Pioneering the Anglo-American Frontier:
Nationalism, Cultural Identity, and the Pursuit of Literary Independence in James Fenimore Cooper‟s The Leatherstocking Tales
Master‟s Thesis English Language and Culture, Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen
Name: Lilian Tabois
Student number: s1613871
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. W.M. Verhoeven
Due Date: 17-05-2011
2
Table of Contents
Preface 3
Introduction 4
Chapter one: Indianised Backwoodsman and Anglicised Indian: 12 Cooper‟s Construction of a Surrogate „American‟ Genealogy
Chapter two: Glorifying the Immemorial Past: History vs. Myth 22 in Cooper‟s Depiction of the American Golden Age
Chapter three: Frontier Wilderness or European Garden? Nature, 32 Ethnoscapes, and the Construction of an American National Identity
Conclusion 42
3
Preface
4
Introduction
In the 1820s, roughly fifty years after the American colonies had officially proclaimed their independence from England, America had firmly established itself as an independent nation by achieving economic and political sovereignty. Nonetheless, fifty years had still proven too short for the young nation to develop both a distinct cultural identity and an established literary tradition. Despite the endeavours of early American writers such as William Hill Brown, Susanna Rowson, and Charles Brockden Brown, culturally speaking America still relied heavily on the literary traditions of the Old World. In 1820, the English writer Sydney Smith expressed this cultural dependency of America on England when he exclaimed: „In the four quarters of the globe […] who reads an American book‟?1
However, as Smith‟s words were being published in The Edinburgh Review, the situation was already beginning to change on the other side of the Atlantic, for a growing nationalistic awareness was giving rise to a collective desire to cut the bonds with the Old World once and for all. Not only did Americans feel the need to equal – if not surpass – Europe in literary excellence in order to shake off their inferiority complex, they also felt that having a distinctly American literary tradition was a much-needed cultural binding force for the young nation. James Fenimore Cooper was one of the first American writers to take up this task. In 1823, Cooper writes to Richard Henry Dana that „if I am able to create an excitement that may rouse the sleeping talents of the nation, and in some measure clear us from the odium of dullness…I should not have labored entirely in vain‟.2
Cooper‟s „literary creed […] was closely related to his political thought‟. 3
Also, he was „interested above all else in America‟s “mental independence”‟. 4
And so, in order to awaken the talents of the American nation, Cooper embarked on a literary career that would result in the publication of thirty-two novels, as well as numerous essays, travel accounts, and non-fictional works.Among this extensive list of publications, the works that have turned out to be most influential in the development of early American literature – and that are also commonly regarded as his greatest literary achievement – are his series of five historical novels collectively known as The Leatherstocking Tales. With this attempt to write the national historical novel series, Cooper not only aimed at laying the foundations for an American literary tradition, but he also wanted to create a national American epic or myth that would pervade American cultural memory and
1 Sydney Smith, „Who Reads an American Book‟, The Edinburgh Review, January 1820.
2 James Fenimore Cooper, „Letter to Richard Henry Dana‟, 14 April 1823, Letters and Journals 1, 94. 3
Alexander Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (New York: American Book Company, 1948), 158.
5 that would thus be an ideological shaping force in the construction of an American national identity. Whether or not Cooper succeeded in this ambitious patriotic attempt, is the subject of this paper.
James Fenimore Cooper‟s The Leatherstocking Tales have indisputably come to occupy a central position in American cultural memory. In fact, The Leatherstocking Tales are now widely perceived of as one of the central, and inherently American, myths of the New World. The classic images of the pioneers, the Wild West, and the Frontier have become ingrained in American popular culture and have given Cooper the reputation of being „one of the architects of the American national consciousness‟.5
Also, Cooper‟s creation of the archetypal backwoodsman Natty Bumppo and the heroic Native American Chingachgook have had a significant influence on the formation of a distinctly American cultural identity. For example, D.H Lawrence claims that Natty Bumppo is „the very intrinsic-most American‟.6
Furthermore, John Cawelti is of the opinion that the „creation of the ambiguous American epic of the frontier and its deeply divided hero was one of the most important mythical creations in the history of American culture‟. For his part, Leslie Fiedler claimed that „to understand the Leatherstocking series is […] to understand the most deeply underlying image of ourselves‟.7
And yet, seen in a wider, transatlantic context, it turns out that Cooper‟s „intrinsically American‟ myth is, ironically, closely related to the Old World. For example, what is often glossed over by critics when investigating Cooper‟s American myth is that the literary genre that Cooper selected for achieving his American nationalistic goal was in fact a recent product of ideological developments in Europe. In the early nineteenth century, the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott introduced the historical novel to Europe. The emergence of this new literary genre coincided with the fall of Napoleon, and according to Georg Lukács there was a causal relationship between the two phenomena. Just as content determines form, Lukács states, „significant developments in literary form…result from significant changes in ideology‟.8
As a result of the French Revolution, Europeans had developed a new historical consciousness. People were starting to perceive of the past as „the prehistory of the present‟, which is to say, for the first time it was felt that „there is such a thing as history, that it is an uninterrupted
5 W.M. Verhoeven, „Introduction‟, in James Fenimore Cooper: New Historical and Literary Contexts, ed. W.M.
Verhoeven (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 9.
6 D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, eds. Ezra Greenspan et al. (Cambridge: CUP, 2003),
60.
7 John G. Cawelti, „Cooper and the Frontier Myth and Anti-myth‟, in James Fenimore Cooper: New Historical
and Literary Contexts, ed. W.M. Verhoeven (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 159; Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (London: Cape, 1967), 182.
