Driving Home, page 46
That film was a strange and telling choice. Ford had earlier cast Wayne as a white-hat hero, but in The Searchers he plays Ethan Edwards, an outlaw (at the beginning of the film he appears to be fresh from a bank robbery), an Indian-hating racist, and pathological killer. His six-year search for his niece, Debbie, abducted by Comanches after they killed her parents, her brother, and her sister, is not a mission to reclaim her for white society; he plans to shoot her because “Livin’ with Comanches ain’t livin’,” by which he means that the girl will have been so unspeakably violated by the Indians that only death can redeem her. Moreover, Ford strongly insinuates that Debbie may not be Edwards’s niece but his daughter, conceived with his sister-in-law shortly before he rode off to fight for the Confederacy in the Civil War. When, at the end of the movie, Wayne puts away his gun and cradles Debbie—now the young widow, by a few minutes, of a Comanche chieftain—in his arms, his action is one of unprecedented mercy by a cynic with a tungsten heart. Rove and Workman, encouraging twenty-first-century schoolchildren to see Ethan Edwards as an inspiring model for their Texan president, were plumbing the lower depths of public feeling at a time when being in touch with one’s inner Indian killer had become the hallmark of the true-blooded American male.
The brazenly staged “rescue” of Private Jessica Lynch from her hospital bed in Nasiriyah in 2003 is the well-constructed central hinge of The Terror Dream, and Faludi folds the American present into the American past around that day when the war in Iraq was turned into an episode from a Hollywood Western. Lynch herself has always refused to recognize as her own the story of a helpless maiden rescued from the fate worse than death by a posse of daring male heroes, insisting that she was receiving exemplary care from her Iraqi doctors and nurses when U.S. commandos, equipped with night-vision video recorders to immortalize their mission, burst into the hospital, draped Lynch with an American flag, and raced her on a gurney to the safety of a Black Hawk helicopter.
But no one listened to Lynch—least of all her ghostwriter, Rick Bragg, the former color-writer-in-chief at the New York Times. In Bragg’s I Am a Soldier, Too, Lynch was required to be raped by her savage captors (something she has continued to deny), relentlessly girlified (“She looked like a child who had sneaked into her daddy’s closet and tried on his uniform to play soldier”), and transformed from a servicewoman who had voluntarily reenlisted for a second four-year term into a civilian princess deserving to be rescued from the dark tower by knights in shining armor. In all this, Faludi sees a flickering reprise of the tale of Cynthia Ann Parker, abducted by Comanches in 1836 and eventually rescued by the Texas Rangers in 1860, in the course of a massacre whose victims were nearly all Indian women and children. (It was the Parker story that inspired Ford’s The Searchers, via the 1954 novel of the same name by Alan Le May.)
Cynthia Ann Parker, long sought by James Parker, her ne’er-do-well uncle, a horse thief, fraud, and bounty hunter (he published a self-promoting book titled Narrative of the Perilous Adventures, Miraculous Escapes, and Sufferings of Rev. James W. Parker), had resisted a string of attempts to ransom or capture her from the Comanches. She took an Indian name, Nautdah, and married the warrior who’d led the 1836 raid on her family compound, and to whom she bore three children. On her unwilling return to white society, the Texas newspapers went to town on the supposed tortures and rape she had endured during “her long night of suffering and woe.” Then as now, the sexual violation of the woman was needed in order to validate the myth of her heroic male saviors. In fact, Parker repeatedly tried to escape back to her Indian family, and had to be locked in a room by her white relatives. Topsannah, the infant daughter with whom she was seized by the Rangers, caught pneumonia and died. Parker mutilated herself, refused to speak or eat, and died in 1870 of starvation and flu.
The national obsession with the fate of people kidnapped in Indian terror attacks found voice in the “captivity narrative,” which Faludi claims as the “only genre indigenous to American literature.” Between 1682, the date of Mary Rowlandson’s A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, and 1890, more than two thousand of these works were published, and “in the early nineteenth century, every best-selling novel featured a captivity drama.” “The trial of Indian bondage was the first story America told itself.”
