Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, Chapter 2
Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press-University Press of New England, 1973.
Chapter 2: Cannibals and Christians: European vs. American Indian Culture
Again, it helps to remember that Slotkin's interest is in white men, not anybody else. He does do a surprisingly good job of specifying which Native American culture he's talking about, which is something many historians of colonial America are just awful at. And he does a not-terrible job of considering how the Europeans looked to the Native Americans, even though his focus is on how the Native Americans looked to the Europeans. (And he's consistent in his bias. He's talking exclusively about Native American men and their world view, not about Native American women at all, just like European women are invisible to him.)
I'm torn between my suspicion that he's romanticizing the "primitive" and their "natural" connection to their myths and my admiration for the way he conceptualizes the juxtaposition of Puritan and Native American world views. (And, like I said, he specifies that he's talking about the Delaware Indians, also called the Lenni Lenape. I hope the beliefs he ascribes to them are their actual beliefs.) He's very influenced by Campbell and Jung (with Freud lurking in the background, as Freud so often does), and he's still got this horrific failure to understand how storytelling and art work:
There are so many problems here I almost don't even know how to start. He has a serious down on courtly love (which he thinks is a distorted travesty of the myth of the hero who sexually conquers the Earth-mother) and will say nothing good about it. But my real issue is with the implication hidden in this passage that Greek poets were "free" of artifice and convention, when in fact the truth is anything but. Any oral tradition of poetry (which is what Homer is) is built of conventions. It has to be, because the poet has to have those blocks ready to hand as he's building his poem on the fly. And Greek drama, which I am significantly better acquainted with, is certainly not free of artifice. Greek drama is a highly artificial art form--which I don't mean in a negative sense. Artifice is not a bad thing; you can't turn a series of events into a story without it. And the mental picture Slotkin induces, of Euripides, of all people, warbling his native wood notes wild, is . . . well, it's freakin' hilarious. But it's also very very wrong.
The Greek poets were not innocent myth-makers, and if you want to talk about somebody "imposing rigid artistic categories on the received material," let's sit down and talk about Aristotle's theory of tragedy for a while. Slotkin is imposing a false dichotomy between "primitive" and "civilized" art, and while this irritates me for several reasons, the big one is that it denies artistic agency to "primitive" poets, "primitive" meaning those who work or worked in oral traditions or who come early in his teleological schema of chronological progress from "pure" myth to "artificial" poetry. I don't know enough about Delaware/Lenape traditions of story-telling and poetry to know if he's doing them the same disservice, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess the answer is "yes."
So it's all very Campbellian, with a healthy side of The Golden Bough, and there's a Jungian anima wandering around and a Freudian Id, and I'm skeptical in several places, partly because I am always skeptical when twentieth century psychological schematics are imposed on pre-twenteith century people, and partly because Slotkin makes it all sound so simple when I know it's anything but.
(There's also a serious problem wherein nobody told him that More's Utopia is Janus-faced. It's a utopia, but it's also a satire. It cannot be read as simply an idealization of the New World without missing a good 50% to 90%, depending on where you draw that satirical line, of what More's actually doing.)
I love his point about European mythology about the West: "In the mythology of Europe, the West and its peoples were strongly associated with the kingdom of death and dreams, the underworld" (28). That puts such a dark and beautiful spin on the whole idea of exploration (and resonates for me with Hamlet's "undiscovered country") that I love it and distrust it at the same time.
But then I think Slotkin's straight up brilliant when he starts talking about the Puritans and how they understood the New World. He points out that the Puritans in America were far from being the only Puritans who decided that subjugation and extermination were the only way to deal with an inconvenient native people: cf. Cromwell and the Irish. He talks about the stark contrast in Puritan and Native American understandings of the divine, where for the Native American peoples, the divine was in the world and for Puritans, the divine was what Slotkin calls "otherworldly," which I think is not a great term, but what he means is that the divine is separate from the world. God can choose to reach down and affect the mortal, sublunary world of sin and suffering, but he is not part of that world. That's one of the reasons Jesus is a vital part of Christian mythology: he is the part of God that experiences the sublunary world in all its imperfection and pain. And then, significantly, returns to that perfect place outside the spheres of Creation when his Hero's Journey is complete.
