02 Unit 1: Exploring residual discourse

Goal: Explain how representations of gender and race have changed over time, and how a “residual” ideological media text at the beginning of this unit can be used as a convenient touchstone throughout the Module.

You may remember the discussion of residual ideology in Module 1, Unit 4:

• A residual ideology was dominant at one point in time, but is now considered “out of date.” However, it can still exist in some form.
• A dominant ideology is adapted from a residual ideology.

Residual Ideology in Film: The Searchers

Many films (or TV shows, cartoons, or advertisements) from across the 20th century exhibit residual discourse. For this unit, we like to examine a gem of residual discourse: The Searchers, a Western directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne that was released in 1956. The film is acclaimed for its film direction and cinematic vistas. Indeed, it’s one of the most famous Westerns ever made^[1] and considered to be one of Hollywood’s 100 greatest films.^[2]  The film was a critical and box office success.^[3] 

The Searchers (film) was adapted from a 1954 best selling novel of the same name by prolific American novelist Alan LeMay. In turn, Film critics have suggested that LeMay adapted the book from the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, who was abducted at age 9 by a Comanche war band in 1836 and absorbed into the tribe. While many versions of the story appeared in newspapers at the time, LeMay appeared to adapt the account of James W. Parker, who “rescued” his niece, Cynthia Ann Parker in 1860.

Here is the storyline: A tribe of Comanche people snatch a young white girl (Debbie Edwards, age 8) from her white family’s homestead during a raid. Her uncle (tough guy Ethan Edwards, played by John Wayne) resolves to find Debbie and bring her back, which he finally does by the end of the film, after a five-year period of searching.

Through the perspective of Ethan Edwards, the film glamorizes white male control over the wild west. But ultimately, it also reveals the dominant American ideology of the 1950s. The Searchers (1956) was shot a decade after WWII, before the civil rights movement took hold in the late 1950s and 1960s, before the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s, before the gay liberation movement in the 1960s-1970s, and during a period when First Nations people were practically invisible (even as their culture was frequently interpreted by white movie producers). In the 1950s, Black Americans were still being lynched in the south – many due to fabricated stories about raping white girls and women. Cultural icons Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and Doris Day were prominent. McCarthyism (led by Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy) was at a fever pitch, with U.S. congressional committee investigations alleging people (including many Hollywood writers, producers and directors) had communist ties. In fact, The Searchers star John Wayne was legendarily anti-communist. Finally, an iconic image of the heroic western cowboy, represented by the Marlboro Man, emerged in 1954 through a new advertising campaign. Marlboro cowboy imagery would make Marlboro cigarettes one of the most recognized and top international brands, ever (see Module 1, Unit 1 on Narrative for a brief history of the Marlboro Man).

From a media-and-power perspective, The Searchers is interesting in that it exposes numerous ideological underpinnings of race and gender in American culture and American history – representations that were dominant 70 years ago, but are still with us – albeit much diluted – today.^[4] It also is a representative example of a captivity narrative, a genre of stories we explore more later.

Captivity Narratives: At the core of American Identity

The Searchers, and many other well-known films (e.g., Birth of a Nation, Beauty and the Beast, Last of the Mohicans, Taken, Star Wars, even Super Mario Bros.), are captivity narratives. These stories feature a captive woman (typically from the dominant race), captured by a minority race, who is saved by a man from the dominant race. Beyond those basic elements of the plot, though, captivity narratives vary widely in terms of character development. Which characters are heroes (and which are villains), which characters are agents of action (and which are acted upon), and with whom audiences are meant to identify (or through whose eyes they are meant to watch the events of the story), vary. The history of captivity narratives helps us better understand their relevance to U.S. identity.

The first captivity narratives were written by women and were autobiographical^[5] 

Between 1675–1676, English colonists were at war with the Narragansett people – a leading First Nations tribe in New England. The King Philips War (1675–1676), as experienced by white settlers documenting the conflict, was terrifying. In a single year, the Narragansetts seized 1600 white settlers. This scene played out over and over again: while the men were working in the fields, the Narragansetts raided the homesteads, often taking the women and children hostage, and using them for bartering. The women who survived to tell their stories were the ones to originate the genre of captivity narratives.

