WOMEN IN THE WORKS OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

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University Microfilms International 300 N. ZEEB ROAD. ANN ARBOR, Ml 48106 18 BEDFORD ROW. LONDON WC1R 4EJ, ENGLAND 791913**

BRADSHER. FRIEDA KATHERINE I WOMEN IN THE WORKS OF JAMES FE NIMORE COOPER.

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA, PH.D., 1979

COPR. 1979 BRADSHER, FRIEDA KATHERINE

University Microfilms International 300 N. ZEEB ROAD, ANN ARBOR, MI 48IOE

© 1979

FRIEDA KATHERINE BRADSHER

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WOMEN IN THE WORKS OF

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

by

Frieda Katherine Bradsher

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

19 7 9

Copyright 1979 Frieda Katherine Bradsher THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE

I hereby recommend that this dissertation prepared under my direction by Frieda Katherine Bradsher entitled Women in the Works of James Fenimore Cooper

be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree

Qf Doctor of Philosophy

Qt ,6sC I / 9 7 y Dissertation Direction: Date#

As members of the Final Examination Committee, we certify that we have read this dissertation and agree that it may be presented for final defense.

/ LuM 1 Date 7

Da

Date

Date

Date

Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent on the candidate's adequate performance and defense thereof at the final oral examination.

11/78 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available- to bor­ rowers under rules of the Library.

Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder.

SIGNED ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their helpful advice and careful readings of my manuscript,

I sincerely thank Albert F. Gegenheimer, Sidonie A. Smith, and Edgar

A. Dryden of the Department of English of The University of Arizona.

For the immense patience and skill that provided me with many nineteenth- century volumes, I thank the inter-library loan staff of the University of Arizona Library and all those unknown librarians across the country who assisted them. For permission to examine and to quote from unpublished material in the Collection of American Literature, I thank the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University.

For the constant encouragement that preserved my enthusiasm for this study and sometimes even my general sanity, I am especially grateful to my parents and all my family and friends, whether they are as far away as South Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, or Oregon or as close as the Arizona Quarterly office. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Sherry O'Donnell and all the other members of the Women's Studies

Feminist Theory Group of The University of Arizona for emotional support and invaluable intellectual stimulation.

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ABSTRACT vi

1. THE PROBLEMATIC WOMAN IN COOPER'S SOCIETY 1

Social Roles of Men and Women 6 Feminine Sexuality . 11 Feminine Spirituality 22 Two New Feminisms 29

2. WOMEN IN COOPER'S PERSONAL LIFE 33

The Mother 34 The Wife 36 The Daughters 49

3. JUSTICE IS FEMININE, 1820-1824 73

The Complexity of Femininity 75 Women and the Discovery of the Self 86 Women and the Education of Men 100 Justice Thwarted 104

4. A DARK COMPLEXITY, 1825-1833 107

The Metaphors of Complexity 112 Characterization and the Tragedy of Rejection 136 Double Plotting and the Tragedy of Rejection 158

5. ADULTHOOD AND INITIATION IN THE PATHFINDER 171

The Separation 181 The Initiation Proper 189 The Return 200

6. JUDITH, DEERSLAYER, AND CHRISTIAN INITIATION 206

Christianity and a Hero's Denial of Complexity 211 Adulthood, Sin, and Repentance 228 The Problem of Justice 245 The Author and His Hero 254

iv V

TABLE OF CONTENTS—Continued

Page

7. AMBIGUITY DENIED: CONVENTIONAL WOMEN IN THE NOVELS OF THE 1830s AND 1840s 269

"The proper sphere of a woman": The Ideal of Decorum . . 272 "A total abnegation of self": The Ideal of Selflessness 285 "Her thoughts and prayers": The Ideal of Spirituality .297

8. AMBIGUITY CONDEMNED: WOMEN IN JACK TIER AND THE WAYS OF THE HOUR • 305

Jack Tier 306 The Ways of the Hour: The Ambiguity 314 The Ways of the Hour: The Condemnation 325

9. FROM ACHIEVEMENT TO INSANITY: THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE COOPER HEROINE 345

REFERENCES 358 ABSTRACT

"Women in the Works of James Fenimore Cooper" is a develop­

mental study arguing that changes in the treatment of women indicate

significant shifts in the author's concepts, especially those concerning

the nature of truth and the moral nature of the world. According to

Cooper, women are especially apt at testing these issues because they,

more so than men, embody a dualism that combines good and evil. In

stressing this feminine complexity, Cooper often articulated common

assumptions of his age, country, and class, assumptions explored in

chapter 1. He was also influenced by his mother and wife, who conformed

to most of the standards of the time, and by his four daughters, who

indirectly challenged many conventional attitudes, as chapter 2

demonstrates. The third chapter argues that in the early fiction of

1820 through 1824 women may establish a transcendent justice by

discovering how their own complexity echoes that of the world and by

educating men about true virtue. Chapter 4 discusses the increasing

pessimism about human nature that between 1825 and 1833 led Cooper to

expand his vocabulary of metaphors for dualism and, through ironic

characterizations and double plotting, to emphasize the tragedies resulting from rejections of the feminine.

In 1840 with The Pathfinder, the subject of chapter 5, Cooper returned to his early theme of a woman's discovery of her own nature

and described Mabel Dunham as undergoing a classic initiation into

vi vii adulthood even as Natty Bumppo destroys his hopes of happiness by remaining blind to her dual nature. In The Deerslayer (1841), analyzed in the sixth chapter, Natty fails the moral tests of his own initiation by refusing to accept Judith Hutter. This refusal is linked to his denying that her repentance can atone for her sin, a denial that the author, as an orthodox Christian, subconsciously defined as heretical even as he consciously tried to idealize his protagonist.

After 1841 Cooper attempted to abandon the complex femininity that in Judith had presented Deerslayer with spiritual problems he could not solve. As the seventh chapter indicates, he returned to the conventional definition of virtuous women as decorous, self-denying, and spiritual that he had used in the late 1830s, and in most of the fiction of the forties Cooper emphasized heroines who do not challenge or threaten men. Ultimately, however, this attempt to deny moral dualism proved troublesome. In two late works, discussed in chapter 8, the attempt failed. In Jack Tier (1846-48) the title character, a woman posing as a man, parodies both the ideal woman and Natty Bumppo, while in the final novel, The Ways of the Hour (1850), the main character,

Mary Monson, is presented paradoxically as both the pathetic victim of social corruption and as a dangerous feminist who threatens to destroy the foundations of civilization; unable to solve this contradiction in her characterization, Cooper concluded by defining her as insane.

The last chapter summarizes the development of Cooper's thought as he moved from a positive depiction of femininity in his early works through a sympathetic presentation of thwarted or rejected women to a viii sensitive evaluation of the heroines of The Pathfinder and The

Deerslayer and finally to a rejection of the dualism inherent in women and to a pessimistic assessment of the moral state of the world. CHAPTER 1

THE PROBLEMATIC WOMAN IN COOPER'S SOCIETY

Although James Femimore Cooper was early recognized as a major

American novelist, commentators have long slighted or misunderstood his woman characters and have thereby neglected the insights into the author's thought that they provide. In 1848, even before Cooper's death, James Russell Lowell typified a humorous one-sidedness in "A

Fable for Critics" when he said of Cooper that "the women he draws from one model don't vary,/All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie."1

William Dean Howells continued this type of distortion when he declared that "the heroines of Cooper did not exist even in the imagination of his readers; there were certain figures in his pages, always introduced as 'females,' and of such an extremely conventional and ladylike deport­ ment in all circumstances that you wished to kill them."2 Most critics since Howells's time have also tended to dismiss Cooper's women. Their defenders, such as Edgar Allan Poe, W. C. Brownell, and Lucy Lockwood

1Poems_III, Riverside Edition, Vol. IX of the Writings of James Russell Lowell (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896), 61.

2Heroines of Fiction (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1901), I, 111. 2

Hazard,3 have been relatively rare. This study is presented as a partial corrective in that it suggests that a study of the ways Cooper depicts women can lead to a new understanding of the development of his thought throughout his long and productive writing career.

To provide a framework that will indicate the extent to which

Cooper reflected the beliefs of his age, I begin by exploring assump­ tions about women generally held by middle-class Americans during the first half of the nineteenth century. The second chapter describes

Cooper's relationships with his mother, wife, and daughters, relation­ ships that had a strong, though indirect, influence on his writing.

The remaining chapters trace the development of the treatment of women in Cooper's novels. The third chapter discusses the early fiction of

1820 through 1824 in which woman characters reveal that Cooper saw females—both as a group and as individuals—as highly ambiguous but capable of learning from their own ambiguity to understand the frequently deceptive nature of reality so that they can both act for good by themselves and educate others. Between 1825 and 1833, in works that form the subject of the fourth chapter, Cooper's view of femininity increasingly emphasized the ambiguity of women and their frequent

3Poe, review of Wyandotte, Graham's Magazine, 24 (1843), 261-64; rpt. in Fenimore Cooper: The Critical Heritage, ed. George Dekker and John P. McWilliams (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 212; Brownell, American Prose Masters, ed. Howard Mumford Jomes ([1909]; rpt. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 30-35; Hazard, The Frontier in American Literature (1927; rpt. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1941), pp. 100-03. 3 victimization by men; in this period the inability of men to accept or defend women often results in tragedy and is not condoned by the author.

After 1833 Cooper did not produce another conventional novel until The Pathfinder in 1840. (In 1835 he published the allegorical satire The Monikxns and in 1838 the slightly fictionalized social cri­ tiques, Homeward Bound and Home As Found.) When he did return to the more usual types of fiction, he stressed the problems of the education of women and their proper relationship to others and produced The Path­ finder (1840) and The Peerslayer (1841), the subjects of the fifth and sixth chapters, respectively. Both these works are initiation novels in which the wilderness educates women about the complexities of adult life and reveals the inadequacies of Natty Bumppo. The female protag­ onists, Mabel Dunham and Judith Hutter, are largely responsible for the inadvertent revelation of these inadequacies because Natty cannot successfully cope with their confusing combination of carnality and spirituality.

At least partly in response to the fact that this dual aspect of femininity had undermined the heroic nature of his favorite character, Cooper revived the type of conventional, nonthreatening women that he had created in the mid-thirties and from 1842 through

1849, the period emphasized in the seventh chapter, attempted to idealize women who embody the virtues of decorum, self-denial, and spirituality. This idealization of the conventional was only partly successful. The eighth chapter demonstrates how Cooper's old concept 4 of women as ambiguous and potentially dangerous reasserted itself at the end of his life in vicious portrayals of deceptive women in Jack

Tier and The Ways of the Hour. The concluding chapter summarizes these developments in a brief survey of Cooper's career.

Although critics have frequently analyzed the importance of social problems in Cooper's works, there remains a general failure to recognize how central women are to his concept of society, since many commentators assume that the celibate Leatherstocking's rejection of marriage represents Cooper's last word on the subject. Although D. H.

Lawrence is correct in assuming that at one level Natty is Cooper's wish-fulfillment, it is also true, as Lawrence himself points out, that

Cooper's allegiance to society and the women essential to it is no less deep.1* Actually, all of Cooper's novels, including his stories of sea and wilderness adventure, are primarily concerned with the relationships of individuals to society as a whole and, hence, with relationships between men and women.

Throughout his career one of Cooper's major interests was the interaction of people in social groups. The problem for society, as

Cooper saw it, was to find a compromise between anarchic individualism and stifling conformity. In The American Democrat he succinctly describes the proper relationship of people to one another: "An entire and distinct individuality, in the social state, is neither possible nor

**Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923), pp. 68-70. 5

desirable. Our happiness is so connected with the social and family

ties as to prevent it; but, if it be possible to render ourselves miserable by aspiring to an independence that nature forbids, it is also possible to be made unhappy by a too obtrusive interference with our individuality.1,5 In other words, people cannot be happy (will, actually, be miserable) without ties to others, but no one should attempt to dictate how others shall live. No individual should attempt to force his personal beliefs on his neighbors, as do the newcomers to

Mark Woolston's island in The Crater and the Yankees in the Littlepage trilogy; neither should one attempt to live in isolation, as Natty

Bumppo does. Links to other people define human life and perpetuate the values that preserve civilization.

Despite the fact that women are essential to "the social and family ties" that Cooper deemed all-important, his appraisal of women has never been defined in any detail. To say that his attitude is patriarchal or Victorian is insufficient because these are catchall terms that imply a belief in the superiority of men over women.

Although superficially a "Victorian" attitude may seem simple enough, it is actually highly complex because it usually assumes that women may be spiritually divine but for all practical purposes incompetent or that they may be diabolically carnal and therefore competent but danger­ ous. The depth of the split between these two nineteenth-century visions of woman indicates that the period saw her very nature as dual

5Intro. H. L. Mencken (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), p. 175. 6 and highly ambiguous. This dualism and its consequent ambiguity were so important for Cooper that his writing career may be seen as a series of attempts to come to terms with the paradoxes of femininity.

Social Roles of Men and Women

The assumption of Cooper and his age that femininity is essen­ tially dual derives at least in part from the orthodox Christian belief in the fallen nature of the human race. All people are partly divine and partly corrupt, a confusing combination of good and evil, "that godlike-devil man," as Cooper said in Gleanings in Europe: Italy.6 But while most early nineteenth-century Americans agreed that all people embody both good and evil, they also assumed that the nature of males was very different from that of females. Before the 1860s began to produce new developments in anthropology and psychology, people believed, as Elizabeth Fee has demonstrated, that unchangeable differences in the natures of the sexes determined the social roles played by men and women. Cultural pressures supposedly had little or no effect on behav­ ior, since men and women were inherently different.7 Man was self- controlled, rational, intellectual, and active. Woman, in contrast, was undisciplined, emotional, intuitive, and passive. Such distinctions,

Barbara Welter believes, were accepted by most members of the white

6(Philadelphias Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1838), II, 99.

7"The Sexual Politics of Victorian Social Anthropology," in Clio's Consciousness Raised, ed. Mary S. Hartman and Lois Banner (New York: Harper & Row/Harper Torchbooks, 1974), p. 87. 7 middle class in nineteenth-century America, conservatives and radicals

alike; contrasts between males and females abound in the social analyses

of the period.8 From the 1843 volume of a Fourierist journal, The

Present, Welter reprints a chart pairing male characteristics with

corresponding female attributes,9 a chart that reveals much about the

assumptions of the time:

MALE FEMALE

man woman truth love knowledge wisdom ignorance folly history poetry labor amusement head heart law commandments action re-action thinking reflecting justice mercy mind soul intellect understanding talent genius

The traits here ascribed to woman sketch a personality type idealized by romanticism. First of all, woman is emotional: in her, soul is superior to mind, heart dominates head, love triumphs over truth, and mercy supplants justice. Woman is also intuitive rather than rational. She understands, that is, is capable of comprehension, but does not truly have an intellect; thus her lapses are due to folly

8"The Cult of True Womanhood: 1800-1860" and "Female Complaints: Medical Views of American Women," in Dimity Convictions (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 21-41, 57-59.

9"Anti-intellectualism and the American Woman: 1800-1860," in Dimity Convictions, p. 77. 8 rather than ignorance; she reflects instead of thinks, amuses herself rather than labors, and is drawn to the emotions of poetry instead of to the facts of history; most important, her innate wisdom supplies the place of acquired knowledge. These intuitive, emotional qualities are part of woman's general passivity. Whereas man acts, woman re-acts; instead of making laws she obeys commandments; even her superior abilities are the result of in-born genius rather than nurtured talent.

The distinction between self-controlled, rational, active males and emotional, intuitive, passive females was reinforced by sharp division of sex roles, which have been explored by Vern L. Bullough,

Page Smith, and G. J. Barker-Benfield, among others. Although western culture has defined only a few occupations and life styles as appro­ priate for women, the nineteenth century offered women even less scope than did previous periods. In predominantly agrarian societies a woman's work had been as essential as that of a man; a farm wife had responsibilities that contributed largely to the success or failure of her family. Off the farm also a woman in the early eighteenth-century could achieve some parity with men. With the trades dominated by small workshops of masters and their apprentices, a woman could become a master craftsman, particularly if she inherited her husband's business.

The industrial revolution, by tending to make single family farms and workshops unprofitable, helped to limit the types of meaningful occupa­ tions available to women. While men took over what skilled factory positions were available, women were forced into menial, inferior jobs.

Simultaneously in the eighteenth century occupations such as medicine 9 and pharmacy gradually shut out women, who had previously played important roles in them. This closure resulted from a growing profes­ sionalism that imposed educational standards women could not readily meet. At the same time, the growth of the middle class forced new, strict standards of propriety on women in that group, while rising incomes meant that in well-to-do families butlers ad bailiffs assumed the essential managerial tasks previously handled by wives. When leisure for women began to define middle-class status, women started to use their time to acquire the culture that busy husbands could no longer pursue.10

In the eighteenth century, according to Stow Person's analysis, high culture had been one of the concerns of powerful men also involved in politics and business. In America such a catholic interest in a broad range of activities did not long survive the Revolution, which destroyed the old aristocracy, thereby forcing the gradual separation of the cultural elite from a powerful, moneyed class. Cooper's lifetime saw the gentry class to which he belonged cut off from the sources of power. In response, it appointed itself defender of cultural values, values that among the rich and powerful were the province of women. In this manner the eighteenth-century gentry's broad, inclusive concerns

10Bullough, The Subordinate Sex (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1973), pp. 263-64, 277-78, 283-88, 310; Page Smith, Daughters of the Promised Land (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 54-76; Barker- Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-known Life (New York: Harper & Row/ Harper Colophon Books, 1977), pp. 19-22. 10

dwindled in the next century into an isolated elite's often peevish

defense of high culture.11

The result of these developments was that by the end of the

eighteenth century middle class white women in America, as well as in western Europe, found themselves performing social functions very different from those of their husbands. Men were supposed to take full responsibility for their families' financial security by working outside the home whereas women were supposed to be completely domestic, raising the children and creating a decorous, cultured tone that defined the family's social status.

In his own life Cooper combined aspects of both these male and female roles. He supported his family and made all the major decisions, but he did not work outside the home. His career as a writer kept him in closer contact with his family than did the business careers of most middle-class men. His eldest daughter, Susan Fenimore Cooper, described him as doing his writing at home, with his study door open because he always wanted to be in touch with his family.12 His rejection of business was not a purely personal decision. He opposed the business community on ideological grounds as well as personal ones, believing that landed proprietors were a stable, beneficial influence on society whereas businessmen merely encouraged selfish competition. In his

1xThe Decline of American Gentility (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 1-50, 84-88.

12"Passages from a Diary by James Fenimore Cooper," Putnam's Magazine, 1 (1868), 733, quoted by Rosaly Torna Kurth, "Susan Fenimore Cooper: A Study of Her Life and Works," Diss. Fordham University 1974, pp. 322-23. 11 career and his assumptions, then, Cooper aligned himself as much with the feminine world of culture and gentility as with the masculine one of authority and action.

Feminine Sexuality

One might expect that Cooper's devotion to values his culture defined as feminine would create in his attitude towards women a tension between loyalty and uneasiness. The problem of sex roles and cultural values were, however, only one factor in the ambiguous treatment of women in his novels. Another was the conflicting theories of the time about female sexuality. For most men in the first half of the nine­ teenth century, including Cooper, the crux of female nature was sexual­ ity. Though the contemporary discussions of woman that stress her emotional, intuitive, passive nature discreetly do not mention sex, various nineteenth century medical textbooks described in separate studies by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and G. J. Barker-Benfield make clear the assumption of the age that woman's nature differed from man's because of her lack of control over her reproductive system. In her inability to control menstruation and pregnancy she was the passive victim of her animal nature. In contrast to female passivity, the male sex drive was active; man was always the sexual aggressor. However, he, unlike woman, could control his sexual impulses through reason and discipline.13

In this definition of female nature as emotional, intuitive, passive,

13Smith-Rosenberg, "Puberty to Menopause: The Cycle of Femininity in Nineteenth-century America," in Clio's Consciousness Raised, p. 24; Barker-Benfield, pp. 52-57. 12

and dominated by sex, the most striking thing is woman's ambiguous,

divided quality: she is both pure angel and devilish temptress. On

the one hand, she is a sensitive, passive creature who can do no wrong.

On the other, her sexuality can, without warning, overpower her better

instincts and threaten man.

As the nineteenth century saw it, woman's animal nature was

strong enough to arouse any male, even if the woman did not intend to

attract him. This definition of females as passive permitted Timothy

Dwight, the Yale president who initiated the Calvinist evangelical

Second Great Awakening during Cooper's residency at Yale from 1803 to

1805,14 to express sympathy for seduced girls and prostitutes—the

victims of evil men—even as he insisted on their damnation.15 Cooper,

too, believed that female sexuality was a passive, not an active, force,

that women could arouse men and even be seduced themselves without

intending any such results. Cadwallader, the author's spokesman in

Notions of the Americans, explains to another man that "women are,

literally, our better halves. Their frailty is to be ascribed to the

seductions of man."16 The sexuality of the woman characters in Cooper's

14Stephen E. Berk, Calvinism versus Democracy: Timothy Dwight and the Origins of American Evangelical Orthodoxy (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1974), p. x; Kenneth Silverman, Timothy Dwight (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969), p. 15; James Franklin Beard, ed., The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), 5.

15Theology: Explained and Defended in a Series of Sermons, 9th ed. (New Haven: T. Dwight & Son, 1836), III, 412-14.

16Intro. Robert E. Spiller ([Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1828]; rpt. New York: Frederick Unger, 1963), I, 28. novels is also latent rather than active. In The Prairie the almost

infantile Inez de Certavallos unwittingly arouses the dangerous passions

of an Indian chief. In The Deerslayer the fallen Judith has lost her

virginity because of her love of flattery and fine clothes rather than

because of any sexual appetite of her own. She and Cooper's other

woman characters are not in control of their own sexuality.

The belief that women could not control their sexuality contri­

buted to the tremendous fear of sex characteristic of Cooper's attitude

and the attitude, Eva Figes believes, of most other people in the

nineteenth century,17 a fear arising in part from ignorance about

venereal disease and birth control. As Norman E. Hines explains,

condoms, the only effective protection against venereal disease, had

been available in brothels in Europe in the eighteenth century but did not come into widespread use until after the vulcanization of rubber

in 1844. Not until then did any practical artificial means of birth

control become generally available.18 Coitus interruptus was the most

common form of male contraception in the first half of the nineteenth

century,19 while women could douche or use a sponge dipped in chemicals.

But these methods were by no means foolproof, and douches and sponges

17Patriarchal Attitudes (London: Faber and Faber; New York: Stein and Day, 1970), p. 50.

18Medical History of Contraception (1936; rpt. New York: Schocken Books, 1970), pp. 190-201.

19Daniel Scott Smith, "Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America," in Clio's Consciousness Raised, p. 129. 14 frequently produced urinary infections that made intercourse painful.20

Andrew Sinclair has shown that even the inadequate rhythm method was unavailable, since, before the menstrual cycle came to be understood in

1849, women thought they were safe from pregnancy when actually they were most fertile.21

Another solution to the birth control problem was abstinence,- which had some appeal in an age placing high value on self-control.

Certain feminists went a step further and recommended celibacy, as

Margaret Fuller did in Woman in the Nineteenth Century in calling celibacy "the great fact of our time" and promoting it as the best means for a woman to discover her true self by becoming independent of men.22 But none of these techniques was practical for the majority of people, who nevertheless were ready for birth control, since for the middle class large families were no longer economic assets.

Only as birth control techniques were improved and information widely disseminated in the last decades of the century were women able to limit the number of children they would have. A study by Daniel

Scott Smith shows that in 1800 in America married white women surviving to menopause bore an average of 7.04 children, and in 1840 an average of 6.14. In 1880 the average had declined to 4.24 and in 1900 was down to 3.56. These figures show that the most dramatic drop in family size,

20Bullough, p. 326.

2 xThe Better Half (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 130-33.

22The Writings of Margaret Fuller, ed. Mason Wade (New York: Viking, 1941), 179, 178-80. more than twice that of the preceeding forty years, occurred between

1840 and 1880. Before about 1840 a woman could expect to spend the first fifteen to twenty years after marriage either pregnant or nursing2 3 and could be released from this regimen only by death or an early menopause, during and after which she was expected to abstain from intercourse.21* Cooper's own wife born him seven children in less than thirteen years.

With woman's seemingly unlimited ability to produce children proving to Cooper and other theorists of the first half of the nine­ teenth century that the sexuality of woman was uncontrollable, men emphasized quiescence and conformity as feminine virtues to help negate woman's sexual potency. Though no discipline could by itself control woman's sexuality, her passivity might render it harmless and assist her "higher nature" in fending off sexual advances outside marriage.

Even with her husband a woman was not supposed to enjoy sex or show that intercourse affected her, since to do so would be to capitulate to her animal nature. The age reinforced this denial of an active female sexuality by insisting that woman was more sensitive and spiritual than man, with a passivity that strengthened her superiority by disqualifying her for participation in the sullying conflicts of everyday life and necessitating her seclusion in the home. Her weakness

23pp. 122-23.

2Smith-Rosenberg, pp. 31-33. 16 was supposed to be her strongest claim on men, whose duty it was to

protect her, while she, in turn, provided him purifying contact with her high morality. Cooper explained that, "retired within the sacred

precincts of her own abode, she is preserved from the destroying taint

of excessive intercourse with the world" and can depend on "those distinctive features of her sex and character, which, by constantly appealing to the generosity of men by admitting her physical weakness, give strength and durability to her moral ascendancy."25

Such insistence on woman's high morality, Eva Figes believes, provided external support for the internalized taboos against sex that permitted an urbanized, capitalistic society to function. These taboos had replaced masculine physical force as the restraint on female sexuality and, with the shift to wide-scale capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, penetrated all levels of society.26 Vern

Bullough discusses how by the nineteenth century Americans had developed these taboos into rigid codes of social behavior, which dominated and helped to define middle-class life. Decorum and high morality became a badge of social status, helping the insecure American middle class assert its superiority to decadent European aristocracy with its freer sexuality.27 A somewhat parallel situation developed in American

25Notions, I, 105, 197; Barker-Benfield (pp. 8-13) discusses how this and similar contemporary statements reveal that men's feelings about women were deeply ambiguous.

26pp. 39-58.

27p. 278. literature, as Ann Douglas has shown. Finding themselves more and more

isolated from the sources of power in a rapidly industrializing society,

genteel women and Protestant ministers developed informal unions,

appropriating to themselves the guardianship of the high morality that

their society professed but increasingly failed to live by. The result was the deluge of sentimental and moralistic novels that make up the

bulk of pre-Civil War American fiction.28

An emphasis on marriage was one of the most obvious effects of

this demand for high morality. Of course western culture has long used

marriage as a major institution for enforcing feminine decorum, perhaps,

as Eva Figes believes, because a carefully controlled home gives the husband the assurance that his wife's children are also his, assurance he needs to properly bequeath his material possessions and even his social position, considerations that materialistic capitalism has brought to the fore.29 By condemning free sexuality with such rational­

izations, nineteenth-century repressive morality protected the status

quo by buttressing the home. Page Smith emphasizes a different aspect

of the problem. As he sees it, the stress on marriage and motherhood

typical of America before the Civil War was basically a device for

A A containing female sexuality and controlling the fear it produced.

