“WE’RE ALL IN SOMEBODY ELSE’S HEAD”: CONSTRUCTING HISTORY AND IDENTITY IN XENA

A Thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree A3

Master of Arts

E_OGiL In English: Literature

by

Rvann Mackenzie Lannan

San Francisco. California

January 2018 Copyright by Rvann Mackenzie Lannan 2018 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read “’We’re all in somebody else’s head’: Constructing History and

Identity in Xena ” by Ryann Mackenzie Lannan, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in English: Literature at San Francisco State University.

Geoffrey Green, Ph.D. Professor “We’re all in somebody else’s head”: Constructing History and Identity in

Ryann Mackenzie Lannan San Francisco, California 2017

My thesis analyzes the construction of history and identity in the pop-culture television show Xena: Warrior Princess ( XWP ). I argue that the implicit allegory of XWP shows us that history and identity exist as interpretable and revisable narratives. I use the character Gabrielle’s chronicling of Xena’s adventures to show how historical narratives are consciously constructed by historians to tell one specific version of events. I then use her mediation of the major characters to depict how historians also construct the characters of history. I then show that similarly, all people read and are read by others, and that these readings influence identity construction. XWP shows that identity originates outside the self and is a product of constant dialog between the self and the other.

correct representation of the content of this thesis.

/2^|re- Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A thesis is by no means a one-woman job. I would like to thank Dr. Hackenberg and Dr. Green for their tireless edits and suggestions. I would also like to thank my friends and family for their support and patience.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction...... 1

1. “The Xena Scrolls” and the Construction of History...... 24

2. “The greatest hero that ever was!” The Self and Identity Construction...... 55

Xena the Warrior Princess...... 58

Joxer the... Mighty?...... 72

Gabrielle, The Battling Bard of Poteidaia...... 83

Works Cited...... 97

vi 1

INTRODUCTION

In a Season Three ode to the pop culture hit Groundhog , Xena, the warrior princess, is faced with a day which keeps repeating. When she explains the phenomena to her friends, Gabrielle and Joxer, they attempt to help her figure out why she is reliving the same day by offering a series of explanations which become more fantastical the more the day repeats. Joxer offers: “What if none of this really is happening—and, like, we’re all in somebody else’s head, and they’re making us up?” (“Been There Done That,” emphasis in original). The expressions on Xena and Gabrielle’s faces make it clear that they think such an idea is preposterous. But the rising music coupled with the break in dialog make it clear to the viewer that Joxer has stumbled upon something profound. And indeed he has, for Joxer’s suggestion of existing in someone else’s head is not only an accurate description for his own fictional position within the show, but it also describes the position of the viewer as well.

Xena: Warrior Princess (hereafter XWP) presents to the viewer a model for identity which is inextricably tied to the “other,” or the “somebody else” to whom Joxer refers. While the self contributes to the construction of identity, a version of that identity is also, as Joxer points out, constructed by others who read and interpret the identity presented to them. Joxer is read by nearly every character in the show as a fool, though he sees himself as a hero. Xena sees herself as a criminal, but to those she saves she is a hero. Gabrielle is perceived as a simple “little girl” or an “irritating” blonde, and often 2

takes offense at how others describe her. Each has their own identity story which is constructed from stories, memories, and figures from their past. But each is also read by the other characters who see a different version of identity.

This theory of identity is encapsulated in Gabrielle’s construction of an alternate ancient history within the show. Gabrielle, Xena’s friend, “sidekick,” and maybe lover, is the chronicler of Xena’s life and deeds within a fantastical world of familiar history and myth. Her scrolls are read and produced throughout her own time, and are also rediscovered in the modern-day in a storyline concerning the origins of XWP within

XWP. The show’s metafictional telling of its own creation allows the viewer to see that every character and event is mediated, first through Gabrielle, then the creators, and finally the viewer. The show presents every character as a real historical figure within its own fiction, but it also insists that the characters we are viewing are not fully the people that they were in ancient time. By presenting Gabrielle’s scrolls as “real” history within its narrative, XWP shows how others read and write, and in essence “make-up” the identity of others as well as the supposed “true” history. By making the construction of history and identity so explicit, XWP shows us ways to read and interpret the history and identity narratives constructed by others.

In creating an alternative history, and depicting both the creation and the effects of that history, the writers of XWP create an allegory that shows how deeply ingrained the narrative process is in our conceptions of history and life. Gabrielle’s stories show us that history depends on a narrative constructed by the historian through a conscious selection 3

and exclusion of artifacts, events, and interpretations. calls out dominant narratives within “traditional” western, Eurocentric history by telling the stories of those traditionally excluded from this history, and offering different versions of those figures privileged in the western narrative. In positioning Gabrielle as the mediator of this history and its characters’ lives and personalities, the creators suggest that identity is also interpreted and constructed by the other who gathers information about a person and fashions a story about them. Narrative is unavoidable in making sense of history and identity, and by using the narrative process to construct history and identity, we relegate

“history” and the “self’ to the realm of stories. The self, both past and present, is then, as

Joxer proposes, a story to be read and interpreted, in a sense “made-up,” by the other. But at the same time, XWP shows us that as narratives, history and identity are fluid and endless. By showing us how each is constructed, XWP empowers us to continually write a more complete narrative.

Joxer’s question about our possible fictiousness and self-agency is part of a larger web of metafictional storytelling elements within the show, and understanding this metanarrative is important for understanding how XWP presents the formation of history and identity. At its core, XWP is a show about a woman’s search for redemption in ancient Greece. Those who encountered her in her earlier appearance in Hercules: The

Legendary Journeys will remember Xena as the evil warlord who was convinced by 4

Hercules to change her ways.1 In her own show, Xena embarks on a lifelong quest to redeem the sins she committed as a warlord. Along the way she meets Gabrielle and

Joxer who aid in her heroics and, in Gabrielle’s case, keep her on the path of righteousness. Within the show, Gabrielle takes it upon herself to tell the world of Xena’s deeds, first by telling and then by writing down her adventures with Xena. Gabrielle’s purpose in telling stories about Xena is to tell the world of the “real Xena,” the new, good

Xena. The scrolls spread word of Xena’s turn to good and as the series progresses, Xena is met with less hostility as people learn that she is no longer evil.

In the Season Two episode “The Xena Scrolls,” Gabrielle’s scrolls are found in

1940s Macedonia. The final scene in the episode shows how the scrolls are then turned into the modern-day show that the viewers are watching. Then in Season Four, the television show becomes a subject within itself when modem day characters within the show watch Xena:Warrior Princess, and the viewer sees that within the fiction, the characters are real historical figures. When the modern-day character Annie Day believes herself to be the reincarnation of Xena in the Season Four season finale “Deja vu All

Over Again,” her boyfriend Harry believes her delusions stem from her obsession with

XWP, an obsession proven by the “internet chat rooms” mentioned by Harry, the life

1 Xena appears in three early episodes of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, later known as “The Xena Trilogy” though the episodes were not aired as a trilogy. In the second episode of the “trilogy” Xena and her lieutenant have a disagreement about killing a baby during a village raid. To her army’s disapproval, Xena saves the baby, but when she attempts to return to command her army, she is rejected. Still intent on killing Hercules, she fights him only to be bested. He spares her life because Salmoneus had suggested that she is not as evil as her army because she saved the baby. Hercules tells her that “killing isn't the only way of proving you're a warrior, Xena. I think you know that." Xena leaves but returns to help Hercules defeat her army. After defeating her lieutenant in the final episode of the trilogy and her heart “unchained” by Hercules, Xena sets off on her own to “make amends” for her past crimes. 5

sized Xena cut out in their bedroom, and Annie’s Xena costume (worn when she goes to a past-life counselor). When Maddie, the phony, scam-running past-life counselor, also begins to have past life visions, her assistant Marco says, “You’re probably watching too many episodes.” Maddie replies, “No, I don’t watch that show. A bunch of chopsocky crap” (“Deja Vu All Over Again”). When Maddie, Annie, and Harry find through past- life visions that they are each reincarnated from the three major characters, the characters in the show become real people instead of just fiction. In addition to having their own memories, Maddie, Annie, and Harry gain some of the memories of their past selves,

Gabrielle, Joxer, and Xena, respectively. For Harry and Maddie who doubted the reality of XWP, this makes the subjects of the show real and the stories within it personal history.

“Deja vu All Over Again” and “The Xena Scrolls” are tied together in the Season

Six episode “Soul Possession” when a new scroll is discovered in the Ionian Sea. The scroll is revealed at a press conference given by The Centre for Historical Accuracy of

Key Research in Ancient Mythology, cleverly abbreviated to CHAKRAM, the name of

Xena’s most iconic weapon. The symbolism behind the centre’s name is multi-faceted.

Using the name of Xena’s physics-defying, circular boomerang symbolizes the show’s representation of the cyclical nature of history and interpretation: as new stories are added, history is retold. Aligning a centre devoted to historical accuracy to a weapon perhaps figures both the Centre and the show as a weapon against a singular version of history in the sense that viewers are empowered to rewrite history. The fact that only four 6

people (all women) are capable of wielding the chakram (Xena [in all her incarnations],

Callisto, Eve, and Gabrielle) would then figure for the particular power women have to reconstruct the monolithic narrative of history. I will further discuss reconstruction of the monolithic Western history story in Chapter 1.

The Centre researches Xena’s history and takes responsibility for ensuring the accuracy of the historical record. The discovery of this scroll alters what CHAKRAM and

XWP fans believe to be the correct history of Xena as it contains new information about

Xena’s life in ancient Greece. Harry and Maddie, now married and recently returned from vacation in Greece, receive a notification about the conference in the mail.

Harry/Xena fears he knows which particular scroll has been found and the two head to the conference. Others at the conference include Annie Day, now editor in chief of the

Joxer the Mighty Quarterly, and Barb Binder from WOOSH!, a real-life Xena fan site and archive. The modern-day story line in these episodes presents Xena as a real historical figure whose actions in history are told in Gabrielle’s scrolls, which once found, add to the historical timeline.

The historical narrative of the show is a retelling of history from an alternate perspective, with Xena positioned as the Forrest Gump of the ancient world, present at events ranging from the Fall of Troy to the murder of Caligula. Gabrielle’s narrative fills in the missing perspectives from the stories which celebrate Roman civilization, and positions a female warrior as just as powerful, if not more powerful, than the evil spreading from Rome. From her homeland of Greece, Xena travels across the ancient 7

world often playing a major role in the determining of historical and mythological events the viewer is already familiar with such as the defeat of Goliath, the Battle of Actium, and the Battle of Pharsalus. Xena plays a decisive role in the major battles of ancient history, usually drawing the opposing side into combat and defeating them with her vast knowledge of waging war. Xena’s position as a female warrior impacting the history traditionally understood through men and male accomplishments, undermines the sexual politics of western history and gives control of history’s events to women both in the determining of those events and in the chronicling of them.

In XWP, history and myth are intertwined, each privileged equally in their occurrence. Gods and figures from ancient myths interact with the human characters allowing myth’s role in history to literally play out on the screen. Instead of being simply stories of fantasy, in XWP the myths of ancient cultures are privileged as real events as they might have been for the people living in ancient times. The myths and histories from many ancient cultures are presented and often fused together. For example, after the fall of Troy, Xena meets Ulysses and helps him reach his homeland of Ithaca instead of meeting his Greek counterpart Odysseus. Ancient Greece and Rome are fused again when Xena, Gabrielle, and Joxer face Bacchus and his Bacchae instead of Dionysius and his Maenads. Sheila Briggs would refer to the merging of these two cultures, what I would like to call “Grome-ing,” as the effects of globalization. She states that the cultural hybridity in XWP is a realistic result of the contact of cultures which occurred in the 8

ancient world, thus putting XWPcloser to the historical facts of the ancient world than other narratives which typically keep these cultures separated.

The show presents a very different view of Greece and Rome than is typical for visual depictions of the civilizations which have influenced modem culture. Very rare are images of the white temples, marble columns, and senate buildings often shown in other television shows and movies. Rather, XWP depicts a Greece which is more pastoral and a

Rome which is more bmtal than honored history would tell. In her chapter titled “The

Baby, The Mother, and The Empire,” Alison Futrell notes that XWP differs greatly from other depictions of Graeco-Roman history, which revel in the brutality and oppression built into the foundations of Western society. This is because in the spread of

Rome is equated with the spread of war, death, and suffering rather than with the spread of civilization.

XWP depicts war and fighting, often showing familiar scenes from history and

Xena’s influence on those events. But instead of privileging the victors in these battles,

XWP privileges the ordinary person and depicts what life might have been like during these key moments in history. In the episode “A Good Day,” which is a retelling of the

Battle of Pharsalus, a group of Roman soldiers search a sacked Greek village for spoils but learn that Pompey and his army have already taken everything. For their disloyalty to

Rome and Caesar in allowing Pompey to sack their village, the leader orders the villagers killed. Flanigus, a Greek mercenary in the Roman army now returning home, stops them, aided by Xena and Gabrielle who show up at the perfect time. Caesar and Pompey have 9

brought their civil war to Greece, and Xena wants to ensure they fight and decimate each other’s armies so they will return to Rome. Flanigus doesn’t want to speak of war again, and desires to live in peace with his wife and son, but Xena convinces him that fighting now would be better than feeding two armies of occupation. Xena’s plan involves drawing the two armies into battle near the village. She evacuates the villagers, but tells them to destroy their village to make it worthless to the Romans. Flanigus’ wife is the first to pick up a torch, and the villagers bum their homes down. This episode shows what villagers caught in the middle of Caesar’s civil war with Pompey might have had to live through. And instead of glorifying the military tactics of Caesar or Pompey, the episode glorifies Xena’s cunning and life without war.

Domestic characters in XWP regularly glorify peace and condemn war. In the second episode, Xena saves the son of Darius who lives in a village of people sworn to peace. When Xena wants to go up against the warlord terrorizing the village by fighting his army, Darius tells her “Xena, I went to war once. I went to war. I lost everything I was fighting for.” The villagers hope to make a peace treaty with the warlord Cycnus hoping that he and his army are capable of change as Xena was. While Cycnus remains unchanged at the end of the episode, his son, Sphaerus does give up war and embrace peace (“Chariots of War”).2 Xena too often criticizes war and fighting even though she knows that often fighting evil is the only way to stop it. When Gabrielle takes a vow of peace and refuses to fight anymore, Xena accepts her decision and even defends it. When

2 Sphaerus was uncomfortable with his father’s murderous ways, but did as he was told. After a conversation with Gabrielle, he is encouraged to stand up to his father and choose peace. 10

Amarise, a young Amazon warrior, criticizes Gabrielle’s leadership for allowing Brutus to live, Xena tells her:

Her battle isn’t with Brutus. It's with this [holds up her sword] and with

this [draws Amarise’s dagger] and with war and with hatred. And you

know what? Sometimes, I don't like the way she goes about it. But I’ve

come to understand her. Amarise, you're so young— and when you're

young, ya think the answers are simple to find. You think you’re gonna

find them on the point of a sword? Well, you’re wrong. I just pray that you

live long enough to lay down your sword and look for those answers in

yourself. (“Endgame”)

Even though Xena is a warrior, she understands peaceful resistance and fights for those who wish only for peace. Once a vicious warlord who burned villages for glory, Xena is now a hero who protects family and home, from people who would seek to destroy them.

Xena’s most pervasive nemesis is Rome and the spread of its “empire.” The spread of Rome in XWP is linked with the spread of death, shown in their gradual destruction of the Amazon Nation and their prolific use of crucifixion. Xena herself is crucified twice by Caesar, only one of which she survives. Her resurrection by Eli, a preacher of love, in the next season shows the power peace and love have over Rome and

Caesar’s cruelty. Xena’s battle with Rome takes form with her ongoing feud with Caesar who betrayed her ten years before the start of the show. Wherever Caesar leads his army,

Xena shows up to stop him. She travels to Gaul to capture Crassus, a member of Caesar’s 11

triumvirate, in order to trade him for a warrior of Gaul, Vercinix. When it becomes clear that Caesar is not going to make the trade as he originally promised, Xena plans a prisoner switch. Gabrielle is uneasy with her plan due to the fact that Crassus might be executed in place of Vercinix. When Gabrielle states that she cannot send a man to his death, Xena tells her that “Crassus stopped being a man a long time ago. The village of

Gardenis was his crowning achievement. It surrendered to him without a fight. He then crucified over 100 men, women, and children along the Appian Way” (“When in

Rome”). References to the brutality of the Romans shows the imperialism and the brutality of Western “Civilization” which is typically downplayed in Western interpretations of history and gives voices to those typically silenced by the Western narrative.

In her influential article “Xena on the Cross,” Kathleen Kennedy argues that

XWP’s reconstruction of history and myth is meant to empower the “domestic” sphere which has been previously relegated to the side in history:

Its retelling of key western myths from the perspective of a woman

warrior equally capable of exercising violence ... allows the show to

reinvent those origin stories so that they expose the corrupt bargain

between empire building and the destruction of the domestic and suggests

that justice can be located not in abstract or divine but in the worldly and

often imperfect love formed in domestic relationships. (327) 12

The character of Eve, Xena’s daughter, is perhaps the most explicit example of what

Kennedy is suggesting. The Eve character is a direct response to the Christian Christ figure in that she is the product of a magical birth, is redeemed by the divine power of love, and becomes a messenger for peace. But in contrast to the Christian story, XWP

“locates redemption and love in the birth and rebirth of a daughter not in a divine son”

(Kennedy 322). Eve is orphaned as an infant and is raised as Livia, a Roman warrior.

