The Myth that made the America

POCAHONTAS

SELF-MADE MAN

PILGRIMS and PURITANS

COLUMBUS

FOUNDING FATHERS

MELTING POT

WEST

first half 17th cent
Ame beginning: religiosity, idealism, utopian vision

  • Ame as the Promised Land => new beginning
  • Calvinism Reformation => predestination

HISTORY

Af. Ame experience

authors

Ame renaissance

Hawthorne

Young Goodman Brown

Salem wicth trails (1692)

Rappacini's daughter

  • 17th-century Puritan New England
  • Calvinism belief; God unconditional election; sin
  • Tale of SIN and GUILT
    → critic the ideals of Puritan society
  • fantasy or reality
  • ART and SCIENCE
    (experimenting with human nature)
  • life and death
  • Garden = Eden + Rapp. = Adam / God / the serpent / artist
    → fatal power of science

Frankenstein (1818)

Yezierska, America and I

4th of July, 1776 → Declaration of Independence

  • life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness
  • free and independent state
  • Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) → "first Ame"
  • George Washington (1732-99) → 1° president of US
  • Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
  • James Madison (1751-1836) → father of the Constitution
  • John Adam
  • John Jay → abolition of slavery
  • Alex Hamilton (1775-1804)

John Trumbull, The Declaration of Inde

performative act of declaring inde

  • importance of the FF and the foundational document

LEGITIMACY

signing of the Decl. → how did the signers become the FF?
the Decl creates the people → the FF created a "new fiction" => American people

BLACK SLAVES

NO ABOLITION in the Decl

  • FF => slaveholders (+relationship with them)

Ame as a mixed-race state → RACISM

  • David Walker's Appeal: racial hatred and slavery + attack on Ame society
    • natural rights for Af. Ame

Frederick Douglass, What to the Slave is the 4th of july
A Lincoln → simbol of integration
Obama
Luther King

GENDER

Abigail Adams (1744-1818) → Founding Mother: "Remember the Ladies"

  • women's rights
    • 1848: Declaration of Sentiments (1° national women's movement)

MOUNT RUSHMORE

  • history > theatre
  • oppression = (white) Ame triumph

Liberty Tower at Ground Zero (1776 feet)

Israel Zangwill's play = metaphor of the immigration in the us

  • Anglo-Jewish intellectualism
  • future of Jewish ppl in the diaspora

Shumsky: what if the myth is just a dream?

myth of making of Ame society

  • national unity and cohesion
  • but aslo violent assimilation

FOUNDATIONAL PHASE

first man to describe Ame society as a melting pot: John de Crèvecoeur → man in Ame is free

  • Ame = mix of European "races" + Native Ame
  • NEW
    • new race of men → melting => biological hybridization

T. Jefferson: meet and blend together

  • intermarriage
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson → Europeans, Africans and Polynesians, but not Natives
  • Walt Whitman: the nation of many nations
  • Frederick Turner: the frontier (West=centre)

MIGRATION

assimilation = homogenization

  • nativist anti-immigration and eugenicists
  • the melting pot = assimilation to Anglo-Saxon culture

scientific racism

  • eugenics laws
  • underman

MULTIPLE MELTING POT

exclusion of Af. Ame

  • black people
  • amalgamation and misgeneration
  • segregation

Barack Obama
Guess who's coming to dinner (1967)

Anzaldua, Borderland → mestizaje

OUT OF MANY, MANY → multiculturalism (toleration and recognition)

Expansionism = manifest destiny
Agrarianism

different interpretation:

  • space of transition
  • pars pro toto
  • as a region
  • pastoral dimension

Edenic paradise

THE EXPANSIONISM AND THE WILD WEST
settlers and Native Ame
(peaceful garden and conflicted frontier)

Richard Hofstadter, "The Age of Reform"

  • rural living, and rural people
  • innocence of their origins
  • Thomas Jefferson
    selfdetermined, autonomous farmer-citizens - chosen people of God
  • Crèvecoeur
    farmer = new North American type

agrarian myth → colonial immaginary ot the new world (17th cent)
farmer → West as a pastoral idyll
20th cent: agrarian myth = crisis → Great Depression

  • Southern imaginary of the West: farmer = plantation owner
  • Northen version of the myth: West = free land ownership for everyone

Frederick Turner

  • the forntier
  • Ame = East/West perspective
  • expansionism = geog determinism
  • the frontier = Eurocentric history of settlement in N.A.
  • west = forntier → meeting point between savagery and civilization
    prime locus of Americanization
  • individual succes → what he makes of himself
    (most Ame = middle class)
    • pursuit of happines
  • democracy, freedom, equality

RISE AND FALL NARRATIVES

IMMIGRANT FICTION

AF. AME.immigration

self-made WOMAN

MYTH AND FOUNDATIONAL PHASE (18th cent)
Benjamin Franklin Founding Father an homo americanus
Autobiography => self made man

individualism and free will
self-improvement (your own fate)