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg agrees that propagation within marriage was

28The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).

29pp. 37-41, 66-91.

30p. 210. defined as the only legitimate purpose for sex in order to inhibit

socially disruptive unlimited sexual expression.31

Rigidly monogamous marriages robbed sexuality of much of its

potential for disruption, since women devoted to husbands would not

make themselves available to other men. Cooper's own explanation was

that "when an American girl marries, she no longer entertains the

desire to interest any but her husband. . . . One rarely sees married women foremost in the gay scenes."32 Many of the European traveler,

studied by Page Smith and also by G. J. Barker-Benfield commented upon

this domesticity of American wives, describing them as less free than

European married women. In contrast to matrons, however, unmarried

American girls were freer than their European counterparts, since they

had to have scope to choose husbands they could be happy with for the

rest of their lives.33 Cooper was a true American in arguing that to

insure happy marriages girls should be given great freedom in picking

husbands,3** although he permitted his own daughters hardly any freedom at all.

Cooper's stress on wedlock indicates that he would have agreed with the conservative position of his old college president,

31pp. 27, 31, 33.

32Notions, I, 193.

33Page Smith, pp. 88-93, 62-65, 82-86; Barker-Benfield, pp. 37-44i

3**Italy, II, 129. 19 Timothy Dwight, who, in the headings of one of his sermons, described

marriage as the source of "all the Natural Relations of mankind," "all the gentle, and useful, Natural Affections," "all Industry and Economy,"

"all Education to useful Knowledge, and to Civility and Sweetness of

Manners," "all Subordination, and Government; and, consequently, of all Order, Peace, and Safety, in the world," and even "all the Religion which exists in the world."35 Like conservatives, nineteenth-century liberals also emphasized that marriage was an essential control on the

bestiality of sex. Margaret Fuller felt that celibacy was the ideal solution to the problem of sex but admitted that it was not suitable for all people. When it was impractical, marriage provided the only effective curb on what would otherwise be a dangerously unbridled licentiousness. Males, she explained, were most prone to sexual excess, which must be controlled with a virtue that "involved, if not asceticism, that degree of power over the lower self which shall 'not exterminate the passions, but keep them chained at the feet of reason.' The passions, like fire, are a bad master; but confine them to the hearth and the altar, and they give life to the social economy and make each sacrifice meet for heaven."36

The earlier feminist Charles Brockden Brown had an equally low opinion of physical love, which he expressed through his persona, Mrs.

Carter: "I know that love, as it is commonly understood, is an empty

35III, passim 400-05.

36p. 201. 20 and capricious passion. It is a sensual attachment which, when unaccom­ panied with higher regards, is truly contemptible. To thwart it is often to destroy it, and sometimes, to qualify the victims of its delusions for Bedlam. In the majority of cases it is nothing but a miserable project of affectation."37 The sensuality of this shallow kind of love can easily become destructive and needs marriage to hold it in check. In fact, sensuality is so destructive that its mere existence necessitates marriage. Mrs. Carter wants to permit divorce and reform the laws governing wives, but she would never wish marriage abolished:

When I demand an equality of conditions among beings that equally partake of the same divine reason, would you rashly infer that I was an enemy to the institution of marriage itself? Where shall we look for human beings who surpass all others in depravity and wretchedness? Are they not to be found in the haunts of female licentiousness. If their vice admits of a darker hue, it would receive it from the circumstances of their being dissolute by theory; of their modelling voluptuous­ ness into a speculative system. Yet this is the charge you would make upon me. You would brand me as an enemy to marriage, ... in the sense of that detestable philosophy which scoffs at the matrimonial institution itself, which denies all its pretensions to sanctity, which consigns us to the guidance of a sensual impulse, and treats as phantastic or chimerical, the sacred charities of husband, son, and brother.38

As a husband, son, or brother, a man could rationally control his sexuality by reminding himself of his responsibilities to his female

37Alcuin: A Dialogue, ed. Lee R. Edwards (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1971), pp. 82-83.

38p. 70. 21

relatives. Only if he lacked a firm definition of his relationships to

women was his self-control in danger of succumbing to the temptations

of declasse women in brothels, those "haunts of female licentiousness."

That the roles of husband, son, and brother should define the

essential relationships between men and women indicates the important

function that families performed in nineteenth-century society. Cooper

and others of his time and country saw them as the beleagured but

essential defense of civilization. Studies by William R. Taylor and

Christopher Lasch, Stow Persons, and Daniel Scott Smith have discussed

the position of the family in nineteenth-century America. They show

that by 1800 families in the United States were usually nuclear,

composed only of parents and children, the form best adapted to American social mobility. Extended families had begun to disappear in the eighteenth century, even before the shift from agriculture to indus­

trialization and urbanization, which greatly accelerated the change.

By its very nature an isolated, vulnerable relationship, the nuclear family had been made all the more insular and insecure by the declining importance of social institutions supporting its authority. The

American Revolution destroyed a British-style class structure and political organizations, and the new nation discarded old standards to emphasize equality over freedom. The frontier encouraged social mobility, as did the expansion of commerce, both of which contributed to weakening religion. Because of their disturbed political history,

Americans, more than Europeans, came to venerate the family as society's main hope for stability, as well as a haven from the increasing stresses 22 of the commercial, urban world. In the midst of social upheaval, the frail nuclear family became the most visible force for social continu- . ity. The tenuous internalized restraints on sexuality, on which society depended, meant that the family had to assume additional burdens of social control with the decline in authority of institutions such as class and church. The emphasis that Americans put on the family arose most basically from a fear that few other social controls remained.39

Feminine Spirituality

The moral standards supporting the family and the paradoxical definition of female nature as both spiritual and animal were reinforced by Christianity, especially by the Prostestant denominations to which Cooper and most of the American middle class were deeply committed. Nineteenth-century Protestantism emphasized the inferiority of woman to man and to that end stressed the teachings of the apostle

Paul, as Cooper did when he insisted on the inferiority of wife to husband.40 At the same time, however, Protestantism claimed for woman a role superior to the typical male role of material provider, the role of guiding husband and children to virtue by the example of superior female morality. Cooper's daughter Susan Fenimore Cooper relied on this paradoxical Christian concept of women in her 1870 anti-feminist

39Taylor and Lasch, "Two 'Kindred Spirits': Sorority and Family in New England, 1839-1846," New England Quarterly, 36 (1963), 35; Persons, pp. 4-6, 74-79; Daniel Scott Smith, pp. 132-33.

**"American Democrat, p. 81. 23 article "Female Suffrage: A Letter to the Christian Women of America."

Part I of this article insists that woman should not challenge the status quo because she is inferior to man, as is proven by her physical weakness, her mental dependency, and Christianity, which "confirms the subordinate position of women, by allotting to man the headship in plain language and by positive precept. ... it also enjoins the sub­ mission of the wife to the husband, and allots a subrdinate position to the whole sex while here on earth."1'1

Although in Part I Susan stresses the inferiority of woman, in Part II, published a month later, she analyzes the current position of women and discusses how the supposed defects of her position actually qualify woman to pursue her own high purpose, which she defines in capital letters: "THAT WORK IS TO PROMOTE BY ALL WORTHY

MEANS THE MORAL CIVILIZATION OF THE COUNTRY.""2 Women, according to

Susan Fenimore Cooper, can best promote morality by accepting their present position, since it not only teaches them Christian humility and self-sacrifice but also insulates them from the cares of the world and gives them time for religion, time men lack. She speaks directly to women:

In no other mode can you so well forward the great work of Christian civilization as by devoting yourselves to the daily personal practice, and to the social cultivation, by example and influence, of these plain moral duties.

^Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 41 (1870), 439, 438-39.

"p. 598. 24

Your present domestic position is especially favorable to this task. You have more time for thought on these subjects; you have more frequent opportunities for influence over the young nearest to you; you have more leisure for prayer, for invoking a blessing on your efforts, however humble they may be. . . . And where there is life, there we have hope of growth, of higher development. To cherish that growth, to further that higher development by all gracious and loving and generous influences, is a work for which women are especially adapted. They work from within outwardly. Men work chiefly by mental and physical pressure from without. Men work by external authority; women work by influences. Men seek to control the head. Women always aim at touching the heart. And we have the highest of all authority [the New Testament] for believing that this last is the most efficient mode of working.4 3

According to Susan, then, woman's very inferiority to man produces a moral superiority, a paradox that has its theological basis in the doctrine of the Fortunate Fall: Though Eve brought sin into the world,

Mary bore a Son to redeem the human race. As Margaret Fuller put it,

"the sliding and backsliding men of the world, no less than the mystics, declare that as through Woman Man was lost, so through Woman must Man be redeemed . . . Susan Fenimore Cooper never provided a theolog­ ical context for her argument, but the source of her antithetical images of women is the paradoxical Christian concept of female nature.

While Woman was capable of redeeming Man, Man was himself responsible for Woman's salvation, according to Protestantism, whose stress on the value of the individual strongly influenced the

"p. 600.

^p. 203. The wording is "if they [Israel] made Eve listen to the serpent, [they] gave Mary to the Holy Spirit" in "The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women.," The Dial, 4 (1843), 18 (rpt. New York: Russell ft Russell, 1961). 25

relationship between fathers and daughters in the United States, as

Page Smith has argued. Whereas often in Europe mothers and governesses

raised girls who saw their fathers infrequently, in American fathers

and daughters tended to be very close, at least partly because the dominant religion made the father a spiritual guide responsible for the well-being of all members of his family.45 While most Protestants stressed that the Bible defined woman as inferior to man, they insisted that she was inferior only on earth, not in heaven. Even on earth, as has been pointed out, she might be morally superior to man if she accepted her subordinate position and the intuitions of the highest part of her nature.

In addition to the ambiguous definition of woman as both higher and lower than man, the stress on the value of the female soul in

Protestantism created other uncertainties for Christian fathers wishing to lead their daughters to salvation. On the one hand, this aim could supposedly be achieved by teaching girls to accept conventional roles in which their passivity would necessitate a seclusion from the world that would permit their innate spirituality to develop. On the other hand, Protestantism also emphasized the need for education to counter the evil tendencies of fallen human nature. Even women were expected to benefit from instruction that would aid them in actively resisting temptation. In this manner Protestantism implied that woman was a rational, active creature like man while overtly claiming that her

passive, emotional, intuitive nature was the opposite of his.

"pp. 33-36. 26

The majority of Americans attempted to resolve this dilemma by

insisting that their daughters receive thorough religious instruction

and at the same time govern their behavior according to the rigid

demands of conventional propriety. However, the increasing stress on

the nuclear family and the idealization of the intimacy of husband and

wife provided the middle class in the United States with the impetus

for giving daughters instruction in more than religion. Education was

especially important in a socially mobile country where parents

expected their children to achieve the same if not higher social

standing than themselves, a point emphasized by Stow Persons.46 And it

was not enough for the middle class to educate its sons well. Since

the division of sex roles gave women more responsibility than men in

the raising of young children, mothers had to be sufficiently well

educated to begin their children's schooling.

Women were also expected to be well enough informed to be the

intellectual equals of their husbands. As Cooper put it in The

Chainbearer, "The wife of an educated man should be an educated woman;

one fit to be his associate, qualified to mingle her tastes with his

own, to exchange ideas, and otherwise to be his compansion, in an

intellectual sense."47 In a similar vein, typical advice books for

teenaged girls who had completed their formal schooling encouraged their readers to continue their educations through lectures or the study

"p. 23.

'•'Mohawk Edition (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, [1896]), p. 196. of foreign languages and history and enjoined them to show their

fathers, brothers, and suitors that they were good listeners who

enjoyed hearing about the concerns of men.1*8 Both Cooper and the

advice books attempt to undercut the potential impact of women's

education by insisting that its purpose is only to enable women to

understand the world and to make them agreeable to others. A marriage

of intellectual companionship was not supposed to destroy masculine

authority because the wife's main duty to her husband was still sub­

missively to support him and to enlighten him spiritually; her

education would merely permit her to give him intellectual stimulation

as well as love and religious guidance. But whatever the original

intention of educating women, it began their gradual emancipation from

conventional roles.

In addition to emphasizing the education of women, thereby increasing their stature within the family, Protestantism also provided women with expanding roles in the community. Gradually they came to affect the functions and even the theology of most denominations, changes discussed by Barbara Welter. In the first half of the century women took over almost all volunteer church work and became influential enough that various sects quietly dropped certain doctrines especially

't8Eliza Ware Rotch Farrar, The Young Lady's Friend (Boston: American Stationers' Company, 1836; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1974), pp. 4-7, 208-09, 317-18, 417-29, 431-32; Mrs. L. G. Abell, Woman in Her Various Relations, Containing Practical Rules for American Females (New York: W. Holdredge, 1851), pp. 37-38, 118, 198. 28

repugnant to them, such as that of the damnation of unbaptized infants.

More important were the changing concepts of the qualities necessary

for salvation. In contrast to eighteenth-century Christianity, which

emphasized guilt and repentance, the nineteenth century came to stress

the need for virtues usually associated with women. The emphasis

shifted from a masterful, judgmental, vengeful God to Christ, the friend

of all, whose divine characteristics were overwhelmingly feminine; they

included humility, meekness, love, innocence, suffering, submission,

and passive acceptance of the will of God, the same virtues that the

time demanded of its women. Since woman could not escape many of her

problems, such as childbirth or loss of financial security, she, like

Christ, was seen as a natural victim who had to be submissive and

accepting. Romanticism and theories about her passive, intuitive nature further insisted on her Christ-like qualities of innocence and love.k9

In general, the overt insistence of the age was on woman's

purity. While Christianity held that all people shared the dualism of

"that godlike-devil man," for Cooper and most of his contemporaries male frailty was more acceptable than female weakness, because of man's

"sullying" contact with the world and woman's "purifying" seclusion.

In accepting masculine corruption, Cooper looked to female purity for compensation and was appalled to discover it mingled with evil. Because

**9"The Feminization of American Religion: 1800-1860," in Dimity Convictions, pp. 83-102; Page Smith, pp. 177-79. 29

the high standards of his time did not reflect the reality of woman's nature, woman always presented the novelist with the threat that reality

might not live up to appearance, the same threat that he encountered at

a masked ball in Italy where he greatly admired a beautiful young girl,

only to discover she was a disguised boy.50 Although woman might appear more pure than man, underneath both were the same ambiguous mixture of good and evil.

Two New Feminisms

Femininity in general was inherently threatening to Cooper because of the discrepancy between woman's spirituality and her latent carnality. This generalized threat was particularized for him in the

1840s, as social changes began radically to alter the position of women. While American society continued to stress the family, women gained power within their own homes. Despite the persistent masculine assumption that the pater familias had complete authority, in actual practice most patriarchs were too busy earning livings to concern them­ selves with their families' day-to-day affairs or with refinement and culture, concerns that passed into the hands of wives and daughters.

These women made their homes havens for men from the stresses of the outside world by imbruing domesticity with their values, insisting on friendly, decorous, pious behavior. In fact, so strong did the power of ordinary women within their own homes become that Daniel Scott Smith

50Italy, II, 161-62. 30 has termed it "domestic feminism," a feminism of ordinary women that paralleled the militant feminism of a-minority of upperclass women.51

The power of American women within the domestic setting was in such contrast to the situation in Europe that even as early as 1828

Cooper had his European narrator comment on its negative aspects in

Notions of the Americans: "Your Englishman, and his cis-atlantic kinsman, are the only real slaves in their own households. Most other husbands consider matrimony, more or less, a convenience; but these downright moralists talk of its obligations and duties . . . ." But in return for the assumption of these "obligations and duties" the ordinary middleclass male gained his own personal Utopia. Belying the tone of the first quotation, Notions of the Americans also presents a positive view of the home where "the husband can retire from his own sordid struggles with the world to seek consolation and correction from one who is placed beyond their influence."52 Cooper's personal dependency on his wife and daughters indicates that he regarded the home as this type of haven from strife.

While domestic feminism did not pose a threat to Cooper, other, more public, more militant feminism did. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century a radical minority had always insisted on new definitions of woman's nature and her position in society. In the

1830s Utopian movements and transcendentalism began to stress the equal

51pp. 119-34.

52II, 55; I, 105-06;' see also Barker-Benfield (pp. 35-36, 45-50) on the home as a spiritual haven from the workaday world. 31 value of men and women and to disseminate the earlier radicalism discussed by Sidney Ditzion,53 radicalism expressed in works such as

Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), William

Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), and Charles

Brockden Brown's Alq.uin (1798). Before the first version of Margaret

Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) appeared in the Dial of

July 1843 as "The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus /Women.," two abolitionists had already published feminist works in the United

States: Lydia Maria Child's History of the Condition of Women in

Various Ages and Nations came out in 1835 with Sarah M. Grimke's Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman following in 1838.

In the 1830s also America began to be influenced by birth control advocates, responding to Malthus's predictions of the disastrous effects of overpopulation. In 1830 Robert Dale Owen's

Moral Physiology, advocating coitus interruptus, was published. It was followed two years later by Dr. Charles Knowlton's Fruits of

Philosophy, which provided Americans with their first fairly comprehen­ sive discussion of birth control techniques. Both books found a wide audience and went through several editions. Up to ten thousand copies of Knowlton were printed between 1832 and 1839. 5**

5 3Marriage, Morals and Sex in America (New York: Bookman Associates, 1953), pp. 69-158.

5lfHines, pp. 224-31. 32

One effect of these developments was to make ordinary American women less satisfied than previously with their lot, so much so that in the 1830s and '40s they first began to be described as "restless."55

Twice in 1848 Cooper's home state saw more specific developments. One was of course the Seneca Falls Convention, which began the formal organization of the women's rights movement in this country. More important for the novelist was the Married Women's Property Act. Though this bill supported the aristocracy by giving wealthy brides control of their marriage portions, it had radical overtones, since it made married women legally independent of their husbands in many, though not all, respects.56

Then in 1850, the year that Cooper's reactionary The Ways of the

Hour was published, The Scarlet Letter, with its powerfully complex heroine, appeared. Cooper, in abandoning his old concepts of the positive potential of feminine dualism and in attempting to insist that women remain subservient to men, no longer represented the convictions of society in general. In their attitudes towards women, even people who were not feminists were passing him by. While American writers would continue to depict women as dual creatures, they would seldom again go to the lengths that Cooper had in exploring the ambiguity of the forces of femininity.

55Taylor and Lasch, p. 24.

56Sinclair, pp. 87-88. CHAPTER 2

WOMEN IN COOPER'S PERSONAL LIFE

Whereas Cooper's father had been both an entrepreneur and a gentleman, such unity was no longer possible for the son, who saw business as a threat to gentility. The decline of Cooper's career and the isolation that resulted from his defense of gentry values against the power of the parvenus illustrate both the depth of his commitment to culture and the extent to which the mid-nineteenth century no longer considered it the proper concern of a "real man." Towards the end of his life Cooper found his strength and assertiveness devoted mainly to causes that his culture defined as the proper spheres of ministers and women. At the same time, however, Cooper maintained the traditionally masculine roles of family head and provider.

This dual commitment to both masculine and feminine aspects of life had its earliest roots in his deep love for both his parents, who, like most men and women in the late eighteenth century, adhered to the widely different roles assigned the two sexes. His father, William

Cooper, was a land developer who in 1785 and 1786 had purchased a large tract in central New York and founded a successful settlement, the frontier village of Cooperstown, where the family moved in 1790 when

James was thirteen months old. Little definite information is available on young Cooper's relationship with his father, though the boy seems to have got into his share of scrapes. At age thirteen he was sent to

Yale, which expelled him two and a half years later after a somewhat

stormy college career culminated in a prank involving gunpowder and a

door. Then when James was barely seventeen his father placed him as a

common seaman with the merchantman Stirling, on which he voyaged to

London and Spain. In 1808 at age eighteen he enlisted as a midshipman

in the navy and was stationed at New York City and Oswego.1 However

normal this adolescence may have been, Stephen Railton sees in it the

first signs of what he regards as a deep conflict in Cooper's feelings

about his father. According to Railton, this conflict was to affect

the rest of the novelist's life, driving him sometimes to rebellion

and sometimes to the defense of William's ideals.2

The Mother

Important as Cooper's psychological struggles with his father

may have been, his mother, as Railton points out, also strongly

influenced him by providing an alternative to the repressive masculinity

1James Franklin Beard, ed., The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), 3-6. Most subsequent references to this work will be parenthetical in the text by volume and page number. When the information comes from Beard, not Cooper, these numbers will be preceeded by his name, when necessary for clarity. Unless otherwise identified, material in square brackets and pointed brackets (i.e. < >) is Beard's and indicates, respectively, insertions due to a defective manuscript or to unintentional omissions and restorations of material canceled by Cooper. See I, xliii.

2Fenimore Cooper: A Study of His Life and Imagination (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978). 35 of William.3 Unlike her husband, Elizabeth Fenimore Cooper was not imbued with the pioneering spirit and hoped to leave the frontier and settle in James's birthplace, Burlington, New Jersey, where the family had bought a house for their permanent residence. Instead she lived out her life in Cooperstown (IV, 498; Beard, I, 3-4). In the words of

James Franklin Beard, Elizabeth

was a patrician who detested the frontier. With her books, her music, her flowers, and her hospitality to all respectable company, she insisted on the primacy of civilized values. Yet the younger sons, especially James, early developed deep psychic attachments to the lake, the forests (rapidly disappearing before the ax), and the picturesque characters and employments indigenous to a pioneering community. (I, 4)

These "psychic attachments," strong as they were, did not supplant

Cooper's deep devotion to his mother and to the civilized life she represented. By becoming an author, he in fact committed himself to the world of culture that his contemporaries associated more with women than with men and that he himself must have linked to his

"patrician" mother.

James also showed his devotion to his mother in a more concrete way than that of the choice of a career when he adopted her family name. Elizabeth early offered any one of her five sons her share of family land in New Jersey if he would change his surname from "Cooper" to "Fenimore." James did not act on this proposal during his father's lifetime, since William opposed the name change, and did nothing until after his mother's death in 1819, since he was involved in legal affairs

3pp. 57-58, 62, 64. that would have been greatly complicated by a name change (III, 56).

But in 1826, finally freed of legal entanglements, he petitioned the state legislature for permission to change his surname to "Fenimore

Cooper." The government responded by permitting him to adopt "Fenimore" as a middle name, which he did, although he used it as if it were part of his surname. (The oldest son, Richard, also adopted the name

"Fenimore" and bequeathed it to his descendants.) Earlier James had taken other steps to perpetuate his mother's memory, naming his first child "Elizabeth" and his first son "Fenimore"; these children died in infancy. After 1826 James used "Fenimore" as the middle name of both his only surviving son, Paul, and his oldest surviving daughter,

Susan (V, 196, 200-02; Beard, I, 23, 132). (Previously the girl had been called "Susan Augusta," after her mother.**) In this manner the surname of Cooper's mother became so firmly established in the family that it is still used at present; three of the great-grandchildren of the novelist, for example, are Paul Fenimore Cooper Dr. Henry S.

Fenimore Cooper, and Lin Fenimore Cooper (Beard, I, vii).

The Wife

Neither with his mother nor later with his wife and daughters was Cooper generally aware of any deep psychological conflict. Stephen

Railton goes so far as to assert that he simply took them and other

4Henry Walcott Boynton, James Fenimore Cooper (New York: The Century Co., 1931), pp. 142-43. women for granted.5 It would be far closer to the truth to say that

Cooper wished he could take women for granted even as he discovered

that this was impossible. His wife did fulfill his wish; his daughters,

as the last section of the chapter will explain, threatened it,

although he was usually able to defuse this threat. The older Cooper

grew, however, the more disturbed he became about femininity and what

it represented, as his treatment of women in the novels reveals.

At the time of his marriage Cooper had not yet faced such

problems. In his youth he did not question that family life would

bring happiness. He proposed fairly young, as soon as he could afford

to, becoming engaged less than five months after the death of his

father made him financially independent (I, 16; Beard, I, 16-17, n. 2).

At age twenty-one he married eighteen-year-old Susan Augusta DeLancey, whose family was socially more prominent than the Coopers but poorer, since as Tories they had lost much of their wealth during the

Revolution (Beard, I, 18-19, n. 2). A brief courtship had begun shortly after the two met in the spring of 1810. Before spring was over, on the eighteenth of May, Cooper wrote to his family announcing his desire to marry, which he and Susan did on January 1, 1811 (I,

17-18; Beard, I, 6, 23). Beard describes Susan as not "being remarkably beautiful or talented" but "petite, intelligent, and charming" (I, 6).

In downplaying her beauty and talent and stressing her slightness and charm, this description reinforces the impression Susan's letters and

5p. 52. those of her husband give of her as a self-effacing, loving woman, who,

despite her intelligence, conformed to the stereotyped femininity of

the period by being loving, intuitive, and passive. Cooper himself

called her "retiring by nature" (II, 104).

Although she seldom asserted herself in opposition to her

husband, Susan Augusta Cooper was at least as intelligent as James and

at the beginning of his writing career interested in actively assisting

him. She spurred his first writing attempts,6 analyzed Precaution, and

later predicted a brilliant, success for The Spy, which it achieved (I,

43, 44). She helped Cooper correct and proofread the first volume of

The Spy, but a high-handed publisher refused to accept her authority

and printed the book without corrections (I, 53-56). After this

unfortunate experience, she refused to take the responsibility of

proofreading the second volume of the novel by herself (I, 61) and, for

the most part, ceased to assist her husband.

The significant thing about her brief period of important aid

is that it indicates that Cooper treated his wife as his intellectual

equal and encouraged her to undertake the challenging and responsible

tasks of criticizing his work and correcting his proofs. He defended

her changes to the publisher, saying "by no means suffer a sheet to be

put to press without the revision of Mrs. Cooper—or myself—she knows

my style and expression and can correct my errors with safety" (I, 55)

6Susan Fenimore Cooper, "Small Family Memories," in Correspon­ dence of James Fenimore-Cooper, ed. James Fenimore Cooper (grandson) (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1922), I, 38-39. 39

and "I will not on any consideration consent to its being publish'd

without her or my revision" (I, 57). When the publisher failed to make

corrections, Cooper complained that "I cannot trust you with Mrs.

Cooper—as she has not authority enough I find" (I, 57). The problem

was not that Cooper mistrusted his wife but that the publisher ignored

her, failing to believe that a woman could be held wholly responsible

for her husband's work.