Kennedy argues that as Livia, Rome’s champion and Octavius’ future wife, Eve represents the “male state” and is representative of the patriarchal power structure. In becoming Livia, Eve became an evil warlord for Rome similar to the evil Xena. But when she is shown the error of her ways, she is reborn into a community of women and gains her mother’s love and her redemption before becoming the messenger of peace. In replacing the traditional male Christ figure with a feminine hero, XWP “shines a spotlight on the sexual politics not only of empire building but also the Christian origin story”

(322). XWP features not just strong women, but women who are capable of fighting the powers of Empire and conquest with both fighting and love. Xena, Gabrielle, Eve/Livia, and others including Boadicea, are all strong women warriors who not only fight, but defeat evil with both strength and love. 13

Xena’s position as a hero within traditional western history allows us to critique that history as well as the inherent misogyny in the Western hero myth.3 In her study of

Xena’s heroism Futrell notes that

The specific targets of Xena’s justice and the social and historical impact

of her actions... separate her from the ancient heroic norm ... By

representing the family and the home as essential to the series’ concept of

‘good’ and as jeopardized by androcentric ancient social, political, and

ethical structures XWP celebrates the traditional feminine sphere, giving

voice to those conspicuously silenced in the ancient texts. (14)

In their reconstruction of myths, the creators, lovingly referred to by fans as The Powers

That Be (TPTB), often reconstruct myths to privilege the feminine sphere which is missing in traditional renditions. In addition to reconstructing Christ as a woman, TPTB also retell heroic literary myths. For example, in the Season Three episode “The Furies,”

XWP depicts an alternate fate of Orestes, who in The Eumenides was obligated to kill his mother to avenge his father’s murder at her hand. In Aeschylus’ version, the Furies inflicted madness upon Orestes for his crime of matricide, but Apollo and Athena defended Orestes’ decision to kill his mother and considered his actions justified on the basis that the father is the only true parent. They believed that Clytemnestra committed

3 Sherrie Inness’ discussion of Xena as a woman warrior is particularly interesting in considering Xena as a modem superhero. As a female warrior capable of defeating her foes without the help of a man, Xena subverts common notions (as of the early 2000s) that a hero must be a man. For more on Inness’ examination of Xena as a modem hero, see her chapter “A Tough Girl for a New Century” in Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture. 14

two crimes: one, she killed her husband, and two, she killed Orestes’ only parent. At the end of Aeschylus’ third play, Orestes is vindicated. When Xena is placed in a similar position as Orestes and is inflicted with madness until she avenges her father’s murder at her mother’s hand, Gabrielle seeks out Orestes to find out if retribution is possible without matricide. She finds him in an asylum, still insane from the madness inflicted upon him by the Furies in punishment for murdering his mother. Xena is able to find a way around murdering her mother, who, it turns out, actually killed her husband to save the life of an adolescent Xena. Xena is able to cast enough doubt over her father’s identity that the Furies believe Ares to be her father. While that possibility raises the question of incest in Xena and Ares’ past relationship, it also means that Xena no longer has to avenge her father’s murder. In its rewriting of The Eumenides, XWP privileges the mother figure and upsets Aeschylus’ and history’s beliefs of the primacy of the father.

XWP also tells a new version of the Beowulf epic in which the “hero” Beowulf asks Xena for help defeating the monster Grindl. It is Xena, not Beowulf who destroys

Grindl, but she does not kill the monster. Rather, Xena reminds Grindl, who is really a corrupted Grinhilda, of who she really is and asks for forgiveness for the crime she committed against her 35 years ago.4 By retelling such classic tales of heroic myth, XWP

4 When Xena first traveled to the Norse lands she stole the Rheingold from the Rheinmaidins and forged a ring of power from it. The ring will give the wearer the power of a god, but those who have forsaken love can wear the ring without falling under its spell and losing that which they value most. Grinhilda, who had not forsaken love, took the ring before Xena could use it, and put it on to get a momentary surge of power to defeat Xena. But she wore it too long. She lost her beauty, turned into a monster, and the ring became useless. Xena got the ring back and trapped Grinhilda in a cave, intent on leaving her there for an eternity to suffer with her ugliness. Grinhilda was able to steal the ring back as Xena was locking her up, and Xena 15

provides a more feminized history and allows viewers the opportunity to access and

critique the “patriarchal and imperialist history of the Western hero” (Kennedy “Love”

40). Characters from the familiar tales are often given a gender change, or the plot is

given a feminist twist. Wim Tiggs suggests that “what justifies the qualification of

regendering as well as remediation is the suggestion that in adapting the stories we are

familiar with from myth or history in such way that male protagonists are replaced by

female counterparts, the viewer is as it were ‘put right’ concerning what ‘really’

happened” (8). This “regendering” is also seen when we meet Xena’s mentor Lao Ma, the female founder of Taoism. XWP calls out the male dominated perspectives within

recorded Western myth and allows the female voice to be heard.

XWP ’s retelling of Western history and myth shows that there are multiple sides

to every story, even the stories that make up history. Robert F. Berkhofer Jr. defines such

reading between the lines of the “great history” as metahistory. Positioning Xena at the

center of pivotal historical moments allows the viewer to imagine different explanations

for the events which make up the “great history.” These explanations are fictional, but

they point out that there is not just one narrative for the events of history. In their

fashioning of history, historians rely on narrative to relate the events which happened and

why they happened. Because the number of artifacts and interpretations for an event can

be endless, historians must pick and choose what to include, and must fill in any gaps in

the story between events. The result is a narrative which tells a version of what happened,

made the choice to leave it with her rather than risk her life. But after 35 years of imprisonment, Grinhilda finally forsook love and gained the power of the ring and became Grindl. 16

much like Gabrielle’s narrative which tells the story of Xena’s life and deeds. Gabrielle’s story of Xena in history dialogs with recorded history, and allows the viewer to imagine the more feminine or domestic side of history and question the construction of the history with which they are familiar.

TPTB’s construction of history through Gabrielle also involves the construction of the figures in history who appear as characters in the narrative. By the time Joxer proposes his own fictitiousness, the viewer is already aware of the Xena Scrolls and their impact on history. Joxer’s question though, puts himself, Xena, and Gabrielle at the same level of fictitiousness as the other historical characters: they are all equally “made-up.” In narrating their interpretations of history and its figures, historians create characters within a narrative. In privileging a different interpretation of the same events, TPTB create different versions of the same characters. And even though these different versions are

(probably) completely fictitious, they nonetheless point out that the characters in history are always simply interpretations.

XWP also shows how identity is read and constructed by the differently other depending on the information available to the viewer or reader. In Season Four, Joxer is faced with having accidentally killed a warlord, Cryton. Already ridden with guilt for having actually killed a person (Cryton is Joxer’s first kill), Joxer is devastated when he learns that Cryton has a son, Armon, who believes that his father is actually a hero:

Cryton the Courageous. When Armon learns that Joxer murdered his father, he wants revenge but Xena asks him to think about who Joxer actually killed: 17

ARMON. Easy— my father.

XENA. That's one point of view.

ARMON. You know another?

XENA. There's always another, Armon. In your dreams, your father was

Cryton the Courageous. But the man that Joxer killed was dirt. Armon,

you don't need that dream anymore. You’re 100 times the man your father

ever was. (“The Convert”)

With this new information from Xena, Armon reconfigures his notions about his father, eventually renouncing Cryton as his father and realizing that Joxer is the true hero for ridding the world of an evil warlord. The ways in which different points of view produce different versions of identity are also seen in the two views of Rome and its major leader,

Caesar. Brutus, for example, is blind to Caesar’s malicious maneuvering within the

Senate to elect himself Emperor for Life. Xena, too, fell for the charming yet ambitious

Caesar ten years before. The differences are cultural: for the Greeks and Xena, Caesar is a dictator, yet for Brutus and the Romans, he is a beacon of the Republic’s ideals before his corruption. Each version privileges different character traits of the key characters.

When Xena opens Brutus’ eyes to Caesar’s intentions, Brutus can finally see Caesar’s evil for himself and begins to plot his murder.

Xena’s character too is often interpreted in multiple ways. When she first turns good, her own mother turns her away because of the “shame” Xena’s actions have brought upon their family (“Sins of the Past”). She believes Xena’s change of heart is 18

only an act to once again recruit an army. Whenever Xena becomes too focused on her enemy, even Gabrielle, Xena’s greatest champion, is often scared that Xena will turn evil again. In the episodes following Xena’s conversion to good, her former “colleagues” still believe she is a warlord, a belief she often uses to her “advantage” (“The Path Not

Taken”). When asked about the rumors flying about her disappearance from the battle field and “working for peasants for no profit,” she cleverly replies, “All part of the cause, boys. All part of the cause. It’s called gaining their trust. Once you do that, you’ve got them right where you want them. There’s profit to be made.” Any good intentions she had are retold as “Draco’s payback for my trouncing him.” And the baby she rescued in the previous episode? She retells the story to state that she “ransomed” the baby. Xena’s skill in battle and her well-known ability to “trounce” any warlord who stands against her means that Xena’s word is gold, and the men do not question her. In this moment, Xena deliberately influences the men’s interpretation of her to keep the “evil Xena” persona circulating. By pretending to be a different version of herself, Xena is able to infiltrate the enemy’s army, and shows how information can be added or omitted when telling a story to influence the audience.

As the viewer watches Xena’s life through Gabrielle’s scrolls-tumed-TV-show, and as Gabrielle’s scrolls spread Xena’s mission, it becomes harder for Xena to pull this trick and hide her mission to do good from warlords. But not everyone believes Xena is as selfless and good as Gabrielle writes her to be. Calligula hates her for taking away his godhood, Athena believes she is trying to destroy the Olympian gods, the Archangel 19

Michael believes she is selfishly avoiding her duties, and even the Amazons at one point think she is after the Amazon throne. As a hero or not, Xena’s name becomes famous because of Gabrielle and her stories. In Season Three, Ares credits Gabrielle’s scrolls with creating the Xena “legend” (‘The Quill is Mightier”). In Season 6, after Xena and

Gabrielle have been asleep for 25 years,5 they run into a group of Bedouins who worship them. They come to find out that Gabrielle’s scrolls have traveled far east and made

Gabrielle “The Battling Bard of Poteidaia” and Xena “The Legendary Warrior Princess.”

The Bedouins have grown up on stories of Xena’s victories and want her to lead them into battle against the Romans (“Legacy”). In writing down Xena and her adventures,

Gabrielle has created a story which has become a what Donald E. Polkinghome calls an exemplar plot,6 first for her own culture and then for the Bedouins. In creating the Xena legend, Gabrielle has become the author of a narrative which shapes her own culture.

According to Polkinghome, the narratives of exemplar plots become the foundation of identity creation within any given culture.

In creating our identities, we continuously (consciously and unconsciously) draw on exemplar plots and their characters by deciding who we want to imitate. The dialog

5 In Season 5, Xena’s daughter Eve is prophesized to bring about the “Twilight,” the end of the Olympian Gods’ reign. In an effort to preserve their future, the gods attempt to kill Eve while she is a baby. To get the gods to back down, Xena, Gabrielle, and Octavius devise a plan to fake their deaths and the death of baby Eve. But before the effects of Celesta’s (a.k.a. Death) tears (which mimicked the effects of death) wore off, Ares takes Xena and Gabrielle’s bodies and preserves them in ice coffins deep in the mountains. The pair remains in ageless sleep for 25 years. 6 Polkinghome states that out of all the stories told in the past, only certain ones are retained and passed down into the present culture stock. The stories within a culture’s stock of tales contain certain elements which resonate with the people of that culture and become the “exemplar plots” which the people continually draw on to shape their own identities. 20

with the stories is ongoing as new stories are internalized and influence identity. illustrates that identity, like history, is a piecemeal of narratives and characters (i.e. the hero, the damsel, the villain), and, as I argue, emerges as a narrative itself to be read and interpreted by others. Identity construction then is always a construction based on other constructions. When drawing on any stories, historical or fictional, to construct our identities, we are drawing not on real people but constructions of them. The more we learn about the multiple and competing narratives of history, the more we can come to realize the complexities of our own constructed and narrativized selves. Identity is fluid because we can change which stories we draw on and which characters we want to imitate. Xena meets Hercules and begins to reconstruct herself by doing good. Her continued quest to redeem herself eventually changes the way others perceive her as well, and she becomes a hero instead of a warlord. XWP teaches us that only by understanding that identity is constructed by both the self and the other, can we reconstruct our identities and become different selves.

The metanarrative of the show and the meta-level awareness of the show within the show mirror the creation and the effects of real history. Gabrielle is the historian within the show who records Xena’s deeds for future generations. She presents Xena as a hero, a doer of good. In Gabrielle’s depiction of Xena, Xena is a super-human mortal with abilities which are impossible, yet not out of the realm of authorial embellishment for creative effect. In contrast to Xena’s heroics, she depicts Joxer as a clumsy “idiot” who always seems to be in the way. Gabrielle’s position as historian allows us to see her 21

construction of each character, and then how those constructions affect the modern-day characters. Originally, Annie Day believed herself to be the reincarnation of Xena, the hero. She is horrified to find out that she is actually the reincarnated spirit of Joxer, the comic relief. But after some research of her own, Annie comes to see that Joxer was possibly portrayed only one way and that he was not necessarily a fool. Throughout the show, Joxer insists that he is a hero, and constructs his identity as Joxer the Mighty.

While we can see that he is read by others as a fool, his position as being mediated through Gabrielle’s scrolls, however makes us question Gabrielle’s portrayal of him.

Gabrielle hardly has anything good to say about Joxer, the bumbling “idiot” who is in love with her, and Xena is the only one who acknowledges Joxer’s sometimes very important role in events. Did Gabrielle exaggerate his bad qualities because he annoyed her? Did Tapert and Rami then portray him as even more clumsy for comic relief? The viewer must now question the validity of each character and their actions which have been, and will continue to be, an interpretation based on Gabrielle’s version of events.

They must read each character for themselves and reconstruct their own versions of each, in turn making the viewer also that “somebody else” who makes up the characters.

In positioning Gabrielle as a metaphor for writing history and its characters, XWP and the Xena Scrolls become an allegory for how we read and write ourselves and each other. On the surface, the explicit story of Xena and her friends seems to be just that: a funny story about what could have happened in history. But when analyzing the metafictional positioning of the story within the story, it is clear that there is an implicit 22

allegory at work in XWP. The show constantly asks us to question interpretations of history and historical documents because the story created in response to such documents and events is a construction based on an interpretation. In Chapter 1 I will show how the alternate histories presented in XWP teach the viewer to reconstruct the common narratives of history and to interpret their own narrative while being aware that their own reconstruction is still just one of many interpretations of the same events and characters.

In Chapter 2 ,1 will show how the metanarrative of the show implies that identity cannot be accurately fixed or known because any interpretation of it is a constructed narrative.

Xena, Gabrielle, Joxer, and every other character are products of the fictional creators’ interpretations of Gabrielle’s “historical” documents, and the viewer has to decide how to read the identities presented. Is Joxer a fool like Gabrielle presents him or is he a hero as

Annie says? Is Xena as heroic as Gabrielle makes her out to be, or is Gabrielle blind to her self-serving intentions?

The many possible interpretations of each character within the show make the viewer question their own interpretations not just of the characters presented, but also of others in “real life.” The implicit allegory of XW warns of the interpretive mediation of not just history, but also of others. In using narrative to both construct and make sense of history and identity, we open history and identity up for interpretation as any other piece of fiction. The implication is that each individual has their own interpretation of the narrative, whether it is of fiction, history, or of an “other,” but because each is a construction, it can be reconstructed. Joxer’s seemingly crazy explanation for Xena’s 23

repeating day in “Been There, Done That,” points out that though we physically exist in time and space, there are versions of us which are made up by others that exist only in their heads. And though we never have complete control over the narratives constructed about us, we, like Xena, can exploit the instabilities of history and interpretation to play an active part in reconstructing ourselves. 24

1. “THE XENA SCROLLS” AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF HISTORY

In Season Two, the writers of Xena:Warrior Princess (XWP) “jump the shark” and launch the storyline two thousand years into the future. In what is a direct salute to

The Mummy, “The Xena Scrolls” episode opens with a 1940s-excavation crew unearthing the “Xena Scrolls” in Macedonia. Rene O’Connor (Gabrielle) plays the Indiana Jones-esq

Dr. Janice Covington; Lucy Lawless (Xena) plays the brilliant Melinda Papas, reminiscent of The Mummy's own Evie Carnahan; and Ted Raimi (Joxer) plays the faux

Frenchman “Lieutenant Jacques S’Er,” actually Jack Kleinman, brush salesman, out to protect the scrolls from the Nazis after getting denied military enlistment.7 The three team up to unearth the remainder of the storied “Xena Scrolls” hidden in an ancient tomb, a search began years before by Covington’s father, whose search was inspired by a scroll he’d found at “another dig site.” Janice Covington is continuing his quest in an attempt to prove that his search, financed by grave robbing, was not in vain. Papas insinuates that the scrolls are myths and stories only, but Covington defensively asserts that the scrolls contain “history.” She states that the scrolls would be the “most important archeological

7 The use of the same actors for multiple roles is a common occurrence in Xena: Warrior Princess. In this episode, the use is to denote lineage from the three main characters of the ancient storyline: Papas from Xena, Covington from Gabrielle, Kleinman from Joxer. Of the three, Kleinman is the only one who knows of his lineage before arriving at the tomb. His fake name “Jacques S’Er,” while sounding French, is simply a clever play on the name of his ancient ancestor Joxer. 25

find of the century,” because they have the power to change the way we look at conventional history.

As it turns out, both Papas and Covington are right; the scrolls contain myths and stories, and history. The stories in the scrolls end up reshaping ideas about history for the

20th century characters in the show, and possibly for the modern-day viewer outside the show. The theory of history presented in XWP positions history as a constructed narrative, one which is sewn together by the historian who has gathered and interpreted artifacts. XWP emphasizes the role of the historian in the history-making process and points out that the history with which we are familiar is comprised of stories. That is not to say that history is a fiction, but that it is constructed, emplotted, and organized according to the historian’s purpose. Hayden White suggests that such choices on the part of the historian are exclusionary by nature, but the history constructed purports itself to be “true.” True for whom? If history is naturally exclusionary, then it doesn’t tell the story of someone and the question arises: what is the history of those excluded from

“history,” and who gets to tell it? “History” relies on a fantasy of totality, on the idea that it is true and true for everyone. XWP shows that any attempt to tell a complete history which applies to all persons and all cultures is a fantasy, and suggests that, the only way to tell such an inclusive history is through a fantasy.

