Part 1 Richard Slotkin

The notion of Regeneration through Violence is not new to the American cultural concept, nor is the intensive use of myth. Richard Slotkin’s book meticulously accounts how the use of violence has been integral to the construction of a distinctly American mythology. Slotkin argues, “In American mythology the founding fathers were not those 18TH-century gentlemen who composed a nation at Philadelphia. Rather, they were those who tore violently a nation from implacable and opulent wilderness”. As a result regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience. In describing the evolution of the myth of regeneration through violence, Slotkin describes North America as an empty, unoccupied wilderness where resources are rich and land is free for the taking, or if not exactly free, the land becomes the rightful spoil of war for those representing the interests of civilization and progress. The symbolic landscape of the frontier narrative is marked by boundaries and by the encounter of opposites; civilization and savagery, man and nature, whites and Indians, good and evil. These encounters are characterized in terms of conflictand violence as the protagonist struggles against the harsh environment, the unknown and potentially hostile Indians, and the savagery of the empty land. As Slotkin argues, European American encounters with the wilderness produced a national mythology steeped in blood and violence. “The first colonist saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation,” is what took shape in the Puritan captivity narrative, whose very structure required a violence against the wilderness and Indians, who the Puritans understood as embodying the most chaotic and