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Richard
Slotkin
REGENERATION THROUGH VIOLENCE: THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 1600 - 1860 (1973) ISBN 978-0-8061-3229-7 (paper) reviewed by Patrick Killough I. for barnesandnoble.com
Title of this review: 'Davy Crockett grinning by a mountain of 105 bear-hides' Reviewed by Patrick Killough, a student of James F. Cooper Reviewer's rating of REGENERATION THROUGH VIOLENCE * * * * FOUR STARS Richard Slotkin's 1973 REGENERATION THROUGH VIOLENCE is a very good read, even 35 years after publication. Its subtitle is: THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER 1600 - 1860. The book lives up to its titles. First in time came the raw facts and deeds of European migration to North America. Not much later there were writings about what Europeans experienced: narratives and sermons. Those were mainly about 'redskins' from a white perspective. First the New England Indian wars were written down and their meaning probed. Then arose narratives of people, mainly white women, captured by Indians. These captives were often ransomed, sometimes escaped, even killing their captors in some cases, and returned to their families. Culture shock was immense and furnished much fodder for the sermons of the Mather family and others. Out of these diverse raw materials myths were developed by American writers, i.e. stories of heroes, their quests, their temptations and their triumphs. Some of these myth-rich heroes were instantly popular: George Washington, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Natty Bumppo the Deerslayer. In other myths, especially the figures in Melville's MOBY-DICK, it much took longer for people to recognize themselves as the Americans. It would be a mistake, Professor Slotkin argues, to identify these myths as literal truth or even academic history. But in oversimplified shorthand, all tackled one question of global interest: what is an American? To the earliest New England divines Americans were emigrants who had fled Europe to create the kind of sanctified land God wanted them to live in. There was, alas, one complication: the land was not empty. There were Indians already in place, godless, violent. Their lifestyles were free and very seductive. The New England divines warned their flocks to stay close to the coast, live in communities with churches. To venture into the Indian-filled forests was to enter the heart of darkness and damnation. Yet from the earliest times white men and women did enter the wilderness to interact with Indians. Hundreds did so involuntarily, as captives after Indian raids on white settlements. Others went west voluntarily as hunters, farmers, trappers, missionaries and traders. Some rather enjoyed themselves. Indians often seemed to accept whites, especially peaceful, honest, fair-dealing Quakers, more easily by far than whites could deal with Indians. Still, many white captives, when a ransom was offered, refused to return home. Over time mythic heroes emerged who lived among Indians, learned from them, and adapted some of their ways to white necessities. Even George Washington was portrayed by Parson Weems as an early student of Indians. But the first bombshell national popular myth was that of Kentucky pioneer Daniel Boone. Not much later came the literary productions of James Fenimore Cooper, especially the five LEATHERSTOCKING tales built around the life and quests of Nathaniel 'Natty' Bumppo. Natty spoke Indian languages, picked and chose among their ways (he never scalped a dead foe), resisted temptations to marry and have children and found God in the forest not in books. Cooper, according to Richard Slotkin, cut through the underbrush when he discovered in the dark wilderness the even darker American soul or subconscious. Better than he, two later writers, Thoreau and Melville, probed the depths of the American psyche. Thoreau found in hunting and killing the source of the poet's creativity. A poet had to reach into his experience and scalp out his verse! According to the popular and later myths, America is a synthesis of warring with savages, (notably red men and later blacks), being captured and rescued from bestial humans, fishing, hunting and killing. Heroes rescue captive white women. Heroes scorn settled agriculture. [But note that real Eastern Indians were agriculturalists in large measure, contrary to the growing myth.] What have our myths, often mistakenly, led us to want Americans to be? Hunters. Killers. Killers who love their prey. In MOBY-DICK, Ahab's great mistake was to hate the white whale he quite rightly hunted. With Leatherstocking, we earn our names by our deeds: Deerslayer is called Hawk Eye by the first Indian brave he slays in a fair fight. Americans destroy the wilderness in order to develop it through chopping down forests, mining and building towns. We remember "Davy