6 process of changes and finally that it has a direct effect upon the life of every individual‟.9 According to Terry Eagleton, „the great realist writers arise from a history which is visibly in the making; the historical novel, for example, appears as a genre at a point of revolutionary turbulence in the early nineteenth century. This allowed writers to grasp their own present as history‟.10 Living in the midst of this social turmoil, writers such as Scott could „recapture a harmonious totality of human life‟, their novels being both document and agent of this turbulent ideological shift.11 What Scott was doing for Scotland, Cooper wanted to achieve for America; however, as an historical novelist on the other side of the Atlantic, Cooper found himself in a difficult position. As it happens, the American and French Revolutions had been grounded on different principles. Whereas the French Revolution can be regarded a complete system change, the American Revolution had been merely a regime change.12 In other words, whereas the French Revolution constituted a radical break with the ancient feudal system, the American Revolution was largely a continuation of British ideology on a different continent. What‟s more, if Cooper paralleled Scott‟s manner of depicting the past as the prehistory of the present – as this way of representing the past had proven a potent ingredient for a powerful nationalist tale – he would inescapably have to glorify English history, for it is predominantly this history which constitutes the „prehistory‟ of the United States. Obviously, Cooper by all means wished to evade this notion, as it would only undermine America‟s claim for cultural independence. And so, Cooper instead proposed an alternative prehistory for America, one avoiding all links with the Old World. First, there is the orphaned – and thus history-less – frontier backwoodsman Natty Bumppo, who represents the archetypal American forefather. Second, Cooper created the Native American Chingachgook in order to convey a sense of ancient lineage and spiritual kinship without having to resort to European blood-lines. Despite this furtive attempt to deny America‟s British heritage, however, Cooper‟s invention of a surrogate American ancestry simultaneously reflects Cooper‟s doubts and struggles to sever the ties with the Old World. For example, Chingachgook is an Anglicised, almost gentleman-like character. Also, the myth has an impossible construction. For one, the strength of Natty and Chingachgook in their roles as the symbolic communal „fathers‟ of the nation lies in them remaining forever confined within this mythological, pre-historical space. In other words, it is imperative that Natty and Chingachgook remain childless, thereby to uphold the illusion of an
9 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1955), 23. 10 Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, 29.
11
Ibid., 27.
7 intrinsically American ancestry and to rule out even the most theoretical possibility of any future mixing of Indian and white blood.
Together, Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook are central to an important myth-motif within the so-called „myth of descent‟, a cultural phenomenon which emerged as a result of the eighteenth-century rise of nationalism and the formation of nation-states.13 Anthony D. Smith, who has developed the ethno-symbolist paradigm with regards to the study of nationalism, claims that „nationalism is a modern movement and ideology, which emerged in the latter half of the eighteenth century in Western Europe and America‟.14
The movement can be defined as one that „seeks to attain and maintain autonomy, unity and identity for a population some of whose members believe it to constitute an actual or potential “nation”‟.15 Although the ethno-symbolist model departs from the notion that nations are modern constructs, it also proposes that „even in the case of the major revolutions, there is often a gradual return to some of the older collective interpretations and values after the violent stage of the revolution has run its course‟. 16
This, of course, ties in closely with the newly developed historical awareness and the perception on the past as the prehistory of the present; that is, it is „the rediscovery of the ethnic past [which] furnishes vital memories, values, symbols and myths, without which nationalism would be powerless‟.17
In other words: in order to create a truly unified and powerful nation, „a unit of population requires not merely a territory, economy, education system and legal code to itself, but also needs an ethnic foundation in order to mobilize and integrate often diverse cultural and social elements‟.18
This ethnic foundation was often re-created by means of a myth of descent, which, according to Smith, „attempts to provide an answer to questions of similarity and belonging‟.19
National myths of descent are made up of several different myth-motifs. Smith explains that
there are myths of spatial and temporal origins, of migration, of ancestry and filiation, of the golden age, of decline and exile and rebirth, [and] these separate myth-motifs are brought together to form a fully elaborated mythology of origins and descent […] a kernel of „historical truth‟ is decked out with fantasies and half-truths so as to provide a
13 Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism (Padstowe: Routledge, 1998), 48. 14 Anthony D. Smith, The Antiquity of Nations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 23. 15
Ibid., 23.
16 Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 45. 17 Ibid., 45.
18
Smith, The Antiquity of Nations, 44.
8
pleasing and coherent „story‟ of the ways in which the community was formed and developed.20
The historical novel in Europe was a popular literary framework that writers such as Scott adopted to compose this myth of descent to found a coherent collective identity. By „reviv[ing] episodes of…heroic pasts, or furnish[ing] myths of national values and virtues‟,21
historical novelists sought to depict „the spirit of peoples and place that could legitimate and inspire the nationalist ideals‟.22
In his Leatherstocking novels, Cooper aspired to evoke nationalist American sentiments with the creation of an all-American version of this myth of descent. However, as we have seen, Cooper was faced with several problems. The main components of Cooper‟s myth of descent are the myth-motif of common ancestry, of the golden age, and of the ancestral homeland, and each of these three myth-motifs strongly reflect Cooper‟s ambiguous position as an early American novelist. In the composition of each myth-motif, Cooper was confronted with his nation‟s lack of ancient history, cultural unity, and irrevocable ties to Europe. The first myth-motif, that of common ancestry, has already been introduced above. This myth-motif serves to re-establish a modern nation‟s emotional ties by relating stories about a national ethnic common ancestor. As mentioned previously, the United States was a young, immigrant nation, a melting-pot of cultures lacking a coherent and far-reaching national ethnic pre-modern past. In addition, following the traces of the American people back into the realms of history would irrevocably lead Cooper to the roots of the very culture he was so desperately trying to break free from. Hence, with the creation of the liminal and indefinable characters of Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, Cooper invented an alternative ethnic ancestry, one that could be considered intrinsically „American‟. Yet, the ambiguity of Natty and Chingachgook‟s characteristics mirrors the ambiguous position Cooper found himself in as an early American historical novelist.
The second myth-motif in The Leatherstocking Tales through which Cooper‟s equivocal position becomes apparent, is the myth-motif of the golden age. This myth-motif functions to re-awaken the nation‟s glorious ancient past in order to „satisfy the quest for
20
Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 25.
21 Paul Schellinger, ed., „Adventure Novel and Imperial Romance‟, The Encyclopedia of the Novel (Chicago;
London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998), 204.
22
9 authenticity‟ and to „mirror and point towards a glorious destiny‟.23
Cooper parallels the successful structure of Scott‟s Waverley novels – that is, taking the nation‟s golden age as temporal setting and glorify this era – by setting his novels around the time of the American Revolution and the downfall of the Native Americans. By combining historical facts with fiction, Cooper constructed a highly idealised and stylised version of the emergence of the nation and laid bare the forces of history. Also, in order to obscure the bonds with the Old World, Cooper adopted the vanishing cultures of the Native Americans and set them as a base for a modern American identity.
