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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Chroniclers of the American Dream have made progressively clear in recent years that the “dialogue” or “dialectic” it produced was the distinguishing feature of nineteenth-century American letters. An important consequence of the valuable studies carried out in particular by Marius Bewley, A. N. Kaul, R. W. B. Lewis, and Henry Nash Smith has been the rehabilitation of James Fenimore Cooper as an early and exemplary participant in this debate. According to Lewis, he is, as the creator of the “fictional Adamic hero unambiguously treated,” a partisan of the party of Hope in its skirmishes with the parties of Memory and Irony. In the more properly internalized drama presented by the others, he is the theater for a struggle between what Smith sees as his commitment to the “principle of social order” and his attraction to the “anarchic freedom” projected in Leatherstocking; what Bewley sees as Europe and America taken as value clusters similar to those later placed in dramatic opposition by Henry James; and what Kaul sees as “the history and the myth of American civilization,” acceptance and repudiation of ties with the corrupt European past. But this revised conception of Cooper's significance is in the process of passing into stereotype before it is validated. What remains to be done, what I propose to do, is to examine closely the texture of his habitual discourse. By isolating and relating those minute flourishes and recurring expressions which betray a writer's stance in its complexity, I hope to bring more clearly into focus the conflict between Cooper's formal theory, the conscious thesis of universal depravity which was the structuring principle in his religious and political philosophy (his acceptance of Europe as an abiding reminder of the human condition) and the half or barely articulated antithesis of meliorism (his rejection of Europe as the inevitable condition)— a conflict which did not so much end in an outright victory for either view as subside in a faltering synthesis.
1 R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago, 1955), p. 91; Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (New York, 1957), p. 66; Marius Bewley, The Eccentric Design (New York, 1959), pp. 18–20, 71–72; A. N. Kaul, The American Vision (New Haven and London, 1963), p. 84. See also Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), p. 52; Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York, 1960), p. 186; Edwin Fussell, Frontier: American Literature and the American West (Princeton, N.J., 1965), pp. 50, 59–60; and D. E. S. Maxwell, American Fiction: The Intellectual Background (New York, 1963), p. 3. Although Charles L. Sanford's The Quest for Paradise (Urbana, Ill., 1961) is not directly concerned with Cooper, it provides a background against which the tensions of his thought may be similarly viewed.
2 William Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes in This Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity (London, 1811), p. 22.
3 Roger B. Salomon, Twain and the Image of History (New Haven, 1961), p. 141.
4 See particularly Dixon Ryan Fox, “James Fenimore Cooper, Aristocrat,” NYH, xxii (Jan. 1941), 18–24; Charles O'Donnell, “Progress and Poverty: The Later Cooper, ”AQ, xiii (Fall 1961), 402–409; and Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (Chicago, 1953), pp. 171–178. A number of scholars in recent years have hailed Cooper as a novelist (even the nineteenth-century American novelist) particularly distinguished for the depth and centrality of his religious vision: most notably Charles A. Brady, “James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851): Myth-Maker and Christian Romancer,” American Classics Reconsidered: A Christian Appraisal, ed. Harold C. Gardiner (New York, 1958), pp. 59–97; Howard Mumford Jones, “Prose and Pictures: James Fenimore Cooper,” Tulane Studies in English, iii (1952), 133–154; and Donald A. Ringe, “Cooper's Last Novels, 1847–1850,” PMLA, lxxv (Dec. 1960), 583–590.
5 Precaution (New York, 1861), pp. 267, 308. All subsequent references to Cooper's novels, unless otherwise noted, are to this first collected edition, published 1859–61 by W. A. Townsend and Co., with illustrations by F. O. Darley. Abbreviations for novels cited parenthetically are as follows: The Pioneers (Pion.); The Prairie (Pr.); The Red Rover (RR); The Heidenmauer (Heid.); The Headsman (Head.); The Monikins (Mon.); Homeward Bound (HB), Home as Found (HF); The Pathfinder (Path.); Mercedes of Castile (MC); The Deer-slayer (D); Wyandotté (Wyan.); The Chainbearer (Chain.); The Redskins (Red.); Jack Tier (JT); The Crater (Cr.); The Oak Openings (OO); The Sea Lions (SL); The Ways of the Hour (WH).
