It’s St. Patrick’s Day.
Like lots of People with Irish ancestors, I semi-celebrated the vacation rising up. Our household would eat corned beef and potatoes and adorn the home with shamrocks and pots of gold.
We’d additionally watch St. Patrick’s Day-themed films. There was Darby O’Gill and the Little Individuals, in fact, starring a crooning Sean Connery.
After which there was John Ford’s 1952 Irish epic romantic comedy The Quiet Man, starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. As a child, this film bored me to tears. However my mom beloved it so we needed to watch it.
Once I watched The Quiet Man once more as an grownup, I loved it extra. I began making a viewing a St. Patrick’s Day custom, and I’ve watched it yearly for the previous seven or so years.
At first, I couldn’t fairly pinpoint why I’d grown to like this film. Sure, it’s refreshing to see John Wayne play a task that doesn’t contain a cowboy hat and a rifle. Maureen O’Hara is gorgeous and proficient. Barry Fitzgerald is hilarious as Michaleen Oge Flynn. The picturesque scenes of the Irish countryside are charming and pastoral and make me wish to dwell in a cottage with a thatch roof. And, in fact, there’s the epic struggle scene on the finish of the film.
However I sensed there was one thing extra to the enchantment of the movie than that.
Just a few years in the past, I lastly discovered what that one thing was:
The Quiet Man represents a near-perfect meditation on the anthropological evolution of honor.
The Story of The Quiet Man
To grasp the theme of honor in The Quiet Man, it helps to know the fundamentals of the story:
Having killed an opponent within the ring, former boxer Sean Thornton (John Wayne) has sworn off combating for good and hopes to make a contemporary begin by shifting from America to Eire.
On his first day within the quaint Irish village of Innisfree, Sean spots Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O’Hara) herding sheep. It’s love at first sight.
Sean purchases his household’s previous cottage, outbidding native squire Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen), who additionally occurs to be Mary Kate’s domineering older brother. Will immediately resents him, organising the movie’s central battle.
Regardless of Will’s objections, Sean courts and marries Mary Kate. However their marriage ceremony night time turns disastrous when Will refuses at hand over Mary Kate’s dowry. Feeling the snub unimportant, Sean lets the slight go; he’s obtained loads of cash as a efficiently retired prizefighter. However to Mary Kate, the dowry is essential, and deep tensions ensue.
When Sean refuses to struggle for what’s rightfully hers, Mary Kate is humiliated. With out her dowry, she doesn’t take into account herself really married, and she or he refuses to consummate the union. The village whispers about Sean’s manhood, and their marriage deteriorates.
Annoyed, Mary Kate tries to flee by prepare, forcing Sean’s hand. Within the movie’s most dramatic second, he drags her by city to confront Will, demanding that he both give him the dowry or take again his sister. “No fortune, no marriage,” he declares. Will throws him the cash, and, with Mary Kate’s assist, Sean tosses it right into a boiler to burn. Mary Kate proudly walks house.
Enraged, Will sucker punches Sean, sparking an epic brawl that spills throughout the countryside. The brawl, although heated, is full of camaraderie and grudging respect and resolves the boys’s feud. By the top, Will, Sean, and Mary Kate reconcile, and Sean lastly involves peace together with his previous.
What Is Honor?
If you happen to’ve been studying the positioning for some time now, you already know that we did an in-depth sequence on the character and historical past of honor over a decade in the past. Right here’s the TLDR summation of it:
Whereas for many of us residing within the fashionable West, honor is about integrity and being true to a set of private beliefs, anciently, honor meant one thing very totally different. It was not solely private, however social.
Anciently, honor was about your popularity inside a gaggle of equal friends.
Anthropologists who’ve studied this historic type of honor have discovered it’s premised on three components: 1) a code of honor with real requirements that should be met to have the total standing of personhood, 2) an unique group of equals who dwell by that code, and three) the very actual menace of disgrace for many who fail to measure as much as it.
Historic honor is an all-or-nothing sport. You both have the respect of your friends, otherwise you don’t. Bringing dishonor upon your self by failing to satisfy the group’s minimal requirements means exclusion from the group, in addition to disgrace.
A Conflict of Honor Cultures
The Quiet Man is compelling as a result of it units up a conflict between the trendy and historic senses of honor.
Sean Thornton represents the trendy sense of honor. For him, honor is about being true to his values. He doesn’t care about what others suppose as long as he lives by his internal code.
A part of Thornton’s private code is that he received’t ever struggle once more. To Sean, sustaining this precept of self-restraint is a matter of private integrity, no matter what others would possibly consider him.
One other a part of his individualistic American code touches on love and marriage. For Sean, if two individuals love one another, that’s all that issues. You don’t want the approval of household and neighborhood.
However in Innisfree, Sean encounters a society nonetheless working beneath the traditional code of honor, the place popularity and standing inside the neighborhood matter deeply. Will Danaher and Mary Kate embody this conventional understanding.
