Frontier Androgyny: An Archetypal Female Hero in The Adventures of Daniel Boone

Abstract

Influential American studies scholars of the mid-twentieth century, such as R. W. B. Lewis, Henry Nash Smith, and Leslie A. Fiedler, focussed attention on a mythic American character, the frontiersman who penetrates the wilderness. These critics provided analyses of figures such as Daniel Boone and his fictional counterpart, Natty Bumppo, and discussed the power the romanticized western frontier had over the American imagination. Their observations were accurate, as far as they went. However, these critics did not acknowledge the many narratives in which a female character conquers the frontier. The assumption seemed to be that the literary female figure belonged in the parlor with her sewing basket and not in the forest with her weapon. Unfortunately, this incomplete assessment of the frontier adventure genre is still in evidence today. In this essay, I work towards the development of a more complete understanding of the American frontier story and point out that, even in the iconic John Filson/John Trumbull Boone tale, we find a mini-narrative involving a female hero who triumphs over the “savage” forces of the wilderness. This female figure became a cultural archetype, and similar versions of her story were repeated in countless captivity and western adventure anthologies, almanacs, and the like for the next seventy years. The popularity of this frontier narrative featuring a strong, violent female figure suggests that readers were accepting of the idea of an active, aggressive woman, at least while she was contending with chaotic forces in the wilderness. The popularity of this kind of narrative also undercuts the traditional gender paradigm (the nurturing passive female versus the active aggressive male) too often imposed by scholars on antebellum American letters and culture.