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Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for

1991

Stephen Crane's "Bride" As Countermyth of the West

Jules Zanger Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville

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Zanger, Jules, "Stephen Crane's "Bride" As Countermyth of the West" (1991). Great Plains Quarterly. 611. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/611

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. STEPHEN CRANE'S "BRIDE" AS COUNTERMYTH OF THE WEST

JULES ZANGER

It has become a critical cliche to recognize and slouches off in confused disappointment, Stephen Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow "a simple child of the earlier plains. "1 Sky" as a parody of the traditional, cliche-rid­ Eric Solomon, in his Stephen Crane: From den Western. His transformations of that form's Parody to Realism, writes, "All the donnees of conventional hero, heroine, and badman, as the Western story are reversed; the empty forms well as of the climactic, de rigueur shootout are are shattered. The marshall is an unarmed hon­ amusing and obvious. In the story Crane de­ eymooner; the gunman is a childish old man; picted the Pullman journey of a middle-aged, the gunfight is aborted." Donald B. Gibson de­ honeymooning couple, Jack Potter, a Texas scribes it as "a spoof on the kind of sentimental marshal, and his plain, "under-class" bride, to Western fiction written earlier by Bret Harte their home in Yellow Sky. There they are con­ and the many lesser writers who have turned fronted by the rampaging Scratchy Wilson, the out drivel about the frontier West ever since. "2 last of the badmen, who on learning that the The identification of this particular parodic marshal has taken a wife, holsters his revolvers intention of Crane's story seems unassailable, if a little reductive; why, however, Crane should have chosen to parody what had become in his own time a moribund and juvenile mode­ "drivel" and "empty forms"- and why Mc­ Clure's, the leading muckraking journal in America, should have chosen to publish such Jules Zanger is professor of English at Southern a self-limiting parody are questions that perhaps Illinois University in Edwardsville. His articles in deserve consideration. the field of American studies have appeared in such journals as American Quarterly, Americ~n THE MYTH OF THE WEST Studies, CLIO, Modem Philology, and Amer­ ican Literature. I believe that "Bride," beyond its parodic deflating of a minor popular juvenile form, was [GPQ 11 (Summer 1991): 157-165] a response to what was in 1898 a much broader

157 158 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SUMMER 1991 and more significant issue: the transformation books, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885), of an American myth of the West, not by real­ Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1888), and ity, but by an alternative myth empowering and The Wilderness Hunter (1893), as well as nu­ justifying the extension of an eastern, bourgeois merous articles, in which he romantically ideal­ hegemony of values. Western lands from the ized the West and especially the cowboys and, beginning had been settled by large corporate at the same time, reassuringly insisted on their groups for mining, lumbering, and agricultural potential for bourgeois co-option, assimilation, purposes. Following this pattern, in the last de­ and appropriation. s This was a relatively new cades of the century the open range was trans­ perception. In the decade of the 1870s, ac­ formed into the Cattle Kingdom, divided into cording to Henry N ash Smith, "the term 'herd­ baronies, some as large as a hundred miles long, er' was as likely to be used as the classic name mainly held by corporations that had sprung of 'cowboy' and it usually called up the image into being as the railroads penetrated the Great of a semibarbarous laborer who lived a dull, Plains. The great cattle boom attracted not only monotonous life of hard fare and poor shelter." eastern entrepreneurs but also British and con­ Whether regarded as semi barbarous or as rug­ tinental investors who competed for range and gedly individualistic, the cowboy was seen as cattle rights. Ray Billington observes that "by possessing an untameable, even sinister poten­ the end of 1885 the Plains country was entan­ tial for anarchic violence. 