“It’s Just a Girl”: Gender, Misogyny, and Homophobia in RDR2 III

How traditional beliefs about gender fail the women of Red Dead Redemption 2 and doom its heroes.
Part I: Permeability
Part II: Erasure

All articles on this site feature detailed discussion of literary allusions in Red Dead Redemption 2, and as such contain unmarked major and minor spoilers for the game. This post also contains spoilers for the ending of Red Dead Redemption. Read at your own risk.

Part III: Control

The flawed beliefs about gender that Dan Houser, Michael Unsworth, and Rupert Humphries demonstrate through RDR2 harm their efforts to write characters of both the genders the game depicts. They dismiss the women and damn the men rather than allow them to act in ways the Western codes as feminine. If they were able to understand that women are not lesser beings, perhaps their minds would be broad enough to imagine other endings for their male characters. But they aren’t: women are not written well in RDR2. The women the game bothers to represent at all come from much smaller segments of the population than the men — they are almost all white, overwhelmingly abled, entirely heterosexual — and they aren’t written with psychological or emotional complexity equal to their male counterparts. Given all of that, what is their function in the narrative?

The writers’ use of Arthurian material offers an obvious clue: all too often, RDR2‘s female characters exist so the men have someone to rescue. Throughout the game, the player encounters both men and women who ask for help. We rescue men about as often as we do women, but – in keeping with chivalric and Western tradition – women have less agency than their male counterparts. Most of the men we rescue have made decisions that got them into trouble: they escaped from prison, or need to be broken out of prison, or are out hunting bears, or are facing retaliation for their sundry crimes.

The women were simply going about their days when trouble smashed into their lives: they were at home and men broke in. Men kidnapped them. Their horses or their husbands up and died on them. Their fathers and their brothers refuse to listen to them. And even in these scenarios, when we might expect the woman being rescued to be the primary concern, she isn’t the point at all. The men are. Dutch Van der Linde begins the game by rescuing Sadie Adler and ends it by refusing to rescue Abigail Roberts, both illustrating his character arc and leading to Arthur Morgan being done with him for good. And even then, Arthur’s disillusionment isn’t about Dutch leaving Abigail in the Pinkerton’s hands, possibly to be killed: “Now he don’t care if he orphans his friend’s child so long as he gets rich?,” he gripes to Sadie (“Red Dead Redemption”). He doesn’t say anything about Abigail at all. It’s all about Dutch and Jack Marston.

RDR2 at least manages to acknowledge that women may not like relying on men to save them. After Arthur rescues Karen Jones from her john, she says: “I don’t much like being saved, but … when I have to be” (“Polite Society, Valentine Style”). But rarely does the game go beyond that to allow women to save themselves, or anyone else. As Esther Wright points out, “Yes, [Sadie] helps round up the family after the botched bank job, while Dutch and Co. get burned in Guarma. Preserving this quasi-domestic unit after the fallout of male recklessness isn’t exactly a feminist statement” (“Women Out of Date”). Women having to clean up the mess men have made — like Susan Grimshaw killing Molly O’Shea — falls rather short of suggesting that those characters are either empowered or fully realized.

While Sadie’s presence in the game might suggest to some that there’s a measure of gender equality, she’s never written as an equal. Sadie saves herself once, when the O’Driscolls attack Shady Belle (“Horsemen, Apocalypses”). But more often than she saves herself, the game puts her in a position in which she has to be saved: from the O’Driscolls, from the Pinkertons, from one of Micah Bell’s gang, from Micah¹. Whether this was the all-male writing team’s bias at work or a conscious effort to baby the fragile masculinity embodied by some of their players isn’t apparent.

Sadie is also unthreatening to the paradigm of patriarchy because of the way in which she’s portrayed as a “strong female protagonist.” As Esther Wright says, “In Rockstar’s West, women with any narrative significance can only be two things: defined by their relationship to a man, largely masculinized themselves, or both. Sadie is defined by both” (“‘What’s Famous’ and ‘What’s True'” 136). She’s hyperviolent, tough, rude. Eventually, she becomes an agent of the most patriarchal of institutions: the law. While John Marston expresses some moral discomfort with bounty work, RDR2 takes care to stress that Sadie never questions the orders the men she works for give her (“A Quick Favor for an Old Friend”).

