Review of "Regeneration Through Violence" by UH Grad Student

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	• Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 Richard Slotkin University of Oklahoma Press, 2000 - 669 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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Review of "Regeneration Through Violence" by UH Grad Student

1999 marked an "average year" for North American fixation on violence, sexual imagery, and an added combination of technological paranoia as a result of the new millennium. For the most part, television screens tuned in to the daily media circus showcasing the latest "experts" on youth violence, gang activity, and the Psychic Friends Network. The student shooting at Colorado's Columbine high school, however, gripped the nation and left the "experts" scrambling for explanations, counselors, and an array of gun-control measures.

Of all the propositions these so-called experts put forth, none discussed the historical culture of violence that has become the foundation of our country's consciousness. Instead of real explanations and solutions, we endured Senator Diane Feinstein and other "politicians" anxious to defend their domain at the public dole. Many failed to connect the bullets flying in American classrooms with the bombs dropping on civilians in Kosovo. Indeed, they missed the forest for the trees when instead of searching for the root cause of the problem (the culture of violence), they resorted to simplistic cosmetic trimming (more gun control). Richard Slotkin's monograph on the mythology of the American frontier examines the origins of this "frontier mentality" and the making of our national character.

In Regeneration through Violence, Richard Slotkin argues that the North American frontier mythology is a major force in shaping the national character of the country. By building on the theoretical constructs of Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis," Slotkin argues that the frontier was not so much a "regeneration" of democratic principles as much as it was one of violence. Unlike Turner's notion of the frontier as a European and Socialist cleanser, Slotkin offers a more palatable thesis by incorporating the influence and conflict with various Native American populations. The conclusions, nonetheless, are not that simple. American settlers were "not simply an idiosyncratic offshoot of English civilization" but became "Americanized" or "Indianized" in their contact with the indigenous peoples of the continent. By tracing the origins of violence and freedom Slotkin concludes that various European and North American mythologies influenced the early settlers before, during, and after Native American contact.[1] Europeans who settled on the North American continent disembarked with an assortment of adopted ideas and mythologies from their native homeland(s). In this particular context, Slotkin's analysis on European cultural baggage is worth quoting at length:

"The Europeans who settled the New World possessed at the time of their arrival a mythology derived from the cultural history of their home countries and responsive to the psychological and social needs of their old culture. Their new circumstances forced new perspectives, new self-concepts, and new world concepts on the colonists and made them see their cultural heritage from angles of vision that non-colonists would find peculiar. The internal tension between the Moira and Themis elements in their European mythologies (and the psychological tensions that is the source of this myth-duality) found an objective correlative in the racial, religious, and cultural opposition of the American Indians and colonial Christians. This racial-cultural conflict pointed up and intensified the emotional difficulties attendant on the colonists' attempt to adjust to life in the wilderness. The picture was further complicated for them by the political and religious demands made on them by those who remained in Europe, as well as by the colonists' own need to affirm-for themselves and for the home folks-that they had not deserted European civilization for American savagery." [pg. 15]

Much like Reginald Horsman's monograph on the origins of American racial Anglo-Saxonism, Slotkin understands that European settlers did not approach the New World with a cultural clean slate; or as Professor Buzzanco would say: tabula rasa. Europeans carried with them centuries of cultural baggage and transported those ideas to the American continent, particularly the concept of Volkgeist.[Horsman, 25-42]
The new settlers underwent the logical process of a cultural tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis, or "times change and we change with them." Racial prejudice, however, was not the only cultural and social "element" present at the time of contact. Religious nuances and distorted comparisons between Catholicism and Native American blood rites provided an added cultural wedge between the two. Slotkin believes that many of the above mentioned traits found fertile ground in North American literature, specifically in the accounts of Indian wars and captivity narratives. According to Slotkin,