POPULAR STORIES

Horatio Alger

  • national allegories
  • Ame way of life
  • helper figures → protag success
  • protagonist => not rich
  • no bad luck; never become homeless tramps

Abraham Lincoln

  • common man

Andrew Carnegie

  • charity
  • welfare

critical perspective

N. Hawthorne, my Kinsman, Major Molineux

Henry Thoreau

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Melville, Bartleby

Ame = land of opportunity
American dream - promised land

4 patterns in literature

outward success → loss and alienation

other side of winning → failure; no fairy tale x immigrant

Happy ending → sussess and assimilation (es. Rocky)

  • hard work, discipline, and individual talent

alternative success → gangster / criminal
power and corruption (es. Godfather, Gangs of NY)

Frederick Douglass

  • own process of emancipation
  • helpers and supporters
  • education + economic success

film the pursuit of Happyness

Pretty Woman

texts

Las Casa

The life of Columbus, by his son

  • Col = hero and discoverer
  • no one before him

Columbus' letters to the Spanish Crown

  • first Eu to write about the New World
  • authentic document
  • self-fashioning - construction of his role
  • naming

a HERO

  • wonder and awe
  • eathly paradise
  • profit and gain
  • Indians = inferior → religion (children of nature)

the Diary of Columbus

the history of the Indies

  • Col = chosen by God + providence
  • discovery vs colonization

end of 18th cent (Ame anti-colonial movement - Br Crown)
→ colonization of the past = part of the beginning of Ame history

Jeremy Belknap

  • Col day
  • Col knew about the land

LETT ISPA

  • Gran Khan
  • Indies through the sea → he thinks he arrived at the Indies
  • Columbus vs Cortez

AMERICAN HERO

  • not Br (Br colonialism)
  • anti-monarchical
  • precursor to expansion → passage to India
  • individualism
  • providence

John Vanderlyn, Landing of Columbus at the Island of Guanahaní, West Indies (1846).

Ital - Ame ancestor figure

19th cent: immigrations to the Us

  • Ame nativism
  • race (Anglo-Saxons)

Goodrich: Col = pirate and slave trader
Col + Italians = race

progress and civilization

  • etnic hero (for immigrants)

1892: Ita Ame - Col = ancestral figure

NATIVE AMES POV

  • Col arrival = colonialism, genocidy, slavery, cultural death
  • going beyond Col discovery => NA rewriting of the discovery

element of P narrative => foundational myth
selection processes + important image of P
different ideological investments

first love story *
John Smith write

first contact -> new Ame society

Ame (+ new land discovered) = feminized space + female name

  • “America” by Jan van der Straat: Vespucci + female figure(=Ame) → unclothe Indian princess

DISCURSIVE STRATEGIES:

  • savior of JS
  • innocent Ame beginning
  • romantic symbol of self-chosen assimilation

the RESCUE SCENE => rescue of Ame → colonial endeavor

  • Smith's writing
  • Native assimilation + "going native"
    → attract colonizer and immigrant from England
  • Rolfe

visual culture → P baptism

P.L. - Exodus
William Bradford and John Winthrop as religious leaders
P.L. myth + Jamestown and Pocahontas
Af Ame experience

Pilgrims; WILLIAM BRADFORD, On Plymouth Plantation
1620: Plymouth colony (Mayflower)

a Voyage to plant the
First Colony in the Northern Parts of Virginia

peaceful interaction with 2 native people

  • Massasoit → peace treaty in 1621
  • Squanto → broken English, captivity

PURITANS:

  • read "the book" - signs
  • self-scrutinity
  • direct relat. with God

John Calvin

  • total depravity after original sin
  • God unconditional election
  • redemption and predestination

UTOPIA

  • Thomas More, Utopia
  • Campanella, City of the Sun

Ame = a site of utopian communities

  • (but) Eurocentric gaze => Native: inferior
    → how to built one utopia there [religious groups → heavens on earth]
  • Pilg. and Pur = only religious groups → foundational narrative of the new world

create Ame as the Promised Land of the Pilgrims
O.P.P =key text, self-repr. of the Pilg. experience

doubt and disappointment
in the progress of the Pil
in realizing the P.L

biblical tale of the P.L → promise of future freedom and salvation

  • God providence in the journey

at first it doesnt look like P.L.

  • savage wilderness
    (Natives like Columbus)

2° book → failure of Ply

Puritans, JONH WINTHROP
1630: Massachusetts Bay Colony (Arbella)-city of Boston

biblical topos of the heavenly city evokes the exceptionality
of the Puritans as a model for others

difficulties; conflicts with indigenous
Roger Williams: 1° dictionaty of Native language

Ame = no land of freedom → built on the backs of blacks (slavery)

  • Russian immigrant
  • Ame = land of the dreams
  • money / salary
  • language
  • Women’s Association

Douglass

M.L.King Jr (1968) → God's will

slavery