Rockstar’s Victorian Ideals

As I discussed in Part II: Erasure, and as Wright points out, Sadie is “defined by [her] relationship to a man.” Women’s priorities in the game rest squarely on the men in their lives. In contradistinction, women sometimes serve as moral guidance for men — which the men can, and do, ignore — but never is a woman a man’s entire reason for existence. Sadie may wear pants and use a gun, but the narrative fits neatly inside Western genre tropes as tired and dusty as a cowboy’s favorite boots:

The women and children cowering in the background of Indian wars, range wars, battles between outlaws and posses, good gunmen and bad legitimize the violence men practice in order to protect them.
Yet at the same time, precious though they presumably are since so much blood is shed to save them, their lives are devalued by the narrative, which focuses exclusively on what men do. Westerns pay practically no attention to women’s experience.

Tompkins 41

In their foundational analytical text The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar analyze the effects of creating in a patriarchal literary environment on the works of female authors in the nineteenth century. Their work pairs nicely with Jane Tompkins’, who argues that the Western genre — men’s writing in the twentieth century — was created largely in reaction to women’s fiction of the nineteenth century. One of the figures that Gilbert and Gubar identified as a constraining force on women writers was the Victorian ideal of the “angel in the house.” Gilbert and Gubar highlight Hans Eichner’s useful description of this figure as she appears in the work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

She shines like a beacon in a dark world, like a motionless lighthouse by which others, the travellers whose lives do have a story, can set their course. When those involved in feeling and action turn to her in their need, they are never dismissed without advice and consolation. She is an ideal, a model of selflessness and of purity of heart.

quoted in The Madwoman in the Attic, 22

Ancient though this ideal may be, this is the function that more than a few of RDR2‘s female characters are made to serve: to guide the male characters, “the travellers who do have a story.” When Abigail leaves John in “Motherhood,” where does she go? What does she do? What is she feeling? She simply stops existing until John grows up enough to call her back: a “motionless lighthouse” by which John sets his course.

In precisely the same way, Mary Linton’s role in the story is to offer Arthur moral guidance: “There’s a good man within you, Arthur, but he is wrestling with a giant. And the giant, wins, time and again,” she writes. Mary does not have any story unconnected to the men in her life. “Remain true to the man I know you are,” Charlotte Balfour writes to Arthur in “The Widow of Willard’s Rest II.” She has met him twice. The point of the letter is not what Charlotte, as a person, would write, but what the writers think Arthur needs to hear. In camp, Mary-Beth Gaskill, Karen, and Tilly Jackson are sometimes available for Companion Talks, offering Arthur unpaid therapy. He confesses his misbehavior and talks about his feelings; they soothe and gently scold him: “Try. Try to do the good thing,” Mary-Beth tells him in her sweet, soft voice, words he’ll remember on his final ride. All five of these talks are with women, and the favor is never repaid. He never hears about their concerns. He never asks.

Given Rockstar’s smugly rebellious brand identity (which, to be clear, is a sham), their idea of femininity is oddly Victorian. It isn’t limited to the angel in the house: the Western may have originated as a response to the sentimental novel, but RDR2 is strikingly in accord with it in at least one way. Tompkins says that “The sentimental heroine, always unjustly treated, was forbidden to show her anger” (126). RDR2 generally condemns angry women. Admittedly, two angry women live — but Abigail has to live for Red Dead Redemption‘s timeline, and as we’ve seen, Sadie is “largely masculinized.” What about the game’s angry women whose femininity is acknowledged? Penelope Braithwaite swallows her anger: “I hope they all rot,” she says — but although she spoke casually, she quickly corrects herself: “I don’t,” adding in a whisper, “Well, maybe a bit” (“The Course of True Love II”). The Southern Belle is rewarded with her happy ending.

Conversely, Molly O’Shea is murdered while in the grip of fury, raging at a man. Seething, shrieking Susan Grimshaw is shot while confronting a man. Gloria is murdered attempting to extort more money from a man. Nasty Catherine Braithwaite is allowed to burn to death after kidnapping a boy (the game is bizarrely insistent on the word “boy.” Jack Marston is never called “a kid” or “a child” when the gang confronts the Braithwaites. His masculine gender is a defining aspect of the crime). Karen, an angry drunk, succumbs to addiction.

Karen’s anger is not the only reason the game condemns her. It’s part of a larger, equally Victorian pattern of condemnation: unmarried women who have sex must die. Karen has casual sex with a man she isn’t married to or in love with and is unimpressed and unfulfilled by the interaction². Molly and Agnes Dowd have sex with men they aren’t married to. Most likely Annette, Tammy Aberdeen, and Annabelle do, too. All of them die. That’s nearly every named female character who has sex outside of marriage in the game. Considering the way the game makes deaths moral lessons, or karmic retributions, it would be hard to argue that this is an accident — although demonstrating such a prim moral stance was probably unconscious.

