Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860

By Richard Slotkin

National Book Award Finalist: A study of national myths, lore, and identity that “will interest all those concerned with American cultural history” (American Political Science Review).

Winner of the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award for Best Book in American History

In Regeneration Through Violence, the first of his trilogy on the mythology of the American West, historian and cultural critic Richard Slotkin demonstrates how the attitudes and traditions that shape American culture evolved from the social and psychological anxieties of European settlers struggling in a strange new world to claim the land and displace Native Americans. Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries—including captivity narratives, the Daniel Boone tales, and the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville—Slotkin traces the full development of this myth.

“Deserves the careful attention of everyone concerned with the history of American culture or literature. ”—Comparative Literature

“Slotkin’s large aim is to understand what kind of national myths emerged from the American frontier experience. . . . [He] discusses at length the newcomers’ search for an understanding of their first years in the New World [and] emphasizes the myths that arose from the experiences of whites with Indians and with the land.” —Western American Literature

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Jan 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781504090353

Richard Slotkin

Richard Slotkin has been recognized as one of the leading scholars of American cultural history. He has won awards for nonfiction writing on American history, and for historical fiction. His books include Regeneration Through Violence (1973), which won the Albert Beveridge Prize and was a National Book Award Finalist; The Fatal Environment (1985), which won the Little Big Horn Associates Literary Award; and Gunfighter Nation (1992), a National Book Award Finalist. His novel Abe (2000) won the Michael Shaara Prize for Civil War Fiction. He retired in 2008 as Olin Professor of American Studies (Emeritus) at Wesleyan University.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Myth and Literature in a New World

The mythology of a nation is the intelligible mask of that enigma called the national character. Through myths the psychology and world view of our cultural ancestors are transmitted to modern descendants, in such a way and with such power that our perception of contemporary reality and our ability to function in the world are directly, often tragically affected.

American attitudes toward the idea of a national mythology have been peculiarly ambivalent. There is a strong antimythological stream in our culture, deriving from the utopian ideals of certain of the original colonists and of the revolutionary generation, which asserts that this New World is to be liberated from the dead hand of the past and become the scene of a new departure in human affairs. Nonetheless, we have continually felt the need for the sense of coherence and direction in history that myths give to those who believe in them. The poets of the early years of the republic—taught, as part of their classical education, that national mythologies are embodied in literature and begin with national epics in the manner of Homer—attempted to fabricate an American epic that would mark the beginning of a national mythology, providing a context for all works to come after. Their concept of myth was essentially artificial and typically American: they believed, in effect, that a mythology could be put together on the ground, like the governments of frontier communities or the national Constitution, either by specialists or by the spontaneous awakening of the popular genius. Like the Constitution, such myth-epics would reflect the most progressive ideas of American man, emphasizing the rule of reason in nature and in human affairs, casting aside all inherited traditions, superstitions, and spurious values of the past. The freedom and power of man were to be asserted against the ideas of necessity, of historical determinism, of the inheritance of guilt and original sin. From Barlow’s Columbiad and Dwight’s Greenfield Hill in the late eighteenth century, through Whitman’s Song of Myself and Melville’s Moby-Dick in the nineteenth, to Hart Crane’s The Bridge and Williams’s Paterson or the great American novel in the twentieth, American writers have attempted the Homeric task of providing, through epic poetry or epic fiction, a starting point for a new, uniquely American mythology.¹ Even scholarly critics who address themselves to the problem of the myth of America have a marked tendency to engage in the manufacture of the myth they pretend to analyze in an attempt to reshape the character of their people or to justify some preconceived or inherited notion of American uniqueness. Such critics are themselves a part of this national phenomenon of myth-consciousness, this continual preoccupation with the necessity of defining or creating a national identity, a character for us to live in the world.

Works like the Columbiad and The Bridge, whatever their artistic merit, failed (at least in their authors’ lifetimes) to achieve that quasi-religious power throughout the whole of a culture that is the characteristic attribute of true myth. The premises of such works do not take into account the facts that myth-making is a primary attribute of the human mind and that the process of mythogenesis in a culture is one of continuous activity rather than dramatic stops and starts. True myths are generated on a subliterary level by the historical experience of a people and thus constitute part of that inner reality which the work of the artist draws on, illuminates, and explains. In American mythogenesis the founding fathers were not those eighteenth-century gentlemen who composed a nation at Philadelphia. Rather, they were those who (to paraphrase Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!) tore violently a nation from the implacable and opulent wilderness—the rogues, adventurers, and land-boomers; the Indian fighters, traders, missionaries, explorers, and hunters who killed and were killed until they had mastered the wilderness; the settlers who came after, suffering hardship and Indian warfare for the sake of a sacred mission or a simple desire for land; and the Indians themselves, both as they were and as they appeared to the settlers, for whom they were the special demonic personification of the American wilderness. Their concerns, their hopes, their terrors, their violence, and their justifications of themselves, as expressed in literature, are the foundation stones of the mythology that informs our history.

The failure of writers and critics to recognize and deal with the real mythological heritage of their time and people has consequences that go beyond the success or failure of their literary works. A people unaware of its myths is likely to continue living by them, though the world around that people may change and demand changes in their psychology, their world view, their ethics, and their institutions. The antimythologists of the American Age of Reason believed in the imminence of a rational republic of yeomen farmers and enlightened leaders, living amicably in the light of natural law and the Constitution. They were thereby left unprepared when the Jeffersonian republic was overcome by the Jacksonian Democracy of the western man-on-the-make, the speculator, and the wildcat banker; when racist irrationalism and a falsely conceived economics prolonged and intensified slavery in the teeth of American democratic idealism; and when men like Davy Crockett became national heroes by defining 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.

