March 25, 2020

Greetings from a statewide lockdown! Like many humans are nowadays, I am practicing social distancing. All 3 of my real jobs have moved online, which is fine by me because it cut out the 3 hours per day I was spending on my commute. This, in turn, gives me more time to do other fun things, like check on my elderly neighbors and sew splash-guard masks for my local hospital.

During this time of great chaos and change, absolutely no one has asked me "Did any of your subjects ever lose a girlfriend to an epidemic, and if so, what were the circumstances?"

I'm so happy you didn't ask! You see, my next blog entry was going to be about the new Bond movie, No Time to Die, but they postponed its release date because of the pandemic. In place of the Bond girls, therefore, I am now introducing our latest analysis category:

Fictional Girlfriends in Epidemics

I will be analyzing disease-themed episodes of our participating franchises, with special attention to how the women acquit themselves during the emergency.

Now, it would be on-brand if I started with an entry about James Bond. Alas, however, I cannot: people do not get sick in the James Bond universe. Characters can be injured, disfigured, insane, homicidal, or any combination of the above, but they never cough. This means that if you ever find yourself in bed with 007, you have a higher likelihood of being run over by a dune buggy than you do of dying from natural causes.

Instead, I'm going to work through our contestants chronologically. First up is Little Joe Cartwright of Bonanza (1959-1973). For those of you were were born after 1970 and didn't have mothers who were Michael Landon superfans, let me set the scene a bit. Bonanza was a Western, one of a whopping 30 Westerns that were on network television in 1959. Among those, Bonanza's key distinctions were twofold: it was the first to be filmed and broadcast in color; and it focused on a family, the Cartwrights, instead of on either a whole town (a la Gunsmoke) or a single character (a la Have Gun - Will Travel).

The Cartwright clan is a family in which the women are all dead. Seriously. The patriarch, Ben Cartwright (Lorne Greene) has been married 3 times, and each union was blessed with 1 son, but all 3 wives had died before the events of the series. The 3 grown-up sons, Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe, are all similarly unlucky in love. Joe, in particular, is the namesake of the Cartwright Curse trope. Joe's very first dead girlfriend came along very early in the series, Season 1, Episode 6, and it is this unfortunate lady whose story I wish to analyze today.

Julia Bulette ("The Julia Bulette Story," aired 10-17-1959)

Who is she?

Julia Bulette, originally of New Orleans, is the madam of a glamorous brothel in Virginia City, NV. Early in the episode, Joe Cartwright intervenes when he sees her boyfriend, Jean Millain, call her trash and hit her.

Julia and Joe begin a romantic relationship, which is scandalous for more than one reason. First of all, it was somewhat unusual for a man from a prominent family to formally court a sex worker in the 1860s, and it was absolutely unheard of on network TV in 1959. Second, Julia is much older than Joe - which leads his family to fear that he might be suffering from Mommy Issues. His late mother Marie, you see, was also from the French Quarter of New Orleans.

Ben Cartwright takes this opportunity to vehemently deny that Marie was a sex worker.

This is rather strange storytelling choice, considering that this was episode six of the first season and the audience hadn't learned anything about Marie yet. This was the first time anyone had heard of her, and her defining features were:

1. Dead
2. From New Orleans
3. "part Creole"
4. Definitely NOT a prostitute

Glad we got that straight.

What does Julia do during the epidemic?

Julia is quickly established as someone with a sense of civic duty. Virginia City is in the midst of a silver boom (the titular "bonanza"), and the population growth has fueled a need to hire law enforcement. Since most of the town's money is coming from the silver mines and going into Julia's Palace, Julia is the one who raises the funds for a new marshall.

Around a quarter of an hour into the episode, the local doctor announces that there's a fever outbreak in the mines...but it's only "a few scattered cases."

In a sequence of events that feels all too familiar nowadays, an epidemic is declared 10 minutes later. The doctor comes to the opera house and asks the finest upstanding citizens for their help. Naturally, they all decide to flee the city instead, in another plot point that's all too familiar to us this month. Luckily for Virginia City, Julia Bulette was also at the opera, albeit seated behind a curtain so no one could be offended by her existence. She immediately offers to turn her establishment into a field hospital.

She and her employees then work day and night to save lives, despite the lack of PPE, antibiotics, IVs, or germ theory - all of which had not been invented yet. Joe also helps out by convincing the miners not to abandon the city. The doctor even comments that neither Julia nor Joe has slept in days, and that Julia is proving to be the most upstanding citizen in the whole city.

