The Bridges of Madison County

Tall, lean, aging, and solitary, Robert Kincaid roves the world like a lone cowboy, wrangling photos instead of cattle, his horse an old pickup truck named Harry. The freedom and creativity of his lifestyle, he believes, is not long for the world, and he sees himself as one of the last of the breed. Francesca recognizes in him her own yearning to live a free and adventurous life, but she—and millions of others—long ago traded that option for the safety of a modern family.

Modernity offers many assurances that assuage human fears. The price, though, is conformity and routine, the logic of reason rather than the songs of the heart. Robert won’t collaborate with such weak-willed ways but insists on expressing the primitive powers handed down to us from our ancestors, instincts suppressed by modern life. Still, he plans and prepares carefully, not to be safe but to perfect his ability to capture the most inspiring and life-affirming photos possible. He serves not the shibboleths of safety but the songs of the ancients.

The old ways, with their primitive rhythms, frighten most people. Francesca notes that Robert’s highly individual ways make him “a stranger, a foreigner […] a wanderer” (161), and that unnerves settled people. For the locals, Robert’s long hair and odd preoccupation with covered bridges become subjects of jokes and ridicule. The men, especially, seem eager to disparage him, calling him a “hippie.” They soothe their fear of his strange, creative power by making him seem ridiculous.

Multiplied by millions, that attitude spreads across the modern world, making old-style individualists seem like dangerous interlopers. Indeed, Robert’s visit comes close to overturning the finely tuned machinery of the local farming community. Only because Robert and Francesca hide their affair and end it quickly do the residents escape damage to their carefully constructed society of conformity. It’s the two lovers who suffer instead for their emotional and spiritual freedom.

The others, including Francesca’s husband Richard, will never understand a passion they’re unable to feel in their own lives; it’s just as well that they don’t know about it at all. Ignorant of the truth, the neighborhood continues its ways with nary a ripple on the surface. The lovers, like other creative and daring individuals, must hide their true feelings, and this marginalizes them more than any outrage or ridicule ever could.

Francesca’s sense of integrity demands that she honor her commitments to her family—she can’t abandon them to indulge her private needs—and in this way she instead abandons her own deepest dreams. She sees, too, that Robert pays the price of loneliness as he roams through a cold world smothered under a blanket of conventionality.

Though it may be too late for Robert’s kind in the modern age, Francesca hopes women will stand up and assert their own power to risk and create, and thereby conserve some of the essential traits of the old individualists, adapting and nurturing those qualities so that they can endure in this strange new world of surface freedom and deep conformity.