"A GOOD STICK TO BEAT THE LOVELY LADY:
VIOLENCE AND EQUALITY IN JOHN FORD'S THE QUIET MAN"
Gael Sweeney
Syracuse University
I will take up the question of nationality and colonialism, specifically
Irish nationality within British colonialism. The film that I will examine
here is John Ford's The Quiet Man . This film addresses issues of
national identity: What makes an American? What makes an Irishman? What
is it to be a "British colonial"? How does this confusion over
identity effect relations of masculinity and femininity? The country under
imperialism is said to be feminized, forced into a passive role by an aggressive
invader. Ireland is, I believe, a good example of the consequences of long-term
imperial policy. As England's oldest "foreign" colony, Ireland
spent eight hundred years under British domination, yet the Irish did not
lose a sense of separate national identity. The Quiet Man is about
an American returning to his Irish birthplace in an attempt to reclaim that
sense of Irish identity. Although the film takes place after independence,
the impact of colonial rule is still strong. The American, Sean Thornton,
is identified as another kind of colonial (his theme song is, not accidently,
"The Wild Colonial Boy"). Americans are portrayed as the exemplars
of rebellion against imperialistic rule and Thornton is the liberator of
the Irish villagers who cannot cast off the sterility of oppressive colonial
existence without his influence and example. But the legacy of colonialism
is also violence: national independence can only be won by revolution (the
Irish Rebellion), and masculinity (the winning of his wife's love) can only
be reclaimed through violence (the climactic fistfight). Only with the victory
of Sean and the final expelling of the British Anglican bishop can Danaher
be matched with the widow, and Sean and Mary Kate consummate their marriage
in relative equanimity: the throwing away of the stick marks the end of
enmity between man and wife, but also the closure of British domination
over the Irish. Many other films also address British colonialism, including
Gandhi, Lawrence of Arabia, Exodus, Revolution,
the various versions of Kim, and the two recent films about the Scottish
struggle against England, Rob Roy and Braveheart, but The
Quiet Man especially interrogates national identity and its construction
out of imperialism.
Every Saint Patrick's Day you can be assured of one thing: you will be
able to watch John Ford's 1952 film The Quiet Man on television
almost as many times as you can see It's a Wonderful Life
at Christmas. Rarely has a single film come to represent the essence of
a country more thanThe Quiet Man has come to embody Ireland for American
audiences. American critic Danny Peary calls it "the cult movie
of the American Irish who are nostalgic for their homeland (which they may
know only from movies)" (1988 194), while the British critic David
Thompson more cynically suggests that it is most suitable as "an entertainment
for IRA club night" (ibid.). Other critics have called Ford's film
a "poetical travel folder" (Sarris 132), a statement about Irish
feminist economics (Place, French, and Haskell), a fable about the Fall,
with Ireland standing in for Eden (Peary, French), and even "the sexiest
picture ever made" (McBride 110) -- John Ford's own humble assessment.
The Quiet Man , Ford's most successful film, monetarily if not critically,
has been canonized in the consciousness of the public, Irish and non-Irish
alike, as an idealized fairy tale, a picture of the Ireland of nostalgia
and Stage-Irishry, with, as Manny Farber writes, "the dated mimicry
of such stereotypes as the tippling... cabby, the thick-headed bellicose
squire, and the jovial village priest, who curses, jokes and fishes"
(Peary 195). William S. Buckley's mouthpiece of the American Right, The
National Review, recently labeled it as a favorite "Conservative"
film, whether because of the "family values" supposedly inherent
in its chaste romance, the presence of hawkish icon John Wayne, or the Right-wing
reputation of director John Ford, whose body of work also includes the Lefty
labor classics The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley,
and who described himself to French interviewer Bertrand Tavernier as "a
liberal democrat" whose favorite presidents were Lincoln, Roosevelt,
and Kennedy (Tavernier 70-1). I would agree that The Quiet Man is
a deeply political work, but for different reasons than those the American
Right avows. Indeed, the story of a man who rejects the materialistic values
of American society so completely that he becomes an expatriate to escape
them is hardly a Conservative panacea. But The Quiet Man is, like
all Ford's films, a deeply political work, fitting properly into his body
of "Irish" films, such as The Informer (1935), The Plough
and the Stars (1936), The Rising of the Moon (1957), and Young
Cassidy (1965, finished by Jack Cardiff). Among the questions that these
films raise are those of nationality and colonialism, specifically Irish
nationality within the sphere of British colonialism and domination, even
within a supposedly "post-colonial" context. The Quiet Man
directly addresses national identity, primarily what makes an "American"
or an "Irishman" and what it means to be a "colonial,"
and asks how this confusion over national identity effects relations of
masculinity and femininity, and how the use of violence "serves"
the cause of equality and freedom.
