Lavender Screen: Calamity Jane
• What do you think of Doris Day’s impact as a queer icon?
• What do you think of the real Calamity Jane, why do you think her story was changed for
the film?
• How have depictions of the Wild West defined aspirational gender norms, what effect has
this had upon western culture?
Queer Theory and “Retrospective queering of film history”
Calamity Jane was not intentionally made as a queer film, but it is part of the queer canon. The
reason for this is because of our interpretation of Calamity Jane as a film (explained below by
Alex Davidson for Sight and Sound’s ‘So fetch: Straight Films, Queer Appeal’), the gender queer
performative element of a “tomboy” character (read as butch in today’s language and
understanding).
“The queer aesthetic of Doris Day’s films would come to the fore in her comedies, notably
those that starred Rock Hudson (the scene in which the closeted actor plays a straight
man pretending to be a gay man in Pillow Talk is something of a classic). But Calamity
Jane probably enjoys the largest following among gay and lesbian audiences. At the start
of the film Jane is a classic tomboy who is shocked yet fascinated by the femininity of the
women around her. But it’s Day’s rendition of ‘Secret Love’ that has entered queer
folklore, a heartfelt ballad that could be read as being directed towards another woman,
which k.d. lang covered in the 1990s. She hightails it with the leading man in the end, but
many audiences remain unconvinced.”
Michele Aaron in New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader synopsizes queer film theory’s main
preoccupations “as operating on three, not unrelated, levels”
o “critical exploration of queer imagery and directors” (which came to the fore with the 1990s
New Queer Cinema)
o “retrospective queering of film history” (re-assessing classical Hollywood through a queer
perspective such as the work began with Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet)
o “discussion of queer spectatorship” (people’s queer responses, desires, identifications, and,
generally, experience of cinema, even if these people or texts themselves are not self-identified
as queer).
Who was the real Calamity Jane?
“For women, westward expansion often meant a release from the enforced gender
restrictions they faced in the East. Wives and mothers in the western territories often did
not conform to urban gender expectations, since they were running farms or ranches.
Many women took on jobs traditionally held by men. Martha Jane Cannary Burke, known
as Calamity Jane, was an innkeeper and an army scout… There is extensive
documentation of women who dressed and passed as men… Life on the western frontier
was frequently sex-segregated, creating homosocial communities and relationships.
Brothels, for instance, which thrived in towns such as Deadwood… resulted in
complicated female-centred social groups as the women who worked in them offered one
another comfort and safety. Little concrete evidence can be found of sexual relationships
among men or women within these communities. Such relationships, even if tacitly
acceptable, would have been illegal and thus unacceptable or dangerous to record.
There is, however, strong evidence in fiction and poetry of the frequency of intense maleto-male relationships. (Less evidence exists for women’s same sex relationships in the
West, perhaps because women had less access to publishing.)…”
Excerpt from Michael Bronski A Queer History of the United States
Few substantiated facts are known about Calamity Jane’s life, but much is known about the
legend. It seems her biography is a mix of wild tales—many promoted by Jane herself—and
plausibly accurate events. What is generally believed to be true is that she was born Martha Jane
Cannary, possibly on May 1, 1852, in Princeton, Missouri. She was the eldest of as many as six
children born to Robert and Charlotte (Burch) Cannary. Both parents were reputed to be
unsavory, involved in petty crimes and often financially destitute. The family moved to Virginia
City, Montana, in 1863, perhaps to find their fortune in the gold fields. Charlotte died along the
route, most likely of pneumonia, and soon after Robert took the family to Salt Lake City in the
Utah territory.
Becoming Calamity Jane
Martha Jane’s father died soon after arriving in Salt Lake City, making her an orphan at twelve
and the head of the family. She had grown up tall and powerfully built with many male
characteristics. Illiterate and poor, she was forced to move from one place to another, taking any
work available to survive. She was surrounded by desperate people, also scrapping out a living,
and not providing a nurturing environment for a young impressionable girl. Martha Jane began to
find her way in a man’s world taking on men’s work and a male persona. It is also believed that
as a teenager she occasionally engaged in prostitution, as it was more lucrative and always in
demand. It was during this time that the moniker, “Calamity” was given to her.
In 1875, Calamity Jane traveled with an U.S. Army troop into the Black Hills of South Dakota and
soon drifted to the lawless town of Deadwood. At this point the legends surrounding her life
become abundant and the facts harder to find. She is said to have had numerous affairs with
some of the most notorious desperados of the time. One such story was her relationship with
Western legend Wild Bill Hickok, whom she probably did meet in Deadwood. Their alleged
dalliance launched her name into the annals of Western folklore. Even Jane herself, in her
autobiography, spun a wild tale of capturing Jack McCall, after he murdered Wild Bill. Nearly all
historians discount any intimate relationship between the two and Deadwood’s own newspaper
accounts report that McCall was captured by town’s people soon after he killed Hickok.
