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Popular Culture Review
It’s during Sean’s first trip to the local pub that he reveals to the town
folks that he is the long absent grandson of Old Sean Thornton. He’s welcomed
as one of them by all save Red Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen), who is
infuriated that the Widow Danaher sold White ’O Mourn, which borders his
property, to Sean and not him, even though it’s Sean’s ancestral home and he has
more right to it. Therein lies our conflict. Danaher, Mary Kate’s older brother,
will in his anger over the property sale refuse to allow Sean to marry his sister.
The conflict between the Danahers and Sean superficially appears to be a
simple variation on the tripartite relationships present in many of Ford’s movies,
including Wyatt, Doc Holiday, and Clementine in My Darling Clementine (1946),
Owen Thursday, Philadelphia, and Michael O’Rourke in Fort Apache, and Tom
Doniphon, Hallie, and Ranse Stoddard in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, to
name just a few. As Leonard Frey notes, the triangulated relationship is, at its
most basic level, in keeping with the classical regeneration theme, in which the
old god and young god vie for “possession of the goddess, whether of futility or
vital essence or simple beauty” (71). But within the contexts of The Quiet Man
the triangle takes a dramatically different path. Stereotypically, the goddess
ultimately passes from the senior figure to the younger one, representing the
cycles of the season, regeneration through rebirth. But the “old god,” whether he
is Owen Thursday, Doc Holiday, or Tom Doniphon, must die, symbolically if not
literally. In order for there to be rebirth there must first be death. But such is not
at all the case in The Quiet Man; in a reversal of mythical patterns, Ford lets the
old god, Danaher, live in peace with the young god, Sean Thornton, and his
goddess, Mary Kate. The mythic narrative being played out in The Quiet Man is
that of the prodigal son. Sean has left his homeland and will not be accepted back
into the community until he wins a ritual battle against a male elder, the reward
for which is a marriage match within the family. There is no regeneration
because there is no death, although there is a hell of a fight. The ultimate
extension of Ford’s idyllic vision of a pastoral life is realized in Innisfree, a magic
land in which everything is eternally in bloom.
Once the film’s set-up has been established, the resolution is seemingly
inevitable, but it’s Mary Kate Danaher, a stereotypically (in Ford’s movies)
domestic woman who is, nevertheless, not without certain complications. In fact,
she’s Ford’s most well developed and interesting female character. Wh