Failed Frontiersmen

White Men and Myth in the Post-Sixties American Historical Romance

James J. Donahue

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813936840
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Failed Frontiersmen, James Donahue writes that one of the founding and most persistent mythologies of the United States is that of the American frontier. Looking at a selection of twentieth-century American male fiction writers—E. L. Doctorow, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Gerald Vizenor, and Cormac McCarthy—he shows how they reevaluated the historical romance of frontier mythology in response to the social and political movements of the 1960s (particularly regarding the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the treatment of Native Americans). Although these writers focus on different moments in American history and different geographic locations, the author reveals their commonly held belief that the frontier mythology failed to deliver on its promises of cultural stability and political advancement, especially in the face of the multicultural crucible of the 1960s.

Cultural Frames, Framing Culture
American Literatures Initiative

1. Rewriting the Historical Record: The “False Documents” and Failed Frontiersmen of E. L. Doctorow and John Barth

Yet the telling of history is all that stands between human beings and the eclipse of history.

—Emily Miller Budick, Fiction and Historical Consciousness

As Richard Slotkin demonstrates in Regeneration through Violence, the myth of Daniel Boone developed in large part due to the written accounts of his life and exploits by both American and European writers. The various treatments of Daniel Boone by John Filson in the late eighteenth century serve as the starting point to Boone’s development as a key figure in the American frontier mythology. Numerous American and European authors contributed to the development of the Boone myth by adding, deleting, or changing aspects of the narrative.1 Slotkin articulates the inseparability of literature and mythology, especially regarding the American frontier myth: “Great literature is at once the apprentice and the master of myth. Its sources are mythic, for its statements refer to the ultimate questions of human consciousness and human existence, and it employs metaphors appropriate to the experience of the writer and his audience, his culture, and his people.”2 Literature has long been the vehicle by which American mythology is conveyed. The Boone narrative grew into its role as the foundational American frontier myth because of its varied treatment in American literature.3 And given the large number of biographies of Daniel Boone, including Robert Morgan’s recent (2007) contribution to the field, the Boone legend shows no signs of losing its hold on the American imagination.

A second, and no less important reason for the persistence of the Boone mythology in American culture is Boone’s status as an exemplar of white masculinity, a status built on his physical exploits. As R. W. Connell argues: “I have stressed that masculinities come into existence at particular times and places, and are always subject to change. Masculinities are, in a word, historical.”4 This is not to say that there is only one kind of masculinity, of course. Rather, Boone stands as one specific kind of masculinity, a figure of great strength and skill; one who can not only survive in the wilderness but provide for others; a figure for whom the difficulties of the frontier exist as challenges to be overcome; a figure embodying Manifest Destiny and the spread of European people culture across the American wilderness. Heroes of the American Historical Frontier Romance are cut from the same cloth. And as we will see in later chapters, the literary figure of the cowboy is a reimagination of this mythic hero. Because of Boone’s status as the mythic figure representing American expansionism and the settlement of the frontier, Boone is arguably the first truly American embodiment of white masculinity; in short, Daniel Boone is the model against which men have defined themselves as men. In his taming of the frontier, Boone (as mythic hero) provided an example of mastery and control over savagery that Connell has noted lies at the heart of the history of masculinity in the United States: “Loss of control at the frontier is a recurring theme in the history of empires, and is closely connected with the making of masculine exemplars.”5 And so just as the frontier mythology gives the nation a creation story, so also does it provide the foundational figure for white American manhood.

Further, as American literature supports this national mythology, charting its sectional, regional, and national developments, American literature also expands it, helping to shape those developments. Writers occupy a unique nexus in the development of the American frontier myth: they serve as cultural barometers as well as shapers of the cultural consciousness, serving the changes that both Slotkin and Connell note in the development of American culture. As conduits of received wisdom, their works preserve traditional notions while also serving as the genesis for new interpretations and developments. American Historical Frontier Romancers writing after 1960, more than any other group before them, consciously used their dual role in order to critique the various inherited values of the national mythology.

Specifically, E. L. Doctorow and John Barth used their Historical Frontier Romances to challenge the values of the inherited American frontier mythology and the figure of the mythic frontier hero, as well as to highlight the fundamental flaw of basing this mythology on the documentary evidence. Just as there is no one “Daniel Boone narrative,” but rather a collection of related narratives that together created a mythology, Doctorow and Barth show the dangers of accepting one written record over others. In Doctorow’s Welcome to Hard Times, Blue’s ledgers prove to be an imperfect account of the growth and destruction of a small Dakota Territory town, and Blue himself fails as a frontiersman in the tradition of Daniel Boone; in Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, John Smith’s narrative of the Pocahontas legend (as well as his other heroic exploits) are challenged by the recovered journal of Henry Burlingame, whose descendant serves as foil to the foppish and dandified Ebenezer Cooke, another failed frontiersman. These narratives attempt the dual function of deconstructing the American frontier myth—and the values and figures associated with it—and highlighting the difficulties of using written records for establishing a mythology. And as such, this chapter identifies the dual failure of the mythology of the American frontier: first, Blue and Ebenezer Cooke fall far short of the heroic model set by such figures as Daniel Boone; second, and more importantly, that very model is wrongheaded and proves to be inconsistent with the values of a progressive society.