And then there’s the question of sex work. Susan, a former sex worker, is among the game’s dead. Edith Downes survives, but her sex work, like her anger, is in service to Arthur’s character arc. Abigail staunchly refuses when Susan attempts to bully her into returning to work (Horseshoe Overlook). For all that Dutch, Javier Escuella, and Bill Williamson taunt John over Abigail’s former profession in Red Dead Redemption, it’s hardly mentioned in RDR2 at all (Wright, Rockstar Games 150). Susan and Uncle call the single young women “whores,” and their sleeping area is called the “whore wagons” in game files, but the women themselves never mention it, nor do they leave camp to work, nor do they have sex with the men in the gang for money — although they do have to defend themselves from sexual approaches and harassment from Micah, John, and Dutch. At least one of Karen’s outfits would, in 1899, indicate that she was a sex worker, but the one time we see her with a john, she chooses not to complete the act and has to be rescued by Arthur.

What’s the reason for all of this delicate hedging around the subject of the women’s profession? It’s because we’re supposed to like them, and Rockstar has taught its player base to utterly disregard the humanity of sex workers. For instance, Red Dead Redemption “encourages you to ‘hogtie a prostitute, put her on the back of your horse, and set her down on a train track as she screams for mercy before exploding under its wheels’ — all for some notoriety points and an extremely dubious achievement” (Margini, “Cowboy”). Presumably, the writers think that the women working would make players like them less, detracting from their enjoyment of the game and damaging its value. And why shouldn’t Rockstar think that? Those are the attitudes they’ve fostered.

Rockstar’s incitement of violence against digital sex workers makes its depiction of the “Killer Prostitute” particularly aggravating. This special NPC is apparently based on the character Trixie from the TV series Deadwood. Trixie shoots and kills a john because he beat her — and in response, her pimp and lover, Al Swearengen, beats her more. In RDR2, the Killer Prostitute is found huddled in distress, in her underwear, by the side of the road in Valentine. She begs the player for help: her john attacked her and she killed him. She wants you to dispose of the body. But helping her results in the player losing honor, and she later asks for help again after killing another john, implying that she’s murdering the men. Why she might do this, the game doesn’t bother to ask itself. Whether the player helps her or not, she’ll eventually be captured and hanged for other murders. We never learn her name.

At a shallow glance, we might say that Rockstar is being ironic: the tables have turned, and now the sex worker is the killer! But while Rockstar enjoys flexing their “puerile South Parkian politics” to generate irony and deaden — rather than create — meaning, that kind of credulous reading would only serve to obscure the company vilifying a group they’ve persistently denigrated (Cole). While video games can’t make anyone actually commit violence, Rockstar contributes to the dehumanizing way that ill-informed players view women who work in the sex industry, and real-world violence against sex workers is a prevalent and deadly issue. The writers’ treatment of the “Killer Prostitute” character is something beyond tone-deaf that we don’t even have a word for: maybe “callous” comes closest. To have such an incredible lack of self-awareness must be remarkably liberating, although I imagine one walks into walls quite a lot.

RDR2 is set in the Victorian era, but that’s no reason for the game’s own values to be so regressive. If you’re a female character in the game and want to survive, you had better “act like a man,” or you had better behave yourself: be soft, be gentle, be nurturing, be virginal. And even then, your impact on the story will be minimal at best. Discounting the things that men do with women as their ostensible motivation, the women could be yanked from the narrative entirely, like a very loose tooth, and it would change practically nothing. It’s as though the main story was written, and later on, missions that featured women more prominently were created and wedged in. The times in the story when women are afforded importance and action tend to be islands, self-contained, apart from the main plot: pull “Polite Society, Valentine Style,” “We Loved Once and True,” “Further Questions of Female Suffrage,” “The Course of True Love,” “Sodom? Back to Gomorrah,” “No, No, and Thrice No,” “Fatherhood and Other Dreams,” the end of “That’s Murfree Country,” and “Mrs. Sadie Adler, Widow” and you’ll have essentially the exact same story. I’m hardly even the one saying this: some of the missions in which women have the most impact, “Fatherhood and Other Dreams,” “Brothers and Sisters, One and All,” “The Course of True Love IV,” “Do Not Seek Absolution,” “Money Lending and Other Sins VI – Arthur Londonderry,” “The Widow of Willard’s Rest,” “Of Men and Angels I” (and the Sister Calderón version of part II), and “Mrs. Sadie Adler, Widow” are not required to advance the story. Many of these missions are important to understanding the emotional and psychological truths of the story, but always because of the way they illuminate Arthur, not because of the women’s emotions or the women’s psychology, and certainly never because the women are making choices that shape the story’s outcomes.