"The cultural anxieties and aspirations of the colonists found their most dramatic and symbolic portrayal in the accounts of the Indian wars. The Indian war was a uniquely American experience. Moreover, it pitted the English Puritan colonists against a culture that was antithetical to their own in most significant aspects. They could emphasize their Englishness by setting their civilization against Indian barbarism; they could suggest their own superiority to the home English by exalting their heroism in battle, the peculiar danger of their circumstances, and the holy zeal for English Christian expansion with which they preached to or shot at the savages. It was within this genre of colonial Puritan writing that the first American mythology took shape-a mythology in which the hero was the captive or victim of devilish American savages and in which his (or her) heroic quest was for religious conversion and salvation. As their experience in and love for America grew, however--and as non-Puritans entered the American book-printing trade-the early passion for remaining "non-American" (or non-Indian) became confused with the love the settlers bore the land and their desire to gain intimate knowledge of and emotional title to it. If the first American mythology portrayed the colonist as a captive or a destroyer of Indians, the subsequent acculturated versions of the myth showed him growing closer to the Indian and the wild land. New versions of the hero emerged, characters whose role was that of mediating between civilization and savagery, white and red. The yeoman farmer was one of these types, as were the explorer or surveyor and. later, the naturalist."[pg. 21]

The European contrast between civilization and nature found other outlets to vent differences between "civility" and "savagery." Myths such as the ones mentioned above facilitated the aggressive westward expansion of the nineteenth century, particularly during the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848). Additionally, questions regarding early captivity narratives and the fictitious nuances that they engender pose interesting comparisons between those of the early Spanish settlers in New Mexico.

Placed against Hietala's monograph on "manifest design," however, Slotkin's study on the mythology of the American frontier is complimented by additional factors absent from his own book: diplomacy, politics, partisanship, economics, divisions between free labor and slave labor, and logistics. In defense of Slotkin, however, the author is primarily interested in excavating the origins of North American frontier mythology whereas Hietala's interest focuses on the question of "Manifest Destiny" during the Jacksonian period.

The benefit of Slotkin, in my opinion, has more to do with his understanding of the North American mentality and how those psychological underpinnings influence decisions outside of our own cultural distinctions, i.e. political, economic, diplomatic, and otherwise. More importantly, and like I've mentioned before, the question over mythology is, in my estimation, one of the fundamental obstacles obscuring our peregrino (peregrinate) to an open-minded discussion regarding many of our current social, economic, and political issues. The question over how mythology becomes part of our national character requires a crucial understanding of not only the origins of North American mythology itself, but also the ability to propose an alternative, practical model to take its place. The latter, in my opinion, is much harder than the former.

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Seize truth as an Indian takes a scalp -- violently.

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 best 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-

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Slotkin's vision will change the way you think about America

Slotkin analyzes the popular texts of early American life--"capitivity narratives" of women abducted by Native Americans, dime novels, etc.--to show how early Americans came to rationalize the gap between their religious ideology and the reality of the wilderness they were meant to transform into the "city on the hill." His careful study of the documents seems almost academic at first, and is sometimes rough going, but when I let his argument sink in (as a student in Slotkin's undergraduate class which used this book as its text), it profoundly and permanently transformed the way I saw American culture and history. This book is revelatory for anyone interested in "American Studies," the creation of our national mythology, and in what makes America America.

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A Classic

If you truly want to understand American culture this book is essential. It's erudite, detailed, patient, yet lively, examination of the themes of early American life and literature are revelatory. I have no doubt it will become a "classic" of American scholarship.

On the basis of his sweeping 1975 survey of American Colonial and early Republican literature, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860, Richard Slotkin has approached the pop guru status of archetypal excavators such as Joseph Campbell, despite the fact that his work emphasizes the dark undercurrents of American culture. His argument in Regeneration is that, as the British colonists established their own societies in the wilderness, they expressed their regional desires for territorial expansion and self-rule by reinventing their history. Their narratives, according to Slotkin, revolved around frontiersmen who internalized, then disciplined, the "savagery" of their new environments, using their newfound mastery of nature to transform the wilderness into a revitalized civilization. Slotkin begins by examining how narratives of King Philip's War transformed New England from a demon-haunted Puritan enclave to a region where Indian killing represented progress and prosperity. Daniel Boone's paradoxical backwoods mixture of aggression and reflection serves as an icon for the rest of Regeneration, which emphasizes sectional variations of the Indian hunter myth, while analyzing the more "serious" literary endeavors of Cooper, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville.

Regeneration reads at times like a noir-ish variation on Frederick Jackson Turner's influential The Frontier in American History, a vision in which genocide, white supremacy, and environmental exploitation are the real engines driving the nation's expansion. At a time when even the bloodiest of war films extols family values in the midst of combat, Slotkin's grim tour of the United States' collective cultural history demands a wide audience. --John M. Anderson END

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