Thoreau’s Retelling
of the Hannah Duston Story
From Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration
Through Violence:
The Mythology of the
American Frontier, 1600-1860.
. . . Thoreau offers an "improvement" of
Cotton Mather's account of Hannah Dustin's captivity and escape from the
Indians. Mather had mined the account
for all the symbolism and typological data it might possibly contain. He had approached it as a man composing a
sermon on "Humiliation and Deliverance," and his perception of it was
limited by his method of approach.
Thoreau begins with facts, reconstructing the events of the narrative
carefully and objectively. Where Mather
luridly recounted the advent of the "raging Demons" and the horrid
cruelties which their devilish nature led them to perpetrate, Thoreau reports
simply that the Indians forced her to rise from childbed and go with them, that
her husband and children had fled but she knew not where, and that "she
had seen her infant's brains dashed out against an apple tree.” The apple tree is Thoreau's own subtle
addition to the tale, a seed of metaphor and myth planted among apparently
stable, established facts. The rest of
the tale is told with equal economy.
The Indians threaten Hannah and her female companion with being stripped
naked and made to run the gauntlet. The
women, stirred to resolution, rise secretly in the night, brain their captors
with their own axes, and flee in terror.
Then, with a return of reason, they return to the scene of slaughter to
scalp their enemies as evidence of the deed.
They reach home in safety and are awarded the bounty of fifty
pounds. At this point Mather cried out
at the justice of the retribution and pleaded for his parishioners to turn from
pagan to more Christian ways. Thoreau
makes no such obvious appeal for us to identify ourselves with the drama of
Hannah Dustin, nor does he assert his own valuation of the meaning of her
actions. . . .
The last sentence, for all its spartan adherence to
simple statements of fact, touches a tangled and complex mystery in the tale of
Hannah Dustin. It begins with an image
of the typical ending of the captivity narrative, the sundered family group
reunited. The only missing member of
the family is the infant, murdered on an apple tree, a permanent and abiding
sacrifice to the wilderness. In the
same sentence, however, we are told that people have "lived to say that
they had eaten of the fruit of that apple tree.” The fruit of the tree, in a figurative sense, is the sacrificed
infant whose broken skull is the image most strongly associated here with the
tree. The eating of the fruit of the
tree thus seems a kind of Indian-cannibal Eucharist. The specification of the apple tree, reminiscent of the Eden
tree, of man's knowledge and death, reinforces this impression. Interpreted with the most intense concern
for symbolism, the infant is a type of Christ; the tree, the cross on which the
little god is hanged; and the eating of the fruit, a sacrament that ties the
living family group to its sacrificed, divine child. Thus the sacrament mythologically completes the reunion of the
family required by the captivity narrative genre. Moreover, it serves to link the present dwellers in the land to
the reality of that bloody revelation of wilderness by means of a sacrament in
which the symbolic fruit is perceived as a scant covering, an insignificant
palliation or sublimation, of the reality of infant blood and torment. It is a Eucharist, with real rather than
figurative flesh and blood, a revision of the Eden myth in which the eating of
the apple of knowledge is a sacrament rather than a sin.
Thoreau seems aware of the
sacramental quality of this sympathetic reliving of the Dustin captivity. It leads him first into contemplation of the
mythology of woman--the great archetypes of the feminine principle, mother
goddess and anima. The history of the
world, he reflects, is embodied in sixty generations of "old women,"
including Columbus's nurse, the Virgin, the sibyl, Queen Semiramis, and mother
Eve. The captivity and the exploration
of the landscape thus illuminate two symbolic archetypes, woman and the
wilderness. These two in conjunction
symbolize a third component of divinity, the human unconscious, source of
poetic genius and abiding place of the spirit of God in man. "The unconsciousness of man is the
consciousness of God.” To merge with
this consciousness by sinking into the unconscious is the quietist mystic's
path to sainthood. For Thoreau, however,
the act of creation is, not a passive sinking into the unconscious, but a
conscious hunter's foray into the "wilderness of the mind": "The
talent of composition is very dangerous--the striking out the heart of life at
a blow, as the Indian takes off a scalp.
I feel as if my life had grown more outward when I can express it.” (He might as well have identified himself
with the Indian who created the child-god by seizing him and dashing him
against the tree.)
This
insight emerges from a critical exfoliation of the narrative facts with which
Thoreau begins. Nor is the sequence of
ideas that follows the narrative unified by a structure of logical or narrative
connectives. Like the narrative itself,
the ideas generated by the narrative are offered as facts, as events for the
reader to perceive. No explanation, no
explicit justification or illumination of the underlying symbolism of the tale
or of the associational logic of the exposition is given. The reader is left to make his own foray
into the wilderness of Thoreau's intention, to make his own discovery and take
his own scalps. The words on the page
are as enigmatic and full of possibility as the events themselves. The symbolism we read into them, like the
meanings Thoreau sees in Dustin's tale, may be an illusion imposed on reality
by our own sensibilities. On the other
hand, there may in fact be some truth inherent in the very nature of the
objects or events.
The
poet is the man of most prowess in such hunts, surprising truth in her cabin,
capturing her, and forcing her to run naked the gauntlet of his
intelligence. This grotesque image
seems valid, since for Thoreau the Indian symbolizes the wild, spontaneous
quality of poetic genius in the mind.
To the civilized white man are left the lesser functions of the
understanding--material calculation, experience rather than innocence of mind,
and recognition of rational limitations rather 'than acceptance of the infinite
possibilities of the mind and the passions:
The white man comes, pale as the dawn, with a load of
thought, with a slumbering intelligence as afire raked up, knowing well what he
knows, not guessing but calculating; strong in community, yielding obedience to
authority; of experienced race; of wonderful, wonderful common sense; dull but
capable, slow but persevering, severe but just, of little humor but genuine; a
laboring man, despising game and sport; building a house that endures, a framed
house.
The Indian, who does not bind his genius to the soil by a
plow, retains a transcendent buoyance of genius. He does not entail himself to the gods and the soil like the white
man, but retains "the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest
life" and thus "preserves his intercourse with his native gods, and
is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with Nature.”
References are to Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers, 1849.
Source: Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through
Violence: The Mythology of the American
Frontier, 1600-1860. University of
Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK 2000.
Excerpts from pp. 522-24. Used with the author’s permission.