Removing Arthur, John, Dutch, Micah, or Hosea Matthews from the game would require heavy rewrites because they drive the plot in ways that are connected to their identities. Dutch, Micah, and Hosea cause problems for the gang because of actions they take because of who they are. Even the most developed of the female characters — Abigail and Sadie — are barely necessary to the action. Sure, Sadie helps break John out of prison, but her smash-and-grab approach could be performed by anyone capable of shooting a gun, and it’s difficult to believe that Arthur would just leave John there if left to his own devices. Even Abigail saving Arthur by shooting Milton in “Red Dead Redemption” fails to mean much when you consider that Arthur was only there because Milton kidnapped her in the first place. The incident primarily serves to illustrate how weak Arthur has become, not to develop Abigail’s character.

Women aren’t in RDR2 to act as actual characters. Their presence in the game is to serve the needs of men: to honor their memories, to morally guide them, to unburden them of their emotions. Even then, they make no difference. Sister Calderón’s guidance; helping Edith, Mrs. Londonderry, Sadie, or Mary; Mary-Beth’s advice: none of it changes a thing. Not for Arthur or for them.

Rage Against the Domestic

This is even more striking in John’s case than in Arthur’s. Try though he does to be the man Abigail wants him to be — an adult man who provides for their family without constantly risking his life (a desire which RDR2 somehow conspires to make look unreasonable) — the key part of his journey is not following her “beacon in a dark world,” but breaking free of her control. Tompkins analyzes the common trope in Westerns in which a woman begs her husband or lover not to commit some mad act of violence:

It cannot be fortuitous that the shoot-out is staged time and time again in Westerns as a direct violation of what the woman in the story wants: it is not only Molly in The Virginian who says that if her lover goes against Trampas in a gun battle she won’t marry him; Amy in High Noon says that if her newly wedded husband faces the bandit Frank Miller, she will leave him; Marian Starrett in Shane pleads with her husband not to go up against Riker; and scores of other women in scores of other Western movies do the same. The man’s reasoning is always that honor demands he meet the challenge, with honor presented as an exigency only he understands. But what honor is is the need to do exactly that which the woman most hates and fears in order to prove that you are not under her control.

143-144

That sums up the confrontation that John — who took for his alibi the name of a man who his wife shot in the head — has with Abigail in “American Venom” rather perfectly. Sadie tells John she has a lead on Micah:

ABIGAIL: No. He’s not coming.
CHARLES: I will.
ABIGAIL: That’s your business. His business is here.
JOHN: Yeah. Yeah, I’ll ride with you.
ABIGAIL: No, I’m … I’m begging you. No! You’d risk all this? For what? For Micah?
JOHN: All this? All this wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Arthur, Sadie, and all them folks as fell. If I let him go, this place ain’t no more real than one of Jack’s dragons.
ABIGAIL: I’m begging you.
JOHN: And I’m begging you to understand. This is it. This is …
ABIGAIL: Please.
JOHN: Please try to … I ain’t got no other choice.

American Venom

(The writers love their ironic double negatives³.)
The climax — the resolution to satisfy the player — is not brought about by John following Abigail’s desires, but by rebelling against them. The tragedy of the series isn’t John staggering to his knees in the dust, chest pitted with bullets, eyes turned the dead color of mirrors. The tragedy is that Houser, Unsworth, and Humphries can’t envision any other ending. The story has to end with John killing Micah Bell — but that’s only true because Rockstar doesn’t offer us anything but what’s been done before. That’s the danger of Rockstar’s approach to creation, which, as Matt Margini points out, “has always been akin to collage” (“Western”): what happens when you hit the limits of old stories? Are you capable of making something new? And if you aren’t, are you really making art, or are you making facsimiles?

RDR2‘s great failure is its inability to imagine another way. It longs for the ability to feel freely and says that it’s impossible: Evelyn Miller, in “The American Inferno, Burnt Out,” writes,

Have I, and those countless fops born into lives like mine . . . been forever ossified like so many generations of Europeans before us, into men that are at once not men? Mutate us into thinkers who can never quite think for we have been denuded of the ability to feel? Was this the method by which the Serpent and the Apple removed us from Eden?
Not by letting us see, but by allowing us to think and thereby stopping us feeling?