The third myth-motif through which Cooper‟s ambiguous relationship with Europe is felt, is that of the ancestral homeland. Smith argues that „the creation of nations requires a special place for the nation to inhabit…; an historic land, a homeland, an ancestral land. Only an ancestral homeland can provide the emotional as well as physical security required by the citizens of a nation‟.24
Smith calls this cultural attachment to a geographical space to pursue nationalist goals the „territorialization of memory‟, and he refers to these poetic landscapes as „ethnoscapes‟.25
Artists may locate „the deeds of heroes and great men at specific sites, poetic spaces eulogized in the chronicles and ballads recited down the generations, thereby binding their descendants to a distinct landscape endowed with ethno-historical significance‟.26 In The Waverley novels, Scott links the history and ethnic roots of the Scottish people to the ethnoscape of the Scottish Highlands. How, then, were writers in immigrant nations such as the United States to construct these ethnoscapes? According to Smith, nations lacking a historical connection with the land often „depicted their ancestral homeland as a promised land, idealising „the “virgin” land and the frontier as sacred elements of their self-images, and to see them as instruments and rewards of a providential national destiny‟.27
At first sight, it seems as though Cooper‟s version of the myth-motif indeed follows these notions. For example, The Leatherstocking Tales are imbued with Romantic descriptions that praise the “virgin” American wilderness and its rugged frontier. Yet, a closer look reveals that Cooper is at the same time trying to establish a European sense of ancient historical connection with the land, which reflects Cooper‟s ambiguous relationship with the Old World. This time, however, it is not just a matter of feverishly trying to avoid a historical and cultural connection with Europe that Cooper knew was undeniably there, it even serves to show his admiration for
23
Smith, The Antiquity of Nations, 223.
24 Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 150. 25 Ibid., 150-151.
26
Ibid., 151.
10 cultures that did have an ethnic pre-modern past. Cooper spent seven years travelling through Europe. According to D.H. Lawrence, Cooper not only „loved the genteel continent of Europe‟, he even was „a gentleman, almost a European, as proper as proper can be‟.28
This fascination with the Old World is revealed in the myth-motif of the ancestral homeland; instead of simply praising the „virgin‟ nature of the American landscape and the frontier, Cooper simultaneously wanted to echo Europe‟s ancient connection with the land. Similarly, Cooper drew on the ancient cultures of the Native Americans to establish a historical relationship with the American soil, for it is „in the decay of the vast and extensive savage empire there might be felt the touch of antiquity sought for. In fact, the Indians constituted the ruins of America‟.29
In a spirited attempt to answer the early nineteenth-century call for literary independence, the American novelist James Fenimore Cooper ventured like a true pioneer into the realms of historical fiction. Adapting this newly emerged European nationalist genre to suit his American cause, he explored both the frontiers of the literary genre and the vast recesses of American consciousness in order to compose America‟s national myth. With The Leatherstocking Tales, Cooper not only hoped to lay the solid foundation for a distinctly American literary tradition, but he also aimed at creating a myth that would both reflect and construct an inherently American cultural identity. Today, it is commonly believed among critics that Cooper achieved just this. However, this analysis of The Leatherstocking Tales serves to shed new light on this opinion. In particular, it will demonstrate that Cooper‟s American myth in fact conveys an ambiguous moral stance towards the Old World. This equivocal attitude arises from the fact that as an American historical novelist writing barely fifty years after America‟s independence, Cooper found himself in an impossible position. European authors used the historical novel as a framework to compose a myth of the nation that would strengthen the moral bonds of modern civic nations. By re-establishing the unique and significant connection between a nation‟s ethnic pre-modern past and the present, these authors managed to re-capture „a harmonious totality of human life‟.30 Thus, if Cooper was to succeed in composing the foundational myth of the American nation, he would not only have to make up for his country‟s lack of national history, but he also had to deny America‟s incontrovertible ethnic, cultural, and historical British heritage. On the one hand, Cooper answers the young nation‟s call for cultural independence by constructing an alternative
28 Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 57.
29Harrison G. Orians, „The Romance Ferment after Waverley‟, American Literature, 3:4 (Jan., 1932), 420.
12
Chapter 1
Indianised Backwoodsman and Anglicised Indian:
Cooper’s Construction of a Surrogate ‘American’ Genealogy
„Old man‟, said Ishmael sternly, „to which people do you belong? You have the colour and speech of a Christian, while it seems that your heart is with the red-skins‟. „To me there is little difference in
Nations‟.1
Modernism, a widely accepted paradigm with regards to the study of nationalism today, proposes that „the basic characteristic of the modern nation and everything connected with it is its modernity‟.2
Modernists such as Hobsbawm and Gellner „regard the era of the French Revolution as marking the moment when nationalism was introduced into the movement of world history […] hence, nations as well as nationalism are purely modern phenomena, without roots in the past‟.3
Hobsbawm also states that „the primary meaning of “nation” […] was political. It equated “the people” and the state in the manner of the American and French Revolutions‟.4
What Hobsbawm is proclaiming is that what ties together the members of a modern nation is not so much a shared history or ethnicity as an adherence to a set of legal and political rules. As Seymour M. Lipset states: „Being an American […] is an ideological commitment. It is not a matter of birth. Those who reject American values are un-American‟.5 Although Hobsbawm makes a valid point in saying that nations are modern constructs, I believe it does not suffice to say that they are merely political in nature. Anthony Smith, for example, felt that although the concept of nation is indeed a modern phenomenon, it „embraces far more than the idea of a political community […]: it refers to a distinctive culture community, a „people‟ in their „homeland‟, a historic society and a moral community‟.6
This ethno-symbolist approach proposes that „what gives nationalism its power are the myths, memories, traditions, and symbols of ethnic heritages and the ways in which a popular living past has been, and can be, rediscovered and reinterpreted by modern nationalist
1 James Fenimore Cooper, The Prairie (Baskerville: Penguin Classics, 1987), 76.
2 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York: Cambridge
UP, 1992), 14.
3
Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 6.
4 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 18.
5 Qtd. in Adam I.P. Smith, „American Political Culture‟, in A New Introduction to American Studies, eds.
Temperley and Bigsby (Harlow: Longman, 2006), 55.
13 intelligentsias‟.7
National myths of descent, which relate the stories and legends of the nation‟s glorious past, are perceived of as important building blocks in the formation of modern nation-states. Closely tied in with this theory is Benedict Anderson‟s idea of the „imagined community‟. For his part, Anderson states that the modern „nation‟ or „nation-state‟ as it emerged from the late eighteenth century onwards is in fact „an imagined political community‟ that is distinguished „by the style in which [it is] imagined‟.8
It is imagined, Anderson explains, „because even the members of the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion‟.9 According to Anderson, these imagined communities emerged as a result of the increasing secularisation of societies at the end of the eighteenth century. To make up for the decline of religious modes of thought, „a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning‟ was required, and „few things were (are) better suited to this end than an idea of nation‟.10
As Smith observes, „in a secular age we increasingly look to posterity to keep our memory alive; and the collective memory and solidarity of the nation helps us to overcome the threat of oblivion‟.11
Anderson is of the opinion that „if nation-states are widely conceded to be “new” and “historical”, the nations to which they give political expressions always loom out of an immemorial past, and […] glide into a limitless future […] nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems that preceded it‟.12 The development of print-capitalism played a crucial part in the construction of nations and nation-states, since it „provided the technical means for “re-presenting” the kind of imagined community that is the nation‟.13
It is through „identifications and descriptions in newspapers, journals, novels, plays, and operas‟ that this communal image of the nation is constructed. 14
The nineteenth-century drive among authors to create national myths of descent – of which Cooper‟s historical novel series The Leatherstocking Tales is a perfect example – demonstrates that nations are more than just modern, political constructs and need an ethnic core to form a true unit. Also, these national myths of descent serve to show that „the nation‟ can indeed be imagined or invented through literature.
