Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 149
P.C. on the Frontier: Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
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functions. While fans and some admiring critics persist in seeing DQMW as a
significant piece of moral fiction, created to deliver a message that “the individual
has an obligation to try to recreate the world in the image of his or her conscience”
(Sanes n.p.), this message is, in fact, no more than the fall-out of a successful
marketing strategy.
At the same time, critics who attack DQMW for ignoring history and “playing
fast, loose and dumb, with the intangibles of myth” (Stein 43) fail to recognize that
one of the functions of television narrative is to rework the culture’s myths as the
culture evolves. DQMW is noteworthy because it has so explicitly accepted several
key parameters of the classic frontier story while turning others inside out. In so
doing, it draws the attention of the critical viewer to cultural changes which
necessitate radical transformations in the way we retell our history. However, we
must be concerned that programs like this one, which depart significantly from the
historical record — itself deeply flawed — are “likely to have far more penetrating
and long-lasting effect on the nation’s historical consciousness than any number of
carefully researched articles or books” (O’Connor xxxiv).
A decade after Rushing made the comment that “The choice to return physically
to the old west no longer exists, though many cling to its values, desperately
attempting to make them stick to a scene that eludes their adhesion” (292), DQMW
has returned to the Old West, but has transmogrified its movers and shakers as well
as the value system upon which the frontier narrative is based. Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr, the historian, writing in The New York Times to bemoan what he calls historyas-therapy, concludes with a quote which he attributes to Oscar Wilde; “ The one
duty we owe history is to rewrite it “ ( A 13).
Long Island University
Barbara Fowles Mates
Works Cited
Breen, Myles and Farrell Corcoran. “Myth in the Television Discourse.” Communications
Monograph 49 (1992): 127-36.
Carpenter, Ronald. “Frederick Jackson Turner and the Rhetorical Impact of the Frontier
Thesis. ” Quarterly Journal o f Speech 63.2 (1977): 117-29.
Dorris, Michael. “American Indians of Flesh, Blood and Hope. ” New York Times 30 June
1996 Sec.H: 30
Foote, Timothy. “ 1846: The Way We Were and The Way We Went. ” Smithsonian 27.1
(1996): 38-50.
Gates, Henry L., Jr. “Powell and the Black Elite.” New Yorker 25 Sept. 1995:64-80.
Geiogamah, H. and Michael Pavel. “Developing Television for American Indian and Alaska
Native Children in the Late 20th Century.” In Gordon Berry and Joy Asamen, Eds.
Children and Television. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993. 191-214.
Hall, Stuart. “The Rediscovery of “Ideology”: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies.”
Culture, Society and the Media. Ed. Michael Gurevitch,et.al. London: Methuen, 1982.
56-90.