“[Y]ou could be satisfied with an ice wagon being drawn by a horse. So it’s my mistake, pal, my miserable, tragic error – to get married to a man whose dream in life is to be
Huckleberry Finn!”
“Jane Williams” from “A Stop At Willoughby,” in The Twilight Zone
Our last entry has returned us to (our concept of) patriarchy. In reading the book, The Return Of The Vanishing American (1968) (“RVA”,) by Leslie A. Fiedler, I discovered a surprising new connection between this subject and the racism once called, “Indian-hating.”
Fiedler discusses the way both are portrayed in U.S. literature: The “battle between the sexes,” which he had originally thought was the “equivalent to class struggle in American fiction … is merely the comic version of class struggle … race conflict constitutes the pathetic, or even tragic version.” The author provides “Rip Van Winkle” as an example of the former, pronouncing it a fitting tale for what Americans seem to consider their culture – the “first matriarchy of the modern world.”1 Only in the United States was a male character lured into enchantment, not by beautiful women, but “by a night of hard drinking with fellow males.” Quickly, “Indians” replaced the Dutch as people with whom men could dream of escaping their responsibilities. By contrast, stories of women’s encounters with “Injuns” overwhelmingly involved mothers being dragged off by them after the “savages” had smashed their boys heads – In American female narratives, males are presented as either threats or encumbrances, and women must free themselves, usually by killing their captors with an axe or tomahawk. Male narratives usually concur: White men are away fighting other monsters who don’t keep female prisoners or “still worse – and this tends to be the case in our very greatest books – those males may be portrayed as lolling about, at least in their dreams, with the very Savages whom their mothers, daughters, and wives, in corresponding nightmares at least, are trying to escape or even planning to slay.”
RVA subtly expresses the paradox of the American belief in being a “matriarchy” – It tells of the copious number of popular stories of “Indians” kidnapping women and brutalizing them, killing children by bashing their heads against trees. However, it also tells us that brutalization of women and children was very uncommon, at least until the Europeans taught indigenous people the practice. I found confirmation of this claim in Francis Jenning’s text, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest (1975): “Contact-era Europeans agreed that, with few exceptions that occurred in the confusion of battle, Indians killed only men…” Further, those who were kidnapped (which captives were sometimes men as well) were often adopted and “naturalized” to the point that “it was a constant crying scandal that Europeans who were adopted by Indians frequently preferred to remain with their Indian ‘families’ when offered an opportunity to return to their genetic kinsmen.” Fiedler also mentions that Europeans, by the time of Benjamin Franklin, realized that they could use alcohol to overcome native-Americans’ powerful self-control, and quotes this founding father recommending the technique.
Fiedler provides an extreme example of the self-liberating-female narrative in the story of Hannah Duston, and traces its subsequent retellings. The first version is based on Pastor Cotton Mather’s sermon, in which our author highlights the passive role of Hannah’s husband, Thomas. Mather published later versions, such as Magnalia Christi Americana, a text that our author describes as taking many liberties with the first story to bring it in line with that of the murder of Sisera by Jael in the Old Testament. Since Fiedler writes so eloquently about this version, I’ll quote this passage at length:
When Cotton Mather retold this tale for exemplary purposes, he ignored the comic-pathetic ending, eliminated the role of the boy [who assisted our Heroine in both teaching her how to scalp and with the actual murders], toned down the bashing-in of the baby’s head against the tree (not even remembering to say that it was an apple tree, though this was to seem of special significance to Henry David Thoreau), and told the opening episode involving Mrs. Duston’s husband quite perfunctorily. It was the women who concerned him chiefly, as the title he gave the story … indicates: “A Notable Exploit, wherein, Dux Faemina Facti.”
Despite the Latin tag, it was the tradition of Israel which Mather had in mind, and it was to their Biblical prototypes that he tried to assimilate Hannah and her nurse. They were, even in distress, he tells us, like another Hannah before them “in pouring out their souls before the Lord.” And at Mrs. Duston’s moment of decision, he recalls to us the fierce Hebrew mutilator of her male master and exulter over her enemy, writing, “these women took up a Resolution to intimate [sic] the action of Jael upon Sisera. ...” And when at last the deed is done, his own language shifts into the rhythms and words of the Old Testament, as if what he recounts were a deed of pre-Christian antiquity: “they struck such home Blows upon the Heads of the Sleeping Oppressors, that … at the feet of the poor Prisoners, they bowed, they fell, they lay down …”
There was no doubt at all in his mind about the justice of the bloody deed performed by Hannah and her companion; they were for him always “poor women,” while their enemies were not only “raging Dragons” but practicing Roman Catholics as well – so that the whole event was clearly a testimony to “the singular Providence of God.”
And for those among his readers who remember the Christian injunction against violence and in favor of forgiveness, Mather provides some Talmudic casuistry: “and being where she had not her own Life secured by any Law unto her, she thought she was not forbidden by any Law to take away the Life of the Murderers by whom her Child had been butchered.” All of which prepares us for the really Happy Ending, in which virtue does not have to be its own reward since, Mather informs us, lapsing at this point from high Biblical rhetoric into colloquial ease, “they received many Presents of Congratulation from their more private Friends; but none gave ‘em a greater Taste of Bounty than Colonel Nicholson, the Governor of Maryland, who hearing of their Action, sent ‘em a very generous Token of his Favour.
