Frontier vs. Civilization
Stephen Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” is a story about the conquest of America’s Western frontier by the refinery and civilization of the East. The story’s only two named characters, the domesticated Marshall Jack Potter and the untamed outlaw, Scratchy Wilson, embody the dichotomies of the East and West, the new and the old, civilization and the frontier. First published in McClure’s Magazine in 1898, Crane’s tale came five years after the…
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Domesticity, Gender, and Feminine Authority
Throughout “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” the bride is the sole female presence who serves as a symbol of the nineteenth-century “cult of domesticity.” In this ideal, industrial production relieved families of the burden of producing goods for home use. This development consequently relegated the genders into “separate spheres” in which men worked outside the home (the public sphere), while women tended to home and children (the domestic sphere). The home became the cherished…
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Change vs. Stasis
“The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” highlights the conflict between change and stasis (a state of stability). Crane believed that humans were constant victims of powerful forces beyond their control. In “Yellow Sky,” he depicts change as an invasive force that disrupts the lives of the story’s main characters, as well as the environments they inhabit: the town of Yellow Sky specifically and the Western frontier more generally. Capitalist market forces disrupt the frontier remoteness…
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