to actually review one of his works. While The Red Badge of Courage is perhaps my
favorite, I’d like to save it for another time. Instead, since I covered one transformation of
the American Frontier last week with Zitkala-Sa, I figured I’d cover a more positive view
of American Expansion.
In The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, Crane illustrates the eventual movement of
society’s borders by showing how civilization comes to tame the Wild West. The story
deals with movement and transformation, not on a personal level, but on a societal level.
As marriage and family come into Yellow Sky, Texas, the world of the wild frontier
dissolves away. Ultimately this story describes the overall change that society hoped and
argued for at the time. The belief that men could not exist as proper men in as natural
a place as the prairie or the plains of Texas, was widely held by the majority; only the
trappings and suits of society could dress a man properly. So if a man can’t exist in such
a place, that place must be changed so a man can exist there. This is what Crane argues
in his story, that through physically changing the nature of his surroundings, a man can
make a more positive and comfortable life for himself anywhere in America.
The world of Yellow Sky is not wholly wild when the reader is introduced to it,
as the prairie or the woods that we see in other literature at the time. Society had already
been slowly encroaching on the frontier, and as each wave from the east grew stronger
and stronger, what little resistance of the wild ways gave out. In Yellow Sky even the
last savage man, Scratchy, has been partially civilized, as noticed in his “eastern” clothes.
The fancy “maroon shirt” and “gilded boots” adorn a man who is being absorbed by
the influences of civilization, but is still a base creature of the wilderness. The opposite
of Scratchy, is Jack, who has taken a bride and brought her back to Yellow Sky in an
attempt to bring the last few traditions of civilization to the frontier. When confronted
by his rival, the marshal stares down his ties to a savage past and simply steps away,
saying, “I’m married.” Scratchy is forced to withdraw and disappear as a result of
this “foreign condition” which reduces him to “a simple child of the earlier plains.”
The last traces of wildness ebb out of the white man, and civilized man is left standing
and married to his “drooping, drowning woman,” a symbol for the family’s struggle to
survive in the wild. As Crane concludes his story, the woman is wilting, but not dead,
and she will grow stronger as Scratchy fades away and the trains keep running.
In slowly diluting the frontier with eastern influences, man is transforming the
wilds into a place where life is increasingly easier. While this mixture creates a suitable
environment for civilized man to live in, the consequences are questionable and hinted
at in much of the literature of the period. Things must die for such a metamorphosis to
take place, and again I bring up Charles Brockden Brown’s work, and James Fenimore
Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales series. In Brown’s Wieland it is Theodore, the link to
the irrational mind in wilderness seclusion. In The Bride comes to Yellow Sky, Scratchy
is forced off the scene, and the fight in him dies out as he realizes his last opponent has
gone. Coopers, The Prairie, finally, shows the decay of a family as wilderness’s harsh
nature buffets their defenses, and as members drop, the Bushes are forced back east to
seek safety in the number of civilization. Whether these are positive or negative changes
were unclear at the time, but looking back on them now, the reader can better decide.
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