The Myth of Hidden Ireland: The Corrosive Effect of Place in The Quiet Man

Abstract

In households across the United States, the mere mention of John Ford's 1952 film The Quiet Man can have an unnerving effect upon an individual's equanimity. This is particularly true for many Irish Americans of the baby boom era who remember growing up under its influence. Quite simply, that movie has become the embodiment of all that was maudlin, manipulative, and embarrassing about the culture of their forebears, both in this country and in Ireland. At first glance, one can find ample evidence in scene after scene of The Quiet Man to reinforce this view. Like other Ford films from the era, it calls to mind the swaggering optimism of a culture still proud of the part that it played in the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II and still free of any trace of self-doubt that might have curbed the arrogance of an unquestioned belief in the American way of doing things. More particularly, and with far more serious consequences, for the casual viewer The Quiet Man seems to play upon all of the simplistic images of Irish life and character that xenophobic Yankee isolationists and sentimental expatriates had alternately disdained and celebrated in print, on the stage, and ultimately, in electronic media from the mid-nineteenth century onward.