Calamity Jane was also known for her softer side. In her autobiography, she takes credit for
rescuing a runaway stagecoach fleeing from a Cheyenne Indian war party by bravely driving the
coach to Deadwood with six passengers and a wounded driver. There are also accounts from
several sources of her helping nurse patients during a smallpox epidemic in Deadwood. The
accounts have several versions and documentation of her role in the events is suspect, but the
stories are plausible because the events did occur.
Calamity Jane’s private life is even more fabled. In addition to her alleged relationship to Hickok,
there were saucy tales, creatively recorded by Western dime novel authors, of wild sex, a child
born, and even marriage to Hickok. There are numerous stories, with varying levels of credibility,
that Jane was a wife and mother one time. Around 1885, she supposedly married a man named
Burke (Edward or Clinton) and gave birth to a daughter in 1887. There are numerous accounts of
her seen with a young girl in several small towns throughout the West in the 1880s and 1890s,
but no marriage license or birth certificate exists. In 1941, a woman claimed to be Calamity
Jane’s and Wild Bill Hickok’s daughter, but was later proved to be a fraud.
Calamity Jane’s fame grew even more in 1895 when she joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show
performing sharpshooting skills astride a horse. For several years, she toured the Midwest,
bringing a commercialized version of the rip-roaring west to American audiences. The work was
never steady, as she reputedly got drunk and disorderly throughout the tours. Wherever she
performed, she brought copies of her greatly exaggerated autobiography, which she sold to fans
for pennies.
By the turn of the century, her hard life was catching up with her. She suffered from severe
alcoholism and poor health. In July 1903, she arrived at the Calloway Hotel in Terry, near
Deadwood, where she died on August 1 or 2 at age 51. She was buried next to Wild Bill Hickok
at Mount Moriah Cemetery in South Dakota.
http://www.biography.com/people/calamity-jane-9234950
The Purple Prose blog on Calamity Jane
https://purpleprosearchive.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/gender-calamitygender-possibilitycalamity-jane-1953-2/
The 1953 musical western Calamity Jane follows an ostensibly heteronormative narrative trajectory
in which we see two rebellious young women being tamed and made ready for heterosexual
marriage. Wild tomboy and stagecoach guard, “Calam” (Doris Day), gets a makeover and learns how
to be a woman, while aspiring burlesque performer, Katie Brown (Allyn Ann McLerie), gives up on
her dreams of being on stage for the love of a man. But this surface narrative is in constant tension
and conflict with the film’s high camp celebration of queer rebellion and non-normative desire which
conveys an alternative story that, as Eric Savoy argues, questions “the possibility, or even the
desirability of a coherent gender role” (151) or, for that matter, the very existence of “true”, or fixed
identities.
The film came out of the 1950s post-war period during which women were under pressure to return
to the home and, as such, it attempts to push the idea that no matter how much fun you might be
having as a stage coach guard or a burlesque performer (all the while acknowledging that you
probably are having one hell of a lot of fun), marriage is where true personal satisfaction lies. It fails
to convince, not least because the promise of marriage cannot cancel out the joyous, life-affirming
queer energy of the film’s opening which presents us with the spectacle of Doris Days dressed in
buckskin, standing astride the Deadwood stagecoach singing ‘The Deadwood Stage‘ – “Whip-Crack,
Away! Whip-Crack, Away! Whip-Crack, Away!”
The stubborn insistence of Doris Days’ queerness remains far in excess of the narrative’s
heterosexist attempts at containment and “feminization”. Moreover, her queerness has a career of
its own, one that interlines and pulls against the conventional romantic script” (Savoy, 165).
In his excellent essay on Doris Day and queer performativity, Eric Savoy argues that Calamity Jane
interpellates a lesbian spectatorial position (153), but I think we could go further and suggest that
the spectacle of Calamity Jane, especially in the early part of the film, could interpellate a range of
non-normative subject positions- butch, genderqueer, transmasculine – that are not pinned down
to any particular sexual identity. Throughout Calamity Jane, this interpellation of queer, or nonnormative subjectivity, pulls against the ostensibly heternormative narrative.
From the outset, Calamity Jane presents gender roles as socially constructed, rather than natural, as
roles that have to be taught and learned. Living out on the frontier, Calam, we are told, simply has
not learned how to be a woman, but of course the implication that one has to learn how to be a
woman undermines the very idea of fixed gender roles and identities.
Another interesting aspect of the film, in terms of its construction of gender, is that while the male
characters accept Calam, they also try and police her gender performance through the practice of
shaming (Savoy 170). Her friend/rival Bill Hickcock is particularly coercive in his attempts to shame
Calam into being more feminine, telling her to get some female clothes and fixins, and disputing her
claims to be as masculine as the men. It is this competition with Hickcock that causes Calam to go to
Chicago to try and bring stage star Adelaide Adams back to perform in Deadwood.
