Shepard’s plays have little to say about women outside of their role within the drama of male individuation. Yet, it is precisely in his focus on masculinity and its problems that Shepard’s plays provide acute critiques of the destructiveness of patriarchy for both men and women. Shepard’s early plays establish his interest in male individuation, especially in regard to the father/son conflict where the son’s identity is at stake. In The Rock Garden (1964), for instance, the son’s final monologue about his sexuality ends up “killing” the father who falls over, supposedly dead, at the end of the play. Again, in the 1970 play The Holy Ghostly, the son must “kill” the father, or at least the father’s spirit, in order to assert his own identity, which he has been struggling to do after changing his name and running away from the “Old West” to New York City. But sons in Shepard’s plays never escape the father’s legacy, even after the father’s death, because they inherit patriarchal ideas of violent masculinity from their fathers and have learned from them to stake their claim to manhood upon the body of a woman.
This last belief leads Shepard’s men to search for completion of themselves in the body of a woman, reflecting how in many of Shepard’s plays and films a man’s sense of his control over his world and of his own identity is usually tied to his ideas of women. In the early play Chicago (1965), we witness Stu, whose self-image has been shattered by the imminent departure of his girlfriend (aptly named Joy), retreat into a childish land of make-believe as he refuses to leave his bathtub. In Fool for Love (1983), Eddie’s inability to let Mae go – his perpetual seeking of her to return to old fantasies in contrast to her continued attempts to forge a new life for herself – demonstrates the differences between men and women’s needs for each other in Shepard’s world. Often when a man is most desperate in Shepard’s plays, he turns to a woman for solace or grounding, a move made by Lee in True West (1980) when he frantically searches for the phone number of a woman he knows just so he can hear her voice. And most certainly in A Lie of the Mind (1985), Jake’s violence toward his wife Beth is the result of his self-image being destroyed upon believing that she has “betrayed” him with another man. Jake can continue living in this play only after reestablishing his lie of the mind which is his fantasy image of her. Yet, it is precisely because women are not fantasies and thus always elude the narrow definitions allotted to them by the patriarchal ideology of Shepard’s men that these men become so desperate and pathetic.
The tensions between the ideological positioning of women and the reality of women’s lives in Shepard’s work reflect that women clearly mean more than patriarchy insists they should mean. They are not fully captured or contained by the male-defined roles of sexual object or of mother (their main roles in Shepard’s plays as in patriarchal society), and thus the male identity that insists on this narrow definition of women as being necessary for its own self-image is certain to be in continued peril. Shepard’s plays end up portraying the conflict between the fantasy of patriarchal ideology and the reality of women, a conflict that is clearly detrimental to those male characters who cling most to that limited ideology. The men of Shepard’s plays often end up resorting to violence in their desire to enforce the codes of this ideology. Because violence is directed toward women in Shepard’s plays by men attempting to shore up their own sense of self, Shepard’s plays tend to expose his male characters’ weaknesses more than to empower them through this violence. This move is apparent in several of his plays and films, but I will focus on three of them here, one of his most often discussed plays, A Lie of the Mind, and two films that have received relatively little critical attention, Paris, Texas (1984) and Silent Tongue (1992). In all three of these works, male identity is explored through an examination of male/female relationships that are fraught with implications about the intersection of gender, power, and language.
My reading of these works is informed by the theories of Jacques Lacan in regard to a person’s formation of identity, as posited in both Lacan’s ideas of the mirror stage of development and the Oedipus complex he set forth in his Ecrits. Lacan divides the initial moments when an infant gains its first sense of self into the pre-mirror and the mirror stage of development, both associated with the mother as the primary object of identification. An infant passes through the mirror stage of development when he first learns to recognize his image in either the literal reflection of a mirror or the reflection provided by the mother whom the infant sees as an image of self. After this experience, the child progresses through the Oedipus complex that entangles his search for identity with the father. Jonathan Scott Lee explains the Lacanian version of the Oedipus complex thus:
What Freud had understood as a struggle between instinct and the demands of civilization . . . Lacan describes as an entry into the “unconscious participation” in the background “language” making “civilized” behavior possible and intelligible. The child, in passing through the Oedipus complex, learns the language of familial relations and thereby adopts a position within the culture of his family by taking on a name, itself made intelligible by the language of kinship . . . For Lacan, successful negotiation of oedipal conflicts is quite literally a matter of learning to speak properly.1
This name by which the child comes to identify itself within the structure of culture and of language is, in a patriarchal society, the name of the father, where the father stands as “the figure of the law.”2 Ellie Ragland-Sullivan further explains how Lacan’s description of this stage as the Law of the Name-of-the-Father puns on the word “name,” which in French is “nom” and which is similar to the French word “non” or “no.” Thus the father’s name is associated with the law that restricts a child’s behavior according to social codes by providing the “no.”3 When children learn language, they enter the public code, the rules and regulations of society by which they are defined, a code that in a patriarchal society is logically connected to the law of the father. Despite this naming, however, Lacan argues that we remain incomplete, fractured, because language itself (the structure through which we learn to name ourselves) is merely a representation of what it is supposed to signify – it is the symbolic rather than the real. The name of the father does not, it seems, solve an individual’s identity crisis but in fact introduces the individual into the struggle to maintain an identity that is always eluding him or her.
