AmLit – Lecture notes

COOPER and the frontier experience

The frontier was the great theme of Cooper’s life, standing always at the
forefront of his imagination. Though the frontier theme can be seen in
virtually all of his books, it rose to major prominence in his Leatherstocking
Tales for which he is chiefly remembered.

The Prairie, which Cooper wrote in 1826-1827 in Paris, was the third book
in the Leatherstocking saga which chronicled the adventures of Natty
Bumppo, a forest hunter and frontiersman. It was apparently to be the third
and last volume of a trilogy which was artfully structured.

The first volume, entitled The Pioneers, Cooper had published in 1823. It
introduced Natty Bumppo as "Deerslayer," a relatively old man who, in
killing a deer on judge Temple's estate, violated civilized law and was
punished. From the beginning, it was clear that Natty Bumppo had a past
consisting of adventures with the Indians in the forest wilderness, and going
back beyond the Revolution to the French and Indian War. Cooper thus
placed his major character just beyond the middle of life. In so doing, he
began his epic classically in medias res.

The next volume, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), is a flashback that
pictures Natty in the prime of life. The Prairie, written right on the heels of
the previous book and suggesting that Cooper was rapidly spinning out the
conclusion to his woodsman's odyssey, is clearly a grand finale for
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Leatherstocking, now an old man well past 80, and waiting serenely for
death out in nature beyond the reaches of civilization. From a point just past

the center of his hero's life, Cooper had thus flashed backward and forward.
He had, through the medium of Leatherstocking, told the story of frontier
America.

Critics, busy with criticizing Cooper’s stilted language, tend to miss the
subtlety with which the trilogy is structured. Over all three books hangs a
cloud of mortality, of inevitable death and change with its inescapable
sadness and elegiac tone. In the first book, the deer is killed, the trees are cut
down and the forest is rapidly disappearing. Mighty Deerslayer himself is
tried and convicted of the humiliating crime of poaching, and hence suffers
spiritual death at the hands of Judge Temple, the agent of civilization.
Leatherstocking's day, like that of the wilderness he loves so much, is clearly
past.

The Last of the Mohicans, a story of Leatherstocking's prime years, also tells
a tale of dying and thus sustains the tone, if not the theme of the first book.
This time the victim is the noble Uncas, last of his tribe which had been
virtually wiped out by vicious New Englanders years before. Thus we have a
sequence of doom: first the Indian, then the forests, then the hunter.

The Prairie is the last in this somber sequence. It is entirely a novel of death,
but appropriately enough, death and resurrection, for it ends on that
ambiguous Easter note of sadness and hope. It chronicles the death of one
way of life and the birth of another which is not altogether bad.
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At this point, Cooper had created a subtle structural masterpiece; then, as
D.H.Lawrence astutely perceived, Cooper began the "sloughing of the old
skin." He went back in 1840 and 1841 and wrote two more books in the

Leatherstocking series, The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer, which took

Natty Bumppo back by successive stages through young manhood to youth
and the beginning of his career. The spell of death was broken. In a different
sense, another resurrection had occurred, and Leatherstocking once again
roamed the forests. These books made clear to the reader just what the
attractions of the unspoiled wilderness had been. They also recalled the
pioneering exploits of an older heroic generation that had given hard birth to
the country and which was in danger of being forgotten.

Cooper's five Leatherstocking books sustained themselves on the magic

level of story and character down through the years when Americans lost
their self-consciousness in a preoccupation with work, industrial
development, and the growth of great cities where the forest and the log
house once stood. They outlasted the dime novel and hundreds of imitations
which blossomed into a whole new genre called "westerns."

