Strangers at Home: American Ethnic Modernism between the World Wars

4. Romantic Modernism, Modernist Realism

BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 112 / / Strangers at Home / Rita Keresztesi 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [First Page] [112], (1) Lines: 0 to 33 ——— 13.71701pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [112], (1) 4. Romantic Modernism, Modernist Realism Mourning Dove, D’Arcy McNickle, and John Joseph Mathews For however charitable it may be to view Indians as members of the Society of Friends, yet to affirm them such to one ignorant of Indians, whose lonely path lies a long way through their lands,this,in the event,might prove not only injudicious but also cruel. At least something of this kind would seem the maxim upon which backwoods’ education is based. Accordingly, if in youth the backwoodsman incline to knowledge, as is generally the case, he hears little from his schoolmasters, the old chroniclers of the forest, but histories of Indian lying, Indian theft, Indian double-dealing, Indian fraud and perfidy, Indian want of conscience, Indian blood-thirstiness, Indian diabolism histories which, though of wild woods, are almost as full of things unangelic as the Newgate Calendar or the Annals of Europe . In these Indian narratives and traditions the lad is thoroughly grounded. “As the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.”The instinct of antipathy against an Indian grows in the backwoodsman with the sense of good and bad, right and wrong. In one breath he learns that a brother is to be loved, and an Indian to be hated. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man Cogewea reflected bitterly how her race had had the worst of every deal since the landing of the lordly European on their shores; how they had suffered as much from the pen as from the bayonet of conquest; wherein the annals had always been chronicled by their most deadly foes and partisan writers. Mourning Dove, Cogewea This, his home, was a strange country. D’Arcy McNickle, The Surrounded A visiting Indian,a Ponca,by the characteristic circular mirror,encircled by turkey tail feathers placed just above his buttocks, danced and twisted, and jerked his head fantastically; he did the black bottom, the Charleston, and other clownish tricks until Chal looked away in disgust, but he could hear murmurs of approval BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 113 / / Strangers at Home / Rita Keresztesi 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [113], (2) Lines: 33 to 41 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [113], (2) from the visitors on the benches. The Ponca had been on a vaudeville stage, and he knew how to please white people. John Joseph Mathews, Sundown M y focus in this chapter is what Louis Owens calls “contextual identity ” of Native Americans. The early-twentieth-century Native American authors, Mourning Dove, D’Arcy McNickle, and John Joseph Mathews were keenly aware that Indian identity has been extensively and historically appropriated, narrativized, and colonized. Native Americans experienced a particular kind of alienation within the urbanizing,modernizing, and expanding U.S. empire during the 1920s and ’30s. The “stranger” of Native American fiction is usually a mixed-blood character who is rejected by the national discourse and often by native tribal communities. Native American authors, such as Mourning Dove, McNickle, and Mathews , whose novels I discuss in this chapter, address and narrativize the issue of “contextual identity” through lowbrow genres and traditional narratives that are focused on issues of race and ethnicity within a modernist context and philosophical and social framework. In response to the long history of Anglo narrative appropriations of Indians within American literature, each of these authors utilizes traditional mimetic narratives in order to subvert the very genres that have historically denied them realistic and authentic subjectivity and self-representation in fiction. Thus, they do not employ the formal experimentation of Anglo high modernism on purpose. They reuse and subvert the narrative clichés used by mainstream white authors for ideological purposes that are external to NativeAmerican identity,and they write in traditional genres such as realist or naturalist fiction or romance. Instead of representing Indians either as barbarians or as the idealized but...