Tropes Have Fangs: Elsa Dutton, 1883, “Going Native”, Adaptive Whiteness and Trope Resilience

In Taylor Sheridan’s television miniseries 1883, the origin story of his American neo-Western series Yellowstone, the voice-over narration is given by the central character, 18-year-old Elsa Dutton. Elsa is travelling with her family from Texas to Oregon on the wagon trail to the West along with migrants from Eastern Europe who have little idea of the country they have arrived in. Despite her death at the end of the series, the voice-over in the next edition of the Dutton family saga, 1923, is also given by Elsa. Her role and her ongoing spectral presence are the mythical centre of these stories and of the Yellowstone series. In 1883, she plays the daughter who takes advantage of the freedoms of the trail to get out from under her mother, Margaret Dutton’s, control to join the men herding the cattle, and to have two sexual liaisons, including one with a Native American, Sam. In 1923, as a voice-over only, she plays the role of the ancestor whose grave marks the place in Montana where the Dutton family are fighting for their possession of the land. Interesting directorial and narratival questions arise in relation to the role and voice of Elsa when stories are told of a past in which dispossession from land was being carried out ruthlessly and systematically. While her character exercises enviable freedom for a woman of her time, by contrast her voice-over carries warnings of danger, destruction, hell and disaster for both series, captured in the words, “freedom has fangs”. This gaining of freedom for the settlers and great loss of freedom and autonomy for the Indigenous peoples is a complicated story for the director to manage. This article looks at the storytelling tropes activated in 1883 and shows how they work against intentions to tell an old story differently.