Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 144

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Popular Culture Review

articulate, family-oriented, and witty. Dr. Quinn’s children and their friends play
an active role in each episode. There seems to be a particular effort to make the
program attractive to teens through Michaela’s “hunk” son Matthew and her fetching
and feisty daughter Colleen, whose romance and marriage form the centerpiece of
the final season.
Dr. Quinn and Sully epitomize the 90’s version of the frontier myth. Michaela
Quinn is the central character in a genre where traditionally “Women, where they
exist at all, are relegated to the status of object: the prostitute with the heart of gold,
or the ‘nice lady’ who wants the free male to settle down, marry, raise a family, and
give up on killing” (Himmelstein, Television Myth 59). Dr. Quinn, on the other
hand, is in no hurry to get married, and finally settles on the unconventional Sully.
She is an active essential part of the community who has the grudging respect of its
males, as well as the warm acceptance and admiration of its women. The character
suggests a successful integration of an aristocratic upbringing with the democratic
style of the frontier, such that whenMichaela visits her family in Boston, the stuffy
Bostonians pale before her simple style of dress, free-flowing hair, and straighforward
manner. She uses her newly-acquired frontier directness to effectively negotiate the
male-dominated medical circles which had previously intimidated her.
Proud of her education, Dr. Quinn prizes modem scientific thinking and the
latest medical research. Life and death scenes in her rough clinic often show her
trying a new technique she has gleaned from her medical journals. Yet Dr. Quinn,
as the show’s title suggests, is equally open to the value of the Cheyenne’s herbal
medicines. She is often seen consulting with Cheyenne medicine man, Cloud
Dancing. Thus in Dr. Quinn, we find Turner’s acute inventive and practical
frontiersman reborn as a woman who is also characterized by tolerance, a distaste
for violence and vulgarity, and other “feminine” traits.
Michaela Quinn consistently fills the role of the negotiator who will balance
progress and development with the preservation of the frontier community’s more
admirable attributes and values. In