Lacan’s connections between language, identity, and the gendering of roles are useful for examining Shepard’s explorations of the power dynamic between men and women in the struggle for self-knowledge and individuation. Although Shepard is, as early feminist critiques of his work pointed out, most concerned with the male psyche, his explorations of the fractures and schisms within the male psyche lead his readers to consider the pathology of patriarchal ideology.4 This ideology asserts a fantasy of control that cannot actually be maintained if one’s identity is always only symbolically represented through language, or misrecognized through an image projected onto others. Following their fathers’ modes of behavior, especially their behavior toward women, Shepard’s men search for a solid marker of their manhood as key to their identity but can never grasp it.
Due to the feminist revolution, which it wouldn’t be exaggerating to say has affected all aspects of intellectual and physical life in America, the speciousness of patriarchal stereotypes of women, of woman’s “natural” subservience and helplessness, has long been exposed, though of course the effects of these long-standing myths about women are still being fought in courts, classrooms, and business offices. What has only more recently come to be seriously examined is the fact that traditional gender stereotyping has damaged and continues to damage men by way of its myths of male behavior. A recent bestseller by psychologist William Pollack, entitled Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, that examines the troubled boys of American society, brings more fully into public consciousness the legacy of patriarchy’s destruction in the lives of boys.5 Pollack demonstrates through his research that when boys follow the traditional model of emotionally locked masculinity enforced upon them at often very young ages, they end up emotionally damaged, unable to express their emotions in productive ways. Thus, boys and the young men they grow into are more likely to participate in pathological behavior from suicide to murder, from specific physical violence toward those they know to indiscriminate violence such as grabbing a gun and shooting up their school. Acting out physically rather than relying on language is a key trait of traditional masculine behavior, ironic given that, according to Lacan, language itself is what moves us into the law of the father, into patriarchal law. The silencing of women by physical actions of men thus creates an interesting question. If we can speak only in the language of the father’s law, of patriarchy, why do proponents of male power eschew language in favor of physical action? Perhaps the answer is that that law itself also limits and silences men. Increasingly as the works of Shepard’s maturity move from exploring male–male relationships to explorations of romantic love between men and women, he explores the limits of language – where it fractures and erupts – and thus addresses many of these questions regarding the tenuous connection between language and the gendering of power.
Shepard’s use of male violence, especially toward women, is best treated in the 1985 play A Lie of the Mind. Previous discussions of gender issues in this play have often focused on the image of Beth, whose ability to speak has been damaged by her husband’s severe beating of her while in a jealous rage.6 In beating Beth, Jake tries to regain his, supposedly, lost control over his wife (who, he believes, is sleeping with another man), yet he beats her so severely he thinks he has killed her and is devastated by this loss. Although Beth survives, she suffers brain damage that results in aphasia. How Beth has been interpreted critically demonstrates the range or perhaps the evolution of feminist criticism from seeing only victimization of women at the hands of men (and Shepard’s limitations as a writer of women’s roles) to an awareness of how a character such as Beth offers complexities that actually critique male power and even elude it.
An influential early article about the play by Lynda Hart argues that by “silencing” Beth, Shepard moves the focus of the play to Jake’s plight, leaving Beth with “no objective whatsoever; she is simply an image of a destroyed woman,” and thus making her “not a real character in the play; she is a culturally constructed fantasy” who is a projection of Jake’s psyche.7 However, as accurate as this reading is for the early parts of this play, Beth is not so easily dismissed as simply a reflection of Jake’s inner turmoil. Her speech and her behavior, rather than being cowed by this treatment, are freed to a level of greater understanding of the ideas that entrap Jake, and many men, leading them to defensive behavior about their masculinity, behavior that is usually violent and ultimately self-destructive. Beth’s life and her effects on the play do not stop with the image of her beaten body in the hospital room. In fact, it is her actions and her words in Act 2, Scene 3 that provide this play with its greatest critique of male behavior.
Back at her childhood home, where her brother-in-law Frankie has come to check on her, Beth takes over control of Frankie and, in one scene, explains how she knows that men merely masquerade as being strong and in control. She understands traditional manliness as a costume or even a suit of armor that men put on to shield their actual vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Holding up her father’s shirt she tells Frankie:
Look how big a man is. So big. He scares himself. His shirt scares him. He puts his scary shirt on so it won’t scare himself. He can’t see it when it’s on him. Now he thinks it’s him. Jake was scared of shirts. You too?8
Putting on the shirt, she calls it a costume, saying,
Now I’m like a man. (Pumps her chest out, closes her fists, sticks her chin out and struts in the shirt.) Just feel like the man. Shirt brings me a man. I am a shirt man. Can you see? Like father. You see me? Like brother. (She laughs.)