Rowlandson, taken prisoner along with her three children in an Indian raid on Lancaster, Massachusetts, in 1675, spent twelve weeks with the Narragansetts before she was ransomed by her countrymen for £20. “I had often before this said that if the Indians should come, I should choose rather to be killed by them than taken alive,” she wrote, but—like Lynch and Parker—she was not forced to endure the rape she dreaded. “Not one of them ever offered me the least abuse of unchastity to me, in word or action.” Her sharpest words were reserved for her own people: “I cannot but remember the slowness and dullness of the English army, in its setting out.” It was the failure of the white man to protect and rescue her, rather than the atrocities of the savage infidel, that appear to have loomed largest in Rowlandson’s memory of her experience—and white men behaving badly is both a recurrent theme in the captivity narratives and forms the essential nub of Faludi’s argument.
Time and again, the stories report the lax defenses of the townships against Indian attack. Husbands gallop away on horseback, leaving their women and children to fend for themselves. Rescue attempts are belated and feeble. Women are forced to make excuses for the cowardly behavior of their menfolk, as in this exchange from a late example of the genre, not mentioned by Faludi, Fanny Kelly’s Narrative of My Captivity Among the Sioux Indians (1871):
Mrs. Larimer, with her boy, came to us, trembling with fear, saying, “The men have all escaped, and left us to the mercy of the savages.”
In reply, I said, “I do hope they have. What benefit would it be to us, to have them here, to suffer this fear and danger with us? They would be killed, and then all hope of rescue for us would be at an end.”
Some women prisoners took matters into their own hands, in the most unwomanly way, like the celebrated and reviled Hannah Duston of Haverhill, Massachusetts, who, aided by a young English boy, hacked ten Abenaki Indians—two men, two women, and six children—to death with stolen tomahawks in 1697, made her escape by canoe, then returned to scalp her victims (since the going rate of bounty money was $50 a scalp, she turned a handsome profit on her fifteen-day captivity). Thoreau, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, admired Mrs. Duston’s audacity, but Hawthorne called her “the bloody old hag.” Such unseemly enterprise on the part of a woman threatened to undermine the entire structure of the American family.
Anticipating Jerry Falwell, Increase Mather explained Indian attacks on white settlements as “awfull testimonyes of divine displeasure,” and saw King Philip’s War as a “providential dispensation of God” that was meant to bring about “A Reformation of those Evils which have provoked the Lord to bring the Sword upon us.” To this end, regular days of “Publick Humiliation” were added to the calendar, when New Englanders repented of the “strange degeneracy” into which they’d sunk, and which presaged for them the same fate that God had inflicted on the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Here, Faludi slightly overplays her cards. Wanting Mather to lay the blame for the colony’s woes at the feet of its young men, their idleness, drunkenness, and effeminate taste for “monstrous and horrid Perriwigs,” she fails to complete the quotation, which goes on, “and women with their Borders and False Locks and such like whorish fashions, whereby the anger of the Lord is kindled with this sinfull land.” But of course degeneracy in women reflected a breakdown of male authority and morality, and Faludi is surely right to say that Mather saw the Indian raids as divine retribution for a more general crisis of American manhood.
So the myth of the male guardian and avenger, which took its most powerful form in stories of the West, beginning with the elevation of the bemused and hapless figure of Daniel Boone to the status of national hero, arose, according to Faludi, because in real life American men had from the beginning failed to live up to the roles in which they were cast. In the multitude of asymmetric wars against the Indians, the army was off somewhere else, leaving the women and children as easy meat for what Mather called the “Heathen Enemy.” Or the fortifications were neglected. Or the husband fled to save his own skin. This extensive history of male humiliation gave birth to the compensatory fiction of protective male bravery and power. Riffing on a passage from Richard Slotkin, Faludi asks:
What if the unbounded appetite for conquest derives not only from our long relish for the kill but from our even longer sense of disgrace on the receiving end of assault—assaults to our women in our own settlements and in our own homes? What if the deepest psychological legacy of our original war on terror wasn’t the pleasure we now take in dominance but the original shame that domination seeks desperately to conceal?
Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that “the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.” In The Terror Dream, the main contradiction exposed by Faludi is between the more or less impossible duties assigned to men in American society from its earliest days and the predictable failure of men to adequately perform them. Yet that contradiction, important as it is, and eloquent as Faludi is in its unraveling, sits in the shadow of a larger and more glaring one: the fact that white American settlers, whether in New England or the nineteenth-century West, were in the unusual predicament of being simultaneously “at home” and “in enemy territory,” two categories that are normally kept rigidly separate, though perhaps Israeli settlers on the West Bank are in a rather similar situation.
The early colonists didn’t see themselves as occupiers, garrisoned in a foreign country, making themselves as comfortable as they could while far from their real home. Though many did in fact return to England, they came to stay, in what Mather called “our Judah”—the name at once of a people and of its appointed land. That God had populated their new world with agents of the Devil and punished them for their sins with sporadic attacks on their homes, was a sign of His providence. As Mather said, “God does not send such things for nothing,” and Indian raids were to be interpreted as uniquely intimate communications from the Creator to His chosen people. It was a peculiarly American fate to sit comfortably at one’s own hearth-side and be in a state of barely suspended terror. Benjamin Franklin described the Indians’ “manner of making war” as “skulking, surprising, and killing particular persons and families”; their ability to skulk patiently for long periods and then surprise, classic terrorist tactics, meant that no spell of seeming domestic serenity could be entirely free of anxious thoughts of ravening infidels in the woods or the backyard.
That curious plight, or state of mind, is caught quite beautifully in the opening scenes of The Searchers, as John Ford lingers over the selling points of the Edwards family homestead. Far from being the standard wood-frame cabin of the mobile and temporary West, the Edwards place is a house built for the ages, with sturdy walls of adobe brick (so symbolically important is the brickwork that it forms the backdrop on which the movie’s credit titles are superimposed) and massive timber beams to support the shingled roof. Inside, lamplight plays on the matching china on the dining table, the rugs on the immaculately carpentered floor, the accumulation of treasures and knickknacks on the shelves. A fire glows in the hearth. It’s like a Delft School interior, a tribute to the warmth and solidity of family life.
But the illusion stops dead at the unglazed windows, which look out on a wilderness of sagebrush and red shale, low buttes, eroded cliffs, rock pinnacles (the movie, set in Texas, was filmed in Monument Valley, Utah)—the terrain of menace, where Indians skulk and bide their time. A few withered-looking junipers dot the desert, making one wonder where on earth those roofbeams came from. On a hillock near the house, two gravestones form the beginnings of the family graveyard, the tombs of the Edwards grandparents “Killed by Comanches” in 1852, sixteen years before the action of The Searchers begins, and it won’t be long before the two graves are joined by four more. Between these contradictory realms of the domestic and the savage stands the gun hung on the lintel over the front door.
Wayne as Ethan Edwards, the solitary nomadic outlaw, belongs to the hostile exterior world; inside the house, he’s an awkward and disruptive figure. It’s his younger brother, Aaron, played by Walter Coy as if he were in urgent need of a course of antidepressants, who has to be both indoors and outdoors at the same time. Grimly sure that Comanche warriors are gathering in the middle distance, a few hundred yards from the house, he takes the gun down, loads it, and mutters, “I think I’ll see if I can’t knock off a couple of sage hens before supper”—a necessary fiction, and one he carries off with no aplomb at all. Poor Aaron: cuckolded by his own brother, he’s expected to juggle the roles of husband and father, cattle rancher and one-man militia. As Susan Faludi would say, Aaron Edwards has been stiffed.
Only after September 11, as newspapers began to document the American lives and travels of Mohamed Atta and his accomplices, did we wake to the notion that, like the Edwards family, we’d been living in enemy territory all along. The credit-card trails left by the terrorists showed that they had been skulking everywhere amongst us, in New Jersey, Florida, Nevada, California, and points between. Across the country, from Dearborn, Michigan, to Seattle, plots and conspiracies involving Arab Americans were uncovered and trumpeted by the administration before they disintegrated in the courts as fantasies. The attorney general, John Ashcroft, floated his plan to enlist meter readers and postal-service workers as neighborhood spies, to keep a lookout for heathen types who might be up to no good. Local TV news bulletins were full of sightings of suspicious “men of middle-eastern appearance.” The resemblance between twenty-first-century America on red alert and the movie version of an Indian war was further strengthened by the administration’s resort to the rough justice of the frontier, as it interned prisoners in the legal no-man’s-land of Guantánamo Bay, licensed torture, endorsed the CIA program of “extraordinary rendition,” and bent the law with warrantless wiretaps.