7 Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 9.
8 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London:
Verso, 2006), 6.
9 Ibid., 6. 10
Ibid., 11.
11 Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 132. 12 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 11-12. 13
Ibid., 25.
14 A central element in any national myth of descent and which also takes up a central position in The Leatherstocking Tales is the motif of common ancestry. This myth-motif specifically evokes a sense of national kinship by relating the life and adventures of a nation‟s common ethnic ancestor. Anthony Smith argues that this myth-motif is of „fundamental importance‟ in strengthening the moral bonds of civic nations, as they create „a sense of common ethnicity‟.15
„In order to claim the new status of “nation”‟, Smith points out, „a community‟s spokesmen had therefore to advance a case which rested, at least in part, on the conviction of ethnic ancestry and common history‟.16
In Sir Walter Scott‟s historical novel Waverley, for example, the author adopted and re-worked ancient Scottish myths recounting the heroic past deeds and adventures of Scotland‟s ethnic inhabitants, the legendary Highlander clans. By glorifying the Scottish Highlanders as the nation‟s common ancestry, Scott succeeded to arouse feelings of national belonging and comradeship in his readership and so „imagined‟ the nation as a unified whole. The immediate success and powerful nationalistic impact of Scott‟s novels in Europe certainly did not go unnoticed on the other side of the Atlantic, and Cooper – who was writing with nationalistic objectives similar to Scott‟s – was greatly inspired by the Scottish novelist. In fact, the myth-motif of common ancestry is one of the main elements in Cooper‟s American novel series The Leatherstocking Tales.
However, in his attempt to write a myth-motif of common ancestry for the United States, Cooper was confronted with several obstacles - issues his European colleagues did not have to deal with. First of all, the United States was a very young nation – in Cooper‟s days, the nation had only officially existed for fifty years – and so „unlike Shakespeare or Scott, Cooper the American had no ancient national political history to interpret‟.17
In other words, there simply were no older national myths and legends for Cooper to draw on – except European ones. Moreover, in order to compose a successful national myth-motif of common ancestry, Cooper would technically speaking have to locate his novels in the European past; after all, the ethnic roots of the majority of the American citizens were located in the Old World. Paradoxically, reinforcing the cultural ties with the Old World was exactly what the nationalistic-minded Cooper was trying to avoid. For a nineteenth-century writer who was „interested above all in America‟s “mental independence”‟, it was simply not an option to go about heralding King Arthur or the Anglo-Saxons as the heroic forefathers of the American
15 Smith, The Antiquity of Nations, 19. 16
Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 61.
15 nation.18 Cooper certainly set himself no easy task in aspiring to claim cultural independence with the composition of a national myth-motif of common ancestry, as the source of America‟s political, historical, and ethnic heritage could be traced back to the very country it was struggling to break free from.
Nevertheless, Cooper was determined to find a way in which to „relate past to present and present to future, to show causation and continuity in American experience‟ without having to acknowledge the incontrovertible links with the Old World.19 As a result, in The Leatherstocking Tales Cooper composed a myth-motif of common ancestry by simply inventing a surrogate „American‟ genealogy for the United States, one that ruled out every possible historical or ethnic relation with the Old World. The common ancestry Cooper suggested in his myth was grounded in symbolic ties and ideological kinship, rather than biological ancestry. Thus, it is „not blood ties, real or alleged, but a spiritual kinship‟ which is conveyed in Cooper‟s novels, and common cultural descent is traced „through the persistence of certain kinds of “virtue” or other distinctive cultural qualities‟.20 In The Leatherstocking Tales, this spiritual common ancestor is the sturdy frontier backwoodsman Natty Bumppo, otherwise known as the Leatherstocking. The novel series‟ main protagonist is of no obvious traceable descent. Orphaned at a very young age and „without kith or kin in the wide world‟, virtually nothing is disclosed about his parental background.21 The only bit of personal information the reader is granted, is that Natty is a Christian who is „without a cross‟, implying that the blood running through his veins is purely of the white race. Other than that, Natty‟s family tree remains shrouded in mystery throughout the saga. Moreover, the backwoodsman is known by a wide range of names – some Christian, others Native American, but most of them downright bizarre – making it even more complex for the reader to even guess at his ethnic descent.22 According to John Cawelti, Leatherstocking‟s „name frequently changes as if to make it impossible to address him and thereby pin him down geographically and socially‟.23
And indeed, Natty does not seem to associate himself with any social group, nor does he have a fixed place to live. Moving ever westwards along the American Frontier to flee the destructive forces of civilisation yet unable to live in complete isolation, Natty occupies a liminal space, forever hovering on the frontier between society and the wilds.
18 House, Cooper’s Americans, 5. 19 House, Cooper’s Americans, 13. 20
Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 58.
21 Cooper, The Prairie (New York: Penguin Classics, 1987), 383.
22 Throughout the novel series, Natty is alternately called Natty Bumppo, the Leatherstocking, the Deerslayer,
the Pathfinder, La Longue Carabine, the Trapper, and Hawkeye.
16 It seems to be precisely Natty‟s untraceable descent, his unique „outsider‟ position in early American society, and his close relationship to the American land that make him such a suitable character to embody inherently American virtues and values. Larzer Ziff raises an important point when he mentions that „although Natty represents a central value in American life, he is not the product of American society nor does he live within it‟.24
Consequently, Ziff continues, Natty displays „democratic virtues [that] are learned from nature rather than from his training in a democratic society‟.25
Since Natty acquired his democratic virtues from the American wilderness rather than from a society that was founded on British ideological thought, Cooper could label certain moral values and democratic virtues as authentically „American‟. Moreover, because of the Leatherstocking‟s liminal position in society, his unknown genealogy, and his eccentric use of language and style of clothing that give him the air of belonging to an indefinable, yet unmistakeably distant era, he appears to have transcended reality and entered the realm of myth. Often perceived of as „intrinsically aged‟, Natty has become the archetypal American forefather, or in David W. Noble‟s words, has taken up the role of „the American Adam. He exists freely in space and in harmony with nature. He is outside of time and society‟.26
Another way in which Cooper aimed to construct a myth-motif of an inherently „American‟ ancestry was by replacing the biological European ethnic lineage with a symbolic connection to the nation‟s indigenous inhabitants, the Native Americans. As Kay Seymour House claims: „as he broadened his study of the American past, Cooper discovered a pre-history after all, although it was in the oral narratives of Indians‟.27
Cooper was not the first American author to furnish the idea of re-working themes and stories from the Indian story-telling tradition into his works. For example, G. Harrison Orians points out that the American John Knapp had proposed as early as 1817 that „we should not only visit the dwellings of the European settler‟ […] but should also „hasten to acquaint ourselves with the earlier native‟.28 Ever since the earliest encounters between settlers and Native American tribes, Americans had developed an ambivalent attitude towards the Native American. On the one hand, the
