The Half-Blood: A Cultural Symbol in 19th-Century American Fiction by Wiliam J. Scheick (review)

150 Western American Literature Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. By Gregory Bateson. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979. 238 pages, $12.95.) This book is the capstone to the philosophical edifice which Gregory Bateson has been building for several decades. In brief, it is a series of proofs that Cartesian dualism and Lockeian sense-data theory — and be­ hind them, one might say, the entire dominant epistemology of Western Civilization — are incorrect. That is, they do not fit the systematic nature of things, which Bateson embodies in the book’s title and subtitle. Further­ more, they lead, in Bateson’s view, to “greed, monstrous overgrowth, war, tyranny, and pollution.” Unfortunately, however, they continue to run the world. Bateson means to be subversive, and to do his part toward the ultimate healing which has already been suggested by systems theory, cybernetics, ecology, and humanistic psychology, not to mention the works of John Muir, Mary Austin, Frank Waters, Gary Snyder, Joseph Wood Krutch, and many other western American writers. His theory of what is wrong and his hope for a truly transformative, holistic philosophy, are very much in the main line of western regional writing and will seem familiar to students of the field. With such high, democratic aims, Bateson’s prose is strangely difficult. Through his jumpy and oddly juxtaposed paragraphs, one may pick one’s way with great care — perhaps with occasional irritation — and now and then catch glimpses of the promised world ahead. But it is work. Bateson could take a lesson from Walt Whitman, who preached essentially the same overcoming of single vision but took greater care to contact and guide his readers. This book is not a “meal equally set,” except in the final essay, a memorandum to his fellow Regents of the University of California system, in which Bateson speaks directly and practically, and with unmistakable feeling. THOMAS J. LYON, Utah State University The Half-Blood: A Cultural Symbol in 19th-Century American Fiction. By Wiliam J. Scheick. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979. 113 pages, $9.75.) The persistence in popular American culture of the half-breed prob­ lem is indicated by the frequent airings not long ago of Cher Bono’s lament of that title. Yet even at this time of recovering respect for Native Ameri­ cans, the presentation of the mixed-blood in our literature has rarely re­ ceived attention. Reviews 151 This shortcoming is brilliantly remedied by William J. Scheick’s The Half-Blood (a term wisely chosen by. the author to avoid pejorative impli­ cations), which explores the treatment of the offspring of mixed Indian and white parents in nineteenth-century fiction in a lively book whose length belies both the energies put into its creation and its importance. Although the.author is obliged to conclude that “fictional treatments of the half-blood are on the whole artistic failures” (p. 89), we can learn much from the con­ fusions that undermined the plotting in significant neglected works like Wil­ liam Snelling’s Tales of the Northwest. After setting forth the problem that the books studied “reflect what Edwin Fussell described as a characteristic national ambivalence toward the western frontier in general” (p. 1), Scheick in the second chapter explores the problem of the half-blood in Southern literature, where any kind of miscegenation proved particularly troubling, and locates the roots of longprevailing attitudes in William Gilmore Simms’ The Partisan (1835) and Mellichampe (1836). Then in the third chapter, Scheick analyzes the more ambivalent attitudes in the Northeast, tracing a “benign outlook on mis­ cegenation” among writers there to a letter that Thomas Jefferson w'rote in 1808 (p. 39). Most important, however, is a stunning fourth chapter which deals with the substitution in much literature of the period of the “figurative halfblood , a half-blood in spirit or temperament, for the literal mixed-blood Indian” (p. 68). Here we learn how our fictionists portrayed actual bloodmixtures as producing a hybrid type that combined the worst character­ istics of both progenitors, while the “spiritual half-blood” combined the best traits of both (as in Cooper’s bachelor Natty Bumppo). Although Scheick doesn’t press the point, rarely has the genteel nineteenth...