6 gled in a barbed-wire network."3 Though this In Roosevelt's books written in the 1880s, pattern of settlement did not actually mark a however, the cowboys are "sinewy, hardy, self­ significant change in the economic develop­ reliant, their life forces them to be both daring ment of the West, it did violate a deeply held and adventurous, and the passing over their popular perception. The new West was a pre­ heads of a few years leaves printed on their faces carious amalgam of feudal authority and venture certain lines which tell of dangers quietly fronted capital that in most regards was the opposite of and hardships uncomplainingly endured." These that individualistic, pastoral, democratic myth are the new heroes, he tells the reader: "In place of the West that had dominated the American of these heroes of a bygone age, the men who imagination throughout the earlier part of the were clad in buckskin and carried long rifles, century. stands, or rather rides, the bronzed and sinewy Consequently, this transformed West of wired cowboy, as picturesque and self-reliant, as dash­ pastures and corporate investment required a ing and resolute as the saturnine Indian fighters transformed myth that would justify these de­ whose place he has taken." Despite these heroic partures from tradition, invite eastern confi­ and adventuresome qualities, the image Roo­ dence, and obscure the new West's unchecked sevelt presents of his cowboys is comfortably entrepreneurial aggressiveness, an aggressive­ domestic: ness beginning to be threatened in the industrial East by unionization and legislative controls. My home ranch stands on the river brink. The new myth was to take the form of a cele­ From the low, long veranda, shaded by leafy bration of the West as the true, essential Amer­ cottonwoods, one looks across sand bars and ica, embodying Anglo-Saxon ideals and shallows to a strip of meadowland, behind achievements, not simply in opposition to west­ which rises a line of sheer cliffs and grassy ern savagery, but to eastern decadence and met­ plateaus. This veranda is a pleasant place in ropolitanism as well. 4 the summer evenings when a cool breeze stirs A leading articulator of this vision was Theo­ along the river and blows in the faces of the dore Roosevelt, who had invested a fifth of his tired men who loll back in their rocking chairs fortune in two cattle ranches in the Dakota (what true American does not enjoy a rock­ Badlands. Out of his experience in the West, ing chair?), book in hand ... The long win­ Roosevelt wrote three frequently reprinted ter evenings are spent sitting around the STEPHEN CRANE'S "BRIDE" 159

hearth stone, while the pine logs roar and regard for their welfare, and was glad to mod­ crackle, and the men play checkers and chess ify his form of address on being told that it in the firelight. 7 was not what could be described as conven­ tionally military.... It was astonishing how In The Rough Riders (1899), appropriately soon the men got over these little peculiar­ prefaced by a Bret Harte poem, Roosevelt adopts ities. They speedily grew to recognize the fact Harte's technique of discovering in his crude that the observance of certain forms was es­ and violent characters those sterling qualities sential to the maintenance of proper disci­ most reassuring to his eastern readers. Where pline. They became scrupulously careful in Harte, however, reveals the capacity for gentle­ touching their hats, and always came to at­ ness and love in his roughest characters, as he tention when spoken to. 8 does in "The Luck of Roaring Camp," Roose­ velt discovers patriotism, loyalty, and the ca­ At a time when the East was being massively pacity for discipline, service, and obedience. He transformed by the influx of the "New Immi­ begins by describing his recruits: grants" from southern and eastern Europe, the West had become for Roosevelt and many like They were to a man born adventurers, in the him-eastern, Ivy-League educated, well-born, old sense of the word. . . . Some of them and wealthy-a last bastion of the Anglo-Saxon went by their own name; some had changed establishment. In this period Roosevelt shared their names; and yet others possessed but half his beliefs with his friends Henry Cabot Lodge a name, colored by some adjective, like and Madison Grant, who in 1915 was to write Cherokee Bill, Happy Jack of Arizona, Smoky the elegiac The Passing of the Great Race, a racial Moore, the broncobuster, so named because vision of history derived from the theories of cowboys often call vicious horses ... Gustave Le Bon, leading Roosevelt to support "smoky" horses, and Rattlesnake Pete, who immigration restriction. 