24 Larzer Ziff, Literary Democracy (New York: The Viking Press, 1981), 266. 25 Ibid., 267.
26 H.N. Smith, qtd. in George Dekker, James Fenimore Cooper: the Novelist, 164; David W. Noble, „Cooper and
the Death of the American Adam‟, American Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Autumn, 1964), http://www.jstor.org/stable/2710933 (accessed October 20, 2010), 420.
27 Kay Seymour House, „Is Fenimore Cooper Obsolete?‟, in Reading Cooper, Teaching Cooper, ed. Jeffrey
Walker, 23.
28
17 Indians were regarded as „a significant part of America‟,29 and they were in no way connected to Europe. Leslie Fiedler states that as the Indians were „no grandchild of Noah, he escapes completely the mythologies we brought with us from Europe, demands a new one of his own‟.30
As Sherry Sullivan states: „the Indian represented the Romantic ideal of the natural man – the physical beauty and strength, the pride and independence, and the pure and simple virtues of a life lived close to nature. These were the traits, it was believed that most distinguished this country from the older, decaying civilizations of Europe. They comprised a kind of spiritual identity at the very heart of the American national being‟.31
On the other hand, in early American literature the Native American is often depicted as an alien Other, a more primitive and thus inferior race that functioned „as an anti-image from which Americans might distinguish their own emerging white, civilized national identity‟.32
This ambivalent attitude towards the Native American is a key reason why the symbolic image of the American Indian turned out to be so particularly influential in the American nationalistic process; the Native American wholly embodied the ambivalence that was lying at the core of the early American quest for a distinct national identity. As Sherry Sullivan notes,
the Indian represented both the opposite of the civilized ideal America was moving toward, and the embodiment of an idealized state of nature it was in danger of losing. These two conflicting functions, as positive and negative poles of white identity, reflect an irreconcilable split in the American mind and a paradox in national identity. And despite the tension of values encompassed, perhaps because of it, this divided image of the Indian had great evocative power.33
There are several ways in which Cooper interweaved elements from the Native American cultures into his myth to act as a substitute for the existing biological European connections. First of all, Cooper „indianised‟ his archetypal American hero, Natty Bumppo. Despite the Leatherstocking‟s own persistent claims to be a white Christian male „without a cross‟, he is clearly ascribed certain Indian character traits in order to make him appear even more authentically American. According to Francis Parkman, for example, Natty Bumppo
29 Gregory Lansing Paine, „The Indians of the Leather-stocking Tales‟, Studies in Philology, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Jan.,
1926), http://www.jstor.org/stable/4171935 (accessed November 12, 2010), 16.
30 Leslie Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American (London: Paladin, 1968), 19-20. 31
Sherry Sullivan, „A Redder Shade of Pale: The Indianization of Heroes and Heroines in Nineteenth-century American Fiction‟, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring, 1987), http://www.jstor.org/stable/1314998 (accessed November 12, 2010), 64.
32
Ibid., 57.
18 joined „uprightness, kindliness, innate philosophy, and the truest moral perceptions‟ with „the wandering instincts and hatred of restraint which stamp the Indian‟.34
For her part, Sullivan claims that the Leatherstocking is „an Indian stripped of the negative traits whites feared or found offensive‟.35
Secondly, the character who comes closest to acting as a substitute for the family Natty never had is an Indian, the Mohican chief Chingachgook. Natty and Chingachgook maintain a very close spiritual bond throughout the novel series. In The Pioneers, for example, it is described that the two characters „resided in the same cabin, ate of the same food, and were chiefly occupied in the same pursuits‟.36
This unusual Platonic friendship between Indian and white American is a key element in Cooper‟s myth; as D.H. Lawrence claimed, „in his immortal friendship of Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo [Cooper] dreamed the nucleus of a new society‟,37
an intrinsically American society. Moreover, Chingachgook is depicted as wise, noble, courageous, and completely in touch with nature, and so by means of his distinguished character, Cooper could transmit moral values which he deemed to be of central importance in the formation of a distinctly American national identity. Even in the America of today, the impact of Cooper‟s Indian characters can still be felt. Leslie Fiedler, for instance, even goes so far as to say that „everyone who thinks of himself as being in some sense an American feels the stirrings in him of a second soul, the soul of the Red Man‟.38
However, I believe that there is yet another explanation for the fact that Cooper‟s white reader audience could feel such a powerful spiritual kinship with a Native American chief, and it is here that Cooper‟s ambiguous ideological position is starting to be revealed. For example, what is striking is that several of Chingachgook‟s characteristics are overtly European. Not only is the Indian Chief a „whitened‟ character – that is, he speaks fluent English and he is baptised a Christian in The Pioneers – he is also clearly an „Anglicised‟ character. First of all, Chingachgook‟s Christian name is „John‟, an exceptionally common Anglican name. In The Pioneers, Chingachgook‟s European features are simply impossible to miss: „His dress was a mixture of his native and European fashions‟, and his forehead „appeared lofty, broad, and noble. His nose was high, and of the kind called Roman‟.39
Throughout the five novels, his sophisticated demeanour makes him into a true gentleman of
34 Francis Parkman, qtd. in Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven and London: Yale
UP, 1973), 94.
35
Sullivan, „A Redder Shade of Pale‟, 64.
36 Cooper, The Pioneers (New York: Signet Classics, 2007), 82. 37 D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classical American Literature, 58. 38
Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American, 10.
19 the forest, and if it was not for his face, which „bore the infallible mark of his people‟, he could almost pass for an English Aristocrat.40 Nonetheless, if Cooper was really as determined in breaking every historical and ethnic tie with the Old World, as he so zealously claimed, why, then, did he ascribe such overtly European features to one of his main characters? It seems as though these are the first unmistakable signs that Cooper still felt in some way attracted to the sophistication of the older cultures of Europe. In any case, the characterisation of Chingachgook undeniably reveals that the American writer saw the charm in true gentlemanly behaviour.