Crockett grinning by a mountain of 105
bear-hides, Boone, whose rifle shots are prayer and poetry, an acolyte perpetually sacrificing to his god" (Ch. XIV, p. 564). Without violence America's mythic hunters would not be the heroes they happily make themselves. These heroes, good and bad, have done their share to create today's trophy-mad America. In the words of the book's concluding sentence, America has produced "piles
of wrecked and rusted cars,
heaped like Tartar
pyramids of death -- cracked, weather-browned rain-rotted skulls, to signify our passage through the land'" (p. 565). Slotkin argues that political leaders have used myths whose message is that to be American is to be violent in order to justify foreign imperialstic adventures: on the western plains, in the 1898 war with Spain and in Viet-Nam. I studied REGENERATION THROUGH VIOLENCE to better my understanding of James Fenimore Cooper and LEATHERSTOCKING. Richard Slotkin devotes many, many lucid words to Cooper and his place in the flow of conscious myth-making. I will never again be tempted to imagine Cooper as the first to write about Indian-white friendships. I am also ready to accept that Thoreau and Melville neatly mowed down the grass first hacked through by Fenimore Cooper. -OOO- Recommended related titles: --James Fenimore Cooper: THE PIONEERS, THE DEERSLAYER, THE PRAIRIE, THE PATHFINDER. -- George Dekker: JAMES FENIMORE COOPER--THE AMERICAN SCOTT. -- William P. Kelley: PLOTTING AMERICA'S PAST: FENIMORE COOPER AND THE LEATHERSTOCKING TALES Black Mountain, NC 03/12/2008 =-=-=-=-=-= II. for amazon.com Title of this review: Seize truth as an Indian takes a scalp -- violently. Reviewer's rating of this book: * * * * FOUR STARS It is very nearly the end of his book before Professor Richard Slotkin justifies the "violence" in his title Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600 - 1860. His final thesis is that the myth that the best Americans are violent is partial at most and has been misused by politicians to justify imperialist adventures from our own western plains to the 1898 war with Spain to Viet-Nam. Most of the book is about the literary foundations behind the myth of the quintessential American being a hunter who enters a wilderness (the early American forests, the depths of his own dark mind) to endure an initiation of hunting, fishing, captivity, rescues and the "Eucharistic" union of hunter and a prey (the hunted) that is respected, killed and devoured. Herman Melville's MOBY-DICK was not (like John Filson's Colonel Boone) initially popular. But in time it became "The American National Epic" (p. 538). Slotkin's ultimate conclusion is that there must be something to these intertwined myths of America but they are either inadequate to the real American character or false -- and certainly harmful as guides to behavior. The search for American myths culminates before 1860 in the deep probings of Henry Thoreau and Herman Melville and the more fervid but less cerebral expressions by Walt Whitman. Thoreau took from Cooper and other myth-embellishers a notion of literary creativity as a bloody seizure of truth held by a foe or by prey. The research into American myths begins with the Pilgrim/Puritan experiences of the 1620s to 1690s in hostile, wilderness New England, moves into literary comings to terms with those experiences in narratives and sermons and then into increasingly secular and decidedly fictional conceptions by writers like Parson Weems (on George Washington), John Filson (on Daniel Boone) and James Fenimore Cooper (on Natty Bumppo, the Leatherstocking). A sickness entered popular American culture when Davy Crockett, hunter-wastrel, supreme waster of natural resources, became a mythic hero. Crockett, as America's Aeneas, was not a builder, but a destroyer, a conquistador (p. 555). When a mythic male hunter is hero and