In a colonial identity, the colonized people become defined by their colonizers
-- those who write the histories and impose their wills and educational
systems -- and by their positions within the colonial system. The Welsh,
marginalized by the English into a small area of mountainous and unproductive
land, often depended on raiding border territory in order to survive, or
falling back on the last resort of a conquered people, putting one over
on the master. To that end, "Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief"
became a nursery rhyme, while branding someone a "welsher" was
to call him a cheat and a liar. The Scots, living at a subsistance level
in another hostage land, were characterized as thrifty or mean (in the British
sense of cheap), and hot-tempered, liable to fly into rages over the silliest
things, like the enclosure of their lands or their eviction from their Highland
homes. In the same way, the Irish have been defined chiefly by their struggle
against the British, so designated through their rebelliousness, their pugnaciousness,
and even their drunkeness -- people and nations tend to live up or down
to their images and expectations.
In The Quiet Man, Irish masculinity is never literally defined:
Ireland is presented as completely feminized (Mary Kate), castrated (Father
Lonergan, Michaeleen Oge), or completely colonized (Rev. Playfair, Danaher).
The struggle to delineate that identify is between two versions of possible
masculinities: the American (Thornton) and the wannabe British (Danaher).
An authentic and purely Irish masculinity, it seems, is never an option
here.
Ireland is a good example of the consequences of a long-term imperial policy.
As England's oldest "foreign" colony, Ireland spent eight hundred
years under British domination, with their native elite displaced, their
land confiscated, their language, religion, and culture outlawed, but still
the Irish did not lose a sense of their separate and distinct national identity.
To read Ireland from within the English language is to read from colonialism.
Many Irish writers, including the unsentimental Joyce, who puts the thoughts
is his literary alter-ego, Stephen Dedalus: "His Language, so familiar
and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech... My soul frets
in the shadow of his language" (Said Culture 224). The Act of
Union in 1801 and the Ordnance Survey of Ireland in 1824 redrew boundaries,
anglicized names, and served to subjugate the population. Brian Friel's
play Translations (1980) deals especially with the success of the
latter in demoralizing and alienating the population. Geographer Mary Hamer
notes that the survey, carried out by the English government, had the "immediate
effect of defining the Irish as incompetent" (Ibid 226). Edward Said
holds that a colony is "passive and spoken for, does not control its
own representation but is represented in accordance with a hegemonic impulse
by which it is constructed as a stable and unitary entity" (226). The
English language is, in many ways, the major conduit of that representation,
while Gaelic, as an entity and a force is forever problematic. In The
Quiet Man, for instance, only a woman, Mary Kate, and a priest, Father
Lonergan, speak it openly, while Michaeleen Oge, an old man, uses it for
ritual occasions, such as his appearance as offical matchmaker. Sean is
closed out of the language, and so closed off from his wife. How much are
the Irish, then, closed off from themselves and their traditions? Even Irish
achievements in their adopted tongue have been appropriated by their conquerors:
Sheridan, Goldsmith, Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett are all claimed
by "English Literature," while Irish identity and acheivement
is effectively effaced. Programs such as the movement of Scottish Protestants
into Ulster and the giving of passage America to Irish tenants evicted from
those lands served to "settle" and "pacify" what was
seen as a dangerous land full of ever dangerous people. "One of the
first tasks of the culture of resistance was to reclaim, rename, and reinhabit
the land" (Ibid 226), to make new heroes and new myths, and remake
the native language. Many, like Yeats, were torn between a Nationalism that
would make Ireland a Gaelic nation, and the "Englishness" of a
culture and language imposed from without, and yet very rich and creative.
But no matter how "close" geographically or racially -- the Irish
are white and just across a small sea -- "Irish people can never be
English" (Ibid 228). The Irish, like the Welsh, the Scots, and the
Indians, among others, are literal British "subjects" in that
they are subject to a stronger, if not more exalted, power.
The country under imperialism is often portrayed as feminized, forced into
a passive role by an aggressive invader; because of this perceived feminization,
much of the cultural myth-making of subject people may be concerned with
demonstrations of manhood and the regaining of a sense of national identity.
The Quiet Man's scenic beauty and comedic setpieces mask a subtext
of anxiety over Ireland's colonial past: everything that happens in the
"peaceful" little village of Inisfree has its roots in colonial
oppression, from the Thornton family's original exile to the tyrannical
power wielded over Inisfree by Red Will Danaher. It is not an accident that
the folk song "The Wild Colonial Boy" that heralds quiet man Sean
Thornton's entrance into Irish society is the film's true theme: John Ford's
other Irish-themed films all foreground the Irish struggle for self-determination
from English colonial power, and The Quiet Man, for all its resemblance
to a pastoral romance, is as politically charged as any of Ford's films
of rebellion. The Quiet Man reverses the traditional account of emigration
from Ireland by relating the story of an American prizefighter, Sean Thornton
(John Wayne), who returns to his Irish birthplace in an attempt to reclaim
his sense of Irish identity and the peace of mind lost when he killed a
man in the boxing ring. Sean has become rich and successful in America,
but rejects American materialism for what he imagines will be a simpler
life in Ireland. But Sean soon learns that Ireland is no "simple"
place, but a complex and conflicted society.
The Quiet Man takes place in a nebulous time that is never specified,
but assumed to be contemporary (1952). However, Ireland is pictured not
as a modern, self-determining nation, but as an idealized land from another
century, pastoral, feudal, preindustrial (or anti-industrial), and suffering
from a profound post-colonial malaise. Castletown, the nearest town, has
trains, but the village of Inisfree itself (with its conscious evocation
of Yeats' dreamy "lake isle") is without motorcars -- except,
significantly, that of the visiting Protestant bishop. Tractors and other
modern conveniences are, Mary Kate tells Sean, "loud, messy things."
She and the villagers prefer horses and carts, bicycles, and walking: the
five miles to Castletown that are "a mere stretch of the legs"
become emblematic of the distance between Inisfree and the outside world.
It is not coincidental that Red Will Danaher, who fancies himself the local
"Squire" (a title of the English gentry -- and would-be gentry)
uses a smoking and dirty farm machine -- which eventually becomes the furnace
that incinerates the "filthy money" that comes between Mary Kate
and Sean: the troublesome £350. The Danahers are obsessed with money
and property: Mary Kate's concern for her dowry is matched by her brother's
fixation with adding to his already substantial holdings by marrying Sarah
Tillane (Ford favorite Mildred Natwick), a remnant of the landed Norman
aristocracy, and a social step-up for Red Will Danaher. Inisfree and the
surrounding country is seemingly without such ambition or industry: only
Sean, Mary Kate, and Danaher, while the rest of the population fishes, prays,
gossips, or drinks in Cohan's Public House -- even the railroad crew at
the Castletown Station spend more time arguing than driving the train, causing
it to run on so-called "Irish Time," i.e., hours behind schedule
(a strategy that itself may be read as a protest against the mechanizations
and "improvements" of the colonial period). The energy of the
people has been dissipated by years of domination and emmigration.
Even though Ireland has won her independence, the impact of colonial rule
is still strong in Inisfree. The American Sean is presented as a different
kind of colonial -- his theme song is "The Wild Colonial Boy."
Americans are vital and materially successful, but also successful exemplars
of rebellion against British rule. Michaeleen Oge Flynn, jarvey driver,
matchmaker, bookmaker, and village factotum (Barry Fitzgerald) refers to
Sean as "a millionaire, like all the Yanks." Sean is a liberating
figure for the villagers who cannot cast off the sterility of oppressive
colonial existence without his influence and example. Michaeleen Oge casts
Sean in an heroic, mythic mode ("Homeric!" he exclaims), as a
reclaimer of his birthright and redresser of wrongs done to his family,
and by implication, all Irishmen. Mary Kate, with her flaming red hair,
introduced by Ford barefoot amid white flocks on emerald hills, is mythic
as well, a modern Cathleen ní Houlihan, that feminine figure who
traditionally symbolizes Ireland: she is the Ireland that Sean must first
tame, then understand, and, finally, liberate. Danaher, the brother, brute
and petty tyrant who won't let go of his sister's birthright, represents
the colonial power that still holds onto the country. Danaher is the "Gombeen
Man," the despised landgrabber who profited from both the subjugation
of Ireland and from the Famine that displaced people from their traditional
lands, that purely bourgeois collaborator whom Ford, following Yeats and
others, places as neither of the romaniticized Anglo-Irish aristocracy nor
of the sentimentalized peasantry. Colonial policy has put men like Danaher
in place, and his tattle-tale, sexless, bullying rule keeps the proud and
unbroken Mary Kate well under his heel. Inisfree still contains many other
reminders of the old British order: one character known only as the General
(played by "Major" Sam Harris), without a single line of dialogue,
with his pipe, tweeds, and British newspaper, sits in Cohan's Public House
like a piece of furniture -- or a ghost -- the embodied remnant of British
domination. The Reverend and Mrs. Playfair (Arthur Shields and Eileen Crowe)
possess a church, but no congregation -- their little church is just another
sham institution holding over from colonial rule. The Catholic villagers
uphold the Reverend Playfair's ("good man that he is") pretense
that he retains a congregation, while the local priest, the ubiquitous Father
Peter Lonergan (Ward Bond), hides his Roman collar and leads his parishioners
in duping the Anglican bishop, encouraging them to "yell like a bunch
of Protestants." The British comic tradition of the Irish as paragons
of deception and mendacity, especially when duping their English masters,
is used by Ford with great irony: the deception of the colonial dominator
is both a virtue (when it helps a good man) and a tactic of resistance.
