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James Fenimore Cooper Society Website

This page is: http://www.oneonta.edu/external/cooper/articles/suny/2001suny-
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Who hides in the work of James Fenimore Cooper

David Callahan
(Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal)
Placed on line May 2003

Presented at the 13th Cooper Seminar, James Fenimore Cooper: His

Country and His Art at the State University of New York College at
Oneonta, July, 2001

©2001, James Fenimore Cooper Society and the College at Oneonta

[may be downloaded and reproduced for personal or instructional use, or by libraries]

Originally published in James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art, Papers from
the 2001 Cooper Seminar (No. 13), The State University of New York College at Oneonta.
Oneonta, New York. Hugh C. MacDougall, editor. (pp. 21-25)

Return to SUNY Seminars | Articles & Papers

James Fenimore Cooper is taken to be of central importance in the establishment of

European settler foundation narratives in the United States. In Henry Nash Smith's
classic summary, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950), "the
character of Leatherstocking is by far the most important symbol of the national
experience of adventure across the continent" (61). For Leslie Fiedler in Love & Death in
the American Novel (1966): "it is Cooper who first dreams the American version of the
theme [of escape from the social and domestic], converting a peripheral European
archetype into the central myth of our culture" (182). Although Cooper has gone through
lean times in the academy over the past 30 years, the perception of his work as being
significant in these terms at least has remained a given.

Throughout the visions of European violence and the framing of American history in
terms of the exercise of power on the part of the settler-invaders, the performative nature
of this exercise is apparent. By enacting power in view, its efficacy was increased over
those it was directed at and it served to legitimate it in the eyes of the community.
Moreover, we should not forget that there was always more-or-less principled opposition
to many of the violent actions of sections of the invading communities, so that visibility
also served to establish power over those sections of the community as well as over the
indigenous nations or recalcitrant groups of whatever type. Performing in public was
crucial in the establishment of hegemony as well as eventually the illusion of right. Public
performance guaranteed the history of what had been performed—and implicitly defied
anyone to erect a different narrative.

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Cooper's works however are full of characters for whom concealment and secrecy are
as or more important than any assertion of identity or public performance. In crucial
novels the protagonists spend more time hidden, assuming other identities, or worrying
about exposure than they do in modes of open self-presentation or the celebration of
presence. It is no accident that his most mythic character has many names, so that for the
neophyte reading about the Leatherstocking tales must be initially bewildering.
Explanations have been given with respect to the motivations behind this secrecy, from
anxiety about boundaries (Jane Tompkins) to the need for Natty Bumppo to conceal his
mixed-blood origin (Barbara Mann). Major Duncan offers pragmatic reasons in The
Pathfinder, where he admits that behavior "'is different, however, in war. Despatches are
feigned, and artifice is generally allowed to be justifiable'" (195), and most of Cooper's
novels do take place within some sort of war or violent context. Nonetheless it still seems
a theme that could profit from further exploration, for, from The Spy to The Ways of the
Hour concealment in different ways is central to the operation of Cooper's imagination.

When one considers the operation of clusters of related features in Cooper's work
however, we should bear in mind what Richard Slotkin confesses in Regeneration
Through Violence: "Cooper's Leatherstocking, particularly in the later novels, poses more
problems than he answers [...] The reader of the Leatherstocking tales can develop an
almost unlimited number of interpretations of the frontier hero, of American values, and
of civilization in general from Cooper's problematic symbols" (509). W. M. Verhoeven
synthesizes thus: Cooper's work "is basically an elusive conglomerate of ambiguous
meanings" (11) and not amenable to ordering into any coherent scheme.

For all of Cooper's conglomerate of ambiguous meanings, however, is it possible to

schematise Cooper's use of concealment? Basically, there are two modes of concealment
in Cooper's fiction: 1) Concealment in the landscape; and 2) Concealment of identity.
However, it is the first sort that interests me here, as the second has received a substantial
amount of intelligent treatment.

Cooper's settings within Nature are the aspect of his writing that has survived best
the onslaught of criticism that has more or less always accompanied his work. Despite the
approval of Cooper as a landscape artist, however, at times the intensity of Cooper's
topographical enthusiasm can defeat the reader, so closely does he crosshatch the detail.
In The Spy he discovered that crucial features of the interaction of people in situations of
extreme and life-threatening danger were determined by such factors as topography and
plant cover, by lines of sight, by angles of slopes, by density or openness of forest, and
above all by the need to make use of these features to conceal oneself from others. Harry
Birch, the spy in question, possesses a knowledge of the landscape that is so precise it not
only enables him to survive under intense pressure but it makes his appearances and
disappearances preternaturally mysterious. We read, for example, that "he knew that by
bringing himself in a line with his pursuers and the wood, his form would be lost to sight"
(114). This occupation of the landscape is one of the ways he is legitimated as an
American—not in public performance of his presence but in a secretive relationship with
his land and his nation. George Washington himself in Cooper's novel is an {22} analog of
the spy, moving surreptitiously through the landscape under an assumed identity, almost
always offstage and not asserting his presence. In this America, those who hide in the
Nature that exists as a profound symbol differentiating America from Europe become