Susan could not accept this rebuff. Relinquishing what

authority she did have, she ceased proofreading and fell back on the

domestic employments the age deemed suitable for a woman. In later

life she helped her husband a few times but never again undertook the

kind of responsibility she had had for The Spy. She took dictation

of some of The Last of the Mohicans,7 and in 1831, immediately follow­

ing the death of Cooper's copyist, his twenty-two-year-old nephew

William Cooper (II, 144-45, 152), she helped young Susan copy The

Bravo (II, 159). By now this oldest daughter was taking an active

interest in Cooper's writing, an interest the mother encouraged by

permitting the eighteen-year-old to become his secretary. Then the wife

completely relinquished her active assistance and reverted to the passive acts of listening to her husband read from his manuscripts8 and giving him encouragement. In return, Cooper used her as at least a partial

model for the retiring heroines of two of his late books, Mercedes in

7Susan Fenimore Cooper, ed., Pages and Pictures (New York: W. A. Townsend, 1861), pp. 128-29.

8Susan Fenimore Cooper, "Memories," I, 43. 40

Mercedes of Castile and Lucy Hardinge in Afloat and Ashore (IV, 191,

471).

Susan's retiring disposition and dedication to husband and

children cast her in a passive, domestic role that both she and her

husband admired. Even in Europe, where the family moved in 1826,

Susan retained her devotion to domesticity. She was not very active socially, unlike her husband, but she did not become a recluse;

Cooper's letters frequently describe visits she made or received (I,

158-59, 164, 169, 186-87, 188, 206, 353-54; II, 29, 72, 105; Beard, I,

346). During this time both she and James also deliberately determined to remain Americans and maintained high standards of morality. Since at home they had been devout Episcopalians, in Paris they attended an

Anglican church and had their oldest two daughters confirmed there.9

The family always kept the Sabbath strictly, refusing all Sunday invita­ tions. (Much later in Cooperstown they never played chess on Sundays.10)

In Paris when either husband or wife found relaxed European morals in conflict with their own strict sense of propriety, neither acquiesced.

For example, James described rebuking a group of society women who shocked him by admiring a play in which a girl falls in love with a young man she believes to be her brother,11 while in letters to her

9Rosaly Torna Kurth, "Susan Fenimore Cooper: A Study of Her Life and Works," Diss. Fordham University 1974, p. 33; Susan Fenimore Cooper, "Memories," I, 67; Letters and Journals, II, 105.

10Correspondence, I, 122-23; Letters and Journals, V, passim 252-350.

11Gleanings in Europe, Volume One: France, ed. Robert E. Spiller (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1928; rpt. New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1970), pp. 252-54. 41 sisters Susan condemned European mores and aristocrats who were not fit to be received in decent society.12

Still, neither of them was a prude. They did not conform to simplistic stereotypes that depict the nineteenth-century American middle class as being narrow and rigid. To the end of his life Cooper firmly defended candor against false gentility, especially the type of squeamishness that wished to change the name "Hell-Gate" to "Hurl-

Gate."13 As an old man, he tolerantly recommended that young Sarah

Heyward Cruger might be amused by Chinese novels, literary curiosities that inevitably involved polygamy (VI, 98). Earlier, during his stay in Europe, he had commissioned Horatio Greenough to sculpt the

"Chanting Cherubs" from a detail of a Raphael painting (I, 369-70).

Although in the United States Lydia Maria Child, among others, condemned the undraped figures as indelicate,Cooper never wavered in his admiration of the work. Susan, too, appreciated European art and culture and eagerly embraced the study of languages. She quickly became more proficient than her husband in French, Italian, and German

(II, 18) and on at least one occasion used her superior German to extricate the family from difficulty.15 In addition to her skill at

12Correspondence, I, 111, 123.

13Susan Fenimore Cooper, Pages, p. 353.

^History of the Condition of Women (1835), quoted in Eric John Dingwall, The American Woman; An Historical Study (New York: Rinehard & Co., 1957), p. 82.

15Correspondence, I, 194. 42 languages, she possessed all the social graces. An 1826 invitation to the family from the Princess Galitzin translates in part, "Mrs. Cooper may dance a little to the harpsichord; they tell me she is fond of dancing—but this is not a ball."16

Just as Susan shrank from conforming to European mores, so did she avoid the deep involvement in French and Italian social life that would have been made possible by her proficiency in languages and the freedom Europeans accorded married women. Too often European standards conflicted with her strict sense of propriety. While her husband firmly adhered to the liberal causes supported by his friend Lafayette, Susan abhorred a special friend of the old man, the Scottish reformer Frances

Wright, who had visited the United States several times, established an unsuccessful farm run by freed slaves, and been involved with Robert

Owen in the founding in 1826 of New Harmony, a communist community in

Indiana.17 Lafayette was so taken with Frances that he wished to adopt her as his step-daughter,18 in contrast to Susan, who said that her face

"looks now like that of an old Bottle bruiser—and I do not know which is the most disgusting, her Appearance or her Doctrines" (Beard, II, 4).

Cooper himself ridiculed Wright's extravagant praise of America

(I, 243; 247-48, n. 6) but did not condemn her as his wife did. In an

16 Correspondence, 1, 110.

17R[ichard] G[arnett], "Darusmont, Frances," DNB (1888); Sidney Ditzion, Marriage, Morals and Sex in America (New York: Bookman Associates, 1953), pp. 85-94.

18Ditzion, pp. 85-86. 43

1831 letter he described seeing her at one of Lafayette's receptions:

She looked haggard and much changed for the worse, I thought, but I never knew her personally. She excited much attention on account of her appearance, and the women avoided her. I should have spoken to her, had I known her previously, but I did not like to seek an introduction, under the circumstances, as it would have been disrespectful to Mrs. Cooper, who was present. (II, 72)

This description shows that Cooper was intrigued by this exceptional woman but was restrained from pursuing his interest by conventional notions of the deference he owed his wife. In this instance he accepted her values, though in doing so he denied himself a chance to meet one of the most radical reformers of the time.

Cooper apparently felt some resentment at this situation, resentment that he transferred from his wife to Frances Wright. Imme­ diately following the sentence quoted above about his fear of being disrespectful to Susan, he wrote, "I do not think she [Wright] repeated her visit, though I doubt not Lafayette sees her in private. It is my private opinion that the old man has been a good deal hunted this winter by sundry elderly ladies, who would fain attach the shreds of their charms to his great name, but his tastes are as juvenile as at twenty" (II, 72; bracketed material added). This statement implies that

Wright was one of these elderly fortune hunters. Actually she was only thirty-six and uninterested in marriage. The similarity of her liberal interests to Lafayette's apparently provided the only basis for the intimacy of the two. 44

The kind of woman Susan most admired was not active in reform or

prominent in society but fulfilled the American ideal of domestic

service. After meeting the daughter of Madame de Stael in Paris, Susan

concluded that her intelligence and looks were inferior to her mother's

but that the daughter was fundamentally superior, since "she has however,

what is worth more than either of them, the character, of being an

affectionate Wife, and a correct and delicate Woman."19 Susan and her

husband both prized correctness and delicacy over gentility, since good

manners might easily mask poor morals, a theme prominent in Cooper's

novels.

For both the important thing was to remain true to one's highest

principles, which they managed to do without being rejected by French

society. In 1831 Cooper wrote from Paris to his old friend Mrs. Peter

Augustus Jay:

I will take upon myself to say no American woman was ever more respected than Mrs. Cooper, by those who know her here and yet in no instance has she ever lost sight of [a] single opinion either in religion or institutions which are thought distinctive and important with us. . . .In short in every case, she has conducted [herself] first as a woman of high principle and innate delicacy, and next as a lady. She has never believe[d?] that either can lay aside her character, because she happens to be beyond the influence of her immediate circle at home. The consequence is that she is respected, and her eye can do more towards putting up or pulling down the pretensions of certain desperate dames, that flutter in a sort of society in Paris, than all their inventions can do in return. (II, 105)

Here Cooper idealizes Susan as the perfect American wife to whom high principles and delicacy are more important than gentility.

19Correspondence, I, 127. 45

This hierarchy of values exemplifies the rejection by Cooper and the rest of the American middle class of European aristocracy and shows

Cooper's adherence to the American definition of the married woman as rigidly circumscribed by conventional notions of propriety. Cooper constantly stressed one advantage of such conformity in his novels: rectitude is the outward sign of the moral superiority of woman and gives her the power to rebuke and guide. Just as he placed his wife above the social butterflies of Paris, so he placed many of his heroines in the roles of mentor or spiritual guide.

Susan's passivity and devotion to her husband and children made her homesick for American customs and friends, unlike her husband, who was more deeply involved than she in French society and politics. Then too, she was lonely for the company of her sisters, whereas Cooper had few members of his immediate family back in the United States. (He had been the twelfth of thirteen children, but of his six brothers and sisters who survived to maturity only one, Anne Cooper Pomeroy, was still alive by 1820; she outlived the novelist [Beard, I, 7, n. 3; 8, n.; 11, n.; 27, n. 2; 152, n.; III, 166, first n. 2].) In letters to her family Susan Augusta speaks frequently of American ways and antici­ pates living again in her own country where she would be close to her relatives.20 In 1831 to help ease her loneliness as well as to provide himself with a copyist, Cooper offered her sister Caroline a job as his secretary and proposed that she and another sister, Martha DeLancey,

20Correspondence, I, 111, 123, 163-64, 301. 46 join them in Paris. For reasons that are unclear, both offers were declined (II, 159-61).

After the return to the United States, when in the late 1830s

Cooper thought of moving back to Europe, his wife's love for her sisters and her predilection for her own country caused the one serious failure of agreement in this long marriage. Her reluctance to leave America, more than the large debt he had incurred in renovating Otsego Hall, always deterred Cooper from returning to Italy (III, 233; Beard, III,

215). Susan had accepted a seven year's residence abroad but had no desire to repeat it. Because Cooper was more sympathetic to women than his father had been, he acquiesced in her desire to live in the United

States. She had to endure only temporary exile from home, unlike his mother, who lived and died in a village she disliked. In return,

Susan's love for her husband and his emotional dependence on her compensated him for remaining in Cooperstown.

After 1835 Susan and the rest of the family lived a retired life in Cooperstown, which suited her taste better than a foreign capital. The isolation of the town did not bother her since she had always been somewhat self-effacing and had always accepted the American ideal of the wife secluded within her family circle. When she had been married only three years, her husband chided her for not spending enough money on herself (I, 31), and almost twenty years later a sister complained that in her letters from Paris she did not write enough about herself. She responded with skimpy news of her health and her walks and concluded with "What else shall I tell you? my beloved husband, and 47

our dear children are all well—and happy in the hope of being with you

before this time next year."21

With her "beloved husband" always the center of her life,

Susan was fulfilled and confident that she was performing, an: important

function. In 1830 she described her feelings in a letter to him now

at Yale:

You tell me sometimes that I am too humble—but do you know, I cherish a feeling, of something very like (let me call it, an honest Pride) in thinking, that in our Connection, I have been a blessing, (and brought blessings, perhaps upon you) and that among all those Females you may see, be they who, and what they may younger, lovlier, more fascinating, there is none more worthy of your Affection.—You will smile perhaps, and say this is very well—but it is of more importance that I should think so—and I acknowledge it would be, to my happiness.22

While in this letter Susan clearly values her affection because it pleases her husband, she also asserts that her love is primarily impor­ tant in that it pleases herself. For her, there was no conflict between self-fulfillment and devotion to another.

So close were Susan and James that until the late 1830s and '40s they were seldom separated for more than a few days at a time and then were apart only during the weeks Cooper spent in New York or

Philadelphia on business. When she was sick, she was particularly

dependent on him (for example, see II, 323 and III, 304). Perhaps

21Correspondence, I, 300-01.

22ALS to James Fenimore Cooper, [1830], Za Cooper, 183, Collec­ tion of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. partly as a result of this dependency, she survived him for less than

five months; he died on September 14, 1851, she on January 20, 1852.23

Following quickly upon the loss of her husband, her sudden decline and

death freed her from what would have been the extremely painful neces­

sity of having to learn to live without the man who had structured her

life for forty-three years.

If Susan Cooper was dependent on her husband, he was equally

dependent on her. Always loving and even playfully affectionate, his

letters to her assume that their concerns are so identical that she will be interested in anything that happens to him, even if his news is

as trivial as the quality of peaches in Philadelphia or the fact that

their ox has got into the corn. The few times that she traveled by herself and left him at home he missed her badly. His complaint of loneliness was almost the same in 1814 (I, 31) as it was in 1845, when he wrote: "Runaway,/You may have missed me at Syracuse, but you can not imagine how much you have been missed here. For a day, or two, I was about to call out 'matie' [her nickname] every half hour, and your daughters were mistaken for you, at every turn" (V, 43; bracketed material added).

The inclination to call for his wife that Cooper describes in this letter indicates a man accustomed to attention from a woman always willing to give it. Especially late in his life, his letters also occasionally betray a husband accustomed to judge and command. He was

23James Fenimore Cooper (grandson), ed., Correspondence, II, 721. 49 querulous when Susan did not write him (for example, see V, 324) and sometimes slightly condescending, as when he "let" her win at chess

(V, 288, 290) or six months before his death when he wrote, "I shall come home shortly. ... I want to be in my garden. Then I wish to be in your dear hands, love, for though you know nothing you do a good deal that is right (VI, 268). Such condescension indicates not merely the sense of superiority Cooper felt to his typically feminine wife but also the degree to which he felt her gifts differed from his masculine ones.

Though her lack of formal medical training enabled him to describe her as knowing nothing, he trusted her intuitive wisdom of what was best for him. In her, as in the Fourierist chart discussed in chapter 1, feminine "wisdom" took the place of masculine "knowledge." Like his wife he valued intuition, contemplation, and the domesticity that protected him from the outside world. When they were separated, he was usually eager to return home (only the totally masculine world of the ships commanded by his friend William Shubrick was more enticing than

Otsego Hall) and closed his letters with endearments, such as "There is nothing new, my love being an old affair" (V, 17) or "I long to fold you in my arms—, and to have a game of chess" (VI, 155).

The Daughters

In 1841 Cooper admitted to loving "my wife a little better than any child I have, good as all mine are" (IV, 160). His children were important to him partly for the strong bond they forged between him and Susan. In a touching letter written in 1850 to congratulate her on the birth of their first grandchild, he said, "I owe you, my dearest 50 wife, more than I can ever repay you for the care you have bestowed on all our dear children" (VI, 141). However, he also loved his children for their own sakes. After his death the eldest, Susan Fenimore, could sincerely write that "never surely was there a father whose love for. his children was of a deeper, purer, stronger nature than his own; never was there one whose daily life and manners were more demonstrative of the feeling . . . ,"2>i

This deep love Cooper lavished on sons and daughters alike. He and Susan Augusta had seven children in all; five outlived their parents. The first, Elizabeth, was born September 27, 1811, and died

July 13, 1813. Fenimore was born October 23, 1821 and died August 5,

1823. Four of the five surviving children were daughters spaced two years apart: Susan Augusta (later called "Susan Fenimore"), born

April 17, 1813; Caroline Martha, born June 26, 1815; Anne Charlotte, born May 14, 1817; and Maria Frances, born June 15, 1819. The fifth was the only surviving son and the baby of the family, nearly five years younger than the sister closest to him in age, Paul Fenimore, born

February 4, 1824. (See Beard, I, 23; 25; 30, n. 1; 105, n. 2; 112, n. 19.)

Because the death of the first boy in infancy made a nearly five year gap in the spacing of the children, this surviving son was placed somewhat in the position of being the sole member of a second family.

While the cluster of four girls followed after a number of years by a

2l*Pages, p. 130. 51 single surviving son might have encouraged the father to patronize and neglect his daughters in favor of lavishing attention on a long-awaited boy, such was not the case. The age difference between Paul and his sisters encouraged the father to continue long-established habits of treating the girls in a separate category from the boy. Before either of his sons was born, Cooper had been engrossed with his daughters. He loved his son but did not depend on him for affection as much as he depended on the girls, since he kept in mind that the boy would grow up and leave home even as he came to foster a hope that the girls would not abandon him. This hope eventually developed into a deep dependence on his daughters that strongly affected how he depicted women in his novels.

When they were young, Cooper was particularly concerned with his daughters' educations and from early childhood treated them as rational beings capable of benefiting from any instruction he could provide. He did not, however, attempt to give them exactly the same kind of schooling as he provided for his son. Such an education would have been difficult to obtain because of the scarcity of institutions of higher learning for women. Although with Emma Willard, who founded the Troy Female Seminary in 1821, New York was in the vanguard of women's education, such education remained until after the Civil War far inferior to that offered men. While seminaries like that at Troy did provide teacher training, their primary function was to offer general instruction in a wide variety of subjects in an ungraded, noncompetitive atmosphere, thus preparing girls for life, not for 52 college studies.25 Still, such seminaries were better than the popular finishing schools with their superficial lessons in the arts and the social graces. The instruction that the Cooper girls received was thus superior to any education available to the majority of women of their time.26

The education of Cooper's daughters differed most obviously from that of men in slighting mathematics and the classical languages

(though Susan did learn Latin when she was eighteen; see II, 1176) arid im including domestic skills. Susan remembered Caroline's "sewing" with a pin as a very young child and her own creation of an elaborate christening dress for baby Paul when she was eleven. The girls' formal instruction was begun at home by their mother, who drilled them in writing, arithmetic, geography, English history, and the Bible and taught at least one of them to read at age three. In 1822, when the family moved to New York City, the oldest girls were enrolled as day students in a boarding school next door to their home and were given supplementary lessons in foreign languages. When the family went to

Long Island for the yellow fever seasons, an English governess accom­ panied them to instruct the girls. Before they reached their teens, all four of them took Spanish lessons, since Cooper believed that an

25Thomas' Woody, A History of Women's Education in the United States (New York: The Science Press, 1929), I, 329-63; II, 341-63.

26Robert E. Spiller, Fenimore Cooper: Critic of His Times (1931; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell," 1963)'," pp. 111-12. 53 increasing interest in Latin America would make Spanish the second language of the United States. Before departing for France in 1826, he and young Susan took private French lessons. Later he hired a French governess, so that the girls could perfect the language before arriving in Paris, and sent his three youngest daughters to a day school where nothing but French was spoken.27

In Paris Cooper rented an apartment in the same building as the school the girls attended so that he and his wife could always be close to their children (I, 152; Susan Fenimore Cooper, "Memories," p. 64).

He personally drilled the girls on their studies28 and stressed profi­ ciency in modern European languages, settling his family in Italy for a time so the children could learn Italian and taking them with him to

Dresden, where they studied German (Beard, I, 345, 415). One of the reasons he gave for extending his European residency from five to nearly seven and a half years was that Susan's education was so nearly complete that a premature departure for America would prevent her from achieving the finest European polish possible (II, 86-87; Beard, II,

47). The European polish included not only music, dancing, and other social graces but a firm grasp of art, history, and European languages and literature. All the children were fluent in French and Italian and

27See Susan Fenimore Cooper, "Memories," in Correspondence: on the girls' being taught to sew, I, 57, 69, and 141; on their mother's beginning their formal instruction, I, 43-44; on the English governess, I, 48-49, 54-56; on Spanish lessons, I, 56; and on instruction in French, I, 54-56 (also Beard, I, 85).

28Kurth (p. 45) paraphrases a note, now at Yale, from Mrs. Cooper to Susan. 54 knew German and Spanish as well. Though he had not intended such a result, Cooper had given his daughters too fine an education to make them merely the wives of educated men, since few men of the time received such broad instruction, especially in the United States.

Instead of insuring that they would make ideal wives, he fitted them to be teachers and writers. Susan, in fact, tutored her brother until he was sixteen (III, 248; Beard, I, 345) and then went on to create a writing career for herself.

Despite Cooper's belief that women should be educated to be companions to their husbands, he primarily intended for his daughters' superior schooling to make them admirable citizens of the United States, not to enable them to marry, especially not to marry Europeans. He quickly dismissed a French governess whom he discovered to be anti-

American and "a furious royalist"29 and refused to place his girls in a prestigous Catholic school.30 When Susan Fenimore and her sisters reached their teens, he and his wife deliberately kept them out of most social activities, although upper-class French girls their age were permitted more freedom than they. Susan Augusta was a bit defensive about letting her daughters go out at all. In a letter to her sister

Caroline she defended giving fourteen-year-old Susan Fenimore permission to attend a soiree at Lafayette's and denied that she was

29Mary E. Phillips, James Fenimore Cooper (New York: John Lane Co., 1913), pp. 136-37.

30Susan Fenimore Cooper, "Memories," I, 64. 55

being formally brought out.31 And like his wife, Cooper believed that the girls should be kept "in retirement" (II, 103).

Such fastidiousness could not have been predicted from his writings about the social behavior proper for American young ladies.

In 1838 in Gleanings in Europe: Italy, written when his two oldest

daughters were in their teens, Cooper argued that girls should be given

freedom to choose the husbands most acceptable to them.32 In the bulk of his novels, too, his young women are not unduly hampered by social restrictions. Ellen Wade in The Prairie slips away from camp to meet her lover, and in other novels from The Last of the Mohicans in 1826 through The Oak Openings in 1848 young women of all social classes spend long, unchaperoned hours on the trail or on shipboard with men whom they will choose for husbands. In his personal life, however,

Cooper was not willing to grant his daughters the same freedom as his heroines and did not willingly accept the idea that they would marry.

When in 1833 a respectable young Frenchman asked for the hand of the nearly twenty-one-year-old Susan, Cooper refused; he had declared repeatedly that he wished his children to remain Americans (I, 430;

II, 103-05, 375).

Only a few months after he turned down this marriage proposal,

Cooper and his family returned to the United States, where they found

31Kurth (pp. 37-38) paraphrases one of Susan Augusta's letters in the Cooper collection at Yale.

32(Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1838), II, 129. 56 the separation of gentry values from power well under way. As a defender of culture in a society increasingly engrossed in business,

Cooper not only discovered that he was no longer lionized as America's leading novelist but that he was increasingly misunderstood and isolated. He became alienated from the general public and involved in a number of disputes, often as the result of deliberate harrassment by politicians and newspaper men. In 1837 the Three Mile Point contro­ versy about the right of villagers to picnic on Cooper property initiated his long series of libel suits against unscrupulous newsmen, suits that continued through 1845. Between 1839 and 1843 several of these actions involved his version of the Battle of Lake Erie in the

History of the Navy of the United States of America. The anti-rent troubles of the early 1840s led him to respond with the Littlepage trilogy in 1845 and 1846.

Compounding his alienation was his retirement to small, isolated

Cooperstown. After his return to America he planned to summer there and to spend winters in New York City. However, debts, including those for the repurchase and restoration of Otsego Hall, built by his father, forced the family after 1835 to choose a retired life as cosmopolitans in an essentially countrified community (Beard, II, 213-15). The disparity between themselves and the local people threw the family much upon its own resources and isolated the four daughters at a period when they might have been expected to marry and establish lives of their own. 57

In his isolation and battles with the public Cooper came to

depend heavily on his closely knit family for the security and encourage­

ment the outside world denied him. Without emotional support from his wife and daughters, he would net have been able to write the twenty-nine volumes he produced after his return from Europe or to achieve the high degree of artistry that characterizes the best novels of this period.

In 1838 he wrote to his wife about the comfort she and the children gave him: "They [his daughters] are all very dear to me, as are you and

Paul, and I am no-where so happy, as under my own roof" (III, 334; bracketed material added).

By the late thirties as he became increasingly dependent on his family Cooper flattered himself that his daughters might never leave him. In 1838 writing to Horatio Greenough of his desire to return to

Italy he described the family's situation:

There is very little attachment to home, in my family. The tastes and habits of the girls are above the country, and they take refuge in themselves against ill breeding, coarse flirtations and ignorance. They try to love their country, but duty lies at the bottom of the effort, and not feeling. They have been ill- treated too, and that does not increase the attachment. The fact can not be concealed, it is a country of mediocrity of a high order, but, after all, mediocrity. (Ill, 330)

In saying that "the tastes and habits of the girls are above the country" he considered mediocre, Cooper indirectly acknowledged that he had not trained his daughters to be merely good Americans or even the wives of educated American men. While his countrymen gloried in female domesticity and assumed that a wife's education was of less importance than her subservience to her husband, Cooper had unwittingly produced young women who could have assumed the active social and intellectual roles many Europeans expected of their wives. But because his own wife was unhappy in continental society and wished to remain in the United States near the DeLancey family, the girls and their father accepted a retired life in Cooperstown. Susan Augusta Cooper was too much of an American wife to want to embrace the kind of life from which her Europeanized daughters would have benefited.

In this less than perfect situation, the girls, as Cooper said, took "refuge in themselves." He, too, took refuge in them and developed an increasing need for his family that made him unconsciously reluctant for any of his daughters to marry, especially Susan Fenimore. She was the eldest, the most intelligent, and the most gifted of his children and had always been particularly close to him (Beard, I, 260-1, n.;

Kurth, pp. 77-78). When the Frenchman proposed, she had been her father's copyist for two years (II, 159) and was to continue to help him with his writing until his death. While her mother and Charlotte some­ times assisted, Susan was essentially Cooper's confidential secretary

(Beard, VI, 205; 276, n. 1; 277, n. 1; Kurth, p. 58). Though he would not admit it to himself, he refused to believe he might lose her.

Ignoring the fact that he had married his own wife when she was eighteen, he discouraged Susan from socializing when she was that age, insisting that he did not wish her to marry until she was past twenty (I, 430) and saying that she would get a better husband if she waited three or four years (II, 176). 59

Cooper could not readily accept the idea of Susan's marrying

anyone, even his close friend Samuel F. B. Morse, the artist and

inventor, who had been a widower since 1825. Although the father

several times brushed aside rumors that Morse and Susan were considering

an engagement (II, 375; III, 229), James Franklin Beard feels that these

rumors probably had more basis in fact than the quick dismissals would

imply (II, 375, n. 1). Morse was twenty-one years older than Susan but was one of the few men she knew whose talents and intellect were sufficient seriously to interest someone of her caliber and background.

Clearly he was an attractive potential husband whose age should not in itself have been sufficient grounds for avoiding marriage. Morse himself had no objections to younger women. In 1848 when he was fifty- seven, he took a twenty-six-year-old cousin as his second wife.33 Nor should the age difference have deterred Cooper. In Notions of the

Americans he had stressed the need for matches based on "taste and inclination,"31* and eventually he permitted Susan's sister Frances to marry a man eleven years her elder (II, 90).

Cooper was apparently reluctant for Susan to marry because he feared the loss of her emotional support and the breakup of his own family. Since the maturity of her and her sisters meant that they could abandon him for husbands, female sexuality became increasingly

33Carleton Mabee, The American Leonardo: A Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943), pp. 304-06.

