I am Woman: Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Women’s Liberation

When Bonnie Parker first meets Clyde Barrow, he is attempting to steal her mother’s car. “What kinda work you in,” she smirks at him, “when you’re not stealing cars?” (dir. Penn, 1967). Minutes later, Bonnie is on the road with Clyde, embracing a life of crime. Why is Bonnie so eager to leave her life behind and become a fugitive? Bonnie’s decision to become an outlaw can be read through the lens of 1960s women’s liberation, motivated by her desire to move outside the strictures of home and limited opportunity for women. But while the film supports Bonnie, its message is a limited, cautionary tale of asking for too much.

Before discussing Bonnie and Clyde, it is worth briefly noting the history and ideas of the women’s liberation movement. Beginning in the late 50s and early 60s, women’s liberation emerged to address the absence of women from public life. Its ideas are perhaps best articulated in Betty Freidan’s book The Feminine Mystique, which argues that women experience both a lack of fulfillment and reduced subjectivity due to social pressure to conform to the ideal archetype of housewife/mother. The only dream of women, Friedan argues, is “to be perfect wives and mothers; their highest ambition to have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get and keep their husbands” (497). For Friedan and her contemporaries, the home is an oppressive place that prevents women from aspiring beyond their small confines–a problem so pervasive that it reaches beyond mothers and affects their daughters as well. “Girls were growing up in America without ever having jobs outside their homes,” Friedan remarks (496). And for the few who do take jobs, Friedan notes, “very few were pursuing careers” (496). Such social pressure to marry and have children (above anything else) results in a deep sense of dissatisfaction in American women, which Friedan calls “the problem that has no name” (494).

Bonnie seems to represent Friedan’s dissatisfied woman archetype quite well. Bonnie’s first appearance is in her room, a reminder of femininity’s expectations. Children’s dolls line the dressers, preserving Bonnie in a state of infantilized innocence, while a poorly-drawn, childlike picture of a home rests on the wall, a reminder of what Bonnie should strive toward. Such a space seems to produce a sense of hopelessness in Bonnie. She collapses on her bed, the shot framing her head between the bedframe, while she pounds her palms on its bars. A bird chirps in the background. This is not a bedroom, it seems, but a cage, and Bonnie is the winged creature attempting to break free.

An early monologue by Clyde reveals the source of Bonnie’s dissatisfied existence:

So then you got you this job in a cafe. And now you wake up every morning and you hate it. You put on your white uniform [“pink” Bonnie interrupts here] and them truck drivers come in…they kiss you and you kiss em back…and they ask you for dates and sometimes you go, but you mostly don’t because all they’re ever tryin’ to do is get in your pants…So you go on home and sit in your room and think now when in hell am I ever going to get away from this.

It’s a fascinating speech. The discontentment Clyde speaks of is much like Friedan’s “problem that cannot be named;” But I want to note two ideas in particular that stand out in this monologue. First, Clyde emphasizes the repetitive banalities of Bonnie’s existence through his persistent use of present tense, implying an ongoing or eternal cycle of dissatisfaction. “Every day” Bonnie hates her job, “every day” she goes home disappointed, feeling stuck. There is no room for the future in Bonnie’s life (except for the unexpressed possibility that she might marry one of the “truck drivers”); her job is not aimed at achievement (like the extinct career women Friedan mentions), but repetition. Bonnie performs what Simone de Beauvoir calls “immanent” work, or maintenance, in comparison to the future-oriented, productive “transcendence” (which is, as de Beauvoir argues, mostly reserved for men) (De Beauvoir, 1949).

Next, Bonnie’s job is fundamentally tied up with courtship and submission to men. Bonnie’s job isn’t really to wait tables, it seems, but to entertain and court male customers. If there is a goal to Bonnie’s work, it is certainly not career achievement, but marriage. Even in her work, Bonnie seems unable to escape the imperative to couple, to deny her own subjectivity in service of man. Her problem is inherently linked to her identity as a woman. “You got something better than being a waitress,” the robber Clyde Barrow tells Bonnie, enticing her to join him in a life of crime. And why would she ever refuse? To follow Clyde on the road as an outlaw enables Bonnie to a) go on the road, a space characterized in opposition to the home; b) build an identity (outside of wife/mother/daughter) through a process of self-mythologizing, and c) exist outside the law that oppresses her.