The relationship between history and fantasy is deepened in XWP through its treatment of myth. XWP presents its audience with both history and myth and merges the two together in a fantastical history which nearly spans the globe. Over six seasons, Xena 26

and Gabrielle travel all over the world from their homeland in Greece to the northern lands of Britain and Scandinavia, and East to China and India, and eventually to Japan.

The storyline reaches back into Xena’s past where she traveled across the continent from

Siberia to China and to the lands of the Norse. In each nation, Xena meets new gods, becomes a part of different historical events and myths, and even a practitioner of new religions. XWP is the product of many cultures, many histories, and many myths all packaged together as one fantasy. The fusion of myth and history shows the importance of myth as an origin story for different cultures; in XWP, myth history, and history is both fictional and true. While myths may seem like pure fantasy to an outsider, to people within the culture, they are traditional stories which function as origin stories. Jean Luc

Nancy describes myths as “primal” in that they purport to tell of human origins (45). But those origins are specific to a culture, be it a national culture or a religious culture. The

Greek gods, once worshiped, as deities are now viewed as pure myth. Xena depicts the myths and histories of many cultures (though not always accurately), some of which are marginalized in the traditional Eurocentric story of history which privileges war, territorial expansion, the spread of “civilization,” and male-dominated social interactions.

XWP incorporates so many histories that it seems an impossibility for Xena to travel so far in so short a time period. The impossibility for Xena to feasibly interact with so many cultures mirrors the impossibility for the historian to tell a complete history and parodies the inclusiveness assumed in the Western historical narrative. The sheer number of myths and histories within XWP forces the viewer into the position of historian and shows us 27

that a single, true history is impossible because the number of stories which can contribute to our understanding of history is endless

In the traditional Western view of history, the “western” world is separated from the “eastern” world.8 The West, primarily consisting of Europe and the United States, is usually depicted as advanced, superior, sophisticated, privileged, and backed by divine authority. The East which, depending on who is drawing the map, consists of Asia,

Africa, and South America on the other hand, is depicted as backwards, savage, uneducated, and in need of Western intervention. In Western history, history of Eastern cultures is either written by outsiders who depict them negatively, or is completely left out. And even in Western society, the stories and contributions of less powerful groups are abridged or left out of the historical narrative. For example, the history of domestic society is condensed in most history stories. These groups are then left to write their own histories.

In The Fantasy of Feminist History, Joan Wallach Scott argues that a “fantasy” is the only way for traditionally excluded groups like women to give themselves a history.

Women have been excluded from the historical narrative so a sub-genre— “women’s history”—is the only way to tell their story. This fantastical “history” presumes to include all individuals of that group across space and time and to give them a coherent, singular history. It is a fantasy because it is impossible. This thinking can also be applied to the traditional historical narrative: it does not, cannot, tell the history of everyone. Rather, the

8 See Edward Said’s Orientalism for a complete description of West versus East ideology. 28

traditional western narrative parodied in XWP was constructed by exclusion. Most familiar is the saying “history is written by the winners,” but “history” here is a fantasy if we imagine it to tell a complete story when in reality it has ignored and written out those not deemed active participants. Some details be left out in order to form a comprehensible history, states Hayden White, but that history is nonetheless consciously constructed by the historian to emphasize certain events or themes of his choosing. XWP presents a literal fantasy world which undermines the traditional male-dominated

Western narrative by privileging the female characters in its retelling, specifically emphasizing one who defeats and controls key figures from the Western narrative. By doing so, the show points out that the history we have internalized is constructed and

“made-up,” so to speak, by historians. Considering that a constructed version of history is what our society identifies with, is what gives us a rooted history, the show urges us to ask, “Are we in their heads?” Does our relationship with a constructed history push our present into the realm of someone else’s fiction?

Barthes might say yes. His analysis of history and historical discourse leads to the declaration that “historical discourse is essentially an ideological elaboration, or, to be more specific, an imaginary elaboration, if it is true that the image-repertoire is the language by which the speaker (or ‘writer’) of a discourse (a purely linguistic entity)

‘fills’ the subject of the speech-act (a psychological or ideological entity)” (138).

According to Barthes, the “real” can only be signified by historical discourse, as evidenced by the constant repetition of “this happened, then this happened, then this 29

happened...” This produces what Barthes comes to call the “reality effect” which gave rise to genres such as the realistic novel, the diary, documentaries, historical museums, and photography. These genres attempt to prove that events really did happen. But, the historian’s relation of events is simply a signification of them: the historian “shifts” events and organizes them according to his purpose. This reorganization of history is seen most clearly when historians gloss over certain events, but elaborate on others. Or, the historian may cover 100 years in 10 pages, but spend 20 pages relating events of the past five years. This “de-chronologization” of history is what Barthes calls “paper time”

(130), most obvious when Xena and Gabrielle fight in the Trojan war (~1180 BC) and then travel hundreds of years into the future to meet a young Homer (-850 BC); or when they meet Joseph, Mary, and Jesus on the road before they meet Pheidippides (490 BC) and influence Brutus to murder Caesar (44 BC). In altering the timeline, and positioning

Gabrielle as a chronicler of this history, the writers of the show use Gabrielle to mimic the real-life historian who collects thousands of years of events into one “story.” 9 His

9 It should be noted that while the creators of XWPoften present mythological and historical events out of order, Xena and Gabrielle’s influence on those events usually follow a feasible logic. For example, how did Mary and Joseph get the donkey? Gabrielle gave it to them as a solstice gift in “A Solstice Carol.” How did Hippocrates learn so much about anatomy, Xena taught him some of her tricks in “Is There a Doctor in the House?”. There is one major exception to be noted which is historically impossible. In the episode “One Against an Army,” key battles from the second and third Persian invasions are misrepresented. The Greek army, consisting of both Athenians and Spartans, is defeated at Marathon even though they historically beat back the invading Persians. Now Xena must stop the invasion before the Persians reach Athens. She does not face them at Marathon which would have at least been historically accurate. Instead she tricks them into believing the pass at Thermopylae is blocked by a landslide thus diverting their advance because in XWP, the pass is apparently the quickest route to Athens, even though it is geographically an extremely long detour. She then single handedly holds off what can be assumed to be the third Persian invasion at Tripolis. This gross inaccuracy caused quite a stir amongst historically knowledgeable Xena fans, especially those who identified as Greek (Whoosh!). My problem with the episode does not stem from doubt in Xena’s ability to single handedly defeat an army. Nor does it come from the merging of invasions ten years apart 30

story may be out of order (what Barthes calls a “zigzag history” (129)), or told in paper time like Gabrielle’s, but it represents itself as “real.” The historian remains objective and refrains from including any signs of himself in the text in order to make the narrative more real, which makes historical discourse the only genre which seeks to “tell itself.”

But, because of the historian’s interference, as described above, the absence of the historian in the text is no different than the absence of the author in a novel (132). Thus, we enter into historical discourse as we would any other literary text: it is a narrative made up by the author.

“The Xena Scrolls” begins a modern-day story line in XWP which wrestles with the historical fiction/fact dichotomy and outlines the history-making process. The episode focuses on history to show how historical artifacts are always interpreted and can be misinterpreted. As Dr. Covington reads the scroll her father found to Melinda Papas, a clip from the earlier episode “Callisto” plays with her voice-over narration. The juxtaposition of the two narratives makes it clear to the viewer that Covington has mixed up Callisto, the bad guy, and Xena the hero. Papas corrects her mistake by correctly translating the ancient Greek syntax. Later in the episode, the scrolls are misinterpreted again when a modern-day man, also played by Ted Rami, pitches the scrolls to Rob

from each other. My problem with this episode like many fans is the writers’ erasure of one of the greatest upsets in ancient history and of Leonidas and the 300. If Xena and Gabrielle never met Leonidas, that would explain his absence in the scrolls, but the fact that Xena meets nearly every other historical and mythological figure in the ancient world makes his absence seem more of an oversight on the part of the writers. And if Xena had defeated the Persians at Marathon, then the storyline would be historically plausible. Instead, “One Against and Army” becomes a “what if the Greeks lost at Marathon” type episode instead of a retelling of events which actually occurred. 31

Tapert, XWP’s real-life executive producer. He explains that the scrolls were found in his grandfather’s attic,10 and he believes they are about Joxer. Tapert, reading a scroll, looks up and says, “Tell me more about this Xena.” The screen then flashes to the regular intro, showing the audience that the scrolls will/have already become the show they are watching. As Covington states, the scrolls have “the power to turn myth into history, history into myth.” Within the fiction of the show, Tapert’s interpretation is the one which is produced and distributed as “history.” It is presumed that Tapert’s interpretation is the “correct” one, after all, the viewer has been following Xena for two seasons now and the “Callisto” scroll was produced accurately. But the previous interpretations noted by the modem characters have shown that other translations are possible. And if is so easily misinterpreted, what else in history is based on a misinterpretation?

The misinterpretations of history are further shown in Covington’s interpretation of Gabrielle, her forbearer. Covington was convinced that she was the descendent of

Xena, the one with the power to let Ares, god of war, out of his prison or keep him trapped in the tomb. She’s devastated when Ares tells her that she is descended from

Gabrielle, who he refers to as an “irritating blonde.” The single scroll upon which she based her interpretation of Gabrielle is the episode “Callisto” in which Gabrielle is described by Joxer as “irritating,” and gets herself captured. The idea of Gabrielle as

“irritating” or “annoying” would be familiar to viewers who have heard and seen such

10 Based on the show’s reuse of actors to denote lineage, it can be assumed that this unnamed character is the descendent of Jack Kleinman, who, after an accidental switch of backpacks with Covington, ends up with the scrolls. It is also assumed that since Rob Tapert is playing himself, that Ted Rami is also portraying himself in this scene. 32

descriptions in previous episodes. It is only after Xena, really the spirit of Xena in Papas’ body, explains to Covington that Gabrielle was not useless and that they were best friends, that Covington realizes that “irritating” is only one interpretation of Gabrielle.

The label “irritating blonde” that Ares purports was initialized by Joxer in the episode “Callisto,” and was continuously used by other characters, in one way or another, to describe Gabrielle. That Covington, Gabrielle’s descendent, would take Ares and

Joxer’s word on Gabrielle’s character, even for a little while, shows the power of the male voice in the writing of history. Even though Covington is a female historian, as is

Papas, she immediately assumes the truth in the male version of events. That Xena’s spirit overrides the power of Ares’ assertion subverts the power of the male voice and calls out the sexual politics of history. Papas states at the beginning of the episode that both Covington and herself are living in their fathers’ shadows, and at the end of the episode, Covington admits that she was right. Papas replies, “Well maybe it’s time that we both stepped out into the world and show them what we can do.” The call for other voices, specifically a female voice, in the creation of history is unmistakable. And the fact that Gabrielle is actually the author of the artifacts Covington et al are searching for to change history, shows the underlying presence of the female voice which has been excluded or silenced in the promotion of history.

Though Covington based her analysis of Gabrielle on only one scroll, she assumed that the text contained within the scroll was factual. The kinds of interpretation the historian performs for textual sources is both similar and different from the 33

interpretation of non-textual artifacts. Some texts present what can be assumed to be facts, like court records or census reports, but even these primary sources can disagree on facts, which leads the historian to interpretation or to privileging one source over the other. Others present narratives much like Gabrielle’s scrolls. In the case of the later, the historian must pick out the factual details and navigate around the narrative. But even in narratives or diaries, the historian can pick out facts about life during a particular time and use them in the development of a history. In both cases of textual artifacts, the historian must still construct the story around the text. Such a story might be constructed to tell why the document was written and under what circumstances, or who the possible author might be if the author is unknown.11 In picking out what are presented as factual details (i.e. Ares stating that Gabrielle is irritating) and prematurely fashioning a narrative about Gabrielle, Covington constructs only one possible version of history. Ares’ view of

Gabrielle, i.e. “irritating,” was preserved in the scroll, and for Covington, that fact remained undisputed until Xena’s spirit, perhaps the most primary of primary sources, discredited it. While both views of Gabrielle are fact, Covington ends up privileging

Xena’s view over Ares’.

The full effect of “The Xena Scrolls” is not known until later in the season when

Gabrielle begins to write down Xena’s adventures on parchment. Gabrielle’s love for stories and storytelling was made clear earlier in the series in the episode “Athens City

11 See Berkhofer, Robert F. Jr. Fashioning History for more on textual artifacts in the construction of history. 34

Academy of the Preforming Bards” when she enters herself into a storytelling competition to earn a spot to study at the academy. But when Gabrielle wins the competition, she gives up her spot because with Xena, she gets to “live” stories instead of just tell them. When the pair run into trouble, Gabrielle often points out that such altercations will make a “good story.” The first time Gabrielle is shown writing in “A

Day in the Life,” she is acting out a scene with the Baccai in order to get the description just right. Viewers will recognize Gabrielle’s description of the scene as one from a previous episode. From this episode on, Gabrielle is often shown writing or reading from her scrolls, and toting them around in a bag. Her scrolls are so important to her that in

Season Four, Gabrielle back tracks a day’s journey to retrieve a scroll she left in the bathroom. Gabrielle’s scrolls track Xena’s deeds and their relationship, and the moments in which the scrolls are brought up make it clear that Gabrielle is the author of the Xena

Scrolls. Gabrielle can now be seen as the original author of the entire show, or at least the author of the inspiration for the (fictional) show. Gabrielle’s authorship in XWP has been studied by Wim Tiggs who notes that each episode is “not the ‘reality’ as it actually happened, but a reconstruction based on mediation, namely by one of the protagonists, who may be supposed to have had a biased view” (2). For the viewer, everything is now based on Gabrielle’s view of events: Xena’s heroism, Joxer’s clumsiness, even her own status as a bard are all the result of Gabrielle’s possibly skewed view of events.

In giving original authorship to Gabrielle, the creators allow the show to metafictionally reflect both the narrative process and the history making process. The 35

viewer now knows that the stories Gabrielle is telling and writing down will become the scrolls found in “The Xena Scrolls,” the scrolls with the power to change history which will become the show they are watching. The viewer is privileged with the (fictional) story of how the show was recorded, and since XWP is a retelling of history, the metafictional implication is that the viewer is now privy to the narrative process which makes history. Roland Barthes draws a parallel between the narration of history and

“imaginary narration,” i.e. novels and dramas. Similarly, Anthony Paul Kerby states that

“history relies on imagination for its attempt at reenactment” (95).12 No historical event is intrinsically tragic, it is the point of view of the historian which conceives the event to be tragic (White 84). After all, what is tragic from one point of view might be comedic from another. As previously discussed, Gabrielle presents a more feminist view of history which privileges the domestic sphere, and portrays Rome and other armies as savage and merciless. Traditional Western history on the other hand relegates the domestic to a mere mention or to a footnote, while armies and war are given greater prominence on the page and empires like Rome are given a position of honor for “civilizing” the world with ideals of their republic. Hayden White suggests that historical events are value neutral, and that it is the historian who configures those events as tragedies, comedies, satires, etc.

To transform a tragic situation into a comedic or heroic one, all the historian has to do is shift his point of view. Moreover, we only think of events as tragic or romantic because

12 According to Kerby, historical discourse lies in the intermediary realm between fact and fiction. Like “traditional” fiction, history seeks both closure and completeness; it desires a beginning, middle, and end. Kerby draws a distinct line between history and fiction in that history was witnessed by real people, but states that the two are united by narrative discourse. 36

“these concepts are part of our generally cultural and specifically literary heritage”

(White 85). Emplotting history with specific structures to endow meaning is a literary or

“fiction-making” process (85). The meaning within the structures and the differences between them will differ because “in our time, histories differ depending on whether they are told by the East or the West, the rich or the poor, them or us” (Kerby 94).

Historiographic metafiction exposes both sides of the historical narrative—the histories of the losers and the winners, of women and of men, of East and of West. Such fiction does not deny the existence of the “real” past, says Linda Hutcheon, but it enhances the story making process:

The process of making stories out of chronicles, of constructing plots out

of sequences, is what post-modem fiction underlies. This does not in any

way deny the existence of the past real, but it focuses attention on the act

of imposing order on that past, of encoding strategies of meaning-making

through representation. {Politics 66-67).

The number of events in the past is so numerous that the only way to make sense of them all is to impose order upon them by forming those events into a narrative. Events in the past can be represented a number of ways, depending on who is doing the telling. A conquest can be a virtuous civilizing of the savages or it can be the slaughter of innocents for greed depending on how the facts are arranged and which events are privileged. In positioning Gabrielle’s scrolls—written artifacts depicting an alternate view of the ancient 37

past—as the inspiration for a TV show based on history, the creators show how such historical artifacts are interpreted and positioned in the story of history.

Knowing that events are deliberately arranged by the historian makes it much more difficult to find a sole truth in any version of history. While the “real” past still exists as facts, the stories surrounding those facts can be fact or fiction depending on your point of view. In The Politics of Postmodernism Linda Hutcheon states that it is historiographic metafictions (such as XWP) which call into question the “factual grounding” of history writing (35). Hutcheon argues that the past is accessed through representations—documents, testimonies, etc.—and it is from these representations that we construct our narratives of history. But like Gabrielle, the authors of these artifacts have biases, so the historical narrative fashioned from those artifacts will contain those biases as well. Gabrielle’s narrative offers different points of view or different explanations for events with which the viewer is presumably already familiar. Her historical account forces the viewer to question and hopefully deconstruct the history they have already internalized.

