The representation of the savage in selected works of James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville.
Item
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Title
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The representation of the savage in selected works of James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville.
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Identifier
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AAI3037412
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identifier
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3037412
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Creator
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Krauthammer, Anna.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Joan Richardson
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Date
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2002
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American
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Abstract
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Since the seventeenth century, ethnicity has been the central issue in the American search for a national identity. The issue, which had first been defined by the Puritans within a religious context, had, by the nineteenth century, come to be defined within secularized economic, political, and cultural contexts as America became a republic. The dichotomy of savagery and civilization was used in political and literary discourses to articulate this issue.;The works of James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville are essential to those discourses because they are linked thematically and narratively. Furthermore, the works of these writers represent stages in a process of marginalization of non-white others that began with Puritan texts that created a fictive existence for Indians which defined them as either noble or evil savages and led to Indian stereotypes that were used in the Frontier Romance genre of the nineteenth century. However, Cooper, in The Leatherstocking Tales, and Melville in Benito Cereno, Typee, Moby Dick, and The Confidence Man, manipulated these same images to question the validity of defining ethnicity by the dichotomy of savagery and civilization. This manipulation is evident in an examination of these paired characters: Magua and Babo, Chingachcook and Queequeg, Natty Bumpo and Tom.;While Cooper and Melville understood and were able to demonstrate in their works the fallacy and brutality of the dichotomy, they unavoidably abetted the marginalization and silencing of non-white others in their texts by using them and white treatment of them to expose the hypocrisy and ambivalence of white attitudes toward non-white others. Furthermore, as both writers show in their works, these attitudes were derived from the EuroAmerican ambivalence toward nature and a belief that the non-white other embodied both attractive and repulsive aspects of the environment on the American continent.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