As he makes clear in many of his works, E. L. Doctorow is concerned with, as he has repeatedly called it, “the theme of our lives.”6 By this, Doctorow means that his works—while situated in a very specific historical chronotope7—simultaneously address sociopolitical issues of the time and critique contemporary American politics and culture. In fact, for Doctorow, all writing addresses its contemporary world: “Because that of course is what writing about the past is all about: you are writing about the present.”8 Similarly, Doctorow believes that writing is itself a political act: “I think everyone writes political books, actually. . . . I don’t see how it’s possible for a novelist not to recognize the political implications of his work.”9

And Doctorow’s own political views are well known, if not always clear. Though many critics align him with the political Left as a result of the subject matter of his works and his favorable treatment of political revolutionaries, Doctorow himself is cryptic about his politics. When directly asked about his politics and their expression in his works, and to answer the charge that he is a “political novelist,” Doctorow responded:

A novelist is thought to be a political novelist only when the politics of his novel are not the prevailing politics of his society. Then the politics stand out. We could discuss as a proposition the idea that all novels are political; all art is political, which seems to be endorsed in most countries of the world where the profession of novelist or artist is slightly more dangerous than that of high speed automobile racing. We have novelists who are in insane asylums, who are tortured and put in cages, who are exiled. What does the rest of the world know that we don’t know, about fiction and about art? I’ve often made the observation that this is one of the few countries in the history of western civilization in which artists are not seen to be a danger to the state.10

Although one would be hard pressed to characterize Doctorow as “a danger to the state,” his point that art cannot ignore—and in fact must participate in—the politics of the age is well put. And one reason why Doctorow’s politics, in particular, stand out is his active critique of postwar American society. In a 1978 interview with Paul Levine, Doctorow characterizes the skepticism of history that permeated America as it rolled into the 1960s: “A lot of people discovered after World War II and in the fifties that much of what was taken by the younger generations as history was highly interpreted history. . . . And it turned out that there were not only individuals but whole peoples whom we had simply written out of our history—black people, Chinese people, Indians. At the same time, there is so little a country of this size has in the way of cohesive, identifying marks that we can all refer to and recognize each other from. It turns out that history, as insufficient and poorly accommodated as it may be, is one of the few things we have in common here.”11 So for Doctorow, history must be engaged to strengthen those “cohesive, identifying marks” that unite Americans as a people. However, this history must also be critiqued because of past efforts (conscious or not) to ignore certain unpleasant events and to write ethnic minorities out of the historical record.

This dual engagement with history—participating in the transmission of the national myth and critiquing its inheritance—comes for Doctorow very naturally in the buildup to the 1960s, a decade marked by “the New Left, the anti-war movement, an amplification by a later generation of the torment of the 1950’s.”12 In the same interview, Doctorow claims that “when I’m writing out of a spirit of transgression, I’m probably doing my best work.”13 For Doctorow, the 1960s represented a major cultural revolution on multiple fronts:

It wasn’t until the 1960s and the rise of civil rights and counter-cultural movements that Black Studies was created as a subject, as a discipline in the universities. Before that it was as if in the United States there has been no black people or no contribution of black people to the building of the United States. And what scholars discovered in the 60s was that there was an enormous literature of black testimony buried in the libraries: black biography, black autobiography, black scholarship, that had been totally neglected. To this day, there is no concerted or large effort to understand historically the tremendous contribution of the Chinese people to the developing of the United States. The role of women in our history has only recently begun to be defined in Women’s Studies Programs in the colleges and the universities.14

The 1960s, as Doctorow remembers them, were a period of great social and intellectual upheaval, whereby various institutions (as well as institutionally supported limitations based on race and gender) were reexamined with a critical eye as to what was being ignored, what the historical record had effaced. Doctorow’s awareness of and sympathies toward the various social movements of the second half of the twentieth century allow us to read his fiction as participating in the discourses of revolution in which other writers—particularly social activists and alternative historians—were engaged.

