MovieChat Forums > Stagecoach (1939) Discussion > Why does hatfield tries to kill mrs mall...

Why does hatfield tries to kill mrs mallory?


I dont understand that part of the movie , when they are being attacked by the apaches , why does Hatfield , that in the begining ofered to protect mrs mallory, tries to kill her??

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This question has been addressed in other threads...basically it was out of fear of Mrs. Mallory's being violated by rape if captured by the Apaches...better cleanly killed than raped, tortured and killed

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You answer is very much just the tip of the iceberg as to the "violation" of captured white women. Rape was only a part of it. To think otherwise is to view the historical context myopically through a lens limited to modern values and sensibilities, and even then only in so far as it is able to cast scorn on those values.

What you fail to mention is that captured women (and children) would often be "adopted" into the native tribe. Whether or not they would be treated as equals with the other women or would be the tribal pariahs would be a matter that came down to the rank as well as inclination of the warrior in the tribe who took them captive, and by captive I mean a kind of slave to be broken down and remolded by the captor.

But worse than slave for one key reason: the damnation of the immortal soul. It was still a known idea, although the triumph of abolitionism through the Civil War had largely drummed it out of popular culture even in the South, which now had more immediate issues of radical reconstructionism and carpetbagging to deal with. Slavery existed in concert with Christianity. Saving savage souls was doing good works. And murdering or raping slaves was not normal or openly accepted behavior (despite modern fixations - fixations having no capacity to judge "normal" from what is an outlier vs. a common occurrence - a lottery ticket winner makes us forget the 10,000 losing lottery tickets we've tossed in the bin!)

So back to this scene - while enslavement of others in "Christian goodness" to take on responsibility for baptizing them and educating them in Christian morality would have been acceptable to someone of Hatfield's background, so too would the enslavement of a Christian into a situation where their soul would come to damnation have been worse than death. To commit the sin of murder himself, Hatfield would have been saving Mrs. Mallory's soul from hell had she taken up with the Apache and lived as a hethen. This theme is also at the resolution of The Searchers.

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Not only would she be raped, but by non-whites. That's the reason why dying would be a better option, according to Hatfield.

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Don't watch all of The Mist. lol
Just read about the end. A very good use of this idea of chivalrous killing.

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Ford raises this issue in The Searchers when Wayne's nieces are kidnapped. He later finds Lucy dead, and the implication is she was raped and then killed by Scar and/or his men.

In Celluloid Indians the author raises the interesting theory that Wayne himself killed Lucy because he knew she would never be accepted back into white society. She also cites Wayne's body language when he's stabbing his knife into the ground.

I met Lana Wood several years ago at an antiquest and collectibles show and asked her about that theory. She emphatically denied Wayne had killed her sister, and I wondered if other people had asked her the same question.

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In the book, Lucy is definitely dead when the Wayne character finds her.

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It is one of my favorite scenes in this film.
Nothing is ever new, however.
In BIRTH OF A NATION, when the family is barricaded in a lone house, surronded by black men, the father of the girls (I think Lillian Gish and another actress) holds a gun to their head, implying again, it is better to be killed than ravaged by "the savages."
And if not mistaken, the settler/Indian scene is used even earlier that BIRTH OF A NATION in a Griffith short, this time with Mae Marsh with a gun to her head.

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The "fate worse than death" was very real on the frontier...on both sides. Whites and Native Americans did godawful things to one another.

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Take a look at the film Ulzana's Raid. A U.S. trooper uses his last two bullets to kill himself and a woman rather than be captured and be tortured to death.

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After the Fetterman massacre on 21 December 1866 the garrison at Fort Phil Kearney prepared for a possible Sioux attack on the fort. The wagons were arranged in a circle on the parade ground as a second line of defense if the Sioux got over or through the palisade. The powder magazine was inside the circle and it was arranged that the women and children would enter the powder magazine during an attack and a fuse was prepared so General Carrington could explode it at the last if the fort was overrun.

I believe this was mentioned in the books written by Carrington's wives who were both in the fort at the time.

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