The voluminous reports of presidential commissions on violence, racism, and civil disorder have recently begun to say to us what artists like Melville and Faulkner had earlier prophesied: that myths reach out of the past to cripple, incapacitate, or strike down the living. It is by now a commonplace that our adherence to the myth of the frontier—the conception of America as a wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious, self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top—has blinded us to the consequences of the industrial and urban revolutions and to the need for social reform and a new concept of individual and communal welfare. Nor is it by a far-fetched association that the murderous violence that has characterized recent political life has been linked by poets and news commentators alike to the frontier psychology of our recent past and our long heritage. The first colonists saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation; but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience. How that myth evolved and gained credence and power is the subject of this study.

Three critical problems lie in the path of any study of the so-called myth of America. The first is the question of the Americanness of its origin. Myths are human creations, and the people who composed the vast majority of the American population before 1800 were European by ancestry, by language, and by religious and literary heritage. The only non-European native cultures were those of the Indians. Like the colonists, the Indians had mythologies based on their experience in the world—in the Indians’ case, the American wilderness. Did those same conditions, operating on European immigrants, impose on or induce in the colonial mind a similarly American mythology? We know that the colonists adapted their ways of living, farming, hunting, and fighting in order to survive in the Indians’ world. Did they also (to some degree) acquire an Indian-like vision of the New World, an Indian-American mythology? Since the Indian is, from our point of view, the only one who can claim to be indigenously American, it seems important to question whether our national experience has Americanized or Indianized us, or whether we are simply an idiosyncratic offshoot of English civilization.

The second critical problem arises from the fact that this artificially created American nation—the self-baptized American people—first saw fight in the age of the printing press. Mythologies arise spontaneously in the preliterary epochs of a people’s history and consequently are artless in their portrayal of the world and the gods, appealing to the emotions rather than the intelligence. American myths—tales of heroes in particular—frequently turn out to be the work of literary hacks or of promoters seeking to sell American real estate by mythologizing the landscape. One of the problems with which this study has to deal is the question of the relationship between myth and literature. Is the dominance of printed literature inconsistent with the initiation and development of myth, and is the post-Gutenberg period also necessarily postmythological?

The third problem is that which lies at the source of every study of myth in history and literature: the problem of defining myth and of distinguishing between archetypal myth, folk legends, and artistic mythopoesis. Such a definition must be made before we can understand what has been involved in the process of myth-making in America, what the stages of that process have been, and how our mythology acquires and exercises its power in human thoughts and affairs.

Mythogenesis

A mythology is a complex of narratives that dramatizes the world vision and historical sense of a people or culture, reducing centuries of experience into a constellation of compelling metaphors.² The narrative action of the myth-tale recapitulates that people’s experience in their land, rehearses their visions of that experience in its relation to their gods and the cosmos, and reduces both experience and vision to a paradigm. Reference to that myth or to things associated with it—as in religious ritual—evokes in the people the sense of life inherent in the myth and all but compels belief in the vision of reality and divinity implicit in it. The believer’s response to his myth is essentially nonrational and religious: he recognizes in the myth his own features and experience, the life and appearance of his ancestors, and the faces of the gods who rule his universe, and he feels that the myth has put him in intimate contact with the ultimate powers which shape all of life. Thus myth can be seen as an intellectual or artistic construct that bridges the gap between the world of the mind and the world of affairs,³ between dream and reality, between impulse or desire and action. It draws on the content of individual and collective memory, structures it, and develops from it imperatives for belief and action.

The ultimate source of myth is the human mind itself, for man is essentially a myth-making animal. He naturally seeks to understand his world in order to control it, and his first act in compassing this end is an act of the mind or imagination. On the basis of limited, finite experience, he creates a hypothetical vision of a universal, infinite order and imposes that hypothesis on his perception of the phenomena of nature and his own behavior. He tests his vision by acting in accordance with the principles of behavior that seem to be demanded by reality as he envisions it. Insofar as that behavior is consistent with the universal order, it will seem to prosper him and acquire the name of virtue.⁴ Aside from its function as a guide to behavior, his vision is regarded as a source of power, since it tells him how to propitiate and control the forces that order the world.⁵ Thus myth-visions, which are generated by the mind, ultimately affect both man’s perception of reality and his actions. Myth describes a process, credible to its audience, by which knowledge is transformed into power; it provides a scenario or prescription for action, defining and limiting the possibilities for human response to the universe.

In order to understand the process of myth-making in America and to establish criteria by which we can discover and define both the nature of the American myth and the manner and time of its emergence, we must begin by examining the state of mind that transforms experience, perception, and narration into the materials of a myth. Philip Wheelwright calls this state of mind the mythopoeic mode of consciousness and finds it present in the psychology of both the myth-making artist and the artist’s people—his audience.⁶ The mythopoeic mode of consciousness comprehends the world through a process of thought- and perception-association, a process of reasoning-by-metaphor in which direct statement and logical analysis are replaced by figurative or poetic statement: the sudden, non-logical perception and expression of an objective relation between parts of reality, or between objective and subjective realities.⁷ The nature of the mythopoeic perception, in both maker and audience, is mystical and religious, drawing heavily on the unconscious and the deepest levels of the psyche, defining relationships between human and divine things, between temporalities and ultimates.

There is a strong tendency of the different experiential elements to blend and fuse in a non-logical way. And not only that, but the self-hood of the observer tends to blend with them; that is to say he becomes a full participant and not a mere observer. Finally, there is a blending, or partial blending, of worshipper and sacred objects and ceremonial acts with certain transcendent Presences.⁸

Myth-making, by this definition, is simultaneously a psychological and a social activity. The myth is articulated by individual artists and has its effect on the mind of each individual participant, but its function is to reconcile and unite these individualities to a collective identity. A myth that ceases to evoke this religious response, this sense of total identification and collective participation, ceases to function as a myth;⁹ a tale that, through the course of several generations—or even several retellings within one generation—acquires this kind of evocative power has evolved into myth.

