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Chiaroscuro as an Artistic Device in Cooper's Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Donald A. Ringe
Donald A. Ringe*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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Extract

Although the pictorial element has long been recognized as an important factor in James Fenimore Cooper's descriptive style, detailed analyses of specific techniques that Cooper shared with contemporary landscape painters can still add much to our understanding of his fundamental artistry. A number of such studies have already appeared. Howard Mumford Jones has shown how Cooper's moral view of the world found a means of expression—the expansive depiction of a panoramic scene—that is strikingly similar to the typical landscape of the Hudson River School of painting, and James Franklin Beard has written of the basic artistic technique that Cooper shared with the painter Thomas Cole—the harmonization of precise details to present an ideal truth. Other studies, moreover, have pointed out a number of specific devices that Cooper and his artistic friends employed to express their related themes. One important painterly technique used by the novelist, however, has yet to be treated in detail: the chiaroscuro, or arrangement of light and shadow, that he, like the painters, included in his delineation of the natural scene. Many readers of Cooper, no doubt, have perceived the effectiveness of Cooper's carefully lighted descriptions, and comment upon them has, indeed, appeared in print. The technique, however, is so important in Cooper's art that it merits a much more extended treatment than it has yet received.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 78 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1963 , pp. 349 - 357
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963

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References

1 Recognition of this fact dates back at least as far as Balzac's well-known comment on the graphic quality of Cooper's nature description, in Revue Parisienne (Paris, 1840), p. 71. Balzac's discussion of Cooper appeared in this country a few months later translated for the Knickerbocker Magazine, xvii (January 1841), 72–77, esp. 75. A noteworthy later discussion of the pictorial element in Cooper is Edward E. Hale, Jr., “American Scenery in Cooper's Novels,” Sewanee Review, xviii (1910), 317–332.

2 “Prose and Pictures: James Fenimore Cooper,” Tulane Studies in English, iii (1952), 140–147.

3 “Cooper and His Artistic Contemporaries,” James Fenimore Cooper: A Re-Appraisal (Cooperstown, N. Y., 1954), pp. 120–122.

4 See my articles “James Fenimore Cooper and Thomas Cole: An Analogous Technique,” American Literature, xxx (1958), 26–36; “Cooper's The Crater and the Moral Basis of Society,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, xliv (1959), 372–373; and Thomas Philbrick, James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), pp. 234–237.

5 Although chiaroscuro is, strictly speaking, a term most appropriately used in the discussion of painting, so many words in the vocabulary of criticism may be equally applied to both the graphic and literary arts that this one may perhaps be used in the discussion of literature. A writer, after all, delineates a scene and draws a character, and the Hudson River painters discussed the “poetry” of painting.

6 Examples may be found in Yvor Winters, Maule's Curse (Norfolk, Conn., 1938), p. 34; Henry Nash Smith, “Introduction,” The Prairie, by James Fenimore Cooper (New York, 1950), pp. viii–xii; Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, N. Y., 1957), pp. 57–61; David Brion Davis, “The Deerslayer, A Democratic Knight of the Wilderness,” Twelve Original Essays on Great American Novels, ed. by Charles Shapiro (Detroit, 1958), pp. 11, 13–15; Marius Bewley, The Eccentric Design (New York, 1959), pp. 91–93.

7 The Crayon, i (1855), 66–67.

8 Washington Allston, Lectures on Art, and Poems (New York, 1850), pp. 152, 154; Louis L. Noble, The Course of Empire, Voyage of Life, and Other Pictures of Thomas Cole (New York, 1853), p. 116.

9 “Essay on American Scenery,” The American Monthly Magazine, i, n.s. (1836), 3. See also pp. 10–12.

10 Orations and Addresses (New York, 1873), pp. 19, 21, 34.

11 The Deerslayer, with illustrations by F. O. C. Darley (New York, 1861), pp. 33, 300. All citations of Cooper's novels in my text are to the Darley-Townsend edition published in New York, 1859–61.

12 This method of lighting is, of course, characteristic of the Hudson River School of painting and derives ultimately from the style of Claude Lorrain. For an extreme example of the technique, see Thomas Cole, An Evening in Arcady, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn. It is reproduced in Esther I. Seaver, Thomas Cole, One Hundred Years Later (Hartford, Conn., 1948), plate xiii. For another analysis of the symbolism in Cooper's scene, see Bewley, pp. 108–110.

13 This use of light to suggest the moral value of a character has a striking counterpart in Cole's painting John the Baptist in the Wilderness, where, in a vast, dark landscape, a dramatic highlight illumines John and the rock from which he is preaching. The painting is in the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn., and is reproduced in color in Frederick A. Sweet, The Hudson River School and the Early American Landscape Tradition (Chicago, 1945), frontispiece.

14 Virgin Land (New York, 1957), p. 258.

15 See Bewley, p. 112, and Chase, pp. 60–61, both of whom relate the scene of the trapper's death to that of his first dramatic appearance.

16 See Beard, p. 124, who writes of the “religious awe and aspiration” that are implicit in these two great scenes, as in much Hudson River painting, and who also sees the setting of the novel as “an integral part” of both the action and the meaning. Charles A. Brady, too, discusses the contrasting deaths of White and the trapper, in “Myth-Maker and Christian Romancer,” American Classics Reconsidered: A Christian Appraisal, ed. Harold C. Gardiner, S. J. (New York, 1958), p. 88.

17 See Bewley, p. 91, who covers some of these points, but who sees in the Glimmerglass “that equilibrium in nature which is the serene and indifferent resolution of all violence and blood,” and Davis, p. 11.

18 See Winters, p. 34, who also writes of the “symbolic value of the moonlit water” in this chapter, and of the “fragments of action discernible upon it.”