SOURCE: Zanger, Jules. “Stephen Crane's ‘Bride’ as Countermyth of the West.” Great Plains Quarterly 11, no. 3 (summer 1991): 157-65.

In the following essay, Zanger suggests that Crane's attempt to subvert the myth of the American wild west in the story “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” fails.

It has become a critical cliche to recognize Stephen Crane's “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” as a parody of the traditional, cliche-ridden Western. His transformations of that form's conventional hero, heroine, and badman, as well as of the climactic, de rigueur shootout are amusing and obvious. In the story Crane depicted the Pullman journey of a middle-aged, honeymooning couple, Jack Potter, a Texas marshal, and his plain, “under-class” bride, to their home in Yellow Sky. There they are confronted by the rampaging Scratchy Wilson, the last of the badmen, who on learning that the marshal has taken a wife, holsters his revolvers...