“What little lady made these?” Gender, Genre, and Labor in The Power of the Dog

In Jane Campion’s <i>The Power of the Dog</i>, labor is used to reveal aspects of gender, sexuality, and class, as well as offer commentary on the complex generic elements of the film. While the film initially presents as a western, with the cowboy figure of Phil and the setting, elements of the mise-en-scéne are deployed to build melodrama. In particular, the details of labor – domestic, ranch, and as craft – reveal the emotional terrain of the film at the intersection of competing ideologies. As Patricia White notes, the film “explores issues of male homosexuality and the high cost of internalized homophobia, as well as the punishing isolation of ranch life for women implicated in the settler colonial project” (25). To get at these issues, <i>The Power of the Dog</i> spends significant time both on the work of the women – the domestic labor of both Mrs. Lewis and Rose – as well as the work of the ranch performed by Phil and his men.<br> <br>These two types of labor – often framed as private and public – are complicated in reading the film generically. Kathleen McHugh argues that the classical Hollywood melodrama “routinely transformed representations of domestic labor into acts with pathetic, symbolic, or romantic import, rendering their function as labor invisible and irrelevant” (5). In the western genre, the domestic is also typically made invisible, as wives and mothers labor in the background of the male-driven action. <i>The Power of the Dog</i> complicates both generic approaches to labor, both by framing the domestic labor of women as visible and relevant and by reframing the “public” work of the ranch not as the critical male work of survival typically seen in the western, but instead as craft. I use the term craft here to signify the way the work is also reframed by class: the Burbank brothers do not need to work to survive, while Rose is required to work before her marriage. By emphasizing the craft of Phil’s work and assigning it the symbolic weight associated with the melodrama – the careful cleaning of the saddle, for example, is weighted with Phil’s relationship with Bronco Henry - the film shifts the western framework to disrupt gender and genre expectations.