Frontier Fictions: Settler Sagas and

Postcolonial Guilt 1st ed. Edition

Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
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 REBECCA WEAVER˜HIGHTOWER

Frontier
Fictions
SETTLER SAGAS AND POSTCOLONIAL GUILT
Frontier Fictions
 Rebecca Weaver-Hightower

Frontier Fictions
Settler Sagas and Postcolonial Guilt
Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
North Dakota State University
Fargo, ND, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-00421-7 ISBN 978-3-030-00422-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00422-4

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For Marcus
 Acknowledgements

They say it takes a village to raise a child; it has taken more than a village
to write this book. To all of you who have helped my research and writ-
ing or provided inspiration and influence, please know that I am grateful.
You are too many to thank in this space. But I would like to call out the
following for special thanks:

• My spouse, Marcus Weaver-Hightower, and children Harrison and

Evelyn, who I dragged to libraries in South Africa, Australia, and
Canada but also forced to visit every settler tourist site I could find.
Marcus deserves my eternal appreciation for his unflagging support
of my research through all of its phases, his writing and research
advice, and his encouragement. If I were honest, everything I write
should have his name as the second author.
• Members of my various writing groups over the last decade, who
have read many drafts of this manuscript as it evolved and given
excellent expert advice on the argument and writing, especially
Elizabeth Scharf, John Behling, Cynthia Prescott, Thyra Knapp,
Melissa Gjellstad, Chris Basgier, Sheila Liming, Dave Haeselin,
Cari Campbell, Kathleen Vacek, and Patrick Henry. My former stu-
dents Jody Jenson and Michele Willman also greatly assisted with
this research. I am also grateful to Nicholas Birns, Malvern Van Wyk
Smith, and Richard Slotkin for reading an early version of this man-
uscript and to Lorenzo Veracini for reading a later version.

vii
viii    Acknowledgements

• The English department at the University of North Dakota, (espe-

cially Kristin Ellwanger. Cheryl Misialek and Connie Marshall), the
College of Arts and Sciences, and the University of North Dakota
(my academic home while writing this book), for a decade of fund-
ing for research travel, release time for writing, and logistical sup-
port of all kinds. I am also grateful to colleagues in the English
department at Rhodes University (especially Dirk Klopper), who
allowed me to be a visiting researcher during a crucial point in my
research and gave me friendship and much needed guidance.
• The kind librarians worldwide who took the time to track down
materials or help me work in collections, especially staffs at the
National English Literature Museum in Grahamstown, South
Africa; the National Library in Canberra, Australia; and the Library
and Archives Canada in Ottawa. I would also like to especially thank
the staff of the University of North Dakota’s Chester Fritz Library
(especially Will Martin, Zeineb Yousif, and Stephanie Walker) for
their assistance finding obscure references and building the com-
panion website to accompany this book (which can be found at
https://commons.und.edu/settler-literature, in the UND schol-
arly commons). This book could not have been written without the
work of many hardworking librarians and volunteers worldwide dig-
itizing manuscripts and making them available for free through the
internet. Please keep up the good work!
• My patient publishers at Palgrave, who have been excellent to work
with and their anonymous readers, whose influence in shaping this
book I hope to repay some day.
• I would like to thank the publishers of journals and presses who
have allowed me to try out ideas from this book in different
forms, including Western American Literature, Wiley-Blackwell
Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, and English in Africa. Parts of
two chapters were published as essays in Settler Colonial Studies and
Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and
Cultural Studies (Ed. Robert Tally. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
 Contents

1 The Settler Saga 1

2 Guilt and the Settler–Indigene Relationship 41

3 Guiltscapes of the Homestead, Village, and Fort 81

4 Settler Guilt and Animal Allegories 117

5 The Lost Settler Child 157

Conclusion: Settler Holidays and Guilty Reenactments 199

Afterword: Settlers, Guilt, Denial, and Me 225

Index 235

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 The walls surrounding the historic Lower Fort Garry site
in Manitoba (Picture by the author) 3
Fig. 1.2 The empty tepee visitors pass to visit the Lower Fort Garry
site in Manitoba (Picture by the author) 4
Fig. 1.3 The frontispiece to Conquering the Wilderness… by Colonel
Frank Triplett presents its own settler fantasy 6
Fig. 2.1 Settler and Aboriginal Family Round a Fire, South Australia by
Edward Russell (Reproduced courtesy of the National Library
of Australia, collection number an5880827) 57
Fig. 2.2 A Native Family of New South Wales Sitting Down on an
English Settlers Farm, by Augustus Earle (Reproduced
courtesy of the National Library of Australia, collection
number an2818442-v) 58
Fig. 3.1 Still from the American “Crying Indian” Keep American
Beautiful public service announcement of 1971 82
Fig. 4.1 Peaceable Kingdom (1834), the version housed in the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (US) and a detail from the
background of the same painting, showing the painting’s
animal analogy 123
Fig. 4.2 Peaceable Kingdom (1834), the version housed in the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (US) and a detail from
the background of the same painting, showing the painting’s
human analogy 124
Fig. 5.1 An 1871 illustrated edition from Kingsley’s The Lost Child 173

xi
xii    List of Figures

Fig. 5.2 The Little Wanderers, William Strutt’s painting of the living
Duff children resembling a postmortem drawing
(Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Australia,
collection number 3240607) 174
Fig. 5.3 A photograph by Jose Maria Mora of an unknown deceased
girl, posed as if asleep out in nature 175
Fig. A.1 Still from the YouTube video “Inside Voortrekker
Monument, Day of the Vow” that shows the cenotaph, the
shaft of sunlight, and the crowd of onlookers 200
 Introduction: “Sorry Books”
and the Guilt That Never Goes Away

When British colonist Thomas Need immigrated to Canada in 1832,

he traveled by train, canal boat, and horse-drawn wagon to the plot of
land he had purchased, land that had been taken from the indigenous
Canadians—at least in title, since the people were, in fact, still there. Like
most settler accounts, much of Need’s Six Years in the Bush or Extracts
from the Journal of a Settler in Upper Canada, 1832–1838 focuses on the
work of carving a home out of the wilderness: clearing land for house
and farm, planting crops, and hunting/domesticating or eradicating
hungry animals. What it lacks is discussion of the emotions Need must
have felt—the desperation to succeed, the hope of a better life for him
and his children, the terror of failure or death, and the despair of having
left behind everything familiar. To this list of unacknowledged emotions,
I add the inevitable guilt of taking over land that clearly is, as I will show,
inhabited by another.
Unlike most settler accounts, Need’s diary is unusual in that it reflects
on his legitimacy as a colonizer.1 After reaching his new landholding,
Need begins a survey, remarking, I “wandered on, forming plans for
the future, and peopling the solitudes around me in my mind’s eye,
until the lengthening shades of evening warned me to rejoin my com-
panions” (54). Here Need first imagines the land as empty (“the soli-
tudes around me”) and yet also “peopled” by future settlement, both of
which work to justify colonization, with the future settlement justifying

xiii
xiv    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

the first settlers’ hardship. Yet Need’s very next sentence complicates this
justification by acknowledging the prior existence of indigenous peo-
ple. The rest of his surveying party, he explains, was roasting “a haunch
of venison, bought of an Indian, as usual” (54). These “Indians” from
whom his men “as usual” buy meat were already present on the land
Need claims for his own.2 This prior existence, even if Need does not
acknowledge it, would have meant inhabitance, if not ownership.3 These
two juxtaposed sentences—one justifying Need’s ownership and the next
undermining it—show the competing demands settlers like Need had
to manage: while writing their own ownership into existence, they had
to account for the prior presence of indigenous people on the land they
want to claim, but in such a way that their settler ownership would not
be endangered.
Need presents an even clearer example of this cognitive dissonance a
year later:

On returning home, I found a party of Indians encamped on my prop-

erty near the lake. At first I felt very much disposed to assert my manorial
rights and dislodge them; but on cooler reflection, it struck me that, in
their eyes, I might seem the intruder, and that on the whole it would be
politic as well as charitable to leave them in peace, and live on kindly terms
with them during their sojourn. (98, emphasis original)

Here Need labels the Indian settlement an “encampment” and dis-

cusses their presence as a “sojourn,” both words suggesting temporary
inhabitance. Yet, at the same time he wonders—just for a minute—if
he might be the “intruder” instead, revealing his own buried doubts
about his ownership and leading him to alter his behavior, from dis-
placing to living alongside them. Here Need recognizes the true moral
and legal messiness of his situation, which the rest of his narrative
works hard to erase. Yet “voicing” these self-doubts in his narrative
does not dissuade him from his larger settlement project but apparently
expiates them.
In its simultaneous revelation of guilty feelings and work to repress
them, Need’s account is emblematic of the artifacts Frontier Fictions:
Settler Sagas and Postcolonial Guilt examines. This book analyzes such
moments of ambivalence across nineteenth-century Anglophone settler
literatures of the United States, Australia, South Africa, and Canada in
order to dispute the notion that nineteenth-century colonists did not
 INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xv

experience guilt. Instead Frontier Fictions argues that texts like Need’s
would not have worked so hard to depict the heroic settler as undis-
puted landowner if doubt were not already circulating. Examining guilt
requires some nuance, though. Unlike Need’s account, protagonists of
most settler texts do not ponder being intruders. Instead, as this book
will illustrate, most reveal guilty thoughts and feelings through echoes,
efforts to bury or disguise them, and translucent fantasies that only par-
tially cloak the ghostly contours underneath.
As I have shared bits of this research in the decade it took to write
this book, I often encountered two responses. Some listeners patiently
explained that of course settlers felt guilt and wrote about it (as if this book
and its examination were unnecessary). These scholars reminded that guilt
over colonization and settlement is clearly visible in the work of writers
like Thomas Pringle, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others, as well as in the
work of benevolence and missionary societies. These texts not only indi-
cate an awareness that wrongs have been committed against indigenous
peoples, but also often express some level of culpability for those wrongs.
On the other hand, other listeners patiently explained that of course set-
tlers did not feel guilty (as if this book and its examination were anachro-
nistic). Guilt and feelings of responsibility for the treatment of indigenous
peoples, they said, are twentieth/twenty-first-century responses that I am
imposing on nineteenth-century people, who did not see indigenous peo-
ple as human or understand colonization as a form of invasion.
Frontier Fictions walks a line in the middle of these two reactions. It
recognizes authors on both poles, those who much discussed guilt and
those who completely ignored it, paying the greatest attention, as I will
explain, to texts that fall in between. Frontier Fictions examines how
ordinary settlers, perhaps not fully conscious of guilty feelings, expressed
ambivalence in subtle, indirect ways—misgivings flashing onto the pages
of otherwise typical settlement narratives. Thus this book conceptual-
izes guilt not just as the reaction of a few progressives with greater than
average sensitivity and insight, but as an understandable—even predict-
able—reaction to an emotionally difficult circumstance. Historians like
Henry Reynolds have likewise archived examples of ordinary people
expressing reservations about the morality of settlement, such as when
a Port Philip settler wrote in the 1840s “this right to Australia is a sore
subject with many of the British settlers… and they strive to satisfy their
consciences in various ways” (Frontier: Reports from the Edge of White
Settlement 162). Such direct discussions of guilty consciences are few and
xvi    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

far between. But one can only speculate how many more people expe-
rienced pangs of conscience than those with the literacy skills and time
to record them. Writing is all the evidence contemporary scholars have
to uncover complicated historical responses to colonization, so we must
unearth underlying guilt by analyzing stories that recur in text after text
about settlers and settlement, stories that betray all the hallmarks of what
psychologists and psychoanalysts call “defense mechanisms.”
Frontier Fictions, in focusing on narrative defense mechanisms, is a
book about psychological guilt and all the ways literature can provide
means to defend against that guilt. As I have indicated above, nine-
teenth-century European settlers and their descendants were and are
wrestling with complicated and often un(der)expressed guilt inherent in
the colonizing process, which throughout this book I refer to as “set-
tler guilt,” a state of mind that can be historically situated but that is
ongoing. The fields of settler colonial studies and postcolonial studies
would benefit from paying greater attention to settler guilt, especially to
how literature expresses and interacts with it.4 A greater understanding
of settler guilt will result in a more nuanced awareness of settlement as a
transnational, historic and contemporary phenomenon and appreciation
of literature as part of that culture. By reading texts like Catherine Parr
Traill’s Backwoods of Canada or Marcus Clarke’s For the Terms of His
Natural Life in terms of their expressions of or denials of psychological
guilt, we gain insight into the historic and contemporary transnational
situation that we call “settlement.”
Frontier Fictions investigates how the narrative tropes this book exam-
ines—the heroic settler, the “doomed” native, the coveted landscape, the
allegorical animal, and the lost child—together function to justify settle-
ment and so appear in texts across settler cultures. By exploring com-
monalities among settler cultures, this book recognizes that the settler
experience includes wrestling with guilt, even if denying it. These com-
monalities lead to studying settlement and its fantasy of legitimacy hori-
zontally across time and space instead of vertically as a phase in a nation’s
development, or as Patrick Wolfe recommends in “Settler Colonialism
and the Elimination of the Native,” as a structure, not an event—a
phrase that has become a touchstone of settler colonial studies and one
that grounds this study. And as a structure and not an accomplished
event, settlement as it continues must be reasserted, defended, and legit-
imized, even hundreds of years after its initial acts, since those of us liv-
ing in the nations that evolved from settler colonies are still existing in
 INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xvii

this structure and are thus still settlers. Recognizing that settlement must
still be asserted, however, positions it as a structure that can be inter-
rupted or dismantled in the service of indigenous survivance, not as an
inevitability.5