In 1675, a woman named Mary Rowlandson was taken captive near Boston, Massachusetts. In 1682, she published the first captivity narrative about her experience, titled A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Rowlandson’s narrative described how 500 Narragansetts raided the settlement where she lived, how the colonist men failed to protect women and children because they were far off in the fields, how she actively  fought back, and how she cleverly managed her own release by bartering her needlework and naming her ransom price. In Rowlandson’s account, she was being tested by God, and proved her Puritan worth by being vulnerable before her Lord.

The cover page from Mary Rowlandson’s A Narrative of the Captivity, Sufferings and Removes of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, published in both Cambridge, Massachusetts and London in 1682. Mary Rowlandson was captured in an attack on Lancaster, Massachusetts in 1676, during King Philip’s War. This image is in the Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Rowlandson#/media/File:Rowlandson2.jpg

Although Puritan women were far from feminists, the captivity narratives they penned celebrated female agency (Rowlandson secured her own release and passed God’s tests) while portraying white men as bungling dummies. Rowlandson’s book became a bestseller. By 1800, fifteen editions had been published.

The first captivity narratives, penned by women, featured women as heroic characters

The women who wrote down the stories of their abductions controlled their narrative and documented how they fought back, how resourceful they became, and also, how their First Nations abductors often proved to be reasonable and nonthreatening captors who used hostage-taking as an economic strategy. In the stories they wrote about their captivity, the women were the lead characters. These narratives also documented how the men in their lives, who should have protected them, were instead proving inept at this job. They were sleeping when they should have been watching, far away when the women and children were captured, and hiding in the woods rather than chasing after them.^[6] 

Hannah Duston by Junius Brutus Stearns  (1810–1886). Public Domain.

Hannah Duston, from Haverhill, Massachusetts, published another popular captivity narrative in 1697 that documented her feisty heroism.  While her husband was building a brick home a half-mile away (during King William's War), a group of Abenaki people from Québec raided her settlement and captured Duston, her young infant daughter, and 13 others. They forced Hannah, another woman (Mary), and a boy (Samuel), to walk to Canada. In her account, Hannah led Mary and Samuel to rise up against their Abenaki captors and escape. Duston returned with the scalps of two Abenaki men, two women, and six children, and claimed her reward. In her account, her husband had failed to protect her, so she protected herself and others.

Women’s autobiographical captivity narratives shamed colonial men beyond depicting their ineptitude. Sometimes the stories documented women preferring life with First Nations tribes (about a third refused to leave), with some women captives marrying First Nations men.^[7] As journalist Susan Faludi explained, women were beginning to exhibit agency and power during this period of early American Colonial history. “By the 1690s, women were starting small businesses, filing (and winning lawsuits), having fewer children, and, especially in the frontier posts, asserting themselves in nontraditional ways.”^[8] This female pride and economic potential, historian Carol Karlsen notes, was the reason behind the many accusations of witchcraft during this time.^[9] 

The Young Puritans in Captivity by Mary Prudence (Wells) Smith, 1899. https://www.loc.gov/item/99005332/

And, captivity narratives written by women were tremendously popular, usually winding up as national best sellers and undergoing multiple reprints or editions. 

Men take control of the captivity narrative  

Captivity narratives, penned by women, were problematic for patriarchal power. After seven decades of stories celebrating female settler autonomy and agency, of fit women fighting back, of women who proudly found ways to escape the “tyranny of their fathers and husbands,”^[10] and maybe even found a sanctuary with First Nations people, captivity narratives came to be controlled and reshaped by colonial men.

The mid-1700s marked a turning point in captivity narratives, as men started to rewrite and reconfigure the story. Women and children continued to be taken captive as the French and Indian War raged between 1754–1763, pitting French-controlled settlements against British-controlled settlements, with different First Nations tribes supporting each side. In the newly configured discourse, First Nations people were demonized to a far greater extent as devilish brutes and rapists. Women were characterized as helpless victims, and the men in the center were now characterized as smart, strong, and battle-ready protectors and the ultimate heroes of the story; It was they who rescued the frail women and helpless children and brought them home. In some cases, like the book War and Pestilence published by William P. Edwards, the stories were used as propaganda to get white soldiers to enlist in wars against First Nations people, appealing to their desire for heroism against “savage Indians.”