The mythopoeic mode of consciousness is dependent on—but distinct from—the myth-artifact, which is the actual tale or some sacred image or object connected with the myth-narrative. The artifact symbolically embodies the mythopoeic perception and makes it concrete and communicable.¹⁰ The legends and stories we commonly call myths are simply the artifacts of the myth, and they retain their mythic powers only so long as they can continue to evoke in the minds of succeeding generations a vision analogous in its compelling power to that of the original mythopoeic perception. The myth-artist, priest, or fabulist uses the artifacts of myth to evoke the sense of the myth and its complex of affirmations in the audience. He may use these artifacts in two ways—either deliberately, in an effort to make propaganda for his cause, or unconsciously, under the compelling association of perceived event and inherited mythology.

As artifacts, myths appear to be built of three basic structural elements: a protagonist or hero, with whom the human audience is presumed to identify in some way; a universe in which the hero may act, which is presumably a reflection of the audience’s conception of the world and the gods; and a narrative, in which the interaction of hero and universe is described. Hero and universe may be readily abstracted as images, which may in turn be evocative enough to become equated in our minds with the whole of the myth itself. The narrative as a whole is more difficult to abstract, since its action defines (explicitly and implicitly) the relationship of hero to universe and of man to God—and so establishes the laws of cause and effect, of natural process, and of morality. It is the narrative which gives the images life by giving them a mode of interaction.

Images of the hero and the universe are devices that enable us to identify with (and thus enter) the world of the myth, and these may change fairly rapidly to accommodate new perceptions or requirements of the myth-makers and their audience. This is certainly the case with American mythology, in which (as Henry Nash Smith shows in Virgin Land) the image of the wilderness east of the Mississippi changes from desert to Garden in a century and a half, while that of the Great Plains exhibits a similar change in less than half that time—from its purchase in 1803 to the realization of its economic potential before the Civil War. However, while the images may readily exhibit changes in response to the play of social and psychological forces, the narrative or narratives which relate them to each other have or acquire a certain fixity of form. Their structure and character may be more clearly articulated through the passage of time and the operation of historical forces on the mind of the audience, but their essential nature remains substantially the same. Only truly radical alterations of the images of hero and universe effect significant changes at the narrative structural level of the myth, for such changes (by definition) reflect a fundamental alteration of the culture’s conception of the relationship of man to the universe, a revolution in world view, cosmology, historical and moral theory, and self-concept. Hence such changes may be seen as marking the point at which a new epoch of cultural history or perhaps even a new culture can be said to begin.

Stories that exhibit this kind of power persistently in many cultures over long periods of time are termed universal archetypes. Those which exhibit similar persistence within a single culture (and which are variants of universal archetypes) are what I term cultural archetypes and cultural myths. (The former term refers to an abstraction or narrative of narratives derived from and expressing the common structural form of a constellation of related myth-narratives.) This study is an attempt to define at least one of the cultural archetypes which emerged from the historical experience of the American colonial frontier to function as myth in our culture.

The distinction between mythopoeic consciousness and myth-artifact is helpful in dealing with the problem of the relationship between the archetypal and the tribal or culture-bound qualities of myth. The so-called myth critics have been justly criticized for attempting to reduce all literary narrative to paradigmatic archetypes, obscuring all authorial and cultural differences and all distinctions of literary artistry and aesthetic response—in effect, reducing all the varieties of myth and literature to a single psychological or anthropological datum.¹¹ The study of archetypes is based upon an analysis of the underlying structure of myth-narratives or -artifacts; the term is most frequently used to describe those paradigmatic structures that seem to be common to all mythologies, of whatever place or cultural epoch. Since myth begins as a mythopoeic mode of consciousness—a state of mind and a mode of perception—it is reasonable to assume that myths are archetypal or universal to the extent that certain conditions of life and psychological states or concerns are universal among men. All men are born and must die, feel the need for love and begetting children, dream of immortality and an amenable universe, suffer the pangs of guilt and frustration, experience the wastage of time and the waning of their powers. All men share certain perceptions of the relationships between the universals in their human condition, such as the mirroring of seasonal patterns in human life, the echoing of vegetable death and rebirth in the perpetual deaths of fathers and successions of sons. Myth-narratives that embody and explain these conditions and perceptions—the death and resurrection of the nature-god; the sacred marriage of the divine king and the earth goddess, or spirit of place; the hero’s quest in the kingdom of death for the boon of life—are common to all cultures, of whatever technological level or place, differing in particular details but not in their structural patterns.

Archetypal myths combine and correlate individual experience and psychology with collective history and with the processes of cosmic evolution. This drawing together of experiential and historical or cosmogonic threads can be seen in the myth of the heroic quest, which is perhaps the most important archetype underlying American cultural mythology. The quest involves the departure of the hero from his common-day world to seek the power of the gods in the underworld, the eternal kingdom of death and dreams from which all men emerge; his motive is provided by the threat of some natural or human calamity which will overtake his people unless the power of the gods can be borrowed or the gods themselves reconciled with the people.¹² The quest is also an initiation into a higher level of existence and power, echoing the movement of the boy from childhood into manhood: the departure from the world of parental nurture and law into the world of maturity and independent responsibility, in which the forces of the cosmos operate without parental amelioration. For the initiate, the achievement of maturity depends on his ability both to understand and take upon himself the power and knowledge of his parents (quest for the source) and to differentiate himself from them (the triumphant return on completion of the quest). The most significant rituals of the tribe center about the rites of initiation, since these must provide a continuing supply of competent men to sustain the society. Therefore it is not surprising that myths of heroic quest and initiation are among the first coherent myth-narratives formulated by a culture, the bases of national epic poetry (the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Gilgamesh, Beowulf, the Arthurian epics).