The Twentieth Sorry Century

This book juxtaposes contemporary settlement literature with nineteenth-
century settler stories, like Thomas Need’s, in order to examine how
nineteenth-century tropes must still be circulated as settlement continues
and needs to be defended. I began this book wondering if the awareness
of guilt I saw in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was evident in
the nineteenth; I end it with awareness that the situations I observed in
the nineteenth-century endure in the twentieth and twenty-first. As the
decisions, resulting protests, public response, and then governmental
actions around the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2017 make clear, citizens
of the nations that arose from settler colonies are still settlers playing the
same dramas with much of the same rhetoric.
This book began with rumination on a contemporary settlement
event, Australia’s “Sorry Movement”: the public demonstration of apol-
ogy in the late 1990s, spurred by the release of two shocking govern-
ment reports and the occurrence of two landmark court cases, both
exacerbated by the government’s refusal to release an official apology to
the indigenous people it had historically harmed. Much has been written
about these events by Australian scholars, but for those unfamiliar, the
first report, 1991’s Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, investigated reasons
for the disproportionate number of Indigenous Australians dying while
incarcerated. The second report, 1997’s Bringing Them Home, studied
the “stolen generation” of more than 100,000 indigenous children taken
from their families by a century-long policy of assimilating indigenous
children into “white” culture, a situation largely forgotten or repressed
until the report brought this trauma back into public conscious-
ness. Also in the 1990s, the Australian High Court decided two land-
mark cases: Mabo v. Queensland (1992) and Wik Peoples v. Queensland
(1996), together overturning the concept of terra nullius, which held
that Australia was legally available for British colonization and that
Indigenous Australians had and have no rights to it. Responding to the
two reports and court decisions and culminating decades of activism,
Australians for Native Title called for the government of the 1990s under
xviii    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

PM John Howard to issue a formal apology to Indigenous Australians, a

request refused for many years. An official apology was finally issued in
2005 under Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd.
Prime Minister Howard’s refusal spurred many members of the
Australian public to demonstrate remorse on their own. Across the
country, people organized marches and other symbolic acts of repara-
tion, including on 28 May 2000, 250,000 Australians marching across
the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Two years earlier Australians for Native title
organized the first Sorry Day and campaign of “Sorry Books” placed in
civic spaces throughout the country, containing a one-page official apol-
ogy and blank pages for signatures and comments.
The books’ apologies read:

By signing our name to this book we are recording our regret for the
injustice suffered by Indigenous Australians as a result of European settle-
ment; In particular the effect of government policy on the human dignity
and spirit of Indigenous Australians. We are recording our desire for rec-
onciliation and for a better future for all our peoples. By signing this book
we are demonstrating a commitment to a united Australia, which values
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage, and provides justice and
equity for all.

Over one year, half a million Australians signed the over five hundred
Sorry Books and wrote further statements.6
Most of the statements added to the Sorry Books express regret and
communal guilt, like:

To be Australian is not to deny our history, which has shaped our Nation.
To be Australian is to accept what has happened in the past and to learn
from past events, in an effort to grow and develop our nation. I am
extremely ashamed and sorry for the mistreatment of Aboriginal people
and I would not only like to express my shame but also my hope that such
events will never again occur.

Statements like this provide a rich illustration of what I call “persistent

collective guilt,” meaning the continued experience of guilt for the more
overt violence of ancestors, compounded by one’s participation (even if
unwitting and unwilling) in continued acts of settlement.
As well, the Sorry Books provide a useful example of how denial
can serve as an expression of guilt and how settlement, as an enduring
 INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xix

project, continues to be defended. Some responses undermined the

apology with defensive sentiments, like “I shouldn’t have to say sorry.
I am not personally responsible for these tragedies. It was many years
ago. Let’s just get on with our lives and live peacefully together—all
as Australians.” Others displaced responsibility, as in “I am sorry even
though I myself haven’t done anything wrong. I hope in the future
white people will respect you, and treat you as equals, like I always
have.” A few expressed hostility: “Nonsense. We would need to apolo-
gize for every war/theft/cruelty throughout history. I’m sure we all
have ancestors who were hard done by. Our modern capitalist system is
not entirely fair! Not everyone follows the rules anyway. What were the
rules back in the eighteenth century and nineteenth century? Were they
fair? Was it that the squatters broke the law?” These Sorry Books con-
tain a treasure trove of complicated reactions to apology, responsibility,
and reconciliation. And as the title of this introduction indicates, these
Sorry Books parallel the discussion of Frontier Fictions: Settler Stories
and Postcolonial Guilt in that they record ambivalence and denial of guilt
that might otherwise remain internal. The Sorry Books also show that
awareness or experience of guilt does not always result in change. For
instance, Sorry Day was renamed in 2005 “National Day of Healing for
All Australians,” a significant shift from apology to equal victimhood and
healing. Meanwhile, Indigenous Australians remain a persistent under-
class (as do most of the indigenous groups this book discusses) in regard
to health, economic, and social problems. Though the apology was
important, being apologized to didn’t end oppression.7
Yet, despite its failure to completely uproot the Australian class hier-
archy, the Sorry Movement, like other reconciliation movements world-
wide, highlighted that the nation’s unresolved colonial past continues
to impede progress. Of course, desires for reconciliation and atonement
are not isolated to Australia. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation
Commission—like other twentieth-century truth commissions—was
also created in belief that the nation could not progress until it dealt
with the harm created by apartheid. Canada has also attempted to work
through the psychological and legal morass of colonial crimes by rene-
gotiating treaties with its indigenous population and through its own
truth commission, which concluded in December 2015.8 My own coun-
try, the United States, continues to struggle with need to atone to both
the historical victims of slavery and the indigenous victims of settlement
with official apologies presented in 2009, including injunctions against
xx    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

seeking monetary reparations. Nevertheless, if not providing repara-

tions, symbolic apologies do mark the government’s response to calls for
healing.
Frontier Fictions grows out of transnational cultural movements of
the late twentieth century, like those noted above; but it primarily looks
backward to argue that awareness of the harms of settlement is not new.
Thus each chapter brackets its discussion of nineteenth-century texts
with similar tropes still at work: to emphasize that settlement continues
to need to be asserted and that contemporary situations of inequality and
oppression lead writers and readers to rely upon the same colonial tropes.

The Secret River and Other Sorry Novels

To further explore this connection between expressions of settlement
guilt and literature, I will briefly analyze an important historical novel
about settlement, Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005). Grenville’s
companion text, Searching for the Secret River, tells about the novel’s
writing and how she was inspired to research and novelize the life of a
convict ancestor after an indigenous friend helped her see that her ances-
tor’s “taking up land on the Hawkesbury River,” as her family mythos
held, was really “taking land.” The novel thus demonstrates a culture
continuing to wrestle—through literature—with the legacies of settle-
ment, including guilt, and apology.
A second reason for my interest in this novel concerns its explicit
work to recover unexpressed nineteenth-century settler guilt. Grenville’s
carefully researched account of her ancestor Solomon Wiseman (whom
she renames “William Thornhill”) begins with his impoverished life in
England before his transportation to Australia for stealing. The novel’s
focus, however, is on his life in Australia as a convict and then a free
farmer, where he and his wife produce five children and eventually claim
a prosperous riverbank farm near present-day Sydney. Yet the novel is no
typical nostalgic tale of settlement success (à la Colleen McCullough’s
1977 The Thornbirds), for Grenville unearths Thornhill’s emotions—the
motivations, anxieties, and regrets she imagines her ancestor must have
had—not typically explored in novels about settlement. In particular,
Grenville investigates Thornhill’s struggles to rationalize the legitimacy
of his colonization and deny indigenous presence on the land he covets,
that is his sense of settler guilt.
 INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xxi

Indeed, much of the novel involves Thornhill dealing with the psy-
chological conundrum and the resulting guilt from settling already
inhabited land. When Thornhill sees evidence of indigenous crops, for
instance, he convinces himself that the plants grow wild. Then, when he
sees that “some other man had set foot here, worked it with his pick,” he
denies that fact, telling his son that animals had dug the dirt (140). But
indigenous ownership of the land Thornhill covets keeps being asserted.
He discovers rock paintings of a fish and his boat, evidence of contin-
ued indigenous habitation, since the paintings portray his own recent
arrival. Thornhill has an epiphany: “It came to him that this might look
an empty place, but … this place was no more empty than a parlour in
London, from which the master of the house had just stepped into the
bedroom. He might not be seen, but he was there” (206). Yet Thornhill
continues to pretend to himself and others that the indigenous claim
does not exist. And, when he cannot deny it any longer, he participates
in a communal massacre of the indigenous people, in an attempt to erase
them from “his” site—and psyche. The book’s ending shows, however,
that Thornhill’s guilt over these actions haunts him the rest of his life.
By imagining the thoughts of settlers, Grenville resurrects a nineteenth-
century settler guilt that has remained largely unrecorded. Similar efforts
have been made in the work of historians like Henry Reynolds, who have
labored to include the erased and denied violence of colonization in
Australia’s historic record.9 Grenville’s work to understand how “taking
land” became recast as “taking up land” parallels the work of this “sorry
book,” the one you are now reading; for Frontier Fictions takes as its aim
the recovery of the (often) unexpressed settler guilt of settlers and the
unpacking of the stories they and their descendants tell to sanitize colonial
violence. My argument is that we need not rely on contemporary novelists
like Grenville to imagine nineteenth-century settler guilt; instead we can
read the nineteenth-century literature itself for evidence, through the nar-
ratives that emerge as tropes across the settler corpus.
My third reason for interest in The Secret River concerns how it func-
tioned within early twenty-first century Australia’s wrestling with its own
continued settlement. The Secret River sparked the public’s imagination,
becoming a critically acclaimed best seller, adapted into a successful play
and film. The novel provided a cultural touchstone for a nation that
needed to have a conversation post-Mabo and work through its settler
guilt. Marguerite Nolan and Robert Clarke, in fact, show in “Reading
The Secret River” how it encouraged public debate about postcolonial
xxii    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

reconciliation. The Secret River is not alone in this work. The American
Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Canadian Thomas
King’s Green Grass, Running Water, and South African JM Coetzee’s
Disgrace all examine contemporary culpability and reoccurring narratives
of legitimacy.10 In some cases, as with the DVD of the Australian film
Rabbit Proof Fence (from Doris Pilkington’s book), which includes mate-
rials for discussion groups, the spurring of public debate about reconcil-
iation seems deliberate. Frontier Fictions argues that these texts, through
these conversations, aided the management of settler guilt not only of
writers but also of readers, who—through the novels—confronted,
explored, and sometimes denied their own settler guilt.
These recent texts present an apt analogy for the work of settler stories
in the nineteenth century, which also aided the confrontation, explora-
tion, and denial of guilt. However, evidence of the cultural and psycho-
logical work being performed by the nineteenth-century novels is not
always as clear with contemporary texts like The Secret River. Some texts
this book examines, like Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, were widely
read in their own time, but many were not. So the evidence is subtle and
elusive, as I attempt to recover reader responses without book reviews
of the day, historical studies of readership, or evidence that settlers were
reading each other’s work.11 Thus my focus on nineteenth-century texts
is often on what these stories of settler contact tell us about authors
struggling with feelings about settlement instead of on readers who I
can only suppose existed. My exploration, then, relies, as I will explain,
on the texts themselves and the repeated tropes they contain—stories
of heroic settlers, “doomed” natives, coveted land, allegorical animals,
and lost children—which repeat across four settler cultures, over two
centuries and beyond, because of the emotional release they provided and
continue to provide.

