Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Decimonónica

Volume

12

Issue

1

Publisher

Decimonónica

Publication Date

2015

First Page

116

Last Page

133

Abstract

At the end of John Ford’s seminal Anti-Western, The Searchers (1956), a cruel Indian hunter played by John Wayne returns a young white woman he has rescued from the Comanche to a family of white settlers. In one of the most iconic scenes in U.S. film history, Wayne comes to a stop outside of the homestead, standing on the unforgiving and sun-bleached landscape, while the settlers carry the girl through a doorway into the cool, shadowy recess of their domestic realm. Although the girl has lived for many years as one of the many wives of a Comanche chief, and has surely lost her virginity to him, she is welcomed back into civilization. Wayne’s character, however, defined by savage acts that equate him with the barbarism of the Comanche, is symbolically condemned to remain outside, on the other side of the threshold symbolized by the doorway of the settler’s home (Figure 1).

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