disney Company bought Lucasfilm and announced a new trilogy of films with the first coming out in 2015. Besides the movies, spin-off series were produced like The Mandalorian (2019) created by Jon Favreau. This TV series will be the focus of this subchapter, more specifically the character of Carasynthia Dune played by Gina Carano. In an interview to the Hollywood Reporter Carano stated: I definitely think Cara stands out in a way that’s very different from someone like Leia, who’s also very strong and independent. I think that’s exactly what Jon wanted to bring to the Star Wars universe as far as my character. (…) He wanted my character to be this new soldier of women, and he wanted her to have an impact. For me, it’s been a way to embrace who I am, and if the biggest complaint is that I’m too strong, it’s really a compliment to me. (2019: n.p) Cara Dune, as she is commonly referred, is a female character in The Mandalorian, also a western like the Star Wars movies. She is important to consider because the western lacks women like her, that are strong physically and mentally, capable of taking out the male protagonist with her bare hands. It is with women like Cara Dune that the western demonstrates that the times are changing, and that there is space for women to stand and show that they can be as powerful as men can. The narrative of The Mandalorian 5 happens five years after Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (1983), and it follows a Mandalorian and bounty hunter — Din Djarin — throughout his missions until he finds and saves a creature called “The Child”, whose name is later revealed to be Grogu. As a result, the Mandalorian has the mission to keep safe and deliver him to his own species (whose name is unknown), because Grogu is part of a powerful species who can manipulate the Force, an energy field that connected 5 The Mandalorian is a television series created by Jon Favreau and produced by Fairview Entertainment, Golem Creations, Lucasfilm and the Walt Disney Studios. The narrative of the series takes place after the fall of the Empire and it tells the story of Din Djarin, a bounty hunter, who goes on missions across the galaxy trying to make profits. Throughout the two seasons released, the Mandalorian travels across the galaxy meeting different people, some of whom become his allies and are recurrent characters: Carasynthia Dune, Greef Karga, Fennec Shand, Boba Fett and Ashoka Tano. The third season has already been confirmed and will be released in 2022. 34 everything in the galaxy. Cara Dune is one of the people that help the Mandalorian throughout Season One. As more information is disclosed about Dune’s past in Season Two the spectator knows that she is from a planet destroyed by the Empire, Alderaan. After that, she became a storm trooper fighting with the Rebel Alliance, fought in the Galactic Civil War, and helped to create the New Republic. She and others like her were made to keep the peace and act as protectors of delegates. Finally, when the Mandalorian finds her, she has deserted and become a mercenary hiding in different planets and running from a life sentence. Even though Cara Dune only appeared in three episodes of Season One, she became a character linked with a feminist approach, since she stands out from other stereotypical representations of women in the western. She might be compared to other female characters such as Molly Woods, Princess Leia and even Dolores Abernathy, but Cara Dune stands apart from them. All the women mentioned before are in written and visual formats the perfect embodiment of the prejudiced ideas of what a woman should look like: with a slender body representing softness and a sculpted face made for others to admire. Favreau chose Gina Carano on purpose to embody Cara Dune since she has a strong and muscular figure due to her years in Mixed Martial Arts. More than Carano’s physical appearance, her character has other traits that distinguish her not only from women like Molly Woods or Marian Starrett, but from the common female character found in other western films and books. Like Dolores Abernathy and Maeve Millay, Dune’s ability for hand to hand combat, and tactical planning distinguish her from the stereotypical woman found typically in the western. She is capable of taking down the male protagonist, Din Djarin, as shown in episode four of Season One “Sanctuary” when she fought him in a hand-tohand combat, different from the usual Star Wars’ type of combat of using a lightsaber. Additionally, in the same episode she and the Mandalorian protect farmers from a group of bandits and an Imperial Walker, and Dune was the star of the episode by putting herself at risk and taking out the Imperial Walker by herself. Similarly, she also tracked down the shooter who was trying to kill Grogu right before he pulled the trigger on him. Dune’s fighting abilities and her primary reaction to be part of any fight, make her a character who stands out in the western outer space, and an example of a woman that does not need any man to help her survive. She can make it on her own, fighting and surviving. She came to be regarded as part of a feminist approach as she fills a gap in the TV and filmic 41 and controlling big Marvel titles. However, they were artists who had little experience with writing comics, and those Marvel titles they had been assigned to, began to wane. Many of these artists also wanted ownership of the work they had done for those titles, and as Marvel refused, they left and created Image Comics in 1992. The titles they created were similar to the work they had done for Marvel, and their female heroes continued to be oversexualized, but as mentioned previously, like other companies in this business, Image Comics closed before the beginning of the 21st century. The published five issues of Wynonna Earp were: — issue 1 “Red Necks, White Corpuscles and Blue Ribbon Beer”, issue 2 “The Bloody Badge of the Law”, issue 3 “Death Sucks”, issue 4 “Refried Dead” and issue 5 “Wrap Party”. Throughout the five issues one trait is always present: the almost inhuman, over sexualized body of Wynonna, and skimpy clothes which leave little to the reader’s imagination. The reader follows Wynonna Earp, a U.S. Marshall and descendant of Wyatt Earp, while she fights different national threats, including situations in which supernatural, horror and fantasy elements are combined, according to the definition of the weird western genre. She fights evil not only in the western space, but also in the city. Wynonna Earp’s character was influenced by the changes occurring in the 1990s with the widespread access to the internet, and the rising interest in exploring sexuality. These five comic issues of Wynonna Earp mostly take place in the western space, and the female character possesses strong traits and qualities that make Wynonna a skillful and dangerous hero to fight against, and demonstrate a development, and a different way of telling female stories in the West. The first quality Wynonna Earp has and that distinguishes her from other conservative and stereotypical female characters in the western is her fighting abilities and capacity of adaptation to different threats. Therefore, throughout the five issues the reader can see that she is the main agent dispatched by her agency to ‘neutralize’ the threats to national security. Besides being Wyatt Earp’s descendant, in the first issue “Red Necks, White Corpuscles and Blue Ribbon Beer” (last page), it is revealed that she is: An Olympic level athlete with high honors in most known and some unknown fighting styles. Perhaps her greatest weapon is one she shares with her possible ancestor (…). The power to be the coolest head in a very bad situation – to completely control her composure no matter what the odds. 42 She possesses both mental and physical skills that make her difficult to defeat, and arguably the most important skill is her intelligence and logic reasoning when she fights criminals. This can be seen in Issue Three “Death Sucks”, when she is fighting the biggest threat Bobo Del Rey, a supernatural superhuman who while fighting her, increases his strength and power even more to kill the Earp heir. She ends up defeating him by using her intelligence: she had learned that the best way to defeat him would be with a mixture of blood and holy water that would reduce his supernatural abilities, and finally would destroy him, and thus she got it. Another example appears in Issue Two “The Bloody Badge of the Law”, when she entered a bar in the western space filled with criminals who sold a drug called “hemo”. She got there without backup and fought all the men in the bar to obtain information about Del Rey’s drugs. There are other examples that could be referred to since she almost always manages to defeat every villain in the western space and the surrounding cities. Moreover, besides her fighting abilities, she can be seen as a lone hero who like other male cowboys in the West protected the community and defeated the villain. Wynonna Earp had help from time to time, allies that fought with her while she took care of the most dangerous criminal, and she also had a team on standby who took care of things after the threat was eliminated. However, she still defeated the main villain, and gained information on her own about crime in the area. Subsequently, this female hero who was influenced by the social and political changes brought on in the last decades of the twentieth century stands apart from earlier female characters in the West. As stated previously, most of those were still given conservative, stereotypical, and inferior roles, with the exception of heroines like Annie Oakley and Dale Evans who were protagonists of their own adventures and did not stand aside while other male characters became the heroes of the narrative. Then, just as other male heroes in the western who worked predominantly alone, Wynonna Earp in these issues was the same: lonely, and the hero of this western narrative. Finally, the third positive quality was the power of her presence when she appeared in the scenes. Besides being drawn in a bigger size compared to other characters in the comics, she brought power and dominance to the space she occupied. As normally male heroes irradiate power and strength in the West, consequently becoming a threat to the criminals around them, so Wynonna Earp has her own charisma. Her figure emanates power and strength. Additionally, she sometimes uses her body as a tool in her work to obtain information from criminals, using the preconceived image of the fragile and non- 43 threatening woman. In these issues, this seems to work perfectly as men almost never see her as a threat, and only pay attention to her body while she obtains what she needs to finish her mission. It is important to state that being drawn in a sexually exaggerated way, and by using her own seductiveness to obtain information, this can be seen as a negative quality, since it can be easily argued that this makes her desirable to male readers. Nevertheless, it can be seen as a resource she is able to use to her own advantage. Jeffrey Brown in Dangerous Curves: Action Heroines, Gender, Fetishism, and Popular Culture (2011) refers to this double standard arguing that The real importance of the action heroine is that she is not easily written off as “either/or”. She does muddy the waters of what we consider masculine and feminine, of desirable beauty and threatening sexuality, of subjectivity and objectivity, of powerful and powerless. (9-10) Subsequently, Wynonna Earp’s body is both threatening and desirable. Furthermore, related to this matter, there is one main critique that can be made to the version of this character: the short, tight outfits that Wynonna Earp wears while she is on a mission, and actively fighting criminals. Through the five comic issues, her clothing is always tight, leaves nothing to the imagination, and gets torn easily in a fight making her look even more naked than she already was. An example of this can be seen in Issue Three “Death Sucks”, after she fought Del Rey (see Fig. 1.) 