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THIS ONGOING project to consider the legacy of Annie Oakley's performances began when I came upon a framed poster of Buffalo Bill's Wild West in the lobby of the Western History Collection at the University of Oklahoma. I was surprised when the images made me recall my own childhood in suburbia. Despite the fact that I grew up on Long Island during the 1970s, I had played cowboys and Indians, always insisting on impersonating Annie Oakley. This play scenario was perhaps the closest I came to being treated as an equal among the neighborhood boys. Letting me play with their cap pistols and ride my invisible horse next to theirs, they allowed me to be the hero - after I had finished cleaning up the cabin, of course.1 Ironically, by framing my play within gender expectations that included domestic chores, I was able to experience what performance theorist Peta Tait labels "moments of freedom" from those expectations - moments where I was able to run with the boys and capture (or even be) the "bad guy."2
As a female sharpshooter, Annie Oakley traveled the world precisely because she could do a "man's work" while appearing to adhere to the conventions of Victorian femininity. By framing her own "moments of freedom" in gendered gesture and behavior, Oakley was fundamental to the construction of a modern "American" identity for women. Modeling authority and self-sufficiency, as well as a spiffy pair of pantaloons, Annie Oakley influenced American women while fostering the national enterprise of cultural unification. Theorizing that "the Wild West" was an effort toward the creation of a national identity, I consider the way Annie Oakley's presence cultivated an American identity for women by embodying freedoms typically denied to women in the Victorian era. Although Oakley refused to align herself politically with the feminist movement, her dress, actions, and associations resulted from the freedom she experienced as a performer, especially as a woman doing "man's" work. That her audience came to accept and idolize her speaks volumes about her ability to disrupt audience expectations to accommodate social change.
If, as Benedict Anderson suggests, nations are "imagined communities," then it was particularly important, at the end of the nineteenth century, for the United States to establish itself...