The Noble Savage

Native American, as a noble savage

an idea that was immensely appealing to the American Romantic writers

James Fenimore Cooper's novels celebrated an idealized picture of Native Americans

Just as did Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha." Civilization was polluting

living in nature purified man

romanticized picture of Native Americans proved to be...

-more compelling than the actual people
-more to the point
-their lands were more compelling than the people

Native Americans inhabiting their own land proved to be a serious impediment to the craving for more territory

As president, James Monroe wrote to Andrew Jackson:

"The hunter or savage state requires a greater extent of territory to sustain it than is compatible with the progress and just claims of civilized life, and must yield to it"

Yield they did. Anthropologists estimate after the arrival of European settlers...

-Native American populations were decimated to approximately
-one tenth of their previous number

Included...
-European illnesses
-wars with settlers and other tribes
-loss of their culture and way of life
-often-repeated displacement of tribes to less desirable land destroyed them

Treaty of New Echota "traded" Cherokee lands in Georgia for land in distant Oklahoma

Cherokee Nation
forced by government troops to march thousands of miles in what has become known as The Trail of Tears

"By 1844, most tribes had been removed to the West"

Romantics found something to romanticize even in the deplorable situation of the Native Americans

sympathetically, but erroneously, described Native Americans as a vanishing culture

-even as Native Americans gave voice to who they were
-wrote and published, sometimes in their own newspapers

American Romanticism

"In literature it was America's first great creative period, a full flowering of the romantic impulse on American soil"

-generalities about the romantics are problematic, particular ideas prevailed
-response to the formal rules of classicism or neoclassicism that were previously popular

-Neoclassical writers spoke for rationalism and the intellect

-romantics emphasized the imagination

classicists
-appreciated the order and formality of a Greek temple

Romantics
-admired Gothic structures and ruins
-had an enthusiasm for the wild and natural
-saw beyond the real and found the ideal and spiritual.

"The term designates a literary and philosophical theory that tends to see the individual at the center of all life; therefore, at the center of art, making literature valuable as an expression of unique feelings and particular attitudes"

James Fenimore Cooper

first American writer to make a career as a professional novelist

- "Leatherstocking Tales" were the first American books to become international bestsellers

a definitive American "Romantic" writer

-novels resemble those of the British Romantic novelist Sir Walter Scott (e. g., Ivanhoe)
-spent a good deal of his life in Europe, where his novels were well-received

-grew up and lived much of his life in Cooperstown, New York

-named for his father who founded the city and now famous as home of the Baseball Hall of Fame

"The Leatherstocking Tales" are a series of five novels that are connected by two fictional characters

The Leatherstocking Tales"

The Pioneers (1823)
(set in the 1770-80s: Natty Chingachgook are aging squatters near the new fictional town of Templeton, modeled after Cooperstown)


The Last of the Mohicans (1826)
(set during the French and Indian War of 1757-. Natty and Chingachgook are in the prime of middle age. The title character--"the last of the Mohicans"--is Chingachgook's son Uncas.)

historical novel

-novel is set in the location and time of a famous, decisive
-dramatic event or movement in history

-the French and Indian War led to the American Revolution about 20 years later
-Other examples of historical novels would include Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Dumas's The Man in the Iron Mask (1847-50)
-both set in Paris during the French Revolution.

historical romance

-"romance" often means that the plot is more adventurous and amorous
-historical reality fades in importance relative to the fictional adventure

Catherine Maria Sedgwick

-wrote fiction and nonfiction
-didactic tone in all her work
-stresses the need for religious and racial tolerance
-social and political reform

Hope Leslie
considered by most critics to be her best work

historical romance

-situated in New England
-describes the customs of the Native American Pequot tribe

-follows the relations between whites and Native Americans
-introduces the theme of miscegenation into American literature

followed this publication with...

Clarence (1830)
The Linwoods (1835) Married or Single? (1857)

Upcoming...

• Henry David Thoreau" 961-1155 "Resistance to Civil Government" "Walden, or Life in the Woods"
• complete assignments in calendar
• Start reviewing Essay 3 Prompt