44 Fig. 1. Wynonna Earp #3 (n.p), 1997. Hence, while Wynonna Earp is shown to be strong and capable, having the same abilities and presence as other male heroes in comics, and even in the western space, there is a big difference to other male heroes in the 1990s. They do not have an exaggerated display of skin, they fight criminals in outfits that are easy for them to move around, and they do not have their private parts exposed. The “Bad Girls” of the 1990s did, exaggeratedly so. As stated previously, this was related to an almost exclusive male readership of comics, the impact and wide-spread adulation of sexy female heroes portrayed by popular actresses like Pamela Anderson and Demi Moore, and Angelina Jolie (Brown:11). In a narrative which takes place in an imagined western space, Wynonna Earp’s clothing and lack thereof, underrates her as a woman and as a heroine in the West. The outfit she wears most of the time, partially represented in Fig. 1., demonstrates the connection of this heroine to the western space. Her outfit includes the boots, the bandana around the neck, the brown leather belt around her waist, the gun and even the badge she carries around, directly linking her to the typical representation of a cowboy in the West. Normally, this type of garments empowers the hero wearing it, but as the outfit is very 45 revealing and short, it does the reverse: it makes her look like a dominatrix who decided to take on the journey of the hero and fight criminality. It disempowers her as a hero, and it increases her sexual desirability. Likewise, as there are very few female heroes in the western, this aspect is not minor. In chapter one, women such as Molly Woods who had mostly a conservative and stereotypical role to play were referred, and with this version of Wynonna Earp there is basically the same problem only in a different way: this female heroine can still be linked with a stereotypical image, since her body is sexually objectified and disproportionate. Besides, (even though she used it for her advantage sometimes) she was not taken seriously by most men around her because of her body and the clothes she wore in missions, just like in Issue Two “The Bloody Badge of the Law” when she walked into a bar wearing a very short skirt, tight top and high heels. She needed information and was cat-called by the men around her. Subsequently, even if she is strong and capable of defeating criminals on her own in the western, she is, at the same time, not respected enough by others around her when she is not fighting. The “Bad Girls” trend in comic books by making female heroes look like dominatrices turns their strength and power into an afterthought. What defines these heroines of the 1990s is their sexual appeal and desirability. In Wynonna Earp’s case it was the same, her attractiveness was above everything else. Written by a man but drawn by a woman in the first three issues of Image Comics, Joyce Chin, it could be expected that the artist would have paid more attention to the way she drew a female hero. This type of heroines was extremely criticized by most women, but there were others who appreciated them. At the end of Issue Two “The Bloody Badge of the Law”, Beau Smith answered a fan who questioned Wynonna’s tight and short clothes. Smith’s answer explains the trend of the “Bad Girls” in the 1990s, having male readers as the main audience. He stated: “‘Cause she looks good in it and bein’ a manly man I like the way she looks in it. Besides bein’ a beautiful woman herself, artist Joyce Chin knows how to draw a true gun-totin’ badge-wearin’ babe of a marshal” (n.p). This type of female heroes of the late 1990s, should have been more than just ‘babes’ who were good to look at, because as history has shown, women were more than just mothers, house-wives and lastly just good to look at. They had the right to be represented with the same respect and power shown to male heroes. The “Bad Girls” of the 1990s, as well as this version of Wynonna Earp showed some evolution mainly 46 because in this type of narratives, they became protagonists and could be as powerful and strong as male heroes. Finally, there is one last matter related to the last comic issue “Wrap Party” in which the explanation behind Wynonna Earp’s actions is somewhat dubious. In this issue she meets her ex-boyfriend, a criminal, who had cheated on her with other women while they were in Las Vegas. The heroine shows anger at first, but then at the end of the issue she ended up dinning with him and kissing him. Her reason to act thus was that she wanted him to trust her and to become her informant for future missions. This is another critique that should be pointed out, because not only is she undermined and disrespected by the way she looks as a hero, but this kind of actions do not empower her. The explanation is poor, and it helps undermine her even more, because in previous comic issues she was able to get information through other sources without having to let herself be too vulnerable. This version of Wynonna Earp was only progressive in the dominant role and power given to her as a female hero in the western. It did not do more than that, since her clothing and some of her actions undermined her as a woman and hero in the western. Even if she was given more freedom than other female characters, such as Molly Woods and Marian Starrett, Wynonna ended up falling into another stereotypical role. However, due to the previous female heroes’ faults and criticism, new versions of female heroes in the western can learn from, and grow even more as women and heroes, and one thing is true about these “Bad Girls”, as Brown pointed out: “Whether action heroines are depicted as masculinized hard bodies or as soft, miniskirted ass-kickers, they ultimately challenge the assumption that gender and behavior are biologically determined” (13). Issue 5 would be the final issue Image Comics published of Beau Smith’s heroine. Also, it would be the last comic of Wynonna Earp that was published for a while, and as mentioned before with the publishing companies closing, in this last issue Smith had fun with the criticism these female heroes received throughout the years, when he appeared in a conversation with the female hero herself and saying: “Please—come on back! I’ll cancel Pamela Anderson from playin’ ya in the movie! I’ll have ‘em draw more clothes on ya!” (n.p). Thus, even if joking he was well aware that something had to change. Many of the female heroes from the 90s would not reappear again. The female heroes that appeared later, were changed physically and mentally. The same happened to Wynonna Earp whose publishing rights were acquired by IDW Publishing in 2003, publishing first a three-issue series entitled Wynonna Earp: Home on the Strange. 47 2.2. IDW Publishing: The New Wynonna Earp After 9/11, the President of the United States of America George W. Bush used the western and the myths surrounding it to respond to the crisis brought on by that terrible event. It was not the first time that an American president used the image of a mythical West, and Bush used it to create a sense of national need for retribution and safety. Consequently, the love for westerns resurfaced again in multiple mediums such as television, cinema and comics, bringing a reassessment of the idea of heroism and of the place of the US worldwide. Additionally, women’s fight for equality of gender representation and opportunities continued to be a central issue, and in comic books more heroes started to appear who distanced themselves from the white, male, and heterosexual paradigm. Nickie D. Phillips and Staci Strobl speak of a rise of gay superheroes such as Midnighter, Apollo, and Batwoman in the first decade of this century (169). However, the comics industry continued to be male dominated, and female heroes continued to be sexualized, made this way especially for male readers, even if not as much as the “Bad Girls” or the version of Wynonna Earp by Image Comics. IDW Publishing reviewed this female hero’s narrative, drastically altering her clothing, and making her look more like a regular woman than an inhuman female hero. Because of this drastic change, she looks and acts like a respectable, powerful hero of the West, a hero whom female readers would see as approachable and a version of a powerful independent woman. This new Wynonna Earp presents a positive image of and for women. Madrid argued that many female heroes who have “(…) strong, powerful characters can be negated by the way they are drawn, and are dressed” (298), and if readers were to read this new Wynonna Earp, they would see that the way she was drawn does not negate how powerful she can be. There is an exception, but most of the time she is a hero in the western who much like most male heroes can take care of herself and be an example of a woman that anyone would feel safe and protected if they had her on their side. The first positive quality of Wynonna Earp as a hero in the western is how IDW Publishing created a western narrative in which the main character is a woman who is able to stand on equal foot with other men. In this three-issue series, Beau Smith who is known for his love of westerns, wrote a narrative based on real events: there are various 48 references such as the famous gun fight at the O.K. Corral in 1881, a thirty-second gun fight between the Earps, Doc Holliday and a group of outlaws called the Cowboys. In this series, these characters have the same names of the historical group of outlaws like Johnny Ringo and Joseph Clanton, but this time they come to fight Wynonna Earp. Throughout the three issues Wynonna Earp continues to be a Marshall fighting supernatural criminals, but in this series her character appears respectful and able to fight comfortably with the clothes she has on. While in the Image Comics’ version, the reader could question her strength and power because of the way she was dressed (in a version of a bikini), in these issues she wears regular clothes, as can be seen in Figure 2. Fig. 2. Wynonna Earp: Home on the Strange #3 (15), 2004 Thus, she dresses much more appropriately for someone who knows is going to fight. In the previous issues she had little clothing on, and she still managed to get at the end of a fight with even more holes in her outfit. In these IDW Publishing issues, she always wears clothes that directly connect her to the West, giving her a much more dignified and respectful look as a heroine who puts her life ahead of others. She is a woman who is much more than just a character that serves the purpose of being eye-candy to male 49 readers. She is still sexualized in these comics since she wears a short white crop top and is somewhat stereotyped and objectified since she is blond with blue eyes. One needs to remember that even though these issues (and the following ones) have taken into account the criticism given to the first series of Image Comics, the image of women continues to be primarily seen as the trait that attracts most audiences to read them. Jeffrey Brown refers to this issue, when he states: Because the sexualization of female characters in popular culture is still regarded as their primary appeal to audiences, especially the typically male audience that is assumed for all action genres, it is difficult to imagine that the strength and competence of heroines will ever outshine their erotic presentation. (245) Subsequently, Wynonna Earp is still sexualized, but in a much minor way when compared to the first issues. From the IDW Publishing issues onward she can be seen as a woman who is making a real difference in the western space, because she is empowered not only because of her fighting skills, but also because of the way readers can perceive her: as a woman who knows who she is and is capable of taking action into her own hands and save the day. She is directly seen as a western hero because of her boots, and Figure 2 also shows her wearing a brown jacket with fringes. This could be considered as cliché, since almost every hero and villain in the western wears them. In the case of western female heroes who wear this kind of clothes, it could be argued that it is important to wear them, so that they are directly seen as someone who is powerful and strong. Additionally, there is one other trait present in this series that demonstrates a change, and that is the introduction of another powerful woman who like Wynonna Earp is able to take action into her own hands: Marshall Holly Day. She is an immortal agent who helped Wynonna fight the villains at the O.K. Corral. Besides Day, there are two other men who joined them. The introduction of another female character who is just as strong and capable as the main character is important. Since the beginning of the 2000s, the appearance of several teams of women like Birds of Prey 6 (1996) showed that there was an interest to create more narratives in which women were capable of being as strong, independent, and capable as heroes as men were. Similarly, the same happens in Wynonna Earp: Home on the Strange, demonstrating that women had a place as crime 6 Like Birds of Prey, other all-female hero teams have emerged, especially in comics like The Fearless Defenders (2013) and A-Force (2015). 