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equally profound representatives of the new nation. For Daniel Peck, the setting enables
"a hero whose uncanny ability to successfully negotiate the landscape defines his
heroism" (1992: 1), to which I am suggesting that "negotiate" is closely related to "hide."
In The Spy both the centrally positive figure (Birch) and the centrally negative figures
(the Skinners) are hiders. However, those who might try to hide but who don't do so
successfully, like the Skinners (inasmuch as they fail to kill Lawton and their leader is
executed), reveal their inferior right to the new nation. To belong in the new America is to
be concealed within it successfully, to circumvent its uncanny threat by refusing to use it
as a stage for performative acts of claiming.

In novel after novel after this, Cooper's intense use of the landscape serves as a
complex zone of secrecy and threat, a place where his heroes move comfortably only by
being able to be hidden within it from other human beings. Whether in the forests of
North America, in the shifting patterns of weather and water on the sea in numerous
books, the almost bare islets in the ocean of The Crater, to the landscape that is itself
murderous, the Antarctic scenario of The Sea Lions, Cooper's Nature is so excessive that
it is clearly much more than simple backdrop, celebration of the unspoilt. Wherever these
narratives are set, a dialectic between the performative and the hidden is being rehearsed,
a dialectic that favors those who are more successful at hiding, and not simply at putting
on masks, as has been examined by, for example, Charles Hansford Adams in "The
Guardian of the Law". For Adams, writing of the succession of disguises adopted in The
Spy, "the masks that the law imposes on the world upset not merely personal identity, but
the integrity of social bonds as well" (37). Masking and hiding in the landscape however
may be different activities, in that masking one's identity is to cover the signs of one's self,
while hiding is to immerse oneself in that Nature that is taken as one of the strongest
marks of America, and a close relation with Nature, wherever it is, a mark of
Americanness. Harvey Birch does disguise himself when necessary, and he is good at it,
but more to the point he inhabits the landscape with such knowledge and comfort that it
establishes his moral status as an American: "the pedler [sic] was familiar with every turn
in their difficult route [...] the ingenuity, or knowledge, of his guide, conquered every
difficulty" (372). In related territory, Daniel Peck observes that "Cooper's heroes are
characterized by their ability to read carefully, sometimes painstakingly, what is open for
all to see but can in fact be isolated only be the 'practised eye.' That is, they are
distinguished by the power of observation rather than by the power of interpretation"
(21).

Within Cooper's Nature, this observation is centrally put in the service of hiding.
Nature does not exist as the site of openness, the instinctual, or, crucially, freedom. It is a
site of learned survival, of vigilance and constrainment, giving us that sensation that
many observers have felt of the significance of enclosures in Cooper's fiction, not simply
nature but all manner of isolated huts and buildings within Nature, Peck suggesting that
"it may be that all the threatened structures in his novels are ultimately symbolic of the
threatened self" (1977: 150). And those who hide in these varied spaces are the most
significant characters in the novels. Those who don't hide at all are generally secondary
characters. The significant characters may be the heroes or those whom the heroes must
evade or outwit.

I would like to concentrate however on two novels from different phases of Cooper's

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career, novels which also represent different impulses in his imaginative world: The Spy
(1821), and The Pathfinder (1840). Despite their differences however it will be seen that
they share the impulse to have their central characters hide for good portions of the novel,
and perhaps for its most crucial sections.

As has been observed of The Spy by Robert Lee, it "positively abounds in

self-inventions, masquerades, actings-out [...] a gamut of different kinds of
metamorphosis and false shows of appearance" (37). Throughout his career, from
beginning to end, Cooper insisted on the non-transparency of his central characters,
resistant to any claim that character or identity should be apparent. This was partly in the
service of a hierarchical view of identity in which the individual should not be available
for scrutiny by all and sundry, implicit in the ideals and rhetoric of the Revolution, so that
from first to last, as we read in The Ways of the Hour (1850): "persons who were innocent
might have many reasons for concealing their names" (37). Identity is not something to
be ascribed by a majority or to circulate for the assessment of everyone, but rather
something to be held over against the ascriptions of the majority. This is not to say that it
was tortured, confused or self-destructive in other Romantic models, but more that the
need to perform identity was something with which Cooper had a troubled relationship.

