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heavily implicated in the game of appearances sought to strike through the
masks and expose the secret purposes hidden within . They sought as well
the authentic, natural hero , whose appearance was at one with his inner self,
and who would slay conspiratorial demons. Killing the Indian, Bank, or
slave-power monsters healed the divisions in the self-made man, and
reanimated his world .
An analysis like the one offered here uses the methods of the romance
to examine the meaning ofJacksonian individualism . Generating monsters
from within the self, it may seem to share the very antebellum blindness to
social mediation it seeks to analyze. The Bank and the slave power had real
existence after all, if the Mexican-English abolitionist conspiracy did not.
Indians also were not creations of the romantic self. But the Indian monster
so important in white American politics was. He was, in Roy Harvey
Pearce's words , "no Indian but an image . .. .Civilization had created a
savage, so to kill him. Idea had begotten image, so to kill it. The need was
to
go beyond image and idea to the man. " With the other images as well,
pointing to a referent does not replace analysis of its meaning. One must ask
whether the symbols mystified or illuminated social relationships, whether
they advanced or retarded self-knowledge.
Let me illustrate with a final example. Those who celebrated "practi–
cal mechanics," in Daniel Webster's phrase, may appear to have been
comfortable wi th appearance, and to have avoided demonology . Perhaps
here are the protagonists of pragmatic political science . But monster–
building defined work-a-day enterprise as well. It is a short step from
organic parthenogenesis to reproduction by (Webster again) "scientific
art." American idealists, D. H. Lawrence pointed out, are idealists of the
machine . Machines replaced the human dependence and interdependence
so problematic for the self-made man . The "foundling" hero of Melville's
"Belltower" is a "common sense practical materialist ." This "Prometheus"
invents a human automaton, a "metallic agent" with "the appearance of
intelligence and will. " The "iron slave, " created to strike the hours, strikes
dead his creator instead . Melville had read Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein ,
that
fable of the "modern Prometheus, " whose hero, in explicit flight from
parental sexuality, created his own child-monster. But Melville did not
have to go abroad for models. Daniel Webster had already proclaimed a
paradise of machines, "millions of automatic laborers, all diligently
employed for the benefit of man." "The world is precisely as much benefit–
ted," Webster explained , "as if Providence had provided for our use
millions of men, like ourselves in external appearance, who would work and
labor and toil, and who yet required for their own subsistence neither
shelter, nor food , nor clothing . These automata in the factories and the