(There's no place in Christian mythology to talk about whether Jesus' understanding of Heaven was changed by his sojourn in the world, as the Campbellian Hero's understanding of the world is changed by his sojourn in the underworld, but it's a really interesting question.)
Okay, sorry. Tangent. My point is that Slotkin's point is that the Puritans and Native Americans had diametrically opposed and incompatible views of how the divine and the human interact. This is coupled with another problem, which is the Puritans' understanding of their own cultural teleology, their mission statement, if you'll forgive the anachronism. (Maybe my favorite sentence in this chapter is "[Puritan] religion portrayed the progress of the soul as a rising up from the degradation of man's condition at birth to ultimate sanctification through divine grace--a kind of spiritual upward mobility" (37).") In setting out for the New World, the Puritans "desired above all [...] a tabula rasa on which they could inscribe their dream: the outline of an idealized Puritan England, a Bible commonwealth, a city on a hill exemplifying the World of God to all the world" (38). The Native Americans are monstrously inconvenient to this mission, and even worse is the Puritans' us vs. them thinking, which is something inherent to Puritanism: the Elect vs. the damned, the godly vs. the ungodly, the New Jerusalem vs. the Wilderness. When they looked around them, they saw everything through the lens of "a psychological and spiritual quest, a quest for salvation in the wilderness of the human mind and soul. The physical world of America was but the physical type of this primary wilderness" (39). Puritans lived in a very Manichean world of stark contrast between good and evil, and they also lived by typology, which is the practice of reading everything in the Old Testament as a "type" or vehicle for the only true story, which is the New Testament. Once you get the hang of that, you start reading everything as typology, and like Procrustes' bed or Cinderella's stepsisters, you chop off bits as necessary to fit.
Slotkin is kind of cavalier about dates, since he argues that the Puritans saw their colonization of America in terms of Pilgrim's Progress--and while I think that comes to be true, it does help to remember that Pilgrim's Progress wasn't published until 1678, a good fifty years after the Mayflower found Plymouth Rock. But Bunyan is a valuable primary source for understanding Puritan thought and their conception of themselves (and Pilgrim's Progress has the advantage of being far more entertaining than the sermons and diaries that are your other primary sources).
Puritans also saw themselves as constantly besieged, constantly at war against the ungodly who sought to destroy them--a narrative that does not help when encountering cultures alien to your own. (I ended up drawing a little Puritan City on the Hill in the margin, with the Church of England as a besieging army on one side and the Native Americans as a besieging army on the other.) (Also, damn the word "siege." It never looks right no matter how I spell it.) And the final piece he articulates that I think is incredibly valuable is the way the Puritans' Manichean thought patterns dealt with evil:
I don't know if his representation of Native American beliefs is accurate, or if he's done some dichotomous thinking of his own to make the contrast with the Puritans stronger, but he is spot-on about Puritan beliefs about evil being a part of the world and good being separate from it. (This also explains a lot about Puritan conceptualizations of the body and sexualilty.) And about how those beliefs, in practice, justifying as they did any kind of slaughter or betrayal, were so cruel and disastrous for both the people and the land of America
Chapter 2: Cannibals and Christians: European vs. American Indian Culture
Again, it helps to remember that Slotkin's interest is in white men, not anybody else. He does do a surprisingly good job of specifying which Native American culture he's talking about, which is something many historians of colonial America are just awful at. And he does a not-terrible job of considering how the Europeans looked to the Native Americans, even though his focus is on how the Native Americans looked to the Europeans. (And he's consistent in his bias. He's talking exclusively about Native American men and their world view, not about Native American women at all, just like European women are invisible to him.)