dark wilderness is his stage, then left behind are woman, family, civilization and towns. All a Boone, Crockett or Bumppo can do is hunt, kill, eat then resume hunting, killing and eating. This becomes the recommended American mythic cycle. And often, as with Captain Ahab and the white whale, the prey is simply unhuntable (p. 557) but is nonetheless pursued to the end of time. As for the captivity/rescue/reassimilation into society dimension of America's myths, "...rescue from dark events is never complete" (564). Our foe was always the Indian or the pristine forest. And we only recognized and appreciated him when we slew him. Lovers of James Fenimore Cooper will naturally linger over Slotkin's Chapter 13 "Man Without a Cross: The Leatherstocking Myth (1823 - 1841," pp. 466 - 516). Cooper skillfully blended materials from English and Scottish (Sir Walter Scott) romanticism with popular literature from New England and the new West (p. 468). Sir Walter in his introduction to ROB ROY had compared the famous Scot outlaw Rob Roy McGregor to red Indians for readers surprised that "a character like his, blending the wild virtues, the subtle policy, and unrestrained license of an American Indian, was flourishing in Scotland during the Augustan age of Queen Anne and George I." William Wordsworth's poem "Rob Roy's Grave" also catches a likeness to the future Leatherstocking. Cooper did much more than mechanically flesh or draw out the Boone myths and others, though he did make them his point of departure before probing their metaphors of the dark human heart. Professor Slotkin credits Moravian missionary to the Delawares, Rev. J. G. Heckewelder, for the inspiration of the scene in THE PIONEERS where Natty, Chingachgook and Uncas pursue and kill a deer swimming in a lake. This captured a well known creation myth. Slotkin also gives Cooper much credit for hard literary pioneering which made possible even deeper insights of Hawthorne, Melville and Thoreau. Professor Slotkin absolves the typical American from being the stoic killer detected by D. H. Lawrence. But Slotkin also blames at least some of America's myths for glorifying anti-environmental, destructive hunter-killers. This long book is a pleasure to read, is a well-written historical review. Some of its final conclusions do not, however, seem firmly entailed by 99% of the well-chosen words that preceded them. -OOO- Your Tags: mythology, literary theory, frontier civilization, james fenimore cooper, daniel boone, henry thoreau, herman melville ==-=-=-=-=-=- III. for epinions.com Title of this review: What Myths Turned Americans into Killers? by aohcapablanca, Mar 14 '08 By the 1960s most works of James Fenimore Cooper (1789 - 1851) were no longer in print. Suddenly came the revival! Critical editions and secondary scholarly literature now abound. Much current interest comes because we are now taught to read Cooper's five LEATHERSTOCKING tales and other novels not just as boys adventure stories but as popular psychology and soul-probing. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fenimore Cooper saw the early American wilderness as something more than a stage for Indian wars and for capture, ransom and release of white prisoners, mainly women. Those two authors, according to Professor Slotkin in REGENERATION THROUGH VIOLENCE, were the first to present "the wilderness adventure as a search for values and identity." They also extensively explored "the central metaphor in the myths of
America since precolonization times -- the association of the New World
wilderness with the terrors and delights of the hidden mind" (Ch.
13, p. 515).
Myths are stories in which many of our ancestors found themselves recognizably portrayed and by which they were content to plot the course of daily life and futures. Components of myths are heroes, their stage of action and their narrative: departures from a home into the unknown, trials, captivities, rescues, matings and encounters with the divine. Myths are often rich in metaphors and levels of understanding. The moral advice they give to us is not, however, always sound. That is notably true about images of "the real American" derived from national myths. We are by no means compelled to accept D. H. Lawrence's pithy summing up: "The essential (white) American soul is
hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never melted" (p. 2).