3''Intro. Robert E. Spiller ([Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1828]; rpt. New York: Frederick Unger, 1963), I, 27. 60 threatening as the girls grew older. By 1840 the threat had become particularly acute. In that year the youngest, Frances, turned twenty- one, and the oldest, Susan, twenty-seven. Their father could no longer refuse to recognize that they were fully grown and might marry and leave him at any time. The first child to leave Cooperstown, however, was the son, Paul, who in 1840 at age sixteen left home to enter a college in Geneva, New York (IV, 52, 71). Still, it was ten more years before he made himself permanently independent of his family by joining a law firm in Albany, and he did not marry until 1855, more than four years after his father's death (IV, 230; Beard, VI, 248, n. 3). His father accepted Paul's absence, since the current division of sex roles meant that boys must necessarily leave their parents; he himself had served as an ordinary seaman when he was scarcely seventeen. For

Cooper, what was more important than Paul's departure was that his daughters remained at home. Two of them did not marry until they were in their thirties, while the other two, including Susan, never married at all (Beard, I, 260-01, n.; VI, 182, n.).

Until as late as 1848 the Cooper family circle remained nearly as closely knit as when the girls were small, as a result of the insular life in Cooperstown, the similar tastes of the family members, and Cooper's covert reluctance to consider marriage for his daughters.

In that year the second daughter, thirty-three-year-old Caroline, shocked her father by requesting permission to marry Henry Phinney, a thirty-four-year-old Cooperstown publisher and the nephew of a man with whom Cooper had been quarreling (Beard, V, 392, n. and n. 1; 393, n.). 61

Although Beard insists (V, 392, n. 1) that Cooper's shock at this request was the result of this quarrel and did not indicate a reluc­ tance to see Caroline married, Cooper's reaction was too strong to warrant such an interpretation. Replying to the letter Caroline wrote announcing that she wished to become engaged, he said:

Your letter reached me last night, along with its companion [a letter from Phinney], and I can 'not express the astonishment it produced. To me the whole thing was unexpected and new. I had not the smallest conception of any thing of the sort.

And now, my child, I shall be as frank with you, as prudence will allow, in a letter. In the first place your happiness will be the first consideration with the whole family. Under no circumstances must there be coldness, alienation, or indifference. You are my dearly beloved child, of many noble and admirable qualities that I have always seen and appreciated, and you shall be treated as such a child merits. My heart, door and means shall never be closed against you, let your final decision be what it may. . . .

But that which you ask is of so serious a nature, that it can not be granted without reflection—without closer and free communications with yourself. Your visit has been a pretty long one, and you had better prepare your aunts for your return home. Paul shall come for you before the holidays ....

In the interval be prudent. Write no notes or letters, and give no pledges. You must hear what I have to say, unfettered; as the counsel and information of one who is still your best male friend, depend on it, and after you have heard I shall leave you to decide for yourself.

All send their love, and mother unites with me in giving this advice. I write to Mr. today, begging to defer an answer to his demand until after your return. (V, 391-92; bracketed material added) In this letter Cooper reassured Caroline that, as an American father who believed in free choice for young people, he would accept her decision if he had to. However, he wanted a chance to dissuade her before she formalized the engagement. The "counsel and information" that he wished to give must have been negative or he would not have insisted so strongly on her receiving them before she next communicated with Phinney even though Cooper could not have had much against the young man, who, after all, was not an active party in his uncle's quarrel. Cooper apparently objected more to his daughter's marriage than to the man she had chosen.

Caroline may very well have expected some such resistance from her father. His total surprise may indicate that the courtship had been secret, and her announcing her desire to marry in a letter written while she was on an extended visit to her aunts in Geneva could have been a way of giving him time to think about her proposal before he saw her. Phinney's letter was apparently written from Buffalo. (At least

Cooper's reply refers to his being there [V, 393].) If he did write from Buffalo, he and Caroline would have had to make special arrange­ ments to insure that their letters would have reached Cooper by the same post. The possibility of such forethought is another indication that the couple deliberately chose a roundabout method of announcing their desires and expected some reluctance from Cooper. (Their letters would be invaluable in proving or refuting this theory, but these were apparently destroyed. See Beard, V, 392, n. 1.) No one knows what

Cooper's discussion with Caroline covered, but he dropped his quarrel 63 and gave away the bride at the wedding, which took place on February 8,

1849, less than two months after his shocked letter to his daughter.

In the case of Caroline, Cooper let the standards of the time prevail. Her choice of a husband was not his, but she had freely chosen and could not reasonably be denied permission to marry. Much the same thing happened with the youngest daughter in 1850. On December tenth of that year thirty-one-year-old Frances married her cousin

Richard Cooper, a forty-two-year-old widowed country lawyer with a large family (Beard, II, 90, n.; VI, 246 and 246, n. 2). Cooper's half- baffled rationalization about this marriage was "she seems very happy, and that is all I care for. Seven children, to besure, is a large allowance to begin with, but she has ever loved them and treated them as her own" (VI, 257).

While Cooper admired his wife's careful nurture of his son and daughters, he was a bit nonplussed that a woman in her thirties with

Frances's sophisticated background should undertake to raise seven children not her own. She was the second of his beloved daughters to choose what was, to his way of thinking., a less than ideal marriage.

In his novels, however, he was not able to admit that marriage might involve difficulties such as sorrow to parents or a new wife's relation­ ship with stepchildren. At the same time that he was personally discovering that marriage could bring pain and hardship, he continued almost invariably to marry off his heroines and to stress that domes­ ticity would insure happiness. Although he insisted that his novels dealt with "things as they are," with reality, his fictionalized 64 idealizations of orphan boys and girls finding happiness together are far different from the circumstances of his personal life.

While two of her sisters drifted toward satisfactory but less than ideal late marriages and her brother was away at school, Susan

Fenimore devoted herself to assisting her father, charitable work, and writing.35 In the 1840s she was her father's companion as well as his daughter, an intellectual equal as well as his secretary. Unlike his wife, whom he loved but regarded as someone very different from himself, someone intuitive and passive rather than intellectual and active, his eldest daughter did not fit the stereotype of domestic femininity of the period. She had been educated almost like a son and was intelligent and capable while still being loving and subservient. Cooper enjoyed this situation, since it meant that Susan was able to give him not only the kind of love and encouragement provided by his wife but intellectual companionship as well. He would have felt threatened if she had directly competed with him or other men, but in writing and charities she was involved with nothing unfeminine. Because women had been identified with culture in the United States since the eighteenth century, in becoming writers they were only defending it more actively than their grandmothers had. Now that American society no longer found art so acceptable an employment for a man as for a woman, Cooper's own commitment to writing aligned him more firmly than ever with feminine

35Anna K. Cunningham, "Susan Fenimore Cooper—Child of Genius," New York History, 25 (1944), 339, 347; Letters and Journals, VI, 99; Kurth, pp. 86, 188. 65 values and enhanced his appreciation for his talented daughter, whose writing he encouraged.

In 1846 he arranged for the anonymous publication of Susan's novel Elinor Wyllys, which for a time was attributed to him.36 In

1850 he had his publisher bring out her book of nature sketches, Rural

Hours. He not only handled the negotiations for its publication but also all the printing business, including proofreading, so that Susan did not leave Cooperstown to see the book through the press. It was quickly successful because of its graceful descriptions and scientific accuracy; in addition to relying on her own detailed observations,

Susan had utilized much careful research.37 His daughter's almost instant fame surprised Cooper, who had warned her not to be disappointed if the public did not welcome her sketches (VI, 151). Since his own late works were going largely unappreciated, he assumed that her volume would meet a similar fate. When it was welcomed, however, he showed no signs of professional jealousy and delightedly collected compliments for Susan in New York and made advantageous contracts with Putnam for later editions in order to insure that the right thing was done by his

"Much Beloved Child" (VI, 93), who was thirty-seven but still a child to him so long as she remained unmarried.

36Robert E. Spiller and Philip C. Blackburn, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper (New York: R. R. Bowher, 1934), p. 209; Kurth, pp. 105-06.

37Kurth, pp. 140-41, n. 37. 66

Cooper was probably glad to see Susan earning a bit of money on her own. While he would have been horrified if she or any of her sisters had wanted to assume a male role and work outside the home, the problem of leaving his unmarried daughters financially secure after his death had long vexed him. Several times in the 1830s and '40s he had denied himself the luxury of trips so that he could put away money for them (III, 34; IV, 389). Now he saw that Susan would be able to supplement her meager inheritance with writing if need be. Though her strict sense of propriety kept Susan from ever being more than a semi- professional writer, she went on to produce many miscellaneous works, including several articles for Putnam's Magazine, probably because she needed the extra income.3 8

Cooper was proud of Susan's ability to earn money and of her success, but the attention her fame attracted threatened his family- centered life, as the marriages of her two sisters had. In 1851 he wrote to young Sarah Heyward Cruger, humorously but with an undertone of seriousness:

This marrying does leave sad vacancies at the table, and around the hearth. Paul has flitted, leaving only four of us, at a table where the same seven faces had been so long seen. I am horribly afraid for Bend Leather [Susan Fenimore Cooper]. She is so pretty, and good, and engaging, and all that, I fear some fellow will be after her. There is no one here she would marry, but they send her documents from the Smithsonian Institution, franked by M.C. ['s?] and make so much fuss about her, I expect a special ambassador, every day. (VI, 258-59)

38Kurth, p. 317. 67

By this time near the close of his life Cooper had realized that simply raising a daughter not to long for marriage was no guarantee that she would not eventually take a husband. The increased range of contacts Susan established through her writing might operate as surely as a conventional emphasis on domesticity to draw her away from her father's family. Though Cooper could think only in terms of Susan's marrying and could not conceive of genuine freedom from her, the type of education he had given her and the literary projects he encouraged her to undertake enabled her to participate in the gradual emancipation of the lady from the home, an emancipation that permitted genteel women first to engage in writing and then in reform work.39 Susan continued to write until the end of her life and was the moving force behind the Cooperstown orphanage and hospital, though she never became involved in more controversial reform movements, such as abolition or women's suffrage.40

Actually Susan's commitment to her own projects was Cooper's best guarantee that she would not leave him for a husband. Despite his fears, she never married and did not regret her spinster life. Having more personal resources and outside interests than Caroline and Frances, she never felt compelled to follow their example and settle for the best available local man as a husband. With even the generality of men in a .large American city unable to match her sophistication, Cooperstown

39Stow Persons, The Decline of American Gentility (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 82-83, 89-92.

11 "Cunningham, pp. 339, 347. had little to offer, as is made clear in a brief discussion by

Nathaniel Parker Willis about why, in 1849, the young women of that village might not find suitable husbands:

In the windows of the houses in the side-streets, sit young ladies without a sign of a shirt-collar in their company, and this last bespeaks a town of exhausted uncertainties—everybody's exact value ascertained and no object in visiting except with definite errand or invitation. Ih towns of this size, by the way, young ladies have hardly a fair opportunity, as any handsome male natives, who have an ambition that would swim, find the scope of a village too bathing-tub-y, and are all off for deeper water and other adorations. By glimpses that I caught, over rose-trees and picket fences, I should say there was many a charming girl, wasting her twilights, in Cooperstown, while I saw no sign of the gender to match—nothing masculine stirring except very little boys and very manifest "heads of families."1*1

To insure Susan's seclusion in this placid environment where "there is no one . . . she would marry," Cooper was glad to undertake the chores involved in seeing Elinor Wyllys and Rural Hours published in a big city.

In the letter in which he expressed his fear that a "special ambassador" might carry Susan off, much as a prince in a fairy tale might rescue a princess from a desert tower, Cooper revealed to young

Sarah Cruger that in the last year of his life he regarded Susan as essential to his happiness. A whimsical 1849 letter written to the same young lady further reveals the complexity of his attitude toward his oldest daughter, then thirty-six:

41Rural Letters and Other Records of Thought at Leisure (Auburn: Alden, Beardsley &'Company; Rochester: Wanzer, Beardsley & Company, 1853), pp. 320-21. How I love that child! Her countenance is that of a sister I lost, by a fall from a horse, half a century since, and her character is very much the same. They were, and are, as perfect as it falls to the lot of humanity to be. J. am in love with Sue, and have told her so, fifty times. She refuses me, but promises to live on in gentle friendship, and, my passion not being at all turbulent, I do not see but this may do. (VI, 99)

Rather than viewing Susan as a grown woman who will eventually establish her own home, Cooper here jokingly compares himself to a lover, rejected but still living for his beloved. This veiled incest wish does not so much represent a desire to make love to his daughter as it is an expression of oedipal desire for the mother, for what is most signifi­ cant about this letter is the comparison of Susan to the lost older sister Hannah, whom Cooper called "a sort of second mother to me"

(IV, 256). The implication of the comparison of Susan and Hannah is, therefore, that Susan gave her father a maternal security that he craved.

The skill she displayed in her writing and charitable work showed the reassuring competence of a mature, capable woman, while her never- failing encouragement provided the kind of love a mother would give a favorite son.

In subconsciously idealizing Susan as his devoted mother

Cooper inadvertently denied her a right to a life independent of him, a right to fame and success of her own. Such unconscious denial perhaps underlay his deathbed request that no one write his biography, a request that indirectly forbade Susan to produce the literary project that she, of all of Cooper's relatives and friends, was best qualified to under­ take. Consciously Cooper probably thought only of the public hostility to which he had been subjected for nearly two decades; he wished to forestall any slurs on his memory. But such an assessment of his reputation would have failed to appreciate a revival that was rapidly gaining strength. Four major editions of his novels appeared between

1849 and 1861, and in the 1850s their total sale was greater than the total sale of Irving's work (Beard, VI, 4-6). Favorable critical analysis had reappeared in 1844 and 1845 with articles by Rufus

Griswold and William Gilmore Simms. Five months after Cooper's death most of the important literary men of the period either attended or sent tributes to an impressive meeting commemorating him.4,2

In this climate of renewed interest in Cooper's writings, publishers tried to arrange with the family for a biography. Although their mother objected, Susan Fenimore and her sisters were willing to set aside their father's prohibition. They went so far as to meet with a journalist who wished them to supply him with information, but Paul, the head of the family since Cooper's death, apparently reiterated his mother's disapproval and the project was dropped (Beard, I, xxxvi).

Unable to write a formal biography, Susan attempted to compensate by turning out prefaces to selections of her father'.s works in Pages and

Pictures, introductions for the Household Edition, "Small Family

Memories," miscellaneous articles, and editions of some of his journal passages (Beard, I, xxxvii). In this work and other aspects of her

42George Dekker and John P. McWilliams, ed., Fenimore Cooper; The Critical Heritage (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 25- 26. 71 writing career she was continually hampered by the ambivalent attitudes towards women that her father had instilled in her by both encouraging her creativity and keeping her completely under his control.

Cooper had himself been hampered by these same ambivalent attitudes towards women. His fictional treatment of women had been largely influenced by his relationships with his mother, wife, and daughters. In the long run, however, these influences pulled him in opposite directions, since the involvement in husband and children that preoccupied his mother and his wife was not finally what he desired for his daughters. His wife provided him with a loving, essential security that prevented him from openly questioning the con­ ventional definition of woman as decorous, pious, passive, self-effacing, and domestic. He came to discover, however, that Susan Augusta's extreme domesticity and his deep dependence upon it were mixed blessings.

The problem came to a head when his daughters became women, forcing him into a painful recognition of the fallacy of his belief that marriage and family were dependable sources of happiness; in creating new families, Cooper finally realized, marriages destroy the families of the parents. In insisting that woman's proper sphere was domestic, he had inadvertently demanded that his daughters leave him for families of their own, but by the time his girls were grown he was emotionally too dependent on them to welcome such a conclusion. Far from being a stable source of happiness, domesticity, Cooper came to understand, necessarily involves a cycle of creation and destruction. 72

Even in the home, where they could supposedly be ideals of perfection,

Cooper discovered women to be deeply ambiguous figures. He was to find no permanent escape from the ambiguity of femininity that haunted him throughout his writing career. CHAPTER 3

JUSTICE IS FEMININE, 1820-1824

The world of Cooper's novels is often a confusing one. Nature

may suddenly and arbitrarily shift her moods. Hypocrisy and deceit may

permeate fashionable society. But despite the fact that in it appear­ ances are frequently deceptive, Cooper's world does conceal a core of absolute reality. As H. Daniel Peck has pointed out, Cooper, in the eighteenth-century manner, trusted that nature could reveal truth, unlike later, more completely romantic writers like Hawthorne and Melville, who saw nature as a mask for truth, which, finally, resides only in the mind of the individual.1 In Cooper's world, in contrast, what one person can discover can also be discovered by others. Truth is not internal and individualistic but external and public, which is not to say that it is obvious. Before discovering true reality Cooper's characters must

undergo moral conflicts proceeding from the clash between conventional notions of righteousness and absolute standards of morality and justice.

In the search for truth the woman characters play important roles because of their complex nature. On the one hand, the dualism of an individual woman can make her more sensitive than a man to the deceptiveness of appearances. On the other, woman's capacity for

XA World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper's Fiction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 9-14.

73 74

transcendence—the reverse of her capacity for bestiality—can enable

her to adopt and act on higher standards than those invoked by socially

conditioned, compromising men. At their most positive, the women in

Cooper's work hold forth the possibility of the discovery of true

standards. As Peck says, apropos The Pathfinder and Satanstoe, "women

are always the final arbiters of adulthood in Cooper's fiction."2

This positive role is particularly important in the early novels

in which women face a world even more confusingly complex than they are

themselves but may by careful observation, flexibility, and self-control

succeed in winning secure, happy futures, usually in the form of

husbands who become worthy of the women by learning from them both to

accept complexity and to adhere to truth. This scheme holds even in

the derivative pieces Precaution (1820) and Tales for Fifteen (written

1821; published 1823) and becomes increasingly apparent in The Spy

(1821) and The Pioneers (1823). It also occurs in The Pilot (1824);

but, heralding the breakdown of Cooper's initial optimism and fore­ shadowing the Gothic treatment of women in the next novel, Lionel

Lincoln, the three heroines of The Pilot, while neither simplistic nor

dangerous, are more passive and potentially destructive to masculine

goals than are the heroines of the earlier works.3

2p. 170.

3For Precaution, The Spy, The Pioneers, and The Pilot see the Mohawk Edition of the Works of James Fenimore Cooper (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, [1895-96]). For Tales for Fifteen see the edition intro­ duced by James Franklin Beard (New York: C. Wiley, 1823; rpt. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1959). Subsequent references to these works will be parenthetical in the text. 75

In comparison, however, to some of the heroines of the novels published between 1825 and 1833, even the women of The Pilot act beneficently. They and the other women in Cooper's early fiction function in three main ways. First, the diversity of the characteriza­ tions of women in any one novel indicates the complexity of femininity, a complexity reflecting that of the outside world. Then, precisely because Cooper saw femininity as deeply complex, even as embodying apparently conflicting traits, he presents women as uniquely qualified to penetrate beneath appearance.to reality in a process of self- discovery in which they personally learn to modify their beliefs in order to comprehend their true situations and to act in accordance with transcendent standards. Frequently they are called upon to reconcile opposing forces when they must learn to be loyal to both fathers and would-be husbands. Finally, women teach men how to discover reality beneath appearance and how to follow absolute standards. In his fiction previous to 1825, then, Cooper saw women as more potentiality than threat, more beneficent than destructive. As he pondered femininity, however, these conclusions were to undergo substantial modification.

The Complexity of Femininity

One of Cooper's favorite techniques for emphasizing the complex nature of femininity was to set up contrasts between women characters.

In any one novel the women, taken as a group, exhibit a broad range of temperaments, emotions, and sometimes even morality. In Precaution, for instance, the exemplary heroine, Emily Moseley, exercises a discretion 76 that protects her from a sister's total infatuation with a worthless man and from a friend's impulsive, disastrous marriage. Nevertheless, these three women represent points on a spectrum, not rigid character types with nothing in common. Emily's sister and friend could, Cooper emphasizes, have saved themselves much sorrow by exercising a modicum of self-control, while even Emily's good sense does not prevent her from falling in love with a supposedly unworthy man.

The tension between Emily's self-control and her engrossing love for George Denbigh is related to a fundamental discrepancy between

Cooper's overt insistence on feminine decorum and his fascination with the machinations women set in motion to win husbands. Noting that

Cooper "was always disturbed by the convention that a virtuous woman must be passive in love until spoken for," James Grossman concludes that I the violation of decency in the constant discussions of love and marriage is the result of "his general failure to understand that thorough discussion of conventions is a means of overthrowing them. In his first novel he went so far in crudeness that, had he accepted its intellectual implications, Precaution would have been of the same school as Man and Superman, a manifesto of the right to arrive openly at sexual objectives."4 In spite of her self-control and decorum,

Emily thus embodies the potential for sexual aggressiveness of a heroine like Judith Hutter.

11 James Fenimore Cooper ([New York]: William Sloane, 1949; rpt. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 22. 77

The Tales for Fifteen pose an interesting example of Cooper's

conflation of femininity and deceptive appearances. This is the only work for which the author adopted a female pseudonym, "Jane Morgan," and his only work aimed at an audience of teenage girls, whom he exhorts

to recognize and accept truth. But even in the midst of his didacticism

Cooper presents a range of feminine types in a somewhat confusing

manner. In "Heart" he opposes an idealized heroine, Charlotte Henley, to her decent but much more ordinary friend, Maria Osgood. Although he initially appears intent upon praising Charlotte, the final effect of the story is to endorse Maria's position, thereby evaluating the two women in similar terms. Charlotte, almost too good to live, withdraws from the world after the death of the man she loves because "she has but one heart, and that was long since given with its purity, sincerity, and truth, to him who is dead, and can never become the property of another" (p. 222). But then Cooper indirectly questions this pure devotion by showing the love of Maria and Seymour Delafield developing in a gradual, natural manner, despite Seymour's having previously been in love with Charlotte, who rejected him.

In The Pioneers, as in Precaution and "Heart," Cooper again uses contrasts between women to express the complexity of femininity.

Elizabeth Temple, a black-eyed, black-haired beauty, conceals beneath the self-control of her perfect decorum a keen intelligence, quick perceptions, and a courageous self-reliance, traits that make her almost the perfect opposite of blonde Louisa Grant, the sentimental, timorous daughter of the local minister. While Elizabeth senses that Oliver Edwards is not really a poor hunter but a gentleman and quickly recognizes that he is as interested in her as she is in him, Louisa

pities his poverty and grows increasingly infatuated without realizing that Oliver and Elizabeth are falling in love. Whereas Elizabeth

preserves her status by carefully hiding her feelings, Louisa naively and fatuously reveals her emotions, never noticing that they are not reciprocated. Louisa similarly lacks self-control in the face of danger and faints when confronted by an enraged panther, unlike

Elizabeth, who sets her dog on the beast and tries to protect her helpless friend. But despite these contrasts in their reactions and personalities, the two young women share similar values and aspirations.

In Cooper's rigid class hierarchy, they are both young ladies and hence extremes of a single type rather than completely disparate personalities having nothing in common. Together they indicate the range of feminine experience and potentiality.

Using Louisa primarily to set up a contrast with Elizabeth,

Cooper further develops the theme of female complexity by showing how the growth of Elizabeth affects others, in.various ways. The gradual, regular development of her personality provides a basic structural element of the novel analyzed by Jay S. Paul, who emphasizes how her changes.enable Elizabeth to represent an ideal of gentility.5 Still, the effect of Elizabeth is not entirely positive. Although epitomizing

5"The Education of Elizabeth Temple," Studies in the Novel, 9 (Summer 1977), 187-94. 79

civilized perfection and an ideal towards which the raw community of

Templeton must strive, she also disrupts the even tenor of the life of

the men of the town. On the most superficial level, commented upon by

Gary Brenner,6 she disturbs the equanimity of Oliver, who finds himself

falling in love with her, even though he regards her father as his

family's greatest enemy.

Closer to home, Elizabeth disturbs her father's peace by

questioning the justice of his sentencing Natty Bumppo to a jail term

and a large fine. And at the most important thematic level she disturbs

Natty's own peace because her return to Templeton after several years

away at boarding school signals a new stage in the transformation of

the wilderness into civilization. As her father's housekeeper, irked

at being displaced by a new mistress, remarks, "new lords, new laws"

(Ch. xv, p. 170). Elizabeth's arrival does in fact, coincide with her father's pushing new game laws through the state legislature and

appointing a new officer of the law, the first sheriff for the county.

Essential to civilization as these developments are, they are not

universally accepted, especially not by Leatherstocking, whose

6Cooper's 'Composite Order': The Pioneers as Structured Art," Studies in the Novel, 2 (1970), 268. 80 conflict with the new legalisms develops many of the major themes of the novel.7

Insofar as she represents a civilized life anathema to him, the admirable Elizabeth threatens Natty. But while on the one hand

Natty can see in Elizabeth the advancing civilization that will drive him from his beloved home, on the other, he discovers in her an innate sense of justice that coincides with his own beliefs in questioning the validity of Judge Temple's laws. Edwin Fussell describes this relationship by identifying Elizabeth with Natty as "another potential aristocrat of the spirit," while H. Daniel Peck goes further to see her as a mediator "between the natural pastoral of the wilderness and and the civilized pastoral of fully developed cultures."8 Although women represent the civilization that will destroy the free life of forest hunters like Natty, Cooper defined good women as themselves living according to an innate sense of justice similar to that of the

7See Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (1950; reissued Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 63-64; Donald Davie, The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), pp. 143-44; D. E. S. Maxwell, American Fiction (New York: Columbia Univ. Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 112-18; Edwin Fussell, Frontier (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 35-39; E. Arthur Robinson, "Conservation in Cooper's The Pioners," PMLA, 82 (1967), 565, n. 6; John Lynen, The Design of the Present (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 174-86; George Dekker, James Fenimore Cooper: The American Scott (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), pp. 46-59; John P. McWilliams, Jr., Political Justice in a Republic: James Fenimore Cooper's America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972), pp. 101-29.

8Fussell, p. 37; Peck, p. 104. 81 old man. This similarity indicates that true virtue cuts across divisions of sex, age, and class, that it may be developed by anyone.

Such a grasp of transcendent values has little to do with the dictates of religion. The contrast with Louisa shows that Elizabeth's morals, while Christian, are not primarily inculcated by formal religion. Of the two young women, Louisa has more conventional piety but less true moral fiber, as her insensitivity to Natty's conflict with civilized values demonstrates.

