Young Writers Society

Note: Since this is tailored for the teacher, there's probably a lot of bull.


The American culture is infatuated with heroism. From survivor shows to action heroes, young and old alike delight in their chosen champions. They will even spend copious amounts of money on anything and everything pertaining to their chosen one’s sound, name, and logo. Especially with the rise in popularity for comic book characters, it is easy to wonder how America’s people came to be this way. What framed the way the modern American looks at heroism? To answer this question, it is best to return to the beginning, or at least, as close to the beginning as possible. The Puritans, as one of the first groups to “settle” America, were naturally contributors to the beginnings of American Literature. One of these Puritans was a woman named Anne Bradstreet.
Anne Bradstreet was, in fact, the first known woman author, as well as the first known poet of North America. Her works conveyed passion; something the Puritans had heretofore somewhat frowned upon, and a devotion to God apparent even in the works in which He is not specifically mentioned. “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” for instance, focuses on her love life. While God’s name cannot be found in it, the dedication to her significant other is apparent. The line “If ever two were one, then surely we” (108) cements this—in fact, it shows that she and her husband strove daily to become everything God wanted them to be. For her, it was not a matter of being subjected to staying at home and bowing to a man’s will; it was the pleasure of serving the ones she loved. Thus, to Bradstreet, the American hero embodied servitude.
As is natural with anything in this world, this definition begins to change over the years; and perhaps the person who best portrays the difference is Benjamin Franklin. A self-proclaimed deist, the scholar spent a considerable amount of time devoted to pursuing certain virtues; namely, “Temperance…silence... order… resolution… frugality… industry… sincerity… justice… moderation… cleanliness… tranquility… chastity…” and “humility”(284, 285). Franklin believed that each man should pursue these values on his own. In this, it seems that to Franklin, the American hero embodies a somewhat self-sufficient striving for the betterment of character.
In something of a turnabout that probably reflects her upbringing more than anything else, Phillis Wheatley turns the American Hero back to God. As the first African American woman to publish poetry, she somehow managed to balance knowing her place as a slave and woman in that period with speaking out and making a name for herself. In her work, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” she said that “Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land” (420). Though she cannot remember her homeland or her native tongue, she counts it a blessing that she could come to a place wherein she could be taught the love of God. To her, the American Hero embodied a quiet strength that knew when to yield and when to stand firm.
James Fennimore Cooper would, no doubt, have agreed with at least some of her philosophy. Of the mentioned authors, his work, The Last of the Mohicans, was the only one to have tackled the subject at hand from the point of a woodsman. The woodsman, affectionately termed Natty Bumpo, is, by many accounts, more of a Native American Indian than a white man, and this lends him a unique versatility unseen among his literary counterparts. Hawkeye, as Natty Bumpo is also called, can track as well as his Mohican relatives, whom he grew up with. Although he prides himself on being a sure shot, he knows when to give way to reason, as he does on page 474 when Chief Chingachgook reminds him that he will alert the enemy tribe to their presence if he fires his rifle. Further, he openly admires the work Unqas does in killing the deer his sights had been set on, saying tha it was “‘done with Indian skill,’ […] ‘and was a pretty sight to behold’”(475). Still, he maintains his pride as a white man; puffing himself up in his knowledge of the English language when it becomes clear that white men are coming their way. Thus, in Natty Bumpo Cooper demonstrates that his version of the American Hero embodies reasonable tolerance, a healthy dose of self-sufficiency, and large amount of adaptability.
Ralph Waldo Emerson takes these themes and stretches them further in his essay, “The American Scholar.” For an American Hero to emerge, he argues, a man must break away from the pack of humanity to think for himself. The most desirable state for a scholar, according to Emerson, is to become Man Thinking, rather than a “victim of society… a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking” (521). “Meek young men,” he goes on to say, “grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books” (523). To him, the education system is doing students a severe disservice by forcing them to memorize and regurgitate facts. To Emerson, the American Hero embodies a free-thinking spirit.
The journey of the American Hero has already been quite long, and he has already endured many changes, though the span of time has only been approximately two centuries. In that time, he has mutated from a subservient, God-fearing subject, to a self-sufficient free-thinker. Sadly, though the loss of a God-centered life is a severe one, many will only see the good in becoming more self-assured, and rush in to mold the American Hero to their own liking. Who knows? Perhaps eventually, he will return to even a shadow of what he once was. After all, if the literature of only two hundred years can shape the character of the American hero this much, who can tell what a few hundred more will do to him?