In addition to urging the viewer to rethink history, TPTB teach the viewer how to be a historian. The chaotic narrative structure in XWP forces the viewer to navigate through different continents, myths, and to piece together a nonlinear narrative of Xena’s life and of history. By piecing together the facts presented by Gabrielle, the viewer becomes an honorary historian of Xena, and hopefully, a historian of “real” history by reconstructing their notions about history outside XWP. 38

The postmodern metafiction presented in “The Xena Scrolls” offers one reason for Xena’s absence in conventional history: the scrolls containing her deeds were simply lost, first in Ares’ tomb, and then later in someone’s attic. In the Season Six episode

“Send in the Clones” we find out why Xena never made it into the historical record. Fans of the show use 2000-year-old hair strands found in the tomb where the Xena Scrolls were discovered in the 1940’s to successfully clone Xena and Gabrielle. They use clips from the XWP show to “download” “memories” into the clones. But someone is out to sabotage the experiment and downloads “evil” memories into the clones in an attempt to bring back the bad Xena. The lead scientist on the cloning experiment reveals herself as

Xena’s enemy Alti to the other scientists. She states

I spent countless incarnations enjoying the fact that Xena’s reputation as a

do-gooder was lost for eternity. After she died, I hid the scrolls. I thought I

could just sit back and enjoy the unchecked evolution of evil on earth. It’s

really hit a few high points in the last century. But then, this hideous TV

show starts celebrating her as a defender of righteousness. We’ll see how

long that reputation lasts.

Alti’s deliberate hiding of the Xena Scrolls in Ares’ tomb tells how Xena was lost to history. Linda Hutcheon describes the attention given to the loss of historical events in postmodern fiction the “epistemological questioning of the nature of historical knowledge” (Politics 70-71). All events have the potential to make it into the historical 39

record, but only the ones that are narrated become history. Those not narrated are usually consciously excluded by the historian or they are lost. Because of Gabrielle’s stories,

Xena had the potential to make it into the historical record, but because Alti hid the scrolls, her deeds were lost until Covington uncovered the scrolls. In hiding the scrolls,

Alti had a direct impact on the writing of the historical record.

As it turns out in “Send in the Clones,” the scientists have not created clones, but rather they have actually managed to bring back the real people. When the fans have the clones watch episodes of XWP,it becomes apparent that they remember more than the scenes they were programmed with. “That’s not how it happened,” says Xena of one scene. “I woke you up before I went to Valhalla.” “That’s how I remember it” replies

Gabrielle. Gabrielle also remembers her own writing and takes offence at the idea that others have rewritten her work: “What about this writing? ... They’ve taken liberties with my scrolls!” (“Send in the Clones”). As a clone, Gabrielle now exists in the same

“present” as the show’s viewers and is allowed to offer comment on the stories which she originally wrote. Gabrielle’s commentary suggests that the fictional creators of the show have not simply transcribed but rather interpreted and changed Gabrielle’s scrolls.

Whether for artistic effect or simple misinterpretation, the fictional creators of XWP have not, according to Gabrielle, created an entirely accurate show. The scientists are stunned to find that they have created the “real” people, the ones with access to the real historical record which, much to Gabrielle’s chagrin, was not told correctly in XWP. Here again, we see the power of interpretation of historical artifacts in the creation of a historical 40

narrative. Gabrielle’s version of events as told in her scrolls, while not necessarily true or correct, were interpreted as all sources inevitably are. Historical narratives are unstable because as the teller changes, so does the story.

Gabrielle has always been protective of her work: in “The Play’s the Thing,” she remains adamant that her story of peace be staged without embellishments like sex and gore. But she too is historically guilty of exaggeration in her writing. In “The Quill is

Mightier,” her scroll is enchanted by Aphrodite so that anything she writes comes true.

But when Gabrielle uses expressions and metaphors to enhance her writing, unexpected consequences ensue and her writing wreaks havoc on the village. It is only by writing events exactly as they happen that the scroll is unenchanted and things are put right in the village. In the same way, all historical narratives are the product of interpretation and embellishment. Different than a list of pure facts, a story of history always contains some level of interpretation by the author. Artifacts are interpreted by historians and the

“history” story may be elaborated in some places and condensed in others. Either way, the story can never be entirely accurate, something creators are making quite clear. The XWP presented to the clones is a historical fiction, a genre of fiction which is based on history and fact, but is, as Gabrielle points out, full of creative “liberties.” These fictions rely on history, but do not, and cannot, portray it accurately. Dramatic movies like Gladiator, or TV shows like Rome, try to portray the look and feel of history through 41

location, costumes, and language.13 Parodies like Mel Brooks’ Robin Hood: Men in

Tights call out the inability of historical fiction to ever be completely accurate. Mel

Brooks specifically calls out Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves for intentionally not giving

Robin Hood (played by Kevin Costner) an English accent. In the Men in Tights version,

Robin Hood (Cary Elwes), declares that he is a better Robin Hood because “unlike some other Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English accent.” While the English accent might be the only historically accurate element in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, the line makes it blatantly clear that the Prince o f Thieves version is not any more accurate. XWP also parodies fiction’s inability to portray history correctly. The location is wrong, the costumes are too gaudy to ever be considered historical, and let’s not forget Aphrodite’s anachronistic bra and panties. These elements make it clear that the show is fiction, but within the show, this fiction is presented as history. Whether or not the fictional fans believe these inaccurate elements to be a part of history is unclear, but they do believe that the show accurately depicts Xena’s life and her role in history. Historical fictions show what life might have been like during certain time periods but as TPTB point out in

XWP, these fictions are just as inaccurate as the historical narrative.

In positioning Xena as a historical figure within a familiar historical past, the creators of the show insinuate that there is always more to the historical narrative than what is told. According to Joan Scott, this constant incompleteness is because of the exclusion inherent in history, which “undermines the historian’s ability to claim neutral

13 See Fashioning History by Robert F. Berkhofer Jr. for more on history’s role in television and cinema. 42

mastery or to present any particular story as if it were complete, universal, and objectively determined” (qtd. in Bunzl 46). We see this theory at work in XWP in the episode “The Giant Killer” which depicts Goliath’s side of the biblical story and paints him in a much more positive light than the traditional David and Goliath mythology. We also see Xena and Gabrielle sympathetic to both the Trojans and their Greek countrymen during the Trojan War. In constructing his narrative, the historian must choose which events to include in order to serve his ends. For example, an account of King David would not traditionally include Goliath’s past or his circumstances. But learning about his possible motives may alter our perception of the giant.14 Similarly, when both sides of the

Trojan war are understood, blame is a little harder to lay on any side in particular.

According to Martin Bunzl, a change “in the set of descriptions true of the past generates the ‘retroactive re-alignment of the past’” (34). In other words, because of the openness of the future, there is no sense in which a full description of the past is to be had. Every time new information is introduced, our entire perception of the past is altered as shown in Covington’s new appreciation for Gabrielle, the “irritating” blonde. Both theories show history to be a story which is incomplete and ever expanding.

14 In XWP, Goliath’s family was murdered, by Gareth, another giant, while he was helping Xena in battle. Xena feels that she owes Goliath her life because he saved her when he should have been protecting his family. Goliath spent the next ten years seeking revenge against Gareth and working to save money to track him down. Unfortunately, he took a job with the Philistines believing they needed protecting from the Israelites. Xena is nearly able to convince Goliath to change sides, but Dagon, captain of the Philistines, plays on Goliath’s hatred for Gareth and promises Gareth’s location in return for defeating the Israelites. It is not clear if Dagon was being truthful about knowing where Gareth was. Goliath’s painful past makes him a much more sympathetic character, even though he is still consumed with hatred for Gareth. 43

This realignment of the past is also seen in the episode “Soul Possession” when

CHAKRAM Laboratories hosts a press conference to introduce a “revolutionary” new scroll detailing new information about the life of Xena, Warrior Princess. Fans of the show at the conference are excited about the possibility of new episodes. (New information means new episodes, which means Season Seven, yes?) While the fans do not get their wish for more episodes, Doctor Delany does revel the information contained within the scroll, and it changes the entire timeline of Xena’s history, both within the show, and outside the show. Doctor Delany reveals that the scroll was not written by

Gabrielle, but by Joxer, and that Xena used the scroll to hide a marriage contract between herself and Ares. The press doesn’t believe him: the webmaster from WOOSH! (a real- life Xena fan site) says that Xena would “never subscribe to the subjugating regime of marriage.” CHAKRHAM, too, was originally concerned with the authenticity of the scroll in light of the all the “fan-fiction” which pretends to be based on real scrolls. But they did confirm that the scroll and the contract are real.

The scroll accounts for the missing time between the two-part Season Four premier and the third episode “A Family Affair.”15 At the end of Season Three, Gabrielle and her evil daughter Hope appear to have perished in a lava pit in Gabrielle’s last ditch effort to save Xena’s life.16 In the Season Four premier, Xena searches for Gabrielle in the Amazon land of the Dead, but instead of finding Gabrielle, she receives a vision from

15 In cast interviews about the episode, writer Melissa Blake reveals that this episode was written in response to fan questions regarding the missing time between the episodes. 16 The Fates prophesized to Gabrielle that if Xena killed Hope that Xena would die. So, naturally, Gabrielle finds a way to save Xena’s life. 44

Alti depicting her own and Gabrielle’s crucifixion which leads her to believe that

Gabrielle is still alive. It is revealed in “A Family Affair” that both Gabrielle and Hope survived the fall. When Xena asks Gabrielle how she survived, Gabrielle says that she cannot remember, and the episode ends without revealing how exactly Hope and

Gabrielle survived. And as Joxer adamantly pointed out, “No one could have survived that fall” (“A Family Affair”).

Viewers will remember at the beginning of “A Family Affair,” Joxer is seen at the lava pit where Gabrielle fell, tossing in daisies because those were Gabrielle’s favorite.

Xena pops up out of the pit surprising Joxer and telling him that Gabrielle is alive. The next scene shows the pair in Poteidaia and they find Gabrielle. But when Doctor Delany begins to reveal the contents of the scroll, the scene is different. According to Delany, the scroll begins with Xena riding away from the Amazon land of the dead with hope that

Gabrielle is alive, and Joxer, in the throes of mourning, has taken to drink. The scene shows Joxer in a bar, and Xena meets up with him to tell him that Gabrielle is alive.

Along the road back to the lava pit, Ares confronts Xena and does indeed propose to her.

In exchange for Xena marrying him in front of the Fates, Ares promises to look for

Gabrielle. Xena does agree to marry him so long as the marriage takes place at the lava pit where Gabrielle died. “Kinda morbid, don’t you think,” says Ares, “Fitting” replies

Xena. As per usual, Xena has a plan. At the time of the wedding, when Xena is supposed to say “I do,” she instead refuses Ares and jumps into the lava pit. Ares saves her as she knew he would. Xena posits that Ares saved Hope from death because it was his child 45

she was carrying. And that he also saved Gabrielle knowing she would make a good bargaining chip to induce Xena to marriage. Ares says she’s close, but that he actually saved Hope because of a deal he previously made with Gabrielle: in exchange for saving

Hope’s life, Gabrielle gave Ares her soul. The scroll reveals that in order to get Ares to release Gabrielle’s soul and let her live out her life with Xena, Xena agrees to marry Ares in her next life, and the two sign a binding contract. According to Delany, Xena takes the contract and hides it inside Joxer’s scroll before hiding it at the bottom of the Ionian Sea in an attempt to prevent Ares from claiming her as his bride in her next life. She then makes for Poteidaia and finds Gabrielle.

Though Delany’s version of events fills in the gaping hole in the story, it opens up the timeline for debate. In “A Family Affair,” Xena meets up with Joxer at the lava pit. In

“Soul Possession” the new scroll apparently says that she meets him at a bar. Annie Day, the modern-day reincarnation of Joxer and Editor-in-Chief of The Joxer the Mighty

Quarterly, says that according to her research, it was Joxer who pulled Xena out of the drunken stupor. She also says that Joxer was actually very heroic, but he was not accurately depicted in the show. Which version is correct? Given Joxer’s penchant for embellishment, are the events in his scroll accurate? We can infer from Ares showing up at the press conference and Harry/Xena’s concern for destroying the contract that within the show, Joxer’s scroll relates events at least somewhat accurately, and that Xena did make a deal with Ares. It would also make sense that Gabrielle neglects to record the events contained within Joxer’s scroll if she wanted to hide both her and Xena’s contracts 46

with Ares. But considering the ensuing modern-day conflict between Ares and Xena at the conference is pure fiction for the viewers outside the show, the viewer is left with a disjointed timeline and three possible versions of events.

The viewer is supposed to see how history is constructed from artifacts.

CHAKRHAM found the scroll and was able to interpret how it came to be at the bottom of the sea and how the story contained within fit within the already established timeline.

The process mimics the historian who may have to adjust his story based on new evidence. The fact that “Soul Possession” relates a somewhat different opening than “A

Family Affair” forces the viewer to decide which artifact is correct and in essence make their own history of Xena.

The writers of XWP force the viewer to question the character of Xena and possibly rewrite her story in the episode just before the series finale in which Xena will die for the third and final time. I believe that such questioning of an established storyline is representational of questioning an established historical narrative. Remember, in the fictional world of the show, Xena was simply a myth before Covington discovered the scrolls which proved her existence. The fictional Rob Tapert and crew continued the mythic strains in their television show with a superhuman heroine, magical shamans, and powerful gods. If Xena is purportedly real in the fiction of the show, her story has been turned into one like that of King Arthur—more magical than is probable. Robert Scholes compares history and myth by stating that events are saved from “oblivion” by the 47

historian who “turns them into instances of heroic myth” (17). According to Scholes,

“reality” is either lost to “obscurity” or “transformed into mythology” (16). This is essentially what the fictional Tapert has done—turned history into a heroic myth. If we take Scholes’ argument one step further, rather than simply deciding which events make it into the historical narrative, the historian has power to create myth. Historical narrative then, different from historical facts, is myth. And it is these historical myths which are the stories that as Gabrielle states “tell us who we are” (“The Giant Killer”). If historical narrative is inherently mythic, is myth then historical narrative?

According to Jean Luc Nancy, myth was invented to relate stories of origin.

Nancy positions the foundation of people within the foundation of myth: “Myth is of and from the origin, it relates back to a mythic foundation, and through this relation it grounds itself’ (45). Myth is a human invention, or rather, the function of myth—to relate the primal—is a human invention, made up to tell a fiction which presents itself as undisputable fact. Thus, says Nancy, the primacy of the myth or the foundations it relates are inherently problematic because they are fiction. When Mavican is fighting Xena and

Gabrielle in an attempt to prove herself to Ares, she tells Gabrielle, “Haven’t you ever been struck— with the difference between us and the gods? They’re immortal because we make them that way” (“Succession”). Even though she is fighting to be Ares’ right hand women, Mavican knows that the gods are a human construction, and that humans could change the way they “make” or construct the gods. Xena and Hercules, too, often say that there will be a time in which humans no longer need the gods (in reference to the 48

Olympian gods). XWPsubverts the foundational notions of myth and points out that mythic stories are human constructions.

Myths, though they can be known by many cultures, are culture specific and provide a story of origin or an imagined history which echoes into future generations.

These echoes provide “the scenes for the imaginative identification through which a new generation establishes its rootedness in the past” (Scott 119). Each generation looks to the past in order to construct its identity in the present often drawing on fictional myths. The history presented in XWP is inextricably tied to this idea of mythical historical origin. In addition to Xena’s fictional role in the history of Rome, the show brings in the religions

(what I will continue to call myths) of no less than six cultures as Xena travels across the ancient world. She maintains a tenuous relationship with the Greek gods, until she ends up destroying many of them in an effort to save her daughter’s life. She travels to

Scandinavia where we find that she once held the position of Valkyrie and was the former lover of Odin, king of the Norse gods. Xena and Gabrielle travel to Chin (China) where Xena attempts to avenge her former mentor, the fictional founder of Taoism, Loa

Ma, and in the next season the pair travels to India where Xena teams up with Krishna to save Gabrielle and Eli, an unmistakable Christ figure. As it turns out, Xena is also supposed to rule over Hell when she kills Mephistopheles, but instead she corrupts the archangel Lucifer and tricks him into taking her place. 17

17 Xena’s place in such a mythical world arguably makes her a character in a historical romance instead of a historical fiction. But that is a question beyond the scope of this paper. 49

Shelia Briggs states that the numerous religious cultures included in is part of the show’s “cult” origins: ‘ Xena Warrior Princess maximizes cult television’s potential for hybridity by bringing together in its storylines and visual elements motifs from a wide variety of cultures” (179). The syncretism represented in however, is symbolic not just of the historical fusion of cultures, but also of the mixture of religions which formed the Roman pantheon, and the Israelitic and the Christian religions. As

Briggs notes, XWP is careful not to identify with any one particular religion too much.

Instead, viewers must decide whether or not to invest religious meaning into what they see on the screen (174). Does Xena’s desire to do good, death on the cross, subsequent resurrection, and ultimate sacrifice for the salvation of others make her a Christ figure?

Does the obvious homoerotic subtext between Xena and Gabrielle negate any divine characteristics of the Xena character?