But it’s not until Calam goes to Chicago and meets Katie Brown that she begins to feel that there
might be something awry with her gender presentation: “I reckon I do look a mite strange to a lady
like you”, she says to Katie. Yet, it is also when Calam meets Katie that the initially fluid sexual
possibilities suggested by her gender presentation threaten to solidify into something that looks
more decidedly like lesbian representation. As Savoy notes, Calam’s sexuality is defined by the film’s
narrative as heterosexual, insofar as she has a crush on Lieutenant Danny, but this crush is also
presented as extremely immature and therefore in doubt, leaving other possibilities open.
The relationship at the centre of the film is that between Calam and Katie Brown. It is, after all,
Katie, not the men, who recognizes Calam as “beautiful” and expends considerable effort trying to
bring Danny and Bill around to her point of view. Katie moves in which Calam and together they set
about turning her shack into what Savoy calls a “little closet on the prairie”, “a site of domestic
lesbian bliss”. By suggesting erotic, as well as potentially housewifely meaning, their duet “A
Woman’s Touch” veers close to reconfiguring their relationship into that of a visibly butch/femme
couple (Savoy 173).
When Calam’s crush, Danny, falls in love with Katie, Calam’s jealous rage can be viewed from more
than one angle. Who is she really jealous of? When Katie feels that Calam won’t be mollified, she
leaves town rather than upset her friend any further. It’s interesting that the emotional climax of
the film is not the rather perfunctory and sudden switching of Calam’s affections from Danny to Bill
Hickcock, but her racing her horse after Katie’s carriage to persuade her to return to Deadwood.
And let’s not even get started on the song ‘A Secret Love‘; a song that is supposed to be about
Calam’s realization of her love for Bill, but, well, I’ll just let you watch Doris Day’s performance for
yourselves.
So although everything appears to be sorted out at the end, with Katie and Calam marrying the
“right” men, no matter how much effort the film puts into trying to convince us that Calam and Katie
will be happier as housewives than stagecoach guards or burlesque performers (or prairie lesbians
for that matter), that fate never seems to offer the promise contained in their big numbers, in the
energy of ‘The Deadwood Stage’, the athletic exuberance of Calam’s “The Windy City”, or the joyous
naughtiness of Katie’s “Keep it under your hat”. After these performances, the marriages of Calam
and Katie do seem to represent what Molly Hashell calls “the creeping paralysis of adult
womanhood”.
The setting is also interesting in terms of the sex and gender possibilities it produces. This fantasy
frontier space cannot be unproblematically celebrated, not least because the characters are quite
upfront about the reason for their presence there, which is oppressing the inhabitants and stealing
their land. The film’s excruciating casual racism prevents it from being entirely enjoyable. But as a
space that is presented as being beyond “civilization”, it does suggest something interesting.
Perhaps coercive gendering is required by “civilisation” because coercive gendering is about
upholding civilization, but if you’re outside of civilization, you don’t need to follow the same rules. It
is certainly a space in which gender identities appear to be in flux. The men of Deadwood cannot
recognise that performer Francis Fryer is a man in drag, and when Bill Hickcock says “she ain’t very
pretty”, it is only Calam, in a lovely “it takes one to know one moment”, who replies “that ain’t all
she ain’t!” (Savoy 1778). But once the men get over their anger at the deception committed by
Francis and the bar owner, they accept him readily enough as a effeminate (coded gay) man, just as
they accept Katie once she stops pretending to Adelaide Adams.
There is an element of historical truth here because Calamity Jane is based on a real figure, that of
Martha Jane Cannary, a frontierswoman and professional scout who at times in her life also worked
as a dishwasher, a cook, a waitress, a dance-hall girl, a nurse, an ox team driver and a prostitute.
She was a notorious “character” who was known for cross-dressing and passing as male. Whether
we now interpret the historical Calamity Jane as butch lesbian, genderqueer, or transgender, it
seems that the frontier allowed hir a more fluid gender and sexual identity than was possible for
many women who lived in more “civilized” places.
The possibilities represented by the historical Calamity may be softened in the film, but I think they
are so disruptive, they cannot be contained and persistently continues to haunt the narrative. It’s
interesting that as the now supposedly happily married couples ride away at the end, they are
singing Calamity’s song “The Deadwood Stage” recalling the queer thrill of the opening credits, and
suggesting that this thrill has not been entirely vanquished by marriage.
Further reading, Eric Savoy, ‘That ain’t all she ain’t’: Doris Day and Queer Performativity’, in Ellis
Hanson (ed), Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film (1999). I highly recommend this anthology
to anyone interested in queer theory and film.
For further reading, a lovely review by Le Cinema of Dreams
http://lecinemadreams.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/calamity-jane-1953.html