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Savage Conversations

Red Leaf mentioned in Savage Conversations.

Savage Conversations (novel){{Dashboard.wikiedu.org sandbox}}

Overview

Savage Conversations is the seventh book by author and poet LeAnne Howe (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma). Published in 2019, the story is based on historical events in the United States during a fourteen year period between 1862 and 1876: the execution of thirty-eight Dakota men in 1862; the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865; and the court-ordered institutionalization of Mary Todd Lincoln in 1875. The characters are Mary Todd Lincoln; Savage Indian, and The Rope. Howe connects two events: Mary Todd Lincoln’s mental condition to the mass execution of the Dakota men.

Background

While Howe lived and worked in Illinois in 2008, she began writing the book during a visit to the Abraham Lincoln Library in Springfield, Illinois. The state and nation were gearing up to celebrate Lincoln's two hundredth birthday in 2009 and Howe wanted to examine Lincoln's life and legacy through an Indigenous person’s perspective.

Howe researched historical documents (biographies, diaries, newspaper clippings, trial, and letters), and shifted her interest to Mary Todd Lincoln. Howe’s research led her to memorabilia and files of Todd Lincoln’s short stay at Bellevue Place Sanitarium in Batavia, Illinois in 1875. Her history of erratic behavior included her complaints about an “Indian spirit” visiting her nightly who “scalped her, cut bones from her cheeks, and made slits in her eyelids, sewing them open.” These incidents led her son, Robert, to have her, through the court system, committed for treatment of a mental condition.

Howe wondered who the “Indian” was that Todd Lincoln referred to. Howe speculated that he was “one of the thirty-eight Dakota males hung in a mass killing the day after Christmas in 1862” by order of President Lincoln. Howe has stated that the male “Indian spirit” voice was the first that she heard and that her “own adopted father’s mental insanity” and anger and curiosity about Todd Lincoln were the basis for the book. The Rope became a character after an incident Howe had in Las Vegas while writing a draft of the book.  

Plot Summary

Mary Todd Lincoln is institutionalized in the Bellevue Place Sanitarium. Between June 1875 to September 1875, Savage Indian (the ghost of one of the executed Dakota 38 men) visits her. They discuss events, such as Savage Indian’s death, the Dakota men killed in the mass execution which he blames Mary for, to Mary’s husband’s affair. The Rope eavesdrops on their conversations and occasionally comments. Each night, the Savage Indian also commits physical violence: to her request, he slits her eyelids and sews them open, and also scalps her. The following morning her wounds have disappeared. Between September 1875 to June 1876, Savage Indian visits her in the home of her sister, Elizabeth Todd Edwards.

Themes and Analysis

Howe mixes in the historical context with Mary Todd Lincoln’s stay to the asylum (because of her illness of munchausen by proxy) to emulate the fixed reality that Todd Lincoln must have felt being alone with the delusions of being haunted by the “Savage Indian.” She recognizes him as a haunting figure, from when her husband and former president Abraham Lincoln signed an order to execute thirty-eight Dakota members from the Dakota tribal nation from Oklahoma in 1865. Every night,“A deep horror plays itself out, again and again, in history and in Mary Todd’s mind.”

Todd Lincoln dives into her victim complex of delusions and paranoia with the effects of solitude, which “invites a measure of compassion alongside a clear-eyed understanding of the very real racism that lends its form and shape to her hallucinations.” She remains obsessed with her late husband (and his suspected infidelities), “sexually frustrated, selfish, and venal.” Her characterization “challenges narratives of innocence surrounding white female fragility and instead considers the agency of a First Lady. Mary Todd Lincoln used her agency to stoke impulses towards violence and cruelty that led to the mass execution of the Dakhóta 38, as well as the subsequent war crimes against the surviving women and children.”

However, “Mary’s relationship with Savage Indian is odd and intimate.” Mary constantly despises the Savage Indian and his existence to contradict herself, but at the same time, she wants to feel the pain of his knife every night. She even “begs for it.” Howe intricately expresses Todd Lincoln’s behavior with pain related back to her illness and need for victim-mentality with her replayed imagery of the Savage Indian carving her face and removing parts of it.  

The Savage Indian acts as a “hybrid figure.” “His name and Mary Todd’s fear of him recall the “Indian Savages” cited in the Declaration of Independence as one of the great threats to America.” The rope, “an image of the U.S.’s tools of execution” is also marked as a character “who hangs at the periphery of these conversations, commenting in brief but disturbing reminders of the terrible history unfolding around the purgatory where Mary Todd Lincoln and Savage Indian find themselves.”

Structure

Three scenes, “They Speak of Dreams,” “A House Divided,” and “An Uneasy Union,” divide the book and each scene has titled segments. Each scene is written in lines of verse. The book starts with an introduction from Susan Power, then follows with descriptions of The Story and The Characters. Three scenes acted by the characters, then ends with the note pages from the author. Each of the characters have their own voice plus the third-person narrator that is not a character in the play but speaks from the perspective of each character. “Howe experiments with the form of verse drama to tell the history of the Dakhóta resistance to colonization and the mythos surrounding the Lincoln presidency of that same period”

Savage Conversations has been categorized in a variety of ways. It’s been called a novel, a play, a poetically infused play, a play-in-verse, “a striking hybrid, a play in verse never meant to be staged, a novel that resists prose structure, a series of scenes that encompass the unseen,” a "play/poem/novel/historical nightmare," and “a sui generis collection of poetry and drama.”

Literary Significance

Savage Conversations brings attention to aspects of U.S. history that receive little or no attention. Indigenous history that’s “omitted from textbooks and cultural memory” Howe “adds a difficult, necessary territory.” Readers are called to “rethink history as we know it.”  

Reception

Positive reviews followed the release of Savage Conversations. Annette Lapointe wrote in the New York Journal of Books that the novel resists prose structure and that it’s a crucial book. In The Georgia Review, Shanae Martinez wrote that “Savage Conversations offers a significant contribution to decolonial truth-telling.” Nathan McNamara wrote in the LA Review of Books that the book “operates with a savage intimacy that goes beneath the skin, that creeps and bleeds and transubstantiates back into something that haunts us, that reminds us in a Faulknerian sense that the past isn’t death; it’s not even past,” and praised Howe as “a genre chemist, mixing disparate textual, visual, and auditory techniques to create singular narrative energy.”

The Kenyon Review praised Howe for “her insightful and deft use of dramatic monologues.” In The Carolina Quarterly, Karah Mitchell wrote that “There is a quietness that thrums through this slender book, a brutal honesty that pulls us in with its power and that invites us to dwell on “the thirty-eight lives abandoned,” and, by extension, all of the other Indigenous lives forgotten throughout U. S. history.” Numerous critics wrote reviews on the book.

Adaptations

In early 2020, the University of Washington did a reading of Savage Conversations, featuring a small cast and minimal set. The reading was directed by Andrew Coopman, a master’s student at UW.

The Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York City, NY, also held a reading of Savage Conversations, with an announcement made by the University of Georgia.

Dedication

Howe dedicates this book to the brave character of the Dakota people.

Back Cover Blurb

On the dust jacket, a summary of the play is provided. Below the summary are two brief reviews of the book. The first review is written by Philip J. Deloria and the second review is written by Heid E. Erdrich. Below the reviews is a short, biographical paragraph about LeAnne Howe.

References

Categories (novels): Psychiatric hospitals in fiction | Works set in psychiatric hospitals | Fiction by century of setting | 2019 novels | American novels