Furthermore, Cooper‟s ambiguous position as an early American historical novelist is reflected in Cooper‟s ceaseless attempts to safeguard the mythical status of the novel series‟ main protagonists. In a widely celebrated critique on Cooper, D.H. Lawrence proclaimed that „the Natty and Chingachgook myth must remain a myth. It is a wish-fulfillment, an evasion of actuality‟.41
For example, Natty‟s status as communal ancestral father of the nation wholly depended on his untraceable ethnic ancestry. In order to uphold the idea of a purely spiritual and intrinsically American ethnic ancestry, it is thus imperative that Natty remains forever confined within this symbolic literary space, for only then could Natty‟s status as the nation‟s ancestral forefather or „American Adam‟ be secured. More importantly, the highly mythical nature of the novel series served to rule out even the remotest possibility of miscegenation. Cooper had to be very careful not to suggest the idea of a possible mixing of the White and Red races, as this delicate issue was still considered a serious taboo in early nineteenth-century America. Since even the theoretical possibility of the mixing of Indian and white blood was absolutely unheard of in Cooper‟s days, both Natty and Chingachgook would have to die childless in the course of the novel series. In the series, Chingachgook and his son Uncas are the last living members of their tribe, and in The Last of the Mohicans, Chingachgook calls out: „Where are the blossoms of those summers! Fallen, one by one. So all of my family departed, each in his turn, to the land of spirits. I am on the hilltop, and must go down into the valley; and when Uncas follows in my footsteps, there will no longer be any of the blood of the Sagamores, for my boy is the last of the Mohicans‟.42
As it turns out, Uncas departs for the Indian world of the spirits even before his old father is re-united with his ancestors, for the young Indian dies a noble, yet untimely death fighting off a member of a
40
Cooper, The Pioneers, 83; George Catlin‟s painting „Pigeon's Egg Head The Light Going to and Returning from Washington‟, which was painted between 1837 and 1839, forcefully visualises the image of the Anglicised Native American. Link: http://americanartmuseum.wikispaces.com/Pigeon's+Egghead
41
Lawrence, Studies in Classical American Literature, 56.
20 rival tribe in The Last of the Mohicans. Likewise, if Natty were ever step out into the „real‟ world, marry, and raise a family, spiritual kinship would turn into biological kinship, irrevocably destroying his vital unifying role of communal pre-historic ancestor. And so Natty dies, unmarried and childless. Lying on his deathbed, facing the setting sun, Natty exclaims in The Prairie: „When I am gone, there will be an end of my race‟.43 According to Nalle Valtiala, Natty is a virgin „who will, in fact, never change his state, because that would be impossible. Natty is wed to nature, he is a part of nature‟.44 D.H. Lawrence expresses a similar opinion by saying that „Natty had no business marrying. His mission was elsewhere‟.45
Although the sterility of Natty proved the only way in which Cooper could sustain his American myth, this certainly does not exclude the idea that the novelist did not secretly felt attracted to the idea of Natty marrying an aristocratic English girl and producing children whose features were both American and English. This, of course, once again reveals Cooper‟s complicated attitude with regards to the Old World. In The Pathfinder, published fourth in the series yet starring a young Natty in the prime of life, the backwoodsman is very close to getting married – to an English girl, for that matter. Not only does the structure of the novel closely resemble the English novel of manners, the society-shy hunter also steps completely out of character by falling in love with and even openly courting the well-educated daughter of an English naval officer. At one point in the narrative, Mabel says: „I believe you are happier when alone, Pathfinder, than when mingling with your fellow-creatures‟.46 To this, Natty answers:
I will not say that, I will not exactly say that. I have seen the time when I have thought that God was sufficient for me in the forest, and that I have craved no more than His bounty and His care. But other feelings have got uppermost, and I suppose natur‟ will have its way. All other creaturs mate, Mabel, and it was intended man should do so too.47
Despite his courtly advances, however, Mabel eventually kindly refuses Natty‟s marriage proposal and chooses the English officer Jasper instead, leaving Natty momentarily shattered yet determined never to occupy himself with women again. Instead, he says, „I shall return to
43 Cooper, The Prairie, 383. 44
Kaarle-Juhani (Nalle) Valtiala, James Fenimore Cooper’s Landscapes (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1998), 171.
45 Lawrence, Studies in Classical American Literature, 63. 46
Cooper, The Pathfinder (London: MacMillan & Co., 1924), 257.
21 the wilderness and my Maker‟.48
Just in time, Cooper seems to have realised that „the young couple belong to history, in other words reality, whereas Natty Bumppo belongs to myth‟, and that for the sake of his American myth these lines should not be crossed.49 Nevertheless, the impossibility of his myth, the momentary instability in Natty‟s character, and Cooper‟s choice to apply courtly literary conventions in The Pathfinder once more discloses a yearning for the continuation of the sophistication of European manners and customs in American society. Apparently, „the plain, democratic man in Cooper is expressive only when filtered through the consciousness of the complicated civilized man who stands firmly on the top of the structure.50
48 Cooper, The Pathfinder, 455. 49
Valtiala, James Fenimore Cooper’s Landscapes, 171.
22
Chapter 2
Glorifying the Immemorial Past:
History vs. Myth in Cooper’s Depiction of the American Golden Age
The Leatherstocking novels […] go backwards, from old age to golden youth. That is the true myth of America. She starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing of the old skin, towards a new youth. It is the myth of America.1
A defining characteristic of the historical novel is its unassailable link to history. According to Avrom Fleishman, „the plot must include a number of “historical” events, particularly those in the public sphere‟, and there needs to be a „realistic background for the action‟.2
Despite this key role of history in the genre, however, what truly distinguishes the historical novel from other nationalistic literary genres is the complex interplay between history and myth. Nationalist myth-motifs of the golden age often embody this generic trademark. This sub-motif of the national myth of descent is often embedded in the structure of historical novels to evoke nationalist sentiments, both by re-establishing the connection between the past and the present and by glorifying a nation‟s heroic history. Cooper‟s The Leatherstocking Tales are a clear example of an historical novel series containing a myth-motif of the golden age. Cooper provided an accurate historical framework for his adventurous plots; according to Fielding, Cooper regarded himself not only a writer of adventure fiction but also as „a true historian, a describer of society as it exists, and of men as they are‟.3 Spanning the years between 1740 and 1804, each of the five novels is set either in the years leading up to, during, or just after the American War of Independence. Also, Cooper vividly described the historical processes leading not only to the American Revolution but also to the downfall of the Native American cultures. In all five novels, historical reality is continually clouded over by myth, both in expressing the significant relationship between the past and the present and in the depiction of America‟s glorious past. The resulting myth-motif of the golden age in The Leatherstocking Tales reveals that Cooper was determined to break the bonds with the Old World, yet was unable to completely do so. On the one hand, the novelist skillfully replaced the existing ethnic European heritage with a Native American legacy, laying the foundations for an
1 D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classical American Literature, 58.
2 Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (London: The John Hopkins
Press, 1971), 3.