9 At best, Roosevelt's had lived among the Moquis and taken part attitude toward foreigners was an amused con­ in the snake dances. Some were professional descension. In The Wilderness Hunter, he ap­ gamblers, and, on the other hand, no less provingly wrote, than four were or had been Baptist or Meth­ odist clergymen-and proved first-class Native Americans predominate among the fighters, too, by the way. Some were men dwellers in and on the borders of the wil­ whose lives in the past had not been free derness and in the wild country over which from the taint of those fierce kinds of crime the great herds of the cattlemen roam; and into which the lawless spirits who dwell on they take the lead in every way. The sons of the border-land between civilization and sav­ the Germans, Irish, and other European agery so readily drift. newcomers are usually quick to claim to be "straight United States," and to disavow all Nevertheless, he reassures his readers, kinship with the fellow countrymen of their fathers. The men were singularly quick to respond to any appeal to their intelligence and pa­ Owen Wister, another member of the Roosevelt triotism. The faults they committed were circle, particularly emphasized the ethnic back­ those of ignorance merely. When Holder­ ground of the cowboy in his essay "The Evo­ man [the Indian cook], in announcing din­ lution of the Cowpuncher": "the knight and ner to the Colonel and the three Majors, the cowboy are nothing but the same Saxon in genially remarked, 'If you fellars don't come different environments, the polished man in soon, everything'll get cold,' he had no London and the man unpolished in Texas." thought of other than a kindly and respectful Roosevelt's friend and illustrator, Frederic Rem- 160 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SUMMER 1991

ington, was less moderate than either in his of taste, avid for money, and hostile to culti­ ethnic predispositions; in a letter to his friend vation. "12 Crane the ironist was, in many sig­ Poultney Bigelow he wrote, "Jews, Injuns, nificant ways, a leading member of that avant­ Chinamen, Italians, Huns--the rubbish of the garde, as a religious iconoclast, as an experi­ Earth I hate-I've got some Winchesters and mental artist, as an enthusiastic critic of bour­ when the massacring begins, I can get my share geois moraliry and hypocrisy in his writings, and of them, and what's more, I will ... "10 as an equally enthusiastic dissenter from that The older western myth had emphasized its morality in his private life. 13 It is from this point hero's individualism, his idiosyncratic, outlaw of view, I suggest, that "Bride" is written, rather (in the sense that he was outside the social than from that celebratory one expressed in the order) nature. If the West was to be rewon for works of Wister and, before him, of Theodore eastern interests, the westerner as wild man, as Roosevelt, in whose accounts of the West tra­ semisavage, and the West as wilderness land­ ditional bourgeois values were conjoined with scape had to become tamed, domesticated, ul­ longings for aristocratic privilege and prestige. timately utilizable and coherent. Roosevelt's The essential parodic target of "Bride" is not longtime friend, admirer, and Harvard school­ the trivial literary form it employs but rather mate, Owen Wister, who was introduced to the the self-congratulatory bourgeois transforma­ West by Richard Trimble, manager of a Wyo­ tion it dramatizes. ming cattle company and member of the no­ The instrument of transformation in Crane's torious Wyoming Stock Growers Association, story is the great Pullman carrying Jack and his first presented this new westerner in a series of bride into their new lives with all the speed and sketches in Harper's Weekly in 1893 and then power of the industrial age itself. Its appearance in a novel, Lin Mclean, in 1897. Wister's civ­ among "the woods of light and tender trees" ilizable, compatible western hero was to receive had become sufficiently commonplace by the his popular apotheosis in The Virginian in 1902. end of the century that the oneiric and sinister In the course of that extremely widely read novel, metaphor that opens the story is immediately dedicated to "my dear critic" Theodore Roo­ accessible. sevelt, its cowboy hero was transformed from a happy-go-lucky, gun-toting, prank playing "child The great Pullman was whirling onward with of the earlier plains" into a perfect bourgeois: such dignity of motion that a glance from married to the new school marm, property-own­ the window seemed simply to prove that the ing, and off his horse and into a buckboard­ plains of Texas were pouring eastward. Vast "an important man, with a strong grip on many flats of green grass, dull-hued spaces of mes­ various enterprises, and able to give his wife all quit and cactus, little groups of frame houses, and more than she asked for or desired. "11 Five woods of light and tender trees, all were years earlier, Stephen Crane had anticipated sweeping into the east, sweeping over the this re-vision in "Bride." There, however, Crane horizon, a precipice. (p. 109) did not celebrate the bourgeois conversion. The shock and dismay felt earlier in the cen­ "THE BRIDE COMES TO YELLOW SKY" tury by Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Emerson at the intrusion of the great hooting machine into A major thematic element in "Bride" is the their pleasant Concord woods are no longer so triumph of a bourgeois culture over a primitive apparent: 14 The landscape has now become eva­ one. It is important, therefore, to recall that at nescent and dreamlike. Significantly, Crane's the end of the nineteenth century the American landscape has none of the epic grandeur-the bourgeoisie had as its critic and avowed enemy overwhelming mountains, stark deserts, steep what Peter Gay called "the implacable avant canyons--traditionally associated with the West. gardes . . . disdaining the bourgeoisie as bereft Instead he shows the reader a muted, domes- STEPHEN CRANE'S "BRIDE" 161 ticated, curiously fragile topography. The ma­ For both Crane and his opposite number, Owen chine, however, is all dignity and solidity and, Wister, a major symbol of the changes the West running on its iron schedule, denies the watcher was undergoing was marriage. Wister's Lin even surprise. Mclean and The Virginian are as much about Though grown familiar by the end of the marriage as any Jane Austen novel and offer to century both as literary trope and as cultural the reader an idealized vision of that institution experience, this conjunction of railroad train that corresponds to Wister's approving percep­ and rural American landscape remains in Crane's tion of the social and economic forces changing story filled with tension. In part this was be­ the West. The courtship of Molly Wood shows cause the myth and countermyth those images us the Virginian learning to read Shakespeare represented still were deeply rooted in the and Sir Walter Scott as well as how to settle American consciousness. In part, also, each of down and invest his money. Retaining his manly the opposing elements is shown as containing western attributes, his honor and courage, his its own negation. Scratchy Wilson represents grace and speed with his six-gun, in marrying most immediately the real toad (or snake) in Molly and becoming a landed proprietor, the the earthly garden that was the mythic West; Virginian has achieved a superior degree of civ­ Crane had no need to belabor the hollowness ilization and fulfilled the western promise of the of the western pastoral. On the other hand, transformation of the lowly. His achievement, that vision of modernity, technology, progress, however, is only part of the general transfor­ and triumphant bourgeois social order emblem­ mation the West is undergoing: ized by the train had to be subverted, as we shall see, more subtly because the social forces By the levels of Bear Creek that reach like it represented were so powerfully on the as­ inlets among the promontories of the lonely cendant. Finally, however, Crane's presenta­ hills, they [the cowboys] came upon the tion of the familiar trope is unsettling because schoolhouse, roofed and ready for the first he has inverted its most basic dynamic: instead native Wyoming crop. It symbolized the dawn of presenting the train conventionally as an in­ of a neighborhood, and it brought a change trusive, invading presence thrusting itself into into the wilderness air. The feel of it struck the idyllic garden, we are shown, paradoxically, cold upon the free spirits of the cow-punch­ the "whirling," speeding train as the still center ers, and they told each other that, what with of an otherwise unsubstantial world from which women and children and wire fences, this all of the familiar elements of solidity and or­ country would not long be a country for der-the farmhouse, the homestead, the earth men. 16 itself-are in flight. Crane's perception of the train as destructive Crane's presentation of marriage, while as of the ordered past had been comically antici­ central as Wister's, is significantly different. Pe­ pated in a newspaper article he wrote while ter Gay has suggested that for the nineteenth visiting San Antonio in 1895. Instead of the century the train had become a powerful erotic Pullman, however, he wrote of its diminished, symbol, "a conjunction of change and sensual­ urban version, the trolley: "Trolley cars are mer­ ity."17 Appropriately Crane links the train and ciless animals. They gorge themselves with rel­ sensuality by presenting his newlyweds in the ics. They make really coherent history too like charged public intimacy of the Pullman, speed­ an omelet. If a trolley car had trolleyed around ing them, implicitly, toward sexual consum­ Jericho, the city would not have fallen: it would mation. It is difficult, however, to anticipate a have exploded. "15 more awkward, embarrassed, and angular union. If Crane's Pullman destroys the old natural It is not merely that these two are not the