(74–75)
Ultimately, Beth shows that the “power” of male gender is no more than a masquerade, just as later she plays with the masquerade of femininity when, wanting to marry Frankie, she appears in a stereotypically sexy outfit of black high heels, a tight pink skirt, a low-cut sweater, and heavy make-up, an outfit her father describes as making her look like “a roadhouse chippie” (111). This get up is clearly another costume, part of the role-playing she sees as defining gender.
Beth is not the only female character in this play whose critique of patriarchal ideology is worthy of consideration. Jane Ann Crum’s 1993 article about Lie reads the play as an exploration of feminine writing that “rejects binary opposition and challenges the power structures which result from phallogocentrism.”9 Crum reads the women of this play as offering “two diverse models of feminine revolution, two methods by which the female characters liberate themselves from submissive roles and activities and achieve ‘the landscape of the female body’” (197). These two models are embodied by two mother/daughter combinations: Lorraine and Sally who destroy their ties to the men in their life and prepare to move to the motherland of Ireland, and Meg and Beth who “resocialize the invalid men” of their lives (203). While Crum comments that “neither solution is without substantial cost” for the women,10 she seems to favor the moves made by Meg and Beth to reintegrate their men, and to “save” them, so to speak. Yet, to call the behavior of these last two women revolutionary is a bit questionable. Not only do Meg and Beth seem to see their role as necessary for the resocialization and the saving of men, but it seems that Shepard’s men most often consciously or unconsciously view “their” women that way, thus placing the women into a traditional role of helpmate for male individuation. How then does this role differ from the one that women have been expected to play by patriarchy for centuries – as the civilizing influence on men, their saving grace? The difference from this traditional role seems to lie in the self-awareness of the women, of their knowledge of their own independence and their willing choice to still be with men rather than compulsory enforcement of this behavior. Meg pointedly says to her husband Baylor when he complains of the burdens women place on him that women can and will “take care of [them]selves. We always have” (106). She further points out that men are dependent on women for their survival but don’t recognize it due to a profound lack of self-awareness: “The male one goes off by himself. Leaves. He needs something else. But he doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t really know what he needs. So he ends up dead. By himself” (105).11 Through such characters as Jake and Baylor, who clearly cannot function without the women in their lives, A Lie of the Mind shows that male identity within a patriarchal structure is more dependent on women than is female identity dependent on men. In doing so, the play ultimately presents these would-be domineering men as the weaker party in the negotiation for individuation and selfhood within gender roles. They are a burden on the whole system, although traditionally it has been expected that the burden be carried for men by women. While this burden has in the past “victimized” women, it does not end up doing so in this play. In fact, the fracturing of Beth’s language serves to uncover the precariousness of male power within the patriarchal system as we see the law of the father break down and the women escape its control, even as the men succumb to its destruction.12
While A Lie of the Mind is the most complex and rewarding of Shepard’s stage works in regard to female subjectivity, Shepard’s work is generally more concerned with the plight of men within and against patriarchy than it is with women. Yet he consistently grapples with the problem for men that their self-image is tied to their idea of women. By vividly recording the literal and psychic dead-ends of patriarchal ideology for both men and women, Shepard ends up recording the pathological nature of this ideology. While feminist theory has long talked about how women are silenced by male oppression and power, Shepard’s plays demonstrate that men are often destroyed by this oppression as well. The question thus becomes how to elude this silencing – how to escape or to speak other than the destructive law of the father. Although he does not provide solutions to this dilemma, in his two most successful screenplays Shepard has focused on this issue of language and identity from a male point of view.
In Paris, Texas, a 1984 film directed by Wim Wenders and written by Sam Shepard, the familiar issue of the legacy a son inherits from his father is explored, along with the issue of the mother/wife’s role as well. In some ways, sections of this screenplay seem almost a pre-script for A Lie of the Mind. In both scripts, the fractured family is the result of male obsession with having absolute power over a woman, and his violence toward her comes out of his unfounded suspicions of her sexual infidelity. Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), seen at the opening of the film wandering in the desert, and speechless for the first part of the film, is a self-exiled wanderer, we learn, due to his inability to maintain a reasonable relationship with his wife, Jane (Nastassja Kinski). Growing ever more obsessed with her, unable to leave her even for a few hours to work due to his constant fear that she is sleeping around on him, Travis drives Jane to leave him. After tying a cowbell around her leg at night, and still finding her trying to get away, Travis ties her to the stove one night, only to awake the next day to find her and his son gone and the house and himself in flames. His response is to wander aimlessly, so we are led to believe, for four years – absolutely lost. And in that time of wandering, his basic human markers disappear, most significantly his ability to speak.
