The Summariser

Original text:

National Mythology: A Summary View (subchapter from Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860, by Richard Slotkin)

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.” 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 myth-metaphors.

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 obiective 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….”

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 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.’”

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.”

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 ne-cessity 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. Au-thors 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 situa-tion 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 experi-ences 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. 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 ca-reer, 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 sur-veyor. 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. 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 ex-periments, 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: representations 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 indis-cipline 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.

Reading notes:

• the myths of a particular people must rely on universal archetypes to be viable, and they must apply to their own historical and environmental conditions; the success of a myth in answering the questions related to their existence lies in the metaphors and elements they SELECT; – these metaphors are expressed in narratives, and these narratives operate a people’s move from universal archetypes to myth-metaphors; peoples develop their own, traditional mythology through metaphors, and it is in their choice of metaphors, and the narratives that develop from them, that they differentiate themselves from other people;
• “myth provides a useful tool for the analysis of the particularity of a human culture.”
• thus THE NARRATIVE, namely the medium through which traditional metaphors are embodied and as such mythology is created and transmitted becomes essential; – by extension, the artist, “the intelligent manipulator of media and artifacts”, becomes a central figure in myth-making and thus nation-making; they interpret universal archetypes and adapt them so that they reflect their own experience (for instance: Christians have the dead-and-resurrected God while others have the Norse or the Dionysian have different gods);
• these narratives were shaped by the realities that surrounded the colonists: the native Americans, the difficulties of the frontier etc.;
• the settlers found themselves in a peculiar position: they brought with them European mythologies which reflected the European way of living, BUT they had to adapt those mythologies to their new way of life – thus, old elements such as the Greek goddesses of fate and wisdom, found an objective correlative in their fight racial, religious, and cultural opposition of the American Indians; at the same time, they felt the need to show that they were different from those who remained behind (all of them felt the need to justify their departure from Europe); the narratives that came out of this conflict, were thus polemic and apologetic; metaphors of European descent were gradually adapted to the American experience;
• the printing press helped the proliferation of such narratives; the most important vehicle of myth in America; literature became the primary vehicle for the communication of mythic material;
• this process is different from that of primitive cultures because the medium, that is the narrative, had already been developed extensively in Europe; BUT while the descriptions of early conquerors coming from Europe were highly romanticized, therefore European, the descriptions of early American authors focused on the figure of the Native American; SO – the evolution of the American myth was a process of reconciling the romantic-conventional myths of Europe to American experience – achieved by a return to a primordial figure of the wilderness, namely, the native American; at the source of the American myth lies the opposition between two worlds, two races etc.; the anxieties and aspirations of the settlers found their embodiment in the Indian wars; they defined themselves by negative means, by setting themselves against Indian barbarism (“definition by repudiation”); the hero: Daniel Boone; repetition was essential in this myth-making literature: the myth-narrative that emerged from the early Boone literature became archetypal for the American literature that followed;
• around all these aspects a body of literature with distinct formal conventions developed: narratives of discovery, narratives of Indian war and captivity, sermons and tracts; all these writers sought to create a unified and compelling vision of the American experience – an American Myth; the wilderness and the environment dictated how these narratives developed (the sermons fused with accounts of frontier hardship etc.);

Summary of “National Mythology: A Summary View” by Richard Slotkin

In “National Mythology: A Summary View”, R. Slotkin argues that narratives, seen as the medium through which universal archetypes are transmuted into local realities, represent the groundwork of an American national mythology. In particular, he argues that it is only by unpacking these narratives and the conventions and forces that shaped them one can reveal and truly grasp the uniqueness of an American experience and culture.

The settlers found themselves in a peculiar position, Slotkin contends, upon their arrival in the New World. They brought with them European myths which no longer reflected their reality and so they were forced to adapt them. Thus, the morals and values represented by the Greek goddesses of fate and wisdom found an objective correlative in their struggle against the racial, religious, and cultural opposition coming from the allegedly savage natives.

At the same time, the early settlers felt compelled to differentiate themselves from those who stayed behind and justify their departure, which increasingly felt like exile. Therefore, the narratives that stemmed from this conflict were often polemic and apologetic in nature.

This process of adapting archetypes to local realities, Slotkin showcases, is essentially different from that of primitive cultures because these narrative genres had been developed extensively in Europe. However, while the early conquerors’ descriptions of the New World were highly romanticised, the descriptions of early American writers focused almost exclusively on the figure of the native American, which became the “standard” in opposition to which an American identity was beginning to take shape.

In this sense, at the source of the American myth lies the violent opposition between these two contrasting worlds: that of the evangelising settlers, who were on a sacred mission to reclaim the land they had been promised, and that of the savage natives who were as dark-minded as the colour of their skin. Violence is thus seen as the force around which the “American” identity crystalised.

Around all these elements, a body of literature with distinct characteristics and formal prescriptions was thus formed. Among these, Slotkin names narratives of discovery, of Indian wars and captivity, sermons and tracts, genres that while still clinging to some of the formal conventions pertaining to the Old World, were also opening themselves up to the realities to which the settlers were exposed. Thus, sermons fused with accounts of frontier hardships, and narratives of exploration began mentioning Indian attacks, elements that were part and parcel of the American experience.

The success and mythmaking attributes of these narratives, Slotkin clarifies, were primarily due to the existence and use of the printing press and its replicating capabilities. The printing press not only helped the proliferation of these narratives, but it also contributed to their transmission between generations and ultimate transformation into mythology. The permanent nature of the printed text as well as the forces of the literary marketplace to which it was subjected further led to the creation of a unitary vision and the edification of subsequent generation of settlers.

Finally, Slotkin contends that in order to fully understand American mythology and the way it was shaped by the historical forces and the local realities that surrounded it one must return to these narratives because they reflect the changes and developments that a culture such as the American one resorted to in order to define itself.