50 fighters and western heroes. Holly Day, just like Wynonna Earp, has a past linked with the West: her parents had been members of the outlaw group Cowboys, but afterwards they sided with the right side of the law. With two strong female characters like these two, it is shown that more female characters were starting to be taken more seriously, and were able to be equals to male heroes. In contrast, one critique can be made about this series, and that is related to one scene in Issue One when Wynonna Earp was drawn in an intimate position in her hotel room, after taking a shower (Figure 3.). She is dressed in a pink robe with her legs opened wide. The robe covers her genitalia, but the position and the fact that her legs are bare can be linked to the hyper-sexualization depicted by Image Comics. As stated before, in this series the female hero is still sexualized, but in a much more controlled way than in the issues published by Image Comics. In this scene the main character as a hero is undermined like she was in the Image Comics issues, and she loses her dignity. No male hero is drawn in such a sexual position. Fig. 3. Wynonna Earp: Home on the Strange #1 (22), 2004. 57 other works that resonate through repetition with variation (8)”. The process of adaptation is important to be understood especially when adaptations are analyzed and compared with their original forms. Many adaptations change their methods of engaging with the “original” even using different media. Furthermore, the process of adaptation has to consider other areas of society and culture, still according to Hutcheon and O’Flynn: We engage in time and space, within a particular society and a general culture. The contexts of creation and reception are material, public, and economic as much as they are cultural, personal, and aesthetic. This explains why, even in today’s globalized world, major shifts in a story’s context – that is, for example, in a national setting or time period – can change radically how the transposed story is interpreted, ideologically and literally. (28) This can easily be seen when a film or television adaptation conveys a narrative of a specific culture that has its own traditions and costumes, or even when there is a narrative of a female hero being told by a male producer. Depending on the process of adaptation, there is always criticism to be made by spectators in a certain cultural context. Moreover, in the process of adaptation there will be, most probably, additions being made to the narrative being told: they can vary from new characters, adding more drama to the storyline, to even changing the ending of the original work (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 37). Adaptation is particularly important because Wynonna Earp was dually adapted: first from comics to television, and then from television to comics, in which the latter adaptation was based on the overall changes done to the storyline by the television series. Within the process of adaptation, the process that transforms and adapts the storyline from telling to showing, generally from print to performance, involving dramatization, implies that “(…) description, narration, and represented thoughts must be transcoded into speech, actions, sounds, and visual images’’ (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 40)”.The change in mediums implies advantages and limits, and in the process of adapting to performance, such as in film and television, there is one specific advantage and limit, respectively, the use of cinematic techniques is an advantage, and the limit is that the process of transcoding print texts to visual is complex and there may be some losses in the process (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 43). These authors also argue that “[g]raphic novels are perhaps adapted more easily to film for this reason” (43), since when the process of transcoding involves comics, which have drawings as part of the narrative, the transformation to another medium or genre is easier. Nowadays, adaptations of comics have become common and more of these are being proposed and made into film and television series, 58 like Supergirl (2015) and The Mandalorian, showing society’s need for adaptations, of wanting to see the same stories being told repeatedly. These narratives act “as a specific cultural representation of a “basic ideology” and as a general human universal (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 176, emphasis in the original)”. The process of adaptation implies the change of narratives to suit a certain time and place, and most importantly “[w]e retell — and show again and interact anew with – stories over and over; in the process, they change with each repetition, and yet they are recognizably the same. What they are not is (…) inferior – or they would not have survived (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 176-177)”. Likewise, the existence of stories of female heroes, which may have similarities, does not imply there is no need for new narratives of heroines to be told and shown. The world has changed positively in regard of female representation, but there is still much work to be done, which in part can come from adaptations, such as the ones involving Wynonna Earp. In chapter two, the comic book series published by Image Comics and IDW Publishing were analyzed, then in 2016 there was the adaptation to television by Syfy. It was a production by Emily Andras 10 who had been previously involved in Lost Girl (20102015). As already referred, the process of adapting from the comic book series to the screen might involve changes to the storyline and the characters, and there were major changes to the original narrative. The television series of Wynonna Earp continued to follow the main female hero Wynonna who continued to be a descendant of Wyatt Earp. However, in the show the spectator followed a narrative much more centred on family, friendship and the power within those relationships. The spectator follows the female hero’s narrative in only one space, Purgatory, her place of birth 11 and the development and maturing of the female hero from a woman who ran away to the heroine the town and her family and friends needed. The plot of the TV series follows Wynonna Earp, a woman whose family had been cursed by a powerful demon Bulshar Clootie, who was originally the snake who tempted 10 Andras had previously worked on Lost Girl participating and consulting during the first and second seasons. Then, she became executive producer and showrunner during the third and fourth seasons of this television series. 11 The name of the female hero’s birthplace in the television series was inspired in Wynonna Earp comic series in which the birthplace of the female hero was Tombstone, a real town in Arizona where the O.K. Corral took place. Smith when talking about the series and thanking Ted Adams said that: “Ted’s believed in it from day one, he’s [been] there at the O.K. Coral [with me].” (Beau Smith, Wynonna Earp Wiki). Then, the name of the town in the tv series was changed, but in the comics it is Tombstone. 59 Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Clootie cursed Wyatt Earp and his descendants because the gunslinger had killed Clootie’s sons. In every generation of the Earps there would always be a cursed heir, someone who on their 27th birthday gained new abilities, basically becoming a power to be reckoned with, and inherited Wyatt Earp’s gun — Peacemaker. Additionally, every generation, Earp’s heir had to kill the revenants or demons Wyatt Earp had already killed and sent to Hell in his lifetime. In Wynonna’s generation she was not supposed to be the heir, since that would be her older sister Willa Earp. Wynonna had two sisters, Willa and Waverly, the youngest of the family. Wynonna and her sisters grew up in an emotionally unstable home with her violent and alcoholic father, Ward Earp, the previous heir to the curse. Their mother Michelle Gibson was present until Waverly was born. Michelle bonded herself with a demon Jolene who wanted to kill Waverly and was voluntarily institutionalized to keep the demon locked away. The three sisters grew up together, and after their mother left them sometime after Waverly was born, years later the family homestead and territory, which was supposedly sacred ground and limitless to demons, was invaded by seven demons. Wynonna’s father had made a deal with the demons, Willa Earp was allegedly killed, and when Wynonna tried to save her father from the demons, she accidently killed him. After these incidents, she was institutionalized because of what she did, and because she kept on saying that demons had killed her sister. Moreover, Waverly had to grow up without her sisters, and Wynonna lashed out and became an angry and emotionally closed up individual who drank at all hours of the day, using alcohol as her coping mechanism. As already mentioned, on her 27th birthday she returned to Purgatory to attend her uncle’s funeral. She became the heir of the curse and she joined a secret government agency — Black Badge Division —and throughout the four seasons of the television series, she tried to break the curse by killing the demons that had reincarnated. She became the hero Purgatory and the Ghost River Triangle needed to fight evil. In the television series she has a team to back her up, made by her family and friends: Waverly Earp, Xavier Dolls (a special agent), Nicole Haught (sheriff’s deputy), Jeremy Chetri and John Henry Holliday (also named simply as Doc Holliday), an immortal who had been Wyatt Earp’s best friend. The first season is focused on the hunting and killing of the seven demons that kidnapped Wynonna’s sister, Willa, and also on the re-appearance of Willa who had been brainwashed by the main villain Bobo Del Rey. Willa had aligned with the villain and 60 wanted to break the curse and free the demons from the Ghost River Triangle so that the next Earps did not have to continue to hunt and kill demons throughout the years. In the end, Wynonna had to fight her sister and the villain, and consequently she killed her sister mercifully after she had been taken by another supernatural monster who would probably use her in a new evil plan. In the second season, the female hero continued to fight and kill demons, and she went against the two widows of the demon Clootie whose main goal was to free him. She also discovered that she was pregnant with the next heir to the curse, and she struggled to decide about what to do with the child. At the same time, Wynonna’s younger sister Waverly was possessed by a demon and found out about her true ancestry, being the daughter of an angel and not really an Earp. By the end of the season, Wynonna gave birth to a girl, and had her flown out of Purgatory because there were people who wanted her child as she was the next heir if Wynonna died. She was able to kill Clootie’s wives, but not before he was resurrected. Throughout season three, Wynnona fights Clootie as he was trying to find the entrance to the Garden of Eden which was a sanctuary in the Ghost River Triangle. The female hero