Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, Chapter 3
Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press-University Press of New England, 1973.
Chapter 3: A Home in the Heart of Darkness: The Origin of the Indian War Narratives (1625-1682)
But first, a wildly out of context quote from the incomparable Stephen Jay Gould: "Mythology does have its use as a powerful aid to narrative" (Wonderful Life 81). Gould is talking about a different subject, but the same problem: the way that mythology shapes stories, the way that it's easier to tell the story the mythology expects than it is to tell what really happened. And the way that that warps the story you're trying to tell.
So the thing that Slotkin is really atrociously awful at is differentiating what he thinks from what his subjects think, just as he's atrociously awful at remembering that his male Europeans are not the only subjects in the game. In fairness to Slotkin, I should make clear that he is well aware of the Puritans' racism, and he explicitly recognizes it as a massive problem, so it isn't that he agrees with them, it's just that he can only see them from the perspective of the default-white default-male historian looking back at them. Please take it as a given that I find this intensely exasperating and creepy.
(His use of Heart of Darkness as a completely unremarked-upon intertext in chapter title and epigraph is certainly symptomatic.)
I also wish Slotkin would close-read and really dig all the meat out of the sublimely self-blind entitlement of Increase Mather's definition of Native Americans: "the Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers have given to us for a rightful Possession" (Mather, qtd. in Slotkin 84)--or the more delicate dance of abdication of responsibility in John Underhill's account of an atrocity he participated in (as perpetrator rather than victim): "Mercy they did deserve for their valor, could we have had opportunity to have bestowed it (Underhil, qtd. in Slotkin 74) and later:
Slotkin certainly registers the way Puritan writers shift agency onto God--it's the culminating point of his chapter, that they shift glory as much as blame (at least they're consistent): if they do terrible things, it's God's will, but if they survive, it's also God's will. No personal heroism, which is Slotkin's point in my cut-text. I picked it because there's a secondary connotation that I think is equally apt: the lack of human heroes in the accounts of King Philip's War. Because really King Philip's War and the wars that followed it will have no human heroes, in the sense of those who triumph because they are brave and their cause is just. The Native Americans are defeated, and the Puritans are treacherous and vile, and the in-fighting between the colonies means you can't even ascribe them the virtue of loyalty to their own side. Slotkin talks about the Indian Wars as the "distinctive event of American history, the unique national experience" (78), and while he means that unironically (because for him only the (1) white and (2) male Americans have a subject position and everyone else exists to be acted against or upon), it's still, horribly, true if you read it the other way, if you read this "unique national experience" as one fundamentally of betrayal and injustice and self-righteous bigotry providing all the explanations. And that's the distinctive event of American history.
Why, yes, I am bothered by our current national nightmare, thank you for asking.
Slotkin is very good at conveying how the Puritans saw and understood America and their own place within it. America was a wilderness peopled by cannibals, witches, and devils; it was a microcosm of the universe and the externalized stage of the Puritan psychomachia. The Puritans themselves were sinners subject to the wilderness' temptations, with the potential to fall and become as beasts; they were also always and forever world without end the protagonists who acted upon this stage, the especial favorites of Providence, for whom this continent had been offered up that they might have a proving ground. Puritans saw themselves as the center of the universe, their spiritual defeat being synonymous with the destruction of the world (I described this as "catastrophic solipsism" in a marginal note, both in the sense that something bad happening to you personally becomes CATASTROPHE on the grandest macro-scale, and in the sense that your solipsism becomes catastrophic to those around you). And if you believe that, and you believe that everyone who is not One Of You is either damned or a tool of the Devil or both, then, well, yes, the way that Puritans formed their mythology of America makes perfect, dreadful sense.
(...I should probably apologize for posting this on Thanksgiving.)
