At the beginning of Old Yeller, Travis Coates’s father leaves his family at their rural Texas homestead and goes off on a cattle drive to Kansas, hoping to make some money. As Papa departs, he urges Travis to “act like [a man]” in his absence. At only 14, Travis accepts his father’s challenge with grit—even as he holds back tears watching his father leave. Travis’s struggle to stand in as the man of the house offers a look at how masculinity and emotion intersect. While Travis thinks of masculinity as the ability to ignore or suppress one’s emotions, the novel suggests that true masculinity is characterized by feeling deeply and expressing oneself authentically.
At the start of the novel, Travis sees masculinity as the hard-nosed suppression of any emotion or weakness. When Travis’s Papa heads out on his cattle drive to Kansas, Papa’s parting words are to tell Travis to “act like [a man]” in his absence. Travis has little idea of what it really means to act like a man; he believes that being tough and emotionless is the only way to embody masculinity. Travis therefore decides that he’ll do all of his duties around the house and the farm without any complaining or emoting—he sees masculinity as the ability to suppress one’s emotions and refuse help from others. While Travis is right to see independence and responsibility as important qualities in an adult, he confuses total emotional suppression for emotional strength at this point in the novel. He has a long way to go toward a healthy embodiment of masculinity, and Gipson implies that Travis has a host of misconceptions about what really makes a man a man.
Throughout the novel, as Travis navigates his new role as “the man of the family” alone, he struggles to reconcile his inner emotions with his conceptualization of masculinity. And when his dog, Old Yeller, is unexpectedly bitten by a rabid wolf, Travis is forced to confront his conflicting ideas about what it means to be a man. Travis knows that he has to put his beloved dog down before Old Yeller begins to suffer the slow, devastating effects of hydrophobia (rabies). Though Mama cries at the very thought of Old Yeller’s death, Travis steels himself as he prepares to kill his “big yeller dog”—an act that he knows will “kill something inside [him]” too. Even after the act is done, Travis claims that he didn’t really feel anything while executing Old Yeller: “I was just numb all over,” he recalls, “like a dead man walking.” In the days that follow Old Yeller’s death, Travis is unable to bring himself to cry—he feels “empty,” even though he is “hurting worse than [he’s] ever hurt.” When Papa returns home from the cattle run at last, he tells Travis that he heard about what Travis had to do, and he compliments Travis on acting like a “grown man.” He suggests that Travis “forget it and go on being a man.” This shows that while Papa has long been Travis’s model for masculinity, even Papa struggles to affect numbness and emotional detachment in difficult moments. Papa, too, has a hard time understanding that there’s more to masculinity than acting tough and ignoring one’s feelings.
Travis eventually understands that masculinity isn’t necessarily about numbing oneself to the pain and joy of life. Rather, being a man means having the strength to fully experience and accept the most difficult, complicated parts of life. During his conversation with Papa, something inside Travis breaks, and he asks how he can go on. Papa softens and agrees that he “do[es]n’t quite mean” what he just said about forgetting Old Yeller’s death in order to “go on being a man.” The conversation ends at an impasse, with Papa unsure of how to comfort Travis and Travis unsure of how he wants to be comforted. A few days later, however, Travis finds Arliss playing with his new pup—part of a litter Old Yeller fathered with the Coateses’ neighbor Lisbeth’s heeler—in the same watering hole where Travis used to play with Old Yeller. Rather than reprimand Arliss for playing in the drinking water, as he always did while Papa was away, Travis begins laughing—and that laughter soon turns to tears. In this moment, Travis has an emotional breakthrough: he is no longer constrained by the learned response to suppress and hide his emotions, the way Papa has taught him a real man should. Travis at last allows himself to cry and to mourn Old Yeller, and this marks his arrival at his own version of masculinity—not by steeling himself against the pain of losing his dog, but by fully allowing himself to feel and express intense emotions. Being a man, Travis ultimately learns, means having the strength to be vulnerable and confront difficult feelings.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Masculinity and Emotion ThemeTracker
Masculinity and Emotion Quotes in Old Yeller
"What you're needing worse than a horse is a good dog."
"Yessir," I said, "but a horse is what I'm wanting the worst."
"All right," he said. "You act a man's part while I'm gone, and I'll see that you get a man's horse to ride when I sell the cattle. I think we can shake on that deal."
He reached out his hand, and we shook. It was the first time I'd ever shaken hands like a man. It made me feel big and solemn and important in a way I'd never felt before. I knew then that I could handle whatever needed to be done while Papa was gone.
