Pastoral Dreams in Innisfree, Ireland, U.S.A.
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The Quiet Man is the most unabashedly joyous film John Ford ever
made; as such, it’s aptly reflective of the heightened post-war optimism
characterizing his films in the late 40s and early 50s. Though set in Ireland, the
film is a vision of an idealized pastoral existence, an existence longed for by other
Fordian heroes, but never to be achieved within the historical realities of
America’s geographic borders. But in Innisfree, John Ford created his ultimate
pastoral paean to the possibilities of an agrarian life, if only things could have
remained as Jefferson envisioned, a yeoman society devoted to a life on the land.
The film remains Ford’s most popular because it speaks to the possibilities of an
agrarian America still dreamed about in an era in which it’s all too clear that even
if such a place could exist, there’s no chance in hell of its ever being realized. We
know we can’t go back to our imagined simpler past, but there’s comfort to be
had in our fooling ourselves that said past really did happen in accordance to our
sentimental fantasies. When last we see Sean Thornton and Mary Kate Danaher,
Sean is working in the garden when Mary Kate leans over and whispers in his ear.
They jump up and begin running towards their home, giggling like innocents, no
doubt heading for their bedroom, in which they’ll produce the heirs to the throne,
a new generation in Innisfree’s eternal line of yeoman gods. For once, in a Ford
film, his pastoral vision is comically realized.
Whitman College
Robert Sickels
Works Cited
Anderson, Lindsay. “The Quiet Man.” Sight and Sound 22.1 (1952): 24-26.
Frey, Leonard H. “Two Studies of Irish Myth and Film: Odd Man Out and the Death of
Cuchullain/The Quiet Man and its Unquiet Mythic Background.” Etudes Irlandaises
20.2 (1995): 71-75.
Gallagher, Tag. John Ford: The Man and His Films. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford UP, 1964.