I'm torn between my suspicion that he's romanticizing the "primitive" and their "natural" connection to their myths and my admiration for the way he conceptualizes the juxtaposition of Puritan and Native American world views. (And, like I said, he specifies that he's talking about the Delaware Indians, also called the Lenni Lenape. I hope the beliefs he ascribes to them are their actual beliefs.) He's very influenced by Campbell and Jung (with Freud lurking in the background, as Freud so often does), and he's still got this horrific failure to understand how storytelling and art work:
In its primary form the hero myth reflects the mental journey of the mystic, the man who drowns his consciousness in the inner ocean of his mind or the ocean of the universal god. The hero myth itself, however, presents the quest of consciousness in social and historical terms: it takes place in the "real" world, the world of time and event; and it involves a hero who is the symbolic vessel of the whole culture's collective consciousness and the agent of their will to survive or their aspiration to power. In Europe during the Age of Discovery, however, such myths were better known in their romantic, conventionalized forms than in their primary forms. Centuries of literary and philosophical embellishment had substituted artifice and convention for mythopoetic spontaneity in epic poetry and tragedy. The Romans imitated the forms of the Greek poems and plays that inexplicably moved them, and in their concern with formal imitation they lost the sense of life inherent in the myths. The medieval scholars and troubadors ornamented and elaborated the received tradition, hiding the core of myth under a panoply of social and religious conventions, imposing rigid artistic categories on the received material, rather than illuminating the mythic essentials that transcend artificial distinctions of genre.
(Slotkin 29)
There are so many problems here I almost don't even know how to start. He has a serious down on courtly love (which he thinks is a distorted travesty of the myth of the hero who sexually conquers the Earth-mother) and will say nothing good about it. But my real issue is with the implication hidden in this passage that Greek poets were "free" of artifice and convention, when in fact the truth is anything but. Any oral tradition of poetry (which is what Homer is) is built of conventions. It has to be, because the poet has to have those blocks ready to hand as he's building his poem on the fly. And Greek drama, which I am significantly better acquainted with, is certainly not free of artifice. Greek drama is a highly artificial art form--which I don't mean in a negative sense. Artifice is not a bad thing; you can't turn a series of events into a story without it. And the mental picture Slotkin induces, of Euripides, of all people, warbling his native wood notes wild, is . . . well, it's freakin' hilarious. But it's also very very wrong.
The Greek poets were not innocent myth-makers, and if you want to talk about somebody "imposing rigid artistic categories on the received material," let's sit down and talk about Aristotle's theory of tragedy for a while. Slotkin is imposing a false dichotomy between "primitive" and "civilized" art, and while this irritates me for several reasons, the big one is that it denies artistic agency to "primitive" poets, "primitive" meaning those who work or worked in oral traditions or who come early in his teleological schema of chronological progress from "pure" myth to "artificial" poetry. I don't know enough about Delaware/Lenape traditions of story-telling and poetry to know if he's doing them the same disservice, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess the answer is "yes."
So it's all very Campbellian, with a healthy side of The Golden Bough, and there's a Jungian anima wandering around and a Freudian Id, and I'm skeptical in several places, partly because I am always skeptical when twentieth century psychological schematics are imposed on pre-twenteith century people, and partly because Slotkin makes it all sound so simple when I know it's anything but.
(There's also a serious problem wherein nobody told him that More's Utopia is Janus-faced. It's a utopia, but it's also a satire. It cannot be read as simply an idealization of the New World without missing a good 50% to 90%, depending on where you draw that satirical line, of what More's actually doing.)
I love his point about European mythology about the West: "In the mythology of Europe, the West and its peoples were strongly associated with the kingdom of death and dreams, the underworld" (28). That puts such a dark and beautiful spin on the whole idea of exploration (and resonates for me with Hamlet's "undiscovered country") that I love it and distrust it at the same time.
But then I think Slotkin's straight up brilliant when he starts talking about the Puritans and how they understood the New World. He points out that the Puritans in America were far from being the only Puritans who decided that subjugation and extermination were the only way to deal with an inconvenient native people: cf. Cromwell and the Irish. He talks about the stark contrast in Puritan and Native American understandings of the divine, where for the Native American peoples, the divine was in the world and for Puritans, the divine was what Slotkin calls "otherworldly," which I think is not a great term, but what he means is that the divine is separate from the world. God can choose to reach down and affect the mortal, sublunary world of sin and suffering, but he is not part of that world. That's one of the reasons Jesus is a vital part of Christian mythology: he is the part of God that experiences the sublunary world in all its imperfection and pain. And then, significantly, returns to that perfect place outside the spheres of Creation when his Hero's Journey is complete.
