To Defy But Not To Deny

For the Western, a most masculinity-charged film genre for the American cinema, presence of women has long been bound up with an "absence" in the patriarchal discourse. After a temporary decline, a rebirth caused by films like Dances with the Wolves and Unforgiven in the1990s has initiated a fresh consideration of visualizing female images after a new fashion. Building from the study of stereotypes already perpetuated on the image of women, this thesis elaborates how the post-1990American Westerns are trying to effect a break while meanwhile confined in rigid gender scripts.After reviewing gender studies and feminist film theories which are adapted to this research, an effort is made to establish their relation to the Western by looking back into the history of the genre and its female roles. Then five Westerns are taken as a text to present how those respective female roles have been patterned to function for men’s sake, transformed to amplify their voice and restored to a gender routine. She may have her gender infirmity undermined by an Indian-race complex of the genre but to fulfill the man’s need in Dances with Wolves, she may deploy a cowboy pretence to decode the masculine myth but with the man’s critical help in The Quick and the Dead, she may speak out her "big idea" but to be realized by the man in Open Range, she may make the dichotomy between the lady and the prostitute ridiculed but by the man in Appaloosa, or she may assume the breakthrough role of "narrator" but behind the man’s action in True Grit. The paradoxical mentality in dealing with these films is representative of a cultural thinking, deriving from a masculinized frontier tone inherent in the cinema and culture but complicated by a revisionist trend in the new era.