Briggs places Xena alongside other heroes of 90s television who are transformed by their fantastical circumstances. Xena exists in a world of myth and magic, and the religious allusions serve as a vehicle for describing her transformation. The show’s opening credits state that she is a “hero” and that her “courage will change the world,” a world in “turmoil.” Xena is a kind of superhero, though she is completely mortal unlike

Hercules, her real mythological counterpart. Despite being fully human, Xena possesses

“many skills” (her own words) such as superhuman strength, full knowledge of medicine and human anatomy, and uncannily heightened senses. Xena can snatch a flying arrow out of the air, jump impossible distances, and use pressure points to stop the flow of 50

blood to your brain. She also happens to be the only one who can best the god of war in a fight. Xena’s strength, bested only by Hercules, subverts traditional notions of the male superhero, and her resurrection from Hell doesn’t seem out of place in the campy world where she can also summersault from a tree onto a boat at sea. The moments when religion is foregrounded serve to bolster Xena’s growth as a character. When Xena dies for the first time, she is greeted in the afterlife by the spirit of M’Lila, her former prisoner turned friend. M’Lila convinces Xena that it is not her time to die: “You have a destiny,

Xena. But you have to choose it.” She tells Xena that her past as a warlord can help her defeat evil: “Now that you know evil— were evil— you can fight evil.” Xena and the viewer overhear Gabrielle telling Xena to “remember [her] destiny. Remember it and fight” (“Destiny”). Not only is Xena literally transformed back into the world of the living, she is also set more firmly on her quest to fight evil and suppress her dark side. In another episode, Xena uncharacteristically prays to Krishna.18 She needs Krishna’s help to defeat a daemon and rescue Gabrielle and Eli. It is Krishna who helps Xena embrace the “Way of the Warrior” and helps her understand that her fighting for a just cause is her destiny (“The Way”). Though Xena interacts with many religions and gods, she does not embrace one too fully, and nor do TPTB, but religion helps to symbolize for the viewer the transformations Xena goes through.

Whether or not Xena is a Christ figure is debatable, and a subject which I cannot do justice to in this paper. The inclusion of such religious imagery, however, is of great

18 Xena does not rely on religion or the gods as a rule. She advocates that humans create their own destinies and do not need the gods. 51

importance because it shows the relationship between myth and history. When Xena’s mysteriously divine pregnancy is foretold to bring about the Twilight, the Olympian gods join together to kill Xena before her daughter, Eve, is bom. Eve was conceived by the spirit of Callisto, Xena’s original enemy turned good when Xena redeemed her while in

Hell. Such circumstances could arguably make Xena a Mary figure and Eve another figure for Christ in the series. The Fates prophesize that Eve will bring about the Twilight of the Gods, and the Olympians, already scared of the spread of the religion of the One

God, believe that the Twilight will mean their deaths. When Xena and Gabrielle fake their deaths and Eve’s to stop the gods’ attacks, Ares places Xena and Gabrielle in ageless sleep for 25 years. During that time, Eve has become Livia, The Bitch of Rome, a feared warrior for the Roman Empire and Ares’ lover. Awakened from their sleep by a ray of sun melting their ice coffins, Xena and Gabrielle leam of Eve’s turn to darkness, and Xena sets out to redeem her daughter. During a fight, Livia is transformed by a divine ray of light and turns good. She is baptized by “The Baptist,” and begins atoning for her crimes by becoming The Messenger of Peace and preaching the love of the One

God.

During Eve’s baptism, Xena is given the power to kill gods, and when the

Olympians leam that Livia is Eve, they launch their attack anew. Many, including Athena and Artemis are killed by Xena. The gods believed that Eve would bring about their deaths, and their attempts to stop that ensured the very destiny they tried to avoid. What they did not know was that the Twilight Eve would begin was not their deaths per se, but 52

rather a time when humans “would no longer need the gods...and [the gods] would lose their power” (“Seeds of Faith”). Eve marks the Western world’s turn from paganism to

Christian monotheism. The gods who survive the twilight will eventually fade into mythology, metaphorically losing their power as prophesized, as people begin to rely on them less, and as the religion The One God spreads.

The fading of the Greek Pantheon and its subsequent replacement with monotheism as fictionally shown in XWP is what Nancy would call “the interruption of myth.” The interruption of myth occurs when the myth becomes a myth, when it is seen as fiction instead of indisputable fact. Nancy makes the claim that there are no new myths, but that literature functions just as well as myth, if not better than myth in telling us about ourselves because by its very definition literature is fiction and thus already interrupted. Literature can still function as a myth in the community by providing foundational origins stories which do not purport themselves to be indisputable fact.

Nancy argues that literature can function as a non-totalizing myth in the community, as myth that can allow for questioning and change. In a literary work, there is both myth and literature, and the literature interrupts the myth “to the extent that literature does not come to an end” (64). Like myth before it, literature is passed on and shared from author to readers, and from readers to other readers. Unlike myth, literature is never ending; it is passed around, read multiple times in multiple ways, included in other narratives, and the story, no matter how long or how intricate, is never complete. In its inclusion and expansion of popular myths and historical narratives, XWP shows the inherent dialogic 53

nature of literature. It is literature and writing which recount our history now, since myth has been interrupted, and we “understand ourselves and the world by sharing this writing” (Nancy 69). As Gabrielle says, stories “tell us who we are” and provide a

foundation for our understanding of our origins.

Xena’s treatment of myth foregrounds it as part of history: myth history. While myths may seem like fantasy to outsiders of the time and place, myths tell distinct stories

of a culture’s origins and history. While myths are fiction purporting themselves to be truth, literature provides the same function as myth while being completely forward about

its own fictitiousness. XWP’s inclusion of myths, interrupted fictions, within history,

shows that any story which purports to tell origins is a fiction. There is no single story

which can tell a culture’s origins because, as we’ve already seen, any story constructed is

inherently exclusionary. In being a type of literature, XWP is upfront about its

fictitiousness and shows that all origin stories, mythic or historical, are constructed

fictions. In this way, XWP is more truthful than the myths or histories it retells. It is up to

the viewer to navigate the original myths and retellings and construct a story for

themselves.

In this chapter, I have shown how XWP uses the character of Gabrielle to show

how historians construct narratives of history. Her emplottment of history and her

privileging of traditionally excluded persons and cultures encourages the viewer to

rethink traditional notions of history. History, though constructed from real events, is a

fiction in that any narrative constructed to tell a history is always incomplete because of 54

the exclusions necessary to form a coherent narrative. s retelling of key historical and mythical events serves to urge viewers to read between the lines of these narratives to realize that they are incomplete. The notion of a “great history” which encompasses all peoples is a fantasy, one which XWP clearly points out in Xena’s travels. XWP shows us that any narrative of history is in a sense a fiction made up by the writer; the events and characters within the narrative are interpretations which only exist in the head of the writer. Though a “great story” of history is a fantasy, XWP shows us that by incorporating more narratives into the story, it can become a more complete story. 55

2. “THE GREATEST HERO THAT EVER WAS!” THE SELF AND IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION

In the Season Four episode “Takes One to Know One,” Xena arrives at her mother’s tavern to celebrate Gabrielle’s birthday with her family and friends. Instead of a

celebration though, the episode quickly turns into a rendition of Clue when her mother’s

only tenant, the bounty hunter Ravinika, is found dead, apparently stabbed in the chest.

Discord, newly made Goddess of Retribution, tasks Xena with finding out who among

Xena’s closest friends is the murderer because, after all, “it takes one to know one”

(“Takes One to Know One”). Accusations fly as everyone tries to pin the murder of the bounty hunter on someone else and construct the story of how they did it: “It was Minya

in the bedroom with the knife!” concludes Joxer with certainty. Xena is able to use her knowledge of her friends and of Ravinika’s own murderous nature to put the clues together. As it turns out, Argo, Xena’s horse, kicked Ravinika in self-defense,

inadvertently causing her death.

Xena’s past identity as a murdering warlord more often than not helps her in her

quest to redeem that very same past. Discord was not incorrect in asserting that Xena is a

murderer; she was a murderer in her past and that past is an integral part of her present

hero-self. Within the fantastical world Gabrielle and TPTB have constructed for us

viewers, the characters are also constantly constructing their identities. Particularly, 56

Xena, Joxer, and Gabrielle each construct themselves as heroes.19 But when compared to the traditional romantic hero the outside viewer can see that each falls short. Xena is a superhero in strength and skill, and the closest to Frye’s description of a romantic hero.20

But she is a flawed hero whose murderous past often creeps up and causes her to suppress her new-found morals. Joxer has created a reality in which he is “the greatest hero that ever was,” but it is obvious that he is by far the worst warrior in the ancient world.

Gabrielle is the village girl who wants to be like Xena, but is constantly overlooked because of Xena’s reputation. In their authorship of themselves as heroes, Xena, Joxer, and Gabrielle provide a counterpoint to the romantic hero: Xena reconstructs herself as a hero, but she constantly battles a past which will eventually kill her; Joxer writes a reality in which he is a romantic hero, but his constant failings make him a relatable figure whose heroism lies in his perseverance despite his shortcomings; Gabrielle rewrites herself as a warrior-poet who tells stories of Xena, her friend and mentor. Gabrielle literally constructs Xena on paper, but she also figuratively constructs the warrior princess in serving as Xena’s moral compass and keeping her on a heroic path.

Xena: Warrior Princess (XWP) presents a model for identity which is based on narrative. When forming their ideas about the characters in XWP, the viewer uses

19 My criterion for “hero” stems from Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces and Northup Frye’s theory of romantic myth. 20 “...the hero of romance is analogous to the mythical Messiah or deliverer who comes from an upper world, and his enemy is analogous to the demonic powers of a lower world. The conflict however takes place... in the middle, and which is characterized by the cyclical movement of nature. ... It follows that any attempt to prove that a romantic story does not resemble, say, a solar myth, or that its hero does or does not resemble a sun-god, is likely to be a waste of time” (Frye 187-188). 57

evidence from each episode to form narratives about each based on dialog, actions, and

the actor’s portrayal of the character much like how the characters form opinions about

each other based on actions and personalities. Like history, identity is a narrative

constructed from interpretation of facts, and, like history, it is in a state of flux as new

information is added and the narrative is revised. The self uses its readings of others,

societal expectations, and narratives to construct an identity-narrative which is then presented to others. The other makes sense of the self by constructing an interpretation of

that narrative based on actions, personality, dialog, etc. Identity then, originates outside the self and continues as a dialog between the self and the other. Identity formation begins with an internalization of narrative, be it literature, the culture-stock of one’s

society, or narratives formed of other people. The events in one’s life also help to form

the self-narrative which is presented to others and interpreted by them. Though we have

no control over the narrative others form about us, we can read their interpretation and

use it to reconstruct our own identity narrative. By showing three characters who

continually reconstruct themselves as heroes, shows us that not only is identity

constructed by the self and other through narrative, but that the identity narrative is in a

constant state of revision. 58

Xena the Warrior Princess

Xena’s identity is constructed for the viewer before they even begin an episode.

It is clear from the title of the show that Xena is a warrior. In fact, she is the “Princess” of warriors. As Stacey D’Erasmo puts it:

We don’t need another hero, except for Xena, Warrior Princess. Like

something out of Russ Meyer combined with Betty Page and projected

onto the walls of the Clit Club, Xena is full-tilt, strap-on, Greco-medieval

realness, as much superfreak as superhero in her leather minidress and

breastplates, her thigh-high lace-up leather boots, her fetching way with a

spear. (47)

Xena is a hero for everybody with her ability to defy gender norms, rewrite history, upset

sexual stereotypes, and smash the patriarchy all while looking sexy as hell in a leather

minidress. Xena is the hero the world “cried out” for, the one whose courage will save the

world. The title “Warrior Princess” stems from the title of the Hercules episode, “The

Warrior Princess,” in which Xena made her first appearance. We learn in that the

name was given to her during her days as a warlord, but it is not how she refers to herself

after her turn to good. Xena was a warrior so feared she was described as coming down

“out of the sky in a chariot, throwing thunderbolts and breathing fire” (“Sins of the

Past”). But when she meets Hercules, he tells her that “killing isn’t the only way of

proving you’re a warrior,” and she begins to reconstruct her identity as a heroic warrior

for peace (“The Gauntlet”). In doing so, her dark past becomes an integral part of her 59

current identity as she seeks redemption for that same past, a redemption Gabrielle says she is cursed to seek but “will never allow herself’ (“The Rheingold”).

Xena’s own series opens with a scene of Xena riding through the countryside haunted by images of her past deeds.21 The next scene shows Xena literally burying her armor in an attempt to bury her dark past (“Sins of the Past”). Since armor is equated with war and fighting in XWP, burying her armor is synonymous with burying the dark part of herself. But when a band of warriors tries to kidnap a group of young women, an unarmed Xena steps in to stop them. After rescuing the women, Xena retrieves her armor and becomes a warrior once more, but this time as a warrior questing to do good and to atone for her past. When Xena attempts to return to her home town of Amphipolis, her mother is not welcoming. Xena’s exploits as a warlord have ensured her ostracism from the village she once called home. Cyrene, her mother, tells her, “I don't think anything’ll ever take away the shame and sorrow you've brought on your kinsmen.” Xena replies,

“Probably not. But I'm gonna spend the rest of my life trying” (“Sins of the Past”). Alison

Futrell points out the most notable aspect of Xena’s quest: Xena’s journey largely conforms to the traditional mythological “hero’s journey” storyline, but it also relies heavily on “American” ideals of the heroic quest by stressing “atonement and redemption, relying on the selflessness of the hero rather more than is typical for Graeco-

Roman mythology” (13). The implication is that Xena will never escape her dark past, but her past is precisely what fuels her quest for atonement.

21 Xena was originally supposed to die at the end of the third episode of Hercules' “Xena Trilogy,” but the character’s popularity and back story made her the perfect candidate for a spin-off. 60

Xena began her journey as a warrior when her home village was raided by the

warlord Cortese. Determined to save her family and friends, Xena organized a militia to

stand up to the warlord, and the fight cost her brother his life (“Death Mask”). Knowing he would return again, Xena then began her career as a raider to protect her village from

future invasions. “And then somewhere...I changed,” she says. She went from raiding for protection to raiding for the fun of it. Years later, Cortese takes credit for Xena’s violent reputation: “I created her” (“Death Mask”). While it was Cortese who created the

warrior, it was Caesar who turned her into the vicious warlord known as “The Destroyer

of Nations.” When Caesar seduced and then betrayed Xena ten years prior to he

crucified her and broke her legs. M’Lila, a stowaway, rescues Xena and takes her to a healer. She tells Xena she saved her because it “was not [her] time to die.” When

Caesar’s men find them, M’Lila is killed and Xena avenges her. She says to the man

dying in her arms, “Tell Hades to prepare himself. A new Xena is bom tonight. With a

new purpose in life: Death” (“Destiny”). The death of Xena’s friend and Caesar’s betrayal transforms Xena into a warrior bent on revenge. In this moment, Xena becomes

the “Destroyer of Nations” and begins her bloody campaign across the ancient world.

Xena’s child with Borias begins her transition to good which is completed in

Hercules The Legendary Journeys ( HTU ). At first, Xena does not care for her unborn

son the way that Borias does: “This child is nothing compared to my empire!” The

Destroyer of Nations would rather risk her unborn child than risk the morale of her army

by allowing them to see her weakened by pregnancy (“Past Imperfect”). When Xena 61

betrays Borias’ trust, Borias leaves her. He returns with his army to see his son bom, but is killed in the attempt. Later, Xena will note that Borias “showed me the hatred I had for myself. He showed me the love that someone could have for a child.” Xena gives up her son knowing that if he stays with her, he will become evil, like her. She gives the child to the centaurs she had previously betrayed stating, “If he stays with me, he’ll become a target for all those who hate me. He’ll leam things that a child shouldn't know. He’ll become like me.” Even though she was not ready to admit it at the time, Xena knew she was evil, and wanted to ensure that her child did not know her as a deceiving warlord.

When Xena is later faced with killing a child as seen in HTU, she cannot kill it, and her army betrays her. Even as a warlord, Xena never allowed her army to kill women and children.

When she turns away from war towards peace and justice, Xena must rewrite her identity so that others no longer see her as an evil warlord, and more importantly so that she no longer sees herself as a monster. Anthony Paul Kerby stresses that recollection of one’s past always involves an interpretation of that past: “self-narration is—and this needs stressing—an interpretive activity and not a simple mirroring of the past” (7).

Before her change, Xena interpreted her past actions as righteous or glorious. Now, from her new vantage point as a hero, she sees them as abominable. When she returns home looking to once again save her village and find peace, her mother does not believe she has changed and turns her over to the villagers who want to stone her. A guilt-ridden

Xena was about to let them kill her before Gabrielle stepped in to save her. 62

It was Hercules who first helped Xena see that she could still be a warrior and not kill people for profit. Xena internalized Hercules’ self-construct and became a hero like him. And it is Gabrielle whom Xena credits with keeping her on the path of righteousness. Xena often describes Gabrielle as “pure,” or “good,” and though Gabrielle wants to be a hero like Xena, Xena tells her “I want to be like you” (“One Against an

Army”). Without Gabrielle as her moral compass, Xena believes that she will slip back into her old ways of fighting for glory and blood. According to Charles Taylor, humans exist in a space of ethical questions and assess themselves in relation to those questions and standards. In XWP the act of waging war provides a dividing line between the heroes and the villains: the villains fight for greed and glory, and the heroes fight only to stop the villains, if they even fight at all. In relation to these ethical questions such as war, we

“devise, or accept, or have thrust upon” us descriptions of ourselves which define who we are. It is these descriptions which situate us relative to standards or obligations we cannot escape and determine how we act in certain situations. Taylor states that “To escape all standards would not be a liberation, but a terrifying lapse into total disorientation. It would be to suffer the ultimate crisis of identity” (305). To not know where one stands on these ethical issues is to lose one’s sense of self. Xena uses Gabrielle as a moral signpost to help her see where she should stand on questions of ethics. She knows that Gabrielle’s instincts are selfless and tries to do as Gabrielle would do.

Paula S. Nurius also describes the self as a product of external influences. Who we are in a given moment is dependent on our response to the moment. Because memory 63

structures about the self are limited like other memories, only a small portion of the total self-concept knowledge is available to us at any given moment. Certain events or situations will trigger dormant schemata and thus we will feel hurt or ashamed in moments of embarrassment or proud in moments of accomplishment. Because our sense of self changes based on the situation, i.e. ashamed or successful, Nurius argues for a

“variety of personal realities” rather than a “single ‘true-self” (270). Xena continually struggles with her past self and certain situations trigger her “evil” tendencies. In the episode “The Price,” Xena and Gabrielle must help the Greek army defeat The Horde, a tribe of warriors so fierce that even Xena’s old army ran in fear. With so few soldiers left to defend the garrison, Xena takes command and rallies the troops. But in doing so, she becomes the warlord she once was. When Xena orders that the sick and dying men are to receive no food or water, Gabrielle questions her:

GABRIELLE. Who are you, Xena? What happened to the Xena that I

know?

