American Indian Culture and Research Journal

"Is man a salvage at heart, skinned o'er with Manners? Or is salvagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?" The question posed so delicately by Mary Mungummory," the traveling whore a ' Dorset " in John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor, reflected an increasingly serious concern of generations of English colonists in America. In a culture that saw itself as the apotheosis and vanguard of "civilization," contact with the Indian cultures of the New World produced an unexpected and uncharacteristic uncertainty about its own identity. The Indian was important for the English mind " for what he showed civilized men they were not and must not be " -a negative force in the cosmic duel between Darkness and Light. But he also exerted a positive force, for "what he was in and of himself," what his culture actually was, posed a threat and a challenge to English culture that struck at the very heart of its existence, its identity , and perhaps most of all, its integrity.