In moving from the moral and social realms of Precaution,

"Heart," and The Pioneers, Cooper becomes increasingly explicit about woman's ambiguous nature when he dealt with political themes in The

Spy and The Pilot. In these novels closely related women—sisters or cousins—almost schematically represent divergent political views and raise the problem of the divided nature of women's loyalties, a problem linked to Cooper's mixed feelings about the American Revolution, which he often presented more as a civil war than as a glorious rebellion against tyranny.9

Of the two Wharton sisters in The Spy, the older, Sarah, is a

British sympathizer. She loves the English Colonel Wellmere, whose bigamous marriage to her symbolizes Cooper's view of the relationship between Britain and America at the time of the revolution. The insanity that this marriage induces in Sarah indicates that those elements of

9See Marius Bewley, The Eccentric Design (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959), p. 78; Harry B. Henderson III, Versions of the Past (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 54-56; McWilliams, pp. 64-73; Peck, pp. 100, 102. 82

American society that insist on turning to England are committing mental suicide. In contrast, Sarah's younger sister, Frances, is devoted to the Americans, partly out of love for a Virginia cavalryman, Peyton

Dunwoodie. The third young woman, Isabella Singleton, another American devotee, differs from Frances in the uncontrollable fervor of her patriotism. This passion apparently disturbed Cooper. He got rid of

Isabella quickly and in a copy of The Spy being revised for the

"Standard Novels" series candidly wrote, "I'm damned glad she is dead."10

Isabella's death reveals the irrational, fratricidal aspect of the revolution; she is accidently killed by a villainous American irregular, the leader of the marauding Skinners, as he attempts to revenge a personal grudge against another American, Captain Lawton. For Cooper the lawlessness inherent in the American Revolution could negate true patriotism, as at least two critics have mentioned.11

The three older women in The Spy represent a spectrum of morality and political faiths paralleling in many respects the contrasts between the three younger women. Jeanette Peyton, the Southern maiden aunt and surrogate mother of the Wharton girls, is closely linked to Frances, both by her good-natured, common-sensical decorum and by the events of the plot, in which she supports her niece's wishes. Kathy Haynes, almost the perfect opposite of Miss Peyton, is a poor, grasping New

1"Quoted in James Franklin Beard, "Cooper and the Revolutionary Mythos," Early American Literature, 9 (Spring 1976), 90; 104, n. 10.

xlKay Seymour House, Cooper's Americans ([Columbus]: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1965), p. 26; McWilliams, pp. 54-56. 83 England spinster who has kept house for Harvey Birch and his father and has long cherished the hope of marrying Harvey for security and the paltry wealth of his six silver spoons. Though an older and a much coarser person, she bears some resemblance to Sarah Wharton, who, in falling in love with Wellmere, has fallen for an ideal, not the man himself, and who has hoped to gain through marriage the security that her incompetent father is unable to provide.

Betty Flanagan, the last of the trio, is defined by exuberant devotion to America, young Captain Lawton, and strong drink. She represents the comic inverse of the melodramatic strain developed by the impetuously passionate Isabella, who is characterized by fervent devotion to America, ill-concealed infatuation for Peyton Dunwoodie, and an emotional intensity bordering on insanity. Despite Cooper's humorous treatment, Betty embodies a potential like Isabella's for tragedy. Only precariously maintaining shreds of feminine decorum in following the cavalry as cook and washerwoman, she loses caste because of her familiarity in the same way that Isabella does by revealing her unrequited love for Dunwoodie. And while Isabella is only spared a life of grief by a stray bullet, Betty is dismissed almost as summarily.

After the death of Lawton, Cooper abruptly drops her, apparently unable or unwilling to cope with the questions her freewheeling life raised for him about feminine loyalty, love, and morality.

When Cooper resurrected Betty in The Pioneers as the wife of the retired Sergeant Hollister (another character first introduced in

The Spy), he modified her personality considerably. In the latter book she serves more drinks than she consumes and delivers more lectures

than tirades. Only her bravery and outspoken common sense remain

unchanged, as in the Christmas Eve tavern scene, when she denounces a lawyer's urging people to sue Judge Temple, and in the scene of the attack on the cave, when she berates her husband for running away from

battle and losing her an opportunity for looting. But Cooper remained

uneasy with the strength and independence of even his new version of

Betty. In future works those older women who exhibit even a small

portion of her spirit usually fight for their children rather than for themselves alone, as she does.

In The Pilot, rsrs" in The Spy, women again represent a broad range of political faiths, indicated by careful color symbolism.

Corresponding in many respects to Sarah Wharton is the blonde Scotswoman

Alice Dunscombe, whom John Paul Jones has rejected some six years earlier.

At the other extreme, corresponding to Isabella Singleton at least in her brunette coloring and the depth of her devotion to the American cause, is Katherine Plowden, who remains in England with her Tory guardian

Colonel Howard only because she is too young to leave him legally and because she loves her cousin Cecilia Howard. Cecilia, Colonel Howard's niece and ward, stands between Alice and Katherine, as Frances Wharton stands between Sarah and Isabella; her black hair and blue eyes combine

Alice's blonde coloring and Katherine's dark.

Each of these three women must cope with conflicting loyalties.

Alice has been rejected by John Paul Jones but continues to love him even while she disagrees with his cause. Katherine commits herself to 85 following Richard Barnstable, the American sailor whom she loves, but remains unwilling completely to sever her ties to her guardian and to

Cecilia. And Cecilia, while an American patriot and in love with

Edward Griffith, an American naval officer, also loves her Tory uncle too much to reject him, even though his political prejudices threaten her happiness because he wishes her to marry a villainous turncoat.

As in previous novels, women cause the men they love pain as well as happiness. Alice elicits from Jones regrets about sacrificing her love to his ambition, while Katherine and Cecilia distress Colonel

Howard with their loyalty to America. All three also have ambiguous effects on the behavior of men. Though ostensibly a story of war and battles, The Pilot actually revolves around women. As the novel opens, the American sloop Ariel makes landfall to take on John Paul Jones, whose professed reason for being on this dangerous coast is to capture

English hostages, a purpose for which any other isolated location would have served as well. Though Cooper refuses to be explicit, Jones seems to have chosen this particular place in order to see Alice again. In a similar manner Katherine and Cecilia attract Barnstable and Griffith, who, diverted by a desire to see their mistresses, not only fail to take the intended hostages but are themselves captured. Then Katherine and Cecilia inadvertently produce more disaster by causing a quarrel between Barnstable and Griffith, who cannot agree on whether or not to secure the persons of their mistresses by making them prisoners.

The conflict between what actually happens in the novel and the demands of its formal plot, which revolves around military tactics, is 86 usually regarded as a major weakness. James Grossman Is offended to

find Cooper turning the American Revolution into the Siege of Troy, with

men using war as an excuse for winning wives instead of for gaining

political ends. John P. McWilliams, Jr., concludes that the pilot1s

actions are "petty and absurd," while Donald Ringe feels that the ease

with which Jones is deflected from his true mission justifies Colonel

Howard'is fear of rebellion as essentially an ungovernable force. James

Franklin Beard argues more subtly that this displacement of public

interests by private ones indicates the limits to human accomplishment:

". . . man may fail to achieve his ultimate objective, as the American

expedition fails to attain its original goal, and still wrest a human

victory from defeat" in the reunion of two pairs of.lovers.12

Women and the Discovery of the Self

In Cooper's early novels this "human victory" usually begins with a woman's self-discovery. In Precaution and "Imagination" the

heroines learn how mistaken they have been about others. "Imagination,"

which with "Heart" makes up the Tales for Fifteen, stresses that women need to be clearsighted and flexible. Its satiric plot revolves

around the education of young Julia Warren, who, unlike her sensible

cousin Katherine Emmerson, is misled by an overly romantic imagination

into wild fantasies about a lover disguising himself as a coachman to

follow her on a trip. Only when she discovers that the man is actually

12Grossman, pp. 38-39; McWilliams, p. 70; Ringe, James Fenimore Cooper (New York: Twayne, 1962), pp. 38-40; Beard, p. 93. 87

"an ugly wretch" of a servant does she abandon her dream and her

dangerous flights of fancy (p. 122). Simplistic though it is, this

story utilizes themes to which Cooper returned again and again: the

need to penetrate beneath appearances to reality and the ease with

which one's preconceptions can interfere with this process.

In both "Imagination" and Precaution perception is a basic

problem for Cooper's women. The complexity of a woman's nature may

unbalance her to such an extent that she loses touch with reality,

as the overly imaginative Julia does when she nearly throws herself on

a deformed servant because she lacks self-discipline and common sense.

In the earlier work Emily errs not through romanticizing others, but

through the opposite problem, too quickly believing the worst of them;

lacking any firm proof, she assumes that the man she loves is a

seducer without asking him for his side of the story. Emily is both commonsensical and disciplined, but these traits compound the evil

effects of her erroneous conclusion rather than mitigate them, enabling

her to repress her emotions so completely that she does not attempt to

communicate with George Denbigh until after the mistake is rectified.

Once Denbigh's true identity as Lord Pendennyss is revealed, however, and the real seducer discovered, all problems evaporate, and Emily and

George become engaged. While the heroines of these early works imperil their future happiness by making false assumptions about men, the danger is averted merely by the discovery of the truth.

Instead of making simple errors of judgment, Cooper's later heroines discover how acting on an incomplete understanding of the truth 88 has ambiguous results, necessitating further action, which may itself produce more ambiguity unless the complexity of life has been taken into account. Especially in The Spy and The Pioneers the heroines become the agents of reconciliation and true justice when they learn how to mitigate the harm they have inadvertently caused. While their initial adherence to love and mercy paradoxically imperils those whom they wish to aid, Frances and Elizabeth discover how to transform these qualities into the more viable virtues of truth and justice by balancing conflicting loyalties and acting in the face of opposition. Their first step is to learn that what passes for justice in this world is almost inevitably unjust and that true justice may be won only by circumventing some of the demands of the law. In spite of Cooper's lifelong defense of legal systems as essential to the stability of society, he never saw the law as sacrosanct and, in fact, viewed it as a necessary but very imperfect mechanism that too often works counter to its intended purpose of dispensing justice. Standing outside this legal system, not recognized by it as people in their own right, his women can defy the law in ways impossible for men and can substitute for the harshness of earthly justice the mercy of a divine dispensation.

The most active woman in The Spy, Frances Wharton, embodies divided loyalties and the potential to destory as well as save those she loves. She stands at the center of both the plot—which involves her brother's arrest as a spy, his condemnation, and his escape—and the structuring theme—the accidental nature of political loyalty and the consequent arbitrary nature of the justice of any group. Her weak-willed 89 father attempts to preserve his neutrality by retreating from British- held New York City to his country home in the neutral ground of

Westchester County. At heart a Tory sympathizer but lacking the courage to proclaim his loyalty, Mr. Wharton demonstrates the futility and the destructiveness of a lack of firm commitment. The contrast between

Frances and her father reveals that Cooper demands a choice between conflicting duties or an acceptance of both equally; shilly-shallying is not the way to cope with opposing demands.

Whereas Frances gains stature and becomes increasingly effective by refusing to abandon either her brother or her fiance, even when they seek each other's lives, Mr. Wharton becomes more and more equivocal as the novel progresses. The most obvious sign of his decline is his ill- considered desire to gain a son-in-law, any son-in-law, to give his daughters the protection he cannot provide. But instead of securing their safety, the hasty wedding of Sarah and Colonel Wellmere produces disaster. As the bridegroom is revealed to be a bigamist and forced to flee, Sarah collapses into madness and Mr. Wharton himself falls into irreversible senility, leaving his family more unprotected than ever before.

In contrast to her father and sister, Frances is able to remain loyal to both her Tory family and the revolutionary struggle of her native land and her fiance, even when the conflict between these two duties appears irreconcilable and when her ovm attempts to support both seem merely destructive. Her first mistake occurs soon after her brother Henry, a British captain, disguises himself with the help of the 90

spy Harvey Birch and passes through American lines into neutral

Westchester County, which during his visit is invaded by the Americans.

With their house surrounded by Virginia cavalry commanded by Peyton

Dunwoodie, Frances makes an error in judgment, vainly attempting to

prevent her brother's arrest by hastily and clumsily disguising him.

But because he is captured in disguise, Henry is arrested as a spy, who is subject to capital punishment, instead of as a prisoner of war, who could not legally be executed.

Frances inadvertently further endangers her brother at his

trial. As his hope for an acquittal ebbs, Henry has her called to the

stand "with an indefinite expectation of assistance .from the loneliness of his sister" (Ch. xxvi, pp. 319-20). Her beauty does sway a court

reluctant to condemn, but her testimony that he communicated with

Harvey Birch ensures a guilty verdict, the significance of which Kay

Seymour House downplays, arguing that in testifying against her brother

Frances exhibits "no more than a virtuous dedication to abstract truth" rather than Jeanie Dean's religious commitment in The Heart of

Midlothian.13 The question of the quality of Frances's adherence to

truth is beside the point, however, because Cooper's concern in this novel is not the power religion may exercise over the individual but

the difficulties of discovering and upholding any absolutes in an

ambiguous world. While Frances knows Harvey, a top American spy,

simply as a peddler and a neighbor, all the American officers except

13p. 28. Washington himself believe him to be the most dangerous and powerful of the secret agents of the British. Thus the court's discovery that

Henry has met with Birch is in itself sufficient reason to condemn the young man to execution within twenty-four hours. In vain does Frances ask for an appeal to Washington, who upholds the sentence because "he is but the guardian of the law" (Ch. xxvii, p. 330).

Military justice has proven its imperfections, as McWilliams argues.1 ** Frances has condemned her innocent brother because she believes truth must produce justice and so has not concealed Henry's meeting with Birch. What she has failed to realize is the elusive nature of truth. Not knowing all the facts, she gives evidence that works against her brother. The court itself does not know Birch is a loyal American and so condemns Henry for associating with him. But because the truth cannot be made known without destroying the spy's effectiveness and seriously damaging the American cause, the unjust sentence paradoxically becomes part of a larger struggle for a truer justice.

After the trial, once Frances realizes that the imperfection of human law does not destroy the validity of the concepts of truth and justice, she can effectively work surreptitiously to save the brother she has endangered. Her reparation involves two steps, the first demanding simple action and the second necessitating a painful decision. Only after Henry's escape does she act, using discoveries

1,fpp. 56-58. 92 that she has already made and that indicate her ability to grasp reality more quickly than those around her. Because she alone has seen

Birch's camouflaged hut and has recognized Birch reconnoitering before assuming the disguise of the preacher, she knows who has helped Henry escape and where the fugitives will spend the night. Resolving to warn them of the danger of pursuit, Frances heroically ascends the mountain in the dark but at the hut discovers neither her brother nor the peddler, who have not yet had time to reach their destination, but

Mr. Harper—that is, Washington—who tells her she must urge Henry to flee and then delay for two hours any pursuit by the American troops.

Shortly afterwards, she persuades Birch and Henry to start immediately for New York City.

Up to this point Frances has had only to act covertly and has not experienced any painful conflict between what she wishes to achieve and her love of justice and truth. In her second, crucial effort such a conflict does develop. The simplest way for Frances to delay

Dunwoodie would be for her to conceal the need for delay and to win time by marrying him on the spot. She nearly agrees to an immediate wedding without any explanation about what its timing would mean to her:

In fact, the temptation was mighty. Indeed, there seemed no other way to detain Dunwoodie until the fatal hour had elapsed. . . . Perhaps there was also a fleeting thought of the possibility of an eternal separation from her lover, should he proceed and bring back her brother to punishment. It is difficult at all times to analyze human emotions, and they pass through the sensitive heart of a woman with the rapidity and nearly with the vividness of lightning. (Ch. xxxi, p. 386) 93 In this quotation women in general and Frances in particular embody the complexity of human motivation and action; if she were immediately to marry her lover, Frances would not only be acting on her brother's behalf but on her own as well.

Yet Frances hesitates to answer Dunwoodie's importunities not so much because she doubts the purity of her motives as because she is unwilling to conceal them. Superficially there seems to be the same kind of conflict between subterfuge and truth that previously necessitated covert action, but actually the situation has changed fundamentally. Subterfuge and disguise have proven essential when the truth, especially the truth about Birch, could not fully be made known to all parties. Under such circumstances, Frances learned that honesty may actually harm the cause of justice. But despite the frequent injustices of Cooper's world, transcendent justice and truth can be achieved, as Frances now shows by refusing to found her marriage on a lie, however expedient. Confessing to Dunwoodie that she has seen Henry since his flight and that delay is essential for him, she asks her lover if he will still marry her immediately.

France's choice of truth over subterfuge is justified when

Dunwoodie seizes this opportunity to marry. When, after the wedding ceremony, a message arrives ordering that the pursuit of Henry be aban­ doned, her collaboration with Washington is complete. The two hours that she has gained were not simply to provide Henry and Birch with a head start but to give the commander-in-chief time to return to headquarters where he could countermand the order to capture the two supposed spies.

By learning when to act secretly and when to act openly, Frances has 94 saved her brother, gained a husband, and discovered that amid the exigencies of imperfect human justice partial truths prove dangerous but the whole truth can save.

Like Frances, Elizabeth Temple is gradually initiated into the devious ways of an ambiguous world so that eventually she too can become the agent for a justice that transcends the imperfections of human law. The crux of the problem comes in the confrontation between

Elizabeth and her father about the fine and imprisonment to which

Judge Temple has sentenced Leatherstocking for resisting a search warrant. Temple defends his strictness on the grounds that, even though an injustice may have been done in this case, leniency would undermine the meaning of laws in general and so destroy a fundamental bulwark of civilized life. When his daughter protests, the judge tells her that

"the sanctity of the laws must be respected" and "that the laws alone remove us from the condition of the savages." As she remains obdurate, he sends her to Natty with more than enough money to pay the fine but continues to dismiss her position, telling her, "Thou talkest of what thou dost not understand .... There thou talkest as a woman ....

Thou has reason, Bess, and much of it, too, but thy heart lies too near thy head" (Ch. xxxv, pp. 396-97). What Temple rejects is the feminine reliance on emotion instead of reason and on mercy instead of justice.

Initially her father's unquestioning supporter, Elizabeth has come to see by this time the imperfections of the laws he extols and the need to supplement them with a true justice emanating from mercy rather than from power. Her education into the weaknesses of her father's position has begun gradually with a recognition of the joys of wilderness life. Unlike the shrinking Louisa, Elizabeth delights in horseback excursions into the forest and in canoeing with Leather- stocking as he spear-fishes for a giant trout. Eager as she is to embrace the pleasures of nature, she is not immune to its dangers, the most pressing of which brings home to her the need for an authority beyond that of human law. Like Benjamin-Pump, the judge's steward who is reborn as Natty's faithful follower when the hunter saves him from drowning, Elizabeth is reborn when Natty shoots a panther springing to attack her. As Cooper puts it, "the death of her terrible enemy appeared to Elizabeth like a resurrection from her own grave"

(Ch. xxviii, p. 318). She herself tells Oliver Edwards, "Your friend, the Leather-Stocking, has now become my friend, Edwards; I have been thinking how I can best serve him" (Ch. xxxi, p. 354). This desire to serve Leatherstocking leads Elizabeth to divide her allegiances, adding to her love for her father an equally deep loyalty to the hunger. Like

Frances, she finds that she can love the representatives of two conflicting orders and that she must strive to transcend the conflict between them.

As in The Spy such a conflict cannot be resolved by the law, which is presented sometimes comically and sometimes ironically, indicating its inability to address the deepest problems of life. One lawyer, Hiram Dolittle, is totally unscrupulous, while his friend,

"Squire" Lippet, is a troublemonger who tries to encourage both Dr. Todd and Oliver to sue Judge Temple. Even the established lawyer, Dirck Van der School,- is overly cautious and devious. In one ludicrous conversation with Oliver, his suspicions of the young man lead him into such circumlocutions that he cannot even say "Good morning, Mr. Edwards" without the addition of some thirty words (Ch. xxv, p. 289). And when he acts as public prosecutor at Natty's trial, Van der School's summary to the jury is "an abridgment of the testimony, recounted in such a manner as utterly to confuse the faculties of his worthy listeners" (Ch. xxxiii, p. 382).

Aside from the question of the justice of his sentence, the judge's commitment to legality further harms Natty when in the crucial aftermath of the jailbreak he is too absorbed in a conference with

Van der School to realize that Richard Jones has exceeded his authority as sheriff by ordering out the militia to pursue the old hunter

(Ch. xxxix, p. 446). The judge only learns what has happened in the nick of time and arrives at Natty's cave just as the troops storm its barricade to deman, "Is not the law sufficient to protect itself?" and to call Richard's posse comitatus "a posse of demons" (Ch. xxxix, p. 454). Although earlier in the novel Temple has emphasized that the law has been perverted in the Reign of Terror as the Jacobins "continue those murders which are dignified by the name of executions" (Ch. xiv, p. 159), even during the attack on the cave he does not realize that the law is not "sufficient to protect itself," that all too easily it lends the sanction of legality to brutal acts of naked power.

Not the judge but Elizabeth recognizes the limitations of the law and seeks to redress them through subterfuge. Although at least two critics have praised her self-reliance and initiative in assisting

Natty's jailbreak and in bringing him his powder, they have not con­ nected these actions to the larger role she plays in establishing a justice higher than earthly laws.15 After Natty's trial, when the judge condescendingly says that she "talkest as a woman" whose "heart lies too near thy head," Elizabeth argues that "those laws that condemn a man like the Leather-Stocking to so severe a punishment, for an offence that even I must think very venial, cannot be perfect in them­ selves." Much of the rest of this conversation defines the divided nature of Elizabeth's loyalties. First she tells her father, "I see the difficulty of your situation, dear sir, . . . but in appreciating the offence of poor Natty, I cannot separate the minister of the law from the man. ... I know Natty to be innocent, and, thinking so, I must think all wrong who oppress him" (Ch. xxxv, pp. 397, 396-97).

Then when Temple asks if this condemnation includes him, she avoids answering, not because she hesitates to embrace Natty's cause but because she is committed both to it and to that of her father and seeks to reconcile the two. While the predominant critical opinion is that in this argument Cooper clearly sides with the judge,16 the denouement of the novel reveals not only that the author exonerates Elizabeth of

15Fussell, p. 37; House, pp. 40-42.

16See Robert H. Zoellner, "Conceptual Ambivalence in Cooper's Leatherstocking," American Literature, 31 (1960), 403-05; Maxwell, p. 118; Dekker, pp. 56-58; McWilliams, p. 122; Smith, p. 63; Ringe, Cooper, p. 35. 98 blame, as David Howard argues, but that she functions, in Joel Porte's words, as "an American Madonna, ... a gentle mediatrix for the harsh legal judgments of Judge Temple."17

Elizabeth acts on her divided loyalties during the jailbreak when she willingly promises not to betray Natty and Benjamin Pump, eagerly agrees to bring Natty a cannister of powder, and only asks to retire before they depart in order to preserve her allegiance to her father because "it should not be said that you escaped in the presence of the daughter of Judge Temple" (Ch. xxxv, pp. 405-06). Then she enables the fugitives to avoid detection. When Benjamin's drunkenness threatens to lead to their speedy capture—and Oliver's as well—

Elizabeth suggests the successful expedient of laying Benjamin in a cart where no one will think to look and starting the oxen moving.

Encouraged by Oliver's exclamation, "your advice has saved me once already; I will follow it to death," she further advises him and Leather- stocking to flee across the lake in her father's boat and removes

Oliver's scruples about trespassing upon the judge's property rights by proclaiming herself accountable for its disappearance (Ch. xxxv, p. 408). In legal terms Elizabeth makes herself an accessory after the fact, but in another sense she serves a higher justice than that of the judge.

17Howard, "James Fenimore Cooper!s Leatherstocking Tales: 'without a cross,'" in Tradition and Tolerance in Nineteenth-century Fiction, ed. David Howard, John Lucas, and John Goode (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 22; Porte, The Romance in America (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1969), p. 9. 99

The final purgation that shall reveal the whole truth and

prepare the way for true justice begins with Elizabeth's bringing Natty

his powder. Like Frances, she climbs a mountain and at the summit receives instruction from an older man. Looking for Natty on top of the Vision, she discovers Indian John, adorned for one last time with his savage ornaments and composedly awaiting death. At first she treats him condescendingly, but then, in a quick turnabout paralleling the shift in her attitude toward Natty, she recognizes his worth as he begins to relate the history of the Mohicans and to challenge Judge Temple's title to the land. This lecture leads her to question not only her father's administration of justice but also the manner in which he acquired his wealth. Although she continues her dual loyalty, defend­ ing her father as "just and good," she also immediately probes the mysteries and possible inequities of the past by asking John who Oliver

Edwards really is. Before he has time to answer, the fire bursts out around them, Oliver himself appears, searching for John, and Natty arrives, looking for Elizabeth.

That John, Natty, Oliver, and Elizabeth nearly die in this forest fire is symbolically appropriate because it represents the destructiveness of perversions of justice. It has been set by the posse trying to recapture Natty and Benjamin and has spread quickly in dried branches that the settlers abandoned when they chopped.down trees for firewood but took only the trunks (Ch. xxxviii, p. 432;

Ch; xxxvii, p. 423). While the posse represents a corruption of civil 100 law, as McWilliams has noted,18 the settlers' wasteful manner of wood- gathering represents a comparable violation of the natural law by which Natty and the Indians have lived. But because it is in the ambiguous nature of Cooper's fallen world for things to work by paradox, the devastating power of the fire, instead of annihilating true justice, serves as the agent for re-establishing it. Suffering not from his burns but because the fire has destroyed the last remnants of his desire to live, old John dies, anticipating rebirth in "the land of the just" or, according to Natty, judgment "by a righteous Judge, and by no laws that's made to suit times, and new ways" on a judgment day when

"justice shall be law, and not power" (Ch. xxxviii, pp. 437, 441;

Ch. xli, p. 476). For the survivors, too, justice is at hand, prepared for by the revelation of Oliver's secrets when he confesses his love to

Elizabeth and reveals how he has hidden his grandfather, Major

Effingham, in Natty's hut because he has despaired of making good the

Effinghams' valid claims to Judge Temple's lands.

Women and the Education of Men

More so than in any of Cooper's later works, most men in the fiction before 1825 learn to penetrate the ambiguity of the world and to accept the feminine principles they discover. In Precaution the problem is the simple one of a man's needing to recognize and abandon his destructive prejudices about women. George Denbigh nearly wrecks the happiness of himself and Emily by concealing his title, Earl of

18pp. 123-24. 101

Pendennyss, largely out of a mistrust of women. Horrified that his mother's youthful desire to marry into thenobility stimulated her to such coquetry that she drove a man mad, Denbigh conceals his rank from

Emily out of fear that he will be loved for it instead of for himself alone. His deception almost results in disaster when Emily and her aunt mistakenly conclude that he is trying to hide past seduction attempts. But by overcoming his fear of women's ambitions, Denbigh learns that Emily truly loves him, regardless of his station. In a similar vein Oliver Edwards learns from Elizabeth to slough off his prejudices and to forgive her father for the sufferings of the

Effingham family. As he tells her during the forest fire, "I have been driven to the woods in despair; but your society has tamed the lion within me. ... If I have forgotten my wrongs, 'twas you that taught me charity" (Ch. xxxvii, p. 429). In these two early novels, then, a change in a man's attitude is often sufficient to rectify past errors.