Archetypal myths derive from and mirror archetypal states of mind. In Thresholds of Initiation, J. L. Henderson (developing a Jungian thesis) characterizes the basic psychological tension as a conflict between Moira and Themis—between the unconscious and the conscious, the dream or impulse and the rational idea, the inchoate desire and the knowledge of responsibility, the gratification-world presided over by the mother and the world of laws and reasons ruled by the father. The process of maturation, of initiation into adulthood, requires the reconciliation of these two elements, these two modes of relating to life; and since, as infants, we are absorbed in the maternal world of Moira, the initiation requires us to move toward the paternal figure (Themis) for a confrontation and some form of reconciliation. This tension and the psychological processes it evokes are echoed (according to Jung) in the processes by which myths evolve. Moira was a prehistoric earth-goddess, predating the Olympian deities of Greece, a goddess ruling both personal destiny and the allotment of moieties of land, a maternal spirit of place. She represents the mythopoeic pole of the myth-making process, existing at the undifferentiated matrix of the archetypal world of prehistory, her nature established by the impulses, dreams, and inchoate desires that characterize the human unconscious. About her gathers the fresh and timeless phenomenon of a ritual dance, drama, or painting which serves the function of providing religious, aesthetic, social, and philosophical experience all at once.¹³ Just as individuals, in the course of normal maturation, leave the womblike maternal world of childhood for the world of men, of activity, of the disappointment of dreams and the difficulties of achievement, cultures presumably move from the maternal, Moira vision of their character and destiny toward the Themis vision. This vision centers on the paternal principal in deity, Olympian Zeus rather than pre-Olympian Moira, and on the activity and responsibility of social life as opposed to passivity and absorption in the mother. Themis represents the final socio-religious, artistic, or philosophic cultural form of any given community, varying in its character from nomadic hunting cultures and the herdsmen to settled agricultural groups and larger organizations of hieratic city-states.¹⁴ Henderson also notes that as this transition takes place, the archetypal content [of myth] is spread out and becomes much thinner than it was at its primordial source. Finally Moira and Themis are separated and may be in conflict with each other.¹⁵

This conflict between Moira and Themis—between the unconscious and conscious, the mythopoeic and the artificial, the archetypal and traditional elements in myth—is not one which is capable of resolution through the victory of one or the other. Perhaps conflict does not describe their relationship so well as tension, since elements of both persist in all mythologies, as in most human psychologies. Although Moira ceases to dominate the gods, she or her avatars retain a subordinate position under Zeus and periodically assert their primordial power against paternal authority. Bacchus or Zagreus—or the drunken Indian Joes of American literature—are their children, embodiments of the childish and primitive impulses of the unconscious: hunger for food, power, pleasure, dissolution of the self in passionate love, and cruelty. These qualities make the children of Moira a perpetual source of disorder, inciters of female or youthful violence against paternal agents of order like the king of Thebes and the artist Orpheus. As Henderson says, this mythic tension reflects the individual human need to reconcile mother and father, the male and female sexual principles, the unconscious and conscious realms of the mind.¹⁶

The stages of development in the evolution of myth-artifacts mirror the psychological alternation between movements away from the mythopoeic source (Moira) and attempts to return and reacquire the power of original mythopoeic perceptions. Philip Wheelwright identifies three stages in the development of myth: primary, romantic, and consummatory.¹⁷ The primary stage is that in which the mythopoeic mode of consciousness predominates both in the activity of the myth-maker and in the perceptions of his audience. Through repetition of the formulas or repeated use of the artifacts of this primary myth, however, a convention of form is established and identified with the content of the primary myth. In this romantic stage, the attainment of an original experience of mythopoeic insight into the nature of reality becomes less important than fulfilling the social obligations established for the myth and for the priests who keep and ritualize it. Fulfillment of the literary and social requirements that custom has established for artists likewise becomes of primary importance for the tribe’s official or semiofficial artificers of myth-stories. Thus in this phase the metaphoric surface of the myth may be overelaborated in such a way as to obscure or even twist its original meaning or content, to repress and even deny the faiths and values that were inherent in the original mythopoeic experience. In highly sophisticated cultures, such as that of modern Europe and the West, artists and thinkers become aware of this corruption of the modes of belief and expression and attempt to overcome it, either by reachieving the mythopoeic, spontaneous element in artistic perception and creation or by critically separating the gold of archetypal myth from the dross of particular traditions. This consummatory stage is marked by a conscious attempt to recapture the lost innocence of the mythopoeic attitude by transcending the narrative, logical and linguistic forms which romantic mythologizing accepts and utilizes.¹⁸ In this stage of myth-making the artist acts as prophet rather than as priest or ministrant to his people, shaking minds and hearts with new visions rather than providing customary balm for normal social and personal anxieties. The novelists and poets who attack the conventions of thought, feeling, and expression by transforming and revolutionizing literary and linguistic forms—the Romantics in their day, for instance, and the post-Joycean novelists in ours—belong to this phase of mythic endeavor, as do the Protestant revivalists who prophesy against conventionalized, normalized, formalized religious experience in the name of a spontaneous mythopoeic experience of faith in God.

In the attempt to recover the world of primary myth and universal archetypes, the consummatory myth-maker must draw upon the vocabulary of myth-images and -structures that is his cultural heritage. Hence his approach to the reenvisioning of the universal archetype necessarily involves the reenvisioning of the cultural archetypes that lie behind the variegated surface of his culture’s myth-media. Moreover, the consummatory myth-maker brings to his efforts a critical awareness which sets him apart from his forebears. First, he is aware of and capable of articulating the need for myth as myth—that is, as a construction of symbols and values, derived from real and imaginary experience and ordered by the imagination according to the deepest needs of the psyche. In addition, he has the benefit of historical knowledge and can look back over a span of time in which myths have developed and decayed, have shaped and been shaped by human and national history. Given this double awareness, the consummatory myth-maker has a degree of critical distance from his material and his works which does not exist for the mystic of the primary myth or the conventional imitator of romantic myth. This creates barriers to the acceptance of the vision of the consummatory myth-maker as a social myth, since it is the function of myth to provide a formula for credence and faith, not an apparatus for critical analysis. Thus a novel like Melville’s Moby-Dick or Joyce’s Ulysses, which are attempts at consummatory myth-making, fails to achieve recognition and credence among the people and in the historical time to which it is addressed.

