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Imagined Hillarys: Feminism, Fantasy, and Fictional Clintons in The Good Wife and The Good Fight

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2020

RACHEL SYKES
RACHEL SYKES*
Affiliation:
Department of English Literature, University of Birmingham. Email: r.sykes@bham.ac.uk.
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Abstract

In the 2010s, Hillary Clinton emerged as a central character not only in American political life but also in its imagined political scenarios. This article considers the centrality of Clinton as a model for women's legal and political empowerment in CBS drama The Good Wife (2009–16), arguing that the show's generic blend of the television procedural with melodrama and soap is key to both its normative portrayal of women in the corporate workplace and its positioning of Clinton as an aspirational figure for white liberal feminists. A similar tension is also central to Clinton's bid for the presidency in 2016, and this article dissects the ways in which Clinton's anticipated victory has provided a powerful but ultimately misleading “feminist” fantasy for many television shows of the last decade. A final section concludes this article with a brief analysis of The Good Wife's 2017 spin-off The Good Fight, to argue that this show pivots from a fantasy of women's empowerment to a much more interesting dystopic picture, tapping into the surrealism of the present moment to convey the difficulty of women's aspiration under a Trump administration in ways that more directly, if still imperfectly, tackle the failings of liberal feminism to account for racial and economic difference.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , May 2021 , pp. 312 - 335
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2020

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References

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25 “Fleas,” The Good Wife, Season 1, written by Amanda Segal, dir. Rosemary Rodriguez, CBS, 2010; Sandberg, 151.

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27 VanDerWerff, “CBS Is Remarkably Defensive.”

28 The DVD box set for Season 1 recalls Tassler's description of Alicia as both “identifiable and relatable” by centring Alicia's innocence in the face of a harsh work environment. As the cover notes, she is a “resilient” woman, forced to “take the reins” of her own life, return to work, and defeat her “cutthroat 20-something rivals,” all while “raising two teens” and facing a public scandal without the help of her husband.

29 Ang, Watching Dallas, 45.

30 Ibid. Ang borrows from Raymond Williams's famous discussions of realism, using his infamous phrase “structure of feeling” to describe the ways in which soaps like Dallas capture different ways of thinking vying to emerge in its cultural moment.

31 Ibid., 44–45.

32 Banet-Weiser, Empowered, 16.

33 Orgad, “The Cruel Optimism,” 168, 166.

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35 Orgad, 168.

36 Berlant, 2.

37 Radway, Janice, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 193Google Scholar.

38 Ibid., 208.

39 Rebecca Traister, “There's Nothing Inevitable about Hillary,” New Republic, 12 April 2015, at https://newrepublic.com/article/121516/hillary-clinton-2016-announcement-5-things-worry-me.

40 The Chicago Daily Tribune famously published an incorrect banner headline, announcing “Dewey Defeats Truman,” on 3 Nov. 1948, the day after incumbent United States President Harry S. Truman won an upset victory over Republican challenger and governor of New York Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 presidential election. “Dewey Defeats Truman,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 3 Nov. 1948, 1.

41 Eisenstein, Zillah, “Beyond Hillary: Toward Anti-racist, Anti-imperialist Feminisms,” in Featherstone, Liza and Frost, Amber A'Lee, eds., False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Clinton (London: Verso, 2016), 173–79, 178Google Scholar.

42 Banet-Weiser, Empowered, 174.

43 Ibid.

44 Liza Featherstone and Amber A'Lee Frost, ‘Introduction,’ in Featherstone and Frost, False Choices, 28–37, 28.

45 Zevnik, “Postracial Society,” 625.

46 “The Next Day,” The Good Wife, Season 5, written by Leonard Dick, dir. Michael Zinberg, CBS, 2013; “Bond,” The Good Wife, Season 7, written by Michelle and Robert King, dir. Brooke Kennedy, CBS, 2015.

47 In her memoir My Life on the Road, Steinem makes several odd defences of Clinton, suggesting that many feminists were jealous of her because of the stability in her marriage. Steinem, Gloria, My Life on the Road (London: Oneworld Book, 2015), 158–9Google Scholar.

48 “Loser Edit,” The Good Wife, Season 7, written by Luke Schelhas, dir. Brooke Kennedy, CBS, 2015.

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50 As sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottam writes, from Bill's presidency onwards, “the implicit promise was that Bill and Hillary were a twofer. His accomplishments would also be hers because she would be there, in the trenches. Hillary was smart and invested in policy. She chafed at the role of merely decorative first lady. Hillary's record is also Bill's record, and that is not just the narrative of revisionist Republican smear campaigns.” Tressie McMillan Cottam, “The Great Ambivalence,” in Featherstone and Frost, False Choices, 97–103.

51 VanDerWerff, “CBS Is Remarkably Defensive.”

52 Bill Keveney, “First Look: Good Wife's Alicia meets Gloria Steinem,” USA Today, 1 Oct. 2014, at https://eu.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2014/10/01/exclusive-photos-document-the-meeting-of-good-wife-alicia-florrick-and-real-life-activist-gloria-steinem/16540089.