was given a solution to end Clootie which involved Waverly taking the place of keeper of the garden. Wynonna fought against this decision and was able to kill Clootie before he could get into the garden, but again not before Waverly, the angel, was trapped in the garden. Finally, in the last season released, Wynonna and Nicole Haught (the new sheriff of Purgatory and girlfriend of Waverly) tried to find a way inside the garden to rescue Waverly and Doc Holliday who had gone in to help Waverly. After releasing Waverly from the Garden, they came home to find out a long time had gone while they had been in the garden, and the town of Purgatory was turned upside down with the Earps long-time enemies — the Clantons — running things. Then, as Waverly and Nicole try to get past the trauma of being apart for so long, Wynonna searches for Peacemaker, now a sword. The background given to Wynonna Earp in the TV adaptation was not as glorious as the female hero in the original comics, since in the TV adaptation it is clearly shown that even though she became a hero, she had traumas to deal with, memories that haunted her, putting her in a vulnerable state of mind. While in the comics the reader never sees the female hero deal with a traumatizing past or even the aftermath of killing monsters, in the series and afterwards in the comics that were generated from the series, the hero 61 and even the monsters show human emotions and personalities. This allows the female hero to question her duty as the heir of the Earp curse, as well as the spectators who ponder on what it takes or validates pulling the trigger on some (not all) of the revenants who while having committed some petty crime in their other life, overall did not deserve to become collateral damage in a conflict they had nothing to do with. Thus, the following subchapters will deal with the development the female hero displayed throughout the four seasons in order to show whether Wynonna Earp embodies what a real female hero can be in the western space. 3.1. From Reluctant Hero to Rightful Hero of an Imagined Western Space According to Valerie Frankel, “[t]he oppressed minority cultures of America needed tales of subtlety, of patience, of quiet heroics, but the American philosophy of the white man settling the West into a gender-specific paradise had little room for spunky women” (From Girl to Goddess 183). Even though Frankel could find out some stories of women’s adventures in the West, the mythical western space has always been typically male, and women were always side lined and ultimately thought of as secondary to the tales of men out West. Real stories of women existed, but they were neglected just like Kolodny showed in her study. With the changes brought on particularly in the last decades of the twentieth century with the Feminist movement growing in strength worldwide and having women fighting for the same opportunities that men had throughout their lives, new narratives of women’s adventures in the western started to get public attention. More women were being given heroic roles, just as Mark Wildermuth noticed in Feminism and the Western in Film and Television (2018), pointing out several female characters that have appeared in movies and television series, particularly when the myths surrounding the West have been criticized and new perspectives and narratives are coming to the fore, different from the male perspective, as Campbell noticed: Postcolonial theory, the impact of the civil rights movement and feminism can be seen in the gradual shift towards the inclusion of marginalized voices in New West cultural representation. (…). It is hybrid ‘in-between’ space (…). This, I would argue, is the multicultural space of the New West, a complex mixing of cultures in phases of tradition, agitation, negotiation, and hybridity. (The Cultures of the American New West 104) 62 Subsequently, Wynonna Earp, as a weird western television series embodies what several authors have argued about the West needing to change and revision, since the female hero in this TV adaptation disturbs and negotiates with the past, present and future of the narratives told in the West. The female hero has some traditional or classical traits seen in other western narratives, and at the same time she has a new code of behavior that puts her in a grey (‘hybrid’) area between the classic western hero and the non-traditional western hero. Therefore, the analysis of this female character will be divided in two sections: a) Classic Western Traits and b) New Codes of Behavior. a) Classic Western Traits The first trait that should be mentioned because it is present throughout the four seasons of Wynonna Earp is the western’s predisposition for violence. It is known that the western genre is inherently violent, and that the hero’s use of violence and killing other villainous characters is typically justified. Richard Slotkin when analyzing the myth that surrounds the West and violence, argues that: What is distinctively “American” is not necessarily the amount or kind of violence that characterizes our history but the mythic significance we have assigned to the kinds of violence we have actually experienced, the forms of symbolic violence we imagine or invent, and the political uses to which we put that symbolism. (13) Thus, violence and myth have a big influence on the creation of narratives and when certain stories are linked with violence, they gain new meanings and symbolism. The same happens in the town of Purgatory, because the environment surrounding the female hero and the other characters is already violent and calls for more violence in response to the evil that lurks in Purgatory. In the first episode of season one entitled “Purgatory”, the spectator learns that there had been several murders in the town before Wynonna arrived, in which some of them are mentioned − four young girls and Wynonna’s uncle − through a conversation between Xavier Dolls and Sheriff Randy Nedley: DOLLS. “Spoken like a man who finds a lot of dead girls. And you've had three of 'em in the past six months. So, you find..."Kiersten's" head yet?” NEDLEY. “Which agency did you say you were from?” DOLLS. “See those skid marks? This isn't the kill site.” (…) 63 DOLLS. “And these lacerations... - defensive wounds?” NEDLEY. “Bite marks... from scavengers. We have an overpopulation of coyotes this summer. Winter will thin out the pack. You plan to be here that long, Mr...?” Furthermore, these type of “incidents” are common for the people who chose to live in Purgatory, and they know that they were much more than just accidents or animal attacks; they knew that there was something supernatural lurking in town. The town already had its accounts of criminality and violence without the Earp heir being there. When she finally arrives, violence escalated even more with the revenants wanting to kill her. The adaptation of Wynonna Earp to television dramatized the female character’s background story. In the comic series because the female hero was the descendant of Wyatt Earp having grown up hearing stories about him and there was no mention about her parents. In the TV series the heroine’s background is traumatizing when it is revealed she came from a broken home with an alcoholic father who used to beat her mother, and a mother who ran away when Wynonna was young. Moreover, there is a palpable increase of trauma and violence in the television adaptation, not only because of the change in mediums, but also because the narrative acquired a much darker perspective. If the western space is violent, so is Wynonna’s past and present. The audience learns that before coming to Purgatory she had been in a mental institute and that afterwards she became part of a criminal group called the ‘Banditos,’ as well as being wanted for questioning in a criminal case. Furthermore, Wynonna Earp’s job is to eliminate revenants with a shot in the forehead. Her job is both killing and protecting, and she acknowledges that she is good at being a killer throughout the four seasons. In episode thirteen of Season One “I Walk the Line,” after killing her sister, the female hero says: “But first, I'm gonna kill every single revenant from the Rockies to the big city. And then I'm gonna stop that thing from getting in here;”. Again, in episode twelve of Season Three “War Paint” when she is trying to defeat Clootie and has associated with the other revenants who also had been cursed, she admits: WYNONNA. “Anybody wanna go break a goddamn curse? I f*cking loved hunting and killing you all. From the moment I first fired Peacemaker... really fired it... and sent my first Revenant back to hell, Malcolm...” (…) “I knew it was what I was meant to do. Even if it was supposed to be someone else... my sister, Willa... the Earp heir was gonna be me. I've never said it out loud to anyone before: The only thing I've ever been any good at is killing. But 64 I'm willing to give it up. I am willing to go back to being... not much of anything.” Likewise, in episode six “Holy War Part Two” of Season Four, when she is trying to get her gun back, she states: WYNONNA. “The curse may be over, but you know what, our enemies won’t stop coming just because we want them to. And I know you want what I want: to keep kicking evil ass. Enough bullshit. I do what needs to be done ‘cause I’m a hero, and you know what, sometimes, that makes me a killer.” It seems clear the female hero had a predisposition for violence all her life even when she was not actively hunting revenants in her hometown. Moreover, her use of violence is usually justified, since most of the revenants she killed had murdered other people in their previous lives. The use of violence is done in the name of justice and to finish a curse that was affecting not only the Earps, but also the people living in Purgatory. The use of violence by the female hero is justified for the spectator since morality and justice are on the heroine’s side. Tompkins questioned the need to retell this kind of violent narratives over and over again. Even though she could not arrive at an exact answer, when referring to the use of violence she argues that The entire purpose of the pattern I’ve described is to get the audience to the point where it can’t wait till the hero lets loose with six-shooters. (…), there’s a tremendous feeling of relief at the moment of discharge (…). Vengeance, by the time it arrives, feels biologically necessary. (228) While also adding that The story can climax, and desire be sated, only if the moral applause meter reads way off the scale in the hero’s favor. What justifies his violence is that he is in the right, (…) and can now be permitted to do things which a short while ago only the villains did. (…) The hero is so right (that is, so wronged) that he can kill with impunity. And we are with him one hundred percent. The feeling of supreme righteousness (…) is delicious and hardly to be distinguished from murderousness. (229) Earp’s heir in Wynonna Earp is in the same kind of situation and the spectator is on her side, feeling that justice was served, and that the female hero did what was right. Wynonna stands apart from the villains because she does not kill people without thinking or without a higher reason, also the demons she killed had been criminals and continued 65 to be in their new lives. As already mentioned, there were some revenants who were not truly evil and had just committed petty crimes and found themselves cursed, particularly in Season one. In episode five “Digging Up Bones” she shot one revenant, Ambrose, who she saw was not a bad person, just had made some bad choices. She offered to let him go. This happens before Clootie was resurrected and the curse could be broken if she killed him. For her to break the curse without killing Clootie, she needed to kill the seventyseven revenants Wyatt Earp had killed in his lifetime. After she offered to let Ambrose go, he refused and asked her to shoot him, which she did: WYNONNA. “I think it's time. You sure you're OK with this?” AMBROSE. “It was always gonna end this way. I don't want to live, waiting for either of us to be shot down by the heir. That's no