The film opens with the image of Travis wandering into a small Texas town from the desert. Due to a card found in his pocket by the doctor who attends him, Travis’s brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) is located and arrives from Los Angeles to retrieve him. Walt, a successful businessman, has been taking care of Travis’s son Hunter (Hunter Carson) for the past four years after Hunter was left with Walt by Jane. Travis is thus reunited with his son, and it is through this reunion that he reconnects with life, starting to talk again, and to interact with the world around him. This reincarnation of Travis follows an interesting trajectory in regard to identity being created through mimicking a role. Hunter inspires in Travis a desire to communicate with others again, but Travis does not know how to interact with his son. One afternoon, while Hunter is at school, a maid finds Travis flipping through magazines. When she asks him what he is looking for, he inquires, “What does a father look like?”13 Figuring out that Travis wants to “look” like a father, she helps to costume him in the appropriate outfit by finding a suit of clothes in Walt’s closet. That afternoon, wearing the suit that transforms him into a father, he is at last successful in connecting with Hunter by walking him home from school. Although initially the two – father and son – walk on opposite sides of the street, Hunter ends up mirroring the actions that Travis makes such as walking backwards and bumping into a trash can. The entire sequence points out the way that proper costuming helps Travis to achieve his role of father, which is affirmed by Hunter accepting him as a model for his behavior. The father/son relationship becomes a mimicking or a reflection that leads, at the end of the walk, to Hunter’s acceptance of his father’s presence.
Once Travis has found his identity as a father, his mission soon becomes to locate Jane and restore her to the role of mother. He eventually finds Jane working in a peep show in Houston, a job that emphasizes the kind of sexual objectification of her that had initially caused Travis to mistreat her. In the peep show, she can never be touched by any of the men who come to observe her, and instead remains an image or an idea onto which they can place their fantasies. Travis’s purpose in coming to see Jane at the peep show, however, is different. He seeks a kind of communication more akin to that of the confessional. Placing himself in the position of a disembodied voice by speaking to Jane through the two-way mirror of the peep show that obscures him from her, Travis retells the story of his obsession as a way to do penance for his behavior, acknowledging through this retelling that he is the cause of their disrupted lives. Thus he reestablishes contact with Jane only verbally, indirectly asking for her forgiveness by his confession. At the end of this conversation, he tells her that Hunter is waiting for her at a nearby hotel, and he leaves before she can make any physical contact with him outside of the peep show. Travis, again through a mirrored window at the hotel, witnesses Jane and Hunter’s reunion before leaving. Realizing, evidently, that he would recreate the same problems if he joined them, Travis is last seen driving alone into the Texas night. Thus the film’s ending offers no resolution to the issue of a man’s successful integration into the roles of husband and father. This ending parallels the distance between men and family that Shepard’s plays have often explored as time and again he offers portraits of men who disappear into the western desert rather than live with people. Perhaps the most stunning explanation of this move is made by Lee of True West when he explains to his brother that his choice to live in the desert is the result of a personal failing, his inability to live with people: “I’m living out there ’cause I can’t make it here.”14
In contrast to Travis’s stunted relationship skills, the film offers the successful family life and career of his brother Walt. Rather like Austin of True West to Travis’s Lee, Walt seems to have integrated successfully into the role of family man, being a good husband to his wife Anne (Aurore Clement) and a good father to Hunter. Nevertheless, Walt demonstrates no qualms at giving Hunter back to Travis, even though he has been raising Hunter as a son. Walt’s seeming lack of emotional attachment to Hunter, especially when compared to that of his wife, perhaps reflects an expectation that the father-bond is simply not supposed to be as emotionally close as that of a mother. Walt, still, provides a stark contrast to the wayward Travis. Why one brother goes so terribly wrong and the other doesn’t is a question that this film never really addresses, but which a viewer can’t help but wonder, especially since we have seen this pattern elsewhere in Shepard’s work. Particularly in the context of the present discussion of the pathology of patriarchy, it is important to note how Shepard’s work will at times show women actively trying to escape the destructive legacy of patriarchal gender roles, but does not fully explore how it is that men might or do succeed in doing so. In fact, Shepard usually shows the futility of trying to escape a father’s legacy because it is part of one’s character. In an interview with Carol Rosen about this subject,15 Shepard commented, “I think character is an essential tendency that can’t be – it can be covered up, it can be messed with, it can be screwed around with, but it can’t be ultimately changed. It’s like the structure of our bones, the blood that runs through our veins” (8).
In the course of the film, Travis actually grapples with his past, and the issue of his roles and responsibilities, as well as where and how he went wrong. He tries to understand how he got where he is by thinking back to his origins – not where he grew up but where he was conceived, which he believes to be in Paris, Texas. He reminds his brother of the way their father used to say he met his wife in Paris, then he would pause before offering the clarifying bit of information, Texas. As a result of this story of where his parents fell in love, Travis comes to believe he was also conceived in Paris, Texas. His sense of connection to this town is revealed in the fact that he carries with him a picture of an empty parcel of land he bought there sometime in his past. Travis later tells his son, when the two are traveling to find Jane, about how his father got into his head confused ideas about his mother:
My mother, was NOT a fancy woman. [. . .] Just plain and good. But my daddy, see, my daddy, he had this idea, he had this idea in his head that was kind of a sickness. [. . .] He had this idea about her and he looked at her, but . . . he didn’t see her. He saw this idea. And he told people she was from Paris. It was a big joke. But he started telling everybody all the time, and finally, it wasn’t a joke anymore. He actually believed it.
