The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

The “bride” of Crane’s title plays a rather minor role in this story, in which her arrival in the jerkwater town of Yellow Sky is treated in a decidedly ironic manner. An extraordinarily plain woman from San Antonio, she has recently married the town’s sheriff, Potter, a man as ignorant of Pullman car etiquette as he is of the marital state and, more especially, of how Yellow Sky, which has pretensions to Eastern respectability, will respond to the fact of his marriage, about which the townspeople have not been forewarned.

Crane compounds the general ignorance and its attendant uncertainty in the next two of the story’s four parts, in which he introduces a drummer (traveling salesman) from the East, who knows nothing of the wild West, and Scratchy Wilson, the drunken desperado who is in fact an old man dressed as a kid dressed as an outlaw. The actual confrontation between Wilson, hurling challenges at Potter’s empty house, and Potter, slinking along the streets, hoping no one will see him and his bride, is funnier still.

The sheriff does indeed vanquish the desperado, not with his sixgun but with his bride. Wilson, no longer having Potter to play with anymore, shuffles off into the distance of history and obscurity. Potter, however, is vanquished too, by Crane’s deadly irony and by his own delusions about his bride, whom he mistakenly associates with the ersatz grandeur of his one Pullman-car experience.

Because it concerns the sudden juxtaposition of ideas, myths, and regions, it is appropriate that the story have a fragmented narrative structure and focus on no one single character, for Crane’s subject is not Potter or Wilson or the bride but, instead, the question of point of view, one which has cultural as well as aesthetic implications. Crane is concerned with the ways in which man perceives--or more often misperceives--his world and himself. He presents each character’s perceptions only to undercut them by presenting or implying a more realistic frame of reference. Crane clearly understood that there was a reality, but he also recognized that man’s understanding of that reality was often based upon a kind of optical illusion, as he suggests in the story’s opening sentence: “The great Pullman was whirling onward with such dignity of motion that a glance from the wit window seemed simply to prove that the plains of Texas were pouring eastward.”