Susan Faludi: America’s Guardian Myths
AT length they came and beset our own house, and quickly it was the dolefulest day that ever mine eyes saw.” Thus did a minister’s wife, Mary Rowlandson, describe the Indian attack and immolation of her Massachusetts village, 35 miles west of Boston. “On the 10th of February 1675 came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster,” she wrote. “Their first coming was about sun-rising. Hearing the noise of some guns, we looked out; several houses were burning, and the smoke ascending to heaven.”
Rowlandson was one of the fortunate that morning: she and her three children were spared and taken captive. Her youngest, a 6-year-old daughter, died in her arms on the forced march north. After 11 harrowing weeks, Rowlandson was released and a few years later wrote “A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson,” which would run through four printings in its first year and become America’s original best seller, the model of the captivity narrative, the foremost indigenous genre of American literature.
Huddled inside the garrison, with “the smoke ascending to heaven,” Mary Rowlandson and the other villagers faced a choice that echoes grimly through the commemorations of our own “dolefulest day”: whether to stay inside and burn, or plunge into certain death. The parallels between the Lancaster ordeal and the catastrophe we faced on 9/11 are not incidental. Rowlandson’s story holds a key to our own experience, shedding light on not only the trauma of the day itself but our response. On a deep cultural and psychological level, our reactions as a nation to 9/11 had as much to do with Mary Rowlandson as with Mohamed Atta....
What is the relevance of all this to 9/11 and its aftermath? Surely, given the historical forgetfulness of Americans, not many people know Rowlandson’s name or recall her era’s conflicts. Nevertheless, that Colonial travail profoundly shaped our modern society and lives on in our world view, whether we are conscious of it or not. Our original “war on terrorism” bequeathed us a heritage that haunts our reaction to crises like the one that struck on that crisp, clear morning in the late summer of 2001.
Even our amnesia is evidence of this haunting, because the amnesia was not natural. It was intentionally induced by the creation of a myth, a fable of national invincibility on the American frontier. Beginning in the 18th century and culminating in the Victorian era, journalists, novelists, artists and sculptors concocted a fantasy that supplanted memories of vulnerability and terror on the Northeastern borderlands with tales of conquest and victory on the Great Plains....