{23} This leads us back to The Spy. Beginning the novel with a Gothic storm and a
solitary, unidentified traveller, Cooper rapidly introduces a world in which "great
numbers [...] wore masks, which even to this day have not been thrown aside," but what
interests me is when a stranger approaches a farm-house the instinctive reaction is to
prepare to head off to one's "ordinary place of concealment in the adjacent woods" (10).
This suspicious farmer is a representative of settling America, and his first response to the
presence of someone unknown is to retreat from the supposed refuge of his dwelling to
the real refuge of the forest (and in the process leaving his wife to deal with the threat,
interestingly and symptomatically enough). That the passing stranger in this instance is
no-one less than George Washington (in disguise) may indicate Cooper's perception of
the fragility of the community of Americans the Revolution is supposedly establishing,
along with his privileging of the forest as the natural zone of safety for an American.

This is a surprising affirmation in view of the fact that out of the forest may appear
(in this novel) the appalling perversion of the principles of the Revolution, the Skinners,
and (in many other novels) the threat of Native Americans. Yet what this suggests to me is
that the forest, the landscape in general, is the principal site of contention in which
Euro-Americans forge themselves, but not simply through performative acts of claiming,
assertion and presence but through success in hiding, withdrawing and concealment.
Those who hide the best are the best. It is no accident that on more than one occasion in
the novel the female character that the novel most privileges, Frances, has recourse to
hiding outside, and each time she does it successfully; for example, "she shrank, timidly,
into a little thicket of wood" (351) to avoid passing soldiers, who pass her by obliviously.
Even in easily overlooked events in the novel hiding is often thus significant.

Many consequences in Cooper's fiction flow on from following this supposition. It is

one of the reasons, for example, that Native Americans in general feel so highly valorised
in his work, despite other qualities that Mingos or other less favored nations possess, at
least according to the sententious utterances of Natty Bumppo. It is also one of the

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reasons we feel so little sympathy for his society characters, who are often all performance
with little skill at concealment. Typically Henry Wharton doesn't trust to his knowledge of
and ability to cloak himself in the landscape to reach his family but goes in for disguise
instead, which leads to his dire straits in the novel (Washington doesn't disguise himself
but merely gives himself a different name). Wharton may belong to the favored family in
the novel but he is also a representative of the British as well as being a society figure, so
his insertion into the landscape cannot be as successful as that of supposedly more true
Americans such as Birch (who when he is taken is taken at home, not in the forest).

The heart of America in The Spy then is a secret, a man who hides. For all the novel's
success, however, it is generally known today only by specialists and scarcely an
obligatory reference in general syntheses of central American literary myths. What is, of
course, are the Leatherstocking tales. Turning to The Pathfinder then, we can see that to
be good at finding paths means to be good at not leaving signs of them. A pathfinder finds
a way but does not leave a way. To leave a path behind one is to invite discovery and
death, so that, once again, Nature is not a site of public performance but of private
survival.

Strangely enough, however, in this novel Natty Bumppo spends very little time
finding or concealing paths or directing operations. Apart from the memorable, long
opening sequence in the forest, the rest of the novel he either abdicates his pathfinding
functions in favor of romance or he is on a boat on Lake Ontario, watching and
commenting but not directing. Indeed, in this latter scenario he is singularly unsuccessful
when he does give opinions, the suspicions of others with respect to the loyalty of Jasper
Western overriding Natty's belief in Jasper's honesty. Even in the penultimate sequences
in the blockhouse, where his presence is crucial, we see him not in the forest but holed up
in a military structure, keeping enemies at bay more than anything else. It is Jasper's
arrival, primed by the shadowy but crucial Chingachgook, that swings the balance.

In the beginning sequence of The Pathfinder, for example, when the Pathfinder and
his charges are being pursued by the Iroquois, Natty ensures they are well-hidden, so that
"their enemies began to think that the latter had taken to flight. The course was that
which most white men would have followed, but Mabel was under the care of those who
were much too well skilled in forest warfare" (71). Repeatedly, Natty and Chingachgook
show themselves masters of using the landscape for their concealment, able to proceed
and to preserve life by a series of such uses of the landscape for protection. Unlike Henry
Wharton, Chingachgook is also able to disguise himself successfully, but significantly his
disguise is as a piece of Nature, with bushes tied to his head, pushing a piece of a log
across the river (75). To be able to occupy this landscape successfully one needs to be able
to be in it, looking out. In this section they are almost perpetually represented as
"completely concealed from the view of their enemies, while they kept a vigilant watch
over the proceedings of the latter, in order to consult on their own future movements"
(80). Performing belonging in public exposes one to the end of all belonging: death.

{24} Indeed, Chingachgook is so accomplished at hiding that in one episode he even

joins the Iroquois, admittedly in the dark, thus finding out valuable information. Not only
that, this type of bravery had a tradition in many Native American cultures, the bravery of
going among your enemy and carrying something off, not necessarily harming anyone in

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the process. Demonstrating bravery but also intelligence and in this context a greater
presence within the scene, in that Chingachgook can be in the place of his friends and the
place of his enemies; his claim to belonging or occupation of the landscape is thereby
increased.