con­ order of the West, it carries a new order em­ ventional handsome hero and pretty ingenue of blemized in the marriage of Jack and his bride. the traditional Western. What Crane shows us, 162 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SUMMER 1991 especially in the case of Jack, is that the bour­ them. "18 It is this social and economic in­ geois transformation involves a loss of grace, equality that informs the amusement with which confidence, and potency, precisely those attri­ Jack and his bride are regarded by their fellow butes of manliness so central to Roosevelt's and passengers and is underlined in that devastat­ Wister's image of the heroic westerner. We see ing, by today's more hypocritical standards, de­ Jack, previously "a man known and feared in scription of the bride's "under-class his own comer" (p. 111) now as "furtive and countenance." When Jack suggests that they shy" (p. 109), seized with "a new cowardice" eat in the dining car where they "charge a dol­ (p. 112) with fumbling hands "heavy and mus­ lar," the bride's response, "Charge a dollar? cle-bound" (p. 112), and, in his encounter with Why, that's too much-for us---ain't it, Jack?" Scratchy, without a gun, unmanned. In con­ (p. 110) wavers between an indignant realism trast, Scratchy Wilson, the unregenerate man and a naive and plaintive hope. The correctness for whom Crane shows no slightest shred of of her initial response is validated by the amused elegiac nostalgia, is described as walking with superiority of the Negro waiters in the diner "the creeping movement of the midnight cat," who patronize them in a manner very like that while his hands move "with an electric swift­ of plantation house servants patronizing white ness" and "like lightning" and "in a musician's trash. The "dazzling fittings of the coach," the way" (p. 117). When he is confronted with the numerous mirrors, the figured velvet seats and bride, however, he slouches heavily away, drag­ bronze figures and frescoes, may suggest Euro­ ging his feet, his boots making "funnel shaped pean high culture as they refer the reader to tracks in the heavy sand" (p. 120). palaces and museums, but their primary allusion Crane's perception of a fracturing, unravel­ is not so much to European culture as it is to ling world both denies that earlier anarchic pas­ eastern wealth and tasteless bourgeois acquisi­ toral vision of the West and challenges the new, tiveness and display: the "environment of the ordered bourgeois vision that was replacing it. new estate" (p. 110) to which Jack aspires. The Crane's West, at least as he establishes it in overwhelming impact of the Pullman on the "Bride," is made up of jarring cultural discon­ bedazzled newlyweds is undercut for the reader tinuities to which all of the story's allusions to by the realization that the "separated chamber" caste and race contribute. sturdily supported by a "bronze figure" can be The first section of "Bride" introduces both nothing else than the toilet, and that the evoc­ these elements. Jack and his bride are not "fur­ ative effect of the "frescos [sic] in olive and tive and shy" in the Pullman simply because silver" is deliberately negated by the observa­ they are rustic and newlywed; they are awkward tion that they have been painted "at convenient and uncomfortable because they are intensely places on the ceiling" (p. 110). aware that they, according to the mores of their If Jack and his bride are awkward and plain time, are where they do not belong. At the end and naive, the dazzling new estate they find of the century, the Pullman was a luxury car themselves in is at least equally flawed. The intended for the very rich. Lord Charles Russell, malice and snobbery of the other travelers, the who visited the United States in 1883, wrote, porters, and the waiters, the ostentation and "It is clear that in this country of so-called pretentiousness of the Pullman car, all suggest equality, one thing that most strongly recom­ the hollowness of the culture symbolized. The mended the Pullman was the fact that it enabled social divisions expressed in the encounters be­ the rich to create the clearest possible inequality tween Jack and the waiters are extended in a in the conditions of even ordinary travel." Pull­ series of allusions that suggest something of the man travelers in the West were customarily "a past and future complexity of Crane's West. In superior class-Df Easterners:-it costs too much the very limited context of the story, Crane to get here for the scum of the earth to be among introduces references to a whole series of mar- STEPHEN CRANE'S "BRIDE" 163 ginal Americans: Negro porters, Mexican Texas in 1895. Crane felt a strong personal an­ sheepherders, Apache scalp-hunters, Jewish imus for Roosevelt, however, that