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Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales: Fiction on the Frontier
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Plagues, Witches, and War: The Worlds of Historical Fiction
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Two Centuries of Historical Fiction
This module reviews the history of historical fiction looking at major works and authors from the 18th and 19th century including The Leatherstocking Tales, William Wells Brown, and Charles Dickens.
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Bruce HolsingerProfessor
English
This lecture is on James Fenmore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, probably the
most influential, historical novels published
in the 19th Century United States.
There were a series of five novels published between 1823
and 1841, but set as much as a century earlier.
Together, the Leatherstocking Tales give us a
great flawed searching saga of the American Frontier.
With all the excitement, inventiveness,
prejudice and violence these subjects entailed.
What I want to emphasize here, is the enormous popularity and
diversity of Cooper's literary corpus, he
wrote seafaring novels, adventure novels, romances.
He was prolific and popular and the
reception of The Leatherstocking tales, is a really
essential part of what established him as among
the most important writers in the American tradition.
So the five novels in The Leatherstocking series include
The Pioneers, published in 1823, The Last of the Mohicans
from 1826, The Prairie from 1827.
So the first three Cooper published very quickly.
Then he waited a full 13 years to resume the
series with The Pathfinder in 1840 and The Deerslayer in 1841.
So here you see them listed in their order of
publication, but if you flip them around and put the story
told across these novels in historical sequence; in other words,
the period of pastime represented in each novel, the list would
look like this, and here I've also
included the original subtitles of these novels.
The Deerslayer: The First War Path, set in the 1740s and 1750s.
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757, obviously set in 1757.
The Pathfinder: The Inland Sea, set during the 1750s.
The Pioneers, The Sources of the Susquehanna, which
takes us up to 1793, and then The
Prairie, A Tale, set in 1804, much closer to Cooper's period.
So as you can see, it was the Deerslayer, the
very last of the Leatherstocking Tales to be published, that
came first in historical sequence, then reaches back a full
century to think about the nature of the American Frontier.
This reverse ordering of the Leatherstocking Tales has led to a lot
of speculation over the years about what this novelistic experiment in chronology
might mean.
A famous example is DH Lawrence, who
claimed in studies in Classic American Literature, that
the reverse chronological order of the series
and that is the true myth of America.
The tales move backwards, Lawrence says, from old age to golden youth.
That is the true myth of America.
She starts old, old, wrinkled, and writhing,
in old skin and there is a gradual
sloughing of the old skin towards a new youth, it is the myth of America.
We can see this kind of mythic thinking
at play from the chronological opening of the cycle.
Here is the first paragraph of the Deerslayer, remember, published
in 1841, but beginning its story just a century before that.
So it's the most chronologically remote of the Leatherstocking tales, reaching
all the way back to the middle of the 18th century.
On the human imagination, events produce the effects of time.
Thus, he who has traveled far and seen
much is apt to fancy that he has lived long; and the
history that most abounds in important
incidents soonest assumes the aspect of antiquity.
In no other way can we account for the
venerable air that is already gathering around American annals.
When the mind reverts to the earliest days
of colonial history, the period seems remote and obscure,
the thousand changes that thicken along the links of
recollections, throwing back the origin of the nation to
a day so distant as seemingly to reach the mists of
time; and yet four lives of ordinary duration would suffice to
transmit from mouth to mouth, in the form of tradition, all
that civilized man has achieved within the limits of the republic.
Although New York alone possesses a population materially
exceeding that of either of the four smallest
kingdoms of Europe, or materially exceeding that of
the entire Swiss Confederation, it is little more
than two centuries since the Dutch commenced their settlement.
Rescuing the region from the savage state, thus
what seems venerable by an accumulation of changes
is reduced to familiarity, when we come seriously
to consider it solely in connection with time.
Now there's a lot going on in that first paragraph.
First, we have the themes of time and temporality.
With the passage of time, events that took place recently,
come to seem like distant history.
We're always getting more and more distance from what's come before.
Second, there's the remoteness and the
obscurity of the earliest American history,
now hidden by the mists of time, in Cooper's kind of cliched phrase.
Despite the fact that only four average lifetimes have passed
since the beginnings of Dutch colonization, in the 17th century.
Third, the notion of European settlement as a rescue,
from what Cooper calls it, savage state;
in other words, its native American inhabitants.