Will symbolizes the traditional code of manly honor. He’s boisterous, loud, and domineering as a result of that’s the way you achieve standing in his city. He cares deeply about his popularity and is prepared to resort to violence to defend it. For Will and different males who observe the traditional code, would possibly makes proper.
There’s a scene that captures this conflict between fashionable and historic honor completely, wherein Sean accuses Will of mendacity.
For us moderns like Sean, his insult isn’t an enormous deal. You name issues as you see them. If you happen to’re fallacious, you possibly can argue about it and possibly work out the misunderstanding. At worst, the particular person accused will get offended, stroll away, and not have something to do with you.
However for Will, who lives beneath the traditional code of honor, accusing somebody of mendacity is a extremely, actually huge deal — one of many gravest insults you may levy at a person. Publicly difficult a person’s honesty — an act typically described as “giving the lie” — was a critical affront, even when the accusation was true.
In honor cultures, an accusation of mendacity needed to be met with a violent protection of 1’s popularity. And that’s precisely what Will Danaher undertakes.
When the battle over the dowry involves a head, Will calls for that Sean struggle him over it as a result of that’s what you do when you’ve gotten a battle in a standard tradition of honor. Sean refuses, so your entire city questions his manhood. They disgrace him.
A Lady’s Honor
Will isn’t the one character representing the traditional code of honor. Mary Kate does as nicely.
Usually, in historic honor cultures, a lady’s honor is tied up together with her chastity. We nonetheless see vestiges of that at this time; whereas it not carries forex in some circles, accusing a lady of being free nonetheless registers for a lot of as a gross insult.
For Mary Kate, her chastity isn’t the problem. Reasonably, it’s her dowry. In Innisfree, the dowry isn’t simply cash. It represents a lady’s independence from her childhood house. Not like Sean, she doesn’t simply see it as cash however as an emblem of her honor and standing as a mature girl. Her refusal to consummate the wedding with out it isn’t born out of spite or greed however springs from a deep-seated perception that she can not really be Sean’s spouse except she enters the union on equal phrases.
Mary Kate’s honor can also be social. She refuses to be seen as a lady who has been dishonored within the eyes of the neighborhood. When Sean fails to confront Will, she sees it as a betrayal. Her insistence that Sean struggle for her dowry isn’t about cash however about proving his dedication to her. She wasn’t asking Sean to struggle for her cash however for her honor. As a result of Sean refused, she needed to take care of the disgrace of being married to a coward and of not having her standing and standing as a full grownup girl.
Sean, together with his fashionable sense of honor, is totally flabbergasted. His values conflict together with his spouse’s deeply rooted, conventional code of honor.
Synthesizing Honor Cultures
The battle resolves when Sean lastly realizes that his fashionable sense of private honor should discover a solution to coexist with the traditional communal honor of Innisfree. He realizes that whereas his private values matter, they will’t exist in isolation from the neighborhood he now calls house. When in Innisfree, it’s important to do because the Innisfree-ans do.
Sean in the end fights Will Danaher not as a result of he seeks violence for violence’s sake however as a result of he desires to be part of the neighborhood and part of Mary Kate’s household. The struggle isn’t about cash or revenge however relatively serves as a ritual that enacts Innisfree’s code of honor. The struggle really serves as a solution to create a relationship.
Whereas it might appear international to us, Mary Kate claims her honor within the city when Sean drags her throughout the countryside to her brother and calls for the dowry. To her and to the village, Sean is lastly appearing like a husband and getting Mary Kate out from beneath the thumb of her domineering brother.
Sean synthesizes his concept that love isn’t about cash together with his spouse’s concept that it represents honor by accepting the dowry . . . however then burning it. Even with out the cash in hand, Mary Kate is ready to stroll together with her head held excessive as a result of she now has her full standing and standing as an grownup girl.
Conclusion
What makes The Quiet Man endure as a basic isn’t simply its sweeping Irish landscapes. Nor the interpersonal conflicts. It’s the competing notions of honor on show.
The movie is about within the Twenties, when conventional, social notions of honor had been giving solution to extra fashionable, individualistic ones. When the film was launched in 1952, there nonetheless existed pockets within the West wherein the traditional code of honor continued, and viewers would have acknowledged vestiges of it in their very own lives.
Even at this time, whereas the standard code of honor has largely disappeared within the West, remnants of it stay, and we nonetheless expertise tensions between the previous and new notions of honor. As a lot as we’re inspired to pay unique adherence to our inner scorecards, and never care what anybody else thinks, we yearn for the standing and affirmation of our friends. Such tensions characterize the deepest sort of drama, and account for the additional curiosity burbling beneath the film’s common plot and the rationale that viewers, previous and current, have been drawn to the movie.
So this St. Patrick’s Day, after you’ve had your fill of corned beef and potatoes, queue up The Quiet Man, and replicate on the way you’re balancing fashionable and conventional notions of honor in your individual life.
All of the whereas, nonetheless chuckling at Michaleen Oge Flynn’s witty one-liners.
“Homeric!”