Spaces of Settlement
My explication of common tropes in nineteenth and twentieth/
twenty-first-century settler tales in order to better understand the
Anglophone settler experience demands that I cut a broad swath in
my analysis. Like James Belich in Replenishing the Earth: The Settler
Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World, 1783–1939, I am fasci-
nated by the explosion of Anglo-settler colonies across the globe. And
like other texts of settler colonial studies, this project is comparative.12
 INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xxiii

Frontier Fictions analyzes Australia, South Africa, Canada, and the

United States because of their similarities and differences in coloniza-
tion and reconciliation, and because of how these experiences affect
their literatures. I chose these four former settler colonies because
each experienced twentieth-century cultural movements to make colo-
nial reparations, which, while making space for apology and reconcili-
ation, also revealed societal rifts, indicating an ambivalence important
for postcolonial studies to analyze. By including the United States of
America, Frontier Fictions, as does Walter Hixson’s American Settler
Colonialism: A History, counters “American exceptionalism.” Despite
calls for the United States to be included in postcolonial discussions,
critics still often leave American literature out of postcolonial debates.13
Frontier Fictions, though, examines the United States as another settler
colony, though one that transitioned from being an occupation colony
to settler colony to colonizer of other spaces (like Puerto Rico and the
Philippines).
I chose these exemplar settler states also because they evince a com-
plicated mix of competing ethnicities. As well as the simplistic white/
black binary of settler and indigene, the countries all contain competing
groups of “whites,” which is important for understanding how literature
constructs “good” and “bad” settlers in its efforts to deflect or project
guilt, explored in Chapter 1. The English and Dutch in South Africa; the
English and French in Canada; the convict and free settler (and English
and Irish) in Australia; and the English, French, and Spanish in the
United States all historically competed for resources and colonial dom-
inance, and in many cases, this tension led to violence over resources.
The Afrikaner descendants of the Dutch warred with the English; the
Quebecois descendants of the French also battled the English; the British
fought wars with the Spanish and French over colonial possessions
in the United States, in addition to what the United States calls “the
Revolutionary War”; and in Australia, lore holds that friction between
convicts and settlers (or “squatters”) stemmed from conflicts in the old
world, since many Australian convicts were Irish or political prisoners,
while soldiers and settlers came from the colonial masters.14
Other similarities among Canada, Australia, the United States, and
South Africa that encourage comparison (further be explored in Chapter 1)
come from the use of claims of indigeneity by settler descendants to estab-
lish land rights. For instance, two mixed race non-aboriginal groups in
both Canada (the Metis) and South Africa (the “Coloureds”) claim to
xxiv    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

be indigenous to their continent, putting them in conflict First Nations

Canadians and black South Africans over priority and land rights.15 Even
more complicated is that Afrikaners understand themselves as distinct from
their Dutch ancestors and thus born of Africa, with the rights indigeneity
brings. French Canadian Quebecois exhibit similar claims to indigeneity, as
a badge of victimhood and basis for rights. So, too, as Pal Ahluwalia has
noted, in Australia, white colonists who were born in Australia called them-
selves “natives” to distinguish themselves from more recent immigrants
and encourage assumed indigeneity, while indigenous peoples were labe-
led “aboriginal natives” to deny citizenship. As Ahluwalia explains, “The
myth of terra nullius was dependent upon the nonrecognition of the local
population and the ‘indigenisation’ of their white conquerors” (“When
Does a Settler Become a Native?” 65). Such claims, stemming from historic
debates, complicate contemporary work to assign land rights and collective
guilt, and again highlight important complexities of the post-colonial set-
tler experience.
Of course, despite similarities among Canada, South Africa, the United
States, and Australia, the nations are significantly different in how, when,
and by whom they were colonized; what techniques were used; and when,
how, and to what extent they experienced decolonization. They most
obviously differ in their current enjoyment of financial prosperity, health,
and global power. Despite its gains since 1994, South Africa, as the most
recently decolonized country, still remains economically, militarily, and
politically less advantaged than the other three; and the “white” pop-
ulation of South Africa, unlike the other three countries, is a numerical
minority (though an economically and politically empowered one). One
might argue that South Africa differs from the other three nations in that
its settlers (the Afrikaners and English) are no longer in national political
power, though their economic and cultural power remains significant. This
book aims to hold in tension discussion of these important historical and
cultural differences while analyzing the settler narratives, because when
held side by side, despite differences, the literatures of these nations illumi-
nate important shared facets of the settler condition in the contact zone.16

The Nineteenth-Century “Guilted” Age

Though set in four very different settings, all of the texts Frontier
Fictions examines were written by first generation settlers. That is, the
texts that proved most useful for my investigation were stories of colonial
 INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xxv

contact, of early white settlers who struggled to make a home in their

new country while facing—in a literal way—the people already living
there. Indigenous peoples had not been already pushed off to the side so
that their presence could be ignored. Borrowing from what Mary Louise
Pratt in Imperial Eyes calls “the contact zone,” meaning “social spaces
where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other,” (6) I call these
settlers “contact settlers” (and their descendants in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries “continued settlers”). These contact settlers broke
ground in a space where encounter and conflict with indigenous peo-
ples were inevitable. As Mahmood Mamdani explains in “When Does
a Settler Become a Native?”, “Settlers are made by conquest, not just
by immigration,” meaning that violence of some sort—cultural, eco-
nomic, ideological, and physical—was intrinsic to settlement, no matter
the good intentions of the settlers themselves (222).17 Frontier Fictions
focuses on the psychological violence necessary to justify colonizing the
land of indigenous owners who were very much still present.
For these contact settlers, resistance from indigenous peoples was an
ever-present threat because, though the land had been officially claimed,
the on-the-ground work to wrest ownership from the indigene had yet
to be done. These first settlers cut down forests to create farms, pulled
up stumps to plant crops, built cabins from those trees, and established
relationships with other regional settlers and indigenous neighbors. Later
settlers, which one could call “communal settlers,” would come to a set-
tlement already established, where towns were already named and con-
structed, needing people to run stores, newspapers, and schools, where
indigenous people had already largely been displaced and physically and
psychologically contained. While these simple categories in practice had
many overlaps, my interest is in studying and understanding contact but
not communal settlers, because with contact settlers comes more direct
encounter with the indigene that is useful for my understanding of how
that encounter was psychologically and literarily processed.
I limited the authors this study reads to those I could classify as having
inhabited the settler perspective (with more being explored on this book’s
companion website, to be found at https://commons.und.edu/settler-
literature).18 So, for instance, though Henry Kingsley did not remain
in Australia (he immigrated to Australia in 1853, returning to England
in 1857 after failing on the goldfields), I include him because at one
time, he fully intended to remain in Australia and experienced the psy-
chological state his book describes. He was not an armchair settler, like
xxvi    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

R. M. Ballantyne and G. A. Henty, who both wrote sensational and quite

popular novels about settlement from the comfort of Britain. (The complete
list of settler texts I used and considered can also be found at this book’s
companion website, in the University of North Dakota’s digital commons.)
I chose the nineteenth century for my focus because of the importance
of the historical novel and memoir in that century to the national con-
sciousness of the four settler colonies I analyze. In the nineteenth century,
eyewitness settler accounts began to be turned into fiction, readily pro-
duced and consumed by settlers and potential settlers. This focus on the
nineteenth century, however, meant juxtaposing literatures of colonies in
different stages of colonization: the North American and Canadian colo-
nies were well established on the East coast by the nineteenth century but
were expanding to the West coast, while Australia and South Africa were
in the thick of early British colonization. However, despite residing in dif-
ferent stages of settlement, the narratives of contact settlers, when juxta-
posed, provide telling correspondences regarding life in the contact zone.
This book’s title “frontier fictions” emphasizes that all of these texts,
whether claiming to be fictional or not, present fictions of the frontier,
the always expanding edge of settlement which is still being asserted
in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, despite Frederick Jackson
Turner’s famous edict that the frontier closed in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Regarding my use of the word “fictions” in my title: throughout
this book, I do examine contact settler narratives written as nonfic-
tional, either collections of letters, like Catherine Parr Traill’s Backwoods
of Canada; or diaries or memoirs, like Louisa Ann Meredith’s Notes and
Sketches of New South Wales. I also explore settlement novels, like James
Fenimore Cooper’s American frontier story, Last of the Mohicans; John
Robinson’s South African settler saga, George Linton: Or the First Years of
an English Colony; John Richardson’s Canadian military tale, Wacousta:
Or, The Prophecy, a Tale of the Canadas; and Marcus Clarke’s Australian
convict narrative, For the Term of His Natural Life. I apply the same ana-
lytical strategies all texts, since fiction and nonfiction present one person’s
version of settlement, giving insight into the individual consciousness and
self-presentation as well as the nineteenth-century zeitgeist.
In addition to crossing literary genres, this study also reads texts from
a range of media, which argue that the settler fantasy that permeated the
nineteenth century is still very much in existence. The five key tropes
I examine (the heroic settler, the “doomed” native, the coveted land-
scape, the allegorical animal, and the lost child) pop up not only across
 INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xxvii

cultures and chronologies but also across various forms of media, includ-
ing print media but also paintings, book illustrations, television shows,
films, advertisements, monuments, museum exhibits, and tourist sites.
Such crossover is warranted, for, as Tanya Dalziell aptly explains in Settler
Romances and the Australian Girl, “the role popular texts played in the
production of settlers’ consent to colonial projects cannot be underesti-
mated” (6).
Frontier Fictions furthers the discussion of the settler experience by
looking at similarities in expression across time and space in order to
better understand the ambivalences of the settler psyche horizontally
as a continued experience of colonization, not vertically as a teleologi-
cal completed phase in a nation’s development. As such, the line of this
book’s argument tends to be more triangular than linear, as I compare
what a particular literary text says, what its author wrote and said else-
where, and the historical and cultural context in which the text was pro-
duced. Only by looking at a text as part of an interconnected triangle can
one see what it leaves out, alludes to, represses, denies, or deflects.

