Monsters in America

by W. Scott Poole

  Cannibal Feast

  Images of a New World filled with monstrous races and the tendency to imagine the New World itself as a kind of cannibalistic beast grew out of the deep roots of European culture. Europeans who settled in the New World brought with them a head full of monsters and a well-practiced tendency to define the cultural and religious other in terms of monstrosity. A long history of military conflict with the Islamic world converged with early modern religious tensions and age-old legends of the world beyond the borders of Europe to convince most European explorers that they would encounter new lands crawling with monsters.

  Numerous scholars have examined the European tendency to construct the native peoples of North America as monstrous cannibals and demonic servants. Less attention has been paid to how supernatural beings and occurrences provided a way for white Americans in later historical periods to negotiate the meaning of the colonial period. Simplistic interpretations of folk belief in monsters have seen them as shorthand for death, sexuality, and metaphysical uncertainty. But the monster has, just as frequently, offered a way to ignore historical trauma and historical guilt, to remake the facts into a set of pleasing legends. The grotesquerie of the monster has offered relief from the gruesome facts of history.

  Shapeshifter

  John Landis, best known as the director of the classic An American Werewolf in London, wrote and directed an episode of Showtime’s 2005 Masters of Horror series entitled “Deer Woman.” In it a Native American woman becomes an avenging spirit, transforming into a powerful deer whose hooves gore her victims. She vengefully murders white men in a modern world where centuries of oppression have reduced the native experience to tasteless jokes about casinos. Landis’ tale drew on a fund of folktales about Native American women and addressed the sexual and misogynistic aspects of the legends, reframing these stories as a dark memory of the American past.

  “Deer Woman” drew on a wealth of legendary material primarily from the tribes of the Plains and the Pacific Northwest. In these stories, a beautiful woman lured men to their deaths, seducing them to join her behind a bush, in a cave, or in some hidden place where she revealed that she was actually a powerful deer and trampled them to death. Landis played with this imagery to great effect, creating a metaphor about the contact between white and Native American culture in which the Native American, at long last, strikes back. But such stories could be put to a very different purpose. The tale of a white “Deer Woman,” first told in the early twentieth century but portrayed as part of colonial folklore, shows how white elite memory of colonial conquest could be transmuted by a monster tale.15

  By the late sixteenth century, the decline of Spain as Europe’s primary sea power opened the way for English incursions into Spain’s Atlantic imperium.

  In 1584 English adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh pledged to “seek new worlds for gold, for praise, for glory,” a promise that led him from the Caribbean to the outer banks of North Carolina and the island of Roanoke. Raleigh found friendly local natives and apparently fruitful soil. This environment seemed to offer the perfect prospect for the first English colony in the New World.

  English settlement in both the Caribbean and in North America followed a typical pattern. White colonists founded temporary settlements that became permanent after successful subjugation, through war or diplomacy, of local Native American tribes. These settlements became even more enduring as they developed agricultural and commercial activity that tied them into the larger matrix of the Atlantic economy. The introduction of various forms of unfree labor ensured that they would be profitable ventures.16

  The experience of the Roanoke colony did not follow this pattern of settlement and conquest. In 1587 a little over a hundred settlers came to the island off the North Carolina coast under the leadership of governor John White. White spent about a month in the new “planting,” helping to build the village of Raleigh. He then returned to England for supplies, a trip that took much longer than expected because of the outbreak of war with Spain. When White returned to Roanoke in 1590, all the settlers had disappeared. The only clue he discovered was a word carved across two trees, “Croatoan,” the name of a local native group and the nearby island where they lived. The settlers could not be found there either.

  Historians have offered a number of plausible explanations for what became known in early American lore as “the lost colony of Roanoke.” Settlers may have been killed by natives or perhaps enslaved by them. If the latter, they could have easily blended through intermarriage into local tribal groups. They may also have picked up and moved to an unknown location in Virginia to meet an unknown fate. Whatever became of them, the inhabitants of Roanoke are certainly not the only European colony to face fairly immediate extinction. Further down the coast, near what is today Georgetown, South Carolina, a small group of French settlers abandoned their failed settlement around 1564, building a makeshift boat to return to France. This effort would have resulted in another story of a “lost colony” if the settlers had not been picked up by an English pirate after what one historian describes as, “a hell of cannibalism, starvation, and madness.”17

  The lost colony of Roanoke has produced fantasy and romance as well as mystery. Numerous fictional narratives about the fate of the colony have clustered around Virginia Dare, the granddaughter of Governor White and the first English child born in North America (or as Governor White called her, “the first Christian born in Virginia”). Speculation about her fate has created folk legends, historical romances, science fiction, and even comic book narratives.18

