Goodbye Earl: Domestic Violence and Murder

Heidi Rae Hosmer
WST 3015
3/14/10


A Feminist Analysis of "Goodbye Earl" by the Dixie Chicks


Dixie Chick's song "Goodbye Earl" is one I remember very well, having grown up on country music. I even remember the controversy surrounding this song, how the radio D.J.s would take callers and listen to their input on whether or not the song should even be played on their station. Mothers and fathers were concerned children might hear the song and become confused, and think killing their abuser was an appropriate response to violence (domestic or otherwise). Others noted the Dixie Chicks' tongue-in-cheek tone, and how, if a child was old enough to understand the lyrics, they were old enough to know it was "just a song."

At the time I sided with the listeners who took the song very lightly. In fact, I still do. But I have a better idea of where the concerned parents were coming from. Though in the song Wanda escapes her domestic abuse situation, she only does so by escalating the violence and becoming the abuser. She and Mary Ann didn't batter and hospitalize Earl the way he did to Wanda, but killed him through the much more passive method of poisoning. This action isn't as blatantly, fist-to-face violent as Earl's abuse was, but even still it qualifies as intimate partner violence (Seely 187-189).

The song also has undertones implying that Earl was unwanted, unimportant, and even sub-human. The verse "[I]t turns out he was a missing person who nobody missed at all" minimizes the weight of the crime committed by these women. Just because he was a man, did not mean he was incapable of being victimized. In fact, the assumption that men are not victims of intimate partner violence is probably the reason the law enforcement in the song did not look into his disappearance.

If Wanda's case were to go to trial, Earl's body found and the women accused of murder, her attorney may have made references to "battered women syndrome" (Kirk and Okazawa-Rey 264) and called experts to testify that Wanda suffered from this affliction. They would have claimed Wanda saw no other way out of her situation. this would only minimize Wanda's responsibility for her actions, and lay all the blame on Mary Ann, who could not be suffering similarly since she was not the victim of abuse. Wanda would more than likely receive minimal punishment, and be perceived as just as weak as if she were still being battered.

"Goodbye Earl" can easily be mistaken as empowering and feminist, but feminism is not about taking the law into our own hands and becoming the victimizer instead of the victim. It is about ending violence, against men and women, and changing the laws to make them more effective to that end. Some women who heard this song may have sympathized with these characters, and felt empowered to take control of their situation with a domestic partner. If so, I can only hope they chose to do so legally.

Word Count: 489

Seely, Megan. Fight Like a Girl: How to be a Fearless Feminist. New York: New York University Press, 2007. 187-189. Print.

Kirk, Gwyn, and Okazawa-Rey, Margo. Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. 5th ed. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill, 2010. 264. Print.