XENA. That Xena can’t help us now. If losing her is the price for saving

us all, I’ll pay it. It’s just a part of me I didn’t think I’d need anymore.

Later, Xena credits Gabrielle’s compassion for the enemy with enabling her to see the light once more and regain her more compassionate self.

In another instance, Xena sets out to murder Ming Tien, a ruthless tyrant in Chin who has “grown too large” (“The Debt”). Not wanting Xena to throw away the past few years of goodness, Gabrielle stops her and ends up getting Xena slated for execution. 64

Xena believes she owes a debt to Lao Ma, Ming Tien’s mother and the one who saved her life ten years before and tried to save her soul.22 When Xena is able to upset Ming

Tien’s hold on his people, Ming Tien is still alive and she tells Gabrielle, “Don’t worry, as far as I’m concerned, this is all over.” But when Gabrielle leaves, and Ming Tien describes in gruesome detail how he murdered his own mother, Xena makes him “small” old-Xena style. She tells Gabrielle that she was right: “I didn’t have to resolve this with murder” (“The Debt II,” emphasis added). Gabrielle does not find out that Xena killed him until the pair is thrust into Illusia to reconcile their past sins against each other.23 And before they are sent there, Xena even tries to murder Gabrielle because she believes

Gabrielle is responsible for her son’s death. Xena’s lie about Ming Tien bars her from leaving the musical land of Illusia until she confesses her lie and asks for forgiveness:

“Forgive me my debt as only you could. / Forgive me the hate; replace evil with good”

(“The Bitter Suite”). Gabrielle’s forgiveness is necessary for Xena to reconcile her sin

22 After M’Lila’s death, Xena traveled east to Chin with Borias for conquest. Borias wanted to make an alliance with one of the two great houses of Chin, but Xena wanted to kill everyone. Because she messed up both alliance opportunities and kidnapped Ming Tzu’s son Ming Tien, Borias turned Xena over to Ming Tzu. Lao Ma saves her life because she has the ability to see into the souls of others and knows that Xena will become a “remarkable” woman. Lao Ma uses her powers to heal Xena’s broken legs and begins to teach her about the Way, a powerful force of nature. But Xena is too full of hate towards Ming Tzu to hilly embrace the Way. She kills Ming Tzu and tries to kill Ming Tien. Lao Ma defends Tien because he is her son and Xena and Borias leave. Xena feels indebted to Lao Ma because she ruined Lao Ma’s dreams of peace for her land and for Xena’s soul. Xena is sorry she was never the person Lao Ma wanted her to be until after their parting. 23 While in Britannia, Gabrielle is raped by the god Dahok. Her pregnancy progresses unnaturally fast and she has a daughter who also grows up at an unnatural rate. Because the banshees want to protect and nurture the child, Xena believes the child to be evil, but Gabrielle insists that she is innocent. To protect her daughter, Hope, from Xena, Gabrielle hides her in a basket and sends her down river. They discover later that Hope was discovered and raised by the centaurs who also raised Xena’s son Solan. Xena discovers Gabrielle’s betrayal and plots to kill Hope. When Hope kills Solan, Xena blames Gabrielle and tries to kill her. When they fight, they fall into the ocean and are sent to Illusia, a land of illusion where everyone speaks in rhyme and song, so they can reconcile their differences. 65

with her identity as a just hero, to replace the evil of murder with the morality of forgiveness.

Xena continues to struggle with her dark side and is quick to jump to murder when she is angry. When Ares kills Eli in an attempt to stop the Twilight, Xena seeks vengeance and asks angel Callisto for the dagger of Helios, another weapon which can kill gods. She believes it only “fair” that Ares pay for Eli’s life with his own. Callisto tries to stop her from murdering the god of war: “I've spent my time in Heaven trying to reconcile the monster I was— with the being that I am now. And I've come to realize— we are all bom of two natures, Xena— good and evil. The side we choose to nurture—defines who we are” (“Seeds of Faith”). Xena’s struggle with the two sides of herself make her an imperfect hero. Xena shows both Taylor and Nurius’ theories of identity. Her identity as a hero is not fixed and is dependent on the moral situation she is in. To know how she should act in any situation, Xena looks outside herself to Gabrielle as she originally looked to Hercules to become a hero. In her moments of anger, Xena’s dormant evil side overrides her other feelings of ethics and morality and she commits or tries to commit heinous acts of violence. At moments, Xena chooses to nurture her evil side making her identity as a hero situational. But her identity as a hero is also dependent on those around her. As a hero, Xena compares herself to Gabrielle and is influenced by how Gabrielle interprets her. Her struggle with her dark side is a reflection of our own struggle to walk a path of morality or to nurture one specific part of our multi-faceted identities. 66

No matter how hard Xena tries, she cannot escape the dark part of herself, and in fact, she needs her dark past in order to know herself as a hero. Her past provides a constant reminder of what she is fighting against, and without it, she does not know how to be a hero. After their crucifixions, Xena and Gabrielle are resurrected from the afterlife by Eli. But Xena wakes up with no knowledge of the concept of “evil” nor any memory of her life as a warrior. Because of this she does not know her self and she feels “empty.”

Though Xena is finally the peaceful person Gabrielle desired her to be, she realizes that

“Without her dark side, she’s lost” (“Chakram”). Pure Xena wonders if restoring her darkness is a good idea, but Gabrielle says that it is “vital” so that Xena can go on defending innocents. In order for Xena to return to “normal” she must retrieve the

Chakram of Light, a weapon which only a pure soul can remove from the alter and one of the few weapons which can kill a god, and merge it with her own broken Dark Chakram to neutralize its god-killing power in an overt symbol of her own two-sided nature.24 In another instance, Xena puts on the Rheingold ring to gain a surge of god-like power to defeat Odin. But before she can defeat him, the ring takes hold and she loses that which she values most: her memories of Gabrielle and the woman Gabrielle helped her become.

Xena loses all memory of herself, even her own name. The last scene of the episode shows Xena kneeling in a swamp screaming “Who am I?” (“The Ring”). It is only when

24 Ares stole the Dark Chakram years prior and presumably gave it to Xena. The chakram was broken in “The Ides of March” when Callisto threw it at Xena to stop her escape. The chakram severed Xena’s spine and was broken in two. 67

she wakes up a sleeping Gabrielle, her soul mate, that her memory returns (“The Return

of the Valkyrie”).

Memory is inherently tied to the concept of “self.” Each memory, or episode, in

one’s life is ordered and structured into a narrative in order to give meaning to the

identity story. As Donald Polkinghome states, it is this “narratively structured unity

of.. .life as a whole” that provides personal identity and “displays the answer to ‘Who am

I?’” (“Narrative” 143). Xena becomes a warrior for good precisely because of her violent past. She needs those memories to continue to fight for justice and to fight at all. Without

those memories to form her identity as a hero, she is lost and “empty.” Polkinghome

defines “identity” as “the depth dimension of the self that contains a person’s character.”

Identity, or self-knowledge, is built on an appropriation of the past: “Disconnectedness

from the past results in the loss of identity” (144). Xena’s sense of self is tied to her dark past. The memories of who she was, of who she could potentially once again become,

fuel her quest as a hero and help to keep her on the path of “good.” Xena’s past provides

a narrative for her to read and interpret. The narrative formed from her past helps her

construct herself as a hero. Xena’s dependence on her past to construct her “self’ displays

Stephen Crites’ suggestion that “The self is a kind of aesthetic construct, recollected in

and with the life of experience in narrative fashion” (qtd. in Polkinghome “Narrative”

144). The “self-concept” is a “narratively structured recollected self.” The story of the

self is pulled from moments and memories of the past; the more complete the story, the more complete the self. A “complete” self cannot be formed without the narrative of 68

memories. This narrative is in constant dialog with the other as seen in Xena’s reading of

Hercules and Gabrielle.

Our view of Xena is one-sided because the character of Xena was written from

Gabrielle’s point of view. Ever since Xena saved her life when they met, Gabrielle has

been obsessed with Xena as a hero. She acknowledges Xena’s dark side and is even

afraid of it at times, but Gabrielle believes fully in Xena’s redemption. While Xena

believes that Gabrielle is what keeps her fighting for good, Gabrielle believes that Xena

is inherently good. Xena as a heroic warrior is an easy narrative for her best friend to

construct, but it is not the only narrative of Xena. Xena’s actions are interpreted

differently by others who have had encounters with her and have formed narratives which

present a different Xena than Gabrielle’s narrative. In Season Six, Nigel, an investigative journalist, sets out to investigate Xena’s mysterious return to the Norse lands. He notes

the two major narratives of Xena:

Xena— Warrior Princess. To many, she’s seen as a savior— a protector of

the downtrodden— and the innocent. Others, however— see her as nothing

more than a butcher— her hands— stained with the blood of hundreds— no,

thousands— of innocent people. Which is it? (“You Are There”)

In his attempt to figure out why Xena has returned to the North even though Odin had

previously threatened to kill her if she returned, Nigel confronts Xena with her past

transgressions (stealing the Rheingold, turning it into a ring of power, corrupting the

Valkyrie (Grinhilda especially), killing many of the Olympian gods...) without 69

acknowledging either the context surrounding her actions or her rectification of those

transgressions, and asserts that she has returned to kill Odin. He then conducts a series of

interviews with those Xena has previously encountered, but the interpretation of Xena’s

character is dependent on who is telling the story. For example, he goes down to Hades

and interviews Caligula who says “I was a god, a living god. And that bitch took me

out!” and that Xena is “evil” (“You Are There”). In another, Odin reveals that Xena is there for the golden apples (fruit which will turn the consumer into a god), and that Xena wants to make herself a god and return Ares to Olympus and rule as his queen (“She’s

always has a thing for him!”). Archangel Michael says that he wouldn’t trust Xena and that she always puts her own self-interest before the greater good. And finally, in Hell

Lucifer says he “wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for her lies and deceit.” Even those who have a neutral or even positive view of the Warrior Princess are unable to convince him that Xena is not after the apples for herself and for Ares.

Finally, when Aphrodite tells Nigel that ever since her own fall from Olympus mankind has been losing their ability to love, Nigel figures out that Xena is after the

apples for Aphrodite. He says to Xena, “I was reporting on the wrong Xena, Xena.”

When Grinhilda explains Xena’s plan to him, she explains the difference between the

“dark, evil Xena” who had turned her into a hideous monster and the “real Xena” who restored her human form and returned her to Valhalla. But he is still wary when she gives

an apple to Ares and restores his own malicious powers. Xena tells him “you can't have

love without hate. You can't have peace without violence, and you certainly can't have 70

forgiveness without anger.” “You Are There” makes very clear the fact that a person can construct very different narratives about another person depending on the facts they put into that narrative. Like a historian who unearths facts about history and fashions them into a story, people read each other by constructing a narrative from facts they discover.

These facts can be past actions like in Nigel’s investigation of Xena, or they can be expressions, character traits, or dialog gathered during an interaction. The narrative they construct exists only in their head, as Xena tries to explain to Nigel, and does not, in fact cannot, depict a complete narrative.

The series finale, “A Friend in Need Part II” opens with Xena in Japan burying her armor in a direct echo of the series premier.25 The chakram she keeps, however, and that will eventually go to Gabrielle. Knowing that she must become a ghost to trap the evil spirit Yodoshi and free the 40,000 souls he is tormenting, souls she had long ago condemned to his torment,26 Xena walks alone into battle against an army. She is hit with multiple arrows and is finally killed when the general beheads her. While burying her armor in the series premier was symbolic of trying to bury her past, this time, Xena knowingly goes to her death, but leaves her armor, now a symbol of her strength and heroism, behind knowing that her death may not be “undone” (“A Friend in Need”). As a

25 Xena’s armor is a clear symbol of her identity as a warrior. The moments she does not wear her armor are those in which she is pretending to be someone else or wearing a disguise. (Season 5 depicts Xena in different armor because of Lucy Lawless’ pregnancy which was then written in as Xena’s pregnancy.) The two moments in which Xena buries her armor are the moments she turns from her warrior path, and in this moment, she is knowingly committing suicide, something heroes don’t do. 26 It is important to note that it was an accidental fire which killed 40,000 people. Xena started the fire accidentally, and the high winds quickly spread the flames. At the time, Xena also had no knowledge of Yodoshi and his power to capture souls, but she nevertheless takes the blame for the fire and longs to set things right. 71

spirit, Xena tells Gabrielle that they will find a way to bring her back from the dead, as they have done before.27 Xena goes up against Yodoshi without her armor, but cannot defeat him until Gabrielle gives her spirit water from the Fountain of Strength and her armor is returned to her. Xena is able to defeat Yodoshi and release the souls he’d held prisoner. But just as Gabrielle is about to sprinkle Xena’s ashes in the Fountain of

Strength to bring her back from the dead, Xena stops her. Xena says that in order for the souls to find peace, they “must be avenged.” Since it was Xena who condemned them to

Yodoshi’s torment, Xena must stay dead.28 This time, Xena chooses to stay dead, and makes the ultimate heroic sacrifice to atone for her past and in doing so, “redeemfs]

[her] self ’ (“A Friend in Need II”). In giving her life for others, Xena finally achieves the atonement Gabrielle said she was cursed to seek but never allow herself.29

Xena’s construction of herself as a hero was based on internalizing her own reading of Hercules’ heroic character. She rewrites herself and becomes a hero for the innocent protecting the people she once fought to destroy. But she is not a perfect hero.

When the situation is dire or her emotions run wild, her dark past returns. In these

27 Xena dies two times prior to this. In “Destiny” she is hit with a log and dies before being brought back to life after eating the ambrosia. In “The Ides of March” she and Gabrielle are crucified, but resurrected by Eli in “Fallen Angel.” In order to resurrect Xena this time, Gabrielle must retrieve Xena’s body, bum it, and sprinkle her ashes in the Fountain of Strength before the second sunset after death. 28 While the TV version of the episode makes it look as if Xena sent Gabrielle on a mission to retrieve her body for a resurrection she never meant to go through with, the Director’s Cut contains a scene between spirit Xena and her ghost friend Akemi that makes it clear that Xena did originally intend to come back from the dead until Akemi told her that in order for the souls attain a state of grace, not just be free of Yodoshi’s grasp, they needed to be avenged. 29 Because Xena’s self-sacrifice seems out of place with her character, same fans believe that her death was an act of scapegoating on the part of the producers to apologize for Hiroshima and Nagasaki given the mushroom cloud depicted in the episode. The Director’s Cut version makes Xena’s decision to stay dead more context than the TV version, and puts some of the blame for Xena’s death on Akemi who never told Xena that the souls must be avenged until after her death. 72

moments, Xena relies on Gabrielle’s goodness to help her find her way again and keep her on the right path. Xena’s reconstruction of herself as a hero results in a flawed hero who relies on her interpretation of that same past and on the ethics of the other to continue writing her self-narrative.

Joxer the...Mighty?

A direct counterpoint to Xena is Joxer, the bumbling, wannabe hero who can’t seem to ever do anything right, the clown who dubbed himself “Joxer the Mighty.” Susan

M. Schulz describes Joxer’s incapability and underdevelopment as a source of irritation for many fans of the show: “.. .these flaws of character have earned Joxer ridicule and, ultimately, dismissal.. .many conclude that he is a secondary character whose presence is unnecessary to the show and its development of story” (np). For these reasons Joxer is a source of annoyance for many viewers who fail to see his heroic qualities and end up hating him because next to the heroic Xena and her friend Gabrielle, Joxer seems simply inept. Schulz goes on to note that “the basic tenets of his character belong to the realm of

‘comic relief, a title that ultimately condemns the character to act in ways that result in laughter or ridicule by viewers.” While Ted Rami’s portrayal of Joxer’s comedic traits is exceptional, Joxer’s role as the comedic relief is extended into the show with Gabrielle’s portrayal off his character. While Joxer, Meg, his reincarnated self, and sometimes even

Xena, maintain that Joxer is a hero, Gabrielle and the other characters, Tapert and crew, and the viewers all interpret him as a fool. So, who is Joxer? 73

Joxer’s desire to be a hero was formed in response to the culture in which he was raised. The son of a warlord and brother to “The King of Assassins,” Joxer grew up close to war and fighting. In Joxer’s family, and the culture in warriors are seen as powerful and successful. While Xena and many domestic characters do condemn war, a large portion of the population values war and strength of arms. Joxer is of the latter group and thinks that becoming a warrior is his path to success. In Joxer’s family, becoming a warrior is a “family tradition” going back generations (“Callisto”). Joxer’s first brother Jet is a famous assassin and the “over achiever” in the family (“The King of

Assassins”). His second brother, Jace, is a successful popstar, but an embarrassment to

Joxer because he is “different,” i.e. gay (“Lyre Lyre Hearts on Fire”). Joxer distances himself as much as possible from his flamboyant brother and tries to live up to his family’s, and society’s, expectations of success, i.e. being a fierce warrior. So, he dons his hodgepodge of metal attire,30 dubs himself “Joxer the Mighty,” and sets out to make a name for himself. Viewers will learn later that he tried to join every army he could find, but that no one would have him (“Eve”). It is a secret he only ever tells to his son, and only then on the night before a decisive battle. Joxer is the quixotic hero whose attempts at heroism, while inept, are no doubt more relatable to the viewer than Xena’s superhero actions. And no matter how many times Joxer fails at being a true hero, he continually

30 Joxer’s piecemeal armor is reminiscent more of kitchen utensils than actual armor. Jace finally says what viewers have been thinking for five seasons: that Joxer is wearing “a pasta strainer for a shirt” (“Lyre Lyre Hearts on Fire”). Since clothing denotes status in XWP,Joxer’s pseudo armor is symbolic of his incapability. 74

writes a reality in which he is a successful warrior, going so far as changing history to suit his narrative.