America

And, having argued so passionately for the importance of feeling, he dies. Arthur, beginning to acknowledge his feelings, dies. Feeling is important, the game allows, but it can’t see how to live that way. In depicting Arthur’s deaths, RDR2 chases its tail, gets tangled up in its own misogyny, and falls flat on its face. As I shared in Part I: Permeability, Tompkins writes that the Western genre enshrines a masculinity that is closed up, closed off, sealed tight:

The male, by remaining ‘hermetic,’ ‘closed up,’ maintains the integrity of the boundary that divides him from the world. (It is fitting that in the Western the ultimate loss of control takes place when one man puts holes in another man’s body.) To speak is literally to open the body to penetration by opening an orifice; it is also to mingle the body’s substance with the substance of what is outside it. Finally, it suggests a certain incompleteness, a need to be in relation. Speech relates the person who is speaking to other people (as opposed to things); it requires acknowledging their existence and, by extension, their parity.

56

High-honor Arthur is more open than low-honor Arthur is: it isn’t that he necessarily speaks more, but that when he speaks, his words come from a part of himself that’s both more truthful and more emotionally connected to others. He’s more vulnerable with Tilly, Sadie, and Abigail in “Red Dead Redemption” than low-honor Arthur is. Compare:

(I don’t need to comment on the fact that all three of the women have the exact same lines and animations in these different versions, do I?)

That emotional honesty is the crux of the difference between the two renditions of Arthur, which seems like a profound statement on Rockstar’s part — until one considers what happens in the last half of “Red Dead Redemption.” Especially since Arthur’s better deaths are quite the opposite of his worst one. In the game’s true ending, when Arthur makes John leave him, he tells him, “There ain’t no more time for talk” and “Get the hell out of here and be a goddamn man.” This the last, and presumably among the most important, advice that Arthur gives his brother. As Tompkins notes, “in The Virginian and in every Western since, the concept of being a man looms so large and is reiterated so tirelessly, as if to say ‘be a man’ were the end-all of human utterance” (144). Talking (the feminine) will not get us where we need to go: for the story to conclude properly, we must be men, closed up and silent. In “American Venom,” Dutch is no longer dapper and silver-tongued. His coat is splotched with mud; his hands are blackened with filth; his nailbeds are grimed. In their standoff, John pleads with him to speak. “I ain’t got too much to say no more,” he tells John. It’s only then, with all his polish stripped away, that Dutch finally does what he should have done in the first place and shoots Micah Bell. In the end, he’s the archetype of the outlaw: when John thanks him, Dutch doesn’t say a word, just sneers at him eloquently. The silent killer, he swaggers away.

Moments after John leaves Arthur in “Red Dead Redemption,” Micah attacks. This final fight is supposed to be some sort of triumph, even if no one wins:

The physical punishment heroes take is not incidental to their role; it is constructive of it. Prolonged and deliberate laceration of the flesh, endured without complaint, is a sine qua non of masculine achievement. It indicates the control the man can exercise over his body and his feelings. It is the human counterpart of horse breaking, only what is being broken is not the horse’s will but the hero’s natural emotions. The hero beats himself into submission in the same way he subdues the animal.

105

This fistfight of attrition, as brutal, drawn-out, and ultimately pointless as it feels to play through, is Arthur “beat[ing] himself into submission.” Having opened up a sliver in his relationships with Rains Fall and Sister Calderón, Arthur closes himself up tight again. He doesn’t have to feel his pain over the death of his son, over the deaths of his friends, and over Dutch’s betrayal when his physical pain is a far more insistent demand on his attention.

In Arthur’s “bad” deaths, he’s penetrated — take your pick of phallic objects, knife or gun — by another man, and the framing of his worst death shows that this is supposed to be understood as a kind of sexual violation. Under the paradigm of toxic masculinity, male homosexuality is feminizing. This creates a sense of paradox: Arthur failing to become more open in his speech and emotions (behaviors the Westerns codes as feminine) results in the narrative punishing him by opening his body in a way it codes as feminine (or: if he doesn’t become feminine on his own, it’s forced upon him). RDR2 says that those first feminine-coded behaviors are actually good — but only up to a point, after which they’re bad, or simply impossible for the writers to imagine — but the second feminine-coded behaviors are sickening, deadly. What we are supposed to understand here — whether the writers are trying to make a point, or if we’re seeing the raw confusion of the unexamined psyche — is unclear.