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56 Jack Bernhardt, “Sod It, Let's Pretend Hillary Clinton Won the Election Last Year,” The Guardian, 8 Nov. 2017, at www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/08/president-hillary-clinton-election-trump-email-servers; Victor Davis Hanson, “If Only Hillary Had Won …”, National Review (1 May 2018), at www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/hillary-clinton-presidency-leakers-lawbreakers-rewarded; Newt Gingrich, “What If? History That Could've Been,” Fox News (12 May 2018), at www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/05/12/newt-gingrich-what-if-history-that-could-ve-been.html; Niall Ferguson, “If Hillary Clinton Had Won, US Politics Would Be Even Crazier,” Boston Globe, 27 Aug. 2018, at www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/08/27/hillary-clinton-had-won-politics-would-even-crazier/s2V0ZunuXo5QzdU1ahmlEI/story.html; James Mackintosh, “Where Would Stocks Be Now if Hillary Clinton Were President?”, Wall Street Journal, 18 Jan. 2018, at www.wsj.com/articles/where-would-stocks-be-now-if-hillary-clinton-were-president-1516295645.

57 James Kleber, “Minutes: News and Notes,” New Republic, 3 Feb. 2017, at https://newrepublic.com/minutes/140416/can-imagine-hillary-clinton-said-this; Bret Stephens, “What if Clinton Had Done All This?”, New York Times, 1 Feb. 2018, at www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/opinion/clinton-trump-republicans-impeach.html.

58 Bonnie Malkin, “New Curtis Sittenfeld Novel Will Imagine Hillary Clinton's Life without Bill,” The Guardian, 9 May 2017, at www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/09/new-curtis-sittenfeld-novel-will-imagine-hillary-clintons-life-without-bill.

59 Devorah Blachor, “‘Imagine Hillarys’ with Increasingly Fanciful Endings,” McSweeney's Internet Tendency (2 May 2018), at www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/imagine-hillarys-with-increasingly-fanciful-endings.

60 Ibid.

61 The popular idea that 52 percent of white women voted for Trump (compared to 43 percent for Clinton) is debated: the widely cited statistic is based on 2016 exit polls, which are historically poor at determining demographic breakdowns and tend to replicate systemic biases. A 2018 survey published by the Pew Research Centre nuanced the claim, showing that 47 percent of white women voted for Trump and 45 percent for Clinton. While white women were therefore more likely to vote for Trump than the overall electorate, there was only a 2 percent difference between voting for either candidate. Pew Research Center, “For Most Trump Voters, ‘Very Warm’ Feelings for Him Endured” (9 Aug. 2018), at www.people-press.org/2018/08/09/an-examination-of-the-2016-electorate-based-on-validated-voters.

62 Matt Donnelly, “How Donald Trump's Election Win Sent ‘The Good Fight’ Scrambling for Rewrites,” The Wrap (26 Dec. 2016), at www.thewrap.com/good-fight-rewrites-trump-inauguration-christine-baranski.

63 This advert is just one example of the ways in which the term was adopted by some women as a rallying cry in the months (and years) after Trump used it. See Lorraine Ali, “‘Such a nasty woman’: Trump's debate dig becomes a feminist rallying cry,” Los Angeles Times, 20 Oct. 2016, at www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-nasty-woman-trump-clinton-debate-janet-jackson-20161020-snap-story.html; Attias, Bernardo Alexander and Mingé, Jeanine Marie, eds., Nasty (Wo)manifestos: Remixing Feminisms for Social Change, special issue of Women and Language, 40, 2 (Spring 2018)Google Scholar, at www.womenandlanguage.org/40-2womanifestos.

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66 Aaron Hicklin, “Christine Baranski on Diane Lockhart, Hillary and Fighting The Good Fight,” Out (12 Jan. 2017), at www.out.com/television/2017/1/11/exclusive-christine-baranski-diane-lockhart-hillary-and-fighting-good-fight.

67 Other shows have replicated the passivity and horror of many white Democrats watching Trump's victory on television. Ryan Murphy's anthology series American Horror Story (2011–) opens its seventh season, “Cult,” in two living rooms in Michigan, switching between the bright, light living room of a distraught couple, Ivy (Alison Pill) and Ally Mayfair-Richards (Sarah Paulson), and their Hillary-supporting neighbours, and the dark, dank basement room of Kai Anderson (Evan Peterson), an anarchist and later murderer who rejoices at the election results as a sign of oncoming chaos. “Election Night,” American Horror Story, Season 7 (“Cult”), written by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, dir. Bradley Buecker, Fox, 2017.

68 Emily Nussbaum, “The Incendiary Verve of The Good Fight,” New Yorker, 28 May 2018, at www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/06/04/the-incendiary-verve-of-the-good-fight.

69 Rebecca Nicholson, “The New Season of The Good Fight Declares War on Trump,” The Guardian, 5 March 2018, at www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/mar/05/the-good-fight-new-season-war-on-trump.

70 “Day 450,” The Good Fight, Season 2, written by Tegan Shohet, dir. Frederick E. O. Toye, CBS, 2018; “The One Where Diane Joins the Resistance,” The Good Fight, Season 3, written by Jonathan Tolins, dir. Brooke Kennedy, CBS, 2019; “The One Where a Nazi Gets Punched,” The Good Fight, Season 3, written by Tegan Shohet, dir. Jim McKay, CBS, 2019.

71 “Day 422,” The Good Fight, Season 2, written by Joey Hartstone, dir. James Whitmore Jr., CBS, 2018; “Day 415,” The Good Fight, Season 2, written by Williams Finkelstein, dir. Jim McKay, CBS, 2018; “Day 436,” The Good Fight, written by Marcus Dalzine, dir. Jim McKay, CBS, 2018.

72 “Day 436,” The Good Fight, Season 2, written by Marcus Dalzine, dir. Jim McKay, CBS, 2018.

73 “The Gang Deals with Alternate Reality,” The Good Fight, Season 4, written by Michelle and Robert King, dir. Brooke Kennedy, CBS, 2020.

74 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2.

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