Killing the Indian Maiden examines the fascinating and often
disturbing portrayal of Native American women in film. Through
discussion of thirty-four Hollywood films from the silent period to
the present, M. Elise Marubbio examines the sacrificial role of
what she terms the "Celluloid Maiden" -- a young Native woman who
allies herself with a white male hero and dies as a result of that
choice. Marubbio intertwines theories of colonization, gender,
race, and film studies to ground her study in sociohistorical
context all in an attempt to define what it means to be an
American. As Marubbio charts the consistent depiction of the
Celluloid Maiden, she uncovers two primary characterizations -- the
Celluloid Princess and the Sexualized Maiden. The archetype for the
exotic Celluloid Princess appears in silent films such as Cecil B.
DeMille's The Squaw Man (1914) and is thoroughly established in
American iconography in Delmer Daves's Broken Arrow (1950). Her
more erotic sister, the Sexualized Maiden, emerges as a femme
fatale in such films as DeMille's North West Mounted Police (1940),
King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946), and Charles Warren's Arrowhead
(1953). The two characterizations eventually combine to form a
hybrid Celluloid Maiden who first appears in John Ford's The
Searchers (1956) and reappears in the 1970s and the 1990s in such
films as Arthur Penn's Little Big Man (1970) and Michael Apted's
Thunderheart (1992). Killing the Indian Maiden reveals a cultural
iconography about Native Americans and their role in the frontier
embedded in the American psyche. The Native American woman is a
racialized and sexualized other -- a conquerable body representing
both the seductions and the dangers of the frontier. These films
show her being colonized and suffering at the hands of Manifest
Destiny and American expansionism, but Marubbio argues that the
Native American woman also represents a threat to the idea of a
white America. The complexity and longevity of the Celluloid Maiden
icon -- persisting into the twenty-first century -- symbolizes an
identity crisis about the composition of the American national body
that has played over and over throughout different eras and
political climates. Ultimately, Marubbio establishes that the
ongoing representation of the Celluloid Maiden signals the
continuing development and justification of American
colonialism.
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