The opening and closing scenes of How Green Was My Valley, while not as
visually symmetrical as those of The
Searchers, present a similar dichotomy of arrival and departure, except in
reverse order. The film begins with a
waist-level shot of Huw Brown, now fifty years old, packing his belongings in a
shawl as he prepares to leave his valley and never
return. “I am leaving behind me my fifty
years of memory,” he muses.
“Memory. Strange that the mind
will forget so much of what only this moment has passed and yet hold clear and
bright the memory of what happened years ago, of men and women long since
dead.” The topic of memory returns in
the closing scene after the death of Huw’s father: “Men like my father cannot
die. They are with me still, real in
memory as they were in flesh, loving and beloved forever. How green was my valley then.” A memory montage follows Huw’s
narration. In order, the entire family
sits at the dinner table; a young Huw meets and greets his sister-in-law Bronwyn
as she goes to the market; his sister Angharad opens a gate leading out to the
meadows to see Huw and Mr. Gruffydd walking towards her; Huw and his father
walk together up a hill, spanning left to right on the screen, while in the
next shot his older brothers enter right and continue left, signaling an
inevitable convergence.
In contrast to the final shot in The Searchers of Ethan Edwards,
“[leaving] the house again to return to the desert, to vagrancy” (573), the
Morgan clan returns home. The horizon,
visible in both endings, serves different purposes: In The Searchers it completely envelopes Ethan, who becomes smaller and
smaller as he walks away from the camera and into the desert’s vast expanse; in
How Green Was My Valley the
characters divert attention away from the horizon by coming towards the
camera.
The endings of both films
emphasize “the master antinomy in Ford’s films…between wilderness and garden”
(573). Wollen explains differences in
antinomic presentation thusly: “As we have seen, in the case of Ford, some
antinomies are completely reversed.
Instead, there will be a kind of torsion within the permutation group,
within the matrix, a kind of exploration of certain possibilities, in which
some antinomies are foregrounded, discarded, or even inverted, whereas others
remain stable and constant” (575). The
antinomy of wilderness and garden, contorted by the reversal of
arrival and departure in The Searchers
and How Green Was My Valley, has the
same implication in both films: the wilderness is the garden.
Wilderness
is Garden most certainly means something different to the Morgan family
than it does to Ethan Edwards. After
all, they are settlers, or at least established in their village; one could even make the case they are natives, this film's version of the Comanche (the Morgan's occupation of this role depends on the civilized/uncivilized antinomy between mine workers and mine owner, townspeople and clergy transplant Mr. Gruffyd; the obvious torsion here is the Morgan's attachment to their land versus the Comanche's transient relationship to land as hunters/gatherers). Cwn Rhondda is the only place Huw knows before
beginning school; it is his home until he leaves at age fifty. As an adult he associates his childhood in
the valley with purity: “So I can close my eyes on my valley as it is today,
and it is gone, and I see it as it was when I was a boy. Green it was and possessed of the plenty of
the earth.” The earlier the memory, the
better, for he associates the infiltration of industry with corruption: “In
those days, the black slag, the waste of the coal pits, had only begun to cover
the side of our hill, not yet enough to mar the countryside nor blacken the
beauty of our village, for the colliery had only begun to poke its skinny black
fingers through the green.”
Oppressive and ever looming, the
colliery remains the sole means of subsistence for the majority of the valley’s
residents. Trouble begins when a notice
is posted announcing a reduction in wages.
Too many men are willing to work for less, which leads to talk of
creating a union. Crucial to this plan
is Mr. Gruffydd, the new preacher. Like
Ethan Edwards, Mr. Gruffydd plays the role of the nomad; he is an outsider from
the University of Cardiff, come to “conquer the world with truth,” more
plough-share than sabre. In helping the
miners unionize, he hopes for them to stay, not to become nomads in a different
sense by going to America.
His entrance also reveals a
forbidden love. In The Searchers, the barrier between Ethan and the woman he loves, or
at least used to love, is his brother; in How
Green Was My Valley, the barrier between Mr. Gruffydd and Angharad Morgan
is his status as clergyman. In the wilderness/garden overlap, or torsion,
Mr. Gruffydd, like the colliery owner Mr. Evans, brings civilization to the
people of the valley. The difference between the two is their method: Mr. Gruffydd hopes to civilize via the Word, Mr. Evans via industrialization. Mr. Gruffydd's method proves unsuccessful when rumors of a
scandalous relationship between Angharad and him surface. The accusers call a deacons’ meeting to determine a fit punishment for the female party involved. No one has accused Gruffydd of wrongdoing,
which is proof to him that Christ’s teaching have become corrupted,
perverted. He announces his departure:
“This is the last time I will talk in this chapel…I am leaving with
regret.” His regret is not an admission
of indiscretions but of a sorrow that his stewardship over the people of Cwn
Rhondda did not have its intended effect. Mr. Evans also has a corrupting influence on the people and the village, although one could argue that his intentions were never as altruistic as those of Mr. Gruffydd. His unstated contribution to the village--providing employment on a large scale--only serves to dispossess Huw's brothers and accelerate their exodus to America.
Mr. Gruffydd’s presumed exit is
never confirmed; as he is readying himself to leave, the emergency horns at the
colliery begin to blare, distracting him from his plans. Whether he stays or goes is not as important as
the fate of Huw and the rest of the Morgan family, though, considering How Green Was My Valley opens with Huw
and ends with Huw. The “My” of the title
belongs to Huw, who, though just a boy, is the protagonist in a story full of
adults. The placement of nomad onto a
supporting character is just another torsion of John Ford, always mindful of
“the theme of the quest for the Promised Land, an American re-enactment of the
biblical exodus, the journey through the desert to the land of milk and honey,
the New Jerusalem” (574). For Ethan
Edwards, never able to stay put in any one place, the Promised Land is the
wilderness. Conversely, for Huw Morgan
and his family the Promised Land is a memory of times lost; it is a garden, a
virgin land uncorrupted by industrialization's pollutants.
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