Le Bon Sauvage: Dances with Wolves and the Romantic Tradition

Abstract

The noble savage, according to eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is an individual living in a “pure state of nature”-gentle, wise, uncorrupted by the vices of civilization. Producer-director Kevin Costner brings this vision to his film Dances with Wolves, and thus he creates a nation of Sioux Indians living in a golden age, free from European social convention and removed from the failings of ”civilization.” His film is less about Indian tradition than European romanticism: Its white hero longs for the Arcadian wilderness, pursues his own ”dream woman,” and searches for a nature uncontaminated by contemporary society. Costner’s vision of Sioux life before white contact is a chimerical dream of Native American existence, a portrait of a people doomed to extinction. Dances with Wolves is the story of Lieutenant John J. Dunbar (Kevin Costner) and his life among the Lakota Sioux. The year is 1863, and Dunbar, a Civil War hero, requests a transfer to the isolated Dakota Territory. As the only white in an alien world, he