would have shirt-makers, eastern drummers. This West is made him particularly skeptical of Roosevelt's hardly the seamless Anglo-Saxon garment Roo­ vision. In 1896 Crane presented Roosevelt, who sevelt shows us. 19 was currently New York City's commissioner of The pattern of cultural disjunctions estab­ police, with a signed copy of George's Mother; lished in "Bride" is echoed by its structural and Roosevelt then requested an autographed copy stylistic divisions. This barely twelve-page story of his Red Badge of Courage, which he, at that is formally divided by Roman numerals into four time, especially admired, and the two appar­ separate sections, each with its own cast and ently became enthusiastic friends. According to locus: Jack and his bride on the train, the towns­ his niece, Helen Crane, Crane could "talk all folk in the Weary Gentleman Saloon, Scratchy night with Theodore Roosevelt." In the same on the street in front of the saloon, and, finally, year, Crane felt sufficiently confident of Roo­ the Potters and Scratchy in front of Jack's house. sevelt's good will to show him the unpublished The fragmented presentation of the action is manuscript of one of his Mexican stories. This made even more striking by the chronological story, "A Man and Some Others," elicited from violence done to the conventional sequence of Roosevelt a response that both reflected Roo­ events when section II is made to begin twenty­ sevelt's conventional ethnic biases and antici­ one minutes before the conclusion of section I. pated the issues that would divide them: "Some Many of the images Crane creates contribute day I want you to write another story of the to this sense of disorder. John Cawelti, in his frontiersman and the Mexican Greaser in which The Six-Gun Mystique, defines the Western, the frontiersman shall come out on top; it is among other things, as "a story that takes place more normal that way. "21 somewhere in the western United States in Their relationship was to change in Septem­ which the characters wear certain distinctive ber 1896, when in the course of the notorious styles of clothing. "20 The detailed and persistent Dora Clark affair, Crane, defending the falsely clothing imagery Crane employs in "Bride"­ accused prostitute, testified against one of Com­ Jack's new and uncomfortable black suit, the missioner Roosevelt's policemen, preferring bride's embarrassingly elaborate blue cashmere charges against him for false arrest. Crane be­ dress, Scratchy's maroon shirt and child's lieved that Commissioner Roosevelt had white­ boots---in denying the conventional expecta­ washed his policeman, and Roosevelt insisted tions established by the setting, further suggests that Crane was "a man of bad character.... a world of skewed or broken connections. From consorting with loose women. " The quarrel was the initial verbal disjunction of "Yellow" and never made up. Crane, who later became war "Sky" in the title to that final one in which correspondent for the New York World, accom­ Scratchy picks up his "starboard" revolver, panied the Rough Riders led by Roosevelt into Crane's style hints at an almost surreal inco­ their first action, the Battle of Las Guasimas, herence underlying the common-sense surface where they were promptly ambushed. His dis­ of the new image of the West and represents a patch to the World was headlined "Stephen denial and subversion of it. Crane Calls It a Blunder." Roosevelt, in tum, though he praised the other correspondents, never mentioned Crane's considerable presence throughout the campaign, except obliquely: "I CRANE AND ROOSEVELT did not see any sign among the fighting men, Crane's antagonism to the Roosevelt-Wister whether wounded or unwounded, of the very myth of a triumphantly bourgeois new West is complicated emotions assigned to their kind by rooted certainly in his habitual avant-garde mind some of the realistic modem novelists who have set as well as in the experience of his visit to written about battles. "22 164 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SUMMER 1991

