29 pages • 58 minutes read
Bret HarteTennessee's Partner
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1869A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Transcendent Nature of Friendship
Friendship is a main theme of “Tennessee’s Partner” and provides a lens through which to examine the story’s central conflict. The story takes place in an era when deeply intimate relationship between partners of the same sex were relatively common. While these relationships, sometimes called “romantic friendships,” could be long-lasting and life-defining and may have included some physical intimacies and cohabitation, they were not considered erotic or threatening to heterosexual marriages. “Tennessee’s Partner” explores a friendship of this kind, which, observed through the eyes of townsfolk in a mining camp, elevates not only the relationship’s participants but also those around them.
Harte titles the story with a reference to the central relationship, but the meaning of the word “partner” changes as the narrator’s understanding of the relationship becomes clearer. At first, the narrator implies that the partner is Tennessee’s criminal partner, but by the end, the term encompasses a deeper relationship that feels more like a life partnership. The centrality of the relationship in the life of Tennessee’s partner is evident in everything from his attempt to bribe the judge on Tennessee’s behalf, to his grief after Tennessee’s death, to his reunion (real or imagined) with Tennessee in the afterlife. He himself testifies to the significance of the relationship when he explains how well he knows Tennessee:
I come yar as Tennessee’s pardner, knowing him nigh on four year, off and on, wet and dry, in luck and out o’ luck. His ways ain’t allers my ways, but thar ain’t any p’ints in that young man, thar ain’t any liveliness as he’s been up to, as I don’t know (Paragraph 11).
His words testify not only to the closeness of the relationship but also to its strength, as Tennessee’s partner’s willingness to overlook what he considers Tennessee’s dubiously moral “ways” is a form of unconditional love.
The narrator and townsfolk exhibit a level of discomfort with the raw emotionality the partner displays, and they often describe it circuitously. For example, when the partner cries into his handkerchief, the townsfolk argue about where his face ends and the red handkerchief begins, implicitly acknowledging that he must be red-faced with grief but never mentioning or admitting any sympathy for his tears. Nevertheless, the sight affects them; those who initially attend Tennessee’s burial as a kind of joke become quieter and more respectful as it goes on. By the end of the story, the tone entirely transforms as Tennessee’s partner deliriously reaches out toward visions of his partner in the moment of death. After avoiding sentimentality for most of the story and employing a host of distancing tactics, the narrator commits to the partner’s point of view in the last line, as if to acknowledge the truth of the partner’s vision. The friendship ends up coopting the story with its sentimental tone. This tonal shift echoes what Harte suggests is the ennobling power of friendship, which makes even Tennessee’s rough-mannered partner a figure the narrator suggests is worthy of admiration.
The Pros and Cons of Self-Created Justice
The messy, crowd-mediated process by which frontier communities agree upon and enforce justice runs through Harte’s work and frontier literature generally. In the absence of federal law or a state-wide governmental organization, settlers and prospectors developed their own systems to maintain law and order, often operating under a brutal system of vigilante justice where expediency and force outweighed fairness. Harte explores this process through multiple channels in “Tennessee’s Partner,” suggesting that the fluid nature of frontier justice came with both pros and cons.
The narrator introduces Sandy Bar with an explanation of the way its naming conventions work: Residents generally forgo their legal names to be “christened anew” with nicknames given by their fellow townsfolk. This suggests that newcomers to Sandy Bar enter with a blank slate, as if markers of class or potential criminal history have little bearing on one’s reputation there. However, this sense of equality and tabula rasa may be illusory, as pieces of backstory and class signifiers frequently pop up in the narrator’s commentary on the townsfolk; such details also inform the ultimate collective judgment of Tennessee’s criminality as part of a pattern. Moreover, if Sandy Bar rejects the conventional legal framework that given names represent, it does not replace this with lawlessness or total individualism. Rather, names are put before the popular tribunal and determined by whatever the crowd (or loudest voice) decides. Not everyone is pleased with the results, but they abide by them.
A similarly ad hoc, crowd-driven system underpins Tennessee’s trial. The story details Sandy Bar’s justice process from the report of a crime all the way through to the aftermath of the punishment. At each step, the townsfolk must quickly agree on the course of action, and the process is often messy. When Tennessee’s partner speaks at the trial, his earnestness, attempts at humor, and ramshackle self-presentation threaten to sway the jury’s opinion until the judge intervenes. Whether this speaks well or ill of the system is left ambiguous. On the one hand, Tennessee is clearly guilty, so acquitting him on sentimental grounds would be a miscarriage of justice. On the other hand, the story encourages readers to sympathize with Tennessee’s partner and therefore desire Tennessee’s release; Tennessee may be guilty, but the partner’s affection for him implies that Tennessee has a value that the legal system does not recognize.
Overall, the story suggests that the inherent fluidity of self-created justice is both its weakness and its strength. If it opens the door to subjective opinion and personal bias, it also allows flexibility in the face of individual circumstances.
The Utility of Humor
“Tennessee’s Partner” references the way humor pervades collective and interpersonal communications in Sandy Bar, creating a shared language that signifies an ingroup. In particular, the story suggests that humor allows the townsfolk to distance themselves from difficult or uncomfortable realities in a dangerous, often violent setting.
The narrator calls the reader’s attention to Sandy Bar’s conventions of storytelling when, after comically recounting the story of Tennessee’s partner’s marriage, he notes that “all sentiment was modified by a strong sense of humor” in Sandy Bar (Paragraph 2). The syntax of that sentence emphasizes the contrast between sentiment and humor and establishes Sandy Bar’s preference for the latter. This preference partially explains their suspicion of Tennessee’s partner. Where Tennessee is described as “good-humored” and never expresses much sentiment about his crime, his death sentence, or his imminent separation from his partner, his partner is serious and—during the trial and funeral—overtly emotional. During his speech to the court, Tennessee’s partner attempts to connect with the townsfolk through humor, talking in circles around the question of Tennessee’s character. However, the judge senses the listeners’ sympathy and intervenes. The partner then missteps by trying to pay off the judge, and his face takes a more “serious and sanguinary hue” as he returns to his outsider position (Paragraph 17). His use of humor briefly functions as a bridge to acceptance but ultimately ends up confirming the line between ingroup and outgroup.
The story suggests that humor’s prevalence in mining camp culture owes much to self-protection and peacekeeping. Tennessee is an example of someone who uses humor in emotionally-charged moments to avoid any display of sentiment. When he’s facing off against the judge in a life-or-death confrontation, he jokingly treats it like a card game, and the result is averted violence. When given a chance to say any last words to his partner, he makes a joke about how his partner was “Euchred.” Humor here serves as a self-protection mechanism that allows Tennessee to avoid facing devastating realities like culpability, guilt, and death. However, it also speaks to what the story implies is humor’s fundamental drawback: its tendency to circumvent emotional vulnerability. This raises questions about the depth of the bonds facilitated by humor, as does the townsfolks’ initially lighthearted attitude toward Tennessee’s funeral procession. As the solemnity of Tennessee’s partner spreads to the funeral-goers, the story sets humor aside, ultimately favoring the partner’s own earnest emotional expression.
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