This is a ubiquitous theme in The Leatherstocking Tales, and
of course, a lot of American literature of the 19th century.
That idea that European colonization and settlement
represent a form of salvation, often a divinely
inspired, historically inevitable salvation of a land
previously wrapped in a kind of eternal darkness.
And fourth, in that final
sentence, that tension between venerability and familiarity.
This is a topos or a central theme of historical fiction of all stripes.
And keep it in mind as we move on to Charles Dickens in, A Tale of Two Cities.
It's the idea that despite the great distance that separates us from
a remote past, we can nevertheless be intimate with this past as well.
And one of the tasks that historical fiction often
sets itself, is to create just that medium of intimacy
with bygone cultures and peoples.
So how do we put this epic cluster
of novels in some kind of meaningful, historical context?
Well, I want to suggest three pathways into the Leatherstocking
Tales, three ways of understanding these novels as historical fiction.
First, through Cooper's central protagonist
throughout The Leatherstocking Tales, Natty Bumppo.
Second, through the racial politics of The
Leatherstocking Tales, particularly the politics of Indian
removal in the middle decades of the 19th century.
And, third, I want to approach The
Leatherstocking Tales through the history of the book.
Thinking about the publication of these novels
and their presentation to a readership precisely as
historical fiction, and what that meant for
literary history in the 19th century United States.
So, first, the heroine protagonist, Natty Bumppo, he's one of the
most complex and written about characters in the history of American literature.
He's seen as the embodiment of
the American frontier, both physically and intellectually.
He's the American Adam, in the words of the
great critic R.W.B. Lewis, unattached to family, circumstance and obligation.
He's also, though, a bundle of contradictions.
He's highly prejudiced in his world view
regularly excoriating Catholics, Iriquois Indians and many others.
And disdains the idea of racial mixture, or miscegenation, which is constantly
represented as a form of moral corruption throughout the Leatherstocking Tales.
On the other hand, his closest companion, Chingachgook, is a Native.
And Bumppo, himself, is often described in terms that can make his
own identity seem to merge with the identities of Cooper's Native characters.
His wild hair, his profound attachment to nature and landscape, his
willingness and ability to kill in cold blood when he needs to.
All of these native stereotypes that Cooper's exploiting
in representing native characters, are also applied to Natty Bumppo
in various places over the course of the five novels.
Also important here is Bumppo's age.
When we first see him in The Pioneers, the
first published Leatherstocking Tale, he's about 70 years old,
but by the time Cooper writes and publishes The
Deer Slayer, he's a young man in his 20s.
So in some ways, he ages backwards through
the course of the publication of the Leatherstocking tales.
But we never really know his exact age, and
neither does he.
So, the way that readers come to know him is through the strange and disorienting
process of encountering him at different stages
of his life, with different nicknames and identities.
So where does Cooper get the inspiration for the character of Natty Bumppo?
Well, one very direct and important inspiration was Daniel Boone.
An American frontiersman of the 18th and 19th Centuries, who became one of the
first American folk heroes, when the legends of his life started to spread and
be retold in the 19th Century.
During just those years when Cooper was writing the Leatherstocking Tales.
If you want to get a sense of how indebted Cooper was to the legend of Daniel Boone,
you might read chapters 11 and 12 of
The Last of the Mohicans, alongside Boone's so-called autobiography.
Now this is a first-person account of Boone's exploits.
It was transcribed and adapted by a man named John Filson,
and published in 1784 as an appendix to a book called,
The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucky.
And I've given you a link to that text in the Readings Tab.
Here's a telling excerpt from Boone's alleged firsthand account of his life.
On the fourteenth day of July 1776, two of Colonel Callaway's
daughters, and one of mine, were taken prisoners near the fort.
I immediately pursued the Indians, with only eight men, and on the
sixteenth overtook them, killed two of the party and recovered the girls.
The same day on which this attempt was
made, the Indians divided themselves into different parties,
and attacked several forts, which were shortly before
this time erected, doing a great deal of mischief.
In Last of the Mohicans, Cooper draws directly on this story, and
its subsequent adaptations, to imagine the captivity and release of Cora and Alice.
Unlike Boone's account, though, Cooper's is not a simplistic
us versus them story of race captivity and war.