CONCLUSION Life and the Hunting Trail (New York: The Century Company, 1888); The WilJerness Hunter (New York: If, as I have been suggesting, one of Crane's G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1893). intentions in writing "Bride" was to subvert both 6. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (New York: Vintage Books, 1950), p. 122; see also Richard Slot­ the older myth of a wild, romantic West and kin, The Fatal Environment (New York: Atheneum Roosevelt's bourgeois myth supplanting it, that Press, 1985), especially Chapter 12, "The Inversion intention failed. Existing as established struc­ of the Frontier Hero," pp. 242-78. tures of reference and emotional resonance, these 7. Roosevelt, Hunting Trips (note 5 above), pp. myths contributed to and helped shape Crane's 7, 25, 10-11. 8. Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders (New story, but each of them had its own positive York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1899), pp. 19-20, narrative that was to prove stronger in an ex­ 30-31. pansive, confident America than Crane's ironic 9. See John Higham, Strangers in the Land (New negations. Crane's unpopular point about the Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955), p. 149. West in "Bride" might have been summed up 10. Roosevelt, WilJerness Hunter (note 5 above), p. 36. (This belief in the capacity of the West to by Milan Kundera when, in quite another con­ transform European newcomers into "straight United text, he wrote "Stupidity [ugliness, mediocrity, States" had been more academically expressed in the dullness] does not give way to science, tech­ same year as the publication of "The Wilderness nology, modernity, progress--on the contrary, Hunter" by Frederick Jackson Turner in his The Sig­ it progresses right along with them. "23 Within nificance of the Frontier [1893]; Wister quoted in John Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique, 2nd ed. (Bowling three years of the publication of "Bride," The Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Press, 1984), Great Train Robbery (1903) appeared, and the p. 70; Remington quoted in G. Edward White, The newly born moving picture industry would take Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience (New up both myths and eventually discover for them Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968), p. broader audiences than those to which any lit­ 109. 11. For a detailed account of Wister's association erary work could aspire. with the Wyoming Stock Growers' Association and the Cheyenne Club, see White, Eastern Establishment NOTES (note 10 above), p. 123; Owen Wister, The Virginian (1902; rpt. New York: Macmillan Company-Pocket 1. Stephen Crane, "The Bride Comes to Yellow Books, 1972), p. 364. Sky," The Works of Stephen Crane, ed. Fredson Bow­ 12. Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria ers (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, to Freud (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 1970), vol. 5, pp. 109-20. (Hereafter cited in pa­ vol. 1, p. 7. rentheses in the text.) 13. See in this regard Edwin H. Cady's account 2. Eric Solomon, Stephen Crane: From Parody to of Crane's complex and individual relationship to Realism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), the avant-garde and "modernity" in his critical bi­ p. 256; Donald B. Gibson, The Fiction of Stephen ography Stephen Crane (note 2 above), pp. 69-95. Crane (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Il­ 14. For a detailed discussion of this phenomenon, linois University Press, 1968), p. 125. For similar see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: appraisals see Edwin Cady, Stephen Crane (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). Twayne Publishers, 1962), p. 124; and Milne Hol­ 15. Stephen Crane, "Patriot Shrine of Texas," ton, Cylinder of Vision (Baton Rouge: Louisiana Uni­ Omaha Daily Bee, 8 January 1899, rpt. Stephen Crane versity Press, 1972), p. 226. in the West and Mexico, ed. Joseph Katz (Kent, Ohio: 3. Ray Billington and Martin Ridge, Westward Kent State University Press, 1970), pp. 35-37, quo­ Expansion, 5th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1982), p. tation pp. 36-37. 625. 16. Wister, The Virginian (note 11 above), p. 69. 4. Patricia Limerick in The Legacy of COTUJuest 17. Gay, Bourgeois Experience (note 12 above), (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987) traces p.67. the persistence of this attitude about the West in her 18. Russell quoted in White, Eastern Establishment chapter "Racialism on the Run," pp. 259-92. (note 10 above), p. 47. 5. Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranch­ 19. Crane here anticipates those criticisms of the man (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1885); Ranch "bipolar" perception of the West as containing only STEPHEN CRANE'S "BRIDE" 165

"whites" and "redskins" that dominated the popular p. 45; Roosevelt quoted in Works of Stephen Crane imagination in this century. See Limerick, Legacy of (note 1 above), vol. 5, p. 1. COruJuest (note 4 above), pp. 259-61. 22. Stallman, Stephen Crane (nofe 21 above), pp. 20. Cawelti, Six-Gun Mystique (note 10 above), 45,607 n. 10,382; Roosevelt, The Rough Riders (note p.35. 8 above), p. 107. 21. Helen Crane quoted by Robert W. Stallman, 23. Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (New Stephen Crane (New York: George Braziller, 1968), York: Harper and Row, 1988), p. 163.