The Demon of the Continent: Indians and the Shaping of American Literature (review)

In The Demon of the Continent, Joshua David Bellin examines the relationship of Native-American and Anglo-American literary and historical texts from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. While Bellin pays particular attention to the eastern United States, he also engages frontiers further west. Bellin challenges the imperative in much of American literary and critical history to see Native Americans as mere images rather than as embodied actors who did not – necessarily and conveniently – disappear to allow for the emergence of America and its literature. Bellin’s title, in fact, references D. H. Lawrence’s claim that with the end of Native presence in America “the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent” (qt. in Bellin 1). Bellin sees the dynamics of erasure that Lawrence enacts as participating in the construction of Native Americans as absences or, at best, images within the conquering literature. Instead, Bellin makes a case for American literature as “emerg[ing] from contexts of encounter, from the interaction and intersection of peoples” (3). The story of America, he says, is the story of “mutual acculturation.” While Bellin acknowledges the devastation of Native culture and expression during this time period, he challenges refusals to see the continued presence of Native Americans as shaping the nation and its literature. In his survey of American literary terrain Bellin engages the work of John Eliot, Roger Williams, Benjamin Franklin, St. John de Crevecoeur, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, George Copway, and David Cusiak, among many others. Bellin’s breadth and his attention to intertextuality comprise two of the study’s great strengths. Bellin also, rightly, challenges the unidirectionality of American literary independence, for the “Campaign for literary nationalism” he says “was fought not only against Europe’s courtly muses but against America’s native mythos” (158).

Furthermore, Bellin claims the possibility of textual and spiritual amalgamation of both Indian and Anglo. Perhaps too kindly, Bellin views Roger Williams’s 1643 A Key Into The Language of America as an intercultural text that challenges the division between Europeans and Indians. Through this analysis however, Bellin spends little time examining the possible “nativizing” of Roger Williams’s text and spirituality. Bellin likewise claims greater Native effects on Anglo culture of this period in his study of John Eliot’s missionary work. Bellin makes the case that in 1652 the year the Natick Indians articulated their first formal conversion narratives, “Indians may not have merely benefited from the post-Calvinist shift toward emotive / participatory religions, but may have played a role in calling them into being” (78). He downplays the “emotive / participatory” dynamic within New England Congregational churches in general and does not take into account that by 1652 the public conversion narratives were losing ground as expressions within European-Puritan churches. Perhaps the Indians’ emotional effusions during confession did affect later spiritual revivals like the Great Awakening, but at certain points Bellin desires greater Native influence than is always textually apparent. Nevertheless, his gestures towards those possibilities are valuable in their challenge against the tendency to erase Native impact on conventional American culture, literature, and religion.

Overall Bellin advocates an “intercultural” rather than a “conversionist” approach to American literature and history. This term, conversionism, which for Bellin stems from Roy Harvey Pearce’s “savagism,” is “absolute difference, absolute conflict, and absolute resolution” (15). Rather than emphasizing the complicated movement between identities and sources, conversionism fixes any oscillation. Bellin elaborates: “The semiotics of conversionism – its denial of the interpretation of the sign – and its hermeneutic elaboration – the division of representer from represented – reproduce the rule of Euro-American imperialism at home and abroad” (34). Bellin illustrates this conversionism in his analysis of the white historian-ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft with the white-Indian captive, John Tanner. Tanner, captured by Shawnees in 1785 at five years of age, writes A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner...