[lit-ideas] The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism
- From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 11 May 2014 08:51:07 -0400 (EDT)
In a message dated 5/10/2014 7:13:54 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx writes:
Well, it is part of the explanation. The Northern AMerica might have been
relatively scarcely populated. The diseases played a part in that, but so
did the destruction of buffaloes, the introduction of alcohol, forced
migrations, and outright killing.
--- commenting on Sat, May 10, 2014 at 9:44 PM, Lawrence Helm
<lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"This also explains why the British had such an easy time colonizing North
America. The Amerindians had been decimated by disease. The New World
was largely empty."
---
For the record, some notes on the myth of the noble savage which may apply!
The Amerindians were decimated by disease but the spirit lingered on!
Cheers,
Speranza
---
Notes and references to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage
Fryd, Vivien Green (1995). "Rereading the Indian in Benjamin West's
"Death of General Wolfe"". American Art 9 (1): 75. JSTOR 3109196.
Grace Moore, "Reappraising Dickens's 'Noble Savage'", The Dickensian
98:458 (2002): 236-243.
Moore speculates that Dickens, although himself an abolitionist, was
motivated by a wish to differentiate himself from what he believed was the
feminine sentimentality and bad writing of female philanthropists and writers
such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, with whom he, as a reformist writer, was often
associated.
Locke, Hobbs, and Confusion's Masterpiece, Ross Harrison, (Cambridge
University Press, 2003), p. 70.
"Montaigne's political and religious context" in The Cambridge Companion to
Montaigne (Cambridge, 2005), p. 14 (cf. also Tom Conley, "The Essays and
the New World" p. 80 in the same volume.)
Essay "Of Cannibals"
Terence Cave, How to Read Montaigne (London: Granta Books, 2007), pp.
81-82.
David El Kenz,"Massacres During the Wars of Religion", 2008
Anthony Pagden, The Fall of the Natural Man: the American Indian and the
origins of comparative ethnology. Cambridge Iberian and Latin American
Studies.(Cambridge University Press, 1982)
The Myth of the Noble Savage, Ter Ellingson, (University of California,
2001), note p. 390.
(OED 'Savage', A,I,3) -- (OED 'Savage' A, I, 3) -- (Ellingson [2001], p.
377) -- (Ellingson [2001], p. 389).
The European Mind, Paul Hazard (1680-1715) (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian Books
[1937], 1969), pp. 14-24 and passim
Doyle R. Quiggle, “Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqdan in New England: A
Spanish-Islamic Tale in Cotton Mather's Christian Philosopher?” Arizona
Quarterly:
A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, 64: 2 (Summer 2008):
1-32.
In 1859, journalist Horace Greeley, famous for his advice to "Go west,
young man", used "Lo, The Poor Indian" as the title for a letter written from
Colorado:
"I have learned to appreciate better than hitherto, and to make more
allowance for, the dislike, aversion, contempt wherewith Indians are usually
regarded by their white neighbors, and have been since the days of the
Puritans. It needs but little familiarity with the actual, palpable aborigines
to
convince anyone that the poetic Indian -- the Indian of Cooper and
Longfellow -- is only visible to the poet's eye. To the prosaic observer, the
average Indian of the woods and prairies is a being who does little credit to
human nature -- a slave of appetite and sloth, never emancipated from the
tyranny of one animal passion save by the more ravenous demands of another. As
I passed over those magnificent bottoms of the Kansas, which form the
reservations of the Delawares, Potawatamies, etc., constituting the very best
corn-lands on earth, and saw their owners sitting around the doors of their
lodges at the height of the planting season and in as good, bright planting
weather as sun and soil ever made, I could not help saying, “These people
must die out — there is no help for them. God has given this earth to those
who will subdue and cultivate it, and it is vain to struggle against His
righteous decree.” --"Lo! The Poor Indian!”, letter dated June 12, 1859,
from An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859
by Horace Greeley (1860)
During the Indian wars of the late 19th century, white settlers, to whom
Indians were “an inferior breed of men”, referred mockingly to the Indians
as “Lo” or “Mr. Lo,” a deliberate misreading of Pope's famous passage. The
term was also “a sarcastic reference to those eastern humanitarians whose
idea of the Indian was so at variance with the frontiersman's bloodthirsty
savage. "The Leavenworth, Kansas, Times and Conservative, for example,
commented indignantly on the story of Thomas Alderdice, whose wife was
captured
and killed by Cheyennes: 'We wish some philanthropists who talk about
civilizing the Indians, could have heard this unfortunate and almost
broken-hearted man tell his story. We think they would at least have wavered a
little
in their opinion of the Lo family'", quoted by Louise Barnett, in Touched
by Fire: the Life, Death, and Mythic Afterlife of George Armstrong Custer
(University of Nebraska Press [1986], 2006), pp. 107-108.
