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UMI A Bell & Howell Informatioii Company 300 North Zed) Road, Ann Arbor MI 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Reading T ourist S ites, C iting T ouristic READINGS: A nglo Constructions o f N ative A merican Identity and the Case of TtoJMSEH Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the D e ^ e Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Rosemary Virginia Hathaway, M.A. * * * * The Ohio State University 1998 D issertation Committee : A pproved by Professor Valerie Lee, Adviser Professor Patrick Mullen Adviser Professor Amy Shuman Department of English UMI Number: 9833995 UMI Microform 9833995 Copyright 1998, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeh Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 A b s t r a c t Through a case study of contemporary cultural productions about the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, this dissertation examines Anglo constructions of Native American identity in tourist sites, literature, and family kinship stories. As such, it combines the methodologies of ethnography and literary criticism to explore and critique the cultural phenomemon folklorist Rayna Green has termed “playing Indian.” Interviews with Anglo families claiming to be descendants of Tecumseh and fieldwork done on site at the outdoor drama Tecumseh!, staged in Chillicothe, Ohio, each summer, are juxtaposed with four contemporary novels about Tecumseh's history: Allan Eckert’s The Frontiersmen (1967) and A Sorrow in Our Heart (1992), Orson Scott Card’s Red Prophet (1988), and James Alexander Thom’s Panther in the Sky (1989). Notably, all of these writers are Anglo, and in most summers almost the entire cast of the outdoor drama—including those playing Native Americans—are Anglo as well. Given recent debates about multiculturalism, cultural representation, and postcolonialism, it is striking that Anglo productions about Native Americans have gone relatively unchallenged. This study strives to determine what it is that Anglos are trying to work out by retelling Tecumseh’s narrative, why Tecumseh himself should be the historical figure chosen for such a catharsis, and why Native American cultures in particular seem so readily available for unchallenged appropriation by whites. In so doing, the dissertation contests and redefines the concepts of ethnicity, authenticity, and tourism from both folkloric and postmodern perspectives. 11 Finally, the dissertation connects the touristic impulse to the act of reading itself, surmising that reading cross-culturally is often an act of tourism, an allegedly harmless peek into an exotic culture. Reader-response criticism and strategies of resistant reading are employed to show how texts that Anglos students often take to be good “snapshots” of ethnic difference—Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God—both encourage and thwart such “touristic readings,” and how ethnic identity is constructed in each novel. As literature teachers, how do we properly contextualize and interrogate works by those outside our own cultural background so as to help students come to more nuanced and complex understandings of those texts? Ill A cknowledgments First and foremost, I wish to thank the members of my dissertation committee: to my adviser, Valerie Lee, I am grateful for the mentorship she has provided since my first quarter as a PhD student; she is responsible for showing me how the study of folklore and literature can be creatively combined (all complaints, therefore, should be directed to her). To Pat Mullen I am grateful for ongoing support, for his living example of how folklorists can and should commit themselves to social change, and for my ever-growing appreciation of country music. I also want to thank Amy Shuman for stepping into this project without benefit of ever having me as a student (a fact I dearly regret) and providing wonderfully detailed and insightful feedback. I am also indebted to other Ohio State folklorists who provided assistance or other ideas for this project—in particular, my thanks go out to Pamela Ensinger-Antos, who introduced me to Bill Dennis and his great aunt and grandmother, the Miller sisters, and their kinship stories; to Larry Doyle, who read early drafts of parts of this document; and also to Ellen Damsky, who charitably offered to help me distribute surveys at Tecumseh! one evening, hardly suspecting what she was letting herself in for. I am, of course, profoundly indebted to those who consulted with me on this project as informants: Virginia Cooke, Bill Dennis, Patty Free, Jim Horton, Renee Norman, and Jamieson Price. My deepest thanks in this regard, though, must be extended to Marion Waggoner, the producer of Tecumseh!, who let me into his theater and answered my questions despite his apprehension and my tentativeness. Needless to say, without the willing participation of all these people, this project would never have come to fruition. iv The fieldwork for this dissertation was conducted largely during the summer of 1994, thanks to the support of a Summer Research Fellowship from the Ohio State University Department of English. That funding, and moreover the freedom to travel that it provided, truly expedited the research process for this dissertation. Finally, I wish to thank my family, who have nurtured me through this project and, at times, suffered with it nearly as much as I did. My parents, David and Joyce Hathaway, have unconditionally supported me through all o f this—and I’d especially like to thank my mother for being the first to prove that this can be done. And to my husband, Tom Bredehoft: thanks for the “marital fellowship”—and the unflagging support—that allowed me to finally finish this dissertation. V it a September 19, 1965........................................ Bom—Columbus, Ohio 1987 ...................................................................B. A. English, The Ohio State University 1988-198 9 ........................................................ Writer/Editor, Division of Research and Communications The Ohio Department of Education Columbus, Ohio 1991................................................................... M. A. English, The Ohio State University 1989-199 6 ........................................................ Graduate Teaching and Research Associate, The Ohio State University 1996-present......................................................Instructor, Department of English University of Northern Colorado Publications 1 .“No Paradise to Be Lost: Deconstructing the Myth of ‘Domestic Affection’ in Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein." Trajectories of the Fantastic. Ed. Michael Morrison. New York: Greenwood Press, 1997. 2.“Praxis: The Necessity of Theory.” Folklore in Use 3.1(1995). F ields o f Study Major Field: English VI T a b l e o f C o n t e n t s P age A bstract...................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments ................................................................................................................... iv V ita............................................................................................................................................. vi Introduction: Folklore and the Touristic Impulse ........................................................ 1 C hapters : 1. Tourist Sites, The Postmodern Condition, and the Challenge to Folkloristics .............................................................................. 22 Uprooting the Discipline: Theory and Terminology..................................24 “Ethnicity”..........................................................................................28 Reinventing the Meaning o f‘Tradition” .........................................35 Arriving at Cultural Representation, Searching for “Authenticity” .............................................................................. 37 The Tourist Site.................................................................................41 Praxis: Theorizing Tecumseh .......................................................................46