When viewers first meet Joxer, he is a warrior intent on doing bad and “making a name for himself’ (“Callisto”). Unaware that she has changed her ways, he tries to join with Xena first, then with Callisto and her army. Callisto tells him he must first prove himself by capturing Gabrielle. He is hilariously unsuccessful. When he is captured by

Callisto, she attempts to force him to murder Gabrielle. When he cannot, she threatens to kill him. Suddenly, the type of warrior Joxer wanted so much to be, is not a perfect fit for him. When he is saved by Xena and learns that she is now good, however, he is indoctrinated into Xena’s heroic world and discovers a new type of warrior. Until he met

Xena, Joxer had been attempting to imitate warlords like his father, brother, and Callisto.

When he sees that he fails to meet their murderous expectations, he reconstructs his definition of a warrior. In Xena, Joxer has a warrior to mimic. He joins with Xena and says that he is “good” now, like her. Joxer’s construction of himself as a warrior grows, and he now sees himself as a warrior-hero “righting wrongs and singing songs,” as his theme song will eventually say.

Like Xena, Joxer’s construction of himself as a warrior is based on the “other.”

Stuart Hall points out that “identities actually come from outside, they are the way in which we are recognized and then come to step into place of the recognitions which others give us. Without the others there is no self, there is no self-recognition” (qtd. in

Peeren 17). Identity is not based within the self; rather it is a transactional process which 75

takes place between the self and the “other,” in Joxer’s case, his family and then Xena.

Peeren describes identity as “an active, creative assignment carried out within a social realm whose relations of domination impose material constrains upon it” (15-16). Joxer is

a product of the society he was bom into, one which values fighting and strength and

equates success with waging war. Though Joxer is not a good fighter, he portrays himself

as such because that is what the “other” has told him to be. Regardless of his lack of skill

in battle, Joxer will continue to insist that he is “Joxer the Mighty” and get himself into trouble trying to save the world. Joxer is so taken in by his playing the part of a warrior that he believes that he truly is a warrior. For him, the reality he has constructed has become the real reality.31 Xena shows us how we continually read others and act in

certain ways based on ethics. Similarly, Joxer reads others and acts accordingly. But

Joxer shows us how to continually read and internalize the other even amidst inevitable

failure.

In Joxer’s mind, he is the “greatest warrior there ever was” (“The Quill is

Mightier”). He introduces himself as “Joxer the Mighty,” a warrior, and often relates

stories and events (mostly Xena’s exploits) with himself as the conquering hero. When

Xena loses her memories, Joxer tells her that he saved her from Callisto (“Chakram”).

And when Gabrielle loses her memories, he reads her scrolls to her in an attempt to give

her back her memories. But in doing so, he tells a different story than what is on the

paper and convinces Gabrielle that he is a warrior and that she is in love with him. He

31 Erving Goffman The Presentation o f Self in Everyday Life 76

even convinces her that she loves his theme song which describes him as the perfect hero and Gabrielle is his sidekick (“Forget Me Not”). Sometimes people believe Joxer’s stories about his exploits which puts him in the predicament of having to live up to his word as in “In Sickness and in Hell,” but most of the time, people simply write him off as a nuisance. Though he will continue to believe himself to be Joxer the Mighty, Joxer is more often getting tied up and beaten by the bad guys or captured by the opposing army than saving any damsels in distress. Whether he is hammering his own thumb or getting tied up by the villain, it is obvious that Joxer is by no means a warrior.

In taking on the title of “warrior” Joxer has committed to playing what Erving

Goffman would call the “role” of a warrior. Goffman posits that we as humans are

“actors” who play parts and take on social roles. Each role has a predetermined social front which the actor must adhere to in both appearance and manner. And whether the actor’s “acquisition of the role was primarily motivated by a desire to perform the given task or by a desire to maintain the corresponding front, the actor will find that he must do both” (Goffman 27). As an actor playing the part of a warrior, Joxer must perform the role (duties) of a warrior (fighting bad guys) in addition to acting like a warrior in both his appearance and demeanor. This new version of self is like a mask an actor puts on to play a new role in a drama. According to Goffman this mask is a reflection of our true self: “.. .in so far as this mask represents the conception that we have formed of ourselves—the role we are striving to live up to—this mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be” (Goffman 17). Joxer’s commitment to the role of warrior is a reflection 77

of his inner self which desires to fight for good. He may be a terrible swordsman, but

Joxer is a warrior at heart.

Though Joxer is a terrible warrior in reality, the narrative he tells himself is so

vivid that he believes himself to be a hero even when he is constantly getting beat up and

captured. His belief in his own self-narrative leads him to present this narrative to others, but it is not a lie per se. Rather, to quote Kerby, “In the case of our personal narratives,

‘truth’ becomes more a question of a certain adequacy to an implicit meaning of the past

than of a historically correct representation or verisimilitude” (7). The fact that Joxer

proports himself as a warrior when in actuality he is a fool does not matter when speaking

of his identity. His belief in the story of himself as a warrior is what fuels the construction

of his identity as a warrior. Paul Ricoeur says

Our own existence cannot be separated from the account we can give of

ourselves. It is in telling our own stories that we give ourselves an identity.

We recognize ourselves in the stories that we tell about ourselves. It

makes very little difference whether these stories are true or false, fiction

as well as verifiable history provides us with an identity, (qtd. in Kerby

40-41)

Joxer identifies as a warrior and a hero. That story—that he is a hero—provides a

foundation for his identity and tells him how to act. Though he cannot fulfill the actual

duties of a warrior, i.e. defeat the bad guys, the mask he wears is that of a warrior. In

Joxer’s self-narrative, he is a warrior, and though this narrative is a fiction for those he 78

encounters, the fiction is the foundation of Joxer’s identity narrative which creates a false reality and leads him to act as a hero.

During his travels with Xena and Gabrielle, Joxer has a few moments of self­ doubt in his identity as a warrior. Most especially in “For Him the Bell Tolls” Aphrodite

casts a spell to make Joxer a hero, in looks and skill. But the ringing of a bell causes him to switch back-and-forth between his usual self and the warrior. Joxer, having no memory of the moments when he is his hero self, believes he was under the influence of a

“warrior haze.” When Gabrielle finally gets Aphrodite to break the spell, Joxer finds out that he is a “phony,” and is devastated that it was all a spell. Xena tells him that the Gods

cannot give mortals anything they don’t already have:

XENA. You did some very brave things.

JOXER. Yeah, but that wasn't me.

XENA. That's where you're wrong.

JOXER. What do you mean?

XENA. The gods can't give us anything that isn't in our hearts. Aphrodite

just used what was already there. The real Joxer may not be the best

swordsman around, but he's always had the heart of a lion.

Within the show, Xena is one of the only characters who acknowledges Joxer’s heroic moments. When Joxer dies trying to stop the fight in “Been There, Done That,” Xena

acknowledges his heroism: “Joxer died a hero, just like he always wanted.” When Joxer protects Argo, Xena thanks him and acknowledges his bravery: “Only someone with a 79

brave heart would stand up to Callisto for a horse,” and tells him he was “very heroic”

(“Intimate Stranger”). Xena sees the heroism in Joxer’s actions and intentions, and in these moments, Xena’s encouragement allows Joxer to see the same for himself and once again rewrite himself as a hero. Through Joxer, the viewer understands heroism because of his courage and intentions, not his results. Joxer may not progress as a warrior in skill, but his lion heart can never be doubted.

Writing Joxer off as the comic relief is easy until we learn that the entire show is written from Gabrielle’s point of view, and Gabrielle just happens to be the one character in the show with whom Joxer is in love. While she loves him as a friend, Gabrielle, like many viewers, finds him also to be a source of irritation. In “The Quill is Mightier,”

Gabrielle begins writing a new scroll, not knowing that it has been enchanted by

Aphrodite to make anything she writes come true. But instead of writing non-fiction about Xena’s adventures, at Xena’s suggestion, she writes fiction for the first time and makes “someone else the hero for a change.” Gabrielle experiments, and dictates as she writes, “’Xena— had gone fishing. The lone warrior, Gabrielle, awoke with a jerk— as five barbarians rode out of the woods. Twirling her trusty staff, she delivered kicks of such fury.’ This fiction stuff can be really fun.” The next morning, as five barbarians attack, Gabrielle wakes up to fight them and afterwards, finds Joxer in place of Xena.

Joxer doesn’t understand how he arrived, or the pun on “jerk,” but it is clear that

Gabrielle realizes what has happened. A few episodes later when she has lost all her 80

memories, she repeatedly mispronounces his name and calls him “Jerkster” (“Forget Me

Not”).

In “A Comedy of Eros,” Cupid’s son Bliss goes on a shooting rampage and

Gabrielle is hit with a love arrow which causes her to fall in love with Joxer. When Cupid

sets everyone right again, Gabrielle laughs at the experience:

GABRIELLE. Can you imagine the two of us in love?

JOXER. Ridiculous.

GABREILLE. Yeah-- kind of makes you laugh just to think about it.

JOXER. Hah-hah.

But it is clear to the viewer that Joxer is not laughing and is completely crestfallen at the

idea of never receiving Gabrielle’s love. When his state of mind is altered by the gods or by some other magic, Joxer’s ulterior self does not hide his love for Gabrielle. For example, in “Fins, Femmes, and Gems,” Joxer believes he is Attus, a Tarzan-George-of- the-Jungle-vine-swinging-ape-man who is in love with Gabrielle. Gabrielle however, is too annoyed with Joxer’s constant mistakes to ever be in love with him. In “Eternal

Bonds” when he leads the three killer magi to Eve, she yells at him: “you just don't

realize that your actions have consequences.” In fact, she was so annoyed at his mistake,

she considered leaving him to find an antidote to his poisoned wound on his own so that

she could help Xena protect Eve from soldiers out to kill her.

As a chronicler of history, Gabrielle is blind to Joxer’s warrior qualities and as a

result, her version of events only gives us one interpretation of his character. When she is 81

telling the story of her day to Aphrodite in “Punchlines,” Aphrodite wonders why

Gabrielle thought Joxer would be able to help convince Lacrymos to put herself and Argo

back to their normal sizes after shrinking them. At first Gabrielle defends Joxer to

Aphrodite: “Joxer has pulled through for us several times.” But when asked for an

example, Gabrielle can’t name a single moment in which Joxer was useful. In actuality,

in “Sacrifice II” Joxer retrieves and delivers the Hind’s Blood Dagger into the cavern so

that Xena can kill Hope. In “Purity” Xena hide’s Lao Ma’s book with Joxer in Argo’s

saddle bag. In “Back in the Bottle,” Joxer helps lead a band of refugees to safety. And just the day before in “Punchlines,” it is Joxer who is able to get Lachrymose to turn

Gabrielle back to her normal size. Lacrymos tells Joxer, “You are not as dumb as you

look.” Viewers are reminded of Lacrymos’ comment when in “Eternal Bonds” Joxer is

cut by a possibly poisoned sword. When Xena asks him who cut him, he can’t remember.

Xena tells him “Think about it. It’s important.” Joxer gets defensive: “Why is everyone

telling me to think? I think. I just don’t show it.” In this moment, Joxer declares his sanity

and demands respect from those who think he is useless. When Joxer thinks, it is for

saving those in need because that is what a heroic warrior like Xena does. In “The King

of Assassins,” Joxer stands up to his brother Jet to stop him from killing Cleopatra, even

though he knows Jet can kill him in an instant. And in “The Bitter Suite,” he tries to save

Gabrielle from Xena. Joxer misses the strategy and skill aspects of heroism, but the

courage and selflessness parts he has. And it is this senseless courage which ends up

costing him his life. 82

Believing Xena and Gabrielle dead for 25 years, Joxer settles down with Meg.

But even owning a business and starting a family have not robbed Joxer of his heroic delusions. He follows Xena and Gabrielle to Rome and into battle against Eve/Livia.

When Gabrielle gets captured by Eve, Joxer follows and tries to rescue her. He is hiding in the camp, counting the men between him and Gabrielle. He says, “Twenty to one.

Good odds!” Even old and frail, Joxer still believes himself capable of entering fights he cannot win. He infiltrates Eve’s army disguised as a Roman, and distracts Eve long enough for Xena to arrive and mount a rescue. During the ensuing fight, Eve is about to kill Gabrielle. Xena is about to throw her chakram to save Gabrielle but Joxer stands up in front of her and runs at Eve. Eve, distracted by Joxer’s screams, turns and stabs him instead. As he is dying, Gabrielle asks Joxer what he was doing. He tells her, “I didn’t want- didn’t want to disappoint you” (“Eve”). In a very touching moment, Gabrielle tells him that he could never disappoint her. Long ago Joxer had accepted that Gabrielle would only love him as a friend, but told her he would always love her as more. And in loving her, Joxer made the ultimate sacrifice to save her life. Did Joxer know that Xena could have saved Gabrielle? Possibly. But to be a hero, Joxer needed to save her. In true

Joxer form, he wasn’t thinking about anything other than saving his friend. When Joxer tells Gabrielle that he did not want to disappoint her, he is saying also that he didn’t want to fail at being a hero to her. In rushing to save Gabrielle, Joxer is finally being the warrior he was emulating all along. It cost him his life, but finally he was able to be a hero and save the love of his life. 83

Though Joxer never achieves acknowledged heroism until his death, Joxer is still a hero. Joxer is the everyman character; he embodies all viewers’ failings and short comings. Though viewers want to identify with Xena because she is the hero, it is easier to identify with Joxer who can’t ever get anything right because we see in him our own shortcomings. As John Allen states, it is easier to become involved with a character who struggles with his inadequacies. Allen describes a “universal human tendency toward self-deception.” Our ability to identify and laugh with Joxer is predicated on this collective “distortion of perception by desire” (522). In Joxer, viewers see themselves— their failings and inadequacies—and realize that they too fall short when compared to their ideal. In being the quixotic entry point for viewers to enter the show, Joxer allows viewers to see themselves in the show and to relate to a part of it. The quixotic Joxer the

Mighty in XWP shows viewers what the everyday man can accomplish, and allows viewers to see extraordinary heroism in ordinary people. Thus, in relating to Joxer, the viewer can see how ordinary people read and imitate those whose character is unattainable. It is hard to be a hero like Xena, but Joxer shows us how to continually read characters we can never fully imitate with passion and persistence.

Gabrielle, The Battling Bard of Poteidaia

Of all the characters in XWP, it is Gabrielle who most understands the role stories play in self-construction. In speaking to David of his psalms, she says it is stories that “tell us who we are” (“The Giant Killer”). It is these great defining stories which lead 84

her to believe that she was “bom to do so much more” than marry a “dull” peasant in

Potediaia (“Sins of the Past”). When viewers first meet Gabrielle, she is busy sacrificing herself to save her fellow villagers from the warriors attempting to kidnap and sell them into slavery. Luckily for Gabrielle, a reformed Xena happens along just in time to save her and her companions. At first, Gabrielle is certainly not a fighter, but she is insistent about traveling with Xena anyway and learning everything Xena knows. “I’m not cut out for this village life,” she tells Xena. Gabrielle is not considered a “normal girl” by her village because she wants to leam about history and philosophy (“Hooves and Harlots”).

When Xena initially refuses her companionship, Gabrielle follows her anyway.

As the viewer follows Gabrielle, it becomes clear that she is a storyteller. She is able to talk her way out of a cyclops’ cage, haggle a ride out of a traveler with a cart, and save Xena from being stoned by the villagers in Amphipolis (“Sins of the Past”).

Gabrielle’s love for talking and storytelling leads her to tells stories of Xena’s adventures.

She wants to tell the world of the “real Xena,” the new, good Xena. For Gabrielle, stories are an integral part of life. She wants to continue to travel with Xena because she gets to

“live” stories instead of just tell them (“Athens City Academy of the Performing Bards”).

For Gabrielle, Xena is a hero out of one of the stories she grew up on and one she wants to imitate. She begs Xena to “teach [her] everything [she] know[s]” (“Sins of the Past”).

In “One Against an Army,” she deliriously admits to Xena, “I want so much to be like you.” Gabrielle’s desire to be like Xena leads her to believe that she must also be a warrior. But Gabrielle also fails at being a traditional hero because not only does she 85

consistently question herself as a warrior, no matter how hard she tries to be a hero like

Xena, she is constantly viewed as a sidekick.

As a warrior, Gabrielle, like Joxer, Gabrielle thinks about others before she thinks of her own safety and willingly sacrifices herself to safe others. In “Sins of the

Past” she says, “Take me” and throws herself between her friends and a bunch of slavers.

Later she places herself between Xena and the villagers throwing stones at her. In

“Hooves and Harlots” she uses her own body to protect an Amazon woman from a rain of arrows. And all this before she learns to fight. Unlike Joxer, however, Gabrielle is a

skilled fighter, though she will always be uncomfortable with killing. When Gabrielle learns to fight, she uses a staff precisely because it does not kill people. As a fighter,

Gabrielle will continue to think of others before herself, and use fighting only as a last resort. She believes that Xena is too quick to resort to fighting and often tells her to try resolving her problems “my way,” i.e. without violence. In an online article for Whoosh!,

Tracy Barnett says that Gabrielle is able live as a fighter in Xena’s world while maintaining her code of ethics and selfless heroism. But in Season Three, Barnett notes that Gabrielle’s character changes. This is because in Season Three, Gabrielle does

finally kill someone (in self-defense), and she is thrown into a period of self-hatred and

self-doubt. Gabrielle’s guilt and her desire to fight remain at odds until the pair ends up in

India, and they meet Eli who preaches about the Way of Love. Eli’s demonstration of the power of love is so captivating that Gabrielle forsakes fighting and begins living a life of

non-violence, believing a life of peace to be more in line with her devout belief in the 86

power of love. Gabrielle eventually forsakes the Way of Love to defend a mortally

wounded Xena. When the two are reincarnated, Gabrielle is again on the path of the

warrior fighting alongside Xena, but she will continue to remain uncomfortable with the

practice of fighting and killing, and her devotion to peace must be constantly weighed

against her desire to travel with and be like Xena.