life.” WYNONNA. “So you've made your peace?” AMBROSE. “You're gonna be the one to break this curse, Wynonna. For all of us. And I thank you.” WYNONNA. “I'm gonna count to three. OK? One.” The female hero’s use of violence can be compared to other western heroes, because she has the same traits in her character as cowboys such as the Virginian and Shane, mentioned in Chapter One. Wynonna Earp as a hero and protector of Purgatory, the fictional western space, has on her side justice and the right morals to justify the pulling of the trigger and killing another person. Slotkin, when referring to violence, also adds: When history is translated into myth, the complexities of social and historical experiences are simplified and compressed into the action of representative individuals or “heroes”. The narrative of the hero’s action exemplifies and tests the political and/or moral validity of a particular approach to the use of human powers in the material world. The hero’s inner life — his or her code of values, moral or psychic ambivalence, mixtures of motive — reduces to personal motive the complex and contradictory mixture of ideological imperatives (…). The heroes of myth embody something like the full range of ideological contradictions around which the life of the culture revolves (…). (13-14) Wynonna Earp exemplifies Slotkin’s argument, since in this western narrative, she represents and experiments with moral issues. Her morality and notion of justice − code of values − and her adventures in the western space function as a test of possible resolutions to issues American culture has problems solving. Another trait directly connected with the use of violence is her responsibility to the people of Purgatory. Since she became a Black’s Division Deputy to control the supernatural occurrences in the Ghost River Triangle, she also became the hero of the 66 town, just like other male heroes in the western. Just as some cowboys in the western who had nothing to do with violence directly, being homesteaders and farmers, but were ‘forced’ into violence, in Wynonna’s case she never wanted to be linked with the role of the hero particularly in Purgatory, the town whose people saw her as a rebellious nonsense and supposedly mentally unstable Earp who had gotten her father killed. At the start of Season One, she is not received by the townspeople with open arms. Instead the spectator learns that because of what happened to her family she grew up acting out, causing problems and being a rebellious teenager. The viewer also learns that she was wronged by a lot of people in town who had always suspected that there was more to the murders and accidents, but chose to see them and the Earps as a plague and one of the causes for the troubles brewing in town. In episode thirteen “I Walk the Line” of Season One, after a party gone wrong and when many were dying of a poison put in the drinks by the villain Bobo Del Rey, the townspeople were told that if they got him the Earp heir dead or alive, he would give them the antidote. What followed was a hunt for the heir by the very same people Wynonna was trying to save. Sheriff Nedley was the one who convinced people in town to let her go, by stating that although she had had negative actions, she was the only one who could end the supernatural occurrences, and save them: NEDLEY. “This is quite the pickle you got yourself into, Wynonna.” WYNONNA. “You know me.” NEDLEY. “You have been a plague on this town... destroyed a lot of lives... and you were a royal pain in my ass. She's also the only shot we got at getting out of this mess. I know you're sick. I know that you're scared. So am I. But that man out there. Bobo Del Rey and his ilk. They're not like us. They've never been like us. If we do this... I mean, if we turn into the angry mob of ignorant villagers that he thinks we are ... if we kill one of our own — and make no mistake, Wynonna is what we made her — ... if we do that, then well, yeah, we'll be just like them.” [indistinct chatter] “Hell, we'll be worse because we had a choice.” (…) NEDLEY. “No one's gonna die, Moira. Wynonna's not gonna let that happen. Right? Go. Fix this.” The female hero was the black sheep in town, never accepted for who she was and never understood for the trauma of killing her father and seeing her older sister kidnapped without being able to help her. The townspeople never saw beyond the rebellious acts, but in the end, she still helped them and became the Earp heir while carrying all the killing and trauma that came from shooting people and loosing friends and family because of the curse. Two examples that support this can be seen in Season One. First, in episode three 73 has made it so far because of her values, morality and because she knows that the world is not black and white. While she tried to stop violence and death as it was shown in Season Four the people around her reminded her that unity might be a solution. Another classic trait of the western problematized in the television show is the rejection of Christianity, especially shown in Seasons Three and Four because of the existence of a portal in the Ghost River Triangle to the Garden of Eden, where the snake Clootie wanted to enter. Jane Tompkins argues that if the western focuses so much on death and violence it is because it denies Christianity (31), adding that the rejection of Christianity is in part related to the fact that the church and the domestic sphere had been a woman’s space (44). Tompkins also adds that For most of the nineteenth century the two places women could call their own in the social structure were the church and the home. The Western contains neither. It is set in a period and in an environment where few women are to be found and where conditions are the worst possible for their acquiring any social power: a technology and a code of justice both of which required physical strength in order to survive. (…), I think it is no accident that men gravitated in imagination toward a womanless milieu (…), and a social setting that branded most features of civilized existence as feminine and corrupt, banishing them in favor of the three main targets of women’s reform: whiskey, gambling, and prostitution. (44) Tompkins is right, because if movies and television shows starring female heroes are compared to the number of male heroes starring in the western genre, it is clear the numbers are much reduced. However, change has been happening, since there are female representations of women in the western that demonstrate women existed in the western, and Mark Wildermuth referred them in his book, stating that even though the number of female characters are fewer than male characters and that, consequently, male heroes are predominant in the western genre, female heroes and their narratives should not be so easily dismissed, since many of them prove that change is coming and that women definitely should have space for their stories to be told (2). Wildermuth focused on ‘professional women’ who in his definition could be muleskinners and gunslingers (8). In Wynonna Earp and keeping in mind Tompkins’ words about the rejection of Christianity, in the television show there are two major plotlines shown in Season Three and at the beginning of Season Four which display a clear rejection of what Christianity stands for. In Season Three, episode three “Colder Weather” the female hero has to deal with the death of one of the main characters, Xavier Dolls, who sacrificed himself to save them all. While she is grieving and must deal with his funeral, there are some dialogues 74 that show that she and the people around her reject Christianity and have a much deeper connection with nature and the land, using other ways of paying respect to those who are gone: WYNONNA. “This one's quite a kick in the box.” HOLLIDAY. “Yes, ma'am.” WYNONNA. “I still don't understand what happened to him out there on that ledge.” HOLLIDAY. “We were dying, Wynonna, and Dolls, he saved us.” (…). “Sometimes you get and sometimes you get got. Back in my day...” WYNONNA. “Oh, God, haven't I suffered enough?” HOLLIDAY. “Back in my day, gunslingers that died with their boots on they were buried at Boot Hill. Of course, it was a flagrant popularity contest. Cactus Pete, he got in.” (…) “But the ritual of it... setting a man's horse loose to run. Placing a fine bottle of whiskey on his grave...” WYNONNA. “That sounds kinda nice.” From the conversation between Holliday and the female hero it can be seen that when death was involved, just like in other westerns, in Wynonna Earp the characters had a much bigger connection with the customs of the land than with the classic rituals of Death used by many religions. They had their own way of remembering and laying their friends to rest. Additionally, in Season Four, episode two “Friends in Low Places”, when Wynonna’s sister, Waverly, was trapped in the Garden of Eden, being the prisoner of a villainous Eve, there is the following dialogue: EVE. “God... hasn't been here for a long, long time. Yup. He hit it, then he quit it. Left humanity on read.” WAVERLY. “Maybe we should just, like, chill on the God talk.” EVE. “And what kind of batshit playground experiment for creation was this?” At the end of this episode, the female hero was able to save Waverly from the Garden, but not without consequences: it was imperative that an angel stayed behind to keep watch over the prison. However, Waverly (part angel) did not stay to guard the prison, and an evil Eve was freed in the process: WAVERLY. “The guardians of the garden do not get to leave.” WYNONNA. “You are not just the guardian. You are an Earp.” (…) WYNONNA. “The curse is over, Waves, it's time to start living for ourselves.” WAVERLY. “Wynonna... Help.” WYNONNA. “All this destiny, curse, fate, heirs of anything bullshit? It's cancelled.” 75 Thus, from the two examples mentioned before, besides the female hero and her friends having their own rules about grieving and funerals, and even if they believed that Hell existed, they always found a way to deviate from the destined path that other supernaturals had seen or laid down for the Earps. This can be seen in Season Four when Wynonna was to let Waverly go, and she did not, unleashing evil in the process. The female hero prefers to believe in their reality and that they can choose, and if that reality is questioned, she fights to keep it. Related to this, Tompkins argues that “(…) the genre rejects organized religion (…) embracing matter, physical facts, and physical force as ultimately real (…). The Western needs a setting, and a set of beliefs, where strength counts more than prayer” (34). In Wynonna Earp, the connection to the land in Purgatory is much more symbolic and has much more weight in the female hero’s life than religion does. The land, which is a topic not immediately discernible in the western and in this television series, has deep symbolism and it contains everything the female hero cares about. Tompkins has also taken this issue into consideration by arguing that The interaction between hero and landscape lies at the genre’s center, overshadowed in the popular image of the Western by gunfights and chases, but no less essential to the experience Westerns provide. In the end, the land is everything to the hero; it is both the destination and the way. He courts it, struggles with it, defies it, conquers it, and lies down with it at night. (81) Therefore, the land holds meaning for the hero in the western, and even if violence and death had a bigger display than the symbolism of the land, the western landscape is where the heroes went through having adventures and facing death. It is the western land that holds the heroes’ memories and their lives. Ultimately, as Neil Campbell argues in The Cultures of the American New West the relationship with the land in the western is a rather complicated one: Applied to the West, this approach to the lived experience of space and the relations between humanity and land discourages reductionism and enables landscape to be ‘read’ as a complex, multilayered construction mixing memory and desire, myth and reality, but always revealing ideology. (42) 76 b) New Codes