(87–88)
Although the film offers little explanation as to why Travis was unable to control his jealousy over Jane, his few comments about his father’s treatment of his mother indicate that Travis inherited a pattern of not really seeing the woman he loved, but only his ideas about her. This is a pattern of behavior that Travis shares with Eddie of Fool for Love and Jake of A Lie of the Mind – men who, like Travis, have damaged themselves by their limited ideas of women. Notably, all three of these men – three of Shepard’s most profoundly damaged men – grapple with troubled legacies from their fathers that have molded their patterns of behavior toward women.
The corruption of the father’s law is apparent in the majority of Shepard’s works of his maturity, where the father is usually a drunken, self-centered, worthless, violent, abusive lout (Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, Fool for Love, A Lie of the Mind, Paris, Texas, and Silent Tongue). The son’s conflict with this father’s legacy reflects his struggle, often an ineffective struggle, to escape that legacy. Some sons, usually the younger sons, manage to overcome this problem – Walt, Austin, Frankie – but others are profoundly and seemingly irreparably damaged by it – Travis, Jake, Lee. And it seems that for many of the elder sons (who are the traditional inheritors of their father’s legacy according to the laws of patrilineage), their damage is then visited upon the women in their lives. Shepard’s 1992 film, Silent Tongue, which he both wrote and directed, is a profound statement of the legacy of patriarchal violence as it is connected to both the treatment of women, and the myths of the American frontier, two ideas that become connected in the film. Yet most of the men of this play, far from embodying the image of the successful conqueror or ruler, are profoundly damaged – haunted by their past, and limited by their inability to survive without the crutches of either liquor or the nurture of a woman. In contrast, the victimized women in this film prove themselves to be the stronger parties, never fully owned or defined by the men who have sought to possess them.
Silent Tongue offers an interesting capstone to Shepard’s many explorations not only of male confusion about women but also of the myths of the Old West and its legacies in modern day life.16 This film, set in the New Mexico Territory of 1873, returns to many of the mythic images of the West that Shepard has explored in earlier plays, and that many of his critics have discussed as well.17 This focus is apparent in plays such as Cowboys, The Holy Ghostly, Operation Sidewinder, The Unseen Hand, and True West. The Holy Ghostly is especially worthy of commentary here in that it offers a striking resemblance to certain elements of Silent Tongue. In this early play, Shepard explores the generational conflict between father and son as a reflection of the conflict between the past and the present, the East and the West, and the city and the country. A father, Pop, has called his son, Ice, to come to him for help. Having traveled from present-day New York City, Ice finds his father camped out in the Badlands and also, seemingly, still in the Old West. Pop is being haunted by a Chindi (a female ghost or witch) who wants to steal his spirit, and he wants his son to rescue him. Yet, by the end of the play, it becomes apparent that Pop is already dead and simply needs to accept that fact, as does the son. Given the ending, it seems that it may have actually been Ice who was haunted by the spirit of his father rather than Pop being haunted by the Chindi. Ice ends up throwing Pop’s corpse on the campfire and freeing himself from his father’s influence and from the past as he watches the corpse burn.
The legacies of the Old West that Shepard explores in his Western-themed plays from The Holy Ghostly to True West resonate with issues of patriarchal ideology. Silent Tongue also genderizes images of the American West, melding iconic images from the genre of the Western with what becomes ultimately a male/female conflict. This conflict between male and female is presented as an outgrowth of a patriarchal legacy that fathers have passed on to their sons, a legacy clearly connected in the film with the colonialism of the white man toward Native Americans. The white man/Indian conflict is presented in this film along gender lines that reflect the gender assumptions lying beneath the colonial mind-set.18 The relationship between the colonizer and the colonized is that between dominator and dominated, a relationship that mirrors the vision of male/female intercourse in a patriarchal society. Thus, the colonized subject is viewed as a feminized subject in the sexist sense of being weak and in need of subjugation, while the colonizer is presented as masculine in the sexist sense of being powerful and a natural leader. The traditional narrative of colonial politics is a clash between men – the ones in power striving to maintain their control and thus protect their manliness, and the powerless seeking to gain their manhood by gaining power and control. Often this battle is fought symbolically or literally over the body of woman. Gayatri Spivak’s well-known discussion of postcolonial discourse, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” examining the debates about the practice of widow sacrifice in India, reveals how the sati emblematizes the subaltern in colonial discourse and thus reflects how women’s bodies are the sites upon which men’s conflicts, discussion, arguments, and wars of national identity, independence, and autonomy are emblematically fought.19
These gendered issues of the colonial conflict are played out in fruitful ways in Shepard’s Silent Tongue in which the main images offered of Native Americans are women, and the story focuses on two father/son relationships between white men who exploit the women for their own selfish needs, much as they or their ancestors exploited the resources of the western frontier. While Shepard’s film does not take on the larger canvas of national identity, its focus on the struggles of the men to maintain control over their women, lives, and sanity offers a microview of how colonialism’s patriarchal ideology is ultimately a destructive force that fails to save even the white men who are supposed to benefit from it.
Silent Tongue opens on a desolate western landscape in which we see a young white man named Talbot Roe (River Phoenix) keeping watch over the corpse of a young Indian woman, protecting it from being eaten by sca-vengers. The scene quickly shifts to the film’s second area of focus, Dr. Eamon MacCree’s Kickapoo Indian Medicine Show run by the Irishman Eamon MacCree (Alan Bates) whose addiction to his alcoholic Kickapoo Indian Juice is quite apparent. MacCree’s son, Reeves (Dermot Mulroney), seems to be the real energy behind the medicine show, keeping the outfit running. The show consists of a grab-bag of vaudevillesque entertainers, including comics, little people, a tap-dancing Negro boy, and the chief attraction, Eamon’s “half-breed” Indian daughter Velada (Jeri Arredondo) who entertains the crowd with impressive pony-riding tricks. Eamon, a drunken father typical of Shepard’s stories, explains to the crowd how he learned the secret of the Kickapoo Indian Juice from “an authentic Medicine Man from the dreaded Kiowa/Comanche Nation” (140–41), thus emphasizing white exploitation of the “exotic” knowledge of the Indian nations. This medicine show is being witnessed not just by a crowd of locals but also by Prescott Roe (Richard Harris), a horse-trader who is Talbot’s father. Prescott has returned to MacCree wanting to trade his horses for MacCree’s daughter Velada. We learn that Prescott had earlier traded three horses for Velada’s sister, Awbonnie (Sheila Tousey), as a wife for his son Talbot. It is Awbonnie’s body that Talbot is guarding in the wilderness, driven mad by his grief over her death in childbirth. Prescott is convinced that the only way to save his son is to replace Awbonnie with Velada, thus revealing how the body of woman is a generic tool for him, to be used for the good of a man. While Velada’s half-brother Reeves is angry over this treatment of his sisters – traded as if they were horses – their father MacCree is unfazed. He turns down Prescott’s offer not out of disgust but simply because Velada is the medicine show’s chief draw, and he believes it would be bad for business to lose her. Unable to trade for her, Prescott abducts Velada and sets off on the two-day ride to Talbot’s camp. When Reeves discovers the abduction of Velada and the trick pony she was riding, MacCree becomes angry that his property has been stolen from him, exclaiming, “That paint was worth a hundred dollars!” (160). Once on the trail of Prescott and Velada, however, the drunken MacCree soon forgets his reason for the pursuit, having to be reminded and encouraged by the much more persistent Reeves to track down the two.
Prescott had originally bought Awbonnie in an attempt to save his already mentally deranged son, and while Talbot obviously fell obsessively in love with Awbonnie, she did not return the sentiment. Her ghost is the chief adversary that Talbot is fighting in order to keep some part of Awbonnie with him. Awbonnie’s spirit wants the corpse burned or else eaten by scavengers so that she will at last be free from him, telling him “You keep me bound here out of your selfish fear of aloneness! I am not your life!” (150). The idea that women can be passed from one man to another as some kind of property, or that they have definition only as part of a man’s life, is an assumption held by Prescott, Talbot, and MacCree, but called into question by both the women themselves, and (interestingly) their brother Reeves. Reeves offers the minority point of view among Shepard’s men, which is similar to that of Frankie in A Lie of the Mind, that women deserve respect and that men must take responsibility for their actions toward the women in their lives. Inevitably, however, these men in Shepard’s work prove ineffectual in altering the behavior of their brothers or fathers. MacCree keeps reminding his son that Velada and Awbonnie are only his half-sisters – and that they are themselves “half-breeds,” their mother being a Kiowa Indian, and thus not worth as much concern as Reeves demonstrates toward them. MacCree explains about Velada, “She’s an Indian. They were born to suffer” (172).