There was in all this a simmering manic elation, and a widespread sense that, after the frivolities of the Clinton era, the terrorist attacks had restored America to its original roots and destiny. Once again Americans could see themselves as a nation uniquely imperiled by devilish savages. In the nineteenth century, scenes like that of the burning, ransacked homestead in The Searchers were an intermittent reality mainly because of the policy of brutal extermination pursued by such white heroes as General “Squaw-Killer” Harney and General Custer. Looking at the parallel situations of Canada and the United States, it’s tempting to see acts of Indian terrorism south of the border as much as expressions of a perverse need of white Americans to feel terrorized as of any great desire by the Indians to wage war on the settlers.
Why America has repeatedly nourished itself on stories of murderous demons in its backyard is the great unaddressed question in The Terror Dream. Faludi brilliantly dissects what happens when the nation reverts to a quasi-frontier society in which “mythical male strength … can only measure itself against a mythical female weakness,” but she writes about a consequence without quite nailing its cause. Wholly convincing on Indians as the proto-terrorists of America’s paranoid imagination, she fails to explain the strange, centuries-old obsession—even love affair—with the sensation of thrilling endangerment that the Indian presence kindled in white minds. When the country lapsed into cowboy histrionics in 2001, it seemed to be feeding a long-standing addiction, not so much to divisive and outdated gender roles, as Faludi rather anticlimactically suggests at the end of her book, but to the powerful psychotropic substance of terror itself. The rescue of helpless female victims by John Wayne–style avengers was an essential part of the paraphernalia of the trip, but hardly either its reason or its object.
November 2007
The Curse of the Sublime
HERE IN THE WEST, there’s an ongoing war (with real shots sometimes fired from real guns) between the metropolitan cities and their outlying rural towns. From the perspective of the small town it’s tempting to see every environmental initiative—to halt or restrict logging, mining, and ranching on federal lands, to demolish dams on rivers like the Columbia, the Snake, and the Colorado, to reintroduce the buffalo, the wolf, and the grizzly bear—as the work of wealthy big-city hobbyists who show up in the countryside on weekends in hybrid SUVs laden with backpacks, fly rods, and climbing gear. With their ready money, soft hands, and unlined faces, the carbon-footprint-conscious invaders look like an alien tribe, zealots bent on the destruction of traditional rural livelihoods. From the perspective of the city, the country dwellers are too easily seen as lacking in education and enlightenment, hapless dupes of the timber and mining corporations, proletarian obstacles to the great mission of conserving what little is left of American wilderness.
Important arguments about land use in the West are aggravated by class resentment and class condescension. This isn’t just the result of the real disparity between rural and metropolitan incomes in the region: something nastier and deeper is going on, and it’s embedded in the DNA of the language in which we talk and think about wild nature.
Not all that long ago, the kind of landscape now so prized in the Intermountain West struck civilized observers as merely ugly and useless—heaps of geological rubbish. In the 1720s, Daniel Defoe made a tour of Great Britain and was repelled by the very modest mountains (none much higher than 3,000 feet) that he encountered in Scotland and Wales: “barren,” “impassible,” “frightful,” “barbarous,” “terrible,” “horrid,” and “desart” were his words for them. It was only in the second half of the eighteenth century that the rage for the Romantic Sublime took hold, and it became fashionable to see mountains, cascades, precipices, and impenetrable forests as objects of transcendent wonder and beauty. By 1806, when the Lewis and Clark expedition came within sight of the Rockies—which would soon prove to be an almighty headache for the explorers as they tried to cross them—Lewis was able to greet the mountains as “picturesk,” “sublime,” “noble”; “august spectacle,” “beautiful,” “majestically grand scenery.”
