The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky

The story’s structure functions primarily as an allegory for the usurpation of the authentic and vital West by the domesticated and decadent East. It depends on characters and symbols to represent oppositional modes of life. For example, the train symbolizes the rapidly approaching forces of an interdependent, urban environment governed by laws and social structures that rely on cooperation and compliance. Potter’s house represents the culmination of that process. Scratchy is stunned to find him unarmed. Furthermore, Potter has a wife now, further evidence of his thorough domestication. These details stand in contrast to the spirit of the Wild West, represented by Scratchy. He is Jack Potter’s foil—the villain to his hero—and represents a bygone era characterized by a dangerously untamed masculinity. In fact, the death of this particular brand of masculinity is one of the primary casualties of the loss of the frontier lifestyle.

Essential to appreciating this ethos is an understanding of the western genre, which captured the popular imagination for more than 100 years and continues to inspire additional iterations in television, books, and movies. Crane presents—but subverts—several of the conventions of the genre, including its stock characters and predictable plots. For example, Potter represents the fiercely independent lawman. He stands in opposition to the emotionally unstable villain, Scratchy, who terrorizes the town of Yellow Sky at regular intervals whenever he goes on a bender. The settings of the saloon and the deserted streets of the town—where the climactic shootout often occurs—are all conventions of western narratives. These familiar plotlines and characters serve to romanticize the Wild West, which embodies a particular set of values; chief among these is rugged individuality, rooted in resolute independence. This Western ethic also encompasses a spirit of adventure, a high tolerance for personal risk, and a sense of ingenuity and resilience in the face of formidable obstacles. These circumstances engender a toughness that is expressed through such cultural habits as men always carrying a gun to protect themselves, as well as women and children, against the threats that continually arise in this environment.

While the western idealizes the lifestyle and cultural traits associated with the Wild West—attributes that Crane also respected as authentic and true—the story does not remain faithful to the conventional plotline of the genre. Instead, it examines the role of masculinity in the diminishing frontier through the use of parody. It exaggerates Scratchy’s menacing qualities and then subverts his expectations for a shootout through the removal of Potter’s gun. According to the conventions of the frontier, their anticipated showdown cannot commence unless both participants are armed. Since Potter has just returned from getting married, he is not armed. Finding the marshal without a gun is so unfathomable to Scratchy that he can only presume the lawman just left Sunday School; the church is the only place where being unarmed is appropriate. When his attempts to provoke a gunsight fail, Scratchy is left to wander away sadly while the marshal enters his new domestic space with his bride.

The author parodies the notions of masculinity within the western genre, but he does not necessarily reject them. Rather, he examines them in a new light—the disappearance of hypermasculinity due to the encroachment of the East and its accompanying values of order and domesticity. Scratchy and Potter ultimately fail as each other’s foils, and this anticlimax disrupts each character’s expected role. Rather than angling for a fight to defend his new bride and demonstrate his skills and masculine force in front of her, the unarmed Potter uses reason and calmness to de-escalate the situation and avoid violence. He tells Scratchy, “If you’re going to shoot me, you’d better begin now; you’ll never get a chance like this again” (24). This strategy is rooted in the conventions of the frontier: Potter knows that even while intoxicated, Scratchy won’t fire on an unarmed man, as this would violate the code of masculine honor. This also robs the would-be villain of the fun of the encounter: There is no adventure or triumph in shooting a lawman who cannot defend himself, particularly in front of the man’s new bride. Potter makes this statement while envisioning the luxury of the train, with its fine furnishings and gleaming surfaces, which call to mind “all the glory of the marriage, the environment of the new estate” (24). This reflects the allure of his first experiences of domestication and luxury and his desire to temper the rugged, violence-fueled unpredictability of the Old West with elements of the more orderly conventions of the Eastern US.

However, Crane does not fully embrace this encroaching Eastern lifestyle. Even as he pokes fun at certain aspects of the masculinity of the Old West, he does not celebrate its successor. He presents the male character who is most representative of non-Western masculinity, the salesman, as frivolous, incompetent, and cowardly. He is initially presented as a fast-talking storyteller, in contrast to the stoic, mostly silent Texans and sheep farmers in the saloon. The salesman’s outsider status is evident in his initially cavalier response to the news that Shorty is “drunk” and ready to “make trouble”: He presumes that the conventions of his home still hold in the West. In contrast, the Mexican men immediately leave, and the others stoically acknowledge that violence is coming, even as they stay in the saloon, ready to face whatever comes their way. The salesman, however, becomes increasingly agitated and panicked, repeatedly seeking reassurance—which does not come—that no one will be killed. The saloonkeeper, accepting these events as commonplace, orders him to sit down so he will not be shot when Shorty fires at the door. The other patrons of the saloon accept the day’s predictable chain of events as unchangeable; these actions are so routine that they even matter-of-factly allocate a window of two hours for the events. Only the salesman is depicted as frightened or in need of protection from other men, placing him in the role typically filled by women in this genre. Thus, the other men view his masculinity as suspect and inadequate for the Western context.