When Gabrielle again accidentally kills, this time a friend who appeared to be

attacking Xena, she is once again thrown into a period of self-hate, and wants to face the

consequences of her actions: death. She tells Xena, “Xena- you once prayed never to see

the light go out in me. I just don't think there’s much of that left in here” (“Legacy”). Her

remorse causes her to begin to doubt herself in battle and she hesitates before killing

which causes her to get hurt. She says, “My reflexes are those of a warrior. I’m afraid my judgment’s not. I think that's a bad combination” (“The Abyss”). When in Season Six

Gabrielle is successful in leading the Amazons into battle against Balaraphont, Xena tells

her that she’s won. Gabrielle replies, “I don’t think I did. Each battle, I lose more of

myself’ (“To Helicon and Back”). Gabrielle, who wanted so much to be a warrior like

Xena, is finally realizing the consequences of her life with Xena. Even Xena believes that

Gabrielle’s injuries are her own fault for “setting [Gabrielle] on a path [she was] never

meant to walk” (“The Abyss”). Gabrielle must constantly negotiate her desire to be a

warrior with her “reverence for life” (“The Debt II”). The external narrative she reads in

Xena does not coincide with the identity she formed as a village girl in Poteidaia who 87

believed fully in the power of love. Her life with Xena causes her to question her ideals

and thus question herself.

Gabrielle’s unwavering belief in peace and goodness leads Xena to believe that

she must shelter Gabrielle from her dark past and defend her in battle. Though Gabrielle becomes a warrior admired by even Ares, Xena’s lack of confidence in her friend leads the couple into fights which threaten their friendship. When Xena leaves Gabrielle behind

for the sake of time in “For Him the Bell Tolls,” Gabrielle wants to meet her a day later.

Xena says “I can handle this without you.” She calls Xena “patronizing” behind her back.

In another instance Xena wants to kill Gabrielle’s daughter, Hope, because she is also the daughter of the evil god Dahok, Gabrielle defends Hope to the point of siding with the

Banshees against Xena. To protect her child, a child which is growing at an alarming rate,

Gabrielle pretends to throw her off a cliff after really putting her in a basket in the river

(“Gabrielle’s Hope”). When Gabrielle discovers Hope is living with the Centaurs she again defends her daughter: “Xena, you were always so quick to blame her, weren’t you?

Well, she is not evil! She’s not!” (“Maternal Instincts”). When Hope kills Solon, Xena’s

son, Xena blames Gabrielle. Gabrielle kills her daughter, but Xena returns in the next

episode with intent to kill Gabrielle and take her revenge. When the pair is thrown into

Illusia to resolve their differences, Gabrielle accuses Xena and says, “ever since we’ve met, you’ve always made the decisions” and “you’re always blaming me for everything”

(“The Bitter Suite”). 88

A few episodes later, Aphrodite casts a spell on Gabrielle, Xena, and Joxer so that they become obsessed with whatever they are thinking about at the moment, and

Gabrielle becomes a narcissist. The only way to break the spell is to come to terms with the unsatisfactory part of herself. She admits to Xena, “no one gives me credit for anything, and everyone thinks I’m a silly sidekick” (“Fins, Femmes, and Gems”) In another episode, the three protagonists must return young Princess Alesia to her parents after she ran away in “If the Shoe Fits.” They take turns telling her a story which viewers will recognize as Cinderella. Gabrielle and Xena have just had an argument when

Gabrielle begins the story. The episode depicts her story visually, so when Gabrielle begins the story “Once upon a time, there was a sweet, very young girl named Tyrella,” the viewer sees Renee O’Connor as Tyrella hanging laundry. But since Gabrielle is voicing the story over the visual, to the viewer, it is actually Rene O’Connor playing

Gabrielle playing Tyrella. As Gabrielle continues, “She was happy, even though she lived with her wicked stepmother, the meanest, crankiest, most horrid woman alive,” the scene changes to Lucy Lawless as Xena playing the stepmother. Because most viewers would already be familiar with the storyline of Cinderella, they see Gabrielle’s story as a reflection of her current state of mind and the current state of her relationship with Xena

(she’s feeling underappreciated by Xena). And in “You Are There” they fight about Xena never telling Gabrielle her plans: “I’m not allowed? Oh, that’s right—I’m the sidekick.

You go ahead, Xena. I’ll walk 10 paces behind you and your horse!” 89

Even Joxer relegates Gabrielle to the role of sidekick. In his theme song, he

writes Gabrielle as his sidekick “fighting with her little stick.” And in “For Him the Bell

Tolls” when he runs into Gabrielle who is by herself he asks,

JOXER. Where’s Xena

GABRIELLE. She’s off being a hero.

JOXER. Oh. How come you’re not with her?

GABRIELLE. Because I’m a sidekick...

JOXER. Wait, wait, wait. That’s great. Don’t you get it? You’re a sidekick

without a hero, and I’m a hero without a sidekick.

Gabrielle laughs at his absurdity, but her rejection of his notion has more to do with him

calling himself a hero than of her being a sidekick, which she has just admitted to being.

After Aphrodite enchants Joxer and he switches back and forth between his real self and

his warrior self, the pair is arrested and put in jail at a moment when Joxer is his real self.

Joxer wants her to ring a bell so that he will become a warrior and get them out of jail.

Gabrielle says “Hah. No, no, no. No— your becoming a super-sexy warrior is what got us

into this mess.” Joxer believes her to be jealous of his ulterior self: “I think you’re jealous. I can understand that. I mean—you wanna be the hero so bad, you can’t stand the

thought of me saving the day. Gabrielle, there’s nothing wrong with being a sidekick.”

Joxer is not wrong here. No matter how hard Gabrielle tries, she is seen as a sidekick.

Even Joxer, though through a spell, is recognized as a hero before she is. 90

Though Gabrielle is not recognized as a hero, through her construction of herself as a hero, we see her more important authorial role. Gabrielle’s alternative form of heroism lies in her authorship of the entire show. As author of the scrolls, Gabrielle has given us an alternative view of history as previously discussed. But Gabrielle has also constructed the characters in her scrolls, allowing us to understand how the self is read and literally turned into a narrative by others. In writing her scrolls about Xena, Gabrielle creates a Xena Legend and in her stories, Xena is a reformed hero. Though Gabrielle wants to help spread the word of Xena’s changed ways, her stories are problematic in that they are constructions of Xena’s and her identities. The experience of identity stories cannot be accurately translated into language, and in the telling or writing of these stories, the stories undergo a transformation, meaning they become stories (Polkinghome,

“Explorations” 365). In order to make sense of the memories which make up our lives, we must translate them into narrative form. In producing a tale, the author or teller must omit or condense certain aspects, and exaggerate others just like the historian does when constructing history. Those stories are then affected by the audience who receives them.

In Gabrielle’s case, her audience is the other characters in the show, and later on, us. In addition, told stories are “missing aspects of peoples’ operating identity stories in that people do not have conscious access to all elements of their storied identities” so the audience is always missing information (366). In this way, it is impossible to tell a complete story about one’s identity. Gabrielle’s tales of the “real” Xena cannot then be 91

truly “real;” they are simply a version of her identity constructed to spread Gabrielle’s message just as her view of Joxer as a fool is only one possible version of his actions.

Gabrielle also figuratively constructs the Xena superhero in providing a moral

compass for the warrior princess to follow. When Gabrielle complains about not getting any credit for her deeds, Xena says “The only reason I do any good at all in this world is because I do it with you. You make an important contribution every day” (“Fins,

Femmes, and Gems”). When Callisto kills Gabrielle’s husband Perdicus, Gabrielle wants revenge and demands that Xena teach her how to use a sword. But Xena refuses: “I won’t help you destroy all the ideals that you live by.” In a rare moment of spirituality, Xena prays, “I was ready to give up once, and-- and Gabrielle came into my life. Please— don’t let that light that shines out of her face go out. I couldn’t stand the darkness that would follow” (“Return of Callisto”). And before Xena faces down the entire Persian cavalry

she tells a dying Gabrielle, “But you’re my source, Gabrielle. When I reach down inside myself and do things that I’m not capable of, it’s because of you” (“One Against an

Army”). Without Gabrielle as her guide and source of good, Xena believes that she will turn into the monster she was before they’d met. In being Xena’s reason to fight for the

innocent, Gabrielle is perhaps the greatest hero of all.

When Xena chooses to stay dead in order to release the 40,000 souls she had unknowingly condemned to Yodoshi’s torment, Gabrielle wants to defy her wishes. She

says that Xena’s sacrifice is “not right” and that she doesn’t care about the other souls.

Xena says, “if there is a reason for our travels together— it’s because / had to learn from 92

you— enough to know the final, the good, the right thing to do. I can’t come back. I can’t”

(“A Friend in Need II,” emphasis in original). Gabrielle wants to forsake her belief in

goodness and justice to save her friend’s life, but Xena’s reading of Gabrielle’s character

has shown her that the right thing to do, the heroic thing to do, is to die for the greater

good. Again, we see Gabrielle negotiating her identity as a preacher of justice and love

with her identity as a warrior and Xena’s friend. The final scene of the series shows

Gabrielle sailing away from Japan with Xena’s spirit beside her. Upon Gabrielle’s hip is

Xena’s chakram. She says that they should go south, to the land of the pharaohs as they

had originally planned at the start of the finale. During the finale, Xena had ensured

before her death that she imparted upon Gabrielle all her warrior wisdom including “the

pinch,” Xena’s signature move which stops the flow of blood to your brain. In this final

scene, the camera pans back and the viewer is left with a shot of Gabrielle alone on the boat.32 Now, Gabrielle is “the girl with a chakram” the people in Egypt need (“A Friend

in Need II”), as shown in her new power to wield the weapon, and has taken Xena’s place

as the hero fighting for good. As the chakram symbolized Xena’s two-part nature, now it

also symbolizes the same for Gabrielle: she is a warrior and a hero, but one who will

always have to balance fighting with her reverence for life. No longer a sidekick to

another hero, Gabrielle rewrites herself as a hero, and sets out to save lives.

• k 'k 'k

32 This scene of Gabrielle alone was cut in the Director’s Cut insinuating that Xena’s spirit will never leave Gabrielle. 93

Narrative is a “primary human function” (Hutcheon Narcissistic 48). Every day

we create worlds for ourselves which are ordered versions of our lives, whether real or

imaginary. As Barbara Hardy states “we dream in narrative, daydream in in narrative,

remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct,

gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative. In order really to live, we make up stories about

ourselves and others, about the personal as well as the social past and future” (5). XWP

shows us how we use stories of others to construct our own self narrative. We draw on

exemplar plots and on others we interpret to form our self-narrative. But like the

characters in the show, we will more than likely fall short of the ideal we strive to be. But

our self-narrative is always changing because we are in constant dialogue with others.

Like history which is changed and rewritten as new artifacts are discovered, the self is a narrative without a predetermined ending.

Narratives are “a primary embodiment of our understanding of the world, of

experience, and ultimately ourselves” (Kerby 3). We understand human experience, both personal and collective through narrative. We understand our memories and our history

as a narrative, and we construct a narrative about those we encounter. Goffman notes the

dialectical nature of social interaction. To uncover the facts about a situation, the

individual would need to know all the relevant data about all the others. Since this is not

possible, the individual must rely on “cues, tests, hints, expressive gestures, status

symbols, etc.” (249). The individual will treat others based on the impressions they give.

These impressions are treated as “claims and promises they have implicitly made, and 94

claims and promises tend to have a moral character” (249). This is why feelings of betrayal may surface when we find out someone is not who we believed them to be. The

“self’ we present to others is read and interpreted by the other, and is then reflected back

to the self which can conform to or reject the interpretation imposed upon it. The presented self is an artifact of sorts which is read by the other and then interpreted.

When Nigel constructs his narrative about Xena’s character in “You Are There,” he believes those who hate Xena more than those who love her because during his

investigation, Xena and those who defend her have lost their ability to love (until

Aphrodite is restored to Olympus), and are quick to anger. These impressions combined

with the evidence he’s gathered about her past actions lead to a skewed interpretation of

Xena’s current identity. His investigative journalism mimics the way a historian gathers

evidence from interviews and documents about the past and creates a narrative of the past. Or the way a person interprets actions performed by another and passes judgment on

their character. What Nigel’s narrative makes clear to the viewers who know Xena’s

good nature is that narrative is always interpreted based on the sources of the narrative.

In Tapert’s representation of Gabrielle’s scrolls, we see how each character works

to construct their identities, and how they are read by others. Stories and other characters

within the narrative continually influence identity creation. Because identity is interpreted

as a narrative, it is never complete. Xena herself says that “You can re-create yourself

every second of your life” (“Forgiven”). Xena recreates her identity after meeting

Hercules and continues to recreate herself with Gabrielle’s influence. Gabrielle recreates 95

herself as a warrior when she meets Xena, and even when she gives up fighting, Xena is what brings her back to the path of a warrior. And Joxer continues to see himself as a warrior through Xena’s encouragement. The heroic selves they construct are presented to others and interpreted as a narrative. Let us remember Joxer’s assertion in “Been There

Done That”: “What if none of this really is happening— and, like, we’re all in somebody else’s head, and they’re making us up?” Structurally, he is correct. But he also points out that identity is made up by others in two instances. First, identity is constructed when a person reads the narrative of identity they desire or are told to be. Second, they are made up when they present their identity to others and are in turn interpreted. In both cases, the identity is originating outside the self in someone else’s head. Finally, the self, constructed from narrative, is understood by the self as a subject within its own narrative.

When Gabrielle tells Aphrodite about her day, she tells Aphrodite a story in which she and her friends are characters. Moreover, the scrolls she writes are stories of her adventures with Xena, ones which literally tell her who she is when she loses her memory.

Narratives are the foundation for how we understand ourselves and others. In

Chapter 1 I discussed that history is a narrative constructed from carefully selected facts to tell a version of events. And in Chapter 2 I showed that identity is also a story consciously constructed by the self to present a particular version of the self. To understand the events of history, ourselves, and others, we construct stories based on interpretation of the facts before us. XWP makes clear that when understood as stories, 96

history and identity are open to interpretation and revision. The narratives of history and identity are never complete because as new facts are discovered, new stories are written, new interpretations are made, and a retroactive realignment of our understanding of the narrative occurs. Narrative encompasses every facet of life; whether we are conscious of it or not, we are constantly writing and rewriting stories of ourselves and others, of our past and our future. As Hardy states, “It is hard to stop telling stories” (14). 97

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Online, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311983.2015.1099197 Xena: Warrior Princess Episodes

Xena: Warrior Princess: Season One. Universal Studios, 2010.

“Sins of the Past.” Episode 1.

“Chariots of War.” Episode 2.

“The Path Not Taken.” Episode 5.

“Hooves and Harlots.” Episode 10.

“Athens City Academy of the Performing Bards.” Episode 13.

“Callisto.” Episode 22.

“Death Mask.” Episode 23.

“Is There a Doctor in the House?” Episode 24.

Xena: Warrior Princess: Season Two. Universal Studios, 2011.

“The Giant Killer.” Episode 3.

“Return of Callisto.” Episode 5.

“Intimate Stranger.” Episode 7.

“A Solstice Carol.” Episode 9.

“The Xena Scrolls.” Episode 10.

“Destiny.” Episode 12.

“A Day in the Life.” Episode 15.

“For Him the Bell Tolls.” Episode 16.

“The Price.” Episode 20.

“A Comedy of Eros.” Episode 22. 101

Xena: Warrior Princess: Season Three. Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2004.

“The Furies.” Episode 1.

“Been There, Done That.” Episode 2.

“Gabrielle’s Hope.” Episode 5.

“The Debt I and II.” Episode 6/7.

“The King of Assassins.” Episode 8.

“The Quill Is Mightier.” Episode 10.

“Maternal Instincts.” Episode 11.

“The Bitter Suite.” Episode 12.

“One Against an Army.” Episode 13.

“Forgiven.” Episode 14.

“When in Rome.” Episode 16.

“Forget Me Not.” Episode 17.

“Fins, Femmes, and Gems.” Episode 18.

“Sacrifice I and II.” Episodes 21/22.

Xena: Warrior Princess: Season Four. Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2004.

“A Family Affair.” Episode 3.

“A Good Day.” Episode 5.

“Past Imperfect.” Episode 9.

“If the Shoe Fits.” Episode 12.

“The Way.” Episode 16. “The Play’s the Thing.” Episode 17.

“The Convert.” Episode 18.

“Takes One to Know One.” Episode 19.

“Endgame.” Episode 20.

“Deja vu All Over Again.” Episode 22.

Xena: Warrior Princess: Season Five. Universal Studios, 2014.

“Chakram.” Episode 2.

“Succession.” Episode 3.

“Purity.” Episode 6.

“Back in the Bottle.” Episode 7.

“Seeds of Faith.” Episode 9.

“Lyre, Lyre Hearts on Fire.” Episode 10.

“Punchlines.” Episode 11.

“Eternal Bonds.” Episode 13.

“Eve.” Episode 21.

“Motherhood.” Episode 22.

Xena: Warrior Princess: Season Six. Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2005.

“Legacy.” Episode 5.

“The Abyss.” Episode 6.

“The Rheingold.” Episode 7.

“The Ring.” Episode 8. “The Return of the Valkyrie.” Episode 9.

“You Are There.” Episode 13.

“To Helicon and Back.” Episode 15.

“Send in the Clones.” Episode 16.

“Soul Possession.” Episode 20.

“A Friend in Need I and II.” Episodes 21/22.

“A Friend in Need Director’s Cut.”