Snakes and the Shedding of Clothing as Colonialist Strategies In The Americas of Cabeza De Vaca And Crévecoeur
Location
SU-214
Department
English
Abstract
What do snakes have to do with the threat and the promise of newness? When can the downsizing of one’s wardrobe function as self-defense, the exhibition of one’s nudity function as defensive artifice? Even as the imageries of clothing, nakedness, and snakes coalesce to support narratives of personal transformation, all these factors engage colonialist strategies of hybridity within settler-colonialism in the works The Relación of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer. This paper explores parallels between two literary works whose publication dates are over two hundred years apart, by attending to their shared themes of human-clothing relationship and animal-human relationship. The narrators of both works exhibit fixations upon snakes and clothing (or its absence). Because these are features of a Biblical creation narrative, it should not be surprising to find them among literatures that promote Christian ideology. Indeed, some extant research traces Crèvecoeur’s work to Milton, but few critics have bridged Crèvecoeur to Cabeza de Vaca, as this paper does. While this paper finds a foundation in textual comparison, it seeks to go further, presenting these striking themes as colonialist strategies. The narrator in Relación associates nakedness with the snakes and the people he encounters in the Americas, and he strategically mimics the indigenous people’s nakedness, thus finding himself more agreeable to them but less attractive to the missionaries who encounter him. This is an effective colonialist strategy for him because he can continue his information-gathering uninterrupted. The narrator in Letters associates clothing with wealth in one of the earlier letters but in a later letter, when distressed at finding himself sandwiched between a factional war and a fearsome aboriginal unknown, he resolves to assimilate towards the unknown and adopt a “new mode of living…without linen and with little other clothing.” This is an effective colonialist strategy for him under these circumstances. Both narrators associate snakes with transformation and both narrators, upon encountering a threat, enact colonialist strategies for addressing that threat. Indeed, each of the narrators seems to be so affected by his environment that he figuratively sheds and reforms his skin.
Faculty Sponsor
Emily Garcia, Northeastern Illinois University
Snakes and the Shedding of Clothing as Colonialist Strategies In The Americas of Cabeza De Vaca And Crévecoeur
SU-214
What do snakes have to do with the threat and the promise of newness? When can the downsizing of one’s wardrobe function as self-defense, the exhibition of one’s nudity function as defensive artifice? Even as the imageries of clothing, nakedness, and snakes coalesce to support narratives of personal transformation, all these factors engage colonialist strategies of hybridity within settler-colonialism in the works The Relación of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer. This paper explores parallels between two literary works whose publication dates are over two hundred years apart, by attending to their shared themes of human-clothing relationship and animal-human relationship. The narrators of both works exhibit fixations upon snakes and clothing (or its absence). Because these are features of a Biblical creation narrative, it should not be surprising to find them among literatures that promote Christian ideology. Indeed, some extant research traces Crèvecoeur’s work to Milton, but few critics have bridged Crèvecoeur to Cabeza de Vaca, as this paper does. While this paper finds a foundation in textual comparison, it seeks to go further, presenting these striking themes as colonialist strategies. The narrator in Relación associates nakedness with the snakes and the people he encounters in the Americas, and he strategically mimics the indigenous people’s nakedness, thus finding himself more agreeable to them but less attractive to the missionaries who encounter him. This is an effective colonialist strategy for him because he can continue his information-gathering uninterrupted. The narrator in Letters associates clothing with wealth in one of the earlier letters but in a later letter, when distressed at finding himself sandwiched between a factional war and a fearsome aboriginal unknown, he resolves to assimilate towards the unknown and adopt a “new mode of living…without linen and with little other clothing.” This is an effective colonialist strategy for him under these circumstances. Both narrators associate snakes with transformation and both narrators, upon encountering a threat, enact colonialist strategies for addressing that threat. Indeed, each of the narrators seems to be so affected by his environment that he figuratively sheds and reforms his skin.