of Behavior In addition to the analyzed issues and subjects common to westerns, there are other traits and subjects which challenge the old ways of the West. Among them, the challenging of ideas of masculinity and the myth that surrounds the western, issues that would be expected in a 21st century western. Neil Campbell in Post-Westerns Cinema, Region, West refers to an important concept when discussing contemporary westerns, that of “phantom architecture” (2). This is a western space occupied with buildings and relics of the western past and, at the same time, buildings connected to the present. In Wynonna Earp, the surrounding space is filled with buildings and items that relate both to the western past – the Earp homestead and Shorty’s saloon – and the western present – the sheriff’s office and the high school building. Related to the changes in the western space, lack of horses in this western should be mentioned. It is true that this television adaptation is a weird western, involving various elements that at first seem disconnected from each other. However, the western is still at the show’s center, and in Wynonna Earp, horses are barely ever seen. Instead, there is the female hero’s love for motorcycles, thus replacing and modernizing old tropes of the western’s past, something that was not new. 12 Horses have always been part of the western genre, even if they were not given much attention, besides being the ride of the main hero as well as other characters. The use of horses in the western relates to a connection with nature and the landscape, since the characters ride living animals to get through the landscape. Tompkins referred to horses arguing that in the western “…[m]ore than any other single element in the genre, they symbolize the desire to recuperate some lost connection to life” (94), but that normally they are not given much attention by critics (90). In Wynonna Earp, the heroine is never seen riding a horse, but a motorcycle left to her by her uncle. It is interesting to notice the comparison made by Doc Holliday when Wynonna first saw the bike in episode six “Constant Cravings” of Season One: WYNONNA. “1200 stage one Screaming Eagle!” (…) WAVERLY. “No, Curtis's will stipulated that the bike goes to Wynonna.” (…) WYNONNA. “I knew we were soulmates. Ohhh!”. (Wynonna purring). “What am I going to name this sexy beast? Doc!” 12 The change and modernization of an old and classic trait of the western has been seen in films like Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man (1991) and Ghost Rider (2007). 77 DOC. “Never seen a cowgirl look more at home in the saddle.” Wynonna’s love for motorcycles instead of horses demonstrates that the western has been changing, and that it has adapted to modern times, thus applying Campbell’s phantom architecture. There is another subject in Wynonna Earp that clashes with the classic western cowboy. Wynonna Earp has grown up as a ‘lone wolf’, but it is when she decides to stay in town that the spectator truly sees the heroic potential. She is still a loner, capable of taking care of herself, and she is seen as a determined and strong individual to be around. She is the character in the series that carries around the burden of killing and always having to be on alert if she does not want to get killed. However, she is also the most broken and traumatized character of the television series. No other character is as emotionally unstable and traumatized as the female hero shows to be. Throughout the four seasons the spectator watches the female hero try to deal with her past, and at the same time deal with the losses brought on by her present responsibilities as the Earp heir: Willa’s, Shorty’s and Doll’s deaths. Adding to this is the weight of killing and the consequent doubts about the cost of pulling the trigger which has already been mentioned before. All these issues are dealt with using toxic and problematic ways, usually involving alcohol and sex. Wynonna Earp is a broken hero who has very different behaviors to the classic western hero whom the spectator more often than not sees as perfect even if emotionally closed off. While the cowboy was often the embodiment of morality, justice and many of the female characters were devoted to being mothers and taking care of the house, Wynonna Earp demonstrates that a different kind of hero might exist in the western, a hero who is humanly flawed like all humanity. She stands in a grey area between the old western hero and the rise of a new hero with a new code of behavior. The classic western hero is in general emotionally closed off, never opens up about how he feels and subsequently does not show how truly affected he is by the death and loss of friends and family. Wynonna is the opposite because even when she does not speak, she drowns herself in alcohol and it is clearly seen how things affect her. There are two examples that demonstrate this. In Season One, episode nine “Bury Me with My Guns On” the spectator watches her drown herself in alcohol, after she was 78 kidnapped by the seventh demon who was involved in the kidnapping of her older sister Willa. She finally kills the seventh and last demon, and after the spectator sees her drinking a lot, dance with every man in Shorty’s saloon, while she had flashbacks of the demon who had almost cut her open. The dialogue between Wynonna and Holliday exemplifies the dilemma: HOLLIDAY. “The thing about an Earp, they are survivors to the core. Quick to recover, tenacious, committed to their cause.” WYNONNA. “Hey! Hey, stranger guy!” HOLLIDAY. “The thing about this Earp is she is all these things, with demons for miles.” WYNONNA. “Ah! I'm free. I'm good.” (…) WYNONNA. “I thought I'd feel different. I thought I'd look different.” HOLLIDAY. “You near perished at the hands of a maniac.” WYNONNA. “I'm not talking about that. The seven murderous spawns of Hell that attacked the homestead and killed Willa are dead.” HOLLIDAY. “Well, you said you'd get them, and you got 'em.” WYNONNA. “But this spring, coiled so tight in me? It's just as tight, Doc. “ HOLLIDAY. From my experience and I've got some you release the rage, you might find there's nothing left. WYNONNA. “Worst fortune-cookie advice ever. I hate this stupid curse. What did Wyatt do to mess us all up so bad?” HOLLIDAY. “He always aimed to be a good man. It might be it didn't take. In the end, it's men like me who often survive.” WYNONNA. “Then maybe it's better to be bad.” Alcohol is used to escape what she had been through and what she felt afterwards and still the anguish remains. In Season four, episode seven “Love’s All Over” the viewer can, once again, see the female hero following a path of self-destruction. This time because she and Doc Holliday (her love interest) could not agree on the killing of Holt Clayborn, she drowned herself in alcohol and has sex with the demon Amon, after which the following dialogue occurs: AMON. “Now there's the Earp sister I like. Hazardous, hot, half-in-the-bag.” WYNONNA. “I wasn't sure if you'd be alone.” AMON. “Demetri? He left after I let him yell some nonsense about how I have no soul.” WYNONNA. “Been there. Hated it.” AMON. “I was mostly bored. I guess I am a monster.” WYNONNA. “Who gives a fuck?” AMON. “I thought you wanted to kill me.” WYNONNA. “All I want is... to stop feeling guilty for what I am. When what I am... is necessary.” AMON. “You're a... You're a confusing woman.” 79 The guilt she feels leads her to act recklessly and, in both examples, she is shown to be humanly flawed just like other human beings. The western male hero might be drawn as almost flawless and with the right values, placing him in a higher esteem than other characters in the West to the spectator, but it is with heroes like Wynonna Earp that western narratives create more space for a new type of hero that is more accessible to the viewer. Thus, what distinguishes this female hero from the western male character is her imperfections, and as the hero in this narrative this is what attracts most spectators to this western, since she is special and still very human at her core. 13 Her flaws, trauma, and her doubts about her life, make her look at life in Purgatory and the fight against evil as not being black and white. While in most western narratives the fight against evil and the villains is black and white, in Wynonna Earp nothing is simple: no hero is completely righteous and good, and not every villain is exclusively evil. This television adaptation created a narrative which shows how complex and complicated humanity is and the use of violence and death is not portrayed as black and white as it is in most westerns. Furthermore, there is another trait that sets aside this female hero from other westerns which is the team that backs her up. Throughout the four seasons the female hero matured and opened up to a group of people whom she started to see as her family. Since she had lost her family when she was young, she thought she did not deserve to be loved and to love back other people, after her father’s and sister’s deaths. However, throughout the series a group of people, which include her sister Waverly, Nicole Haught, Xavier Dolls, Doc Holliday and Jeremy Chetri, were able to get through the female hero’s loss and build a strong relationship with her. Wynonna Earp is not the first female hero (and hopefully not the last) to have a team to back her up, because the same has been seen in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Birds of Prey and even in Westworld with Maeve. What distinguishes Wynonna’s team has to do with the fact that in classic western narratives the hero is almost always the one who saves the day, leaving behind those he wishes to protect from danger. In The Virginian and Shane that was the case, since, respectively, in the former, the Virginian defeated the villain alone while his fiancée stayed in the hotel; 13 The female hero expresses more actively how she feels, but she uses alcohol as her cope mechanism which is normally used by male heroes. The choice of alcohol of the female hero, whiskey, is not considered a women’s beverage, but commonly seen being drunk by male heroes. 80 and in the latter, Shane went out alone to fight against the villains because he felt he was the only one who should do it, even if he got himself killed in the process. When western narratives follow the most traditional stories of the cowboy getting into town and saving the town from the villains, the hero almost always acts alone in the end because he has the best skills among all the men and women in town. However, as mentioned in chapter one, the western has been changing and allowing different stories to be told. One of those changes is related to the group of people that help the main hero. In Wynonna Earp the narrative always shifts toward one narrative plot: the female hero’s family and friends always have her back even when she believes that she is the only one who can save them all. Nothing can take away from the female hero that she is the only one who can save everyone from revenants and other monsters, but if it were not for her team, she would not have the success rate she has as a demon killer, and she would not get out alive from most of her missions. The existence of a team that backs up the main hero is important to discuss, since in this female narrative a new idea is proposed for westerns: that unity and cooperation are better than one hero going out alone and risking his life. Having a team as a backup might mean the difference between living another day or dying alone. The western glorifies the hero for his capacity of sacrifice so that others can live, and when the hero dies or disappears while the sun sets, the spectator sees how people live happily because of what the hero sacrificed for them. Usually the western creates a sense of peace with what the hero accomplished, but also a hint of sadness for the hero’s death/disappearance. As already mentioned, Wynonna Earp is the main hero, but she would not be the hero that she is without her team. They would all sacrifice themselves for each other. The value of the hero’s sacrifice is still respected in this television series, but this series demonstrates that death might be further away due to the people that the hero surrounds herself with. An example of this can be seen in Season Three, episode twelve “War Paint”, in which the female hero wanted to fight Clootie alone. She drugged her friends’ drinks, restrained Doc Holliday, while her sister was stuck in the stairs that led to the garden of Eden. In the end, she kills the demon but is about to die since the demon was able to sink his poison teeth into her blood system. She was prepared to die, but was saved by Doc Holliday who sucked the venom out while the following dialogue occurs: 81 WAVERLY. “No!!” WYNONNA. “Son of a Cobra Kai.” WAVERLY. “Wynonna!”