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

by Richard Slotkin

Book Overview

In Regeneration Through Violence, the first of his trilogy on the mythology of the American West, Richard Slotkin shows how the attitudes and traditions that shape American culture evolved from the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0819560340
• ISBN13: 9780819560346
• Release Date: February 1973
• Publisher: Wesleyan
• Length: 680 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Seize truth as an Indian takes a scalp -- violently.

It is very nearly the end of his book before Professor Richard Slotkin justifies the "violence" in his title Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600 - 1860. His final thesis is that the myth that the best Americans are violent is partial at best and has been misused by politicians to justify imperialist adventures from our own western plains to the 1898 war with Spain to Viet-Nam. Most of the book is about the literary foundations behind the myth of the quintessential American being a hunter who enters a wilderness (the early American forests, the depths of his own dark mind) to endure an initiation of hunting, fishing, captivity, rescues and the "Eucharistic" union of hunter and a prey (the hunted) that is respected, killed and devoured. Herman Melville's MOBY-DICK was not (like John Filson's Colonel Boone) initially popular. But in time it became "The American National Epic" (p. 538). Slotkin's ultimate conclusion is that there must be something to these intertwined myths of America but they are either inadequate to the real American character or false -- and certainly harmful as guides to behavior. The search for American myths culminates before 1860 in the deep probings of Henry Thoreau and Herman Melville and the more fervid but less cerebral expressions by Walt Whitman. Thoreau took from Cooper and other myth-embellishers a notion of literary creativity as a bloody seizure of truth held by a foe or by prey. The research into American myths begins with the Pilgrim/Puritan experiences of the 1620s to 1690s in hostile, wilderness New England, moves into literary comings to terms with those experiences in narratives and sermons and then into increasingly secular and decidedly fictional conceptions by writers like Parson Weems (on George Washington), John Filson (on Daniel Boone) and James Fenimore Cooper (on Natty Bumppo, the Leatherstocking). A sickness entered popular American culture when Davy Crockett, hunter-wastrel, supreme waster of natural resources, became a mythic hero. Crockett, as America's Aeneas, was not a builder, but a destroyer, a conquistador (p. 555). When a mythic male hunter is hero and dark wilderness is his stage, then left behind are woman, family, civilization and towns. All a Boone, Crockett or Bumppo can do is hunt, kill, eat then resume hunting, killing and eating. This becomes the recommended American mythic cycle. And often, as with Captain Ahab and the white whale, the prey is simply unhuntable (p. 557) but is nonetheless pursued to the end of time. As for the captivity/rescue/reassimilation into society dimension of America's myths, "...rescue from dark events is never complete" (564). Our foe was always the Indian or the pristine forest. And we only recognized and appreciated him when we slew him. Lovers of James Fenimore Cooper will naturally linger over Slotkin's Chapter 13 "Man Without a Cross: The Leatherstocking Myth (1823 - 1841," pp. 466 - 516). Cooper skillful

Review of "Regeneration Through Violence" by UH Grad Student

1999 marked an "average year" for North American fixation on violence, sexual imagery, and an added combination of technological paranoia as a result of the new millennium. For the most part, television screens tuned in to the daily media circus showcasing the latest "experts" on youth violence, gang activity, and the Psychic Friends Network. The student shooting at Colorado's Columbine high school, however, gripped the nation and left the "experts" scrambling for explanations, counselors, and an array of gun-control measures. Of all the propositions these so-called experts put forth, none discussed the historical culture of violence that has become the foundation of our country's consciousness. Instead of real explanations and solutions, we endured Senator Diane Feinstein and other "politicians" anxious to defend their domain at the public dole. Many failed to connect the bullets flying in American classrooms with the bombs dropping on civilians in Kosovo. Indeed, they missed the forest for the trees when instead of searching for the root cause of the problem (the culture of violence), they resorted to simplistic cosmetic trimming (more gun control). Richard Slotkin's monograph on the mythology of the American frontier examines the origins of this "frontier mentality" and the making of our national character. In Regeneration through Violence, Richard Slotkin argues that the North American frontier mythology is a major force in shaping the national character of the country. By building on the theoretical constructs of Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis," Slotkin argues that the frontier was not so much a "regeneration" of democratic principles as much as it was one of violence. Unlike Turner's notion of the frontier as a European and Socialist cleanser, Slotkin offers a more palatable thesis by incorporating the influence and conflict with various Native American populations. The conclusions, nonetheless, are not that simple. American settlers were "not simply an idiosyncratic offshoot of English civilization" but became "Americanized" or "Indianized" in their contact with the indigenous peoples of the continent. By tracing the origins of violence and freedom Slotkin concludes that various European and North American mythologies influenced the early settlers before, during, and after Native American contact.[1] Europeans who settled on the North American continent disembarked with an assortment of adopted ideas and mythologies from their native homeland(s). In this particular context, Slotkin's analysis on European cultural baggage is worth quoting at length: "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 cultu

A Classic

If you truly want to understand American culture this book is essential. It's erudite, detailed, patient, yet lively, examination of the themes of early American life and literature are revelatory. I have no doubt it will become a "classic" of American scholarship.

Slotkin's vision will change the way you think about America

Slotkin analyzes the popular texts of early American life--"capitivity narratives" of women abducted by Native Americans, dime novels, etc.--to show how early Americans came to rationalize the gap between their religious ideology and the reality of the wilderness they were meant to transform into the "city on the hill." His careful study of the documents seems almost academic at first, and is sometimes rough going, but when I let his argument sink in (as a student in Slotkin's undergraduate class which used this book as its text), it profoundly and permanently transformed the way I saw American culture and history. This book is revelatory for anyone interested in "American Studies," the creation of our national mythology, and in what makes America America.