The character:	Mary Kate Danaher
The actor:	Maureen O’Hara
The movie:	The Quiet Man (1952)

Scott Eyman, in his biography of John Ford, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford, makes a nifty little observation about The Quiet Man and its heroine. For those of us who have survived the era of Full House, someone named “Mary Kate” doesn’t stand out all that much. But it’s not a common name, and it certainly wasn’t so popular in the 1950s. Eyman makes a connection that seems obvious in hindsight: “Mary Kate” is named that way because of two women who left marks on John Ford. “Mary” is Ford’s wife, the endlessly reliable woman he broke Irish Catholic tradition to marry all the way back in 1920. And Kate is Katharine Hepburn, who Eyman hypothesizes was the most resonant love of Ford’s life.

For most people, the defining image of The Quiet Man has something to do with John Wayne slinging Maureen O’Hara around. Whether it’s that kiss immortalized for frog-dissection perverts via E.T. or the long sequence where Wayne pulls O’Hara around most of Ireland like Achilles dragging Hector’s body around Troy, it’s easy to look at this and see the retrograde stuff you want/expect to see. Even if her name were not Mary Kate but Jane or Sally or Incontinentia Buttocks, there’d be more to the facade because this is the way of John Ford. But since her name is Mary Kate, there must be something more. The two women who affected Ford the most, himself a deeply emotional man, could not lend their names to anyone less than a great lady.

Like most Americans, Sean (the name that Ford gave himself when he was feeling especially Irish, the guy wasn’t exactly hiding what this was about for him) Thornton wanders into another nation and expects it to bend to him. The story of The Quiet Man is, ultimately, the story of a man who learns to humble himself before the customs of his new old homeland rather than trying to impress himself like a conqueror upon it. Mary Kate is the interpreter. She is a good interpreter in the sense that she can communicate the meaning that Ireland wants to speak to Sean. She is maybe not the most faithful interpreter in that she insists on including her own perspective as part of those translations. That perspective, in the best tradition of red-haired Irish women with delectable emotional volatility, is delivered with some mixture of invective and impatience. If you wanted to come to Ireland and steal up one of her daughters, she seems to say, then why don’t you do the thing properly? Why don’t you respect the customs of my people which, not coincidentally, are my own?

It’s tricky to navigate how we’re supposed to ask people to love us. The people who love us are no automatons, after all. They have a right to express their freely held love in ways that are right to them. If a person has to be someone else to prove their love, then the love is not precisely from that person after all. If Sean could not love Mary Kate in ways that match his own person, then the marriage would be false, almost simonistic. All the same, if a person loves another person, then it’s their responsibility to show that love in ways that the other will recognize. For so much of the movie, Sean arrogantly refuses to show Mary Kate love in the fashion that will really signify it to her. What makes Mary Kate heroic is that she walks this line beautifully. She never falters in loving Sean in the way that will make this newcomer know that she values him above her family, which is to say above all else. After all, she rebukes her powerful brother in marrying Sean in the first place. She never falters either in demanding plain fairness. If she can sacrifice something terribly important in order to express her great love, surely he can too?

The one who submits during that long walk to Squire Danaher is not Mary Kate. She’s not the one who gives in. Sean may look like he has the power, which I’m sure is very gratifying, but she has gotten through to him. That he “takes control” is what love looks like for her, a form that she can recognize after growing up in her own culture and with the ways of a people thousands of years old. She returns his gesture: if you can perform, so can I. The key physical motion of Maureen O’Hara in this movie isn’t the stumbling bumbling of Sean dragging her, but it’s the catlike way she springs up to throw her dowry money into the fire, as adroit and sudden as a gymnast. She knew what she was doing the whole time. She needed to know that Sean knew too.