That he situated his first novel on the American frontier—a site often used to embody American identity and cultural values—is therefore not insignificant. In addition to the civil rights movement (which I will address in more detail in chapter 3), Doctorow gestures toward the women’s movement in his comments about the radical social changes facing America in the 1960s. To note but one paradigmatic example of the discourses of revolution within which we should read Doctorow’s fiction, 1963 witnessed the publication of Betty Friedan’s landmark work The Feminine Mystique, the publication of which is seen by many as the first moment of second-wave feminism. Addressing “the problem that has no name” (as she titles her first chapter), Friedan explores the widespread problems faced by women (particularly housewives) in twentieth-century American society. Despite Doctorow’s celebration of the formation of women’s studies programs in the 1960s, Friedan reminds us that “women attending college in comparison with men dropped from 47 percent in 1920 to 35 percent in 1958” (although by 1983, Friedan would note “women’s studies” and “more women now going to college than men” as positive developments over the twenty years since her book was first published).15

Speaking about these various movements simultaneously, Doctorow alludes to the ways these movements were interconnected; often the same activists were engaged with multiple civil rights efforts. However, even within those movements and the resulting laws that were passed, the 1960s at times only gestured toward equality. Friedan reminds her readers that “the sex discrimination part [of the Civil Rights Act of 1964] was tacked on as a joke”;16 Howard Zinn has also noted that “in the civil rights movements of the sixties . . . [w]omen took the place they customarily took in social movements, in the front lines—as privates, not generals.”17 The war analogy is telling, as it reminds us that acceptance to changes in the roles of women, particularly as they have been developed by the narratives employed to disseminate cultural values (the frontier mythology in many ways working similarly to the developing narrative of the American soldier),18 were slow in coming, as were the resulting reevaluations of hegemonic masculinity that came out of the 1960s. Doctorow has similarly noted in interviews that no small amount of the upheaval in the 1960s was due to what “we were all going through [in] Vietnam,” the “anti-war movement” being “an amplification by a later generation of the torment of the 1950’s.”19 Welcome to Hard Times inaugurates this period of cultural upheaval by directly challenging both the foundational national mythology and the notion that our past has been accurately transmitted to us through the documentary evidence.

Doctorow’s first romance reaches back to the nineteenth-century American frontier of the Dakota Territory and grapples with accepted American history and myth. Although one should be careful not to confuse history with myth, Doctorow argues that the two operate perilously close to one another. In explaining the necessity of “multiple witnesses” to history, Doctorow warns of the dangers of perspectivism: “if you don’t [employ ‘as many testimonies as possible’], history turns into mythology. If you don’t constantly recompose and re-interpret history, then it begins to tighten its grip on your throat as myth and you find yourself in some kind of totalitarian society.”20 Reading this in light of his comments regarding the countercultural movements of the 1960s, one can see that Doctorow participated in the recomposition and reinterpretation of the history of the American frontier, challenging the inherited view that the frontier experience led to the betterment of those who pioneered America’s westward expansion. And it is for this reason that he consciously wrote in the romance tradition; of Welcome to Hard Times, Doctorow notes: “I had been trying without success to write a realistic novel until I conceived of this one. I realized I was, like Hawthorne, not an exemplar of realism but a writer of romances. I was interested in imagery as a kind of moral data. And I was at home in the past.”21 The romancer is not writing history; rather, he is focusing on moral truth over historical fact. He reimagines the past in order to provide a counterhistory, one that presents the reader with a representation of the frontier that does not sit comfortably with our accepted mythological inheritance: the frontier town of Hard Times is not the home of heroic frontiersmen.

Similarly, just as Filson’s Boone narratives are not the sole source for the Boone myth, no one account of the West should be accepted as the sole source of the American frontier myth. Rather, all accounts—historical, fictional, sociological, psychological—participate in the construction of the myth. Doctorow’s concern with the multiplicity of written accounts of history is the subject of his essay “False Documents,” in which he explains

why history has to be written and rewritten from one generation to another. The act of composition can never end.

What is a historical fact? A spent shell? A bombed-out building? A victory parade? A long march? Once it has been suffered it maintains itself in the mind of a witness or victim, and if it is to reach anyone else it is transmitted in words or in film and it becomes an image, which, with other images, constitutes a judgment. . . . [H]istory shares with fiction a mode of mediating the world for the purpose of introducing meaning, and it is the cultural authority from which they both derive that illuminates those facts so that they can be perceived.

Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.22

Fiction—especially the romance—is not a corrective to historical accounts; rather, the historian’s account and the romancer’s creation work in conjunction with one another in order to give as wide a lens as possible on the historical moment, where both mediate the world in very different ways, giving meaning to the multiple (but not competing) accounts. And it is for this reason that Doctorow’s text is presented as the journal of the town’s only official, Blue.

Welcome to Hard Times is the written chronicle of Blue, unofficial mayor of Hard Times, a small town on the Dakota frontier to which miners come in order to spend their wages on alcohol and pros...