Honor in The Quiet Man

It’s St. Patrick’s Day.

Like a lot of Americans with Irish ancestors, I semi-celebrated the holiday growing up. Our family would eat corned beef and potatoes and decorate the house with shamrocks and pots of gold.

We’d also watch St. Patrick’s Day-themed movies. There was Darby O’Gill and the Little People, of course, starring a crooning Sean Connery.

And then there was John Ford’s 1952 Irish epic romantic comedy The Quiet Man, starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. As a kid, this movie bored me to tears. But my mother loved it so we had to watch it.

When I watched The Quiet Man again as an adult, I enjoyed it more. I started making a viewing a St. Patrick’s Day tradition, and I’ve watched it every year for the past seven or so years.

At first, I couldn’t quite pinpoint why I’d grown to love this movie. Yes, it’s refreshing to see John Wayne play a role that doesn’t involve a cowboy hat and a rifle. Maureen O’Hara is stunning and talented. Barry Fitzgerald is hilarious as Michaleen Oge Flynn. The picturesque scenes of the Irish countryside are charming and pastoral and make me want to live in a cottage with a thatch roof. And, of course, there’s the epic fight scene at the end of the movie.

But I sensed there was something more to the appeal of the film than that.

A few years ago, I finally figured out what that something was:

The Quiet Man represents a near-perfect meditation on the anthropological evolution of honor.

The Story of The Quiet Man

To understand the theme of honor in The Quiet Man, it helps to know the basics of the story:

Having killed an opponent in the ring, former boxer Sean Thornton (John Wayne) has sworn off fighting for good and hopes to make a fresh start by moving from America to Ireland.

On his first day in 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 family’s old cottage, outbidding local squire Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen), who also happens to be Mary Kate’s domineering older brother. Will instantly resents him, setting up the film’s central conflict.

Despite Will’s objections, Sean courts and marries Mary Kate. But their wedding night turns disastrous when Will refuses to hand over Mary Kate’s dowry. Feeling the snub unimportant, Sean lets the slight go; he’s got plenty of money as a successfully retired prizefighter. But to Mary Kate, the dowry is important, and deep tensions ensue.

When Sean refuses to fight for what’s rightfully hers, Mary Kate is humiliated. Without her dowry, she doesn’t consider herself truly married, and she refuses to consummate the union. The village whispers about Sean’s manhood, and their marriage deteriorates.

Frustrated, Mary Kate tries to flee by train, forcing Sean’s hand. In the film’s most dramatic moment, he drags her through town to confront Will, demanding that he either give him the dowry or take back his sister. “No fortune, no marriage,” he declares. Will throws him the money, and, with Mary Kate’s help, Sean tosses it into a boiler to burn. Mary Kate proudly walks home.

Enraged, Will sucker punches Sean, sparking an epic brawl that spills across the countryside. The brawl, though heated, is filled with camaraderie and grudging respect and resolves the men’s feud. By the end, Will, Sean, and Mary Kate reconcile, and Sean finally comes to peace with his past.

What Is Honor?

If you’ve been reading the site for a while now, you know that we did an in-depth series on the nature and history of honor over a decade ago. Here’s the TLDR summation of it:

While for most of us living in the modern West, honor is about integrity and being true to a set of personal ideals, anciently, honor meant something very different. It was not only personal, but social. 

Anciently, honor was about your reputation within a group of equal peers.

Anthropologists who have studied this ancient form of honor have found it’s premised on three elements: 1) a code of honor with genuine standards that must be met to have the full status of personhood, 2) an exclusive group of equals who live by that code, and 3) the very real threat of shame for those who fail to measure up to it.

Ancient honor is an all-or-nothing game. You either have the respect of your peers, or you don’t. Bringing dishonor upon yourself by failing to meet the group’s minimum standards means exclusion from the group, as well as shame.

A Clash of Honor Cultures

The Quiet Man is compelling because it sets up a clash between the modern and ancient senses of honor.

Sean Thornton represents the modern sense of honor. For him, honor is about being true to his values. He doesn’t care about what others think so long as he lives by his inner code.

Part of Thornton’s personal code is that he won’t ever fight again. To Sean, maintaining this principle of self-restraint is a matter of personal integrity, regardless of what others might think of him.

Another part of his individualistic American code touches on love and marriage. For Sean, if two people love each other, that’s all that matters. You don’t need the approval of family and community.

But in Innisfree, Sean encounters a society still operating under the ancient code of honor, where reputation and standing within the community matter deeply. Will Danaher and Mary Kate embody this traditional understanding.