What Tompkins writes about the masculine ideal fits Arthur in the end, because what she describes is death:

If ‘to become a man,’ as Schwenger says, ‘must be finally to attain the solidity and self-containment of an object,’ ‘an object that is self-contained does not have to open itself up in words.’ But it is not so much the vulnerability or loss of dominance that speech implies that makes it dangerous as the reminder of the speaker’s own interiority.
The interdiction masculinity imposes on speech arises from the desire for complete objectivization. And this means being conscious of nothing, not knowing that one has a self. To be a man is not only to be monolithic, silent, mysterious, impenetrable as a desert butte, it is to be the desert butte. By becoming a solid object, not only is a man relieved of the burden of relatedness and responsiveness to others, he is relieved of consciousness itself, which is to say, primarily, consciousness of self.

56-57

To be an object, to be “relieved of consciousness itself,” is to be a dead body. In Arthur’s last moments, his wounds are not healed; they’re stapled closed and left to fester. There is no release, just a deadening, not just of his body, but of his emotions. As Tompkins says: “Men would rather die than talk” (66). What Rockstar pretends to be (rebellious; forward-thinking) is not what it is. They don’t have the guts to show their hero cry. To watch Arthur Morgan die is to see someone curled around his psychic pain, gripping it tight as it impales him, and to wish you could ask him: do you know what it is that’s killing you?

No Story

At the beginning of this essay, I asked what it is that Rockstar is afraid of. I hate to deliver such an obvious answer as “women, and being like what they think women are,” but that is the truth. It’s that fear that structures Arthur’s uncathartic deaths, and that causes John to make the choices that lead to his own death. Men are victims in this paradigm, too, because to deny all that is feminine is to deny yourself the opportunity to be a whole person. But for all the denied and repressed emotion, many of the men in RDR2 are still granted as complete a humanity as the writers are able to create. Not one of the women is.

One of the most interesting the writers did manage to create — angry, kind, bright Karen Jones — disappears entirely, not just as a character, but as a thought: picking up the letter that Tilly writes John after they meet in Saint Denis and selecting the “Read” option in the interface shows the document in typeface, and reveals that Tilly thinks that Karen’s alcoholism has killed her. But that was, evidently, an afterthought: the actual letter, as handwritten, doesn’t even contain the single sentence claiming Tilly thinks Karen is dead. [Edit: an updated version of the letter appears in the game files. Since the letter is bugged and can’t be saved, I haven’t had a chance to verify which letter appears in the game.]

Dutch doesn’t even mention Karen in “Our Best Selves” when he lists the other gang members who deserted when Arthur was gone. The last we see or hear of her, she’s sitting in the dirt, dead drunk, hostile and depressed. Self-pitying, condescending Reverend Swanson gets his redemption, but Karen, who ran to Arthur when he came back to camp shot, who planned and executed the gang’s most successful robbery, who reassured Kieran that he didn’t have to be afraid of the gang once they released him, who didn’t leave Abigail’s side when Jack was missing, who tried to help Molly even though they disliked each other, who encouraged John to take care of his son — her story doesn’t even have an ending. The phrase that comes to mind is “wrote her off,” but they didn’t even do that.

Nor did they bother to create entries about fan-favorite character Charlotte Balfour in Arthur’s journal, despite the fact that his relationship with her is more meaningful than many of the things he does write about, and despite the fact that those entries are supposed to exist (John mentions them when he goes to visit her and tell her that Arthur has died: “He wrote fondly of you,” he tells Charlotte). After helping her in “The Widow I – II,” if the player visits her, they’ll find her sitting in the cool dark of her front porch, holding a notebook and pen. In a game teeming with notes and letters — written in more than 90 hands⁴ — the pages of Charlotte’s book glow virgin-blank and white. What, after all, could she have to say for herself? As Gilbert and Gubar say of the ideal Victorian heroine, “She has no story of her own.”

New here? Visit the Table of Contents to read the essays in order, or the Index & TL;DR to explore the site by topic. New essays are published Wednesdays at 1 p.m. E.T./10 a.m. P.T. Sharing the site is always appreciated!

1. “Outlaws from the West,” “Icarus and Friends,” “Red Dead Redemption,” “American Venom.” ↩︎
2. Occurs at the party after Sean MacGuire’s return (“The First Shall be Last”) ↩︎
3. See also: “I don’t know nothing about kindness” (Money Lending: J. John Weathers). ↩︎

Bibliography