Although primary, romantic, and consummatory stages in the development of myth can be generally discerned, it would be a mistake to assume that any given period or specific work can be classified as belonging exclusively’ to one of the three.¹⁹ Romantic myth partakes of the original power of the primary myth, despite the fact that it obscures its origins. To the extent that consummatory myth-making succeeds, it becomes identical in quality, power, and function with primary myth; it may in fact be the primary stage of a new myth evolution. At the same time, the symbolic language elaborated in the romantic stage of the myth’s development provides the basic vocabulary of the consummatory myth. Like Moira and Themis, these stages or phases coexist in mythologies, providing formal tension as well as a tension in meaning or content. Myth is essentially conservative, depending for its power on its ability to play on conscious and unconscious memory, to invoke and relate all the narratives (historical and personal) that we have inherited, and to reach back to the primal levels of -individual and collective psychology.

National Mythology: A Summary View

The universal archetype is essential to myth, since all myth, to be credible, must relate the problems and aspirations of particular cultures to the fundamental conditions of human existence and human psychology. But the viability of myth also depends upon the applicability of its particular terms and metaphors to the peculiar conditions of history and environment that dominate the life of a particular people. This principle of distinction is implied in Joseph Campbell’s definition of myth as traditional metaphor addressed to ultimate questions.²⁰ The ultimate, archetypal questions of human existence are spoken to by the myth; but the success of the myth in answering these questions for a people depends upon the creation of a distinct cultural tradition in the selection and use of metaphor. It is in their development of traditional metaphors (and the narratives that express them) that the mythologies of particular cultures move from archetypal paradigms to the creation of acculturated, even idiosyncratic mythmetaphors.

In this process of traditionalization it is the artifact of myth—the narrative—that exhibits change and development. Thus it is in this stage that the nature of the artifact, the medium through which the mythic perception is transmitted, becomes of crucial importance. In addition, it is at this stage that the role of the artist, the intelligent manipulator of media and artifacts, becomes important as a means of controlling and directing the development of myth, limiting or augmenting its power to induce the mythopoeic affirmation in its audience. It is at this stage that various cultures move away from the universal vision of the archetype toward some particular interpretation of the archetypal narrative that will reflect their characteristic approach to life. It is at this point that the Christian variant of the myth-narrative of the dead-and-resurrected god diverges from the Norse or the Dionysian, and it is here that the farming culture’s version of the sacred marriage varies from that of the hunting or the industrial culture. Hence it is at this point that myth provides a useful tool for the analysis of the particularity of a human culture.

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 noncolonists would find peculiar. The internal tension between the Moira and Themis elements in their European mythologies (and the psychological tension 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.

Added together, these conditions ensured that the colonists would be preoccupied with defining, for themselves and for others, the precise nature of their constantly changing relationship to the wilderness. This made for a highly self-conscious literature with a tendency toward polemic and apology, in which the colonist simultaneously argued the firmness and stability of his European character and (paradoxically) the superiority of his new American land and mode of life to all things European. The fact that the colonial experience began in the age of the printing press gave this kind of literature wide currency. The very nature of print made it the perfect medium for this sort of literature, allowing the writer to draw on a vast vocabulary of literary conventions in making his case for America.

This set of circumstances created a pattern of evolution for the American myth that is somewhat different from the pattern suggested by Wheelwright for primitive cultures. The colonists whose writings form the body of the mythology were working in a literary tradition and a medium of communication that had been highly structured and conventionalized through centuries of European practice. The primary sources from the New World, written by early explorer-conquerors, are couched in the imagery of this romantic European mythology and seem at this distance highly artificial and literary. References to images of the Golden Age, as depicted by Greek and Latin poets, abound both in the writings of court and church historians and in the accounts by the explorers themselves. Howard Mumford Jones notes that Columbus’s first description of the New World is colored by the traditional imagery of the earthly paradise:

This island and all others are very fertile to a limitless degree…. In it there are many harbours on the coast of the sea, beyond comparison with others which I know in Christendom, and many rivers, good and large which is marvellous. Its lands are high, and there are in it very many sierras and very lofty mountains, beyond comparison with the island of Teneriffe. All are most beautiful, of a thousand shapes, and all are accessible and filled with trees of a thousand kinds and tall, and they seem to touch the sky. And I am told that they never lose their foliage, as I can understand, for I saw them as green and lovely as they are in Spain in May, and some of them were flowering, some bearing fruit, and some in another stage, according to their nature. And the nightingale was singing, and other birds of a thousand kinds…. In it are marvellous pine groves, and there are very large tracts of cultivable lands, and there is honey, and there are birds of many kinds, and fruits in great diversity. In the interior are mines of metal. The people of this island … go naked…. They never refuse anything which they possess, if it be asked of them; on the contrary they invite anyone to share it, and display so much love as if they would give their hearts…. And they do not know any creed, and are not idolaters; only they believe that power and good are in the heavens….²¹

As Jones notes, the description is generalized, abstracted, and vague to a fault; and the nightingales are either pure fiction or the error of a perception dominated by conventional imagery, since no such birds exist in the New World. The accounts of the conquest of Mexico written by Cortés, Gómara, and Diaz del Castillo (which are discussed in chapter 2) reflect the strong influence of secular chivalric romances. Diaz’s Indians, viewing the ruins of Mexico City, speak in much the same way that we would say: ‘Here stood Troy.’²²

