BWW Commentary: The Mistreatment of Women on BOARDWALK

BOARDWALK EMPIRE writes some of the best female characters around, many can agree, but the treatment of said characters on the show reflects quite the opposite insinuation about the writers.

While the show has tackled many feminist issues such as women's health, the right to vote, the temperance movement, and the misogynistic mindset of men at the time, it's also reduced so many of it's female characters to pointless deaths in order to further characterize and develop their male counterparts, or how I like to put it, allow for the men to feel some "man pain" to make us connect further with them emotionally.

One of the earliest female deaths of the series was that of the prostitute, Pearl, whom Jimmy had relations with while out in Chicago. Pearl represented the plight of the woman; forced to sell her body, in face of the patriarchal society that would have her do nothing more. She did what she had to do to get by, in hopes of one day, making it to California to be an actress. I really loved Pearl, and found her quite interesting, never really feeling as if she was being pit against Angela. The lens wasn't filled with animosity towards her for Jimmy's cheating, and they really allowed us to get to know her quite quickly within her few episodes.

That enjoyment quickly ended when Pearl died. Caught in-between gunfire between Torrio and Charlie Sheridan, Pearl's face is slashed opened, and gone are her dreams of being a big face on the silver screen, gone are her hopes of even getting by. Torrio goes so far as to tell Jimmy that she has to leave, as she's no longer bringing in money with a face like that. This ruins Pearl. She was told her whole life that she was a pretty face and not much else. She relied on that to get her by, because no one ever told her how to (and the patriarchal society never let her) take full use of any of her other skills, talents or assets. Jimmy won't even kiss her properly. All she relied on to get by was taken from her and she couldn't make it through that. The dreams she had were killed, and so she took her life along with them. All this, all this development, all this incredibly rich characterization gone in the blink of an eye, just so Jimmy could feel hurt, anger and pain about something; which repeats itself again with Angela.

Now Angela Darmody was one of my favorite characters on the show. She was brilliant, she was extremely caring, an artist, a great mother and a lover. She fell in love with Jimmy when they were just college age, and fell pregnant with his child. The day after she told him she was with child was the day he left to go to the army, without so much as a word of goodbye, a note, or a kiss. She went on like that for three years, raising their child, thinking that Jimmy was most likely dead. Angela didn't let that destroy her though, or her son. She took them to Atlantic City, the place where she knew she could get help and get by. She took the aid offered from Nucky, as he was like a father to Jimmy, and got on, as a single mother in the 1920's, on her own, painting, and raising her child.

When Jimmy came back, that whole world she built, all she knew for three years, all she fought to have, was destroyed. As much as Jimmy loved her, he was no longer present. He was hollow from the war. Angela had to sacrifice all she dreamed of, Paris, fame by means of her paintings and someone who was perhaps one of the loves of her life, Mary Dittrich. Angela let go of that in hopes of Jimmy being the Jimmy that she had loved before and a good father to her child; but those hopes were crushed.

Instead, in repayment for the crimes and feuds Jimmy started, Angela and her lover Louise are shot down in the Darmody household, Angela pleading to Manny Horvitz to spare her, a mother. No mercy is taken, and Manny proclaims Jimmy did this to her, and he truly did. She "had" to die because of where that plot device would lead Jimmy in the future. Once again we have a wonderfully developed female character, who is three dimensional with wants and needs of her own, but her characterization is stopped dead (literally) in it's tracks when she is forced to pay for the crimes of her husband. Angela couldn't be there to raise her child, couldn't live on to try and find happiness and peace, just because she needed to be a key tool in Jimmy's progress towards his demise. She was the last, and major step, in Jimmy realizing that he had nothing left in him to live for, and sets in motion his settlement of all his affairs before his death, which he walks into willingly. The only real impact that Angela's death had was on Jimmy (and possibly Richard), but as she was wiped from Tommy's memory, she was also wiped from ours.

