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Nasty Trick in Stephen Crane's The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky

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Nasty Trick in Stephen Crane's The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky

"The great Pullman was whirling onward with such dignity of motion that a glance from the window seemed simply to prove that the plains of Texas were pouring eastward" (91). Boom! We're on a train witnessing the liquid landscape of Texas. This fact is all Stephen Crane chooses to tell us. In fact, he doesn't even use the word "train" until the ninth paragraph when he is writing dialogue for the man who is the betrothed to the woman implied in the title of the piece, "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky." We learn in the second paragraph that the couple is on a coach from San Antonio and that "the man's face was reddened from many days in the wind and the sun" (91). We also learn …show more content…

Why do we learn this? Because we are told he feels like he has betrayed "his innocent and unsuspecting community" by going off and "inducing" a girl from San Antonio "he believed he loved" to marry him (92). Now that is quite interesting. An "innocent and unsuspecting community" (92). It would almost seem to suggest and "innocent and unsuspecting" couple. Somehow I don't think this inference is an accident.

Now in Yellow Sky people marry just like anywhere else, or so we are told. But we learn that Jack Porter feels such a sense of duty to his town that he feels he feels "heinous," guilty of "an extraordinary crime," because he never overtly garnered their good graces before the fact. In the nineteenth paragraph he thinks to tell them, but "a new cowardice" has taken stole over him (93). The short sentence Crane chooses says it succinctly: "He feared to do it" (93).

He turns these thoughts of guilt over in his mind, thinking how he will slink into town, tail tucked dutifully between his legs. Then our attention is brought to rest on the bride: "What's worrying you, Jack?" His reply? "I'm not worrying, girl; I'm only thinking of Yellow Sky" (93). Then we learn "she flushed in comprehension" (93). From here they look at each other "with eyes softly aglow," Potter laughs "the same nervous laugh," and "the flush on the bride's face" seems

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