TVA also summarizes retellings by Nineteenth-century author of Events in Indian History2, James Wimer (who removes the religious aspect and praises Hannah’s entrepreneurship,) then Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, whose text reveals that six of Hannah’s victims were sleeping children and which deduces that Hannah was a shrew, like Dame Van Winkle.
Our author’s last example of this story’s retellings is one by Henry David Thoreau, who includes it in his book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Here, Thoreau seems to imply that Duston’s act led to a second Paradise Lost, a loss of male bliss, having shown her ability to destroy his escape from a deadening civilization. Fiedler, however, suggests that this story (or, at least the fear of women that it expresses) precedes the fantasies of escape to the companionship of wilder fellow males. He tells us of the “male Pocahontas,” Wawatam. After summarizing Thoreau’s narrative of Wawatam’s rescue (circa 1763) of and friendship with British fur trader Alexander Henry as well as that of Henry’s own narrative, Fiedler interprets Thoreau’s conclusion that “Friendship is not so kind as is imagined; it has not much human blood in it, but consists with a certain disregard for men and their erections…” Our author reminds us that this last word “signifies ‘monuments’ as well as risings of the flesh” and contrasts the two ideas of the garden of Eden – “one inherited from the Old World, one created in the New.” In the New version, the male indigenous American is the “serpent.”
RVA enumerates the Edenic characters in the new stories: Adam: Alexander Henry, Rip Van Winkle, and James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo; Eve: Dame Van Winkle and Hannah Duston (spokespeople for “the European inheritance [that the new Adam] flees”); and the Serpent: Wawatam, Bampico (Hannah’s captor/victim,) and Chingachgook; then he points out the melancholy character of the new story – The “savage,” as “midwife and mother to the New Son whose father is the old world self, dies giving birth…,” and the New Son himself is presented in the best literature, as in The Last of the Mohicans, as “vanishing.”
Fiedler analyzes Mark Twain’s infamous skewering of Cooper, pointing out that the critic, “a self-advertised lowbrow,” was a fervent “Indian”-hater. Our author suggests a mother issue as well as notes the similarity of Twain’s expression of hatred for indigenous Americans to the Confidence-Man3 speech of Colonel John Moredock4, whose story Herman Melville took through a shallow, pretentious author and told through an unreliable character.
Our author then discusses Edgar Allan Poe’s attempts to write a Western. Poe, a Virginian like Meriwether Lewis (and Lewis’ sponsor,) used the explorer’s Journal to write about the West from an “anti-Northeast” perspective. Fielder brings up the enormous obstacles to this project, including white Southerners’ distaste for non-whites and penchant for “bowdlerization.” He concludes that “the Gothic mode somehow will not do for the Western.” The matter-of-fact tone of the Journals, as ultimate inspiration for all (commercially) successful westerns, conflict with an author who “wants to chill our blood.”
This entry is getting long, and I think it has said everything I want to for now – although I would encourage my readers to explore the subject book for themselves. I’d only like to make a couple final points:
1. “Strong” women (such as those we discussed in our first entries in this series) are coaxed into blaming those who suffer for their afflictions – often including victims of abuse. As women gained more rights, those who used them to further their education were bombarded with prosperity gospel propaganda, up through the identitarian politics of today. I found little discussion of our author’s 1968 work, even on JSTOR, most likely because the author’s use of language would easily “cancel” him in our present academic climate5. This JSTOR article6 shows that teachers, by the year 2000, realized how the politics of identity was already being used to divert attention from systemic classism. Interestingly, there are very few texts published (at least on JSTOR) since then that feature this concern, even in the face of the 2016 & 20 elections7. Articles that do, moreover, clearly fall on the pro-identity-politics side.
2. Fiedler, probably because of his focus on literature, never discovered that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining does what Poe could not – express in mythic form the true horror of the west – The monsters are us.
P.S. I’ve been unusually inspired by this subject, so I’ve been scheduling daily entries. Now that I have only two more ideas for the series left, I’ll return to my once-a-week schedule. – Viola
1 Fiedler, p. 56
2 In Events in Indian History Beginning with an Account of the Origin of the American Indians, and Early Settlements in North America, and Embracing Concise Biographies of the Principal Chiefs and Head-sachems of the Different Indian Tribes, with Narratives and Captivities … Also an Appendix Containing the Statistics of the Population of the U. States, and an Indian Vocabulary; Illustrated with Eight Fine Engravings (1841)
3 The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857)
4 Fascinating article on how Melville satirizes his source, Judge James Hall, author of Sketches of History, Life, and Manners, in the West; and Wilderness and the Warpath:
QUIRK, TOM. “A Pragmatic Defense of Source Study: Melville’s ‘Borrowings’ from Judge James Hall.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, vol. 26, no. 4, 1993, pp. 21–35. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24780479. Accessed 27 Nov. 2023.
5 The above link is to one of the few articles that I found in Google Scholar when trying to verify a Fiedler quote. The use of Fiedler quotes in the article reveal today’s academic culture well in the scholar’s obliviousness to their ironic intent.
6 BELL, SOPHIE, and JOSEPH ENTIN. “INTRODUCTION: Teaching and Social Difference: Beyond Identity Politics.” The Radical Teacher, no. 58, 2000, pp. 2–4. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20710046. Accessed 27 Nov. 2023.
7 Link is to my own blog entry, “Exposing False Dialogue.” – Viola.
Seeker247365v2 