Julia's efforts pay off: the doctor proudly announces that they've saved two out of every 3 patients. The city beats the epidemic as a result, and Ben is inspired to try to offer Julia his blessing for her relationship with Joe. She decides to end things with Joe anyway, believing that the town's "decent" people will never truly accept her and she'd be a social burden to him. But, notably, she also breaks up with Jean, because he's become a burden for her.

Julie: I used to wonder why I'd send you away and then be so happy when you came back.

Jean: Perhaps it's because we're cut from the same cloth.

Julie: Perhaps it's because in order to hate you, I had to hate myself. We're very much alike.

Jean: One cannot change this, Julie.

Julie: One can try.

What happens to her?

After the crisis passes, the town's citizens meet to pat themselves on the back for sticking together and overcoming the crisis. But, as Joe angrily points out, they didn't invite Julia. Thanks to his lobbying, Julia is awarded an honorary membership in the fire brigade, Virginia Engine No. 2.

Joe also proposes marriage to her in front of the gathered forces of said firefighters, although she declines. She says it's because "having faith in no one carries a special kind of security."

Then, minutes before the episode ends, she's stabbed to death by her violent ex, Jean.

If you're wondering why on earth they went with a twist ending instead of a more noble death-in-the-line-of-nursing-the-sick, it's because the real Julia Bulette was murdered.

Oh, yeah, did I forget to mention that Miss Bulette was a real person? Julia Bulette was a sex worker who lived in Virginia City from 1859-1867. Although she was English instead of French, and an independent operator rather than a brothel-keeper, much of the rest of this story was based on her life. She did personally nurse the ill during an epidemic, she was given honorary membership in the fire brigade, and she was tragically murdered by one Jean Millain (although it was during a break-in, not an incident of intimate partner violence). Her murderer's execution was witnessed by Mark Twain, who helped immortalize her legend as the original Hooker with a Heart of Gold.

It's hard to say why the screenwriters for Bonanza chose to shoehorn the fictional Joe Cartwright into the story of a nonfictional dead woman. Considering that they usually settled for shoehorning a dead woman into Joe's misadventures, however, this episode actually comes across as less sexist than most. After all, they didn't kill her off for cheap drama, they killed her off for historical accuracy!

Does she pass the Sexy Lamp Test, the Bechdel Test, the Mako Mori Test, or any similar measures of Fictional Female Agency (FFA)?

I'd say so!  I was actually a little surprised by that, because Bonanza episodes rarely bother giving women screen-time, let alone FFA. To be fair, the Bechdel test is a no, because she only has one line in which she addresses another woman, and it's not really a proper conversation.

The Mako Mori Test is more of a borderline case. The basic requirements of Mako Mori are that a work "1) must have at least one female character and 2) that this character has an independent plot arc and 3) that the character or her arc does not simply exist to support a male character's plot arc." Requirement #1 - check.

It could be argued that Julia's relationship with Joe is "supporting a male character's plot arc." I would contend, however, that this episode is not really about Little Joe, or at least not his character development. Joe doesn't have character development; he's the protagonist of a non-serialized show from the days before reruns. Being a guest star, though, Julia can change, and she does: she becomes much less cynical over the course of the 50-minute episode, develops more pride in herself, and kicks a violent man out of her life. I believe, therefore, that Joe really supports her arc. I will therefore give Julia a passing grade on the Mako Mori Test.

Finally, she passes the Sexy Lamp Test with flying colors. Although there is a vaguely-defined love triangle between Joe, Julia, and Jean, it's not framed with her as the prize. Instead, her arc involves coming to the realization that Jean doesn't deserve her, and she's only kept him around because of her low self-esteem and lack of faith in other people.

Similarly, Joe gets in multiple fistfights defending her honor, but that's not because he thinks he can "win" her. It's because he thinks she has a right to be treated decently, not judged and excluded based on her profession. He fights with Jean because Jean is bad to her, not because he's jealous.

Furthermore, the episode has an actual moral based on Julia's actions: that "decency" is measured by what you'll do in a crisis, not your profession or the company you keep. Anyone who can't appreciate her value to the community doesn't understand the true meaning of civic duty. And that, my friends, is a lesson that we should remember, while we all heroically stay home to save lives.