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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Homesman by Glendon Swarthout The Homesman by Glendon Swarthout. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 660ec720cc5fc2ea • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. User Search limit reached - please wait a few minutes and try again. 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We use cookies to remember your preferences such as preferred shipping country and currency, to save items placed in your shopping cart, to track website visits referred from our advertising partners, and to analyze our website traffic. Privacy Details. The Homesman There are many stories of young women who came west with dreams and hope for a better life only to wind up going out of her mind. Life on the frontier was rough but on Great Plains it was the toughest. It was the dreary incessant wind, flat, treeless lands and the loneliness that drove many of them insane. Recently, I received a letter from Ralph Swanson of Prescott asking about the film, “ The Homesman ” starring Tommy Lee Jones and Hillary Swank. He wrote, “The film is powerful and hints at an element of western history that is seldom heard. Homesteaders faced crushing fatigue, loneliness, isolation and fear in the deserted west. It is reasonable that some lost their minds and desperately needed mental care. In the movie, the Homesman (Jones) and Swank, take a wagon load of “crazy” women back to Iowa and civilization in an effort to save their lives. Are there historical records that any such events actually did happen, were common, or organized in any way? Was the term “Homesman” known or recognized, or appear in western records? Or is it more likely these poor, sick people just committed suicide and were forgotten?” Sadly, many did take their own lives and their stories are largely forgotten. The movie, The Homesman, was adapted from a book by the late Glendon Swarthout, a professor at Arizona State University. He was a genius at rooting out unusual stories. Among his many books are The Shootist, They Came to Cordura, The Tin Lizzie Troop and Where the Boys Are . All were made into popular movies. Glendon was my neighbor and mentored me when I was a young writer. He was one of the most creative writers I’ve ever known. Yes, there are many stories of young women who came west with dreams and hope for a better life only to wind up going out of her mind. Life on the frontier was rough but on Great Plains it was the toughest. It was the dreary incessant wind, flat, treeless lands and the loneliness that drove many of them insane. Husbands would hire a so-called “homesman” to bring them back to the communities on the edge of the frontier. There were women’s relief societies in communities who took them in and tried to reconnect them with their families back east. If they were not successful the women, some only in their twenties, were placed in mental institutions. Women’s relief societies would take them in and try to re-unite them with their families in the East. If they were not successful, these poor souls would probably be institutionalized in insane asylum’s in larger cities and popularly known as “snake pits.” It was from the real stories that inspired Swarthout to write The Homesman. The Homesman. The journey in Tommy Lee Jones' "The Homesman", based on the 1988 novel by Glendon Swarthout, travels from west to east, from the unmarked Nebraska territory to a town in Iowa. It is a reverse trajectory of the typical Western path, the wildness of the prairies and plains reverting, startlingly, to a tame village perched on the edge of the placid Missouri River. When civilization finally arrives in the final section of the film, it seems palpably fragile; what has come before is so unremittingly desolate. "The Homesman," despite the title, is about women. Women are the center of the action, women drive the action forward, women are not only damsels in distress but heroic figures of grit and courage (sometimes in the same moment). The men are helpless bystanders or ambiguous allies. There is only one villain in the film, and he is a villain because he is callous. He lacks empathy. Tommy Lee Jones, as a director, homes in on the surreal aspects of the story with beautiful sensitivity and strangeness ("The Homesman" is an extremely strange film), highlighting the monotony of the landscape in which figures are either dwarfed by the vastness of it or tower above the flat horizon. The West, as seen in "The Homesman," is an unforgiving place, with flashes of stark and nightmarish beauty. Three women have lost their minds in "The Homesman," but honestly, everyone you meet in the film is slightly crazy, the homesman most of all. Nobody is a pillar of mental health. Sanity, then, could be seen as overrated, especially in a world like the one in "The Homesman." And those who lose their minds may very well be the only realists in the story. These are deeply suggestive ideas, and when "The Homesman" works best it teeters around in that morally ambiguous territory. It's a risky film. Sometimes the risks pay off, sometimes they don't, but the feeling of risk infuses the film with chaos, humor, violence, beauty. "The Homesman" doesn't play things safe, and that's a welcome change. Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) is a middle-aged woman, born in upstate New York, who has bought land in the Nebraska territory. She is unmarried and farms the land herself. She yearns to buy a piano and comforts herself by playing hymns on a cloth keyboard. She is seen early on proposing marriage to a farmer who owns land adjacent to hers. She pitches it as a business proposition, although there is an urgent need and fragility beneath her words that tell a different story. He turns her down pretty bluntly: "You're too bossy and you're too damn plain." It hurts, it hurts bad, but Mary Bee does not pity herself. She has too much work to do. During the tail-end of a particularly terrible winter, three women in the area descend into varying degrees of psychosis, dissociation, self-harm, and derangement. It is clear that they need to be transported to a place that can treat them, and the minister (John Lithgow) has a connection with a church in Iowa that has agreed to take them in. When the menfolk in the congregation balk at the job of transport, Mary Bee takes it on. A glorified paddy wagon is provided, complete with iron rings on the interior in order to chain the women in place, should it be necessary. The journey will be dangerous and long, and Mary Bee needs to hire a homesman, and George Briggs, a drunken out-for-himself claim-jumper, is just the man for the job. Mary Bee pitches it to him with the same matter-of-fact tone that she proposed marriage, telling him exactly what she needs and expects, and exactly what she will not tolerate. He's a bit of a buffoon, in his filthy long-johns and whining voice, but he needs the money. The early introduction of the three madwomen is presented hauntingly by Jones. The images flash onto the screen, interrupting the main action of Mary Bee at her farm, and Jones crafts a collage of terror and dread. Gro Svendsen (Sonja Richter) is a Scandinavian woman, seen screaming in agony as her husband drags her dead mother out into the snowy night: the corpse is stinking, she can't stay in the house anymore. Arabella (Grace Gummer) is a teenager, with a young husband, and her three babies died in a matter of days from diphtheria. She has gone comatose, staring out the window, clutching a rag doll. Theoline (Miranda Otto) is shown strolling outside into a biting snowstorm, a wailing purple newborn nipping at her bare breast, and she casually tosses the baby down the hole in the outhouse; the most harrowing image in the film.

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