The 1832 book War and Pestilence! by William P. Edwards has a subtitle that reads “Two young ladies taken prisoner by the savages.” The story documents the experiences of Misses Frances and Almira Hall (ages of 16 and 18) who were taken prisoners by “the savages,”  near Indian Creek, Illinois. The cover depicts the young women, and a young man, Philip Brigdon, being led through the wilderness by four Sac and Fox. Public Domain:  https://www.loc.gov/resource/cph.3a44142/.

By the time James Fenimore Cooper published the best selling The Last of the Mohicans in 1826, a story set during the French and Indian War that describes the capture (by First Nations tribes) of the white (and frail) Monroe sisters, tales about clever women making powerful choices about their survival or positive relationships with First Nations people had disappeared from the dominant discourse. The Last of the Mohicans was based in part on the story of Kentucky frontier settler Daniel Boone, who rescued his daughter Jemima and two other white girls from Cherokee-Shawnee captors. The mythologized exploits of Daniel Boone and fellow frontier explorer and militiaman Davy Crockett (1786-1836) became foundational stories for white American identity.

During this period, while male authors reframed white men as heroes of the frontier and reclaimed the narrative, a flurry of paintings, prints, lithographs and sculptures visualized these same mythologies. The story of Daniel Boone’s heroism (and his daughter Jemima’s helplessness) is depicted here by four separate artists in the mid to late 1800s.

This print, titled “Heroic Deeds of Former Times,” (artist unknown) depicts Daniel Boone and his friend (a “noble savage”^[11]) rescuing Boone’s daughter, Jemima, from the “savage” Cherokee-Shawnee people . The print is from 1851, after the narrative changed to depict men as heroes and rescuers, and women as helpless victims. https://www.loc.gov/item/2003656944/, Public Domain.

A work by Karl Bodmer (Swiss painter) from 1852, depicting the kidnapping of Jemima Boone and her friends. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Capture_of_the_Daughters_of_Daniel_Boone_and_Richard_Callaway_by_the_Indians_by_Karl_Bodmer.jpeg

Another visualization of the Daniel Boone story, from 1853 by established German painter Charles Ferdinand Wimar, is titled The Abduction of Daniel Boone's Daughter by the Indians. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boone_abduction.jpg, Public Domain.

A lithograph by Henry H. Schile titled “Daniel Boone Protects His Family” from 1874c, depicts Boone seizing a Cherokee-Shawnee warrior as his wife cowers over their son on the left. This image is in the public domain, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92504615/.

This 1886 engraving by Welcome Arnold Greene depicts white settlers being violently attacked by Native warriors during King Philip’s War. While a young boy runs in terror, white men heroically protect the homestead with their guns.

Engraving from The Providence Plantations for 250 Years, Welcome Arnold Greene, 1886.Public Domain.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_King_Philip_War.jpg

By the 1850s, monuments depicting white men rescuing terrified white women from Native American “brutes” also began appearing in prominent public places, literally setting the reframed storyline in stone. Examples include “The Rescue” (1837–1850) by Horatio Greenough is a large marble sculpture group which was assembled in front of the east façade of the United States Capitol building and exhibited there from 1853 until 1958.^[12] 

Photo of Horatio Greenough's The Rescue (1837-50) at its long-time site on the east facade of the U.S. Capitol.

Image to the right shows  The Rescue visible in this photograph of Abraham Lincoln's 1861 first inauguration, to the right of the top steps. Both photos are in the Public Domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rescue_(sculpture)#/media/File:GreenoughRescue.jpg and https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Abraham_Lincoln_inauguration_1861.jpg

This 1857 sculpture, “The White Captive” by Erastus Dow Palmer, shows a nubile young woman at her most vulnerable. She is naked, tied to a tree, and about to be raped (it is inferred) by brutal savages. “The White Captive” remains  on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  

• 
  The White Captive by Erastus Dow Palmer is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Photo is in the Public Domain: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/11680.
  