François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, Encounter with the Mandurians,
in Chapter IX of Telemachus, son of Ulysses, translated by Patrick Riley
(Cambridge University Press, [1699] 1994), pp. 130-31. This didactic novel
(arguably the first "boys' book") by the Archbishop of Cambrai, tutor to the
seven-year-old grandson of Louis XIV, was perhaps the most internationally
popular book of the 18th and early 19th centuries, a favorite of Montesquieu,
Rousseau, Herder, Jefferson, Emerson, and countless others. Patrick
Riley's translation is based on that of Tobias Smollett, 1776 (op cit p. xvii).
For the distinction between "hard" and "soft" primitivism see A. O,
Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, Baltimore, I,
1935.
Erwin Panofsky, "Et in Arcadia Ego", in Meaning in the Visual Arts (New
York: Doubleday, 1955).
Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker ([1771] London: Penguin
Books, 1967), p. 292. Interestingly, One of the characters in Smollett's
Humphry Clinker, Lieutenant Lismahago, is a kind of ludicrous noble savage. A
proud and irascible Scotsman of good family and advancing years, Lismahago
has been so poorly requited by the government for his services in the
Canadian wars that he is planning to return to Canada to live out his days
with
his Native American common-law wife, in squalor but with more honor and
decency than would be possible as a pauper at home.
Leviathan -- See Paul Hazard, The European Mind (1680-1715) [1937], 1969),
pp. 13-14, and passim.
J.B. Bury (2008). The Idea of Progress: an Inquiry into its Origins and
Growth (second ed.). New York: Cosimo Press. p. 111.
Jeremy Jennings (May 25, 2012). "Reason's Revenge: How a small group of
radical philosophers made a world revolution and lost control of it to
'Rouseauist fanatics'" (magazine). Times Literary Supplement (London, England):
3–
4. ISSN 0040-7895. OCLC 1767078.
Benjamin Franklin (1982). "Chapter 5: The Philosopher as Savage". Forgotten
Founders: Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois, and the Rationale for the
American Revolution. Ipswich, Massachusetts: Gambit, Inc. ISBN 9780876451113.
OCLC 8115189.
Lovejoy (1923, 1948 p, 21.
Voltaire was no believer in human equality: "It is notorious that Voltaire
objected to the education of laborers' children" – Peter Gay, The
Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton, [1969] 1977), p.
36.
See Ter Ellingson (2001).
In a recent review of a book discussing Steven Pinker, Peter Gay writes "As
far as the noble savage is concerned, that phrase is from Dryden and does
not appear in Rousseau’s writings. In the years I taught the history of
political theory at Columbia to a sizable class of undergraduates, I would
offer students a hundred dollars if they could find “Noble Savage” anywhere
in Rousseau. I never had to pay up" (Peter Gay, "Breeding Is Fundamental:
Jenny Davidson reflects on Enlightenment ideas about human perfectibility",
Book Forum [April/May 2009]).
Originally published in Modern Philology, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Nov.,
1923):165-186, Lovejoy's essay was reprinted in Essays in the History of Ideas.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, [1948, 1955, and 1960], is also available on
Jstor. See also Victor Gourevitch, "Nothing in Rousseau's account of men in the
pre-political state of nature justifies calling them "noble savages," in
Rousseau: The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, Victor
Gourevitch, Editor (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought [1997]
2004).
(Lovejoy (1960), p. 23)
Lovejoy attributes the invention of the term to Turgot in 1750, but,
according to him, it was Rousseau who gave it wide currency. See Lovejoy
(1960),
p. 24,
Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, as quoted in Lovejoy
(1960), p. 27.
"Rousseau's theory of human nature here, in short, is identical with that
of Hobbes", Lovejoy (1960), p. 27.
See Lovejoy (1960), p. 31. ^ Lovejoy (1960), p. 36.
See reference to Frederick E. Hoxie's review of Ter Ellingson's Myth of the
Noble Savage in note 32 below.