But since 1950, at least, with the work of Henry Nash Smith in Virgin Land,
The American West as Symbol and Myth, literary critics and students of
culture have begun to see the larger meaning of Cooper's work. Cooper now
stands forth clearly as the great novelist of changing America, and at the
heart of his work stands the ambivalence and paradox that are central to the
American historical experience. Cooper, along with many other Americans,
could never make up his mind whether he preferred nature or civilization.
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Nature was God's pure handiwork. It was beauty, the vast, silent sublimity of
forest and lake and prairie. It was innocent and noble and free. It was
America's one great spiritual and material resource, a crucial element of
national self-identification. On the other hand, nature was crude, lawless, the
home of violence, danger, and terror. Most of all it stood in the way of
progress. Over and over again in his Leatherstocking tales, Cooper posits the
contrast between nature - time stood still - and progress - the relentless, and
in many ways inviting, wave of the future. The problem was to tame nature
and bring it under control for good without degenerating into the callous
over-civilization of Europe. This was the mission of America, to create a
new society, efficient and orderly and civilized, but based closely upon the
beneficent laws of nature and hence free. So Cooper, like most Americans,
while always aware of the nature versus progress dilemma, invariably had it
both ways.

In his books he celebrated both nature and civilization; time and progress
stood still. The Leatherstocking saga catches all of this so perfectly because
it is a story of heroic proportions that chronicles the emerging historical
identity of the American people. Cooper knew that individual and collective
identities can only be derived from history. His great achievement was to
render the historical process of change during a period of cultural genesis
somehow timeless and permanent while at the same time capturing all of the
ambiguities, dislocations, and anomalies of a culture in the throes of a
process of acceleration more rapid than any ever seen before.

The Prairie, as befitting the final act of a great drama, has most of Cooper's
symbolic characters onstage in a vastly greater panorama than any of his
other books. The tone and many of the characters in the book are
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reminiscent of Shakespeare's valedictory play, The Tempest. The landscape
is a "bleak and solitary place" with "bruised and withered grass", colored by
the "hues and tints of autumn." Leatherstocking, wrinkled and old, appears
as a nature god about to pass from the face of the earth. More important than

his powers, however, are his values for they denote what he represents in
Cooper's myth of America's beginnings. The twin keys to Leatherstocking's
values are freedom and a reverence for nature. Leatherstocking does not
violate nature's laws, and, embodying Cooper's basic ambivalence in this
matter, he does not entirely scorn civilization's laws. He declares, "The law-
tis bad to have it, but I sometimes think it is worse to be entirely without it.
Age and weakness have brought me to feel such weakness at times. Yes-yes,
the law is needed when such as have not the gifts of strength and wisdom
are to be taken care of."

Here Cooper gets at the heart of his theme, the role of law and order which is
synonymous with the best aspects of civilization in that it provides justice
and protection for the weak. The good law is, by implication, Jeffersonian
law which is in harmony with nature, indeed derives from it, but which
nevertheless allows a man to be as free as possible without injury to his
fellow creatures. It depends fundamentally upon tolerance and mutual
respect.

There is a scientist in the book, Dr. Bat, who embodies Cooper's comment
on science and the validity of the abstract scientific view of nature as
opposed to Leatherstocking's common-sense intuitive outlook. Dr. Bat sees
nature only in the abstract. He is a collector out of context, a systematizer, a
classifier. As such, he does not know true nature and he never learns, which
is the worst kind of ignorance, beyond redemption. In Cooper's imagination,
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the "two cultures" stood unalterably opposed: one could not arrive at truth
through science, but one could do so in the most profound sense through
history, the literary imagination, romance, and myth.

It’s an equivocal situation in which all that Cooper is sure of is that things
are deteriorating. The cycle obsesses him, as it was to obsess William
Faulkner a century afterwards. Each feels the compulsion to dig back into
the past, in search of explanation and also of an elusive original perfection.

Cooper sums up in literature the spirit of that idealistic, somewhat crude

democracy which established the United States. He fixed the current heroic
traditions of his day more firmly to actual places. He supplied so many facts
to the great legend of the frontier. In addition, by means of his books, Native
Americans could now take their place in the world of the imagination,
sometimes idealized but more often credibly imperfect.