The later myth-literature of the Colonial and early national periods was intended as a kind of consummatory myth-making: an attempt by artful modems to recapture the unsophisticated, passionate, believing spirit of the primitive natural man. In so doing, these later writers (Cooper, Longfellow, Melville, and others) reached back to the only sources of truly primary American myth—the myths of the Indian aborigines and the personal narratives of the unsophisticated, almost primitive colonials (and their slicker, sensationalistic successors of the popular press) who fabricated a mythology out of their real and imagined experiences with the Indians. The story of the evolution of an American mythology is, in large measure, the story of our too-slow awakening to the significance of the American Indian in the universal scheme of things generally and in our (or his) American world in particular. As Kenneth Rexroth says:

Our memory of the Indians connects us with the soil and the waters and the nonhuman life about us. They take for us the place of nymphs and satyrs and dryads—the spirits of the places. They are our ecological link with our biota—the organic environment which we strive to repudiate and destroy…. the flooding tide, full of turmoil and whirlpools, of the unconscious, or the id, or the dark forces of the blood—the actual, savage environment that reason and order and humane relationships can penetrate but cannot control.²³

Thus the evolution of the American myth was a synthetic process of reconciling the romantic-conventional myths of Europe to American experience—a process which, by an almost revolutionary turn, became an analytical attempt to destroy or cut through the conventionalized mythology to get back to the primary source of blood-knowledge of the wilderness, the Indian mind, the basic, Moiratic, myth-generating psychology of man. Yet our only sources of primary knowledge about the Indian mind (aside from a few incompetent studies of Indian ritual and legendry by missionaries) were works by those who regularly battled the Indians or by those who stayed with them as war captives or adopted tribesmen. These were the people who lived near or among the Indians, learning their modes of thought and behavior so well that they could successfully fight them or even integrate themselves into Indian society. Even at the source of the American myth there lies the fatal opposition, the hostility between two worlds, two races, two realms of thought and feeling.

The land was ours before we were the land’s, said Robert Frost. The process by which we came to feel an emotional title to the land was charged with a passionate and aspiring violence, and the deed of gift was many deeds of war. Because of the nature of myth and the myth-making process, it is a significant comment on our characteristic attitudes toward ourselves, our culture, our racial subgroupings, and our land that tales of strife between native Americans and interlopers, between dark races and light, became the basis of our mythology and that the Indian fighter and hunter emerged as the first of our national heroes. In order to understand the complex and many-leveled influence of our history on our mythology, and of mythology on our culture, we must understand the nature of the peculiar forces that shaped mythology in America.

Generally speaking, the basic factors in the physical and psychological situation of the colonists were the wildness of the land, its blending of unmitigated harshness and tremendous potential fertility; the absence of strong European cultures on the borders; and the eternal presence of the native people of the woods, dark of skin and seemingly dark of mind, mysterious, bloody, cruel, devil-worshipping. To these must be added the sense of exile—the psychological anxieties attendant on the tearing up of home roots for wide wandering outward in space and, apparently, backward in time. The sense of loss was heightened by the inevitable lapsing of communication with the homeland, the divergence of colonial from homeland historical experience, and the rise of new generations more acculturated or acclimated to the wilderness, less like the remembered grandparents in the fixed image of Europe. Exploration of new lands was one necessity imposed on them; fighting Indians, enduring captivity among them, and attempting to convert or enslave them were others. All emigrants shared the anxious sense that they had been, willingly or unwillingly, exiled from their true homes in the motherlands of Europe; all faced the problem of justifying their emigration to more stable folk at home, of trying to sell them either actual land or the idea of a colony. All felt impelled to maintain traditions of religious order and social custom in the face of the psychological terrors of the wilderness. Later, the sons of these emigrants strove to justify their title to the land they took for their own.

Around each of these problems a body of literature with distinct formal conventions gathered: narratives of discovery, narratives of Indian war and captivity, sermons, and colonization and anticolonization tracts. These accounts purport to be first- or second-hand reports of day-to-day events and topography in the new world. The authors usually had ulterior motives in publishing them—a desire to explain or justify, through imaginative reconstruction of events, a course of action they had taken or their right to possess the land; or simply an attempt to persuade potential European settlers of the beauties and wealth of the strange new world. In any case, their appeal to the reader was carried by the metaphors that, implicitly or explicitly, informed their accounts. At the outset these metaphors were drawn from a purely European context, either the literature of the classical age and medieval and Renaissance romances, or the religious and political thought of the Reformation. Gradually these metaphors, constantly adjusted to suit American conditions, began to metamorphose, to take on some of the shape and coloration of the colonists’ experience of America and her landscape.

As American society evolved through years of historical experience, the differentiated literary forms were gradually drawn together by writers who more or less deliberately sought to create a unified and compelling vision of the total American experience—an American myth. This process of reintegration was logically inevitable. The more a writer or preacher understood of the American environment, the less he could simplify or compartmentalize his approach to analyzing it. One could not discuss exploration, for example, without mentioning the chance of Indian attack and captivity. One could not maintain religious discipline by purely theological argument or pure civic force, if parishioners were willing and capable of seeking their fortune by itinerating on the edges of the wilderness; so sermons merged with accounts of frontier hardship. Any work capable of attaining that unified and compelling vision of the whole American experience would have to contain in its terms—narrative, character, imagery, values—the sum total of all these experiences reduced to a basic and universal archetype of all the colonists’ experiences, the one presenting the most vital psychological difficulties, and present its vision in terms appropriate to the historical experience of a wilderness people.