Chapter 3: A Home in the Heart of Darkness: The Origin of the Indian War Narratives (1625-1682)
But first, a wildly out of context quote from the incomparable Stephen Jay Gould: "Mythology does have its use as a powerful aid to narrative" (Wonderful Life 81). Gould is talking about a different subject, but the same problem: the way that mythology shapes stories, the way that it's easier to tell the story the mythology expects than it is to tell what really happened. And the way that that warps the story you're trying to tell.
So the thing that Slotkin is really atrociously awful at is differentiating what he thinks from what his subjects think, just as he's atrociously awful at remembering that his male Europeans are not the only subjects in the game. In fairness to Slotkin, I should make clear that he is well aware of the Puritans' racism, and he explicitly recognizes it as a massive problem, so it isn't that he agrees with them, it's just that he can only see them from the perspective of the default-white default-male historian looking back at them. Please take it as a given that I find this intensely exasperating and creepy.
(His use of Heart of Darkness as a completely unremarked-upon intertext in chapter title and epigraph is certainly symptomatic.)
I also wish Slotkin would close-read and really dig all the meat out of the sublimely self-blind entitlement of Increase Mather's definition of Native Americans: "the Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers have given to us for a rightful Possession" (Mather, qtd. in Slotkin 84)--or the more delicate dance of abdication of responsibility in John Underhill's account of an atrocity he participated in (as perpetrator rather than victim): "Mercy they did deserve for their valor, could we have had opportunity to have bestowed it (Underhil, qtd. in Slotkin 74) and later:
Many [of the Pequot Indians] were burnt in the fort, both men, women, and children. Others forced out, . . . which our soldiers received and entertained with the sword. Down fell men, women, and children. . . . Great and doleful was the bloody sight to the view of young soldiers that never had been in war, to see so many souls lie gasping on the ground, so thick, in some places, that you could hardly pass along. . . . Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents. Sometimes the case alters; but we will not dispute it now. We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.
(Underhill, qtd. in Slotkin 76)
Slotkin certainly registers the way Puritan writers shift agency onto God--it's the culminating point of his chapter, that they shift glory as much as blame (at least they're consistent): if they do terrible things, it's God's will, but if they survive, it's also God's will. No personal heroism, which is Slotkin's point in my cut-text. I picked it because there's a secondary connotation that I think is equally apt: the lack of human heroes in the accounts of King Philip's War. Because really King Philip's War and the wars that followed it will have no human heroes, in the sense of those who triumph because they are brave and their cause is just. The Native Americans are defeated, and the Puritans are treacherous and vile, and the in-fighting between the colonies means you can't even ascribe them the virtue of loyalty to their own side. Slotkin talks about the Indian Wars as the "distinctive event of American history, the unique national experience" (78), and while he means that unironically (because for him only the (1) white and (2) male Americans have a subject position and everyone else exists to be acted against or upon), it's still, horribly, true if you read it the other way, if you read this "unique national experience" as one fundamentally of betrayal and injustice and self-righteous bigotry providing all the explanations. And that's the distinctive event of American history.
Why, yes, I am bothered by our current national nightmare, thank you for asking.
Slotkin is very good at conveying how the Puritans saw and understood America and their own place within it. America was a wilderness peopled by cannibals, witches, and devils; it was a microcosm of the universe and the externalized stage of the Puritan psychomachia. The Puritans themselves were sinners subject to the wilderness' temptations, with the potential to fall and become as beasts; they were also always and forever world without end the protagonists who acted upon this stage, the especial favorites of Providence, for whom this continent had been offered up that they might have a proving ground. Puritans saw themselves as the center of the universe, their spiritual defeat being synonymous with the destruction of the world (I described this as "catastrophic solipsism" in a marginal note, both in the sense that something bad happening to you personally becomes CATASTROPHE on the grandest macro-scale, and in the sense that your solipsism becomes catastrophic to those around you). And if you believe that, and you believe that everyone who is not One Of You is either damned or a tool of the Devil or both, then, well, yes, the way that Puritans formed their mythology of America makes perfect, dreadful sense.
(...I should probably apologize for posting this on Thanksgiving.)
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