From Whore to Hero: Reassessing Jill in Once Upon a Time in the West

Abstract

Sergio Leone’s postmodern, revisionist Western Once Upon a Time in the West has typically been read as both a nostalgic farewell to cinema’s classic Westerns and their male heroes and a pessimistic commentary on the consequences of social progress. In the film, Leone marks the end of the great Western, and thus the birth of the new West, with the arrival of the unstoppable train of capitalism. The iron horse brings industrial progress and Eastern civility to the old, wild West, severing Leone’s ties to the American Western genre and its ideals of masculinity, honor, and the individual man seeking justice in a land where laws often fall short, and thus inaugurates a new symbolic order where the power of money replaces the power of the gun. Leone describes this shift in no uncertain terms when he says the “arrival of the railroad ushers in the beginning of a world without balls.”¹ He marks a shift from the masculine to the feminine where a world without balls implies a world where women dominate, and so it is fitting that the central and surviving figure in the film is a woman. Ironically, his best intentions to revise traditional paradigms of the Western genre nonetheless reinforce the classic, patriarchal anxiety that views women as castrating agents. His mournful nostalgia for the machismo ideals of the old West would seem to necessitate vilifying women as domesticators of men, thereby destroying boyhood fantasies of adventure and independence.