But the legacy of colonialism is violence: national independence can be
won here only by revolution (as in the Easter Rebellion and its aftermath),
while masculinity (including the winning of a wife's love) can only be reclaimed
through violent action (the climactic fistfight between Sean and Danaher).
Ford sets up numerous oppositions throughout the film: the materialism of
America with the idealism of Ireland; the violent boxer, Trooper Thorn,
with the peace-loving farmer, Sean Thornton; the quiet man Sean with the
loud-mouthed Danaher; the passionate love affair of Sean and Mary Kate with
the dry and impotent courtship of Danaher and the Widow Tillane. Violence
and turbulent emotions boil under the serene surface of the Ireland. The
villagers, when finally roused, fight for the love of it, for sport and
honor, and because fighting is their heritage. Mary Kate, her temperment
marked, like her brother, Red Will, by her flaming hair, warns Sean that
"we Danahers are a fighting people." While Sean is given a stick
to master his wife, he refuses to use it; instead, it is Mary Kate who strikes
Sean again and again ("You've got quite a whallop," he says while
nursing his jaw after their first "conversation"). The ability
to fight and to fight back represents liberation to the Irish so long under
a repressive regime. Fighting has also bought Sean's freedom from poverty
and the foundries of Pittsburgh (the Hell that contrasts with the cool Heaven
of White o'Morn) but the violence of materialism and the boxing ring ("a
lousy purse, a piece of the gate") brings not the confirmation of manhood,
but death, namely the death of another boxer, "a good egg" and
a clean fighter, Joey Gadello, a man who possesses what Sean desires: a
wife and a family. Consequently, Sean fears that to fight is to kill, precipitating
the inevitable Fall that will banish him from Inisfree as it has from America.
But Ford suggests that the violence of the world is a force of nature and
a part of life that must be faced, and even in love the specter of chaos
and death pervades: the love scenes between Sean and Mary Kate are played
out amid rains and winds, with the final courting taking place in an ancient
graveyard, a thunderstorm raging over the lovers and the weathered crosses
and stones like a warning and a judgment.
Because he equates money with his own shame, Sean doesn't understand what
Mary Kate's dowry means to her as an Irishwoman. British Penal Laws made
Irish ownership of land and items over a nominal value illegal. The "things
that were my mother's and my mother's mother's and her mother's before her"
may have survived famine, eviction, and civil war, may even have been the
last resort of families whose fathers and sons were jailed or transported,
as Sean's grandfather had been. Sean sees the dowry only as "lousy
money," but to Mary Kate it represents her dreams and the possibility
of her own household, a measure of status and independence as a wife, and,
most significantly, the end of servitude to her collaborating brother: "Until
I've got my dowry safe about me I'm no married woman, I'm the servant I've
always been...you haven't got any bit of me, myself. I'll still be dreaming
amongst the things that aren't my own. There's three hundred years of happy
dreaming in those things. I want my dream." Mary Kate's dream may seem
a mundane one to those, like Sean, who take freedom and autonomy for granted,
but her dream is nothing less than the dream of Irish aspiration: to own
their own land and control their own things, and not be servant to an older
and more powerful "brother" in their own homeland. Sean deeply
misunderstands the personal and symbolic significance of the fortune to
Mary Kate: her claim to a separate identity and independence apart from
father, brother, or husband, indeed, her sovereignty over herself. Had Mary
Kate indeed come to Sean "in my shift" (the word that touched
off the Playboy of the Western World riots at the Abbey Theatre less
than thirty years before sounds a quaint note here), she would have owed
him everything and retained no identity or personal dignity. The analogy
with the situation of Ireland under domination, stripped of possessions
and national identity is clear. Likewise, Danaher's withholding of the dowry,
to which he has no entitlement under Irish custom or native law, flaunts
his institutional power over his weaker sister -- a colonial-based power
of bully strength and appropriation.