Will symbolizes the ancient code of manly honor. He’s boisterous, loud, and domineering because that’s how you gain status in his town. He cares deeply about his reputation and is willing to resort to violence to defend it. For Will and other men who follow the ancient code, might makes right.

There’s a scene that captures this clash between modern and ancient honor perfectly, in which Sean accuses Will of lying.

For us moderns like Sean, his insult isn’t a huge deal. You call things as you see them. If you’re wrong, you can argue about it and maybe figure out the misunderstanding. At worst, the person accused will get angry, walk away, and no longer have anything to do with you.

But for Will, who lives under the ancient code of honor, accusing someone of lying is a really, really big deal — one of the gravest insults you could levy at a man. Publicly challenging a man’s honesty — an act sometimes described as “giving the lie” — was a serious affront, even if the accusation was true.

In honor cultures, an accusation of lying had to be met with a violent defense of one’s reputation. And that’s exactly what Will Danaher undertakes.

When the conflict over the dowry comes to a head, Will demands that Sean fight him over it because that’s what you do when you have a conflict in a traditional culture of honor. Sean refuses, so the entire town questions his manhood. They shame him.

A Woman’s Honor

Will isn’t the only character representing the ancient code of honor. Mary Kate does as well.

Typically, in ancient honor cultures, a woman’s honor is tied up with her chastity. We still see vestiges of that today; while it no longer carries currency in some circles, accusing a woman of being loose still registers for many as a gross insult.

For Mary Kate, her chastity isn’t the issue. Rather, it’s her dowry. In Innisfree, the dowry isn’t just money. It represents a woman’s independence from her childhood home. Unlike Sean, she doesn’t just see it as money but as a symbol of her honor and status as a mature woman. Her refusal to consummate the marriage without it isn’t born out of spite or greed but springs from a deep-seated belief that she cannot truly be Sean’s wife unless she enters the union on equal terms.

Mary Kate’s honor is also social. She refuses to be seen as a woman who has been dishonored in the eyes of the community. When Sean fails to confront Will, she sees it as a betrayal. Her insistence that Sean fight for her dowry isn’t about money but about proving his commitment to her. She wasn’t asking Sean to fight for her money but for her honor. Because Sean refused, she had to deal with the shame of being married to a coward and of not having her status and standing as a full adult woman.

Sean, with his modern sense of honor, is completely flabbergasted. His values clash with his wife’s deeply rooted, traditional code of honor.

Synthesizing Honor Cultures

The conflict resolves when Sean finally realizes that his modern sense of personal honor must find a way to coexist with the ancient communal honor of Innisfree. He realizes that while his personal values matter, they can’t exist in isolation from the community he now calls home. When in Innisfree, you have to do as the Innisfree-ans do.

Sean ultimately fights Will Danaher not because he seeks violence for violence’s sake but because he wants to be a part of the community and a part of Mary Kate’s family. The fight isn’t about money or revenge but rather serves as a ritual that enacts Innisfree’s code of honor. The fight actually serves as a way to create a relationship.

While it may seem foreign to us, Mary Kate claims her honor in the town when Sean drags her across the countryside to her brother and demands the dowry. To her and to the village, Sean is finally acting like a husband and getting Mary Kate out from under the thumb of her domineering brother.

Sean synthesizes his idea that love isn’t about money with his wife’s idea that it represents honor by accepting the dowry . . . but then burning it. Even without the money in hand, Mary Kate is able to walk with her head held high because she now has her full standing and status as an adult woman.

Conclusion

What makes The Quiet Man endure as a classic isn’t just its sweeping Irish landscapes. Nor the interpersonal conflicts. It’s the competing notions of honor on display.

The film is set in the 1920s, when traditional, social notions of honor were giving way to more modern, individualistic ones. When the movie was released in 1952, there still existed pockets in the West in which the ancient code of honor persisted, and viewers would have recognized vestiges of it in their own lives.

Even today, while the traditional code of honor has largely disappeared in the West, remnants of it remain, and we still experience tensions between the old and new notions of honor. As much as we’re encouraged to pay exclusive adherence to our internal scorecards, and not care what anyone else thinks, we yearn for the status and affirmation of our peers. Such tensions represent the deepest kind of drama, and account for the extra interest burbling beneath the movie’s general plot and the reason that viewers, past and present, have been drawn to the film. 

So this St. Patrick’s Day, after you’ve had your fill of corned beef and potatoes, queue up The Quiet Man, and reflect on how you’re balancing modern and traditional notions of honor in your own life.

All the while, still chuckling at Michaleen Oge Flynn’s witty one-liners.

“Homeric!”

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.