A big diamond-back rattler struck at Papa and Papa chopped his head off with one quick lick of his scythe. The head dropped to the ground three or four feet away from the writhing body. It lay there, with the ugly mouth opening and shutting, still trying to bite something.
As smart as Bell was, you'd have thought he'd have better sense than to go up and nuzzle that rattler's head. But he didn't, and a second later, he was falling back, howling and slinging his own head till his ears popped. But it was too late then. […] He died that night, and I cried for a week.
I'd hit her but hadn't made a killing shot.
I didn't like that. I never minded killing for meat. Like Papa had told me, every creature has to kill to live. But to wound an animal was something else. Especially one as pretty and harmless as a deer. It made me sick to think of the doe's escaping, maybe to hurt for days before she finally died.
That day when I saw [Little Arliss] in the spring, so helpless against the angry she bear, I learned different. I knew then that I loved him as much as I did Mama and Papa, maybe in some ways even a little bit more.
So it was only natural for me to come to love the dog that saved him.
After that, I couldn't do enough for Old Yeller. What if he was a big ugly meat-stealing rascal? […] None of that made a lick of difference now. He’d pitched in and saved Little Arliss when I couldn’t possibly have done it, and that was enough for me.
It made me mad. "You thievin' rascal," I said. "I ought to get a club and break your back—in fourteen different places."
But I didn't really mean it, and I didn't say it loud and ugly. I knew that if I did, he'd fall over and start yelling like he was dying. And there I'd be-in a fight with Little Arliss again.
"When they shoot you, I'm going to laugh," I told him.
But I knew that I wouldn't.
I didn't wait to hear any more. I ran off. I was so full of relief that I was about to pop. I knew that if I didn't get out of sight in a hurry, this Burn Sanderson was going to catch me crying.
"You're not scared, are you, boy? I'm only telling you because I know your papa left you in charge of things. I know you can handle whatever comes up. I'm just telling you to watch close and not let anything—anything—get to you or your folks with hydrophobia. Think you can do that?"
I swallowed. "I can do it," I told him. "I'm not scared."
The sternness left Burn Sanderson's face. He put a hand on my shoulder, just as Papa had the day he left.
"Good boy," he said. "That's the way a man talks."
A boy, before he really grows up, is pretty much like a wild animal.
Papa had told me right from the start that fear was a right and natural feeling for anybody, and nothing to be ashamed of.
"It's a thing of your mind," he said, "and you can train your mind to handle it just like you can train your arm to throw a rock."
Put that way, it made sense to be afraid; so I hadn't bothered about that.
A big lump came up into my throat. Tears stung my eyes, blinding me. Here he was, trying to lick my wound, when he was bleeding from a dozen worse ones.
In a way, it sort of hurt my pride for a little old girl like Lisbeth to come in and take over my jobs. Papa had left me to look after things. But now I was laid up, and here was a girl handling my work about as good as I could. Still, she couldn't get out and mark hogs or kill meat or swing a chopping axe. . .
I went off to the spring after a bucket of fresh water and wondered when Papa would come back. Mama had said a couple of days ago that it was about that time, and I hoped so. […] This hydrophobia plague had me scared. I'd handled things pretty well until that came along. Of course, I'd gotten a pretty bad hog cut, but that could have happened to anybody, even a grown man. And I was about to get well of that. But if the sickness got more of our cattle, I wouldn't know what to do.
It was going to kill something inside me to do it, but I knew then that I had to shoot my big yeller dog.
Once I knew for sure I had it to do, I don't think I really felt anything. I was just numb all over, like a dead man walking.
Quickly, I left Mama and went to stand in the light of the burning bear grass. I reloaded my gun and called Old Yeller back from the house. I stuck the muzzle of the gun against his head and pulled the trigger.
Days went by, and I couldn’t seem to get over it. I couldn’t eat. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't cry. I was all empty inside, but hurting. Hurting worse than I'd ever hurt in my life.
"Now the thing to do," he went on, "is to try to forget it and go on being a man."
"How?” I asked. "How can you forget a thing like that?"
He studied me for a moment, then shook his head. "I guess I don't quite mean that," he said. "It's not a thing you can forget. “
I started to holler at them. I started to say: "Arliss! You get that nasty pup out of our drinking water."
Then I didn't. Instead, I went to laughing. I sat there and laughed till I cried. When all the time I knew that I ought to go beat them to a frazzle for messing up our drinking water.