From the arrival at the fort at Oswego however, after this first quarter of the book,
Chingachgook largely disappears from the novel, melting into the forest while Natty is
melting down over Mabel.

Cooper's heroes hide then, but so do their enemies. They become implicated in each
other's relation to the land so that their encounter is not simply that of the dynamics of
the adventure novel but has a moral dimension as well. Those who hide better belong
better. To take another example, as if Cooper had not given us so many indications that
Jasper Western could not possibly be a traitor to the British, he is also of superior skills
when it comes to hiding his boat, in the weather or along coastlines, something he
demonstrates repeatedly. Only through his prudence has the outpost remained secret for
so long as he takes relieving parties in and out without allowing anyone to be on deck at
the time, and, significantly, in alliance with Chingachgook, he is able to approach unseen
until almost at the island and thereby provide the means by which the Iroquois are
defeated. The Iroquois themselves, as all Indian peoples, are superior hiders, but in the
measuring of moral forces in Cooper's novels, their hiding skills will eventually prove
inferior to those of the heroes, while yet being skillful enough to render them admirable.
To make the matter more than circumstantial, Cooper at one point has a pompous
Scottish corporal, in command of the forward garrison, expatiating upon the virtues of
Scottish courage and grit: "'We Scots come from a naked region, and have no need, and
less relish for covers'" (338), but he is not allowed to finish his sentence before the result
of this avowal is made manifest in his being shot dead by a bullet through the forehead
right before Mabel Dunham's eyes. Driving home the point, the rest of the soldiers nearby
are all "shot down almost simultaneously, by the invisible foe, whom the corporal had
affected to despise" (340). In America, covers are essential and those who use them best
survive.

Who hides then in the work of James Fenimore Cooper may tell us interesting things
about the key issue of belonging in and moral occupation of the American landscape. As
an explanatory tool it works in similar areas to existing Cooper scholarship, but isolating
one aspect of that scholarship that has been subsumed within more general observations
on disguise, enclosing spaces and anxiety about boundaries. It also aids us in
understanding how it is that enemy figures, principally Native Americans, still feel
valorised in Cooper's work by readers despite their putative moral positioning as hostile,
and why figures supported by the diegesis of the narratives, such as Cooper's society
figures, are unsupported by the narratives' deeper moral codes. It also activates questions
about the performative aspects of settling-invading and establishing the moral right to be
an American, which is to say, to be a white American, and it activates them in ways that
trouble simplistic assertions about Cooper's relation to the supposed values of adventure
narratives.

Works Cited

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Cooper, James Fenimore, The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground [1821].
Introduction and Notes by Wayne Franklin. New York: Penguin, 1997.
------, The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea [1840]. Historical Introduction and Edited
by Richard Dilworth Rust. Albany: SUNY Press, 1981.
------, The Deerslayer or, The First Warpath [1841]. Historical Introduction and
Explanatory Notes by James Franklin Beard. Text Established by Lance
Schachterle, Kent Ljungquist and James Kilby. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987.
------, The Crater, or Vulcan's Peak [1847]. Ed. Thomas Philbrick. Cambridge, MA.:
Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1962.
------, The Sea Lions, or The Lost Sealers [1849]. Introduction by Susan Fenimore
Cooper. London: George Routledge, n.d.
------, The Ways of the Hour [1850]. Phoenix Mill, Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing,
1996.
Adams, Charles Hansford, "The Guardian of the Law": Authority and Identity in
James Fenimore Cooper. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1990.
Fiedler, Leslie, Love & Death in the American Novel [2nd ed. 1966]. New York:
Anchor, 1992.
Lee, A. Robert, "Making History, Making Fiction: Cooper's The Spy." In James
Fenimore Cooper: New Historical and Literary Contexts. Ed. W. M. Verhoeven.
Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993: 31-45.
Mann, Barbara A., "Forbidden Ground: Racial Politics and Hidden Identity in
James Fenimore Cooper's Leather-Stocking Tales." Ph.D. Dissertation, University of
Toledo, December 1997.
Peck, H. Daniel, A World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper's Fiction. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
------, "Introduction." In New Essays on The Last of the Mohicans. Ed. H. Daniel
Peck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992: 1-23.
Slotkin, Richard, Regeneration through Violence: Mythology of the American
Frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.
Tompkins, Jane, "No Apologies for the Iroquois: A New Way to Read the
Leatherstocking Novels." In Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American
Fiction 1790-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985: 94-121.
Verhoeven, W. M., "Neutralizing the Land: The Myth of Authority, and the
Authority of Myth in Fenimore Cooper's The Spy." In James Fenimore Cooper:
New Historical and Literary Contexts. Ed. W. M. Verhoeven. Amsterdam-Atlanta:
Rodopi, 1993: 71-87.

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