(There's no place in Christian mythology to talk about whether Jesus' understanding of Heaven was changed by his sojourn in the world, as the Campbellian Hero's understanding of the world is changed by his sojourn in the underworld, but it's a really interesting question.)
Okay, sorry. Tangent. My point is that Slotkin's point is that the Puritans and Native Americans had diametrically opposed and incompatible views of how the divine and the human interact. This is coupled with another problem, which is the Puritans' understanding of their own cultural teleology, their mission statement, if you'll forgive the anachronism. (Maybe my favorite sentence in this chapter is "[Puritan] religion portrayed the progress of the soul as a rising up from the degradation of man's condition at birth to ultimate sanctification through divine grace--a kind of spiritual upward mobility" (37).") In setting out for the New World, the Puritans "desired above all [...] a tabula rasa on which they could inscribe their dream: the outline of an idealized Puritan England, a Bible commonwealth, a city on a hill exemplifying the World of God to all the world" (38). The Native Americans are monstrously inconvenient to this mission, and even worse is the Puritans' us vs. them thinking, which is something inherent to Puritanism: the Elect vs. the damned, the godly vs. the ungodly, the New Jerusalem vs. the Wilderness. When they looked around them, they saw everything through the lens of "a psychological and spiritual quest, a quest for salvation in the wilderness of the human mind and soul. The physical world of America was but the physical type of this primary wilderness" (39). Puritans lived in a very Manichean world of stark contrast between good and evil, and they also lived by typology, which is the practice of reading everything in the Old Testament as a "type" or vehicle for the only true story, which is the New Testament. Once you get the hang of that, you start reading everything as typology, and like Procrustes' bed or Cinderella's stepsisters, you chop off bits as necessary to fit.
Slotkin is kind of cavalier about dates, since he argues that the Puritans saw their colonization of America in terms of Pilgrim's Progress--and while I think that comes to be true, it does help to remember that Pilgrim's Progress wasn't published until 1678, a good fifty years after the Mayflower found Plymouth Rock. But Bunyan is a valuable primary source for understanding Puritan thought and their conception of themselves (and Pilgrim's Progress has the advantage of being far more entertaining than the sermons and diaries that are your other primary sources).
Puritans also saw themselves as constantly besieged, constantly at war against the ungodly who sought to destroy them--a narrative that does not help when encountering cultures alien to your own. (I ended up drawing a little Puritan City on the Hill in the margin, with the Church of England as a besieging army on one side and the Native Americans as a besieging army on the other.) (Also, damn the word "siege." It never looks right no matter how I spell it.) And the final piece he articulates that I think is incredibly valuable is the way the Puritans' Manichean thought patterns dealt with evil:
To the Indian the wilderness was a god, whether its face at the moment was good or evil; as a god it deserved and received worship for both its good and evil, its beauty and its cruelty. Similarly, all the gods and the earth itself were referred to as members of one's own immediate family, as close blood-relations. For the Puritan the problem of religion was to winnow the wheat from the chaff, the good from the evil, and to preserve the former and extirpate the latter. The evil was of the world, of nature; the good was transcendent and supernatural. Hence it was quite appropriate to destroy the natural wilderness in the name of a higher good--and quite inappropriate for anyone to worship, as the Indians did, the world or the things of the world, such things being evil by nature.
(Slotkin 51)
I don't know if his representation of Native American beliefs is accurate, or if he's done some dichotomous thinking of his own to make the contrast with the Puritans stronger, but he is spot-on about Puritan beliefs about evil being a part of the world and good being separate from it. (This also explains a lot about Puritan conceptualizations of the body and sexualilty.) And about how those beliefs, in practice, justifying as they did any kind of slaughter or betrayal, were so cruel and disastrous for both the people and the land of America
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