Lineage and the right to the land is always linked in Ford to mothers,
a matrilineage. Sean's mother (in a voice-over memory) evokes Inisfree and
the family homestead, White o'Morn as "a little bit of Heaven,"
a lost Eden. Mary Kate connects her dowry, especially her furniture and
plate, to her mother and her mother's mother and hers before that: the legacy
of authenticity and right to property so vital in Ireland is linked to the
strength and the rights of women. Every character in The Quiet Man takes
pains to identify were he or she stands in the colonial hierarchy by how
long they've been resident in Ireland: Sarah Tillane rebukes Sean, mocking
his assumed desire to canoize his family by "making a national shrine"
of their humble cottage (an ironic foreshadowing of the establishment of
the Kennedy family cottage as just such a monument ten years later!). She
reminds him that her family has been in Ireland since the Normans (at least
800 years), glossing over the fact that, if Sean is assumed to be of true
Celtic stock, then his family was in Ireland long before that. The Playfairs,
outsiders both as Protestants and relics of the colonial era, are also clear
to state that "we love this place; we were born here, too, you know."
Sean claims his right to White o' Morn through his mother, but as a Yank,
he is still an alien who must continually prove himself in rites of passage,
whether in the pub, on the racetrack, in the bedroom, or on the "field"
(literally) of battle, before he is accepted as an Inisfree man and an Irishman.
What National Review readers disregard is that the price of this
acceptance is the final rejection of his own American identity and culture
-- an ironic message from a right wing icon.
If it is a convention to embody conquered peoples as feminine, then Mary
Kate can be read as the embodiment of Ireland, with the forces of Nature
itself reflecting her emotions and desires. At the beginning of the film,
Mary Kate is introduced as a shepherdess leading her flock through the fields,
as Sean wonders, "Is that real? She can't be!" All of Sean's assumptions
about Ireland as a place of dreams and unreality seem to come true in his
vision of Mary Kate. But Mary Kate is "real": her red hair, true
to the ever practical Michaeleen Oge's warning, is "no lie," but
signifies the violent passions and temper that have been too often thwarted
in a life of serving others, but particularly her tyrannical brother. The
turbulent weather that surrounds Sean and Mary Kate in their "stormy"
courtship is the desire too long repressed in village and nation. Inisfree
is an old and impotent place, a hamlet seemingly devoid of children or young
people: the "young" lovers, Sean and Mary Kate, are in their forties
and thirties, respectively, while the other pair of lovers, Danaher and
the Widow Tillane, twenty years older still. Why has a woman as vital and
beautiful as Mary Kate remained so long a "spinster," as Michaeleen
Oge pointedly calls her? The fear of the brother, Danaher, is also the impotence
of oppression. The men of Inisfree are too busy in the pub, drinking to
forget their lost manhood, to either make love or fight to regain it. Sean's
main partisan, Michaeleen Oge, glorifies the Yank's abilities to legendary
status, declaring his imagined sexual prowess "Homeric," when
in fact the broken bed represents the initial failure of the Thornton marriage.
Michaeleen Oge, the keeper of local traditions and lore, urgently desires
a hero to raise Inisfree out of its post-colnial malaise. No wonder that
the donnybrook between Sean and Danaher is the climax of male bonding for
the entire village, a cathartic event that literally raises Old Dan Tobin
from his deathbed: it is no less than the recovery of the collective manhood
of a nation.