Context, Theory, and Methodology

This book’s investigation of contact settlers is built on a solid foundation
of prior scholarship to which it contributes, one being postcolonial stud-
ies.19 The larger field of postcolonial studies has long tended to polarize
texts into those of colonized or colonizer, mostly ignoring the intersti-
tial settler, who can tell us much about how ambivalence and colonial
guilt interconnect. But in recent decades, critics have begun theorizing
the settler experience, to great effect, thus creating an exciting new body
of scholarship to which this book contributes by providing literary exam-
ples of some of the more complicated dynamics discussed in history and
culture.20 Again returning to Patrick Wolfe’s argument that settlement
is a structure, my aim is to better explicate that mode of thinking and
the psychological impulses behind settlers telling their own stories. Other
critics of settler studies, like Mark Rifkin, have recognized and identified
important transnational patterns in settler literature and how they per-
meated thinking. This book aims to further explore the psychological
impulses behind such patterns to explain why they exist, why they cross
cultures and genres, and why they endure.
Explanation of methodology (why I chose to use a psychoanalytic the-
oretical lens and to read the texts that and as I did) is crucial because
xxviii    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

I am piecing together a story of an elusive psychological state that is

often only suggested. If the guilt were more apparent and the literature
more clearly defending against it, then, of course, this book would not
be necessary.
Guilt is a powerful word, provoking resistance from those who feel
targeted by it. So I should explain how I am using that term. First, this
book distinguishes between guilt and shame: guilt describes feelings
formed in reaction to a specific behavior, while shame describes the feel-
ings about oneself resulting from those feelings. That is, guilt is “I did
something bad,” while shame is “I am bad because of the thing I did.”
Though guilt might inspire shame, this project focuses on the emotions
resulting from the behavior instead of the state of being.
Additionally, this book differentiates between ontological guilt (the
state of being morally or legally guilty for a behavior) and emotional
guilt (the feelings experienced in response to the behavior). I stipulate
from the outset that settlers were ontologically guilty. I am influenced by
Albert Memmi in The Colonizer and the Colonized, particularly his dis-
tinction between “colonizers who accept” and “colonizers who refuse.”
Memmi argues, and I agree, that whatever feelings colonizers experi-
enced about their participation in empire, as beneficiaries, they are colo-
nizers—even if they protest, feel guilt, or deny allegiance to the mother
country. No matter their individual intentions in the name of nation or
God, settlers displaced the indigenous people already living on the land
they claimed.21 In stipulating their ontological guilt, though, I am nei-
ther vilifying settlers nor defending them. Settlers were players in a large
and complicated political, economic, and social process (including both
culture and religion), and my interest is in what they thought and felt
while participating in this process, not in castigating or excusing them.
The literature that contact settlers produced indicates that their feelings
were varied and complex, but that not all experienced emotional guilt. It is
a commonplace that even people who perhaps should feel guilty for violent
and transgressive behaviors often do not, while others feel excessive guilt,
even for behaviors for which they bear little responsibility. The literature this
book analyzes shows settlers displaying guilty feelings for their own oppres-
sive actions, but it also shows just as many expressing guilt even though
not directly involved in oppressing indigenous peoples, simply because they
belonged to the group doing the harm or because they benefitted from it.
Such contradictory responses can best be understood using the psycholog-
ical concept of collective guilt. Psychologists Wohl, Branscombe, and Klar
explain individual guilt as “an unpleasant feeling that accompanies the belief
 INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xxix

that the harmful act one committed was not justified” (“Collective Guilt”
2–3); but, in contrast, collective guilt, Branscombe and Doosje explain in a
related publication, “stems from the distress that group members experience
when they accept that their ingroup is responsible for immoral actions that
harmed another group” (Collective Guilt: International Perspectives 3). That
is, collective guilt need not involve participation in harm-doing; one only
needs to feel allegiance to or membership in the group responsible for the
harm-doing. As already introduced, Frontier Fictions further expands the
idea of collective guilt to “persistent collective guilt,” as a state of ontologi-
cal and moral guilt for an ancestor’s actions.
To better discuss this range of individual emotional responses to collec-
tive guilt, I propose a typology of four categories: Sensitivity, Ambivalence,
Disavowal, and Blindness, which can be seen in the expressions in the
Sorry Books already referenced as well as in the texts Frontier Fictions
will analyze. The first category, Sensitivity, is evident in articulation of
emotional guilt (and shame about oneself and culture in response to that
guilt). History is full of examples of Sensitivity and of texts written with
political aims or as part of benevolence movements, by intellectuals, activ-
ists, and abolitionists of slavery and colonization, including well-stud-
ied writers like Thomas Pringle and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The second
category, Ambivalence, can be characterized as the experience of emo-
tional guilt without full awareness and articulation of it. Guilt emerges
in Ambivalent writing as authors struggle with feelings they cannot quite
understand or admit, some denying these feelings, and others expressing
them in indirect ways. Many ordinary settlers, like Thomas Need, with
whom I began this introduction, display Ambivalence. My third category,
Disavowal, comes from the recognition that guilt exists with others but
the denial of it in oneself. Narratives of Disavowal are often bombastically
nationalistic, evoking indigenous people who are either absent or simplis-
tically evil. And the fourth category, Blindness, comes from the absence of
awareness of guilt in oneself or others and thus a lack of contemplation or
writing about it (though I might argue that we find hints of guilt in the
conspicuous absence of some topics). Distinction between being Blind or
Disavowing in relationship to guilt comes through a person’s response to
the issue of guilt. The Blind person would be confused (Why would they
feel guilty?) while a Disavowing person would be overly assertive of a lack
of guilt, indicating strong defensive feelings behind the denial.
These categories are not necessarily discrete or fixed. People can shift
relationship to guilt within their lifetime and even within the same nar-
rative. Though all are important, this book focuses on Ambivalence and
xxx    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

Disavowal, where the writing provides the most insight into the com-
plicated settler position. Frontier Fictions does not focus on Sensitive
texts that obviously express guilt and have been the focus of much liter-
ary criticism already or Blind texts that omit discussion or even recogni-
tion of guilt. Ambivalent and Disavowing texts are both more revealing
and representative of the larger society as it debates and weighs its
conscience.
Unpacking expressions of guilt in settlement narratives and under-
standing how they function for individuals and the larger culture requires
the psychoanalytic concepts of defense mechanisms. Psychologists and
psychoanalysts explain that people respond to feelings of guilt by tell-
ing themselves stories that defend against or release psychological and
emotional discomfort. The repeated, cross-cultural narratives threaded
throughout settler literatures function as defense mechanisms, allow-
ing an individual and a culture to recast the violence of settlement into
something else.
As one might expect, this book draws upon the work of Sigmund
Freud and other psychoanalyts, but my use here, is, as Anne McClintock
explains in Imperial Leather, a “situated psychoanalysis.” That is, Freud
was able, better than anyone, to recognize and theorize the complexities
of the modern condition because he was both an analyst and product
of his time (nineteenth-century colonial-era Europe). I, like other critics,
find his work useful for describing the tangled thoughts and emotions
that grow out of the complicated self/other dynamic that was exacer-
bated by the empire.22 Certainly, as this book argues, inherent in impe-
rial expansion is underlying ontological and emotional guilt; and Freud’s
theories of responses to guilt, though he doesn’t make this connection
himself, make sense as a product of deeply ambivalent colonialism as well
as descriptor of it.
It was Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud, however, who fully
theorized defense mechanisms in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense
(but again not connecting the behavior she witnessed to the impe-
rial world in which they lived), arguing that defense mechanisms must
operate on the subconscious level to be effective in reducing anxiety.
Psychologists since then have identified scores of defense mechanisms;
but the mechanisms that most show up in the literature Frontier Fictions
examines nevermind repression (trying to keep an unpleasant occurrence
from conscious thought), denial (manipulating perceptions to exclude
something unpleasant), identification (attributing to oneself the desired
 INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xxxi

characteristics of another), projection (attributing one’s own uncomfort-

able feelings and thoughts onto another), displacement or transference
(placing feelings about one subject or object onto another, safer situa-
tion), and rationalization or intellectualization (explaining away feel-
ings or situations through plausible explanations). These mechanisms,
all of which occur and function below the level of conscious thought,
can work in tandem in the same narrative. Primary defense mechanisms
(repression and denial) serve to prevent unacceptable ideas or impulses
from entering the conscience, while secondary defense mechanisms
(identification, projection, displacement, rationalization, and intellectu-
alization) grow out of these primary defense mechanisms and work to
alter reality, thereby keeping the individual from feeling anxiety or, in
the case of this study, guilt. I draw upon theories of defense mechanisms
throughout this book to show how narratives not only reveal underlying
guilt but also, through the act of being written and read, expiate it.
By investigating settler psychology, however, this book is not meant
to indicate mental illness in settlers. As Phebe Cramer remarks in The
Development of Defense Mechanisms: Theory, Research and Assessment,
psychoanalysts and psychologists have debated whether or not defense
mechanisms are pathological. Cramer, however, argues that they are not,
that adult defense mechanisms originate in the “normal” behaviors of
infants. This book likewise analyzes defense mechanisms as reactions of
otherwise sane, functioning people when put in the complicated environ-
ment of settlement. Contact settlers left their homes because their situ-
ation in Britain was in some way untenable, perhaps because of poverty,
a criminal offense, political or religious pressures, or lack of sufficient
opportunities. But the stresses of settlement—leaving behind everything
familiar to take a gamble on a better life in an unknown land, where
one’s survival depended on hard work, favorable weather, and good
luck and where the promise of prosperity meant beating out, killing off,
or pushing out indigenous competition—would require a high level of
coping.
To understand how defense mechanisms can work to deal with guilt, I
have found Sigmund Freud’s celebrated patient “the Rat Man,” written
about in “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis” (1909) useful.
Though the Rat Man was likely mentally ill whereas I see most settlers as
not, this case works well to show on the individual level the kind of story
creation as defense mechanism that Frontier Fictions traces. The patient,
a former male soldier, sought Freud’s help for his obsessive-compulsive
xxxii    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

behavior of traveling by train to repay a debt he owed a fellow soldier,

only to find upon reaching his destination that he had already repaid
the debt, an action Jose Brunner aptly describes as like “those of a rat
trapped in a cage, looking for a way out” (514). Simply, the “Rat Man”
had willed himself to forget repayment of the debt in order to compul-
sively enact this guilt ritual, which he confessed in analysis he did because
of an irrational fear that, if he did not, rats would eat out the anuses of
his father and fiancé (hence his sobriquet), a torture technique he had
learned of from a fellow soldier.
Through analysis, Freud uncovered the underlying events for which
the Rat Man felt truly guilty, which had nothing to do with financial
debt but were instead violent feelings towards his father and ambivalent
feelings towards his fiancé. Thus the Rat Man reenacted and later retold
the drama of the debt, which, while complicated, to him was less com-
plicated than his more troubling feelings about his father and fiancé. As
Brunner explains, the Rat Man’s “story is muddled, but it seems that this
was, in fact, its purpose. By being spoken aloud in Freud’s consulting
room, [his] words mirrored and communicated the turmoil raging in
his mind” (514). Because the real guilt was never satisfactorily resolved
through the debt drama, however, he felt compelled to repeat the effort
until Freud helped him deal with the true source of his guilt in analy-
sis. Importantly, the mechanism through which psychoanalysis works,
transference, is similar to what the Rat Man was attempting on his own:
working through an issue by replaying it in a “safer” space, which in
analysis is the analytic session with the analyst playing whatever role the
patient needs him/her to. Psychoanalysis uses this analytical transference
to resolve the patient’s paralyzing issues so that the suffering is relieved
and the obsessive-compulsive behavior discontinued.
I introduce this case because it epitomizes the power of unacknowl-
edged guilt. The Rat Man case so clearly (perhaps exaggeratedly) shows
a person attempting to create his own alternative narrative to quell over-
whelming guilty feelings about something else. Like the Rat Man’s story
debt, this book reads contact settler texts as providing coping mecha-
nisms to individuals and cultures struggling with unmanageable feelings
of disquiet over real and symbolic violence towards indigenous people.
Often settlers work through guilt over settlement through tales that are
seemingly about something else (like the Rat Man’s debt drama), sto-
ries that deny guilt or replay the guilt in other “safer” realms and in the
pages of a book that one can put aside if it becomes too threatening.
 INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xxxiii

The accounts Frontier Fictions analyzes allow authors and readers to play
out one drama through another in order to manage painful feelings of
guilt resulting from conflict with indigenous people. Like the Rat Man rit-
ualistically repeating his narrative in real life and in analytic sessions, tales
of settler heroes, doomed natives, welcoming animals, tamed landscapes,
and lost children are told (with slight variation) over and over in novels
and accounts of settlement. These stories mark a compulsion to manage
colonization’s many anxieties, but because the defense mechanisms are
never entirely successful at warding off the stressors—difficult work for
any single book, poem, story, diary, or account—and because the messy
work of settlement continues, the mechanisms must be repeated in tale
after tale, in futile attempt for the stress of settlement to fade away.

