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Cooper's The Pioneers: Origins and Structure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Thomas Philbrick
Thomas Philbrick*
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh 13, Penn.
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Extract

Many critics of James Fenimore Cooper's early novel The Pioneers (1823) have called attention to the excellence of various individual aspects of its manner and matter, but few have been willing to accord the book the coherence and unity that are the first measure of a genuine work of art. The orthodox critical view insists on Cooper's failure to integrate the three major elements of his novel: the lengthy descriptions of natural scenery and of village habits and occupations; the conflict between Natty Bumppo and Judge Temple, usually regarded as the thematic center of the narrative; and the main plot, the discovery of Oliver Effingham as the true heir to Judge Temple's huge land holdings. Customarily this approach first stresses the divergent origins of Cooper's materials as the basis of their discordance. Since the novel draws both on the real world of personal recollection and family tradition and on the powers of pure imagination, it somehow must lack unity. “Incongruously,” writes Alexander Cowie, Cooper tied his “warm boyhood memories to a superannuated plot involving the temporary dispossession of an estate.” Consequently, “there is in The Pioneers a more definite disjunction of the action from the illustrative material than in any of Cooper's tales of the frontier.” Professor Cowie invites us to set aside the action of the novel so that “the setting and characterization may be enjoyed for their own sake.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 79 , Issue 5 , December 1964 , pp. 579 - 593
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1907

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References

1 The Rise of the American Novel (New York, 1948), pp. 125–126.

2 James Fenimore Cooper (New Haven, 1962), p. 33.

3 The Heyday of Sir Waller Scott (London, 1961), p. 133.

4 Davie, p. 144.

5 The Pioneers; or the Sources of the Susquehanna (New York, 1825), i [v], vii. Cooper later denied that the settlement of Cooperstown provided the basis for The Pioneers. In a letter to the editor of Brother Jonathan, i (1842), 357, the novelist pointed out that the village was founded several years before his birth and had grown beyond the state of development depicted in The Pioneers before he was old enough to remember. His first real contact with the frontier came at the age of nineteen in his naval service on Lake Ontario: “It was there, I obtained most of my notions of a new country, as well as of several of the characters introduced into the Pioneers.” It should be noted, however, that these remarks were made at the time of the celebrated Effingham controversy, when Cooper was attempting to disassociate himself and his family from his fiction. For a helpful discussion of the complex fusion of historical and imagined materials in The Pioneers, see Robert E. Spiller, Fenimore Cooper: Critic of His Times (New York, 1931), pp. 12–14, and James Fenimore Cooper: Representative Selections (New York, 1936), pp. lxxvii-lxxix.

6 Preface of 1849 to The Spy (New York, 1859), pp. ix-x.

7 Letter of 28 June 1820 to A. T. Goodrich, The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. James F. Beard (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), i, 44.

8 See C. K. Gardner's letter of 7 January 1822 to Cooper, quoted in James F. Beard, ed., Early Critical Essays (1820–1822), by James Fenimore Cooper (Gainesville, Fla., 1955), p. [x]. Professor Beard's identification of Cooper's contributions to the Repository and his facsimile reproduction of them in this volume are of vital importance to all students of the novelist's early literary attitudes.

9 Early Critical Essays, pp. 97, 98, 100, 101.

10 Early Critical Essays, p. 97.

11 See W. T. Conklin, “Paulding's Prose Treatment of Types and Frontier Lore before Cooper,” Univ. of Texas Stud. in Engl., No. 3926 (1939), pp. 163–171.

12 Cf. the passages quoted above from Cooper's review and preface with Paulding's key assertions in “National Literature”: “The aid of superstition, the agency of ghosts, fairies, goblins, and all that antiquated machinery ... is not necessary to excite our wonder or interest our feelings”; American writers should work toward the establishment of a national literature by employing native “scenes and events” and “by indulging in those little peculiarities of thought, feeling, and expression” which distinguish the nationality of every country (Salmagundi, 2nd Ser., New York, 1835, ii, 266, 270).

13 The Backwoodsman. A Poem (Philadelphia, 1818), p. [3], 89.

14 For accounts of the reception of The Backwoodsman, see W. T. Cairns, British Criticisms of American Writings, 1815–1833, Univ. of Wis. Stud. in Lang. and Lit., No. 14 (Madison, 1922), p. 164, and William I. Paulding, Literary Life of James K. Paulding (New York, 1867), pp. 95–97. In 1819 Halleck ridiculed The Backwoodsman in his poem Fanny, as did Drake in “The Man Who Frets at Worldly Strife” and “To John Minshull, Esq.,” where Paulding is labeled “The poet of cabbages, log-huts, and gin.” In his novel Koningsmarke (1823), Paulding took common cause with Cooper by expressing his admiration for The Pioneers and defending it against similar charges of vulgarity.