No matter who penned the story, captivity narratives remained nearly instant best sellers for the next 170 years of American storytelling. Indeed, between 1682 and 1850, Pilgrim’s Progress was the only bestseller that was NOT a captivity narrative.^[13] Often the characters remained the same, based on true events, but the heroes were now all men.^[14]  These stories are still a major part of today’s popular culture. As Faludi writes, “A culture forges myths for many reasons, but paramount among them is the need to impose order on chaotic and disturbing experiences—to resolve haunting contradictions and contain apprehensions, to imagine a way out of the darkness…This was the experience that a national myth was called to address–by remaking its shame into triumph.”^[15]

The enduring mythology of Daniel Boone in the 19th and 20th Centuries

The mythical figures of Daniel Boone and Davy Crocket captured the American imagination across centuries. Boone’s story was further mythologized in books and in a 1964-1970 popular U.S. television series. Davy Crockett’s mythologized stories were similarly featured in a 1954-55 TV series produced by Disney, helping to promote the Frontierland section of the new Disneyland theme park in 1955, and popularizing a fad of children wearing coonskin caps. Crockett’s name also has long been associated with bravery in his death defending the Alamo from Mexican forces. A Davy Crockett stamp was issued in 1967.

Daniel Boone (1734-1820), a frontier explorer who helped lead the white colonization of Kentucky, became a white icon of frontier exploration and battles with First Nations people. Boone was celebrated for rescuing his daughter from Cherokee-Shawnee captors, but also owned several enslaved African Americans during his life. His story was further mythologized and sanitized in a 1964-1970 popular U.S. television series.

Book cover from The Opening of the Wilderness (1952), by John Mason Brown, Landmark Book Series , author photo, public domain;  Stamp image of Davy Crocket, 1967, Public Domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Davy_Crockett2_1967_Issue-5c.jpg.

The sanitized American mythologies of both men neglect certain facts. Boone owned several enslaved African Americans during his lifetime, and Crockett and other white settlers revolted against Mexico over its attempts to eliminate slavery on its land.^[16] Those neglected facts helped to make captivity narratives powerful stories for white American identity while simultaneously ignoring the “captive” state that white Americans inflicted upon the people it enslaved. 

Captivity narratives justify lynching of African Americans

At the same time First Nations people were being demonized through both media portrayals and real genocidal practices, a widespread lynching movement was taking hold across the American pre-Civil War South, beginning in the 1830s, and abating during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The stories that drove many of these lynchings were captivity narratives: A white woman needed saving from a sexually aggressive Black man (or teenager), who was (falsely) accused of capturing and attempting to rape, or raping them. Dominant ideology is reflected and maintained in these narratives.

Commonly circulating in newspapers, these fabricated accusations would often result in a white mob of men attacking and lynching this “beast” to save a white woman’s virtue, in effect translating a familiar story told over 150 years into a new framework of media messaging: Beware of Black men. Keep in mind that the end of the Civil War had emancipated approximately 4 million enslaved African Americans, who were also briefly empowered by Reconstruction and new federally enforced laws on equality. By creating a media discourse of fear mongering that framed formerly enslaved African Americans as terrifying, sexually aggressive, animalistic, and stupid, dominant groups could successfully justify racial terrorism and, in doing so, maintain power.

A person from any racialized group could be lynched, but white supremacists used lynching primarily as a form of anti-Black domestic terrorism. White people lynched 4,743 people between 1882 and 1968, 72.6% of which were southern Blacks.^[17] Rhetoric scholar Ersula Ore identified the ideological work of lynching:  “Lynching was a call to communion, a performance of political affiliation akin to citizenship in the way it distinguished those who belonged from those who did not.”^[18]

Lynchings were mediated events up until the 1940s, public spectacles attended by hundreds or thousands of white community members, including families. Historian Amy Louise Wood argued that “mobs performed lynchings as spectacles for other whites” and “the rituals, the tortures, and their subsequent representations imparted powerful messages to whites about their own supposed racial dominance and superiority.”^[19] By “subsequent representations,” Wood means photographs made into postcards which were then circulated by Whites as a souvenir to celebrate the moment.^[20] 