The Chapters
Frontier Fictions is organized into five chapters and a conclusion, with
each chapter focusing on reading one of what Robert Shohat and Ella
Stam in Unthinking Eurocentrism have called “tropes of empire,” across
the four settler colonies and the nineteenth century, with twentieth and
twenty-first-century examples brought in where relevant. This thematic
organization emphasizes the commonalities of the settler experience and
the similar archetypal stories repeated in each place as part of managing a
common settler guilt. One of the chief values of this study is in the con-
nections it draws: among these four settled spaces, among the many texts
it reads (some never before juxtaposed or discussed), among what seem
to be disparate forms (nonfiction, fiction, television, film, poetry, art, dia-
ries, monuments, etc.), and among interrelated but not typically linked
narrative genres.
The book’s first two chapters juxtapose contact settlers’ stories of their
own lives with stories of the lives of their Others, the people indigenous
to the space being settled. Chapter 1, “The Settler Saga” explores rep-
resentations of contact settler life, like Catherine Parr Traill’s Canadian
tale, Backwoods of Canada (1836); James Fenimore Cooper’s story of
the American frontier in The Deerslayer (1841); John Robinson’s South
African narrative, George Linton or the First Years of an English Colony
(1876); and Marcus Clarke’s account of Australian convicts, For the Term
of His Natural Life (which was published serially from 1870–1872 but
as a novel in 1874). I argue that these novels present a version of the
settler experience as a heroic saga, downplaying or erasing conflict with
xxxiv    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

indigenous peoples to focus on the settler’s journey from the old home
to the new one and struggle to conquer the land. In this way, these
stories participate in cultural denial, facilitating the disavowal of vio-
lence inherent in imperial conquest and the indigenous victims of that
violence. As well, Settler Sagas provide a means of identifying with the
victim, since instead of being perpetrator of colonial violence, the set-
tler becomes victim of it, most often at the hands of the English colonial
establishment. In this way, too, the settler becomes depicted as the Good
Settler and someone else as the Bad Settler, another important defense
mechanism.
The book’s second chapter, “The Doomed Native,” analyzes stories
of the contact settler’s interaction with the indigene in various spaces—
the settler’s land, the native’s land, or disputed territory. Tales like
American Emerson Bennett’s Forest and Prairie or Life on the Frontier
(1860), Thomas M’Combie’s The Colonist in Australia or the Adventures
of Godfrey Arabin (1850), Alexander Davis’s South African narrative
Umbandine: A Romance of Swaziland (1898), and John Cunningham
Geikie’s Adventures in Canada, or, Life in the Woods (1864) often depict
indigenes as already tragically doomed to eradication from forces out-
side of the settler’s control, therefore releasing the contact settler from
guilt and responsibility for genocide. Other stories portray the indige-
nous person as violent and unscrupulous, as being unfit for involvement
in “civilization.” These narratives function both as vehicles of denial and
projection (allowing the subject to project negative feelings onto some-
one else; “I hate him” becomes “He hates me,” or “I wish he would
die” becomes “he wants me to die”). This chapter also includes analysis
of captivity narratives, which though typically discussed as an American
genre, exist in all four nations.
The book’s final three chapters include stories about the landscape,
animals, and children, all as symbolic Others, sometimes representing
an indigenous person, always allowing the settler to assert the legiti-
macy of his ownership of the land. Chapter 3, “Guiltscapes and Coveted
Land,” examines the settler’s interaction with the landscape in texts
like Catherine Parr Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada (1836), Henry
Kingsley’s Australian novel of settlement, The Recollections of Geoffrey
Hamlyn (1859), John Robinson’s South African tale George Linton or
the First Years of an English Colony (1876), and William Gilmore Simms’
American story The Yemassee: A Romance of Carolina (1835). Instead
of being focused on representations of the landscape per se, this chapter
 INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xxxv

examines stories about the settler’s relationship with the landscape in

order to unpack how the land takes on symbolic importance, standing in
for the indigenous person as well as for itself and providing a mechanism
for defensive settler fantasies. Some of these stories depict settlement as
inevitable and the settled space as a place needing defending, instead of
as a place the offensive settler has invaded.
Chapter 4, “Guilt and Animal Allegories,” examines texts like
Catherine Parr Traill’s Canadian children’s book Lady Mary and Her
Nurse (1856), Mary-Ann Carey-Hobson’s settlement narrative The Farm
in the Karoo: Or What Charley Vyvyan and His Friends Saw in South
Africa (1885), Louisa Anne Meredith’s memoir Notes and Sketches of
New South Wales (1844), and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the
Mohicans (1826). These stories show the contact settler interacting with
animals, either as pets, as hunted for sport or food, or as objects of sci-
entific knowledge. Key to this literature are stories of the settler’s accept-
ance by animals (standing in for indigenous people), tales of the settler
developing a sort of indigenous relationship with animals including the
right to hunt and kill them, and narratives of the settler having supe-
rior scientific knowledge of and thus control over animals. Another ele-
ment of this type of story is the settler who wants to rescue animals from
indigenous people who would misuse or not appreciate them, again in a
fantasy of earning a legitimate land ownership. In this way, these stories
function as narratives of displacement, allowing the subject to displace
feelings of guilt about one subject into relationships with another subject.
The book’s final chapter, “The Lost Child,” includes tales of chil-
dren lost or dying, as in Ethel Pedley’s Australian children’s classic Dot
and the Kangaroo (1899), Catherine Parr Traill’s novel, The Canadian
Crusoes (1852), Timothy Flint’s American tale Little Henry, the Stolen
Child (1847), and “Beta’s” South African Stories (1901). White children
symbolize the contact settler writ large, typically, as in the Australian
Henry Kingsley’s Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn, wandering out into
the bush only to become lost and either die or be rescued, often by ani-
mals or indigenous people. In Australia, critics have examined these lost
child stories as helping white Australian culture to exorcize an important
ghost of their national guilt over mistreatment of Aboriginal children.
Conversely in South African literature, in what is termed the “Jim Goes
to Jo’Burg” tale, the lost child is often a black child wandering alone
in the city. These tales defend against guilt by showing the black child
only at risk from other black folk instead of being endangered by white
xxxvi    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

(English and Dutch) settlers, so that the violence of apartheid becomes

projected back onto the oppressed themselves. This chapter connects
those two genres and others as part of examining “lost” children as an
expression of the all-too-common experience of childhood mortality,
which was as threatening to the nineteenth-century settler community as
the landscape or animals.
The book concludes by interrogating a final “text” about contact
settlers: national holidays commemorating settlers and their settlement,
which are historically set but which continue to provide fascinating sites
to examine the struggle over settler guilt. The holidays (Australia Day in
Australia, the Thanksgiving holidays in the United States and Canada,
and The Day of the Vow in South Africa) continue to reenact an origin
myth of legitimized settlement on a cultural level. The holidays and their
settler origin myths have to be replayed because the work they perform
of managing guilt is always incomplete and because settlement and our
struggle with it continues. But unlike other texts I have examined, as the
resistance to the myth grows, the holiday-as-text evolves and changes
to reflect the morés of the day, in some cases providing an important
opportunity for indigenous peoples to symbolically resist and for the
descendants of settlers to examine collective guilt.
In sum, then, this book takes on fantasies of settlement, embodied in
the texts and events that surround nearly everyone touched by British
colonialism. For twenty-first-century settlers continuing to grapple with
the seemingly indelible legacies of England’s quest for global domina-
tion, the nineteenth century’s struggles with colonization provide origins
and lessons. By recognizing settler struggles with the guilt of coloniza-
tion and understanding the ways they forestalled the work of reconciling
their wrongs, perhaps contemporary cultures can disrupt the repeating
fictions of frontiers.

Notes
1. I have discovered other accounts of settlers who wrote about problems
with their settlement. For instance, Kate Grenville explains in Searching
for the Secret River that “among the stories of brutality were others of
honourable, even courageous behavior by settlers. At great cost to him-
self, the ex-convict David Carly in Western Australia in the late nine-
teenth century protested to the authorities about the mistreatment of
Aboriginal people: ‘Again I write to you … from this land of murder and
INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xxxvii

slavery and fraud … I have defended these murdered Slaves to the best of
my ability for 13 years and to my Complete Ruin so I will defend them
to the last as I have long since given up all hope of aid from any quarter’”
(125). Grenville creates her character Blackwood as a settler who is aware
of the multiple problems his settlement causes and who feels sympathy
for the indigenous people.
2. This study uses the misnomer “Indian” to refer to Native Americans (not
inhabitants of the country of India) where appropriate for the textual dis-
cussion. Most often, though, I refer to original inhabitants of the four
settler spaces I study using the term “indigenous” instead of Aboriginal
or First Nations or other cognates. I also do not use the more specific
designations of different language groups within the four countries under
analysis. The term “indigenous” distinguishes politically and culturally
between the inhabitants of spaces when the European settlers arrived,
who often did not distinguish among different language groups in their
own representations. I use the term “settler” throughout this book to
refer to Europeans of the fifteenth to twentieth centuries who traveled
to spaces with the intention of remaining there. I realize that some of the
indigenous people I discuss were at one time settlers themselves.
3. As I will explore in Chapter 3, a powerful justification for taking land
involved creating what Patricia Seed in her book Ceremonies of Possession
in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 calls “ceremonies of
possession.” For British settlers like Need, farming or gardening the land
was what was necessary to indicate ownership and erase the inhabitance
and ownership of indigenous hunter gatherers.
4. In the decade I have been writing this book, settler colonial studies has
become a recognized subdiscipline with its own journal and (contested)
canonical authors and texts. New books in settler colonial studies are
published monthly, with some of the most important of late including
not just the work of Patrick Wolfe, Lorenzo Veracini, and Mark Rifkin
discussed elsewhere in this chapter, but also including Fiona Bateman
and Lionel Pilkington’s Studies in Settler Colonialism, Lorenzo Veracini
and Edward Cavanagh’s Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler
Colonialism, and Sarah Maddison, Tom Clark, and Ravi de Costa’s The
Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation. This book aims to contribute to
this field’s understanding of the settler state of mind, to, as Macoun and
Strakosch suggest “provid[e] non-Indigenous people in settler states with
a better account of ourselves—rather than as an account of the entire set-
tler–Indigenous relationship” (438).
5. In this way, this project responds to emerging criticism that the field
of settler colonial studies is contributing to the enshrining of settler
colonialism as a stable, inevitable structure instead of opening cracks
xxxviii    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

for indigenous resistance. See Lenape scholar Joanne Barker’s “The

Analytical Constraints of Settler Colonialism” and Manu Vimalassery,
Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein’s “Introduction: On Colonial
Unknowing.”
6. Readers can find sample pages from the books at http://aiatsis.gov.
au/explore/articles/explore-sorry-books. The books are now held in
the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
(AIATSIS) collections.
7. For more on apology in contemporary settler-indigene relations, see
Elizabeth Povinelli’s Cunning of Recognition, Glen Coulthard’s Red
Skin White Mask and Penelope Edmond’s Settler Colonialism and
Reconciliation. For more on reconciliation movements, see Sarah
Maddison in Beyond White Guilt, Mahmood Mamdani in “Amnesty
or Impunity: A Preliminary Critique of the Report of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission of South Africa,” and Benita Parry in
“Reconciliation and Remembrance.”
8. See Paulette Regan’s Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential
Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada for an account of a
Canadian town officially apologizing to its indigenous citizens for board-
ing schools.
9. A bitter conflict between Reynolds and Keith Windshuttle, who claims
that Reynolds and others are overstating the violence has become known
as “The History Wars.” See the introduction of Attwood and Foster’s
Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience for a thorough explanation.
10. Other critics have examined how Disgrace functioned as a mechanism for
creating space for public discourse over guilt and reconciliation. See, for
instance, Benaouda Lebdai’s “J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace: Post-apartheid
Questioning of Reconciliation” and Julie McGonegal’s Imagining Justice:
The Politics of Postcolonial Forgiveness and Reconciliation (2009). The lat-
ter argues for literature as a catalyst for reconciliation.
11. I am grateful for the critical studies that trace readership, like Andrew
Van Der Vlies’ South African Textual Cultures: White, Black, Read All
Over and Francoise Le Jeune’s “‘A Woman’s Pen Alone …’ Catharine
Parr Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada.” Grant Christison’s “Readers and
Writers in Colonial Natal (1843–1910)” provides a gold-mine of infor-
mation, illustrating that settlers were reading each other’s writing pri-
marily in periodicals and that reading classics “from home” was an avid
pastime. As Christison notes, “In the early years of the settlement, the
number of colonists with literary ambitions seems to have surpassed the
capacity of local newspapers to accommodate them” (126).
12. Other comparisons between different settler colonies have been made
through edited collections, with chapters on different settler cultures,
INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xxxix

like Elkins and Pedersen’s Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century:

