Judith Butler, Power, and Identity in Wendy and Lucy

Introduction: Power, Force, and Identity

We are all aware of power from our earliest moments. We are subject to multiple sources of power even before we have the word power at our disposal — even when we are among the population of speechless infants, and even when we once more join the legion of the speechless as we approach death. We know that power buffets us. Judith Butler has considered the nature of power more deeply than most scholars, perhaps because as a scholar focused on gender she is constantly examining the ways in which force in its many forms enters every conversation, verbal or not. This essay uses Butler's work to explore the dynamics of power, force, and identity as they are played out in the film Wendy and Lucy, and the ways in which power is — and is not — the same as violence.

Following Butler's model, though surely unintentionally, the film creates a series of images and circumstances in which a character becomes trapped by opposing vectors of power. As Butler argues, the result of this kind of entrapment is that the character loses both her own sense of control over her life and fate and abandons, in important ways, a dedicated quest for a truer understanding of self. This leads in turn to mourning — a mourning born of losing a sense of control and any hope of being able to define oneself as a unique entity.

The film is a quintessentially American one, though other versions of this tale appear in all narrative traditions. The story focuses on a young woman named Wendy who decides, as so many young people do, to find herself — in part because she feels trapped in her world. The path she takes, or attempts to take, toward freedom marks this as an American story of power, freedom, and loss: her heart and her feet take her westward, toward Alaska, since the continental frontier that ended at California's Pacific Coast no longer calls the young to "Go West" to the gold fields.

The film focuses on Wendy Carroll. With that given name, it is difficult not to wonder whether the film's director and the writer of the short story on which it was based are asking us to consider the Wendy of Peter Pan — a girl who learns to grow up because she falls in love with a living symbol of what it means never to grow up. Wendy Carroll desperately wants to make a new life for herself and cannot imagine how that might happen without finding a new place to live, hence her desire to go to Alaska. The vehicle she proposes to use for this new world is an old car, a few ordinary domestic possessions, and an amount of money gravely inadequate for the journey.

Her chances of completing the journey become even more improbable when her car breaks down in Oregon, forcing her to abandon it. She turns to shoplifting to survive, and when police release her after she is caught, she discovers that Lucy — her beloved and only companion — has disappeared. The remainder of the film follows Wendy as she tries to find her dog, fix her car, and resume the trip to Alaska, where she is convinced she will find work in a fish-processing plant and escape her accelerating descent into poverty. The whole film is an extended portrait of a woman desperately trying to hang on to the very bottom rungs of a ladder.

Butler's Framework: Power and Self-Knowledge

Butler argues that we — all of us, and certainly including Wendy — tend to view power as something that comes from the outside, that presses on us and that oppresses us. We imagine it as something we fight back against without truly becoming a part of it, or its becoming a part of us. We engage in power struggles, Butler writes, while remaining in some important ways "pure" — though this is neither the language nor the system of imagery she uses. We humans may think we can engage in power struggles with the rest of the world without getting our own hands or psyches dirtied, but this is in fact not the case.

Butler takes up the topic of how we as individuals are opaque to ourselves in a number of her essays, perhaps most eloquently in Giving an Account of Oneself. She believes that none of us has a clear sense of who we are, and that even the most insightful of individuals lack the ability to see very deeply into their own selves. We can only understand our true natures — to the extent that we are able to do so at all — by joining ourselves to the world. Using the language-based metaphors that run as a common thread through philosophy over the last three generations, Butler describes the process of acquiring self-insight as one of having to join in the we of the world and of society in order to understand, from that context, what the I means.

Wendy's Isolation and the Role of Lucy

Wendy is an essentially isolated character, which is why the loss of Lucy is so devastating for her. Lucy is all of the social world that Wendy possesses, and thus represents — though Wendy herself is probably unaware of this — the only chance Wendy has to understand herself, her life, and what it all means. Lucy and Wendy together are the we from which Wendy must determine her I. Moreover, a collective experience — in this case the one that Wendy and Lucy share — is the only way in which Wendy can acquire a sense of being a moral agent in the world.

Butler insists that the only context in which Wendy can learn to know herself, and to understand what her responsibilities as an individual are, is by continually entering into relationships that provide opportunities to understand the ways in which power pushes in both directions. Power pushes in from the outside, and it pushes hardest against those who are the most powerless in society. Indeed, this could well serve as a definition of powerlessness, with apologies for the circularity.

Wendy is relatively powerless because she is young, a woman, and poor. In the historical moment of the film's making and setting, the fact that she is poor is the most important factor in understanding what it means to have so few options. The safety net that exists for her is badly torn — shredded, and continuing to be shredded, by concentrated wealth and austerity — and this is the most obvious aspect of her interaction with the external world. But Butler reminds us to look always for something we cannot easily see: for every force there is an opposing force meeting it.

Conclusion: What the Ball Teaches Us

Wendy is never just a food and fire provider. Her relationship with Lucy is constitutive of her identity and her moral being in the world in a way that the man in London's story never achieves with his dog. The comparison illuminates exactly what Butler means when she insists that selfhood and ethical agency can only be forged through genuine relational bonds — bonds that acknowledge the other as more than a means to survival. Gender shapes the terms of this relational capacity: the man in London's story is permitted, even celebrated, for seeking pure self-sufficiency, while Wendy's vulnerability and her need for connection are precisely what give her access to self-understanding, however painful that access proves to be. The ball, in the end, does push the earth — even if neither the ball nor any observer nearby can feel it move.