Cora herself, the sentimental heroine, is of mixed race we learn,
and she encourages the love of Uncas, the son of Chingachgook.
This complicated relationship between native
and non-native populations and characters inhabiting
The Leatherstocking Tales, leads me directly to my second, larger theme.
And that is, the racial politics of these novels, and
particularly, their relationship to Indian removal in the 19th century.
It's been pointed out any number of times that the publication
of The Leatherstocking Tales coincides and overlaps with some of the most
significant and tragic events of Native American history in the 19th century.
In 1814, there's the death of Tecumseh and the defeat of the Creek chief, Red
Eagle, two great Indian leaders who sought to
build a confederation of tribes against American expansion.
In 1830, the Indian Removal Act was passed by Congress, legislating the
forced emigration of thousands and thousands
of Native Americans from their lands.
And there were lots of other Congressional
Acts and Supreme Court cases in this period.
That eroded whatever remaining power Native Americans possessed.
For example in 1823, Johnson versus McIntosh
which took away Indian sovereignty over their lands.
In 1831 Cherokee Nation versus Georgia
denied sovereignty and citizenship to Native Americans.
And throughout the 1830s, the decade between the publication
of The Prairie in 1827 and The Pathfinder in 1840.
The Trail of Tears removed tends of thousands of Native Americans from
their lands and resulted in many thousands of deaths along the way.
Now correlation isn't causation, of course.
And the role and representation of Native Americans in the Leatherstocking
Tales has been a source of controversy for a very long time.
Some critics say that these novels
are virtually advocating Indian removal and may
have played an actual role in promoting
anti-native government policies in the 19th century,
given their popularity and force.
Others say that Cooper's portrayals
of native populations are actually sympathetic
compared to the dominant tendency to rely on more simplistic racist stereotypes.
In the portrayal of nonwhite people.
You can see evidence for this point of view at the beginning of The Last of the
Mohicans in chapter two, where Cora questions her companion's
suspicions of an indian being proposed as a guide.
Should we distrust the man because his manners are not
our manners, and that his skin is dark.
But despite these moments of critique, Cooper's novels
are filled with depictions of natives as essentially violent.
One of the most horrifying scenes in all
of the Leatherstocking Tales portrays the murder of an
English woman and her child by an unnamed
Huron warrior, described by Cooper as wild and untutored.
This takes place during the surrender scene in chapter
17 of Last of the Mohicans, and I'll warn
you that it's graphically violent.
The savage spurned the worthless rags, and perceiving that the
shawl had all ready become a prize to another, his
bantering but sullen smile changed to a gleam of ferocity,
he dashed the head of the infant against a rock.
And cast its quivering remains to her very feet.
For an instant the mother stood, like a statue
of despair, looking wildly down at the unseemly object,
which had so lately nestled in her bosom and
smiled in her face; and then she raised her
eyes and countenance toward heaven, as if calling on
God to curse the perpetrator of the foul deed.
She was spared the din of such a prayer for, maddened at his disappointment, and
excited at the sight of blood, the Huron
mercifully drove his tomahawk into her own brain.
The mother sank under the blow, and fell, grasping at her
child, in death, with the same engrossing love
that had caused her to cherish it when living.
This is the kind of scene that critics
have taken as indicative of Leatherstocking's racial politics.
Even when Cooper is portraying white violence against
Native populations, we never get the sense of an
almost genetic propensity of brutality, that we get
in scenes like the one I've just shown you.
It's true that Cooper uses his narrative voice in his character's point of view to
question some of the dominant tendencies of his time toward unthinking prejudice.
But we have to recognize that the novels rely on the same stock types that
inform the dominant American discourse on Native Americans
in the first half of the 19th century.
The noble savage, the brutal savage and so on.
And that these stereotypes are an essential component of
The Leatherstocking Tales as an influential sequence of historical novels.
The third and final theme I want to
address in relation to The Leatherstocking Tales,
concerns the history of the book in America.
I want us to think about what these books meant as
historical novels to those who first bought them and read them.
For this part of our unit I'm going to turn to my
colleague, professor Jerome McGann, of the
English department at the University of Virginia.
He's an expert in the history of the book, and he spent a lot of time in
the last few years, reading Cooper's corpus of
novels, and thinking about their physical ant textural presentation,
to the American reading public of the 19th century.
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