. (Shouting). “Wynonna, let me outta here! Don't you dare die on me, idiot!” WYNONNA. “It's okay. You'll be fine, baby girl.” WAVERLY. “No! No!! No!!” WYNONNA. “Where've you been?” HOLLIDAY. “You left me handcuffed, and bound in a circle of holy water. Remember?” WYNONNA. “Excuses, excuses. You suck.” HOLLIDAY. “Thanks.” WYNONNA. “No, I mean you sucked out the venom. How'd I taste?” HOLLIDAY. “Heroic.” Thus, the female hero was prepared to die to defeat the demon who had terrorized Purgatory for centuries. However, as often happens, because she had a team she survived to live and fight another day. Another characteristic that enriches this western narrative is related to gender representation and sexuality. Having already analyzed the female hero’s deviant personality when she is compared to the classic male hero of the western and women, there is yet the need to talk about the female hero’s sexuality and how the television show represents a much more inclusive narrative out West. This television series shows the viewer how inclusive the western space can actually be, if only TV producers allow space for this kind of narratives to be told. Related to this subject Neil Campbell’s argument about hybridity and how the western has been allowing different stories to be told are important to be mentioned once again, because Wynonna Earp created a space where both men and women are comfortable to be who they are and open about their sexualities. Throughout the four seasons there have been recurrent characters who demonstrate how this western is diverse and inclusive: from Waverly Earp and Nicole Haught’s romantic relationship to Jeremy Chetri who is homosexual, the TV show has been relaying a message for spectators saying that it is more than okay to have different sexual orientations and that the western is a space where different stories can be told openly, despite its known limitation to address and show directly other sexual orientations besides heterosexuality. As already mentioned, the western genre is majorly male and heterosexual, constraining other sexual orientations and genders on screen and paper. The relationships that appear more on screen are heterosexual, but it can be argued that underneath the 82 violence and fights between men there is a propensity for homoeroticism. Tompkins when referring to women in the western argued that sometimes Female “screen” characters, who are really extensions of the men they are paired with, perform this alibi function all the time, masking the fact that what the men are really interested in is one another. Western novels and movies tell stories that stem from the positions men occupy in the social structure, and tell them from the man’s point of view, but they concentrate on male-male relationships. (40) Hence, it is not new that the western masks homosexuality behind female characters particularly in narrative plots in which the two male characters spend most of their time with each other and become very familiar, and even intimate with each other. From classic western movies like The Big Sky (1952) to western television shows like The Lone Ranger (1949), it can be seen that the western’s major focus was on male relationships, hinting sometimes from the way the male characters cared for each other that there was much more to their relationships than what was ever going to be shown to the spectators. One western that had a lot of attention and criticism was Brokeback Mountain (2005) which clearly showed and focused on a homosexual relationship between the two male characters. Therefore, the western has had secondary meanings behind some of the relationships between male characters, and with approaches such as Brokeback Mountain, the genre has become more open to address romantic relationships between men and even women. Wynonna Earp is proof of that and nowadays is admired by the LGBTQIA+ community because of the way it addresses relationships and sexual orientation. Waverly and Nicole’s relationship since Season One has been one of the most valued representations of a homosexual relationship on television. Emily Andras who had been previously involved in Lost Girl, which tells the story of a bisexual succubus, talked about the queerness in Wynonna Earp during an interview to the Advocate, “Wynonna Earp's Creator and Stars on Its Authentic Queer Legacy”: I was very immersed in queer culture and queer storytelling. Particularly insofar as delivering that through genre, and [I] realized there was just a huge amount of genre fans who identify as LGBTQIA and were not being served by genre stories. When I was given Beau Smith’s comic book Wynonna Earp, a couple things really appealed to me…. With this one, I really did get goosebumps, because it had a really strong female character (…). She was a descendant of 89 who has her own faults and imperfections can be a hero in westerns and other genres. But, even if this is what the television show stands for and is, consequently, followed by fans because of it, it can also be easily criticized when, unnecessarily, the female hero is undermined by taking her clothes off on camera or when the camera focuses excessively on her butt. Jeffrey Brown when discussing Wonder Woman mentioned the oversexualization of female heroes and what he argued can also be applied to Wynonna Earp. He stated that many of the ideas that surround Wonder Woman clash with each other because she is at the same time sexualized by a male audience and seen as a feminist symbol by a female audience; consequently, as these ideas clash (too sexualized vs female symbol) it might explain why the action hero is complex: progressive and interesting yet still seen as a sexual object by some (235). The same happens to this female hero because she is at the same time sexualized and yet a strong, powerful woman and hero who is able to stand on her own in a predominantly masculine world and stand out as a woman who is as powerful and competent as other male heroes. Even though there is a female producer behind the television adaptation of Wynonna Earp, there is still a need to get more audiences, and one needs to remember that this is still a predominantly male business. In addition, it is also important to analyze the readaptation of this female hero’s narrative from television to comics. 3.2. Readaptation of Wynonna Earp from Showing to Telling Reminding Linda Hutcheon and Siobhan O’Flynn on the process of adaptation across different genres and mediums, the process of readapting a narrative to another genre is complex since the readaptation needs to keep itself true to the previous narrative and characters. The process of shifting across genres in the case of Wynonna Earp implicated that the new comic book series had to be inserted in the narrative told in the television show. Subsequently, based on the new narrative told in the television show created by Emily Andras, four comic book series were published by IDW Publishing and Beau Smith following faithfully the narrative of the television series – Wynonna Earp: Homecoming 90 (2016), Wynonna Earp: Legends (2017), Wynonna Earp: Season Zero (2018) and Wynonna Earp: Bad Day at Black Rock (2019). The narratives of the four comic book series follow the changes brought on by Andras in the television show, and even if the genre is different, spectators from the TV show can easily follow the comics of this female hero. The comics were published after the television show aired and based on the narrative told by it, thus there are some subjects that should be highlighted: 1the female hero’s sexualization and how her clothes continue to connect her to the West as a hero; 2value of unity over violence; and 3the influence of Wyatt Earp’s ghost over the female hero. In the four comic series of this female hero, the reader follows adventures that are related to the main plotline showed in the television series, but there are slight changes especially in the addition of two characters – Valdez and Smitty – who, respectively, in the television show appear as a teenager and the latter does not appear at all. The first aspect relates to the female hero’s sexualization in the comics and how her clothes hold symbolism as a hero in the western. Like many other female characters in comics, such as Wonder Woman, the figure of Wynonna is still sexualized in these comics just like in the television show. Still, in the comics published after the show she is less sexualized than in the television show and in the previous comic series discussed in Chapter Two. Even if the female hero is less sexualized, one of the main concerns even nowadays is that female heroes have to be attractive, so that they can draw audiences to watch the shows and read the comics. Just like Wonder Woman¸ Wynonna Earp is attractive and thus attracts audiences while, at the same time, she is a heroine who advocates for women saying that they can be strong and the heroines in a male dominated medium. Furthermore, related to this subject are her clothes that connect her to the West as the example shown in Fig. 6: 91 Fig. 6. Wynonna Earp: Season Zero #3 (n. p), 2018. This example shows that the female hero is being sexualized, but in a much-reduced way, even if she was drawn with exposed skin and with an attractive physical figure. However, it does not compromise her as a hero since she still stands as a strong and brave individual while fighting criminals. This image exemplifies the farthest point that this female hero’s sexualization went in all the four comic series published after the creation of the television show. Moreover, this image shows how her clothes symbolically connect her to the Earp lineage and with the western: the boots, the black leather jacket (which in the four comics was drawn with fringes around the arms), and especially the orange ‘wild rag’ or scarf the female hero carries around her neck which symbolically connects her to the West. Thus, she is again a mixture of sexualization and empowerment. Similarly, like in the television show, in the comics the female hero is in full control of herself and is sexually free. As a result, the choice of clothing reflects that control over her sexuality and her body. Then, even if because of audiences, female heroes tend to be sexualized to attract more spectators and readers, Wynonna Earp still stands strong and powerful as a woman and hero of the western in these comics. The female hero’s sexualization does not undermine and reduce her power and strength as a hero, it makes Wynonna Earp stronger because she is part of the ongoing battle of female heroes 92 who might be sexualized, but are shown owning their identities, sexuality, and power in masculine dominated areas like the western genre. It is through heroes like this one that the western questions itself on the way it has been representing women throughout time and space. Furthermore, there is a second characteristic present in these four comics that should be mentioned: the value of unity and family over the idea of the lonesome hero of the western. The readaptation to the comic series kept highlighting this subject which can be especially seen when the female hero continues to surround herself in missions with a team of people whom she calls family. An example of this can be seen in Figure 7 in which the team and the female hero had to take back control of a prison from which the most dangerous supernatural felons managed to free themselves: Fig. 7. Wynonna Earp: Bad Day at Black Rock, (n.p), 2019. 