Usually, however, men face more complex situations involving conflicts in their loyalties. In The Spy Peyton Dunwoodie must learn to accept Frances's position by realizing that he cannot alone save his friend Henry Wharton. Trying to procure Henry's release by appealing to Washington, he berates Frances for abetting her brother's escape because now, instead of aiding his friend, he will have to recapture him:

You make me seem your enemy; I, who would cheerfully shed the last drop of blood in your service. ... it is not my country, but my honor, that requires the sacrifice. Has he not fled from a guard of my own corps? But for this, I might have been spared the 102 blow! ... We shall see, before to-morrow's sun, who will presume to hint that the beauty of the sister furnished a mask to conceal the brother! (Ch. xxxi, pp. 383-84)

At this point Dunwoodie still feels compelled to sacrifice love to honor.

When he welcomes Frances's explanation that the time consumed by their wedding will enable Henry to escape, he changes his attitude, using his marriage as a means of affirming his love for Henry as well as for his bride. No wonder, than, that Cooper has Frances, rather than Dunwoodie, supply the wedding ring. Earlier, at Sarah's ill-fated wedding, Colonel Wellmere, like Dunwoodie, has had no ring. Sarah,

Frances, and their aunt all remember that the dead mother's wedding band is readily available but do not mention it because "it was the business of the bridegroom, from time immemorial, to furnish this indispensable to wedlock" that symbolizes the groom's love for the bride, not hers for him (Ch. xxi, p. 254). When it comes her turn to be married, however, Frances gives Dunwoodie her mother's ring. She does not need for him to give her a pledge of his sincerity because he has amply demonstrated his love already by delaying his pursuit of her brother.

To an even greater extent than Peyton Dunwoodie, Judge Temple eventually accepts feminine values. Though McWilliams is correct in affirming that in The Pioneers imperfect law must be tempered by gentlemanly idealism, the argument that "Temple exemplifies Cooper's definition of a just judge" whose "principles of justice never waver 103 either in theory or in application" is incomplete at best because

McWilliams ignores the role of Elizabeth in the development of the law theme and the fact that Natty's fate is not determined by the judge's sentence.19 When Natty is captured in the scrimmage at the cave and

Oliver is revealed to be an Effingham, Temple abandons his strict reliance on the cold formalities of the law. He wins Oliver's good will by showing the young man that he has altered his will to leave half his property to the Effingham heirs, despite the fact that his legal title to the whole is perfectly clear. The subsequent marriage of Oliver and Elizabeth extends and validates the Effingham claim and, according to Thomas Philbrick and others, ushers in a new social order superior to that established by the judge.20

In a similar act of justice towards Natty, Judge Temple adopts

Elizabeth's position that the administration of the law must be tempered by mercy. Although he has Natty and Benjamin returned to jail, the judge does not let the matter rest there but pays the fine himself and sends to the governor for a pardon for Leatherstocking because now "one of the chief concerns of Marmaduke was to reconcile the even conduct of a magistrate with the course that his feelings dictated to the criminals" (Ch. xli, p. 466). In this manner the judge redresses the imperfections of the law which he once supported so

19pp. 101-29; direct quotations are from pp. 116-17 and 118, n. 19.

20Philbrick, "Cooper's The Pioneers; Origins and Structure," PMLA, 79 (1964), 591-93; David W. Noble, The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden (New York: George Braziller, 1968), p. 16; David D. Stineback, Shifting World (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell Univ. Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1976), pp. 32-33. 104

absolutely. Finally it is the idealism of Elizabeth—not the legalisms

of the judge—that defines true justice. The Pioneers, like The Spy,

ends by affirming the feminine virtues of love and mercy over the

masculine idols of reason and duty.

Justice Thwarted

After the important roles played by Frances in educating

Peyton Dunwoodie and Elizabeth in educating her father and Oliver

Edwards, Cooper de-emphasized the ability of women to achieve compro­ mises and, as his second period developed, began in The Pilot to

present women as increasingly passive and men as increasingly rigid.

Although the novel is dominated by three woman characters, none is able to influence the outoome of events decisively. The most Katherine

and Cecilia can do is serve as peacemakers in the quarrel between

Barnstable and Griffith that they have themselves unwittingly precipi­

tated. Katherine declares a willingness to abandon her guardian for

Barnstable, but her ability to make clear-cut choices and firm commitments has no more effect on the action of the plot than does

Cecilia's passivity. Cecilia does not even actively choose to follow her lover to the American warship but goes with Griffith under duress; when he arrests her uncle, she refuses to abandon the old man. Even when she marries Griffith, her dying uncle has to insist on the wedding to insure her a protector after he is gone. Partially because her

loyalties are so evenly split, Cecilia is immobilized. Unlike Frances

and Elizabeth, who find divided allegiances a spur to action, she

cannot act for herself. 105 Even more than Cecilia, Alice Dunscombe exemplifies how emotional paralysis results from an inability to resolve conflicting loyalties. She is still in love with John Paul Jones, but despite his coming to see her again finds that she is unable to win him from dreams of glory back to domestic life. He tells her that her inability to appreciate the struggle of America for freedom belies the early promise she showed of being capable of "noble sentiments." Her defense is that "I have lived and thought only as a woman, as became my sex and station, . . . and when it shall be necessary for me to live and think otherwise, I should wish to die." Jones vehemently rejects this feminine position: "Ay, there lie the first seeds of slavery! A dependent woman is sure to make the mother of craven and abject wretches, who dishonor the name of man!" (Ch. xxxi, p. 373). While on the surface Jones appears to be denouncing the same femininity that

Peyton Dunwoodie and Oliver Edwards embrace, Alice differs significantly from Frances and Elizabeth in being passive whereas they are active; it is this passivity more than femininity per se that Jones rejects. This novel does signal a certain shift in Cooper's attitude, however, in that not even the vivacious Katherine undertakes the kind of active roles that Frances and Elizabeth play. In their powerlessness, all the women in The Pilot foreshadow the second stage of Cooper's develop­ ment.

As Cooper gradually abandoned the primarily positive view of feminine ambiguity he held before 1825, his woman characters became 106 increasingly dangerous and less able to act positively, while his men became increasingly reluctant to embrace the contradictions women represent, though usually this reluctance results in tragedy. These developments produce a significant shift in tone in the next group of novels, beginning with Lionel Lincoln in 1825 and continuing through

The Headsman in 1833. New elements of Gothicism, related to this shifting depiction of women, now permeate his work. Passive though they are, women like Alice Munro in The Last of the Mohicans and Inez

Middleton in The Prairie are highly prized, compelling men into brutal conflicts to win possession of them. When women do act, their influence is often pernicious, and complex and sympathetic women like Cora Munro may be doomed by the inability of men to accept them fully. Most of the men of this period are inflexible, unable to make the successful compromises between masculine and feminine values that previously enabled Peyton Dunwoodie and Oliver Edwards to win happiness.

Hence an air of fatality hangs over many of the novels in this second group. Some have happy endings, but often happiness eludes almost everyone, as in The Bravo, or at least is severely tempered by the sacrifices through which it must be purchased, as in The Water-

Witch and The Heidenmauer. The ambiguity of women, representing all that is mysterious and compelling in life, comes more and more to the forefront, even while the women themselves cannot act effectively.

Whereas the positive side of women's dual nature dominated Cooper's novels before 1825, after that time his emphasis began to fall on their negative aspects. CHAPTER 4

A DARK COMPLEXITY, 1825-1833

The relative passivity of the women in The Pilot signals a new development in Cooper's handling of his female characters. In the next stage of his career his treatment of women increasingly stressed the negative aspects of femininity, though he never doubted that under certain circumstances women could work for good. These developments coincided with stressful times in Cooper's life and with his residence in Europe. In 1823, as he was working on The Pilot after the great successes of The Spy and The Pioneers, a series of personal reverses occurred. Financial losses led to forced sales of his inherited property and even to the seizure (but not the actual sale) of his house­ hold goods. In 1822, the preceeding year, he had become temporarily estranged from his wife's family, the DeLanceys, about a farm that had been left to him but put in trust to prevent its being held for his debts. The house he was building near Cooperstown burned in July of

1833, and tragedy struck the next month with the death of twenty-one- month-old Fenimore, at the time Cooper's only son. Shortly thereafter

Cooper himself suffered a debilitating sunstroke.1 In these unpropi- tious circumstances Cooper completed The Pilot and made plans to move

1James Franklin Beard, ed. The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), 84-85.

107 108 his family to Europe, where from 1826 through 1833 they lived a relatively isolated life turned inward upon themselves.

The nine novels of the 1825-1833 period are more somber than the earlier works, perhaps partly because of Cooper's personal diffi­ culties and the isolation of living in foreign countries. Lionel

Lincoln (1825), ostensibly a story of the American Revolution, combines realistic war scenes with a Gothic plot. It was followed in 1826 by

The Last of the Mohicans and in 1827 by The Prairie. Also in 1827

Cooper published The Red Rover, a nautical adventure about a pirate and the officer who tries to capture him by becoming his first mate.

In 1829 The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish appeared; it is the story of a

Puritan family whose daughter is stolen by Indians. Cooper partially reversed the mood of this grim work in 1830 with The Water Witch with its smuggler and his apparently supernatural ship. In 1831 he produced the first of his trilogy of European problem novels, The Bravo, set during the corrupt oligarchy of eighteenth-century Venice. The

Heidenmauer (1832) explores power struggles in a sixteenth-century

German principality, while The Headsman (1833) attacks a hereditary caste system in early eighteenth-century Switzerland.2

At least three of these works, The Last of the Mohicans, The

Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, and The Bravo, are Cooper's only true tragedies; his other novels seldom develop the hopeless sense of the inevitability of loss that pervades these books. Much of this failure of the author's

2Subsequent references will be to the Mohawk Edition of the Works of James Fenimore Cooper (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, [1895- 96]) and will appear parenthetically in the text. 109 initial optimism is reflected in the women characters. Whereas in his works before 1825 women could learn to act efficaciously by coming to understand their own complexity and that of the fallen world and could educate men to beneficent action, in these later novels women are almost totally passive and are rarely capable, whatever their inten­ tions, of leading men to good. Even admirable women, like Cora Munro in The Last of the Mohicans, remain highly complex figures, but Cooper no longer focuses on their learning to turn the dualism of their own natures to positive uses, the ability that makes Frances Wharton in

The Spy and Elizabeth Temple in The Pioneers so effective. Instead,

Cora, who typifies the women characters of this period, is to all intents and purposes almost as passive as her practically infantile half-sister Alice. While women now stand at the symbolic centers of

Cooper's novels, developing much of the meaning, they play few impor­ tant active roles in the plots.

The primary function of women during this period is to symbolize the valuable, in its broadest sense. While often passive themselves, they frequently motivate the actions of others who desire them. Now Cooper often presents women as pursued or entrapped, held captive by such diverse forces as evil Indians, squatters, and the state of Venice. In emphasizing the pursuit of women by villains

(as well as by heroes) and their constant imprisonment, he at first appears to be adopting the Gothic mode, some elements of which he does stress during this period in novels like Lionel Lincoln with its cursed family and The Water Witch with its apparently supernatural ship. 110

While the pursuit and entrapment of women are standard conventions of the Gothic novel and while Cooper was as fascinated by human evil as ever Ann Radcliffe or Charles Brockden Brown were, his vision is finally not truly Gothic because, despite all its confusion between appearance and reality, his world is ultimately knowable and rationally organized; it is not the irrational, malignant world of the Gothicists.3

Cooper's use of Gothic elements therefore does not indicate that he felt his female victims deserved their treatment or that he conceived of them as evil.

Usually Cooper uses the victimization of women to condemn the shortcomings of others and to show the negative results of rejecting complexity. The Last of the Mohicans, for instance, is organized around a series of pursuits and captures of Alice and Cora Munro, who is killed when Hawkeye, uneasy about the ambiguous potential for racial union that she symbolizes, fails to commit himself wholeheartedly to her rescue. Gertrude Grayson in The Red Rover is similarly an object to be protected or victimized, as are young Ruth in The Wept of Wish- ton-Wish and the heiress Violetta Tiepolo in The Bravo. In The

Prairie the entrapment motif coalesces with the pursuit and capture motifs in the image of the imprisonment of Inez in a little covered wagon, the center of the Bush caravan, the object of the intense curiosity of Dr. Bat and the trapper, and the magnet that draws her

3For a discussion of the conventions of the Gothic novel, see Richard Sam DiMaggio, "The Tradition of the American Gothic Novel," Diss. University of Arizona 1976, pp. 1-14. Ill husband ever deeper into the wastelands of the west. Like Violetta,

Inez is particularly an object of desire because of her precocious sexuality. Though scarcely more than girls, they, like Cora, embody the life force.

The union of sensuality and passivity in many of the women of this period is one indication of Cooper's increasing emphasis on feminine ambiguity, an emphasis discussed in the second section of this chapter. But despite his preoccupation with feminine complexity

Cooper never came to believe that the duality of women was bad. Rather, he used it as a test of his other characters. The third section discusses the negative consequences of rejecting feminine ambiguity with the first part of the section showing how crimes against women have evil ramifications for all involved, while the second part shows how the inability to accept women reveals the inadequacies of several of Cooper's superficially good characters, especially Hawkeye. The final section further indicates that Cooper defined rejection of women as evil and acceptance of them as good by exploring his use of double plots in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish and The Last of the Mohicans.

Although Cooper no longer believed, as he had before 1825, that women could personally avert evil through self-knowledge and the education of others, he nevertheless still held to the vital importance of penetrating the confusion of appearances that femininity presents in order to understand reality and to work for good. The positive value that Cooper found in women of this period—their potential for unifying 112

disparate groups, whether these be sundered families or diverse

cultures—finally arises directly out of the quality that defines

feminine nature, dualism.

The Metaphors of Complexity

Between 1825 and 1833 Cooper became increasingly preoccupied with the union of good and evil in all people. As he said in the preface to the 1832 London edition of Lionel Lincoln, "he who thoroughly understands human nature is not to learn that the most opposite qualities are frequently the inhabitants of the same breast.uh Because of this new preoccupation with dualism in general, Cooper began to stress feminine complexity in ways he had only hinted at in his earlier work. Twice women in the novels after 1824 have such ambiguous personalities that even their sex is in doubt as they assume masculine disguises. Far more commonly Cooper returned to his earlier techniques of pairing fair and dark women with a new stress on their opposing personalities. He also began to use race as a symbol for the disturb­ ing side of femininity, occasionally making his women literally of mixed blood but more often simply using racial terminology to describe them. This.symbolic use of race clarifies the connection between feminine sexuality and those aspects of womanhood Cooper found most troubling because the racial motif brings up the problem of the role of

**Quoted in Arvid Schulenberger, Cooper's Theory of Fiction, Univ. of Kansas Humanities Studies, No. 32 (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1955), p. 26. 113 women in interracial or cross-cultural marriages. So, concurrently with a new use of racial terms, Cooper began to stress how women connect conflicting groups, especially the legitimate and the illegitimate or the overt and the covert. These four groups of symbols—masculine disguise, color, race, arid links between groups—all work together to emphasize Cooper's preoccupation during this period with the problem­ atic. aspects of femininity.

Although disguises are one of Cooper's favorite devices for indicating the difficulty of distinguishing between appearance and reality (he used them as early as The Spy and as late as Jack Tier), two of the.novels written between 1825 and 1833 are unique in present­ ing admirable young women disguised as men. (I will discuss the rather different use of a woman posing as a man in Jack Tier in chapter 8).

This convention is, of course, common in romance, especially in

Shakespeare, of whom Cooper was very fond.5 Cooper, however, used masculine disguise more frequently to symbolize the ambiguity of appearances than to advance his plots. Despite the symbolic importance of masculine disguise, it is not generally recognized that the cabin boy "Roderick" in The Red Rover is actually a woman, the devoted mistress of the title character. "Master Seadrift" in The Water Witch, actually the girl Eudora, has been misunderstood; for instance James Grossman feels that in revealing this character to be a woman Cooper was dodging

5W. B. Gates, "Cooper's Indebtedness to Shakespeare," PMLA, 67 (1952), 717, 720. 114 the sticky question of feminine propriety that he had introduced earlier in having his heroine abscond with Seadrift.6 But in placing the supposed men, Roderick and Master Seadrift, against more conven­ tional women, Cooper indicated not only the tremendous variety of which he felt femininity capable but also the deeply ambiguous nature of all women; in these cases he made women so ambiguous that even their sex is at least temporarily in doubt.

Aside from The Red Rover and The Water Witch, only The Pilot, that curiously transitional novel, has a young woman who poses as a man. And Katherine Plowden's masculine disguise differs from later ones in being assumed temporarily and for a specific purpose: at the beginning of the book she puts on a boy's clothes and slips away from her guardian's house to contact her lover secretly. In this incident a brief disguise is firmly linked to one of the important character­ istics of women in the early novels, the capacity to act on their own behalf. Not so with disguised women in the novels after 1825 in which the disguise reveals more about other people than it does about the women themselves.

In The Red Rover the disguise reveals the perceptiveness of

Mrs. Wyllys, the only one to discover the true sex of Roderick. Struck by something about "his" form and diminutive feet, Mrs. Wyllys starts back, shocked at having learned why Roderick is jealous of her ward

6James Fenimore Cooper ([New York]: William Sloane, 1949, rpt. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 73. 115

Gertrude Grayson, whom the Rover admires, although his interest is not reciprocated (Ch. xxii, p. 326). This discovery prepares the reader to accept Mrs. Wyllys's discovery of the complete truth about the other characters. Shortly before she finds that Roderick is really a woman she has recognized the Rover as her brother, and shortly thereafter she learns that the Rover's first mate is her long-lost son. Many years after the events of the main plot, as the Rover dies at the very end of the book, he is attended by an unnamed woman whom the alert reader recognizes, because of her devotion and general demeanor, as the former cabin boy Roderick. The identity of the two is never made explicit; only Mrs. Wyllys and the reader share the complete truth so that the world of The Red Rover maintains its ambiguous facade almost intact.

Roderick's masculine disguise is more as a symbol of how a few individuals may grasp truth despite the ambiguity cloaking reality than an important factor in the action of the novel. In The Water

Witch Seadrift indicates the extent to which ambiguity permeates our world. Eudora not only poses as "Seadrift," a man, but she and the admittedly pseudonymous "Thomas Tiller" persist almost until the end of the book in claiming that Seadrift is the feared smuggler, the

"Skimmer of the Seas" and maintain this claim even though Seadrift's slight build, exotic clothing, and winning ways contradict the popular notion that the Skimmer is deformed and bold (Ch. xi, p. 110). In being greatly at odds with reality, public opinion indicates the pervasiveness of ambiguity. 116

On another level, Eudora's masculine disguise and her claim

to be the Skimmer create important complications in the plot, compli­

cations that reveal how unreliable appearances are as guides for action

and how much closer to reality women are than men. Repeatedly Seadrift

and Alida build on accidents to discover the truth. Seadrift first

makes the acquaintance of the heiress when she mistakes the three

candles burning in the heiress's window for the alderman's sign that

he is ready to examine a new shipment of contraband. Alida, in her

turn, at first mistakes the visitor for her lover, Ludlow. Realizing

her error, she nevertheless does not repel the stranger and because of

her "female curiosity" abandons the dictates of "propriety, and even

prudence" (Ch. ix, p. 92). After Seadrift reveals her true identity,

Alida departs with her for a visit to the smuggler's ship.

This secret flight to sea of the two girls, the respected

heiress and the illegitimate, disguised smuggler, indicates how the

mysteries of the novel are overwhelmingly feminine. As Thomas Philbrick

points out, the sea itself is intensely feminine in this work, with

Tiller regarding it as a mistress. The ships too are feminine. The

crew of the Water Witch not only regard the boat as a mistress but speak of her in sexual terms; furthermore, they are not ruled by floggings or other harsh forms of masculine discipline but by the

pronouncements of the figurehead of the sea-green lady. Indeed, the

Water Witch herself becomes the quintessence of feminine freedom. She has no set purpose and goes anywhere and everywhere at her commander's 117 whim. Defying the rules and conventions of society (like Alida in visiting her), the ship "becomes the emblem of a freedom that Cooper conceives of as feminine" and "is resourceful, independent, spirited, daring—everything that orthodox criticism finds wanting in Cooper's female characters."7

Thomas Tiller has encouraged the flight of Seadrift and Alida because he thinks that a deeper acquaintance of the two will win

Alida to their side so that she will help them convince the alderman to accept Seadrift for what she truly is, his daughter. This is exactly the kind of revelation of the truth that a heroine of one of the early novels would have carried out with great success. But with the passivity Cooper forced on his women characters after 1825, Alida is not, finally, the agent for the restoration of justice that she might have been. Tiller never uses her to cajole her uncle into accepting his daughter but instead reveals the relationship himself near the end of the book. Alida's sojourn with Seadrift is less the instrument for the revelation of truth and the establishment of justice than it is a means of testing the characters of others. In keeping with the relatively somber mood of all the novels of this period, even in this, the most light-hearted one, men fail the test.

Ultimately Alida's reputation is cleared so that she and Ludlow may marry, but in the interim, the suspicions of all the men leave the

7James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 74-77. 118 happiness of her future in grave doubt. Ludlow, the Patroon of

Kinderhook, and her uncle are unable to accept the ambiguity of her actions, much less penetrate the mystery of Seadrift's masculine disguise. Nevertheless, they act as if they were certain of the truth and nearly reject Alida.

Placing the heroine Alida against the supposed villain Seadrift is merely one of the more extreme contrasts between types of femininity that Cooper utilized between 1825 and 1833. Another striking technique of the novels of this period, a technique originally introduced in the early works, is Cooper's frequent pairing of young heroines according to their coloring, contrasting a blonde and a brunette of strikingly different personalities. Such is the situation in Lionel Lincoln and, of course, in The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie. Although sometimes his dark women are more capable and passionate than his blondes, frequently Cooper reverses the traditional color symbolism, in

The Prairie, for instance, making dark Inez passive ad blonde Ellen capable. Critics, however, tend to neglect such complications and often focus on the use of color in novels like The Last of the Mohicans and The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish because many mistakenly assume that in these novels Cooper links passivity and virtue with blondness and capability and evil with darkness.

Such assumptions of course partly reflect the conventional dualism of fair and dark women in western culture, as in "Snow-White and the Rose-Red," but much criticism emphasizing the contrasts between fair, supposedly pure heroines and dark sensuous ones derives 119 more from D. H. Lawrence's two seminal essays on Cooper than from

Cooper's works themselves. Lawrence defines Cooper's dual attitude by stereotyping his women as either fair, virtuous, immature girls or dark, evil, sexual women. He separates them into stark extremes:

"Thomas Hardy's inevitable division of women into dark and fair, sinful and innocent, sensual and pure, is Cooper's division too."8

The example Lawrence uses is, naturally, The Last of the Mohicans, in which the women do tend toward these extremes. Though Lawrence admits that in The Deerslayer these divisions break down so that the two types exchange some characteristics, he dismisses this phenomena as merely indicating that Judith and Hetty are "the disintegration products" of the breakdown of the American soul.9 This type of

"breakdown" is, however, more typical of Cooper's treatment of women than is a strict identification of evil with darkness and good with blondness.

Because Lawrence has dominated much of Cooper criticism, commentators tend to use his technique of discussing the women characters by categorizing them into contrasting types. An example is Kay Seymour House's unrevealing division of Cooper women into either "douce heroines," the sweet, passive girls, or "viragoes," the shrewish older women. Other critics too often seem to be looking at

8Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923), pp. 89-90.

9p. 92. 120

Lawrence's descriptions rather than at the originals. Richard Chase, who openly acknowledges his debt to Lawrence, never gets beyond the stereotype of the Cooper woman as "simply more tainted with the original sin of being female." Even the feminist critic Judith H. Montgomery accepts Lawrence's divisions literally, mentioning how Cooper's linking beauty and submission in his fair, passive heroines helped to spread the American, version of the Pygmalion/Galatea myth.10

Leslie Fiedler, in asserting that Cooper unconsciously portrayed women as sinful even as he rejected the civilized restraints they represent, has done more than any other commentator to perpetuate

Lawrence's inaccurate divisions. Like Lawrence, Fiedler concentrates on The Last of the Mohicans, which, he declares, sets "the pattern of female Dark and Light that is to become the standard form in which

American writers project their ambivalence toward women." According to

Fiedler, Cooper insisted that women are sacred, but his subconscious rebelled, depicting them as destructive beings who deserve to fall victim to savages, symbols of Cooper's unconscious hostility. Female sexuality is destructive: love of Cora leads both Uncas and Magua to their deaths. In contrast, male friendship is positive and supportive; the intimacy of Natty and Chingachgook provides the only escape from a

10House, Cooper's Americans ([Columbus]: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 17-46; Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co./Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), pp. 44, 64; Montgomery, "The American Galatea," College English, 32 (1971), 892. 121 stifling civilization dominated by females, the authority figures in a New World that has overthrown the Old World fathers.11

The inadequacies of an interpretation such as Fiedler's are most clearly explored by Joel Porte, who notes how Cooper does not— and Fiedler's own examples are evidence—merely see women as the repressive superego, forcing the free male into the strait-jacket of civilization. Rather, Cooper saw women as dual, both id and superego, carnality and spirituality. Natty, in his quest for purity, cannot accept such dualism. He "runs off to the forest to escape, neither the superego per se nor carnality per se, but rather the awful inplications of mixing good and evil (religion and sex, as it were) as they are represented by the confusing single image of woman. She confronts him with a morally equivocal situation, and it is the fruit of this tree—this kind of knowledge—that Natty spurns."12

Although he is often taken literally, D. H. Lawrence must be speaking metaphorically in saying Cooper's sensual women are dark and his asexual ones fair; while he calls the dark Cora Munro "the scarlet flower of womanhood," he calls the blonde Judith Hutter the "inevitable dark," "the scarlet-and-black blossom."13 The result of this

11Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Dell, 1966), pp. 179-214; direct quotation from pp. 200-01.

12The Romance in America (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 8-10, 20-28, 47-50; direct quotation from p. 10.