The difference in attitude between the older man MacCree and his son Reeves indicates a contrasting view of both women and Native Americans that is represented along generational lines. MacCree has taken on many of the clothes and accouterments of Native Americans, and claims to have spent enough time with certain tribes to have learned their medical secrets, but he clearly can see them only through his white prejudice as objects of exploitation or as savages to be feared rather than as people in their own right. When a group appears on the horizon as Reeves and MacCree track Prescott and Velada, MacCree loses his wits and panics, assuming they will attack and scalp the two white men with no provocation. He even shoots his mule and hides behind its body for protection in an iconic image of the cowboy’s last desperate stand against the savage Indians reminiscent of so many of Hollywood’s B-Westerns. Reeves observes this behavior noncommittally, and after calmly asserting they have nothing to fear from this hunting party because they have not done anything to them, he leaves his father and goes on tracking Velada, although he quickly becomes lost in the gathering darkness. The last he hears of his father are pleas coming to him from the dark: “Reeves! You can’t abandon me to this! We’re flesh and blood! Reeves!!! Europeans! Don’t forget that! . . . Masters of an empire! . . . We can’t succumb to this barbarism! We have to cling together at all costs!” (189). Reeves is not swayed by his father’s pleas in regard to their mutual mastery as Europeans. He does not return to his father, but simply makes a dismissive observation about his father’s ideas before disappearing from the film, “Madness is a sorry thing” (190). Unfortunately, his rejection of his father’s ways has no effect over the outcome of this film.
The image that MacCree has of Indians as savages and/or as victims is made apparent in a flashback to MacCree’s younger days when he was hunting buffalo with ten-year-old Reeves and a fellow hunter. Through this flashback, we learn that Awbonnie and Velada are the result of MacCree having raped an Indian woman named Silent Tongue (Tantoo Cardinal). When the hunters come upon Silent Tongue picking up bones in a vast buffalo graveyard (a graveyard that is clearly the result of the white man’s indiscriminate killing of buffalo for sport and thus another image of white exploitation of the West), the unnamed hunter tells MacCree that her name came from the fact that her tongue had been removed as punishment for lying to a chief of her tribe. Silenced for speaking falsely to a man, alone in the landscape, and a mere Indian woman, Silent Tongue is viewed as a ready victim for MacCree’s lust, which he quickly acts upon. When he rapes her, she is completely powerless, unable even verbally to resist. Although MacCree asserts, after this flashback, “I made her my legitimate wife! Don’t forget that!” (159), we recognize his actions as worthy of the guilt he evidently still feels for his treatment of her. She, like Awbonnie, was taken unwillingly and made the wife of a white man. Silent Tongue later ran away from MacCree, who indicates his profound misunderstanding of her when he tells Reeves, “Isn’t that just like a Kiowa! They cut her tongue out and she rushes back to their fold, first chance she gets! I fed and clothed her all those years and she deserts me, back to her tormentors!” (185). We, of course, do not actually know Silent Tongue’s story, despite her titular role in the film, except as it has been interpreted by the white hunter and by MacCree, two clearly suspect witnesses. She herself never gets to tell her own story due to her physical silencing as punishment for supposedly once speaking falsely to a man. Even Shepard limits her screen time, allowing us to see her only in the flashback scene of her rape, and briefly in MacCree’s final scene.
This final scene of MacCree provides the film with some sense of justice, however misunderstood by MacCree. He is captured by the band of Indians he had so feared. MacCree referred to them as the “Dog Soldiers” that Silent Tongue had sent after him as payback for his treatment of her. Although initially, this fear sounded like the ravings of a drunk, the last we see of Eamon among this band of Indians, who have captured him and are marching him through the plains on foot, is from the point of view of Silent Tongue. She sits astride a pony, watching from a distance as Eamon is driven off. Silently, it seems, she has triumphed over her former captor through her connection to her own people, but again, we do not get her full story, and are allowed only a glimpse of her.
Rather like her mother, Awbonnie’s power and person have not been diminished by her enslavement. Her spirit is clearly stronger than that of Talbot Roe, whose mental health was dependent upon Awbonnie’s physical presence. His obsession with Awbonnie’s body, even in death, is clearly pathological. Even as the corpse breaks into pieces, he keeps gathering it up and protecting it from the fire and from scavengers. Although he views his behavior as indicative of his love for her, Awbonnie more accurately describes it as a result of his fear and selfishness. We realize how Talbot has inherited his limited view of women from his own father, who buys women as if they are horses to be used by men. The abducted Velada, at first emblematic of helpless femininity in the face of a man’s greater physical power, soon turns the tide on Prescott and runs away with his horses. Although he recaptures her through trickery, eventually they make a deal in which Prescott pays her the horses and gold coin he had first offered her father if she would just help his son. Setting her own terms for payment, she agrees. On the one hand, Velada could be seen as taking control of her own destiny, although Awbonnie’s ghost derides her for selling herself and thus (Awbonnie believes) denying their mother. Awbonnie’s ghost is clearly vengeful due to her treatment while alive and sees no reason to bargain with men like Talbot and Prescott. She threatens her sister, telling her
You like bargaining with Whites, then you bargain with me, your sister. You move in close to this squirming dog. You pretend that you love him . . . and then take my body and you burn it. You owe this to our mother. If you run, I will hunt you down and cut your tongue out so you will never ever, never, never, never forget who gave you birth.
(184)
If sons are bound to their fathers, it seems that for Awbonnie, at least, daughters are forever bound to their mothers. In fact, much of Awbonnie’s story replicates that of her mother, and she, like her mother, rejects utterly the men who abducted her and seeks a violent revenge.
