Frontier Anxiety and the American Indian in the Fiction of Cooper and Simms
Frontier Anxiety and the American Indian in the Fiction of Cooper and Simms

Summary/Abstract: This research examines the opposition between the American Indian and civilization in two selected nineteenth-century frontier romances: James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers (1823) and William Gilmore Simms's The Yemassee: a Romance of Carolina (1835). The proposed study represents the effects of civilization and its role in forming a collective anxiety within the American Indian community. It aims at depicting cultural anxiety as a product of the confrontation between man and civilization on the American frontier: on the margins of the settlements in the two novels. This paper is based on Sigmund Freud’s assumption that civilization is largely responsible for the misery of humankind and that experiencing anxiety stems from the destructive forces of the external world or from man’s relationship to man.

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