Projects, Practices Legacies and Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis’s Unsettling
Settler Societies.
13. Critics like Peter Hulme in “Including America” and Kaplan and Pease
in their introduction to Cultures of United States Imperialism and others
have stressed the postcoloniality of American literature and culture.
14. Thomas Keneally’s Bring Larks and Heroes and Peter Carey’s True
History of the Kelly Gang both examine this explanation, whether histori-
cally accurate or not.
15. See Mahmood Mamdani’s “When Does a Settler Become a Native?”
and Terrie Goldie’s Fear and Temptation for more analysis of jockeying
for indigeneity or ethnic native status in Africa. “Coloured” refers to an
Afrikaans-speaking mixed race population descended from Indonesian
slaves which has come to have a separate cultural identity from “white” or
“black” South Africans.
16. Covering four national literatures brings challenges of balance. I aimed with
each discussion to use examples from each national literature and culture,
meaning that in some cases I excised interesting examples from one nation
(or moved them to a note) because I had already discussed that nation in
the chapter. Discussion of these excised texts and more can be found at the
book’s companion website, at https://commons.und.edu/settler-literature.
17. See Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the
American Frontier for more on how American literature and culture were
built on colonial violence.
18. My analysis includes texts about that first generation of the settler con-
tact zone even if not written during it, like the novels of James Fenimore
Cooper written in the nineteenth century but set in the eighteenth,
because looking back to settlement of the East coast to justify the US’s
nineteenth-century imperialist actions in the West in the phase of contact
settlement also tells much about perceptions of guilt and representations
of the indigene.
19. Also see Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark and Edward Said’s Culture
and Imperialism. Morrison argues that nineteenth century American liter-
ature reveals the culture’s obsession with race even in literature seemingly
about something else, while Said finds underneath stories of gentility, a
suppressed exploitation of the colonial Other that made white privilege
possible. Frontier Fictions argues that this obsession with empire percolat-
ing through nineteenth century culture involved the management of guilt.
20. Many studies of settler colonialism (more than I have space to reference)
influenced this book, including Lorenzo Veracini’s Settler Colonialism:
A Theoretical Overview; Julie Evans et al.’s Equal Subjects, Unequal
Lives; Avril Bell’s Relating Indigenous and Settler Identities: Beyond
xl    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

Domination; Tracey Banivanua-Mar and Penelope Edmonds’ Making

Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity; Mark
Rifkin’s Settler Common Sense, and Alyosha Goldstein and Alex Lubin’s
Settler Colonialism.
21. I do not discuss religion as an underpinning for colonial actions because
the books themselves do not often do so. Where they do, I call attention
to the language, but of course, religion was for many part of their sense
of entitlement and justification, one of which they would be reminded if
there were a church on the frontier to attend.
22. See Ranjana Khanna in Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism
and Diane Simmons in “The Curse of Empire: Grandiosity and Guilt,”
which also traces how literary texts worked to mediate a sense of guilt
resulting from colonial expansion, focusing on the “loot” gained through
imperial exploitation.
 CHAPTER 1

The Settler Saga

One cannot deal successfully with the present or the future without under-
standing the past. True understanding comes from experiencing—Black
Creek presents experiences. From the first step onto the wooden boardwalk,
time changes. The smell of cooking, the sound of the blacksmith hammer-
ing on his anvil, the feel of soft fleece, the taste of fresh whole wheat bread
and the sight of crinolined skirts swaying along the pathways, all help to
erase the modern world for awhile. The visitor no longer merely views but
participates—history has become an experience involving all the senses. (11)
Lorraine O’Byrne, foreword to Black Creek Pioneer Village:
Toronto’s Living History Village

Places like the Black Creek Pioneer Village in Ontario, Canada as

described in the above epigraph exist because settlers continue to be fasci-
nated with imagining ourselves on the frontier. As O’Byrne says, such sites
facilitate visitors forgetting “the modern world” to “participate” in a set-
tler fantasy created from a multisensory experience. And in some of these
sites, visitors can dress in costume themselves to create photographic evi-
dence of the fantasy, allowing it to endure. These contemporary historic
sites, which I call “settler villages,” largely result from twentieth-century
citizens working to preserve the past and profit from “heritage tourism.”1
In a few cases, as with Brattonsville in South Carolina (United States),
the village marks a preservation of a historic site. In other cases, however,
as with the Bonanzaville Pioneer Village in Fargo, ND, the villages are
twentieth-century constructions, with buildings brought from across the

© The Author(s) 2018 1

R. Weaver-Hightower, Frontier Fictions,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00422-4_1
2 R. WEAVER-HIGHTOWER

region to approximate a historic town that never existed, or with build-

ings built to look historic. Filled with artifacts and antiques to create a
multisensory experience, some settler villages include costumed inter-
preters to give a sense of authenticity, while others include wax figures,
dioramas, cardboard cutouts, or paintings. Settler villages provide a prac-
tical venue for schoolchildren and visitors to see how early farm machin-
ery worked, how women cooked over wood fires in log cabins, and how
houses were constructed before electric lights and running water—all
valuable history lessons. But settler villages also present stories of settlers
akin to the textual stories this chapter will analyze.
There is a consistency to this story. Living history sites like Black
Creek Pioneer Village are not isolated to Canada but are also found in
Australia (like the Loxton Historical Village in South Australia and the
Wagin Historic Village in Western Australia), in the United States (like
Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, Brattonsville in South Carolina, and
the Laura Ingalls Wilder homestead in De Smet, South Dakota), and
though not as popular, also in South Africa (including historic build-
ings like the Drostdy Museum and village in Swellendam and much of
Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape). In my experience of visiting more
than a dozen across the four countries, typically settler villages contain
five to fifteen buildings, one or two historic houses plus a smithy or car-
pentry shop, a barn with tools and animals, a school, a country store, a
church, a doctor’s office, a post office, and a newspaper—all clustered
into a village, each building fitted out to illustrate how that space would
have looked in its original time. These villages remind of the contact set-
tlers’ constant toil, of how hard “they” worked so that “we” could enjoy
lives of comparative ease.2 For continued settlers, the experience provides
a sense of obligation to the ideals of the founders as well as the notion
that settlers earned the land on which we and our descendants live, a
world denying prior existence of indigenous peoples.3
Occasionally these sites present a more ambivalent version of settle-
ment, as does the Lower Fort Garry historic site near Winnipeg, which,
in addition to the typical range of settler buildings filled with historic
reenactors, also includes an Aboriginal Canadian tepee outside the fort
gates. The empty tepee provides a reminder of the site’s historical con-
text as a mechanism of violence, as does the thick wall visitors have to
traverse in order to enter the village. Though it is not accompanied by
historical information about the indigenous community it represents, the
tepee reminds of whom the fort was built to guard against. This uncon-
textualized Fort Garry empty tepee is more than is typically included in
 1 THE SETTLER SAGA 3

settler villages, which tend to present an all-white version of history, rein-

forcing the fantasy that contact settlers came to an empty land, deny-
ing the presence of indigenous peoples and the violence against them.4
These villages give a version of the tales of settlers and their families that
this chapter will call the “Settler Saga,” which typically initiate with the
sea voyage to the new colony, followed by an overland journey to the
place of settlement. Then much of the story, concerns setting up the new
home, conquering the land, and persevering despite obstacles (­including
indigenous presence) to create a new society. Settler Sagas can be n ­ ovels,
diaries or memoirs, even collections of letters or texts describing set-
tlement for the potential immigrant. This chapter collects texts across
genres and connects them to persistent collective guilt, covering new
ground by examining how Settler Sagas recast conflict with indig-
enous peoples into a fantasy of the settler’s struggle, thus illustrat-
ing and enabling denial of the violence inherent in imperial conquest
(Figs. 1.1 and 1.2).

Fig. 1.1 The walls surrounding the historic Lower Fort Garry site in Manitoba
(Picture by the author)
4 R. WEAVER-HIGHTOWER

Fig. 1.2 The empty tepee visitors pass to visit the Lower Fort Garry site in
Manitoba (Picture by the author)

This chapter examines stories about the ideal settler, heroic and him-
self indigenous and then stories of the victim settler, abused and deceived,
ending with analysis of the “Good Settler,” successful and benevolent,
a foil to the “Bad Settler.” As I will note at various places throughout
this chapter, prior critics have analyzed some of the texts I examine
(Catherine Parr Traill’s Backwoods of Canada; James Fenimore Cooper’s
The Deerslayer; John Robinson’s George Linton or the First Years of an
English Colony; and Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life),
while other texts (such as Frank Triplett’s Conquering the Wilderness and
Joseph Hilts’s Among the Forest Trees) have nearly been forgotten.

The Fantasy Settler in the Settler Fantasy

Denial is clearly at work in Settler Sagas, especially the form of denial
that Phebe Cramer identifies, in The Development of Defense Mechanisms,
as a “personal fantasy,” meaning the creation of a preferred version of
reality that seems more and more real to the subject the longer it exists
 1 THE SETTLER SAGA 5

so that, after a time, the subject cannot distinguish the preferred version
from reality. As Cramer explains, “The perceptual system may continue
to function, but it takes second place to the much preferred personal-
ized fantasy” (38). Individuals engaging in this form of denial may insist
that others engage in it, as well. It is not enough that they believe the
fantasy; they need to spread it to others. Though told by settlers writing
in different times on different continents in different settler situations,
the “personal” fantasies in these different books are remarkably similar
because all were in a similar situation of colonial contact. Overall, contact
settler literatures contain a fantasy of a heroic and self-sacrificing settler
that downplays the negative aspects of settlement (fear, doubt, aggres-
sion toward indigenous people). I call this fictional settler a “fantasy set-
tler” and the story in which he exists a “settler fantasy.”
The reality these stories mask was typically far less pleasant.5 In the
United States, for instance, the 1862 Homestead Act encouraged move-
ment into the Western territory by offering 160 acres to those able to
construct a dwelling and farm for five years. Yet conditions were harsh
enough that only half remained the five years, with the rest giving up to
try again or return home to a situation unpleasant enough to cause them
to immigrate in the first place. With little government help and nonexist-
ent social services, life expectancy was short. Even mail was unavailable
to early settlers. Yet, in the settler fantasy, this life of labor turned settlers
into martyrs, and only the worthiest remained to populate the country.
Despite (or because of) these harsh realities, the settler fantasy
endured. By the nineteenth century in the United States and Canada,
a first generation of settlers had been made into celebrities whose sto-
ries created a fantasy embraced by later generations spreading west-
ward across the continent. Much can be said about this influence just
by repeating the lengthy title of one late nineteenth-century American
text by Colonel Frank Triplett, who also authored The Life, Times
and Treacherous Death of Jesse James (1882).6 His text was entitled:
Conquering the Wilderness; or New Pictorial History, Life and Times of the
Pioneer Heroes and Heroines of America, A Full Account of the Romantic
Deeds, Lofty Achievements and Marvelous Adventures of Boone, Kenton,
Clarke, Logan, Harrod, the Wetzel Brothers, the Bradys, Poe, and Thirty
Other Celebrated Frontiersmen and Indian Fighters; Crocket, Houston,
Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill, and the Famous Plainsmen, Graham
Sutter, Marshall Freemont, Kearsey, and Other Historic Names of the
Pacific Coast with Picturesque Sketches of Border Life, Past and Present,
6 R. WEAVER-HIGHTOWER