Clyde promises Bonnie a life on the road, a space characterized by both its forward movement and boundlessness, in contrast to the narrowness of Bonnie’s home. “You and me travelin’ together, we could cut a path clean through Texas, and Kansas, and Missouri,” Clyde tells Bonnie. Arthur Penn, the film’s director, emphasizes the expansiveness of the road through wide shots of various landscapes–hilly passes and grassy plains, fields of gold, green, or brown. Such wide shots contrast with the way in which he films Bonnie in her room, with tight-framing and many close ups of Bonnie’s face to emphasize the smallness and claustrophobia of the space. Temporally, too, the road conveys a sense of movement into the future, while the home, for Bonnie, is a source of numbing repetition.

Being a fugitive also gives Bonnie a sense of identity–particularly one that contrasts with the ideal feminine archetype. Many first and second wave feminists characterize a lack of identity as a major problem plaguing the women of their time; as Margaret Sanger notes, “[A woman] has no identity except as wife or mother. She does not know who she is herself” (Sanger in Friedan, 500). Bonnie’s notoriety as a fugitive enables her to craft her own legend–she publishes a poem called “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde'' in a newspaper, casting herself and Clyde as heroic rebels who fight the law on behalf of the working man. Importantly, this poem casts her in a rebellious, almost masculine light: an image that she expands upon through her photography. Bonnie often poses with guns (sometimes phallically placed near her groin), and she documents her sexual assault of a cop, giving herself an air of arrogant machismo. Thus, through the apparatus of the media, Bonnie not only builds an identity herself, but also undermines the view of women as gentle and maternal.

Finally, living as an outlaw puts Bonnie outside the law that oppresses her. As Ann Charters notes, much of women’s subjugation comes from legal channels–a 1963 report from the President’s Commission on the Status of Women found that “women were discriminated in nearly every area of American life,” including in, “employment, insurance, tax laws, and legal treatment” (492). As an outlaw, Bonnie is not beholden to the law that constricts her. She is free from employment discrimination or the penalties of a sexist insurance law. In one of the movie’s final scenes, Bonnie wears a pretty white dress, skipping beside a vest-clad Clyde. In many movies, this might be the marriage at the end, where the girl and boy finally come together. But Bonnie and Clyde are not married; they cannot be. To obtain a legal marriage would be to go to a courthouse and present themselves, two wanted criminals, before the law. Bonnie and Clyde’s status as outlaws prevents Bonnie’s very initiation into the structure of marriage, which so many women’s liberationists view as oppressive.

And yet, despite the fact that the road and life as an outlaw offers these freedoms for Bonnie, the film seems to cast doubt on Bonnie’s choices. At the same time that Bonnie experiences liberation, something inside of her is lost. She misses the connection that comes from family, deciding to arrange a meeting with her mother and other family members. The whole scene is shot differently from the rest of the film, in grainy, sepia tones, emblematic of the past. A boy collapses at Bonnie’s feet, playing dead. Her expression sours. She wears all black. Bonnie is seemingly at a funeral for the child she will never have. “If you could do it differently, would you?” she asks Clyde that night.

The film recognizes that the home is a space of oppression for Bonnie, and it wants to break her out, but it dooms her for wanting too much. If we could call Bonnie and Clyde a feminist film, its feminism is limited. Bonnie is free, sure, but her lifestyle is not sustainable. Perhaps we should revisit the “wedding scene” at the end. Bonnie is happy, in love with a Clyde who loves her back. She does not have to fulfill the role as a wife, or a mother. Everything is good, right? Minutes into this very scene, Bonnie and Clyde get ambushed by cops, shot dozens of times, and killed. Bonnie may say to herself, “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home,”--but at what cost?