The same happens over an over. Once again with Nucky's mistress Billie Kent, a wonderfully entertaining and lovable showgirl. Just as soon as we get to know her, just as soon as she's on the peak of characterization, she's swept away from us, being blown to bits in an explosion, targeted at Nucky. All in order for him to feel the pain of her loss, the anger to fuel a call for war and the unsettlement of his psyche. We also tragically see the beautiful Maybelle White take a bullet in the head meant for her father's enemy, Narcisse, as she was forced into the line of fire. This, of course, leads Chalky towards his plot of revenge, which we have followed him on this season. He, too, was broken and empty after the loss of Maybelle, inviting Narcisse's men to kill him, for life meant nothing after he lost her.

We've had to sit through this pattern so many times, over and over again, and we have been forced to deal with them throwing away some of the most interesting, and well written, characters on the show, in favor of using their deaths as a plot device to further develop the men. They deserved so much more than they are given.

It reminds me of a quip by Norman Mailer in his essay "The White Negro", where he discusses the effect the atomic bombs and the Holocaust had on the psyche of those alive at the time; "...if in the midst of civilization- that civilization founded upon the Faustian urge to dominate nature by mastering time, mastering the links of social cause and effect- in the middle of an economic civilization founded upon the confidence that time could indeed be subject to our will, our psyche was subjected itself to the intolerable anxiety that death being causeless, life was causeless as well, and time deprived of cause and effect had come to a stop."

These women's deaths were not caused by their own actions, by the steps they have taken in their lives, but rather were caused by the actions exhibited by their male counterparts, thus, as Mailer states, proves their lives (and more importantly their deaths) to have been "causeless," and in a sense, the characterization and development we've seen on the show was causeless and futile as well.

On the other hand, we have Gillian Darmody, an incredibly rich and exceptionally impressive character, who is written brilliantly and who still survives on this show. She is the essence of survival, and is probably the most dimensional, deep, and complicated character on the show. She also is the victim of the sexist, abusive and patriarchal views of hateful men and the society around her for all of her life.

She was forced to run away from an abusive orphanage, selling stolen items to get by, and then, after being shown a hint of kindness in the world in the form of Mabel Thompson, Nucky breaks her. Gillian Darmody, the saddest victim of society's confines, constraints and hate, was truly shattered by what she went through (rape, abuse, violence) at the hands of Nucky Thompson.

Now BOARDWALK never expects us to support Nucky over Gillian. In fact, it quite often reminds us that we should condemn him for what he's done. That being said, Gillian has always been given the short end of the stick in life, facing horrors many could scarcely imagine, and she's continually punished for doing so. She's done some pretty awful things, but I can't blame her for doing them. She's what society forced her to be. She's what Nucky forced her to be. We're all capable of doing some truly horrible things and, given the right pushes and circumstances, we will do them. Gillian was given all of the right pushes and all of the right circumstances, and her story is so tragic, specifically where she ended up this last season (in a horrible mental institution), that I can't help but wonder if she'll ever be given just a taste of kindness, a hand to reach out and take hold of. That kindness, that hand, as the penultimate episode alludes, seems to be coming in the form of Nucky.

We end the episode with young Gillian asking Nucky to save her from her present day horrors. While I understand why Nucky is the one to help her, and why it is duty to help her, it seems somewhat cruel that the man who broke her, who turned her life from horrid to hell, is the man she must plead with to be her savior from a place he had every hand in forcing her into. And once again, Gillian's characterization, her storyline, her emotional development is all in service of completing and fulfilling those same aspects of Nucky Thompson.

I love BOARDWALK, I love it's female characters and in fact, in many circumstances, I like them a lot better than the men on this show, but I can't help but be taken aback by the misogynistic, violent undertones that we're forced to endure as female character after female character is tossed on the train tracks in order for a male character to rise up from her ashes, and further develop or move a plot point forward.

Photo Credit: HBO

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