23 inherently American modern national identity. On the other hand, however, the genre of the historical novel was so inextricably intertwined with European culture and ideology that Cooper‟s American novel inescapably underscored America‟s connections with the Old World.
The relationship between history, nationalism, and the historical novel is an intricate one. In his seminal work The Historical Novel, the Marxist critic Georg Lukács argued that it was certainly no coincidence that „the historical novel arose […] at about the time of Napoleon‟s collapse‟.4
Lukács‟s theory is related to the Marxist notion that just as content determines form, changes in literary form are a result of a change in ideology.5 Lukács is of the opinion that „it was the French Revolution, the revolutionary wars and the rise and fall of Napoleon, which for the first time made history a mass experience‟.6
These eighteenth-century revolutionary bourgeois uprisings occurring throughout Europe led to the development of a new historical consciousness; people were starting to perceive of the past as the prehistory of the present.7 It is these ideological changes which led to the emergence of new literary genres such as the historical novel: as Lukács phrased it, „the transformation of men‟s existence and consciousness throughout Europe form the economic and ideological basis for Scott‟s historical novel‟.8
The nineteenth-century historical novel as it was developed by Scott thus conveyed „a total historical picture [which disclosed] artistically the connection between the spontaneous reaction of the masses and the historical consciousness of the leading personalities‟.9 Scott‟s historical novels were particularly forceful in evoking this new approach towards history because he was writing at a time in which „history was visibly in the making‟.10
For Scott, it was „of the first importance that he was living in the greatest period of revolutionary and imperialistic conflict which the world had yet known‟, because it enabled him to mirror „in microcosmic form, the complex totality of society itself‟.11
The numerous eighteenth-century revolutionary developments in Europe were also inextricably tied in with the formation of modern nations and nation-states. For his part, Lukács believed that „it is in the nature of a bourgeois revolution that […] the national idea
4 Lukács, The Historical Novel, 19.
5 Eagleton, Marxist and Literary Criticism, 22. 6 Ibid., 23.
7 Ibid., 23. 8
Lukács, The Historical Novel, 19.
9 Ibid., 44.
10 Eagleton, Marxist and Literary Criticism, 29. 11
George Dekker, The American Historical Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 36; Eagleton, Marxist
24 becomes the property of the broadest masses. In France it was only as a result of the Revolution and Napoleonic rule that a feeling of nationhood became the experience and property of the peasantry […] for the first time they experienced France as their own country, as their self-created motherland‟.12 Early nineteenth-century historical novels simultaneously reflected and reinforced this growing nationalistic awareness. Scott‟s Waverley, for example, is set around the year 1745, a turbulent transitional period in British history that was marked by great social change. After the second Jacobite Rebellion was crushed at the battle of Culloden in 1746, the Scottish Highland clan system rapidly disappeared and was replaced with a more modern English way of life.13 By setting the story in the midst of one of the defining moments in Scottish history and by highlighting the historical factors that led to these changes, Scott‟s novels successfully displayed „the shaping power of the forces of historical causality‟.14
In addition, by placing fictional characters within a framework of historical characters and events, „the historical novelist provoke[d] or convey[ed], by imaginative sympathy, the sentiment de l’existence, the feeling of how it was to be alive in another age‟.15
In other words, historical novels made readers aware of the human role within history. They „articulated historical events and developments as a category of individual emphatic experience‟, representing history in such a way that „it becomes not a mere movement of forces or sequence of events but the thoughts and feelings of men‟.16
Scott‟s contribution to the formation of a Scottish national identity had been so substantial in part because his historical novels were successfully transmitting the experience of witnessing „the tumultuous birth of an historical epoch‟.17 Just as Scott narrativised the events that had led to a shift in ideology fundamental to the shaping of the modern Scottish nation, so Cooper stirred up nationalist sentiments for his own country by representing „the concept of history as a shaping force – acting not only upon the characters in the novel but on the author and readers outside it‟.18
Like Scott, Cooper was living in a time and place in which „history was visibly in the making‟.19
In the second half of the eighteenth century, North America witnessed the decline and eventual extinction of the ancient cultures of the Native American tribes at the expense of the establishment of a modern and urbanised western way of life. These cultural transformations coincided with the American War of Independence, a
12 Lukács, The Historical Novel, 25.
13 David McDowall, An Illustrated History of Britain (Edinburgh: Longman, 2004), 113. 14 George Dekker, qtd. in Johanna McElwee, The Nation Conceived,19.
15
Fleishman, The English Historical Novel, 4.
16W.M. Verhoeven, 2011; Fleishman, The English Historical Novel, 4. 17 Eagleton, Marxist and Literary Criticism, 29.
18
Fleishman, The English Historical Novel, 5.
25 similarly turbulent and transitional era marking a fierce attempt on the part of the colonists to shake off their former European identities. By exposing the human role and influence in the processes that brought about these fundamental transformations in early American society, in other words by enabling people to „grasp their own present as history‟, Cooper aimed to trigger a national shift in historical awareness that was in turn to strengthen American national pride. 20 According to Lukács, „Scott had only one worthy follower in the English language who took over and even extended certain of the principles underlying his choice of theme and manner of portrayal, namely the American, Cooper. In his immortal novel cycle The Leather Stocking Saga Cooper sets an important theme of Scott, the downfall of gentile society, at the centre of his portrayal. Corresponding to the historical development of north America, this theme acquires an entirely new complexion‟.21
In The Pioneers, for example, Cooper‟s strategic choice of setting was to make his readership more aware of the substantial human role in the historical processes that were shaping the American nation. He wanted, in other words, to illustrate the „deep unity between the historical representatives of a popular movement and the movement itself‟.22
This way, the novel series was to inspire early American citizens to become more involved in the creation of the United States. The main setting of The Pioneers, for example, is the frontier settlement of Templeton in the year 1793. It is exactly in this age and place, when the dust of the American War of Independence has only just begun to settle and the impact of urbanisation and modernisation on the American landscape is starting to become visible, that the shaping forces of history are most forcefully revealed. In his vivid description of the environment surrounding Templeton, the narrator praises the ways in which nature has been tamed in order for the new American nation to flourish:
Beautiful and thriving villages are found interspersed along the margins of the small lakes, or situated at those points of the streams which are favorable for manufacturing; and neat and comfortable farms, with every indication of wealth about them, are scattered profusely through the vales, and even to the mountain tops. Roads diverge in every direction from the even and graceful bottoms of the valleys to the most rugged and intricate passes of the hills. Academies and minor edifices of learning meet the eye of the stranger at every few miles as he winds his way through this uneven territory, and places for the worship of God abound with that frequency which characterize a moral
20 Eagleton, Marxist and Literary Criticism, 29. 21
Lukács, The Historical Novel, 64.