15 Irving had lent his assistance in securing an English publisher for The Spy; see Henry W. Boynton, James Fenimore Cooper (New York, 1931), pp. 96–98, and Beard, ed., The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, i, 75–76.

16 Early Critical Essays, p. 97. I am indebted to Professor Beard's discovery of Cooper's articles in the Repository for the external evidence that is essential to my discussion of Irving's influence on the composition of The Pioneers.

17 Early Critical Essays, pp. 133, 140, 135.

18 In his admirably full discussion of The Pioneers in Fenimore Cooper: Sa Vie et son œuvre: La Jeunesse (1789–1826) (Aix-en-Provence, 1938), Marcel Clavel rejects the notion that Cooper's novel owes anything whatsoever to Irving's Bracebridge sketches on the ground that Bracebridge Hall was published (May 1822) several months after The Pioneers was first conceived (pp. 353–354). M. Clavel overlooks the fact that the Bracebridge materials in The Sketch Book had appeared some two years before Bracebridge Hall itself; moreover, being unaware of Cooper's probable authorship of the review of Bracebridge Hall in the May issue of the Repository, he could not consider the likelihood that the novelist's attention was called to that book before its publication date and while the conception of The Pioneers must still have been in a fairly plastic state.

19 Bracebridge Hall, or The Humourists. A Medley (New York, 1822), ii, 48, 126.

20 Bracebridge Hall, ii, 193.

21 The Pioneers (New York, 1859), pp. 408, 410. All subsequent page references to this volume, the Townsend edition of the novel, will be made parenthetically in my text.

22 The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., No. 5 (New York, 1820), pp. 45, 46.

23 For a history of the genre and a full discussion of the central importance of The Seasons to it, see Dwight L. Durling, Georgic Tradition in English Poetry, Columbia Univ. Stud. in Engl. and Comp. Lit., No. 121 (New York, 1935); for a more compact account, see Robert A. Aubin, Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England, MLA Revolving Fund Ser., No. 6 (New York, 1936), pp. 46–55.

24 See Durling, p. 49.

25 According to Cooper's daughter, Thomson was among his five favorite authors: see Susan Fenimore Cooper, Pages and Pictures, from the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper (New York, 1861), p. 17.

26 Spring, ll. 340–342; the text of all quotations from Thomson is that of The Poetical Works of James Thomson, ed. F. J. Child, 2 vols. (Boston, n.d.). For a discussion of the priority and influence of Thomson's humane concern for wildlife, see Rayner Unwin, The Rural Muse: Studies in the Peasant Poetry of England (London, 1954), p. 43.

27 The best treatment of this aspect of Cooper's thought in The Pioneers is Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York, 1957), pp. 66–70. For discussions of Thomson's contradictory attitudes toward primitive values and the progress of civilization, see Raymond D. Havens, “Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in Thomson,” SP, xxix (1932), 41–52, and Alan D. McKillop, The Background of Thomson's Seasons (Minneapolis, 1942), pp. 89–128.

28 Cooper's handling of time in this section of the novel involves a curious double movement. Like Thomson's Summer, Chs. xxvi-xxxi trace the happenings of a single day from early morning to evening. This day is first said to be “in the beginning of July” (p. 312). Later we learn that it is sometime after the Fourth of July (p. 361), and at last the day is designated as 20 July (p. 368). The effect is to produce at once an extreme concentration of action and the impression that the heat and dryness are increasing as one might expect them to do only with the passage of several weeks.

29 “Discourse on the Life and Genius of Cooper,” in Memorial of James Fenimore Cooper (New York, 1852), p. 47.

30 Ringe, p. 33; Charles A. Brady, “James Fenimore Cooper, 1789–1851: Myth-maker and Christian Romancer,” in American Classics Reconsidered: A Christian Appraisal, ed. Harold C. Gardiner (New York, 1958), p. 84.

31 In Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1953), p. 64, Lawrence makes the strange judgment that The Pioneers “is a beautiful, resplendent picture of life. Fenimore puts in only the glamour.” It is perhaps significant that the highly impressionistic comments of Bryant and Lawrence are both marked by factual errors. Bryant has Mohegan taking part in the turkey shoot, while Lawrence gives the setting of the novel as the shores of Lake Champlain.

32 James Fenimore Cooper (New York, 1949), p. 30.

33 For a balanced and perceptive treatment of these aspects of The Pioneers, see Ringe, pp. 33–37.

34 Brady, p. 84.

35 There is a hint of a still wider perspective in. Cooper's Malthusian remark that the inhabitants of New York will find that “the evil day must arrive, when their possessions shall become unequal to their wants” (p. 15).