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The rhetoric of the primitive savior in Cooper's The deerslayer, Melville's Moby Dick and Hawthorne's The scarlet letter and The Blithedale romance / Samuel Gordon Paley

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Identifier	Thesis 1788
Author	Paley, Samuel Gordon, 1974-
Title	The rhetoric of the primitive savior in Cooper's The deerslayer, Melville's Moby Dick and Hawthorne's The scarlet letter and The Blithedale romance / Samuel Gordon Paley
Publisher	Central Connecticut State University
Date	2005
Resource Type	Master's Thesis
Notes	This project proposes to situate Cooper's Chingachgook and Hetty,Melville's Queequeg, and Hawthorne's Pearl and Priscilla, as rhetorical characters of what shall be termed the primitive-as-savior tradition of American fiction. This rhetoric (persuasive technique) in The Deerslayer, Mobv Dick, Scarlet Letter, and The Blithedale Romance, manipulates reader emotions through pairing a character of the heroic mode with one of the primitive. The character in the heroic mode (a hero or heroine) is directly involved in the novel's main action, commands the most interest or sympathy from the reading audience, and embodies valuable human qualities such as honesty, bravery, and compassion. The heroic character seeks escape from the strictures of his or her ever-expanding Anglo American civilization, and travels (forced or willingly) on a voyage to the frontier (any space outside the bounds of westernized society). The primitive character accompanies the heroic on this voyage. The character in the primitive mode embodies the qualities of cultural primitivism-being more natural, more instinctive, and more spontaneous than the heroic (Bell, Primitivism 8O). The primitive character is also a marginalized character-a social outsider to the western culture. The primitive character is excluded from the full benefits of the heroic character's society because he or she may be described as one of the following: being non-white, non-Christian, lower class, or poor. As a social outsider, the primitive feels a spiritual bond with the hero-or at least feels compassion for the freedom the hero seeks. The primitive having spent most of his or her existence marginalized from society, better understands the psychological and physical challenges of the frontier, and guides the hero toward survival through word and deed (Bell, Primitivism 11). As an outsider with the answers, the primitive is a powerful source of irony. While readers anticipate that their encounter with the primitive will comfortably reinforce their society's negative stereotypes of marginalized peoples, the reverse happens. The early nineteenth century audience is bewildered as their Anglo-American social philosophy fails them and the primitive's way is depicted as the path to salvation. The rhetoric of the primitive savior refers to a persuasive technique, in which authors depict a marginalized (primitive) character and a modem (heroic) character in a relationship in which the marginalized character's mode of existence, for the purpose of irony, is shown to be the answer to the hero's salvation. Through the lens of critics such as Michael Bell, Wayne Booth, Joseph Campbell, and John Gardner, this study examines the achievement of this irony as a multidimensional process, combining at least seven elements. These elements include arguments of characterization (ethos), arguments of emotion (pathos), and arguments of reason (logos). Chapter one, examines how authors use myths to color readers' first impression of a primitive characters vice or virtue. Two elements are analyzed as arguments of ethos: the myth of the frontier (element 1) and the myth of the Native American (element 2). The second chapter discusses arguments of pathos--examining narrative strategies of how each author presents primitive characters to gain reader attention (element 3), and how each author's narrative portrays primitive characters in order to gain audience empathy (element 4). The third chapter examines archetypal patterns, such as that of the hero's initiation (element 5),and that of the primitive-as-teacher (element 6) create arguments of reason.suggesting that the primitive character has social value. The final chapter attempts a holistic evaluation of how the relationship of primitive and heroic characters in each novel makes the works life affirming and socially redeeming ones (element 7), qualifying each work as a work worthy of being termed Literary under John Gardner's theory of moral fiction. In conclusion, while each element on its own is rhetorically significant, by viewing these elements on a holistic level, it becomes clear that the combination of these seven elements serve to create something that is far more rhetorically captivating and literary, than any one element analyzed independently.
Subject	Cooper, James Fenimore, 1789-1851. Deerslayer Melville, Herman, 1819-1891. Moby Dick Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864. Scarlet letter Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864. Blithedale romance
Department	Department of English
Advisor	Heitner, John A
Type	Text
Digital Format	application/pdf
Language	eng
OCLC number	61661193
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The rhetoric of the primitive savior in Cooper's The deerslayer, Melville's Moby Dick and Hawthorne's The scarlet letter and The Blithedale romance / Samuel Gordon Paley

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