26
and reflecting people, and with that variety of exterior and canonical government which flows from unfettered liberty of conscience.23
Subsequently, the narrator draws attention to the surprisingly rapid speed at which the settlers are changing a largely uninhabited wilderness to an urbanised society:
Only forty years have passed since this territory was a wilderness […] before the war of the Revolution, the inhabited parts of the colony of New York were limited to less than a tenth of its possessions. A narrow belt of country […] and a few insulated settlements on chosen land along the margins of streams, composed the country, which was then inhabited by less than two hundred thousand souls. Within the short period we have mentioned, the population has spread itself over five degrees of latitude and seven of longitude, and has swelled to a million and a half of inhabitants.24
By locating Templeton at the very centre of transition – the American frontier – Cooper could not have visualised these radical changes more clearly. The area directly west of Templeton is still primarily a „silent wilderness‟ characterised by „boundless forest‟ and a „severe climate‟, largely uninhabited except for a few Indian tribes.25 However, given the rate at which the settlers progress westwards it would not be long before this environment, too, was irreversibly changed under the hands of man: „so rapid were the changes, and so persevering the labors of those who had cast their fortunes on the success of the enterprise, that it was not difficult for the imagination of Elizabeth to conceive they were enlarging under her eye while she was gazing, in mute wonder, at the alterations that a few short years had made in the aspect of the country‟.26
The simultaneous occurrence of the American Revolution and the downfall of the Native American civilisations not only led to new perceptions on the relationship between the past and the present, but the events even culminated in an historic break with the past, causing a momentary cultural void. This unique situation provided endless opportunities for early American nationalists such as Cooper to shape a modern and intrinsically American national identity. Nevertheless, as previously mentioned national identities never arise out of a total cultural vacuum; even modern civic nation-states such as the United States require an older, ethnic base if they are to function as a unified and stable whole. Since Americans were feverishly trying to discard their former English identities, it was in the ancient history of the
23 Cooper, The Pioneers, 9-10. 24 Ibid., 10.
25
Ibid., 236, 10.
27 rapidly disappearing civilisations of the Native Americans that Cooper found the required ethnic foundation on which to build a modern American identity. In a sense, the legacy of the native American cultures thus replaced the existing biological English ancestry, marking the new American nation as a continuation of the rapidly disappearing Native American cultures.27 This phenomenon can clearly be observed in Cooper‟s myth-motif of the golden age in The Leatherstocking Tales. In general, myth-motifs of the golden age serve to glorify the nation‟s past golden age and its heroes while conveying „a living connection with the past‟.28
More specifically, they function „to establish a sense of continuity between the generations‟.29
This essential link between the generations simultaneously enforces present feelings of cultural unity and serves to sustain the nation‟s sense of cultural unity for future generations. In other words, by incorporating a myth-motif of the golden age, Cooper was to „rediscover and reconstruct the life of each period of the community‟s history, to establish the linkages and layerings between each period, and hence to demonstrate the continuity of „the nation‟.30
In order for a myth-motif of the golden age to be forceful and convincing, it needed to be both local and „encrusted with age‟.31 By merging the authentic Native American way of life – ancient, local, and lived in complete harmony with American nature – with the mythical lifestyle of the all-American backwoodsman, Cooper furnished an authentically American version of his nation‟s immemorial golden past.
For any myth-motif of the golden age to be truly successful, it needs to invoke a collective sense of melancholy or nostalgia for the nation‟s glorious immemorial past. According to Anthony Smith, people „often turn back to the collective past and seek in it something that appears to be missing in the present and which they think will assist them in shaping the future‟.32
By presenting an ideal version of past communal life, myth-motifs of the golden age hold up „a shining exemplar of communal life in the distant past‟, an „exemplar virtutis‟ to „dignify the nation-to-be‟.33 Hence, by summoning a national sense of nostalgia and yearning for a utopian common past, Cooper sought to inspire a communal vision for the future of the nation. In The Leatherstocking Tales, Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo are the nation‟s last living members and solitary reminders of this mythical authentic American way of life. In The Last of the Mohicans, Chingachgook sketches a vivid image of the nation‟s
27 Verhoeven, feedback on first version of this dissertation. 28 Lukács, The Historical Novel, 53.
29
Smith, The Antiquity of Nations, 222.
30 Ibid., 222.
31 Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel, 116. 32
Smith, The Antiquity of Nations, 213.
28 golden past: „then, Hawkeye, we were one people, and we were happy. The salt lake gave us its fish, the wood its deer, and the air its birds. We took wives who bore us children; we worshipped the Great Spirit; and we kept the Maquas beyond the sound of our songs of triumph‟.34
At this point in the novel, however, these authentically American ways of life are on the verge of being lost forever. Chingachgook laments this harsh reality: „A pine grew then where this chestnut now stands […] Foot by foot, [my people] were driven back from the shores, until I, that am a chief and a Sagamore, have never seen the sun shine but through the trees, and have never visited the graves of my fathers‟.35
This sense of nostalgia for America‟s golden age is reinforced with a reference to William Cullen Bryant‟s well-known poem „An Indian at the Burial-Place of his Fathers‟ at the beginning of chapter three. This poem mourns the demise of the Native American cultures and forcefully expresses a sense of longing to return to America‟s golden age:
Methinks it were a nobler sight To see these vales in woods arrayed, Their summits in the golden light, Their trunks in grateful shade, And herds of deer, that bounding go O'er hills and prostrate trees below. […]
Before these fields were shorn and tilled, Full to the brim our rivers flowed; The melody of waters filled The fresh and boundless wood;
And torrents dashed and rivulets played, And fountains spouted in the shade.36
Likewise, by depicting Natty‟s constant struggles and eventual failure to retain his traditional American way of life, Cooper managed to evoke melancholy feelings in his early American audience for this idealised mythical past. At the end of The Pioneers, for example, the advancing forces of civilisation leave Natty no choice but to burn down his primitive wooden
34Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, 37. 35 Ibid., 37-38.
36
William Cullen Bryant, „An Indian at the Burial-Place of his Fathers‟, ll. 25-30 and 67-72, in Cooper, The Last