6 The complicated question of Cooper's political alignment is considered in Robert E. Spiller, “Introductory Note for the Third Edition,” The American Democrat [hereafter cited parenthetically as AD] (New York, 1956), pp. xv–xxvi, and Fenimore Cooper: Critic of His Times (New York, 1931); Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion (New York, 1960), pp. 57–100; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston, 1947), pp. 375–380; and Dorothy Waples, The Whig Myth of James Fenimore Cooper (New Haven, 1938).
7 The American Democrat, p. 45; Sketches of Switzerland. Part Second (Philadelphia, 1836), ii, 61. Cf. The Federalist, ed. Max Beloff (Oxford and New York, 1948), p. 71.
8 Mercedes of Castile, p. 341; America and the Americans: Notions Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor [hereafter cited parenthetically as Not.], 2nd ed. (London, 1836), i, 205–206; The Pioneers, p. 14; The Spy (New York, 1822), i, “Preface to the Third Edition,” viii.
9 Introduction to The Prairie (New York, 1950), p. xix.
10 Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1949), p. 4.
11 For a comprehensive survey of Cooper's attitude toward science and scientists, see Harry Hayden Clark, “Fenimore Cooper and Science,” TWA, xlviii (1959), 179–204, and xlix (1960), 249–282.
12 In addition to the sources parenthetically cited, see The Headsman, p. 195; Wyandotté, p. 109; Afloat and Ashore, p. 244; The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper [hereafter cited parenthetically as Ltrs.], ed. James Franklin Beard, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1960, 1964), iii, 94, 281.
13 James Fenimore Cooper (New York, 1949), p. 146.
14 See The Heidenmauer, p. 198, and especially The Headsman, p. 69, for the description of a debauched professional pilgrim as “one of the lowest class of those fungi that grow out of the decayed parts of the moral, as their more material types prove the rottenness of the vegetable, world.”
15 Gleanings in Europe: England, ed. Robert E. Spiller (New York, 1930), p. 391; Gleanings in Europe: France, ed. Robert E. Spiller (New York, 1928), p. 81.
16 Early Critical Essays (1820–1822) by James Fenimore Cooper, with Introduction and Headnotes by James F. Beard, Jr. (Gainesville, Fla., 1955), p. 32.
17 New York, with Introduction by Dixon Ryan Fox (New York, 1930), pp. 56–57.
18 Letters, iii, 42; Sketches of Switzerland. Part Second, ii, 109, 181; The Manikins, p. 363; Home as Found, p. 214.
19 For a full discussion of Cooper's conception of the gentleman, see Edwin Harrison Cady, The Gentleman in America (Syracuse, N.Y., 1949), pp. 103–145.
20 “Areopagitica,” The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson (New York, 1931), iv, 311; John Winthrop, quoted in Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma (Boston, 1958), p. 11.
21 The Pioneers, pp. 320, 47; Wyandotté, p. 119; The Crater, p. 198; Home as Found, p. 152.
22 Switzerland, Part Second, ii, 176; France, pp. 276–277; Excursions in Italy (Paris, 1838), p. 155.
23 The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, p. 441. See also The Oak Openings, pp. 123, 225. The cultural relativism and moral absolutism involved in the judgment commonly passed by the white American upon the red American's culture are brilliantly examined by Roy Harvey Pearce in The Savages of America (Baltimore, Md., 1953).
24 Robert H. Zoellner, “Conceptual Ambivalence in Cooper's Leatherstocking,” AL, xxxi (Jan. 1960), 402–403.
25 Sketches of Switzerland (Philadelphia, 1836), i, 146; Satanstoe, p. 59.
26 My interpretation here runs roughly parallel to that of Thomas Philbrick in his Introduction to The Crater (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. xxv.
27 James Franklin Beard, Jr., “The First History of Greater New York; Unknown Portions of Fenimore Cooper's Last Work,” NYHSQ, xxxvii (April 1953), 125.
28 “American and European Scenery Compared,” The Home Book of the Picturesque (New York, 1852), p. 69.
29 The Eighteenth Century Background (New York and London, 1941), p. 84.