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"MacNeil, Denise Mary"
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Roots of the American frontier hero in the “Narrative of the Capitivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson”
Mary Rowlandson, captured by Algonquian Indians in 17th-century Massachusetts, is a primary and essential source of a hyper-male icon, the American frontier hero. Specifically, literary and cultural elements crucial to development of the American frontier hero reside in Rowlandson's Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), which are demonstrated by employing the mythological hero paradigm defined by Joseph Campbell. As American literature and culture evolve, Rowlandson's rudimentary heroic prototype becomes explicitly realized and then epitomized in later fictional male characters, finally appearing to become a force of its own, as exemplified in the character of Ethan Edwards from the 1956 John Ford/John Wayne film The Searchers. This evolution results, among other things, in structuring of the American frontier hero such that he is embedded in the wilderness and prevented from ever really returning home, as the mythological hero paradigm demands. In addition, attempts to differentiate androgynous traits within the hero eclipse his transgender roots and result in gender stereotyping and polarization. The captured woman who, at whatever cost, must return to frontier society is transformed into the hero who is effectively confined to the wilderness regardless of attempts to leave; he must make the “underworld” of the American wilderness his home, a significant variation in the mythological hero. In The Searchers, this gender bifurcation reaches its distressing apex: the fission of the heroic character into an active masculine hero (who searches) and a passive feminine victim (who is sought) results in the ejection of the hero from society, even as that crippled hero continues to evidence the androgynous traits employed by Rowlandson. However, the conjunction of wilderness and home evident in the closing shot of the film is hopeful, implying the potential resolution of the opposition of home and wilderness, emotional facility and pragmatic capability, that at present confines Ethan Edwards, and demonstrate a resolution to the dilemma of the American frontier hero.
Dissertation