  One stream of the Dare legend developed into a monster story with Dare suffering a curse that Larry Talbot, Lon Chaney Jr.’s character in The Wolf Man, would have recognized. Sallie Southall Cotten’s 1901 narrative poem The White Doe, or The Fate of Virginia Dare spun a folktale about the young Dare held captive by local natives and becoming a kind of “Indian princess” in her adulthood. Desired by a Native American shaman, Dare’s heart instead belongs to a young warrior. The jealous shaman transforms Dare into a white doe who can only be killed by a magic arrow (rather than a silver bullet). After a series of tragic errors, the young warrior, who truly loves Dare, kills her; though, Cotten asserts, that her shapeshifting spirit endured and that the people of eastern North Carolina saw visions of her for centuries. In fact, twenty-first-century reports of a white doe along the Eno River near Durham, North Carolina, include the claim that the creature spoke with the voice of a woman.19

  Although the tradition of Virginia Dare as Deer Woman seems to have largely been the creation of Sallie Cotten, Cotten herself insisted otherwise. Writing in a preface to the 1901 edition of the poem that it was a tale that “has survived for three centuries,” Cotton added that, “From Maine to Florida, lumberman are everywhere familiar with the old superstition that to see a white doe is an evil omen … the rude hunters of the Allegheny Mountains believe that only a silver arrow will kill a white deer.” Although Cotten is correct that these ideas have some resonance in American wilderness folklore, and a longer history in Europe, none of these motifs ever had a connection to the last survivor of the lost colony until Cotten made the connection herself in the first years of the twentieth century.20

  Regional writers quickly built on Cotten’s effort to create a mythic history for the earliest efforts to colonize the New World. O. R. Mangum described how Dare “grew into fair maidenhood among the Native Americans but was transformed by a sorcerer into the White Doe.” He asserted that the spirit of this creature “haunts continually the place of her birth.” Many of these early twentieth-century retellings of Cotten’s tale focused heavily on the racial imagery of the white child among the native peoples, transforming both the human Dare and the shapeshifter Dare into a sign of the emerging white dominance over the New World. A. Denison Heart, for example, described how “the grim old Indians and their dusky squaws looked with wonder and admiration on this little stranger, calling her White Doe.”21

  Imagining the
first effort to “plant” an English colony ending in a fairy tale serves a clear cultural purpose. American popular memory has generally ignored the degree of callous brutality that characterized early settlement. Cotten’s story of the White Doe soothed anxieties over the nature of the conquest of the New World at a time when the conquest of the American West had recently reached completion. Other early American legends, from the myth of a romance between Pocahontas and John Smith to the legend of “the first Thanksgiving” as a multicultural feast between Pilgrims and Native Americans, hid from generations of schoolchildren the hard facts of colonial history.22

  Cotten surely hoped that Dare’s tale would serve a similar purpose. An inveterate booster of North Carolina history, Cotten actually took the tale of the White Doe on the road, performing the poem in front of women’s clubs, church groups, and in community theaters all across the South while wearing a white-fringed, deerskin coat. Cotten created a tragic and romantic monster that hid some of the true monsters of the early American experience.23

  The development of the tale of Virginia Dare as a Deer Woman reveals many of the anxieties of the colonial experience, including how that experience has been told and retold as part of American memory. Dare’s time among the southeastern Native Americans contains some aspects, retold in legendary form, of the colonial captivity narrative. This genre, especially popular among the Puritans of New England, told the stories of white English women captured by “savage” Native Americans. The subtext of such tales, that European women endured sexual violation by Native Americans, helped make this some of the earliest sensational literature in America. These were a strange sort of moral parable, in which the readers could receive both a sexual frisson and religious edification.24

  The captivity narrative embodies some of the central conflicts of early American religion. The Puritan woman stands in for the Puritan community, faithful in the midst of savagery and coming out of their “errand into the wilderness” with their faith refined and purified. At the same time, these tests are so extreme that they raise questions about the project itself. Various iterations of the captivity narrative became the basis for all kinds of horrific narratives, appearing again and again in American gothic tales of feminine innocence under threat from dirty old men in dirty old castles. They haunted the American imagination in film as well, from the screams of Fay Wray struggling in the grasp of King Kong in the 1930s to the brutal deaths in The Last House on the Left in the 1970s. The captivity narratives not only became one of the first popular American literary forms, they also became foundational for an American brand of horror.25

  Cotten’s decision to weave other motifs into her tale of Dare’s transformation borrows a tendency in early American folklore to identify heroic figures with the wilderness of the New World. Like the legendary material that created figures like Paul Bunyan and surrounded actual historical figures like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, Virginia Dare became entirely identified with the natural wilderness of the frontier environment. She becomes part of the Native American world and then becomes part of the natural world in the most literal way possible.26

  Ironically, Dare has become a symbol in the twenty-first century for anti-immigrant hate groups. The website VDARE.com views the lost colony, and Virginia Dare in particular, as a symbol of the white Anglo culture isolated and under assault. Even the tale of the White Doe serves these groups’ purposes, suggesting transcendent white purity under threat. Like Dare, white settlers “shapeshifted” into something deeply American, a part of the landscape itself, displacing native peoples in a “natural” process. The tale of a monster became a way for white Americans to hide greater horror.27

