28 pages • 56 minutes read
Stephen CraneThe Bride Comes to Yellow Sky
Stephen CraneFiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1898A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Stephen Crane
Crane, born in 1871 in Newark, New Jersey, had a prolific and varied writing career during his short life. Although best known for The Red Badge of Courage, his classic Civil War novel, he also wrote poems, news reports, and short stories. Many of his works embodied the realist and naturalist traditions in literature, focusing on the familiar and banal experiences of everyday life.
Crane was the 14th and final child of Methodist parents, yet he was only their ninth surviving child. Two of his surviving siblings also died during his lifetime, and Crane succumbed to tuberculosis at age 28 after many years of fragile health. The frequency with which the death of loved ones impacted his life helps explain the presence of death in his works. Although nobody dies in “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”—subverting the townsfolks’ expectations—death remains a motif in the story. Indeed, the figurative Death of the Wild West is a central theme.
Crane’s idealized notions of the American West prompted his regret for its demise. Crane was a New Englander who focused his early writing efforts on detailing life in the low-income settlements of the Northeast. He juxtaposed what he viewed as the pretentiousness and dishonesty of his home in the East with the perceived authenticity and purity of the West. In an inscription in his book George’s Mother to a friend and fellow writer, Crane wrote: “To Hamlin Garland of the great honest West/From Stephen Crane of the false East.”
Historical Context: The Wild West
The geography, history, folklore, and culture of the American frontier comprise the imagined entity known as the Wild West. Beginning around the end of the Civil War in 1865 and ending in the late 19th or early 20th century, this image encompasses a period of westward American expansion that was fueled in part by a cultural belief in manifest destiny. This view stipulated that American settlers were destined and duty-bound to inhabit the entirety of contiguous America from coast to coast. In this process, the lifestyle of the Indigenous American inhabitants of these Western lands was ended, and they were pushed into reservations, which were generally located on land the white settlers did not want.
Despite the risks inherent in these undertakings, the promise of freedom and the potential for prosperity beckoned pioneers to venture into the unknown. The 1862 Homestead Act encouraged this migration; it allowed them to claim 160 acres, which would be theirs after five years if they remained on the land and improved it in ways such as building a home. Their experiences spawned the folk tales that created the western genre, although the reality of life in the American frontier was less romantic and far more grueling and tedious than the stories portrayed. Nonetheless, they captured the imaginations of millions, first in fiction and then in later media such as television.
However, by 1898 when “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” was published, the frontier era was reaching an end. Transcontinental railroads were connecting cities spread far and wide across the country, reducing months-long journeys to mere days. By 1912, all 48 contiguous states had been integrated into the union, so that the frontier territories—a designation applying to generally unoccupied land with fewer than two people per square mile—were no more. Instead, the population was exploding, and cities were forming or expanding. These developments led to an end of a culture that was associated with the stereotypical American identity.
Genre Context: The Western
Though perhaps better known as a genre of film and television, westerns in literature contain many of the same tropes. Set in the “Wild West” of the American frontier, typically between the mid to late 19th century and the early 20th century, stories and novels featuring the Old West were written in a straightforward style and cheaply produced. This made them relatively accessible and appealing to a mass audience. Western stories and novels often centered on the adventures of famous personalities of the time, on either side of the law: rogue outlaws, such as Billy the Kid and Jesse James, and the superhuman “lawmen” who put them in their place, such as Wyatt Earp.
The world of the Wild West is full of rampant lawlessness, bar brawls, showdowns at high noon, and a reliable cast of characters: outlaws, gunslingers, bounty hunters, saloonkeepers, and Indigenous Americans who were portrayed as violent. The hero of the story could be the upright lawman or the lone stranger or cowboy who drifts into town at just the right time. Heroes are almost exclusively male and embody a set of stereotypically masculine qualities: tough, rugged, emotionally controlled, and fiercely individualistic. This is in contrast to the qualities frequently possessed by villains. Though they are also invariably male, they lack the hero’s self-control and are motivated by anger, greed, and a sadistic desire to terrorize and dominate. Women in the western tradition are domestic, delicate creatures who exist mainly to be saved.
In “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” Crane faithfully employs all the standard conventions of the western, but subverts them, presenting a would-be villain whose thirst for violence dissipates with his shock at learning the marshal has married and is unarmed. This change of events disrupts their dynamic, leaving Scratchy to repeat in disbelief that it’s “all off” now.
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