Violence in American Literature

Abstract

The frequency of fighting and killing in American literature is not necessarily proof of an unusually violent so ciety, but literary treatments of violence have reflected certain historical conditions and circumstances. The growth of popular literacy created a mass audience whose attention could best be held by suspense, surprise, and startling contrast. The Revolution provided a model for later fiction in which the hero's triumph was not a blow against authority but rather a defeat of the Tory, who defied the sacred rules of the compact. This convention gave expression to a fear of factionalism and anarchy, and to a desire to identify one's own interests with a tradition of self-sacrificing unity. The ideal of social unity might conflict with the ideal of a self-sufficient and self- relying individual, but later writers projected the image of the individualistic hero into the vacant spaces of the West, where his violent acts were devoid of social consequence. Although both proslavery and antislavery writers tended to see the Negro as a pacific being, he has become a focal point of violence in twentieth-century literature. In the twentieth century, Amer ican writers have assimilated the older traditions of individual istic and racial violence to an antirationalistic philosophy which looks on violence as a regenerative or creative force, or as a symbol of reality.