Printed literature has been from the first the most important vehicle of myth in America, which sets it apart from the mythologies of the past. The colonies were founded in an age of printing, in large part by Puritans, who were much inclined toward the writing and printing of books and pamphlets and the creating of elaborate metaphors proving the righteousness of their proceedings. Since Americans turned readily to the printed word for the expression and the resolution of doubts, of problems of faith, of anxiety and aspiration, literature became the primary vehicle for the communication of mythic material, with the briefest of gaps between the inception of an oral legend and its being fixed in the public print. How this occurred is one of the chief issues to be dealt with in this study. For the student of the historical development of America as a culture, the visibility of the several stages in the evolution of traditional metaphors addressed to ultimate questions is an invaluable aid. It also presents several difficulties. In order for us to examine myth, we must rely on artifacts which are translations of the mythopoeic perception of reality. A tale handed down in the oral tradition from generation to generation presents, if examined at a late period, a distorted and adulterated image of the original. As a vehicle of myth, literature enjoys the advantage of formal permanence. The process of writing, however, necessitates a certain distortive distancing between the author and his experience—a distortion compounded where the author has the experience only at second hand or where he attempts to recall it after the passage of many years. Furthermore, myth as literature is subject to the movements of the literary marketplace. Authors and publishers interested in book sales might deliberately shape their narratives to suit current fashion; moreover, writers desiring a wide reputation shaped their narratives to English audiences as much as, or more than, to American audiences, introducing extraneous characterizations of their material which have little to do with the American colonists’ attempts to understand their situation in their own terms.

On the whole, the development of narrative literature in the first two hundred and fifty years of American history is one of the best guides to the process by which the problems and preoccupations of the colonists became transformed into visions which compel belief’ in a civilization called American. Repetition is the essence of this process. Certain instances of experience consistently recurred in each colony over many generations; translated into literature, these experiences became stories which recurred in the press with rhythmic persistence. At first such repetition was the result of real recurrence of the experiences. The Indian war and captivity narratives, for example, grew out of the fact that many pious and literate New Englanders were continually falling into the hands of the Indians or attempted to explain their actions in battle. Once in literary form, the experience became available as a vehicle for justifying philosophical and moral values which may have been extrinsic to the initial experience but which preoccupied the minds of the reading public. Thus Cotton Mather and others wrote improvements" of the captivity narratives and used them in jeremiads and revival sermons. Through repeated appearances and recastings in the literary marketplace, a narrative which proved viable as a bestseller or a vehicle for religious or commercial persuasions would be imitated by more or less professional writers (where such existed) or those emulous of literary or ecclesiastical reputation. Thus the experience would be reduced to an imitable formula, a literary convention, a romantic version of the myth. When enough literature had been written employing the convention, it might become a sort of given betweeen writer and audience, a set of tacit assumptions on the nature of human experience, on human and divine motivations, on moral values, and on the nature of reality. At this point the convention has some of the force of myth: the experience it portrays has become an image which automatically compels belief by a culture-wide audience in the view of reality it presents. Thus in tracing the development of the conventions of narrative literature, we are tracing the development—by accretion of symbols characteristic of cultural values—of a distinct world vision and an accompanying mythology emerging from the early experiences of Europeans in the wilderness.

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.²⁴ 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.

But it was the figure of Daniel Boone, the solitary, Indian-like hunter of the deep woods, that became the most significant, most emotionally compelling myth-hero of the early republic. The other myth-figures are reflections or variations of this basic type; In numerous popular narratives devoted to Boone’s career, the experience of America that first appears in the captivity and Indian war narratives is reduced to a paradigm. The values, beliefs, and experience of life for which the captives and Indian-killers or -converters had spoken were concentrated in this new figure and in the narratives that define his ways of relating to the cosmos. Moreover, these older values were compounded with the newer, more acclimated view of America symbolized by the farmer and the naturalist or surveyor. The figure and the myth-narrative that emerged from the early Boone literature became archetypal for the American literature which followed: an American hero is the lover of the spirit of the wilderness, and his acts of love and sacred affirmation are acts of violence against that spirit and her avatars.

In its structure this myth-narrative follows a variation of the initiation into a new life or a higher state of being or manhood that is a myth-theme as old as mankind.²⁵ The boy’s coming of age, the fall, the Christian conversion, and the success myth (the American dream of perpetual self-improvement and -transcendence) are variations of the basic theme. Usually the experience of initiation is portrayed as an individual accomplishment, an experience of life which each man must come to in his turn. In America, however, the experience of initiation into a new life was shared by all members of colonial society simultaneously during a certain, relatively brief period of time. The pivotal position of the Indian war narratives and John Filson’s legend of Boone’s baptism by combat in the development of American mythology and literature is explained by their applicability to the universal problem of the colonial period: the problem of acculturation, of adjusting the mores and world view of one’s native culture to the requirements of life in an alien environment. The English colonists had to remake their values, their concepts of law and religion, and their images of their role and place in the universe in order to survive in the wilderness. This necessity was difficult to acknowledge, since the colonists felt it their duty to remain loyal to their English heritage. It was far easier to define their cultural identity by negative means, through attacking or condemning alien elements in their society, by casting out heretics like Roger Williams and John Underhill, whose ideas were strange or whose behavior smacked of an Indian-like lack of orthodox discipline. The Indian wars, in which culture was pitted against culture, afforded a perfect opportunity for this sort of definition by repudiation. In opposing the Indian culture, the Puritan symbolically affirmed his Englishness. Even as social and religious issues grew complex and clouded, as men who had been orthodox in England grew heretical in America, as men grew unsure about whether the true church was presbyterian or congregational, antinomian or orthodox, English or universal or American, there remained a fundamental simplicity in the opposition between Indian and settler.

Writers of the Indian war narratives, a circle which included both actual participants and clerical outsiders like the Mathers, generally composed their accounts as if their audience’s belief in certain concepts of morality and theology and the frontier could be taken for granted. Their works were unconscious experiments, designed to test the power of certain ideas of human experience (and in particular the American experience) to produce conviction in an audience. Revival preachers employed Indian war tales as a tool for arousing pious anxiety in their congregations; land speculators used them as advertising ploys; representatives of social, religious, and political factions used them to justify their particular conceptions of the truth. Frontiersmen used them to mock the ways of town-bred tenderfeet; town-bred preachers used them in chastising the restless indiscipline of frontier life.

