Subversion And Re-construction

As the most representative American film genre,the Western has produced and established plenty of classical film works and male heroic characters in its more than one-hundred-year history.Women in Westerns tended to be portrayed as the fragile and the dependent;meanwhile,specialized research on female characters in film was not available until the construction of feminist film criticism in the 1970 s.After the release of Dances with Wolves in 1990,American Westerns seem to have stepped onto the road of revival from its downturn since the late 1960 s,and have been initiating more possibilities for the development of new Westerns in the construction of characters,especially the female character that has long been overlooked.Western the genre still occupies a prominent place in American motion picture industry.Reviewing the history and development of the Western genre and the feminist film criticism,the research makes an effort to sort out the subversion and reconstruction of the female discourse in American new Westerns.The thesis conducts case studies of three representative new Westerns with good market reputation after1990,by comparing them with the traditional genre,focusing on criticism of stereotyped thematic patterns and the male-dominated discourse.Dances with Wolves is taken as a good example of subverting the binary oppositions between the White and the redskins,but its dangling female protagonist only has very limited feminine space except for her passive role in overturning the deliberate hostility towards the Indians in old Westerns.In the 2010 new version True Grit,the female narrator Mattie acts as the organizer and tough enabler of the whole revenge journey but has to stand behind men in critical moments.In The Homesman,the female protagonist Cuddy volunteers to undertake the mission of sending three mad women back to reasonable places and accomplishes the spiritual salvation of herself as well as her male partner on the trek,but she feels deeply trapped by the western physical and cultural environment at that time.Those paradoxical women representations,along with othermain thematic alterations,are the manifestations of the new Westerns' struggle in the revisionist trend and the current sociocultural reflections.