Although the postcards were meant to maintain dominant ideology, African-American journalist Ida B. Wells used one of the postcards in a counter-hegemonic way when she published an 1891 postcard of the lynching in Clanton, Alabama, in her 1894 antilynching pamphlet A Red Record.^[21] She prepared audiences “to view the images against their intended purpose”^[22] by providing historical background, context, and analysis of dominant media stories about the murders. Wells’s anti-lynching work resulted in herself being threatened with lynching and forced to flee Memphis after her newspaper office was destroyed by a White mob angry at an anti-lynching editorial she had penned.

Wells also wrote a powerful 1892 essay (also delivered as a speech), “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases.”^[23] You can access a copy of this pamphlet at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14975/14975-h/14975-h.htm. To challenge dominant ideology that lynching was used to protect white women from Black men, Wells used evidence from white-owned newspapers. Instead of participating in a preferred or dominant reading, Wells used an oppositional or counter-hegeonic reading and found, according to these sources, the real reason that whites lynched Blacks was because of economic motivations: White business people resented the economic success of Blacks. Wells also highlighted that no white man had ever been lynched for raping a Black woman, or even a Black 8 year-old child, making clear that the fear of rape was an inadequate explanation for the existence of lynching. Additionally, white lynch mobs also had murdered Black children and Black women.

Captivity narratives appear in early film

Despite Wells’s, and other anti-lynching activists’ work, lynching – and the discourse that accompanied the practice – came to its height between the 1890s and 1920s, and was fueled by popular films like Birth of a Nation (1915). Originally titled “The Clansmen,” Birth of a Nation is an epic drama directed by D. W. Griffith that dramatizes multiple stories of white women being pursued by Black men (who are played by white men in blackface). In general, the film depicts Black men as sexually aggressive and generally stupid; white men as saviors; and women as weak and in need of saving. Birth of a Nation, deemed a masterpiece and screened inside Woodrow Wilson’s Whitehouse, justified the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and racial terrorism through lynching.^[24] 

Epilogue: The real captivity story of Cynthia Ann Parker

Here is a final note about Cynthia Ann Parker, whose story was the inspiration for the epic 1956 film and captivity narrative, The Searchers. Born in 1827, she was 8 years old when she was taken hostage during a Comanche raid in 1836. In the 24 years that she lived with the Comanche, she went by the name of Narua (which means "someone found" in English–ironically, the opposite of captivity); she married Chief Peta Nocona, and had given birth to two sons and a daughter. Despite repeated efforts by various search parties, Cynthia Ann Parker resisted returning to the European-American settlement. By the time of her recapture by Texas Rangers in 1860, she was 33. Her uncle James W. Parker, who had retrieved her,  opportunistically cast himself as the hero who found her and returned her “home.” Yet, her “rescuers” killed her husband and removed her from her tribe and two sons. Cynthia Ann Parker’s daughter died three years later, in 1864. Parker, who had fallen into a depression, began to forsake food and water, and died in 1871, ten years after her recapture. Her story – or rather the story of her rescuers – lived on throughout the 19th century and into the 20th through operas, melodramas, a best selling novel (The Searchers by Alan LeMay) and ultimately, the hugely successful film –a residual text that is an interesting touchstone for this course.

Parker’s story connects to the “missing white woman syndrome” noted earlier in this course. There was great public interest in the “rescue” of Parker, the missing innocent white girl. But the adult Parker didn’t fit the narrative – she didn’t want to be taken away from her tribe – and the gift of a huge piece of land and a pension from the Texas legislature didn’t serve to make it a happy ending for her. (The Searchers film doesn’t include the story of what happened to the girl repatriated with the white community.)

Two photos of Cynthia Ann Parker after her repatriation into the white community.

Left:Public Domain,  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cynthia_Ann_Parker.jpg,
Right, No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cynthia_Ann_Parker_(4819386194).jpg,