93 This image, just like in the television series, shows the female hero with a team of people who help her succeed in her missions. The idea of showing in the comics a western hero surrounded by a team is important and is linked with the new approach the western has been having. Normally, the heroes of the West fight their enemies alone and at their own personal cost, putting their lives on the line. In westerns like Wynonna Earp a new idea has been proposed that questions the myth and behavior of the classic western hero: unity and friendship between people who fight together to achieve a common goal and to battle a common enemy, should be an idea westerns should apply more in its narratives. As Wildermuth has argued when he talked about violence and unity (155), western TV shows, comics, movies and other formats which address the consequences of the use of violence and suggest that unity and friendship might be answers to it, have important messages to transmit to people and help revise the myth that surrounds the western. As mentioned before, it is unity and friendship between the female hero and others that is essential to the hero’s survival throughout her life. The possibility of death for the female hero and her team always hangs in the air even in the comics, but because of their friendship and unity, death might be delayed because of the trust that they have in each other. Additionally, there is one last trait that should be considered in what concerns the comics published after the TV series, and that is the noticeable bigger influence in the comics of Wyatt Earp’s ghost over the female hero. Because of the process of readapting the narrative from showing to telling, one of the perks of it is how easy it is to create stories in which people who have died can appear easily as if they were alive. In television the same could have been done, but the figure of Wyatt Earp was never addressed in such a way. In the comics, Wyatt Earp appears as a ghost in the first comic series Wynonna Earp: Homecoming, published alongside the first television season, to help the female hero fight supernatural villains who had been enemies of the Earp family. It is important to refer again to Wyatt Earp’s ghost because he continues to be a shadow over this female hero, like he was in the television series. In the TV show even if he would always be present when anyone talked about the Earp hero, the female hero still made her own way through her missions with her team as backup. Therefore, even though she would always be linked with Wyatt Earp, the comics, like the television series, demonstrate that the female hero’s heritage does not justify her success as an agent and hero, since it is shown that Wynonna Earp is who she is because of the family she chose, her team. In the comics, 94 time and time again, the reader can see that it was the people around her, who were not related to her, that molded who she would become as a hero. The female hero might carry Peacemaker and be connected to Wyatt Earp, but she is a hero because of her team which helps her in missions, since she overcame adversities in her life that could change someone’s path drastically. Thus, after analyzing the female hero’s television series and comics, it can be said that even though there are flaws to them, it is with western narratives like these ones that the western genre will continue its revision, allowing it to change and tell stories about women as heroes. They might open more space for other female heroes to appear, passing on the message that women, like men, can be heroic. They just had to be given narratives in which they had freedom to play roles different from the detrimental and subservient characters given to women in other westerns. 95 Conclusion: The Persistence of Female Heroes in the Western Throughout the 20th century until today, female heroes have been successful and well received in films and television adaptations, but most of all in comics. Nonetheless, even if they are successful, female heroes, such as Wonder Woman and Annie Oakley, mentioned during the course of this analysis, have always been associated and approached as characters with a double standard. They are shown as feminist role models for girls and adult women, while being undermined by their sexual appeal and attractiveness which was boosted by the way their bodies were drawn, so that they would reach more male audiences. Throughout the years, women have looked up at female heroes in pursuit of role models and answers on how they should look and behave in society, and often times the answers they get from what they see female heroes do and wear, makes them wonder about how independent female heroes are, posing questions such as: how far have female heroes gone to deconstruct and undermine stereotypical images created by a dominant masculine culture. Answers to questions like this one are difficult and complex to be given, since today female heroes still embody this double standard because mediums such as comics, television and cinema are still male dominated areas, and this fact transpires to most adaptations of female heroes in need of attracting audiences. An interesting and complex result was reached by Nickie Phillips and Staci Strobl when they surveyed readers of comics about what type of comics they read and what type of heroes they were looking for. Their findings were focused on one media, but ultimately, they show the general picture of what other diverse heroes stand for nowadays: While the past decade or so has opened up possibilities for heroes of difference, there remains a tendency for comic book characters’ race and sexual orientation to reflect those of their creators (…). As it stands, the industry lags behind in providing fully dimensional heroes of diversity. Until that happens, the question of whether gay, black, or female heroes are “believable” or “relatable” will continue to be posed. Alternatively, the lack of diversity could make these books more comfortable for readers who remain in privileged positions within white hegemony and patriarchy. (…). In larger contexts, such as Comic Cons, men frequently outnumber women. At one point in the review of (…) discussion boards and podcasts, (…) male fans might be more socially comfortable around 96 hypothetical aliens and zombies than around females, particularly “strong” females. (242) Heroes that stand out as different from the common heterosexual normative male hero, either because of the color of their skin, sexual orientation or gender are much more susceptible to criticism because they look and act different from those typical heroes. Even if many readers look for characters that are similar to them, the fact stands that the industry continues to focus on male, white heterosexual characters over other more complex and diverse characters. The western genre, which normally always gave more spotlight to male heterosexual heroes and overlooked other heroes such as women, has been revising itself by giving more focus to other stories of heroism and perspectives in the West. Hence, many more female heroes have been appearing in various genres and mediums advocating for women to have the same representation and equal opportunities that men have always been given. In the western, characters such as Dolores Abernathy, Maeve Millay, Carasynthia Dune and Wynonna Earp have helped to make way for other women. Likewise, paths and spaces that have been only thoroughly explored by men in the western are now being explored by female heroes who turned the western genre into a more complex and open space to tell other narratives. There is still a long way to go, especially when it comes to other stories that have been left out on purpose from the metanarrative being told, like perspectives and stories of Native Americans. The focus of this analysis were female heroes, and primarily on the various adaptations of Wynonna Earp, since she is a prime example of a successful subversion over a dominated masculine space. She stands as the hero of the community and enforces the idea that women can be whatever they want to be. In Wynonna Earp, women are never tied down to a man. They can be heroic, independent and, ultimately, the narrative of the female hero and other side characters in this imagined western space suggests that the tide is slowly turning, making way for more women to appear in the western as heroes. The present study of Wynonna Earp showed that the television show was one of the few in which spectators could watch openly what the West could be like for female heroes. The television adaptation and comics are not without fault, but predominantly the image they give of women is close to that of male heroes and they can be the heroes of communities. 97 In “Wynonna Earp Creator Emily Andras Talks Season 5 Story Ideas and the Legacy of the Series,” Andras talked about what were her main ideas when creating the series: I’m really interested in taking traditional male spaces in a genre and just taking all the people who would normally be on the margins of the story and making them the heroes. I really love the idea of taking a Western with Wynonna Earp and making the women the gunslingers and the queer characters the heroes. They’re even the angels … I feel that’s just what I want to do going forward with my storytelling. I just don’t want to ever go back. I think that’s what brings me joy, and I think the passion of the audience shows that there’s just a huge, huge fanbase out there for familiar worlds and familiar genre told through a completely unique and different set of eyes. After the cancellation of Wynonna Earp due to lack of capital and complications because of Covid19, the future still seems bright for female heroes in the western and in other genres as Andras argues, because fandom and audiences are still looking forward for more stories of female heroes to be created and adapted to other mediums. In the western genre, Westworld has finished filming its season four, and also in other genres female heroes such as WandaVision (2021) and the recent news of the television adaptation of SheHulk (2022) have been helping to make way for more women to appear in important roles and narratives. Not only did Wynonna Earp television series help bring to the fore the issue of lack of female representation and of others across different mediums and genres, but it also helped advocate for a society in which women can see familiar faces and narratives where they are represented. Likewise, the western genre opened up new space for other diverse and complex stories to be told, broadening the range of issues and people it represents as Neil Campbell has argued: The (…) nature of New Western representation has taken up these subaltern voices to assert difference and counter the claims of a traditional, linear, and often mythic history. (2000:14) The shift in the narratives told in this genre has finally been giving voice for female heroes, Native Americans, and others to tell their own stories. The mythical western whose image has mainly been white, masculine, and heteronormative is evolving, showing spectators a more inclusive and equal space that welcomes the Other. This transformation can be slow and unappreciated by some, but it has gained visibility and as more diverse and complex heroes appear across different mediums, in the case of female heroes the more spotlight they are given, the more they can help fight for a society which 98 often still looks at women as inferior. The western genre reflects on American society and has an impact on popular culture, and nowadays the message it conveys is broader, welcoming people who did not feel like they could belong, as the house sign of the Earp homestead in the last episode of Season Four “Old Souls” announced: “Everyone Welcome.” Persistence is the key word right now in the creation of comics, films, television series led by women, since it has been persistence that has kept women in the fight for female equality and representation. 105 Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. Oxford UP, New York, 1992. 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