M. Elise Marubbio's Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women PDF

By M. Elise Marubbio

Killing the Indian Maiden examines the interesting and sometimes irritating portrayal of local American ladies in movie. via dialogue of thirty-four Hollywood movies from the silent interval to the current, M. Elise Marubbio examines the sacrificial function of what she phrases the "Celluloid Maiden" -- a tender local lady who allies herself with a white male hero and dies because of that selection. Marubbio intertwines theories of colonization, gender, race, and movie reviews to floor her learn in sociohistorical context all in an try and outline what it capability to be an American. As Marubbio charts the constant depiction of the Celluloid Maiden, she uncovers fundamental characterizations -- the Celluloid Princess and the Sexualized Maiden. The archetype for the unique Celluloid Princess seems in silent movies similar to Cecil B. DeMille's The Squaw guy (1914) and is carefully validated in American iconography in Delmer Daves's damaged Arrow (1950). Her extra erotic sister, the Sexualized Maiden, emerges as a femme fatale in such movies as DeMille's North West fastened Police (1940), King Vidor's Duel within the solar (1946), and Charles Warren's Arrowhead (1953). the 2 characterizations finally mix to shape a hybrid Celluloid Maiden who first seems in John Ford's The Searchers (1956) and reappears within the Seventies and the Nineteen Nineties in such movies as Arthur Penn's Little enormous guy (1970) and Michael Apted's Thunderheart (1992). Killing the Indian Maiden finds a cultural iconography approximately local americans and their position within the frontier embedded within the American psyche. The local American lady is a racialized and sexualized different -- a conquerable physique representing either the seductions and the risks of the frontier. those movies convey her being colonized and ache by the hands of take place future and American expansionism, yet Marubbio argues that the local American girl additionally represents a danger to the belief of a white the USA. The complexity and sturdiness of the Celluloid Maiden icon -- persisting into the twenty-first century -- symbolizes an identification concern in regards to the composition of the yank nationwide physique that has performed again and again all through diverse eras and political climates. eventually, Marubbio establishes that the continuing illustration of the Celluloid Maiden signs the ongoing improvement and justification of yank colonialism.