Title: The rhetoric of the primitive savior in Cooper's The deerslayer, Melville's Moby Dick and Hawthorne's The scarlet letter and The Blithedale romance / Samuel Gordon Paley
Abstract: This project proposes to situate Cooper's Chingachgook and Hetty,Melville's Queequeg, and
Hawthorne's Pearl and Priscilla, as rhetorical characters of what shall be termed the primitive-as-savior
tradition of American fiction. This rhetoric (persuasive technique) in The Deerslayer, Mobv Dick,
Scarlet Letter, and The Blithedale Romance, manipulates reader emotions through pairing a character of the
heroic mode with one of the primitive. The character in the heroic mode (a hero or heroine) is directly
involved in the novel's main action, commands the most interest or sympathy from the reading audience,
and embodies valuable human qualities such as honesty, bravery, and compassion. The heroic character
seeks escape from the strictures of his or her ever-expanding Anglo American civilization, and travels
(forced or willingly) on a voyage to the frontier (any space outside the bounds of westernized society).
The primitive character accompanies the heroic on this voyage. The character in the primitive
mode embodies the qualities of cultural primitivism-being more natural, more instinctive, and more
spontaneous than the heroic (Bell, Primitivism 8O). The primitive character is also a marginalized
character-a social outsider to the western culture. The primitive character is excluded from the full
benefits of the heroic character's society because he or she may be described as one of the following:
being non-white, non-Christian, lower class, or poor. As a social outsider, the primitive feels a spiritual
bond with the hero-or at least feels compassion for the freedom the hero seeks. The primitive having
spent most of his or her existence marginalized from society, better understands the psychological and
physical challenges of the frontier, and guides the hero toward survival through word and deed (Bell,
Primitivism 11).
As an outsider with the answers, the primitive is a powerful source of irony. While readers
anticipate that their encounter with the primitive will comfortably reinforce their society's negative
stereotypes of marginalized peoples, the reverse happens. The early nineteenth century audience is
bewildered as their Anglo-American social philosophy fails them and the primitive's way is depicted as the
path to salvation.
The rhetoric of the primitive savior refers to a persuasive technique, in which authors depict a
marginalized (primitive) character and a modem (heroic) character in a relationship in which the
marginalized character's mode of existence, for the purpose of irony, is shown to be the answer to the
hero's salvation. Through the lens of critics such as Michael Bell, Wayne Booth, Joseph Campbell, and
John Gardner, this study examines the achievement of this irony as a multidimensional process, combining
at least seven elements. These elements include arguments of characterization (ethos), arguments of
emotion (pathos), and arguments of reason (logos).
Chapter one, examines how authors use myths to color readers' first impression of a primitive
characters vice or virtue. Two elements are analyzed as…
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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