In the end, it is Prescott who finally throws Awbonnie’s corpse into the fire, freeing her but doing so only in hope of saving his son from madness and death. With Awbonnie and Silent Tongue’s stories rectified, the film moves quickly back to its focus on the male plight. The Roes, father and son, are last seen walking aimlessly across a desolate western landscape, the son’s hand on the shoulder of his father who leads him. When they pass another lone traveler, headed in the opposite direction, who calls out to them, “Where to?” they do not answer. The scene thus leaves us with a final impression that these men are headed nowhere but are as lost as Travis was at the opening of Paris, Texas. Although they have maintained the central focus of this film, the men are left beaten, unresolved, or lost – MacCree being driven off by the Indians who have captured him, Reeves still searching for Velada, and the Roes wandering mindlessly in the desert landscape. The women who were seen by the men as objects of manipulation, as bodies to be traded or used, are the only ones whose stories have been resolved favorably, partly, it seems, because they refuse to validate the male point of view.
The failure of Shepard’s male characters to find resolution or to escape destruction in his plays and films reflects a point of view about male dilemmas that is pertinent to the critique of patriarchy that has driven much feminist criticism. In Shepard’s world, the patriarchal structure fails not only the women who are explicitly subjugated by it but also the men who are supposed to benefit from it. Thus his work provides a scathing look at the damages inherent in patriarchal ideology. As a writer, Shepard may care more about his male characters than he does his female characters, but he nevertheless provides excellent fodder for a critique of patriarchal ideals, a critique that places much of his work into pertinent discussions within gender studies, perhaps explaining one reason why his plays and films continue to resonate with such a wide audience.
1 Jonathan Scott Lee, Jacques Lacan (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 64.
2 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 67.
3 Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 55.
4 For feminist readings that critique Shepard’s tendency to ignore women characters, see Bonnie Marranca’s “Alphabetical Shepard: the Play of Words,” in her edited collection, American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981), 13–33, and Felicia Hardison Londré’s “Sam Shepard Works Out: the Masculization of America,” Studies in American Drama, 1945–Present, 2 (1987): 19–27.
5 William Pollack, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (New York: Henry Holt, 1998).
6 The best examples of this reading of Beth have been offered by Lynda Hart, whose work I discuss in the following paragraph.
7 Lynda Hart, “Sam Shepard’s Pornographic Visions,” Studies in the Literary Imagination, 21.2 (1988): 69–82, reprinted in Matthew Roudané (ed.), Public Issues, Private Tensions: Contemporary American Drama (New York: AMS Press, 1993), 161–77.
8 Sam Shepard, A Lie of the Mind (New York: Plume, 1987), 74. Page references in parentheses within the text are to this edition.
9 Jane Ann Crum, “I Smash the Tools of My Captivity: the Feminine in Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind,” in Leonard Wilcox (ed.), Rereading Shepard: Contemporary Critical Essays on the Plays of Sam Shepard (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 196–214.
10 Ibid., 211.
11 For further analysis of Meg and Baylor’s relationship, see my book, Staging Masculinity: Male Identity in Contemporary American Drama (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 1997), 64–65.
12 For an extended discussion of the gender politics of this play, see my article, “The Politics of Staging Space: Women and Male Identity in Sam Shepard’s Family Plays,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 9.2 (1995): 65–83.
13 Sam Shepard, Paris, Texas (New York: Ecco Press, 1984), 42. Page references in parentheses within the text are to this edition. Film references are to Paris, Texas, Dir. Wim Wenders, Screenplay by Sam Shepard, 20th Century Fox, 1984.
14 Sam Shepard, True West in Sam Shepard: Seven Plays (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), 49. Page references in parentheses within the text are to this edition.
15 Carol Rosen, “Emotional Territory: an Interview with Sam Shepard,” Modern Drama, 36.1 (1993): 1–11.
16 Sam Shepard, States of Shock, Far North, Silent Tongue: A Play and Two Screenplays (New York, Vintage Books, 1993). Page references in parentheses within the text are to this edition. Film references are to Silent Tongue, Dir. Sam Shepard, Screenplay by Sam Shepard, Le Studio Canalt, 1992.
17 For critical discussions of images of the cowboy and the West in Shepard’s plays, see Tucker Orbison’s “Mythic Levels in Shepard’s True West,” Modern Drama, 27 (1984): 506–19; Ellen Oumano’s Sam Shepard: The Life and Work of an American Dreamer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986); Mark Siegal’s “Holy Ghosts: the Mythic Cowboy in the Plays of Sam Shepard,” Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, 36 (1982): 235–46, and Megan Williams’s “Nowhere Man and the Twentieth-Century Cowboy: Images of Identity in Sam Shepard’s True West,” Modern Drama, 40 (1997): 57–73.
18 For a further discussion of the gendering of colonial issues and discourse, see Ania Loomba’s incredibly lucid overview in Colonialism/Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 1998), 151–72 and 215–45.
19 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice,” Wedge (Winter/Spring 1985): 120–30.