As an outsider, Sean has to solidify his claim to a place in village society
with his first visit to Pat Cohan's Public House. Father Lonergan, a celibate
priest and the controlling, institutional voice of the Church and Irish
society, as well as narrator of the film (and a member of the local IRA
cell, as well, along with Michaeleen Oge) and Dan Tobin (played by Ford's
older brother, Francis), act as Village Elders, questioning Sean about his
grandfather, Old Sean Thornton, who, having died in a penal colony in Australia,
is certified as "a good man": any criminal in the eyes of British
justice is a hero in Irish ones. The use of the Australian folk song "The
Wild Colonial Boy" as Sean's theme song is introduced here. The pub
also introduces Sean to his nemesis, Danaher, who equals threats, surveillance,
and bullying in Inisfree. Danaher is loud, but transparent -- his motives
are known and understood by all. But Sean is an enigma: as a "quiet
man" he represents silent strength, but also hidden fears and desires.
Sean is quiet because he is full of secrets (he has killed a man) and unspoken
desires (his sexual desire for Mary Kate). Sean wishes to avoid the inevitable
confrontation with Danaher because "lousy money" isn't worth unleashing
the violence within himself that he knows is deadly. But, asks the Reverend
Playfair, "Is your wife's love worth fighting for?" In the end
the answer is yes. Love and freedom from the past are worth fighting for,
in fact, can only be won by struggle, whether with the self or the forces
of history. Mary Kate's dowry, and her birthright, must be reclaimed, its
material value beside the point as Sean and Mary Kate burn the £350
in Danaher's own furnace. The violence of the brawl is Inisfree's catharsis:
even the weasel Feeney feels empowered enough to bet on the Yank against
his master. The victory of Sean over Red Will engenders Danaher's own pacification
and reconciliation with the village -- Sean brings "the Brother home
to supper" and Danaher meekly wipes his feet on Mary Kate's doormat.
It is only with the victory of Sean over "Squire" Danaher and
the final expelling of the British Anglican bishop that Danaher can be matched
with the widow and Sean and Mary Kate consummate their marriage in equanimity:
Sean's throwing away of the "good stick" that he was given "to
beat the lovely lady" marks the end of enmity between man and wife,
but also the psychic closure of British domination over the Irish. Sean's
triumph proves that his own manhood is not deadly, but redemptive. He wins
his wife's respect, but he already has her love. The ousting of Danaher's
stranglehold of the lives and economic fortunes of Inisfree parallels the
overthrow of the old colonial order that has so long stifled the country
-- literally the defeat of Danaher's Squirearchy.
The irony of The Quiet Man's fairy tale ending in light of the subsequent
history of Ireland and Irish society makes the canonization of the film
as the quintessential representation of a nostalgic and sentimental "Irishness"
problematic. There is an undoubtedly "happy ending": Danaher
is reconciled with the villagers, Sean and Mary Kate reunited, Reverend
Playfair wins the bet from his bishop and he and his wife remain in Inisfree,
and Danaher and the Widow Tillane get down to some serious courting. But
is the uplift illusionary? Mary Kate is still serving meals, this time
for her brother and her husband. She and her husband may be equals,
but is Mary Kate really free, anymore than Ireland, as a nation and a concept,
is free? At the conclusion of The Quiet Man, the village of Innisfree
is identified as unchanged and unchanging, with the picturesque villagers
continuing their "traditional" Stage Irish roles of deceivers
and buffoons as they "yell like Protestants" to fool the Anglican
bishop into thinking that their status as a pacified and harmless people
is secure. Michaeleen Oge and his comrades still get together to "talk
a little treason" -- but if Ireland is a free republic, then why is
it treason, and treason against whom? The Irish psyche understands that
it is still under the wing of colonial power and imperialism, and not merely
force of habit after 800 years of plotting against the authority of a government.
Inisfree exchanges the colonial authority of England for the cultural and
economic domination of America, in the form of tourists and genealogists,
like Sean Thornton and John Wayne, only multiplied a thousand-fold. Will
the equality that Mary Kate has won through partnership with her husband
become equality in fact in a nation still dictated by old grudges and old
institutions of authority, especially that of the Roman Catholic Church?
Thirty years after The Quiet Man, Ireland is still one of the poorest
nations in West Europe, still struggling against the past with issues of
emigration, unemployment, women's rights, reproductive freedom, and the
unresolved conflicts of partition between North and South. Is the victory
of Quiet Man Sean Thornton really the triumph of John Wayne, that icon of
American power and neo-imperialism, the quintessential cowboy, cavalryman,
and GI? Where is there an Irish identity that isn't a hostage to a stifling
colonial past? Where does Ireland as a nation and as a cultural entity
write herself into this history? Or is she, like Mary Kate Danaher Thornton,
barefoot and without her fortune, still in service to the myths of violence
and equality?