For an account of Dickens's article see Moore, "Reappraising Dickens's
'Noble Savage'" (2002): 236-243.
Lillian Nayder, “The Cannibal, the Nurse, and the Cook in Dickens’s ‘The
Frozen Deep'”, Victorian Literature and Culture 19 (1991):1. See Lillian
Nayder (1991), p. 3
Nadyer notes: In their order of appearance, Dickens’s articles are: 'The
Lost Arctic Voyagers,' (December 2, 1854); 'The Lost Arctic Voyagers'
(December 9, 1854); 'The Lost English Sailors' (February 14, 1857); and
'Official
Patriotism' (April 25, 1857). Dr. Rae’s articles are 'The Lost Arctic
Voyagers' (December 23, 1854); 'Dr. Rae’s Report to the Secretary of the
Admiralty' (December 30, 1854); and 'Sir John Franklin and His Crews'
(February 3,
1855)".
(Nayder [1991], p. 7).
On cannibalism, see, for example: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, "The Arctic
heart of darkness: How heroic lies replaced hideous reality after the grim
death of John Franklin", Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 11, 2009.
^ See Ken McGoogan, Fatal Passage: The True Story of John Rae, the Arctic
Hero Time Forgot (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002). -- quoted in Ellingson
(2001), p. 273.
William Oddie Dickens and Carlyle: the Question of Influence (London:
Centenary) pp. 135–42
“Dickens and the Indian Mutiny”, Dickensian 68 (January 1972), 3–15
Myron Magnet, Dickens and the Social Order (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1985), pp. 3–4
Grace Moore, Dickens And Empire: Discourses Of Class, Race And Colonialism
In The Works Of Charles Dickens (Nineteenth Century Series) (Ashgate: 2004)
See Ellingson (2001), pp. 249-323.
History page: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.
The Ethnological Society later merged with the Anthropological Society of
London to form the Institute.
Hunt went on to found the rival Anthropological Society of London, with a
mission of "promoting the study of Anthropology in a strictly scientific
manner" and focused on the issue of race. Like the Ethnological Society,
Hunt's Anthropological Society later merged into the Royal Anthropological
Institute.
"John Crawfurd — 'two separate races'". Epress.anu.edu.au. Retrieved
2009-02-23.
Hoxie Neale Fairchild, The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism
(New York, 1928).
Ellingson (2001), p. 4. Ellingson (2001), p. 380.
"British and Indian Identities in a Picture by Benjamin West", Leslie Kaye
Reinhardt, Eighteenth-Century Studies 31: 3 (Spring 1998): 283-305.
McGregor, Craig (January 30, 1972). "Nice Boy From the Bronx?". The New
York Times.
Jump up ^ For an appraisal of Roger Sandall, see Patrick Wolfe in The
Anthropological Book Review, Sept., 2001.
Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful
Savage (Oxford, University Press, 1996), p. 5.
Ad Borsboom, The Savage In European Social Thought: A Prelude To The
Conceptualization Of The Divergent Peoples and Cultures Of Australia and
Oceania, KILTV, 1988, 419.
Robey, Tim (30 November 2013). "Tim Robey recommends...The Lone Ranger".
The Telegraph.
King, C. Richard (2009). Media Images and Representations. Infobase
Publishing. p. 22.
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passim.
Bataille, Gretchen, M. and Silet Charles L., editors. Introduction by Vine
Deloria, Jr. The Pretend Indian: Images of Native Americans in the Movies.
Iowa State University Press, 1980*Berkhofer, Robert F. "The White Man's
Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present"
Boas, George ([1933] 1966). The Happy Beast in French Thought in the
Seventeenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Reprinted by Octagon Press
in 1966.
Boas, George ([1948] 1997). Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle
Ages. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press.
Bordewich, Fergus M. "Killing the White Man's Indian: Reinventing Native
Americans at the End of the Twentieth Century"
Bury, J.B. (1920). The Idea of Progress: an Inquiry into its Origins and
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Edgerton, Robert (1992). Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive
Harmony. New York: Free Press. ISBN 978-0-02-908925-5
Edwards, Brendan Frederick R. (2008) "'He Scarcely Resembles the Real
Man': images of the Indian in popular culture". Website: Our Legacy. Material
relating to First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples, found in Saskatchewan
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Ellingson, Ter. (2001). The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley, CA.:
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