Backwoods Camp Meetings, Schools and Sunday Schools, Heroic Fortitude,

and Noble Deeds of the Pioneer Wives and Mothers…. Remarkably, the
title continues for another eleven lines listing all of the heroic myths
the book recounts. Published in 1883, this book was already full of
tales of American settler heroes to inspire future settlers. As well as con-
vincing potential settlers of the glory awaiting them in the new world,
Conquering the Wilderness also helped to assuage the guilt of settlers
already in the United States by presenting a personal fantasy of the
heroic settler to replace the reality of violent and often failed coloniza-
tion. The stories in Conquering the Wilderness discuss Native Americans
but only as another obstacle to be overcome, like tree stumps in a plot of
land that needed removing (Fig. 1.3).
The frontispiece of the book facing this lengthy title page vis-
ually reinforces this fantasy. The drawing is captioned “The March of
Destiny,” echoing the phrase “manifest destiny” used to justify the
Westward expansion of the United States.7 In the drawing, men on
horseback and pointing into the distance, follow a train of covered wag-
ons and other riders passing a lonely cabin and tent set beside a river, all
riding into the sunset above an empty prairie. On the other side of the

Fig. 1.3 The frontispiece to Conquering the Wilderness… by Colonel Frank

Triplett presents its own settler fantasy
 1 THE SETTLER SAGA 7

river in the distance can be seen a tiny herd of bison and group of tepees.
The wagon train will bypass the Indians, which do not or cannot p ­ resent
significant obstacles in this “march” predestined to succeed (which I
explicate in Chapter 3).
Into this larger frontispiece scene are inserted two smaller circular
vignettes, one labeled “Kentucky” with a man in buckskin on a ledge
above a river pointing off into the distance, as if indicating to his com-
panion the direction he is planning to travel. The other vignette labe-
led “California” shows two men wading in a stream panning for gold
beside a tent, with the ocean and a ship in the background, likely carry-
ing other immigrants to shore to try their luck. Significantly, none of the
images of “the march of destiny” include cities, towns, or even recog-
nizable figures. The frontispiece gives three different approximations of
people in the midst of settling, not yet success stories. Instead the image
encapsulates the settler fantasy of a nation of people “destined” to be
successful, but in the midst of doing the hard work of settling. To return
to Cramer’s language, this image encapsulates Tripplett’s personal fan-
tasy, which, through the publication of the book, he endeavors to make
a national fantasy.8 I will return to this idea of the personal fantasy
expressed in narrative throughout this chapter, as I examine writers cre-
ating stories of settlement in their novels that directly counter the reali-
ties they would have witnessed around them, thus marking the stories as
defense mechanisms.

Settler Self-Sacrifice
Also part of the fantasy is that the noble and self-sacrificing settler is
doing the hard work of colonizing for the benefit of future generations.
As I will show, this depiction of the settler as a victim for his own future
progeny is a defense mechanism of identification (taking on desired
characteristics of an Other). By presenting himself as a victim, the set-
tler defends himself from blame for harm committed toward indigenous
Others, who are, one might argue, the real victims of the settlement
project.
This notion of the self-sacrificing settler is introduced in the preface
to Joseph Henry Hilts’ 1888 Canadian Settler Saga Among the Forest
Trees: Or How the Bushman Family Got Their Homes. In his other pub-
lished text, Experiences of a Backwoods Preacher or Facts and Incidents
Culled from Thirty Years of a Ministerial Life (1892), Hilts explains that
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Scotch and Welsh Tunes

The Scotch and Welsh also have a very rich store of folk song and
ballads. Along with the Irish they are children of the early Celts and
have brought down to us the music of early times. In all this music
we find the pentatonic scale, and a rhythm of this character

a dotted note followed by a note of shorter value,

which gives a real lilt to Irish, Welsh and Scotch music. We told you
about the Welsh bards and their queer violin without a neck, called a
crwth, and their little harp that was handed around their banquet
tables from guest to guest.
The Gaelic music, or that of the Scotch Highlands, dates back to
prehistoric times. You have seen a Scotch Highlander in his plaid and
kilties playing on his bagpipe, and it has a special kind of scale (two
pentatonic scales put together) like this:

G A B D E G
A B C♯ E F♯ A

and a drone bass (one tone that does not change and is played all
through the piece) which makes it hard to get the same effect on the
piano. Scotch bagpipes are heard in districts where the milk-maids
and serving folk get together in the “ingle,” and still “lilt” in the good
old-fashioned way.
The thing that makes us know Scotch music from any other is a
queer little trick of the rhythm called the snap in which a note of
short value is followed by a dotted note of longer value, instead of the
other way around which is more commonly found. Thus:

but the two ways are always combined, thus:

and so on. If you want to make up a real Scotch tune yourself, just
play this rhythm up and down the black keys of the piano from F# to
the next F#!
Many of the lovely poems of Robert Burns have been set to old
Scotch airs. He saved many of the old songs, for he gathered the
remains of unpublished old ballads and songs, and snatches of
popular melodies, and with genius gave life to the fragments he
found. In his own words, “I have collected, begged, borrowed and
stolen all the songs I could meet with.”
 Canadian Folk Songs

Canada has the folk songs of the habitant which are French in
character. They are very beautiful and full of romance and many of
them can be traced back to France. Many, however, were born in
Canada and reveal the hearts of people who lived in the great lonely
spaces of a new country.
 English Folk Songs

Most of the English folk songs are very practical accounts of the
doings of the people. The English seemed more interested in human
beings than in Nature, like the Scotch and Irish, or in romantic love
songs like the Latin races in Spain, France and Italy. The English had
to be practical for they were always leaders and at the head of things,
while the Scots and Irish were further away from the center and rush
of life and so went to Nature for their subjects.
There are about five thousand English folk songs which sing of the
English milk-maid and her work, the carpenter, the hunter and his
hounds, and hunting calls. They have the Morris Dance tunes, the
May-day songs, the sailor’s chanties, they even sing of criminals
famous in history and always very definitely tell the full name and
whereabouts of a character in a song. They also have songs of
poachers (those who hunt on land forbidden them), of murderers
and hangmen as well as shepherds and sailors. But England’s finest
songs are the Christmas carols which sing of the birth of Jesus. So, if
they sang little of Nature they did sing of man and God and have
given us much that is beautiful and worth while.
 OLD ENGLISH CAROL
From the Time of Henry IV, or Earlier

Lullay! lullay! lytel child, myn owyn dere fode,

How xalt thou sufferin be nayled on the rode.
So blyssid be the tyme!

Lullay! lullay! lytel child, myn owyn dere smerte,

How xalt thou sufferin the sharp spere to Thi herte?
So blyssid be the tyme!

Lullay! lullay! lytel child, I synge all for Thi sake,

Many on is the scharpe schour to This body is schape.
So blyssid be the tyme!

Lullay! lullay! lytel child, fayre happis the befalle,

How xalt thou sufferin to drynke ezyl and galle?
So blyssid be the tyme!

Lullay! lullay! lytel child, I synge al beforn,

How xalt thou sufferin the scharp garlong of thorn?
So blyssid be the tyme!

Lullay! lullay! lytel child, gwy wepy Thou so sore,

Thou art bothin God and man, gwat woldyst Thou be more?
So blyssid be the tyme!

(From the Sloane MSS. Quoted from The Study of Folk Songs, by Countess
Martinengo-Cesaresco).

American Folk Music

We come now to a question that has been the subject of many

arguments and debates. Many claim that we have no folk music in
the United States, and others claim that we have. It would take a
whole volume to present both sides and we must reduce it to a sugar-
coated capsule.
Although we know that Stephen Foster wrote Old Folks at Home,
The Old Kentucky Home, Uncle Ned, Massa’s in the Cold, Cold
Ground, and Old Black Joe, they express so perfectly the mood and
spirit of the people that they are true folk songs. Harold Vincent
Milligan in his book on Stephen Foster says: “Every folk-song is first
born in the heart and brain of some one person, whose spirit is so
finely attuned to the voice of that inward struggle which is the history
of the soul of man, that when he seeks for his own self-expression he
at the same time gives a voice to that vast ‘mute multitude who die
and give no sign.’”
And again speaking of Stephen Foster, Mr. Milligan says:
“Although purists may question their right to the title ‘folk songs’ his
melodies are truly the songs of the American people.”
The folk music of which we have told you has been the music
portraits of different peoples such as the Russian, the Polish, the
French, the German, the English, the Irish and so on. If there has
been a mixture of peoples or tribes as in England where there were
Britons, Danes, Angles, Saxons and Normans, it happened so long
ago that they have become molded into one race. We are all
Americans but we are not of one race, and we are still in the process
of being molded into one type.
We unite people of all nations under one flag and one government,
but we have been sung to sleep and amused as children by the folk
songs of the European nations to which our parents and
grandparents belonged! And so we have heard from childhood Sur le
Pont d’Avignon, Schlaf Kindlein Schlaf, Wurmland, The Volga Boat
Song, Sally in our Alley, or The Wearing of the Green, none of which
is American.
In spite of all these obstacles to the growth of a folk music in
America, we have several sources from which they have come.
As our earliest settlers in Virginia and New England were English,
they brought with them many of their folk songs and some of these
have remained unchanged in the districts where people of other
nations have not penetrated. The Lonesome Tunes of the Kentucky
mountains, also of Tennessee, the Carolinas and Vermont are
examples of this kind of English folk song in America.
In Louisiana which was settled by the French, we find a type of folk
song that is very charming. It is a combination of old French folk
song with negro spiritual, and is brought to us by the Creoles.
 In California there is a strong Spanish flavor in some of the old
ballads that date from the time of the Spanish Missions. There are
also mining songs of the “days of ’49,” including Oh Susannah, by
Stephen Foster, and we defy you to get rid of the tune if once it “gets
you!”
Then there are cow-boy songs of the Plains, The Texas Rangers,
The Ship that Never Returned, The Cow-boy’s Lament and Bury Me
Not on the Lone Prairie; the Lumberjack songs of Maine; the well
known air of the Arkansas Traveller, which was a funny little sketch
for theatre of a conversation between the Arkansas traveller and a
squatter which is interrupted by snatches of a tune; and in addition a
whole book full of songs sung in the backwoods settlements, hunting
cabins and lumber camps in northern Pennsylvania.
So if you seek, you can find a large number of folk songs without
going to the Indian or the Negro.
The Civil War brought out a number of new national songs among
them Glory Hallelujah and Dixie. Dixie was written in 1859 as a song
and “walk-around” by the famous minstrel Dan Emmett, and became
a war song by accident. It had dash and a care-free spirit, and the
rollicking way it pictured plantation life attracted the soldiers of the
South when they were in the cold winter camps in the North. Its
rhythm is so irresistible that it makes your hands and feet go in spite
of yourself. Besides these two the soldiers of the Civil War marched
to Rally Round the Flag, Boys, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys are
Marching, Home, Sweet Home, Lily Dale, The Girl I Left Behind Me,
Hail Columbia and The Star Spangled Banner.
We have told you so much about the Indian and his song that it is
unnecessary now to dwell at length on his music. Of course some
American composers have used Indian folk legend and music, but
after all it remains the musical portrait of the Red Man and has not
become the heart language of the white man.
We have, however, a real folk-expression that has had a great deal
of influence on our popular music and will probably help to create a
serious music to which we can attach the label “Made in America,”
and that is the music of the American Negro.
In Chapter II we showed you what the Negro had brought from his
native Africa, and also that he had been influenced by his contact
with the white race. His music is not the result of conscious art and
of study but is a natural outburst in which he expresses his joys and
sorrows, his tragedies and racial oppression. Also we find rhythms,
melody and form that have grown as a wild flower grows, and are
different from any we have met heretofore.
Mr. Krehbiel in his book Afro-American Folksongs says of the
Negro slave songs: “They contain idioms which were transplanted
hither from Africa, but as song they are the product of American
institutions; of the social, political and geographical environment
within which their creators were placed in America, of the influences
to which they were subjected in America, of the joys, sorrows and
experiences which fell to their lot in America.”
The Negro has cultivated, like all races, songs and dances. As we
said of the Russian, his song is sad and full of tragedy, but the dance
is gay, wild and primitive. From the dance of the Negro we borrowed
the rhythm formerly called ragtime, which is now jazz. The principle
of the Negro rhythm is syncopation, that is, the accent is shifted to
the unaccented part of a measure or of a beat, like this,—

, , . All sorts of
combinations are possible in this rhythm, and it is this variety that is
fascinating in a good jazz tune.
The banjo is the instrument of the southern plantation Negro, and
when a crowd gathers for a “sing” or a dance, the hands and feet take
the place of drums and keep time to the syncopated tune and is
called, “patting Juba.”
A curious dance was the “shout” which flourished in slave days. It
took place on Sunday or on prayer meeting nights and was
accompanied by hymn singing and shouting that sounded from a
distance like a melancholy wail. After the meeting the benches were
pushed back, old and young, men and women, stood in the middle of
the floor and when the “sperichel” (or spiritual) was started they
shuffled around in a ring. Sometimes the dancers sang the
“sperichel” or they sang only the chorus, and for a distance of half a
mile from the praise house the endless thud, thud of the feet was
heard.
 In the beautiful Spiritual, the song of the Negro, we see also the
syncopated rhythm. The religious song is practically the only song he
has, and he sings it at work, at play, at prayer, when he is sick and his
friends sing it after he is dead. To our ears the words are crude and
homely, but always reveal a fervent religious nature as well as a
childlike faith.
No doubt you have heard Nobody Knows the Trouble I See, Deep
River, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Go Down Moses, Weeping Mary
and many others.
Such a wealth of feeling and beauty could not fail to leave its mark
in the land where it was born.
Just how it will bear fruit we cannot say, but it is making its appeal
more and more, not only to the American, but to the foreign
composers as well, and they believe that this music,—the syncopated
rhythm that the American is at last developing in his own way—in
spite of its humble origin, is the one new thing that America has
given to the growth of music, and they envy us that wealth of rhythm
that seems to be born in the American.
Music Becomes a Youth
 CHAPTER XI
Makers of Motets and Madrigals—Rise of Schools 15th and 16th
Centuries

Don’t you think it strange that we have not told you of any pieces
written for the lute alone, or for the viol or any other instrument?
The reason is that until 1700, there was little music for a solo
instrument, but only for voices alone or for voice and instrument
together.
The main sport of composers of this time, was to take a popular
tune and write music around it. The popular tune was called the
cantus firmus (subject or fixed song) and the composer who did the
fanciest things with the tune was hailed as great. So instead of
wanting to make up tunes as we do, they were anxious to see what
they could do with old tunes. Times change, don’t they?
“Like children who break their toys to see how they work, they
learned to break up the musical phrases into little bits which they
repeated, which they moved from one part to another; in this way the
dividing of themes (tunes) came, which led them to the use of
imitation and of canon; these early and innocent gardeners finally
learned how to make the trees of the enchanted garden of music bear
fruit. Still timid, they kept the custom for three centuries of making
all their pieces from parts of plain-song or of a popular song, instead
of inventing subjects for themselves; thus, what is prized today above
every thing else—the making of original melodies—was secondary in
the minds of the musicians, so busy were they trying to organize their
art, so earnestly were they trying to learn the use of their tools.”
(Translated from the French from Palestrina, by Michel Brenet).
By spending their time this way, they added much to the science of
music. If it was not pretty, at least it was full of interesting
discoveries which composers used later, as we shall see, in fugues,
canons, suites and many other forms.
The most popular forms of composition during these two centuries
(the 15th and the 16th) were the motet for Church and the madrigal
for outside the Church.
 What a Motet is

The motet probably gets its name from a kind of profane song (not
sacred) that was called in Italian mottetto, and translated into
French bon mot, means a jest. It dates back to the 13th century, and
was disliked by the Church. The first motets used in the Church in
the early 14th century are very crude to our ears, but interesting
historically. The composers of the different schools of this period
wrote many of them. Motets were usually those parts of the church
ritual which depended on the day or season. They were not the
regular unaltered parts like the mass itself.
This motet, or part-song, used as its central theme a tune already
familiar to its hearers; this tune, the cantus firmus was sometimes a
bit from a Gregorian chant or from a mass, but more often it was a
snatch from a dance song or a folk song with very vulgar words, or it
may have been a troubadour love song with anything but the right
kind of words for the Church. The words for one part were often from
the Bible and for other parts very coarse words from popular tunes.
Imagine singing them at the same time! Still funnier, the words of
the sacred song were sung in Latin and the popular song was sung in
whatever language it happened to be written! Can you think of
anything more ridiculous? The masses came to be known by the
names from which the tune was taken and nearly every composer
including the great Palestrina wrote masses on a popular tune of the
day, L’homme armé (The Man in Armor). Yet they were all quite
different, so varied had become the science of writing counterpoint.
Josquin des Près (1450–1521) the Flemish composer wrote a
motet, Victimae Paschali, which is written around an old Gregorian
plainchant, interwoven with two popular rondelli (in French roundel
from which comes our terms roundelay and rondo) and a Stabat
Mater of his. The cantus firmus, or subject of this motet is another
secular or popular air.
The popular composers returned the compliment and took themes
or tunes from church music and put secular words to them. History
repeats itself, for we today take a tune from Handel’s Messiah and
use it in Yes, We Have No Bananas and we jazz the beautiful and
noble music of Chopin, Beethoven, Schubert and many others.
Yet this music,—the child we are watching grow up—because of
mixing up sacred and profane music soon gets a big reprimand.
The northern part of France seems to have been the birthplace of
the motet; a little later it found its way into Italy where some of the
finest music of the period was written, and the Italian influence
reached into Spain in the middle of the 15th century; at the end of
the century the Venetian school had spread its work into Germany.
In the 17th century the name motet was given to a kind of
composition between a cantata and an oratorio, but it had nothing to
do with the famous motet of the 15th and 16th centuries which we
are discussing.
To show you how clever the men were in these days, one composer
wrote a motet in thirty-six parts!
In the Library of the Sistine Chapel in Rome are volumes
containing the motets of the 14th century, copied, of course, by hand
in notes large enough to be seen and read by the whole choir! These
books are beautifully decorated in gold and lovely colors, or
illuminated, and are of great value.
 Madrigals or Popular Motets

All music of this period not composed for the Church had the
general name of Madrigal, but a real madrigal was a vocal
composition for from three to six parts written on a secular subject,
which often gave to the work a grace and lightness not in the motet.
The vocal madrigals were to the music lovers of that day what
chamber music is today, for instruments were not yet used without
singing. Later, the lute played the chief melody with the voice, and it
was only a step to have other instruments play the other parts of the
madrigal. The instruments played a section of the composition alone
while waiting for a solo singer to appear. He sang a part of the
madrigal that was later called the air and the instrumental part was
called the ritournelle, which literally meant that in this section of the
work, the singer returned from “off-stage” where he had awaited his
turn. By the end of the 16th century it had become the custom for
motets as well as madrigals to have a solo air or aria, and an
instrumental ritournelle, and this was the beginning of chamber
music,—a very great oak which grew from a very little acorn.
In the first printed music books are many of the madrigals of the
early period. We will tell you of the composers of this period
separately, but remember that they all wrote practically the same
kind of music,—masses, motets, and madrigals, but all with the
subject borrowed from something they knew and with many parts for
the voices. Often, too, the same tunes were used for Church and
outside the Church. For this reason much music was published
without the words, so that the singers could use sacred or profane
words as they wished.
Strange as it may seem, it was the folk songs and ballads and not
the learned church music, that had originality and came freely and
sincerely from the hearts of the people.
 Songs in Dance Form

Because these contrapuntal writings were heavy (can you imagine

dancing to a canon?) a new kind influenced by folk music grew up
among these people who were naturally gay and jolly and wished to
be entertained. Songs for three and four parts appeared, more
popular in style and simpler in form than the church motet and were
the descendants of the music of the troubadours. These were in
dance form, such as the French chanson, the vilanelle, the Italian
canzona, canzonetta or little canzona, frottola, strambottes and the
German lied. Many of these songs in dance form later inspired
composers to write music for instruments alone, so that people
danced to music without singing. These dance songs were called
branles, pavanes, gaillardes, courantes, forlanes, rigaudons
sarabandes, gigues, gavottes and many other names.
 The Lute

The favorite instrument of the 15th and 16th centuries was the
lute. It fought for first place with the vielle, the viole, the harp, the
psalterion and the portative organ, but won the fight and took its
place beside the most famous singers of the day, sometimes for
accompanying and again reaching the dignity of soloist, as we told
you above. In the 15th century it took the form, which we see most
often represented in pictures and in museums, with its six strings,
graceful round body, and long neck bent back as you can see in plate
opposite page 127 already described. As time went on this lute was
made larger and strings were added until at the beginning of the 17th
century, it was replaced by an instrument called the arch-lute or
theorbo, which had twenty-four strings, a double neck, and two sets
of tuning pins.
The spinets or virginals, the great-aunts of our pianofortes first
came into vogue in the 15th and 16th centuries.
 Tablature

There was a notation called Tablature used in the 16th and 17th
centuries to write down the music for lute and other stringed
instruments such as the viol, cittern, theorbo. You will find, in
pictures of Tablature, lines which look like our staff, but they do not
form a staff, but simply represent the strings of the instrument.
These lines vary according to the number of strings, from four for the
cittern to six for the lute. The notation showed, not the position and
fingering as we write music, but the position and fingering of frets
and strings. Instead of neumes or notes you will find the alphabet up
to the letter j, figures and queer dots and lines and slurs, but each
sign had its own meaning and was important to the lutenist.
 Rise of Schools

As music outgrows childhood, Schools of Music are started. But

these are not like the schools to which we go every day, but are rather
music groups or centers. Suppose you were a composer and lived in
New York and knew a dozen or so musicians who were writing the
same kind of music as you; the music, if good enough to be known
and played, would be called the New York School, or it might be
called the 1925 School! Or, if you were important enough to be
imitated by your followers, it would be called the Smith School, if
that happened to be your name, just as those who imitate Wagner
are said to be the Wagner School, and so it goes. Not a school to go
to, but a school to belong to!
“What makes these schools start?” we can hear you ask. Many
things. Sometimes people are oppressed by their rulers and in trying
to forget their troubles, they naturally want to express themselves in
the art they know, and in this way groups get together and a school
grows. Sometimes the Church is the cause of schools of music,
literature, and art, and we shall see in this chapter how the Church
influenced the schools of music of this time and made it one of the
most important periods in this story. Sometimes, too, the climate has
caused the development of different styles as we told you in the
chapter on folk music. It often happens too, that a great man or a
great school in one country affects other countries.
 Franco-Flemish School

The first real group of composers to be called a “School” lived in

the part of Europe that today covers the north of France, Belgium
and the Netherlands. The composers who were born from 1400 to
about 1530, in the so-called Low Countries belonged to this school.
Some writers claim that there were three schools, and that the
Franco-Flemish (Gallo-Belgic) is a bridge between the Paris school of
the 14th century and the Netherlands school of the 16th. But it would
be impossible to say when one school began and another ended, as
they all wrote the same kind of music. As the older composers were
the teachers of the younger, the interesting thing to know is that
many of these masters of the north of Europe went to Italy, Spain,
France, and to Germany, and spread the knowledge of the “new art”
of counterpoint and vocal poly-melody (many melodies) and filled
positions of importance in the churches. They were considered such
splendid teachers, that many of the young students of other
nationalities went to Holland and Belgium to be taught.
Zeelandia, a Hollander, an important master in this new school,
tried to get rid of the awkward intervals, fourths and fifths, which
were used in organum (see Chapter VII), and was the first composer
to give the subject or cantus firmus to the soprano voice instead of
the tenor. Doesn’t it seem strange that it took so long to let the
soprano have the main tune?
But the most important composer of his period (1400–1474) was
Guillaume Dufay, from Flanders, who was a chorister in the Papal
choir (choir of the Pope) in Rome. He made the rules and imitation
for the canon (a grown up round) and he was the first composer to
use the folk song L’homme armé (The Man in Armor) in a mass.
The next important name is Jan Okeghem (1430–1495), a
Hollander, who improved the science of counterpoint and of fugue
writing. We have already mentioned his canon for thirty-six voices
(page 149), and he wrote some puzzle canons, for use in secret guilds.
No one could solve these without the key and they were much harder
than the world’s best cross-word puzzles. He tried to make music
express the beauty he felt, and not merely be mathematical problems