  In the generation following the disappearance of the Roanoke colony, English settlers established permanent and profitable colonies. Calvinist dissenters came from England in 1620, separatist Calvinists known as the Pilgrims. These first settlers on Plymouth Rock would soon be followed by the Puritans, a much larger sect of dissenting Calvinists, who created the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. Puritan ministers saw the founding of the New England colonies as an “errand into the wilderness” to create a Calvinist utopia. Cleansed of the mother country’s flirtations with sin, the New World would become the kingdom of God. To their great horror, the Puritans found their wide-open wilderness full of monsters.

  Sex with the Devil

  The Puritan settlements of New England have become representative symbols of early American settlement. Although not the first successful settlements in English North America (Jamestown dates to 1607), they occupy an integral place in the memory of the early American experience. There are many explanations for this importance, ranging from the dominance of New England historians and educational institutions in the writing of early American history, to the way the Puritans’ own self-conceptions comport with Americans’ tendency to view themselves as bearers of a special destiny.28

  The special place the Puritans have occupied in American memory made them multivalent signifiers for national identity, appearing as everything from dour-faced party poopers to, ironically, the embodiment of the alleged American appreciation for the search for religious liberty. Their sermons and devotional tracts have provided the grammar of American understanding of sin, redemption, and national destiny, shaping both religious and political consciousness.

  No aspect of Puritan experience lives more strongly in American memory than their fear of monsters, specifically their fear of witches that led to the trials of about 344 settlers during the course of the seventeenth century. The Salem witch trials, an outbreak of Puritan witch-hunting that ended in the executions of twenty people in 1692–1693, has become central to most Americans’ perception of their early history. Salem historians Owen Davies and Jonathan Barry have noted the central role the event came to play in the teaching standards and curriculum of public schools, making knowledge of it integral to understanding the colonial era.29

  For many contemporary people, Salem is read as a brief flirtation with an irrational past. At least some of the interest it garners comes from its portrayal as an anomaly, a strange bypath on the way to an unyielding national commitment to freedom and democracy. On the contrary, Salem was far from the first witch hunt in early New England. Nor did the American fascination with the witch disappear after 1693.

  Puritans hunted monsters in the generation before Salem. In 1648 Margaret Jones of Charlestown, Massachusetts, became the first English settler accused of witchcraft, and later executed, in New England. The Massachusetts Bay Colony’s first governor, John Winthrop, called Jones “a cunning woman,” someone with the ability to make use of herbs and spells. Jones was further alleged to have had a “malignant touch” that caused her erstwhile patients to vomit and go deaf. Winthrop, after a bodily search of Jones by the women of Charlestown, claimed that she exhibited “witches teats in her secret parts,” which was, by long established superstition, the sign of a witch. The Puritan judiciary executed Jones in the summer of 1648. More trials and more executions followed.30

  Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World

  The witch embodied all the assorted anxieties that early New England settlers felt about their new environment, their personal religious turmoil, and their fear of the creatures that lurked in the “howling wilderness.” The Puritan movement in England grew out of the fear that the English Church retained too many elements of the “satanic” Roman Catholic Church. The Puritan conception of the spiritual life, embodied in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, imagined the Christian experience as a war with monstrous beings inspired by the devil. This understanding of Christian experience as a struggle with the forces of darkness made its way to the New World. Not surprisingly, this new world became a geography of monsters in the minds of many of the Puritans.

  Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather helped to construct a New World mythology that not only included the bones of antediluvian giants but also the claim that native peoples in North America had a special relations
hip to Satan. In Mather’s New World demonology, the Native Americans had been seduced by Satan to come to America as his special servants. This made them, in some literal sense, the “children of the Devil.” Other Puritan leaders reinforced this view, seeing the Native Americans as a special trial designed for them by the devil. Frequently, Puritan leaders turned to Old Testament imagery of the Israelites destroying the people of Canaan for descriptions of their relationship with the New England tribes. The Puritans believed you could not live with or even convert monsters. You must destroy them.31

  The Puritans embodied the American desire to destroy monsters. At the same time, the Puritan tendency toward witch-hunting reveals the American tendency to desire the monster, indeed to be titillated by it. Contemporary literary scholar Edward Ingebretsen convincingly argues that the search for witches in the towns of New England should be read as popular entertainment as well as evidence of religious conflict and persecution. Ingebretsen shows that Mather makes use of the term “entertain” frequently when explaining his own efforts to create a narrative of the witch hunts. He uses the same term to describe the effect of the testimony of suspected witches on the Puritan courtrooms that heard them. Mather described the dark wonders that make up much of his writings as “the chiefe entertainments which my readers do expect and shall receive.”32