13pp. 85, 89. 122 terminology has been that critics often seem to think that all Cooper's passionate women are literally dark while all the passive ones are blonde. Furthermore, they mistake the metaphoric terms "dark" and

"fair" for valid indicators of morality and assume, with Lawrence, that dark, passionate women are evil. In fact, almost all of Cooper's dark women are good. In The Pioneers Elizabeth Temple, who is certainly virtuous, has raven-black hair and eyes. The dark Cora Munro does not deliberately entice either Uncas or Magua, and her sensuality does not diminish our admiration for her quick-wittedness, courage, and willingness to sacrifice herself for her sister. Indian women from

Tachechana in The Prairie through Wah-ta-Wah in The Deerslayer are clever, self-sacrificing, and virtuous. On the other hand, Cooper's fair heroines are not necessarily asexual. Even the most passive of all Cooper's blonde women, the infantile Alice Munro, becomes a bride, and in The Prairie the competent, active, lower-class heroine Nelly

Wade, who slips away at night to meet her lover, is blonde and blue- eyed.

Finally in Cooper the coloring of individual women has little to do with individual morality. Rather, contrasts between women, both in coloring and in personality traits, indicate the duality of woman­ hood in general. Virtuous women, even completely passive women, may have dark hair so long as they possess any capacity for sexual passion.

For instance, the dark Inez Middleton is young, diminutive, and passive but a bride. And the fair woman's blondeness indicates the capacity 123

for good in all people, however corrupt they may appear. She may be

infantilely asexual, like Alice Munro, or so sexually potent as to

intimidate the men around her, like Judith. As these examples

indicate, the color symbolism associated with Cooper's women may

either reinforce obvious character traits or indicate submerged ones

that reveal woman's confusing capacity for both good and evil.

At this stage Cooper also indicated feminine ambiguity through racial symbolism unrelated to the use of color. The fact that he

used this technique only between 1825 and .1833 attests to the deep

uneasiness he felt about women during this stressful period; of all the symbols for ambiguity that he employed during his career, that of a racial taint is the most striking and the most controversial.

Leaving aside for the moment the problem of Cooper's attitude toward individuals who cross racial barriers (a problem dealt with in the next two parts of this chapter), this section will discuss the use of racial terminology to describe the ambiguous nature of femininity.

Critics often make much of the importance of actual racial mixing in The Last of the Mohicans, with some of them interpretating the theme of the novel as race relations or even miscegenation.11*

1'tSuch critics follow Lawrence, pp. 85-86, and include Donald Davie, The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), pp. 105-11; Fiedler, pp. 206-09; George Dekker, James Fenimore Cooper; The American Scott (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), pp. 66-74; Harry B. Henderson III, Versions of the Past (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), p. 76; and Michael D. Butler, "Narrative Structure and Historical Process in The Last of the Mohicans," American Literature, 48 (May 1976), 120, 138. 124

(Cora Munro, it will be remembered, is the daughter of a Scots father

and a West Indian mother, one of whose ancestors was black.) In

focusing almost exclusively upon Cora's mixed blood, however, many

commentators fail to note that in five other novels of this period

Cooper also uses concepts or diction associated with miscegenation to

describe his heroines and to emphasize woman's frightening potential

for breeching cultural barriers. Even the heroine of The Bravo,

Violetta, the pure scion of a noble Venetian family, becomes the center

of controversy because of her desire to marry a foreigner, a Neapolitan duke, Don Camillo Monforte. While the twentieth century, used to considering Italy a unified nation, may not be inclined to regard

Venice and Naples as culturally distinct, in the novel, with its eighteenth-century setting, the all-powerful Council of Three of

Venice emphasizes that Monforte is an unacceptable suitor solely because he comes from another state; the Council's whole aim in choosing a husband for Violetta is to keep her vast fortune in Venice. In a similar manner Inez de Certavallos in The Prairie, a descendant of the original Catholic Spanish settlers of the Louisiana Territory, helps unite dissimilar cultures by marrying the American Captain Middleton, a point Cooper reinforces with racial language. In being kidnapped

Inez has fallen victim to "a dealer in black flesh" (Ch. viii, p. 103);

Abiram White has not been a squatter like the Bushes, but a slave- stealer.

The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish further develops this theme of the capacity of any woman to transcend cultural barriers. In it 125 eight-year-old Ruth Heathcote is captured by Indians, grows up with the Narraganset tribe, marries one of their chiefs, and bears him a son before she is finally reunited with her parents. After this reunion Cooper describes her foreignness in racial terms. Even though the young woman is of pure English stock, she is described as "one who is neither white nor red . . . who speaks with two tongues," and she stands "in the centre of the grave, self-restrained group of her nearest kin, like an alien to their blood ..." (Ch. xxv, p. 321;

Ch. xxvii, p. 349). Living for some ten years with the Narragansets has done more than any actual racial mixing could to estrange young

Ruth from her native culture.

In The Headsman, too, cultural estrangement is described in terms of miscegenation, as Harold T. McCarthy has pointed out in discussing the novel as a covert attack on slavery.15 Here the issue does not literally involve barriers of culture but those of class.

Christine, the daughter of Balthazar, the headsman of Berne, whose despised office is hereditary, is affianced to a peasant who agrees to marry her only if her identity remains secret. When it is revealed, he abandons her in the middle of a public wedding ceremony, ironically part of a larger, almost pagan celebration of the natural fecundity of the earth. This public disgrace draws out the prejudice of the

Bailiff of Vevey, who described the change in his feelings:

15,1James Fenimore Cooper: The European Novels," in The Expatriate Perspective (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 38-46. 126

Now, yonder maiden, the pretty Christine, lost some of her grace in my eyes . . . when the truth came to be known she was Balthazar's child. The girl is fair and modest and winning in her way; but there is something—I cannot tell thee what—but a certain damnable something—a taint—a color—a hue—a—a— a—that showed her origin the instant I heard who was her parent .... (Ch. xix, p. 269)

Cooper also uses racial language in describing cultural mix­ tures. For instance, in The Water Witch Lord Cornbury tells the uncle of the heroine how he feels about the girl's being half-Dutch and half-Huguenot and loving the English Captain Ludlow: "The union of thy sister with the Huguenot then reduces the fair Alida to the quality of a half-blood. The Ludlow connection would destroy the leaven of the race!" (Ch. i, pp. 12-13). And in The Last of the

Mohicans Cora Munro is similarly denigrated. Speaking of his daughter's mixed racial heritage, Munro calls her "degraded—-lovely and virtuous though she be" (Ch. xvi, p. 188), while the Delaware sage Tanemund rightly says that she has been rejected by white men because they refuse to marry any woman "whose blood was not the color of snow"

(Ch. xxix, p. 368).

In these cases Cooper uses related terms like "degraded,"

"half-blood," and "a taint—a color—a hue" to describe women victim­ ized by a variety of prejudices. The people who think in these racial terms are usually despicable; the Venetian officials are corrupt, the

Bailiff of Vevey is a hypocrite, and Lord Cornbury has been exiled from England for embezzlement. This villainy suggests that other

Cooper characters who think in racial terms were not intended to be completely admirable. 127

Rather than using racial terms literally to describe and condemn actual miscegenation, Cooper uses them symbolically to indicate the ease with which women can cross barriers of class, culture, or race. Nina Baym discusses how in general women in the Leatherstocking tales serve as the links between social groups, while Jay S. Paul deals with the role of women in the establishment of families, particu­ larly in The Last of the Mohicans and The Bravo.16 Many critics of course believe that this ability of women sexually to attract men of disparate groups or even of separate races is disruptive, even evil, and that Cooper rejected the possibility of interracial or cross- cultural marriages.17 Cooper was not, however, so simplistic. While he saw great barriers to the success of interracial unions, he felt that such unions would, in the long term, provide the only lasting protection against race hatred and perhaps even against race war.

Prejudiced enough himself to question whether such unions were actually possible, he nevertheless believed they were desirable.

16Baym, "The Women of Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales," American Quarterly, 23 (1971), 696-709; Paul, "Home As Cherished: The Theme of Family in Fenimore Cooper," Studies in the Novel, 5 (1973), 39-51.

17These critics follow Lawrence, pp. 85-86, and include Gross­ man, p. 70; Robert H. Zoellner, "Conceptual Ambivalence in Cooper's Leatherstocking," American Literature, 31 (1960), 407; Davie, pp. 105- 11; Fiedler, pp. 204-09; David W. Noble, The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden (New York: George Braziller, 1968), p. 13; Terence Martin, "From the Ruins of History: The Last of the Mohicans," Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 2 (1969), 229; Baym, pp. 704-05; Henderson, pp. 75-76; Butler, pp. 120, 138; and David T. Haberly, "Women and Indians: The Last of the Mohicans and the Captivity Tradition," American Quarterly, 28 (Fall 1976), 439-40. 128

Cross-cultural marriages could provide the same beneficient merging of disparate peoples with a far greater chance of success. In fact, many of Cooper's novels involve the love of young people of different cultures. George Dekker has pointed out how Cooper stressed the primary importance of women in the process of unifying cultures.

Noting how the marriage of young people of mixed blood can heal colonial schizophrenia and bring into being a national consciousness and a nation, he emphasizes that "Cooper almost invariably uses court­ ship and marriage in this way in his fiction. He doubtless saw his own marriage to Susan DeLancey as representative of the fruitful reconciliation of parties in the new nation."18 (The DeLanceys had been Loyalists.)

Dekker is apparently thinking of The Prairie, in which Cooper explicitly ascribes the ability of women to link disparate groups to their sexual attractiveness to men in general, not just to men of their own backgrounds. Hence the symbols of miscegenation and passion are often combined. For instance, most critics who see Cora's mulatto heritage as making her literally non-white also see it as making her more passionate than white women. Other critics, including Porte and

Baym, regard her black blood as a symbol of sexuality rather than an indicator of race.19 Like Cora, Inez in The Prairie is preternaturally sexual and unconsciously attracts both a good and a bad Indian. She

18pp. 67-68.

19Porte, pp. 21-22; Baym, pp. 698, 704-05. 129 will not, however, repeat the tragedy of Cora because she does not have to unite such disparate cultures. Instead, her function is to

draw together the Catholic colonists of New Spain and the Protestants of America.

Cooper editorializes about how, after the Louisiana Purchase,

Americans must integrate the original settlers of the new territory into their own culture:

In such a novel intermixture ... of men born and nurtured in freedom, and the complaint minions of absolute power, the Catholic and the Protestant, the active and the indolent, some little time was necessary to blend the discrepant elements of society. In attaining so desirable an end, woman was made to perform her accustomed and grateful office. The barriers of prejudice and religion were broken through by the irresistible power of the master passion; and family unions, ere long, began to cement the political tie which had made a forced conjunction between people so opposite in their habits, their educations, and their opinions. (Ch. xv, pp. 181-82)

Inez de Certavallos and Captain Middleton are,, of course, Cooper's representatives of this process.

Joel Porte has discussed how Cooper pointedly applies a sexual metaphor to the possibility that Inez may bring the "heretic" Middleton to Catholicism.20 The passage is a statement by Inez's priest, who tries to convert the American captain:

. . . while no positive change was actually wrought in the mind of Middleton, there was every reason to hope the entering wedge of argument had been driven to its head, and that in consequence an opening was left through which it might rationally be hoped the

20pp. 49-50. 130

blessed seeds of a religious fructification would find their way, especially if the subject was left uninterruptedly to enjoy the advantages of Catholic communion, [that is, of Inez herself], (Ch. xv, p. 185)

This quotation also indicates the extent to which Cooper saw the

integration of cultures as a two-way process. By marrying Inez,

Middleton will not simply make the Catholic foreigner a good American.

Regardless of whether or not he converts to her religion, he will be subtly influenced by her. What their marriage will produce is not a triumph of either the Spanish or the American but a new assimilation, a redefinition and a reinvigoration. A similar theme, as Nicolaus

Mills suggests, dominates Rob Roy and indicates the appeal to both

Scott and Cooper of "the uniting of two cultures."21

In Notions of the Americans in 1828 only a year after The

Prairie, Cooper further explored the problems and potentialities of interracial marriages. His spokesman, a European bachelor traveling in the United States, laments the evil of slavery but denies that anyone has the right to force slave-owners to give up their property.

Emancipation should not be imposed on the southern states because slavery will gradually die out as it becomes economically impractical.

Still, the problem of integrating the races will persist for a long while because of prejudices against mixed marriages:

You will admit, too, that matrimony is very much an affair of taste; and, although there well may be, and there are, portions of the world where white

21American and English Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 44-45. 131

colour is not greatly admired, such is not the case here. The deep reluctance to see one's posterity exhibiting a hue different from one's own, is to be overcome, ere any extensive intercourse can occur between the blacks and the whites.22

Racial prejudice, however, may in time be overcome and has, the bachelor feels, already greatly diminished in the case of Indians:

"As there is little reluctance to mingle the white and red blood,

(for the physical difference is far less than in the case of the blacks, and the Indians have never been menial slaves,) I think an amalgamation of the two races would in time occur."23

While Cooper saw prejudice as a possibly fatal barrier to the merging of races, he nevertheless believed that the failure would have disastrous results. Foreseeing the end of slavery in The American

Democrat (1838), he also foresaw the situation that has, in fact, largely come to pass, two societies, one black and one white, separate and unequal. Furthermore he believed that this division must lead to race war:

American slavery is distinguished from that of most other parts of the world, by the circumstance that the slave is a variety of the human species, and is marked by physical peculiarities so different from his master, as to render future amalgamation improbable. In ancient Rome, in modern Europe generally, and, in most other countries, the slave not being thus dis­ tinguished, on obtaining his freedom, was soon lost in the mass around him; but nature has made a stamp on the American slave that is likely to prevent this

22([Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1828]; rpt. New York: Frederick Unger, 1963), II, 269.

23II, 287. 132

consummation, and which menaces much future ill to the country. The time must come when American slavery shall cease, and when that day shall arrive, (unless early and effectual means are devised to obviate it,) two races will exist in the same region, whose feelings will be embittered by inextinguishable hatred, and who carry on their faces, the respective stamps of their factions. The struggle that will follow, will necessarily be a war of extermination. The evil day may be delayed, but can scarcely be averted.2 **

Dekker concludes about this pessimistic vision that "Cooper's deliberate verdict was that racial prejudice, given man's fallen nature, was inevitable so long as different races existed: and I am afraid that he was right. But he also rightly believed that it was worth trying to understand the problem and to communicate that understanding to others."25

Although he believed mixed marriages might be doomed to failure,

Cooper did not condemn them and with Inez and Middleton shows this type of marriage as the only sure means of merging diverse cultures. No wonder that Edwin Fussell argues that "far from attacking miscegenation, as has often been alleged, Cooper surreptitiously advocates it . . . sex is the great leveler and therefore the principal agent of progress towards human unity."26 Coming only two years after The Last of the

Mohicans, in which Hawkeye rejects the possibility of the union of Cora and Uncas even in the afterlife, the conclusion of the traveling bachelor that marriage will unify the white and red races indicates the

21f(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), pp. 166-67.

25p. 83.

26Frontier (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), p. 42. 133 the disparity between Hawkeye's views and Cooper's. The possibility for cultural union represented by Cora and Uncas may be blighted, as is the consummated union of young Ruth and Conanchet in The Wept of

Wish-ton-Wish. Nevertheless the beneficial potential remains, and with

Inez in The Prairie, Alida in The Water Witch, and Violetta in The

Bravo, unions succeed in which people of disparate backgrounds create the beginnings of new cultures.

Between 1825 and 1833 women also often symbolize the close ties between the legitimate and the illegitimate or the overt and the covert. In The Prairie, for example, Esther Bush indicates the similarity between good and bad means of extending one's family. She is an aunt by marriage of Ellen Wade, has given the orphaned young woman a home, and hopes to see her married eventually to Asa, her oldest son. But Esther is also the sister of the kidnapper Abiram

White, whose imprisonment of Inez is the criminal reverse of the hospitality the Bushes have shown Ellen. (This kidnapping of course may also symbolize the criminality of the effort to prevent the fusion of America and the Spanish colonies.) Finally Esther's divided loyalties bring on the deepest moral crisis of the novel as she must learn to forgive her brother for murdering her eldest son.

In a more attenuated but symbolically equally important manner, the three groups contending for power in The Heidenmauer are connected by a woman, Ulrich Frey, who in her youth was beloved by men who eventually rose to power in opposing spheres, the church, the nobility, and the bourgeoisie. In The Bravo the conflicting groups—the state 134 of Venice and those it attempts to crush—are each represented by women and closely related women at that. Though Cooper does not make much of the fact, Gelsomina, the pure prison keeper's daughter who befriends the victimized Jacopo and attempts to help Violetta, is the first cousin of Annina, who spies on Violetta for the state. Signi­ ficantly, they are sister's children; again women indicate the intimate relationship between the legal and the illegal.

In other novels, too, women connect conflicting groups. The mother of the kidnapped girl in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish raises a foster child, so that when her own daughter is restored to her she finds herself the mother of both a New England Puritan maiden and a barbarized girl-mother. Motherhood is similarly problematic in The

Headsman, in which Marguerite finds her daughter ostracized as the offspring of a despised hereditary headsman, while the young man she has thought was her son is lost to her when he is discovered to be the long-lost child of the Doge of Genoa. In all these novels families are not as immutable as they might seem. Marriages are unhappy, close relatives quarrel, or children are lost. And in each of these situations women, as Cooper's most ambiguous characters, stand at the center of the paradoxes.

This theme of women merging the legitimate and the illegitimate is obvious in The Red Rover, in which Cooper emphasizes the close relationship between the pirate and the king's agent sent to capture him by making them uncle and nephew. In discovering in the Rover the brother whom she thought dead as a child and in Wilder a long-lost son, Mrs. Wyllys symbolizes the close links between political loyalty and rebellion, between the supposedly honorable and the supposedly dishonorable. Carrying this idea further in The Water Witch Cooper uses the kinship of the heiress Alida and the disguised girl smuggler

Seadrift to hint at the close connection between the legal and the illegal, the legitimate and the illegitimate, as James Grossman has noticed in commenting on how the book shows the above-board trade of the alderman perpetuating itself clandestinely through smuggling, in a parallel to that respectable public citizen's being the father of the illegitimate Seadrift.27 The respectable, honorable, prized

Alida is merely a step away from the unacknowledged, dishonorable

Seadrift. Both are finally even courted by, the same man, the rich

Patroon of Kinderhook, who, like the alderman, is more than willing to overlook illegality if by doing so he can increase his wealth.

Those factors making each woman individually ambiguous—Alida's mixed

Dutch and Huguenot heritage and Seadrift's masculine disguise—are reinforced by their consanguinity, which also shows the arbitrary nature of the conventional definitions of society and the difficulty of separating reality from appearance in the world of Cooper's novels.

By revealing how the illegitimate and the legitimate are closely connected and how unreliable appearances are, the women of this period reflect the confusing ambiguities of the fallen world, much as women did in the fiction previous to 1825. The difference

2 7 p« 7/o» n 136 between the two groups of novels is primarily one of emphasis. Before

1825 contrasts between individual women defined the scope of the truly feminine. After 1825 Cooper tended to use family relationships to indicate the close connections between antithetical personalities or between antagonistic groups. The result is to bring apparent opposites into closer conjunction than before. This increasing focus on bifurcation does not, however, mean that Cooper was developing into a

Manichean. Though good and evil continue to war in his novels—in fact some of their conflicts are far bloodier in this period than in the early works—the right can still be defended by recognition of the complexity of all experience and by compromises with strict legality that will ensure the establishment of transcendent justice.

Characterization and the Tragedy of Rejection

Because the women characters in the novels of this period are more passive than in the early works, a far greater possibility exists that men may fail to recognize the confusing ambiguities masking reality and hence may fail to fight wholeheartedly for the right.

Cooper, however, goes out of his way to demonstrate the tragic results of the rejection of femininity. Not only does he show that hatred of the feminine usually produces nothing but destruction, but he also deliberately undercuts the positions of superficially good characters who fail to embrace ambiguity by pointing up ironic discrepancies between their professions and their actions. 137

The Prairie, especially, makes crimes against women the most

disruptive of human villainies. The original crime in the novel is the kidnapping of Inez, which draws Ishmael Bush and even Ellen Wade

into uneasy partnership with the criminal Abiram White as they make compacts with him not to reveal his secret. Despite much objection to

the kidnapping plot, it is the dominant symbol in the book. Cooper himself, apparently thinking only of their fairly passive roles in the action, regretted including Inez and Middleton when he considered revisions that he never carried out.28 William Cullen Bryant objected to the absurdity of the kidnapping,29 and critics since have disagreed over the specific meaning of the kidnapping and transportation of Inez to the barren prairies, although they agree that she is an object of value and that Abiram White, in originally seizing her, is far more culpable than Ismael Bush.

Some critics attempt to dismiss the significance of the kidnap plot. Donald A. Ringe, for instance, sees it simply as "most implausible," while David H. Hirsch describes it as "mythic," that is, not susceptible to a rational explanation. Orm Overland somewhat obscurely feels that it reflects Cooper's fears that westward expansion

28Susan Fenimore Cooper, ed. Pages and Pictures (New York: W. A. Townsend, 1861), p. 157; Cooper, Preface, 1827 Philadelphia edition. The Prairie, cited in Schulenberger, p. 31.

28Bryant, cited in Orm Overland, The Making and Meaning of an American Classic, James Fenimore Cooper's The Prairie (New York: Humanities Press, 1973), p. 191, n. 15. would destroy the Union, in contrast to David Howard, who believes that the desire for Inez is "really the inevitable desire for change and for the future." Nina Baym and Richard Slotkim emphasize Inez's passivity, with the former defining her as "the aristocratic women . . . carried about, . . . transferred among men," while the latter sees in her kidnapping a reworking of the American myth of Indian captivity in which white women could penetrate the wilderness without sin only when carried thither as passive captives. Joel Porte relies on Cooper's own explanation of how women bind diverse cultures together through marriage to interpret the kidnapping as a necessary part of this process since it draws both Inez and Middleton away from her father, whom she has previously held up as a model for her husband to follow; in escaping him, American symbolically escapes the domination of the

Old World fathers.30

Since Cooper clearly intended the marriage of Inez and Middleton to represent the merging of cultures in the Louisiana Purchase, it follows that Abiram White is the enemy of this process. In kidnapping

Inez he wishes to play upon the sympathies of father and husband in order to milk both for his own profit, using a technique similar to

30Ringe, James Fenimore Cooper (New York: Twayne, 1962), p. 45; Hirsch, Reality and Idea in the Early American Novel (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), pp. 108-09; Overland, p. 158; Howard, "James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales: 'without a cross,'" in Tradition and Tolerance in Nineteenth-century Fiction, ed. David Howard, John Lucas, and John Goode (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 16; Baym, p. 707; Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1973), p. 495; Porte, pp. 47-50. 139 to what he would have used as a slave-stealer who could either collect a reward for returning a "run-away" slave or sell the slave anew. But whether White has any real intentions of collecting a ransom or whether he is simply separating Inez from both father and husband, he is violating family unity and disrupting the historical process of the creation of America. Identifying themselves firmly with the land, which they claim by squatters' rights, the Bushes are part of this process as well as exemplars of the strength of family. In kidnapping

Inez, Abiram is therefore acting indirectly as their enemy. Signifi­ cantly, he will finally be punished for another, far more blatant blow against the family, murdering one of his nephews.

Symbolically important as it is, this original crime against

Inez is not central to the plot of the novel, in which the pivotal event is another crime against a woman: Bush's shooting at Ellen Wade when he fears she is about to reveal the secret of Inez's presence.

Because this unwarranted violence breaks the compact the kidnappers have made with their victim, it produces the very result it was intended to avert: Inez appears in protest. Her appearance diverts the anger of

Bush's eldest son, Asa, from his father to his uncle, whom he condemns as a kidnapper. When in reply Abiram calls Asa and his parents hunted lawbreakers, Asa strikes him for defaming the family. Deeply and secretly resenting the blow, Abiram later ambushes and murders Asa.

This crime, in turn, sets in motion the series of captures and escapes that structures much of the novel because the Bushes blame the trapper for it and temporarily ally themselves with the Sioux to capture him. 140

At the climax of the story the trapper's revelation of the truth and

White's inadvertent confession highlight the trial in which Bush disposes of the fates of his companions. Then, however, the murder has its deepest ramifications when it forces Bush to judge and execute

Abiram and produces for Esther the moral trauma of having to forgive her brother for killing her son. Important as these consequences are, the seminal event of the novel is not the murder of Asa, which Cooper carefully de-emphasizes by having it take place offstage, but the violence against Ellen that in the first place draws Abiram's deadly hatred down on Asa.

In firing at Ellen, Bush shows that he regards her as a mere instrument of his will, to be punished if she transgresses. In wishing to marry her, Asa apparently has made a similar assumption. Nowhere in the book is there any indication of love between him and Ellen, who, of course, has an accepted lover, Paul Hover. Paul has followed the

Bushes to remain near her but cannot travel in their company because of Ishmael's jealous desire to keep his family intact; his secret hope is that Ellen will marry Asa and not leave them for another husband.

Significantly Ellen does finally abandon the migratory Bushes to become

Paul's wife in the settlements. As Henry Nash Smith has convincingly shown, she and Paul represent Cooper's rebellion against the conven­ tions of the sentimental novel and his attempts to create a new type of hero and heroine.31 In rejecting the Bushes, Ellen rejects the

31Virgin Land (1950; reissued Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), p. 68. 141 migratory life, but in rejecting Paul the Bushes themselves reject the possibility of becoming legitimate members of society and of preserving the family integrity of which Ishmael Bush is so proud. Although some of the children settle down, the parents are unable to do so and disappear into the wilderness almost as isolated as Leatherstocking himself, despite their painful initiations into social forms during the trial of Abiram. Cooper closes their story by saying that "though some of the numerous descendants of this peculiar pair were reclaimed from their lawless and semi-barbarous lives, the principals of the family themselves were never heard of more" (Ch. xxxii, p. 435).

The centrality of crimes against women in The Prairie is related to crimes against women in other novels of this period, crimes that cause the sins of the fathers to be visited, in the Biblical manner, upon their children. The crime producing the gravest ramifica­ tions is often seduction, though it may be greed, as in Lionel Lincoln.

Even before the novel opens, Mrs. Lechmere, acting out of an inordinate desire to secure the Lincoln title to her immediate family, drives Sir

Lionel Lincoln to the verge of insanity by circulating false rumors about his wife's virtue. (He appears in the novel only as "Ralph," a crazed American patriot.) She also rejects her own daughter for refusing to try to become Sir Lionel's second wife and then spends most of the first half of the book trying to get her granddaughter married to the current heir to the title. Her obsession thus makes her the incarnation of the evils of the British system of inheritance of honors, the system that Ralph blames for his miseries and rebels against by 142 devoting himself to the American cause. The destructiveness of a caste system is similarly illustrated in The Headsman, in which Christine, the daughter of a hereditary executioner, is utterly crushed by being rejected during her wedding by her fiance because the truth of her birth has been made public.