Any experiment was successful to the extent that its assumptions about life, America, Indian, God, and the wilderness coincided with those of its particular audience. But during the first centuries of its existence, colonial society was fragmented into hostile cultural enclaves and rival governments, each speaking for separated and isolated fragments of that society. Even after the Revolution, sectional and local differences persisted and to some degree intensified. This heterogeneity, coupled with the constant pressure of European immigration and expansive emigration to the frontier, made for a constant agitation of issues, values, and ideas. In this fluid culture, the success of any given attempt at myth-making was usually brief, until Filson’s first study of Daniel Boone appeared in 1784. This figure caught and held the national attention for half a century, despite varying sectional evaluations of the moral and social character of the frontier hero.

Even in the pre-Boone literature, however, throughout all the changes and developments, certain themes and values persistently recurred. These are the core of the American frontier myth—the symbolic formulations of the American experience which carried the world view of the first colonists from generation to generation. This study therefore begins with an investigation of the two cultures that battled for the New World. It is followed by an analysis of the Puritan literature of the Indian wars and of the captivity narrative, which emerged as the Puritan myth of America. Changes in the symbolic roles of Indians, frontiersmen, and Europeans in the eighteenth century are then traced to their culmination in Filson’s Kentucke, which formulated the myth of the hunter as archetypal American and mediator between civilization and the wilderness. The divergence of American and European treatments of this figure from 1784 to the Jacksonian era, and the divergence of treatment in the literatures of various sections of the United States, are dealt with in the following section. Finally, the emergence of an American literature firmly based on an American mythology is treated through the works of Cooper, Melville, Thoreau, and other writers of the American Renaissance period.

Chapter 2

Cannibals and Christians:

European vs. American Indian Culture

"Brother; … We are told that your religion was given to your forefathers, and has been handed down from father to son. We also have a religion, which was given to our forefathers…. We worship in that way. It teaches us to be thankful for all the favors we have received; to love each other, and to be united. We never quarrel about religion.

"Brother; We do not wish to destroy your religion, … we only want to enjoy our own…. As we are going to part, we will come and take you by the hand, and hope the Great Spirit will protect you…."

As the Indians began to approach the missionary, he rose hastily from his seat and replied, that he could not take them by the hand; that there was no fellowship between the religion of God and the works of the devil.

This being interpreted to the Indians, they smiled, and retired in a peaceable manner.

Chief Red Jacket and a Missionary¹

The culture and literature we call American was born out of the confrontation between cultures that embodied two distinctly different phases of mythological evolution, two conflicting modes of perception, two antagonistic visions of the nature and destiny of man and the natural wilderness. The European cultures that sought to transplant themselves to these shores possessed a sophisticated, romanticized mythology, in which the land of what was to become the American West figured long before its actual discovery. The Europeans were met by native Indian cultures whose mythology was closer to the primary, Moira stage, whose vision of the American landscape was mythopoeic rather than conventional, whose values and mores (derived from their environment and their mythic vision) were in important respects antagonistic to those of Europe. Yet between European and Indian there was a fundamental bond of sympathy, a mutual recognition of a brotherhood of consciousness (or perhaps of the unconscious). The whites appreciated and envied what they took to be the Indian’s ease of life and sexuality, the facility with which he adjusted to the land, the fidelity and simplicity with which he worshiped his wilderness gods, and the gratification of mind and body such worship brought him. The Indian perceived and alternately envied and feared the sophistication of the white man’s religion, customs, and technology, which seemed at times a threat and at times the logical development of the principles of his own society and religion. Each culture viewed the other with mixed feelings of attraction and repulsion, sympathy and antipathy.

Human cultures on the North American continent, whether they were of European or Indian origin, have been shaped by the interaction of their migrant peoples with the American landscape, the wilderness. The one constant in the American environment has been the wilderness in its varying forms of forest, plain, mountain, and desert. The French and English settlers of Canada and the eastern seaboard of the United States confronted essentially the same physical environment as the Abnaki (Wabanaki), Iroquois, Algonkian, and Cherokee who preceded them in the land. As the American environment was the same for each of these cultures, one might reasonably expect that in the process of adjusting their lives to the wilderness, each of these cultures would acquire certain elements or qualities distinctly derived from and suited to that environment. Differences between them might be accounted for by considering their differing points of cultural and historical origin. Also, their presence together in the land, resulting in both violent and amicable cultural interaction, would affect the development of each culture, just as the constant of the wilderness would. If we are to understand the mythology and the cultures derived from this complex of interacting factors, we must have some understanding of the nature of the hostile cultures involved (Indian and European), of how they reacted to their environment, and of their vision of both their own role in the cosmos and that of their opposites.

The European Myths: Chaos and Arcadia

Colonists from Europe were the inheritors of a long and elaborate mythoreligious tradition, one in which the primary mythic consciousness had been submerged in a complex of social and literary conventions, hidden behind apparently arbitrary and nonfunctional rules and ornaments. The Indians, having no written literature beyond a few glyphs, were closer to the primary sources of myth and more

Reviews for Regeneration Through Violence

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm sorry that this book seems very poorly represented in the collections of Librarythingers. Richard Slotkin came to understand a basic foundation of the American Myth. Americans seem to have divided the world into two areas, that inside the settler's stockade, and the "others", outside it.Those defined as outside, will be well advised to dig foxholes at night.When you combine this social background and natural land hunger, the careening advance across the continent to the pacific, and the treatment of the indigenous, and other European precursors, becomes easier to explain. The Mythology offers some comfort to those Americans who reflect upon their rather violent history, (We were programmed to do this while we were unconscious, so we're now sorry, and less responsible for the trouble we've caused?)The research has been industrious, and the examples appear to be well chosen. Yes, it is a thick book, but to a non-American but neighbouring observer, a book that well rewards the reader. It was written in 1973, before the Tea Party brought a number of these memes forward in the public awareness. 1973.