Professor Slotkin in REGENERATION THROUGH VIOLENCE skillfully and at a measured pace moves from earliest Europeanizing of North America to 1860 in showing first the facts behind America's myths, then the literature those facts inspired and the myths that some writers deliberately created, in some cases letting facts be damned. The seminal fact about the white British, Dutch, Spanish and French encounters of North America from the 1600s onward was that red-skinned Indians were there first. The Pilgrims and then the Puritans of New England forced the Eastern seaboard frontier into rigid Calvinist Christian categories framed by a stern Jehovah, expulsion from paradise, devils prowling around to snatch souls and by those very few Christians whom Jehovah had predestined to be eternally saved and happy. Early New England reactions to Indians included these: they are pagans, they tempt us Saints to sin, they are hostile, they hate us, they take us captives, they must be fought, indeed they must be exterminated or driven away. Literarily the results of early colonial experience on the ground were Captive Narratives and sermons, notably by two members of the famous Mather family -- Reverends Increase and Cotton. The New England Saints were exhorted not to venture voluntarily into the wilderness, lest the Indians tempt them successfully to taste a simpler, nature-adapted lifestyle far from the Christian God. Yet from the beginning some British settlers did enter the wilderness and tried to become one, in some sense, with the Indians. Such was Thomas Morton author of NEW ENGLISH CANAAN and ruler of the settlement at Merrymount in Massachusetts. Such also were traders, surveyors, land hunters and missionaries, especially Quakers and Moravians. Europeans watching from afar these developments in North America quickly developed myths of Good Quakers and Good Indians. Rousseau and others were fascinated by lessons natural law-abiding Indians could presumably teach Europeans. Might it have been possible for white men and red men to get along better than they in fact did? Why did intermarriage become such a taboo? Parson Weems turned George Washington into a mythic figure (remember the cherry tree?). John Filson did the same for Colonel Daniel Boone, the dominant mythical hero of this period. Davy Crockett did the same for himself. Crockett and others defined "national aspiration in terms of so many
bears destroyed, so much land preempted, so many trees hacked down, so
many Indians and Mexicans dead in the dust" (p. 5).
James Fenimore Cooper created the fictional Deerslayer, Hawk Eye, Pathfinder, etc. -- i. e., Nathaniel "Natty" Bumppo, hero of the five LEATHERSTOCKING novels. Cooper, per Slotkin, probed more deeply into the wilderness myth as a door into the workings of the mind than had any predecessor. Henry Thoreau then pushed beyond Cooper to theorize that acquiring knowledge is like stalking a loon on a lake or killing and devouring a deer. A poet violently pulls his greatest insights from his dark conscience much as a red Indian takes a scalp. But greatest of all the mythmakers 1600 to 1860 was Herman Melville. His MOBY-DICK is the classic American myth of the hunt and the destruction that comes to a hunter (Captain Ahab) when he hates rather than loves his prey. The plot of Cooper's THE PIONEERS revolves around claims to the land around Lake Otsego in central New York. How did the Indians lose their land titles? Does white man's law effectively disinherit a white man, Edward Oliver Effingham, whose grandfather was given the land by Indians? In the same novel Fenimore Cooper, in telling of how Natty Bumppo and his two Mohican friends hunt and kill a deer swimming in the lake, is regarded by some scholars as deliberately evoking a Delaware Indian myth of how the first men came up from beneath a lake to enjoy and take possession of the land. Myths were used by some as justifying ignoble means to noble ends. Reverend Increase Mather wrote of "the
Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our
Fathers has given to us for a rightfull Possession ... " (84).
Others judged that the inferior savages must either be killed or driven away. Benjamin Franklin thought that selling Indians alcoholic drinks would so weaken their morale as peacefully to make room for white migrants in Pennsylvania. Earliest Puritans sometimes thought that the New World had to be emptied of non-Saints, lest the Saints themselves perish. They saw the Indians as few in numbers, with even fewer claims to the land (p. 38). I would enjoy simply going on and on. But this sketchy introduction must end somewhere. There is much for you to learn for yourself, very likely very pleasantly, let me add. For starters, try to figure out what is the point of the book's title! The book is "smooth." It glides into the mind without painful struggle. It is clear, its vignettes sharply edged. Encyclopedic might be too strong a word, but REGENERATION THROUGH VIOLENCE is thorough. It does not merrily skip or trip through THE BOOK OF MORMON or Daniel Boone, Charles Brockton Brown, Jim Doggett, "the Big Bear of Arkansas" (p. 479) or Henry Thoreau. This is a book to sip, not gulp down. It is also a book to return to over and over. -OOO- Pros: Clearly written. Chronological review of major elements (Indian wars, captivity, wilderness) behind myths of America. Cons: Persistently but lightly rhetorical and argumentative. Repetitions and summaries are not infrequent and very didactic. The Bottom Line: Want to understand the mythic images white Americans have of themselves? Read REGENERATION THROUGH VIOLENCE. Americans are what they are because of wars with and failure to understand native Indians. Overall Product Rating: * * * * * Excellent Recommended: Yes Black Mountain, NC 03/14/2008 ==-=-=-=-=-=-= |