As even more serious crime against women is seduction, which may produce illegitimate children who symbolize the evil inherent in their respected and seemingly virtuous fathers. Because Alderman Van

Beverout in The Water Witch is a comically unsympathetic character, this theme can be developed in a light-hearted way. He thinks that his niece, by absconding with Seadrift, has permanently sullied her reputation with, as he puts it, her "bad name in the market" now making her "harder to dispose of than falling stock" (Ch. xv, p. 173).

(Actually, of course, Alida's good name is cleared when Seadrift is discovered to be a woman.) Alida's shocking flight is her rebellion against her uncle whom she has just discovered to be a seducer and a test of him and her lovers, a test that they all fail by assuming the worst of her. Seadrift, in contrast, has not been failed by all men.

Although deeply wronged by the father who never bothered to discover her existence, she has escaped the ill effects of her mother's seduction because she has been carefully raised first by her mother's father (Van Beverout's former smuggler-partner) and, more recently, by Thomas Tiller, the real Skimmer of the Seas. She is able to marry

Tiller and permanently reject the alderman's hypocrisy by devoting herself completely to a life of smuggling. In a parallel development 143

Alida marries the repentant Ludlow, leaving the alderman and the

Patroon to the wealthy but sterile life of bachelorhood.

In The Headsman the effects of seduction are more serious than in The Water Witch and cause lasting unhappiness for Signor Grimaldi, the aging Doge of Genoa, who in his youth seduced a poor girl and forced marriage on another girl, who was in love with an unworthy cousin. Unknown to him, his mistress bore his son and died, while his unhappy wife also had a son and died in childbirth. Her cousin, to revenge himself for the loss of his love, kidnapped Grimaldi's legitimate son. Between the time of these events and the opening of the story, Grimaldi has been tortured by the misdeeds of a young member of the underworld whom he believes to be his kidnapped son.

This background, although revealed only in the concluding chapters, determines many of the intricacies of the plot, especially the mysterious connections between a vagabond sailor, Maso, and Signor Grimaldi and between Maso and Sigismund, the hero and supposedly the son of the headsman. At the end of the novel when both Maso and the headsman are tried for murdering the man who has jilted Christine, the truth comes out. To protect himself, Maso produces a signet ring and claims to be Grimaldi's son; his judges, impressed by his high connections, permit him to escape. Then the headsman reveals that Sigismund was adopted and produces evidence that proves this young man, not Maso, must be

Grimaldi's son. Finally Maso admits the whole truth: he has claimed to be Grimaldi's legitimate son, but he is actually the illegitimate child to the mistress; the worthy Sigismund is the Doge's true heir. 144

The common critical approach to this conclusion is to object not only to its contrived nature but to see it as fatally undermining the central theme, the evil consequences of a hereditary caste system, because supposedly Sigismund's being the son of the Doge shows that true nobility can be inherited.32 Contrived the ending certainly is, but inconsistent it is not. Cooper's intention was to attack caste systems, not to comment on whether or not character can be inherited. Sigismund is almost ideally noble-minded, it is true. But so is his adoptive father, the despised headsman. And, at least in his youth when he forced his will on two reluctant women, the character of the Doge was anything but noble. The origin of Sigismund's inner, true nobility is therefore obscure. That the discovery of his real parentage enables him to marry the well-born Adelheid is of course a sentimental device but one that, by contrasting his happiness with the misery of his putative sister, the abandoned Christine, effectively emphasizes the purely arbitrary nature of hereditary honors. Frank M. Collins makes a similar point about "the fortuitous way in which identities are acquired in an

'artificial' society," although he goes on to conclude that the conclu­ sion is flawed.33

32Grossman, p. 84; Ringe, Cooper, pp. 66-67; Dekker, p. 139; John P. McWilliams, Jr., Political Justice in a Republic: James Fenimore Cooper's America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972), pp. 180-82; Henderson, p. 67.

33"Cooper and the American Dream," PMLA, 81 (1966), 86. 145

Furthermore, the revelation of Sigismund's parentage raises

grave questions about the nature of heredity itself. At least in part

because they are half-brothers, Maso and Sigismund share many admirable

qualities; each is brave, resourceful, and proud. But whereas Sigismund

is generous and noble, Maso, having been raised among the criminals of

the underworld, is brash, suspicious, and self-centered, caring for no

one. While Sigismund is everything that is admirable, Maso exemplifies

the ambiguities of human nature: "Man is a strange compound of good and

evil" (Ch. xx, p. 292), according to Grimaldi, while according to Maso's

own description, "we are fashioned like this wild country [the Alps]

. . . with our spots of generous fertility mingled with much unfruitful

rock, [so] that he who does a good act to-day, may forget himself by

• doing an evil turn to-morrow" (Ch. xxviii, p. 392).

Sigismund, while suffering somewhat from the atmosphere of

infamy surrounding the headsman, has been touched only slightly by

hatred and prejudice and has become a noble young man because he has

been sustained, as Balthazar himself has, by the loyalty of a loving

family. Having no such support, Maso has become an outcast of dubious

honesty and uncertain future. The vagabond explains:

This confusion of nature [around the convent at the St. Bernard Pass] resembles my own character. Here everything is torn, sterile, and wild; but patience charity, and generous love have been able to change even this rocky height into an abode for those who live for the good of others. There is none so worthless that use may not be made of him. We are types of the earth, our mother; useless and savage, or repaying the labor that we receive, as we are treated like men or hunted like beasts. ... My mother was fair and good. She wanted only the power to withstand the arts of one, who, honored in the 146

opinions of all around her, undermined her virtue. He was great, noble, and powerful; while she had little beside her beauty and her weakness. Signori,— the odds against her were too much. I was the punishment of her fault. I came into a world then, in which every man despised me before I had done any act to deserve its scorn. (Ch. xxxi, pp. 441-42)

In this speech Maso attributes the warping of his nature to the seduction of his mother. By exercising the prerogatives of his hered­ itary position, Grimaldi used her for his convenience in the same way the people of Berne use their headsman while despising him. And in both cases the abuse of inherited office lights hardest on women: Maso's mother was seduced and abandoned; the headsman's daughter is shattered by the rejection of her fiance. Now that the truth is clear, Signor

Grimaldi does not simply gain a son in Sigismund. He also has forced upon him the knowledge that his seduction corrupted and killed an innocent girl and produced a brother to Sigismund, potentially as noble as the legitimate son but corrupted by his father's infamy. As in other novels of this period, the victimization of women has produced disorder and the unhappy knowledge of how evil permeates good.

Like Grimaldi, superficially good characters in other novels may be revealed as inadequate when they refuse to accept femininity. Some­ times they are simply prejudiced or hypocritical, like the bailiff in

The Headsman who turns against Christine only when he discovers who her father is or the Venetian officials in The Bravo who pretend immense concern for Violetta's welfare but actually wish to keep her fortune within the state. Another character treated ironically partly because of his exploitation of women is dangerously insane. In Lionel Lincoln 147

Ralph's madness, while to some extent the result of Mrs. Lechmere's evil rumors about his wife, springs largely from the hereditary taint of the

Lincolns, a corruption that led him in his youth to seduce Abigail and to abandon her and their illegitimate son, Job Pray, to poverty. Job's simple-mindedness has punished Abigail for her sin, while Ralph's insanity calls into question everything he professes, including the cause of American independence, which is also treated ambiguously elsewhere in the novel in Cooper's unflattering descriptions of the lechery of

American officers and of the mundane butchery of the famous battles of

Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill.

More often than simply revealing presumably good characters as hypocritical or insane, Cooper condemns failure to treat women well by presenting ironically people of genuine good will who nevertheless succumb to prejudice and at critical moments reject women, largely out of fear of feminine complexity, symbolized by women's capacity for unifying different races. By itself The Last of the Mohicans does not present a clear picture of the author's views on inter-racial unions, and analyses of the problem depend largely on the critics' varying evalutaions of Hawkeye. Only three years later in The Wept of Wish-ton-

Wish, however, Cooper presented the rejection of such unions as tragic.

Cooper makes a part of this book an ironic inversion of the Book of

Ruth, an inversionithat supports the all-encompassing theme of the novel, the failure of fraternity within cultures and between cultures.

The setting is Connecticut, first during the winter of 1664-65 and then in the summer of 1675. In the first half, shortly after the downfall 148 of the Commonwealth, agents of the newly restored monarch, Charles II, search the wilderness for a regicide, one of the judges who condemned

Charles I to death and who now lives secretly in the valley of the wish-ton-wish (or whippoorwill) under the name of Submission.

Submission's flight from England and the shaky position of the New

England Puritans after the Restoration indicate deep divisions in the white community, divisions that Mark Heathcote and his family cannot escape even by settling on the very fringes of civilization.

Similar divisions rend the local Indians. In the background of the first half of the action is the Mohican Uncas's killing of young

Conanchet's father, a Narragansett chief. A year before the second half of the action begins (actually in the same year; Cooper mistook his dates), Metacom, the Wampanoag chief known to whites as King Philip, attempts to unify the northern tribes in a last great effort to force the whites out of America. This attempt at unified action fails, however, because Metacom is unable to ally himself with Uncas, who joins the whites in order to continue his revenge against the Narragansetts.

At the end of the book he makes Conanchet another of his victims, and

Metacom's alliances dissolve, assuring the whites victory in King

Philip's War.

These conflicts within white and Indian cultures are not presented as heroic; they are simply destructive. Conflicts between the races, too, are tragic, the more so as Cooper emphasizes the inevitabil­ ity of cultural mixture and the evil results of attempting to reject it.

His primary symbol of the pervasiveness of mixture is the family itself. 149

For Cooper a family is not simply people related by blood but people living together in one household. Conanchet and Submission become

"brothers" by living together in Submission's hut; their bond is so strong that at the end of the novel the Indian permits himself to fall into the hands of Uncas, his most deadly enemy, in order to save the white man's life. Mark Heathcote's family, too, always includes at least one outsider, the orphan Martha Harding, and temporarily draws in the young Conanchet, who, though a prisoner, is treated by the

Heathcotes as much like a son as possible.

The most obviously mixed family in the novel is, of course, that of Conanchet himself. He takes as his wife young Ruth, who has been captured by the Narragansetts and adopted into their tribe as

Narra-mattah. Their son is described as "neither red nor pale,"

"a little flower of two colors" (Ch. xxxi, pp. 396, 403). Conanchet's attempt to send his wife and baby back to her white family and his claim that the Great Spirit was displeased with their marriage signify a tragic lapse of his faith in the possibility of the union he himself has achieved. George Dekker points out the terrible irony of his belief that his wife will be better off with the whites: without him, she dies; while Kay Seymour House also locates the tragedy of the ending in the fact that when Conanchet rejects his wife he tries to deny that individ­ uals can transcend the barriers of race, a truth he has learned with both her and Submission.31*

31>Dekker, p. 81; House, pp. 248-49. 150

Conanchet does not willingly make the tragic choice to reject

Ruth/Narra-mattah but rather has it forced upon him by the whites who betray him to Uncas. As a victor over the whites he has returned her at temporarily to her parents, but later as a condemned captive he must insist that she remain with them for her own safety since he knows he is shortly to be executed. Conanchet continues to affirm his fraternity with all people by giving up his life to save his "brother" Submission and by anticipating that he will continue to love his wife even after death. Although at his execution he tries to tell her to return to her family, he admits his devotion and looks forward to meeting her in the afterlife (Ch. xxxi, 402-03), whither she will soon follow him, his death deranging in her "some of that fearful .'imachinery which links the soul to the body" (Ch. xxxii, p. 409).

Immediately after Conanchet's death Ruth/Narra-mattah reverts to infantilism, fearing the savages, including the form of her dead husband. But, dying, she regains her adult sense of the complexities of life so that the bodies of her and her husband "appeared to gaze at each other with a mysterious and unearthly intelligence. The look of the

Narragansett was still, as in his hour of pride, haughty, unyielding, and filled with defiance; while that of the creature who had so long lived in his kindness was perplexed, timid, but not without a character of hope" (Ch. xxxii, p. 412). The hope that has replaced Narra-mattah's fear express the same sentiment that animates the last moments of

Conanchet's life: the belief that they will meet again in another world. 151

The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish thus emphasizes the inevitability of racial merging, the strength of adoption, and the tragic consequences of failures to accept inter-racial unions. This tragedy is further developed by ironic parallels between the novel and the Book of Ruth.

(George Dekker briefly notes how young Ruth parallels the Old Testament heroine, but he does not discuss how the theme of the novel inverts the theme of her story.35) Once Cooper's stressing the name "Ruth" by using it for both mother and daughter brings the Book of Ruth to mind, another similarity becomes readily apparent: the two works share the theme of what adoption into a foreign culture means. But whereas the Biblical tale records two successful adaptations of foreigners (first Naomi, then

Ruth), The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish records only the tragedy of failure.

In the Old Testament, of course, the Judean matron Naomi embraces a strange culture when she moves with her husband and two sons to the land of Moab, where the sons marry. After the death of the men

Naomi returns to Judah. One of her daughters-in-law stays behind, but the other, Ruth, refuses to quit her, and adopts a strange culture with her famous words, "Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest,

I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God"

(Ruth 1.16). Ruth's loyalty to Naomi is rewarded when the rich Boaz befriends and eventually marries her. And, because Boaz is a kinsman of her dead husband, Naomi finds in his and Ruth's children a continuation of the family that had apparently ended with the deaths of her sons.

Because Ruth refuses to abandon Naomi and continually treats her as a

35p. 81. 152

blood relation, the Lord blesses the Moabitess, making her the founding mother of the line that produces both David and Jesus, the most important line for both Jews and Christians.

While Ruth's total acceptance of the foreign makes such a triumph possible, in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish the elder Ruth's failure to emulate her prototype produces tragedy. Whereas in scripture Naomi returns Ruth's love and nurses her son exactly as if he were her own grandchild, Cooper's Ruth, out of pure racial prejudice, rejects her own grandson, the baby of Ruth/Narra-mattah and Conanchet. But Ruth's rejection of the baby produces a fatal estrangement between her and her daughter, so that the girl can only respond lovingly to her mother in the almost senile infantility immediately preceding her death. On first seeing the baby, Ruth hypocritically attempts to mask her revulsion, and with "all those feelings of pride that prejudice could not fail to implant, even in the bosom of one so meek," she stiffly kisses the infant but repulses her daughter: "the jealous eye of the young mother was not to be deceived. Narra-mattah detected the differ­ ence between the cold salute and those fervent embraces she had herself received, and disappointment produced a chill about her own heart"

(Ch. xxvii, p. 357). Despite Donald A. Ringe's unaccountable interpretation that Ruth accepts her grandchild in the true spirit of

Christian charity,36 this incident shows that the reverse is true and that what Cooper records is the failure of love. Cooper then

36Cooper, pp. 52, 53, 159-60, n. 21. 153 illustrates the unnaturalizess of Ruth's prejudices by showing that it is not universally shared. Although her husband regards his half-Indian grandson as, at best, a burden from God (Ch. xxviii, p. 368), the infant is completely accepted by Reuben Ring, who kisses him as tenderly as if he were one of his own new-born triplets (Ch. xxviii, p. 366).

Significantly, Cooper does not include the baby in his final summary of the fortunes of the various characters. The child is never mentioned after the deaths of his parents but apparently dies since none of the people Cooper lists are his descendants. The potential for the union of two races that he embodies is simply ignored. Because Cooper's theme is how the tragedy of prejudice precludes such union, even the presence of the baby becomes meaningless. He will not be accepted by the white community like the half-Indian son of the heroine in Lydia

Maria Child's Hobomok only five years earlier in 1824, nor will he found an illustrious line, like the son of Boaz and the Old Testament Ruth.

When his white grandparents reject him, they reject the concept of the family of man that they had earlier affirmed in befriending the young

Conanchet.

The tragedy of The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish is that in rejecting racial mixture people reject the source of the vitality of their own families and cultures. In The Last of the Mohicans, too, rejection of racial assimilation leads to death or sterility. Like Ruth, Hawkeye revolts at the idea of racial union and at several crucial times fails to defend Cora adequately because she represents such a possibility.

During the final pursuit of Magua and Cora, this supposedly consummate 154

frontiersman permits himself to lag behind Uncas and Heyward because he

is "encumbered by his rifle, and, perhaps, not sustained by so deep an

interest in the captive as his companions" (Ch. xxxii, p. 406). Before

he responds, one of Magua's companions has killed Cora, Magua has

fatally stabbed Uncas in the back, Uncas has killed Cora's murderer, and

the effeminate singing-master, David Gamut, has killed Magua's other

confederate. That even David avenges Cora's murder before Hawkeye does is significant because, unlike the scout, he is a peaceful man who

previously has protected Cora and Alice only by singing, an effective

enough device because the Indians take it as a sign of insanity and

spare him and his companions. Hawkeye waits to act until it is almost unnecessary. When he finally does kill Magua, the Indian is already on the verge of death, dangling over a precipice and clinging only to a shrub. Although the scout thinks himself ideally adapted to the violent frontier, untimately he cannot accept the full potential of this ambiguous environment, the possibility that it holds out for the mixture of races.

Hawkeye's defense of the girls is less successful than David's, because the scout cannot totally embrace the complexities of life or even the problematic aspects of his own mixed heritage. As David Howard points out, he harps too much on being "without a cross." He must insist on his racial purity because he himself combines Indian and white traits.37 At least twice in the novel Hawkeye has an opportunity to

37p. 38. 155 kill Magua but fails to do so even though he has sworn revenge against him after the Fort William Henry massacre (Ch. xviii, p. 221). Although he has impressed on Heyward that in Indian warfare "it is lawful to practice things that may not be naturally the gift of a white skin"

(Ch. xxii, p. 275), later he fails to kill Magua and the Mingo conjurer in the cave near the Indian village because "the scout believed such an act, however congenial it might be to the nature of an Indian, [was] utterly unworthy of one who boasted a descent from men that knew no cross of blood" (Ch. xxvi, p. 321). In this instance Hawkeye's white sensibilities prevent him from killing Magua, but the next time he spares the villain his motive is that of an Indian. At the beginning of final pursuit of Magua, Hawkeye holds his "fire in tenderness to Uncas"

(Ch. xxxii, p. 405), in other words, because he does not want to rob the young Mohican of the glory of killing their enemy. But whether

Hawkeye's motives are those of an Indian or a white, he cannot act decisively to save Cora; he unconsciously rejects the ambiguity she embodies.

Hawkeye makes his rejection of racial mingling explicit at

Cora's funeral when he denies not only the possibility that she and

Uncas will be united in the afterlife but the Delaware girls who believe they will. These girls accept and even delight in the potential for interracial union, alluding in their funeral chant "to the stranger maiden, who had left the upper earth at a time so near his [Uncas's] own departure, as to render the will of the Great Spirit too manifest to be disregarded" (Ch. xxxiii, p. 414). Although Hawkeye rejects their 156 belief "like one who knew the error of their simple creed" (Ch. xxxiii, p. 416), actually their "creed" is far more sophisticated than his because it reflects the potential complexity of all life, especially frontier life, whereas his clinging to absolute notions of racial purity does not allow for development or change. At the funeral Hawkeye appears not even to consider the possibility that the two races may meet in another world, but earlier he has expressed his own preference for the Indian version of the afterlife, has insisted that both races share the same god, and has even told Uncas that "whether there be one heaven or two, there is a path in the other world by which honest men may come together again" (Ch. xix, pp. 228-29; Ch. xxv, p. 320; Ch. xxx, p. 380).

It is therefore only in connection with women that Hawkeye denies the mingling of cultures that his own life exemplifies and that he anticipates continuing after death.

The views Hawkeye expresses should not be mistaken for Cooper's.

(The most satisfying discussions that I have seen do make this distinc­ tion between the scout's and the author's opinions.38) Despite all the boasting about racial purity that he puts into the mouth of his protagonist, Cooper himself rejects this position by giving most such speeches ironic contexts. Like the bailiff in The Headsman, the

Venetian officials in The Bravo, Ralph in Lionel Lincoln, and the elder

Ruth in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, Hawkeye cannot always safely be believed. He continually brags that he is pure white, but he calls the

38Howard, p. 53; Dekker, pp. 69-72; Thomas Philbrick, "The Last of the Mohicans and the Sounds of Discord," American Literature, 43 (1971), 39. 157

Mohican Chingachgook his "brother" and treats Chingachgook's son Uncas as if the youth were his own son. Although both his parents were white,

Hawkeye's life with the Delawares has made him as much Indian as

European.

Cooper further undercuts Hawkeye's racial pride by often showing him proclaiming his whiteness just before doing something that betrays the Indian side of his nature. Although he emphasizes that he "has no cross of blood," he is so unaccustomed to the ways of whites that he is shamed on three separate occasions by his ignorance of the white man's beast of burden, the horse. First he cannot hear horses approaching through the forest, then he fails to recognize a horrible sound as the shriek of a terror-stricken horse, and finally he does not notice that the horses Magua uses to kidnap Cora and Alice make the unique track of a breed of pacers (Ch. iii, p. 32; Ch. vii, p. 68; Ch. xii, pp. 139-40).

During the hopeless defense of the cave at Glenn's Falls, he tells

Duncan Heyward that the two of them, as "men without a cross," need to show the Indians "that white blood can run as freely as red," but almost immediately he fatalistically resigns himself to death like an Indian warrior and has to be persuaded to escape by Cora (Ch. viii, pp. 85, 87).

And as he, Uncas, and Chingachgook overcome Magua's party on the knoll, it is Hawkeye who assumes the Indian task of knifing the fallen to make sure they are dead, while Uncas, "denying his habits, we had almost said his nature," runs like a white gentleman to help the women (Ch. xii, pp. 131-32). (David Howard points out that in treating Cora as a 158

white lover would, Uncas shows that he, like Hawkeye, unites whites and

Indian traits.39)

In these incidents, as in Hawkeye's using both Indian and white

excuses to avoid killing Magua and in his almost simultaneous acceptance

and denial of a common heaven for both red and white, the scout betrays

over and over again the shallowness of his literal-minded boast that he

is "a man without a cross." He illustrates how Cooper handles the

problems of race and miscegenation less literally than symbolically to

explore the consequences of accepting or rejecting all kinds of ambigu­

ous people and situations. In failing to accept women and the

complexities they symbolize, Ruth Heathcote and Hawkeye reveal their own

personal inadequacies, as do more obviously reprehensible characters in

Lionel Lincoln, The Bravo, and The Headsman.

Double Plotting and the Tragedy of Rejection

Especially in The Last of the Mohicans and The Wept of Wish-ton-

Wish Cooper uses a double plot to emphasize the destructiveness of rejecting women. These novels each begin with one narrative that unfolds

until roughly the middle of the book when it breaks off and another,

similar narrative, using the same set of characters, begins. In The

Wept of Wish-ton-Wish the tragic conclusion develops naturally out of

the failure of individuals to live up to Christian principles even as

the double plot shows how such failure is not inevitable. (Some of the structural characteristics of the novel have been discussed by

39p. 39. 159

Donald A. Ringe and John P. McWilliams, Jr., though neither deals with the significance of the contrast between the two narratives.lt0) Whereas in the first half of the novel the devout Heathcote family succeeds in winning the friendship of their captive, young Conanchet, by treating him in a spirit of true Christian charity, in the second half they are unable to transcend racial prejudice and, when Conanchet repays their love by returning their daughter to them, reject what she has become.

Cooper indicates that this perversion of Christianity is as much an individual failure as a social one by comparing the behavior of the elder Ruth in the first narrative with her actions in the second. In each half of the book she fails to accept completely a child with close bonds to her own daughter, and in each half this failure denotes a lack of Christian love. Although during his captivity Ruth is able to treat young Conanchet with true generosity, she is not able to respond in the same manner to little Martha during a crisis. Because she cannot accept the loss of her own daughter, she fails Martha in a manner that fore­ shadows the rejection of Ruth/Narra-mattah's baby, discussed in the preceding section. When the Heathcote family takes refuge in the block­ house during the fire, Content and Ruth discover that they have lost little Ruth while mistakenly saving an orphan, Martha Harding. Martha is a potential substitute for their own child—the two girls are of the same age and have been intimate companions—but Ruth never accepts her fully. Discovering whom she has saved, Ruth thrusts the little girl

1|0Ringe, The Pictorial Mode (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1971, pp. 157-62, McWilliams, pp. 247-48. 160

from her, shrieking, "It is not our babe" (Ch. xv, p. 180). Later

Martha's foster brother rubs the point in, telling her she has never had a sister or a mother (Ch. xxi, p. 265). Although the girl grows up in the Heathcote household, she is not regarded as replacing the stolen daughter, and Ruth, mourning the loss of her child, goes into. a..longj decline that symbolically emphasizes the deleterious effects of failing to love others as one's self in the spirit of true Christianity. So destructive is this failure that Ruth dies only months after the death of her daughter, completely destroying Content's family. Ironically, their clan is perpetuated only through Martha, who is finally accepted as a true member of the family when she marries Ruth and Content's son, young Mark.

Not only does Ruth's physical health fail because she is unable to submit to the will of God and accept the loss of her daughter, but her mental health slips as well. She begins to live in the past, always thinking of her daughter as the eight-year-old child she was when she was captured. So strong a hold does this image of childhood have on

Ruth that, when Conanchet presents his eighteen-year-old wife to her, she has difficulty recognizing the young woman. Even when she realizes the truth, Ruth responds best to Ruth/Narra-mattah when treating her as a child, singing to her lullabies that the eight-year-old used to love.

In the second narrative, which begins with chapter 17, Ruth's inability to accept reality destroys the well-being of her daughter in addition to her own. Her mother's treating her as a little girl forces

Ruth/Narra-mattah temporarily into a state of childish imbecility. 161

Shaken by the murder of her husband, the young woman reverts to infantilism, pathetically fearing the Indians and lisping childish prayers for protection. Just as the mother denies the reality of her daughter's maturity by thinking of her as a young girl, so does the daughter, in reverting to childhood, at least momentarily deny the pleasures of the wilderness life she has led for ten years with the

Narragansetts. And because the mother is completely unable to accept the assimilation of cultures made possible by her daughter's sexual maturity, she takes Ruth/Narra-mattah's lapse into infantilism as a sign of a literal return to purity and prays that she may die "in the blessedness of infant innocence!" (Ch. xxxii, p. 410). Such a hope is futile, based as it is on the delusion that the past can be obliterated and her daughter's sexuality denied. In actuality, of course, the ten years of captivity and her marriage to Conanchet have made Ruth/Narra- mattah as much Narragansett as white so that at the moment of her death her eyes meet those of her husband with a look of "mysterious and unearthly intelligence" (Ch. xxxii, p. 412).

This interlocked death glance reaffirms the strength of the bonds between cultures originally established in the first part of the story by the Heathcotes' truly Christian treatment of Conanchet, by

Conanchet and Submission's loyalty, and by Conanchet and Ruth/Narra- mattah's marriage. But the first narrative also contains the seeds of the betrayal of Christian love in Ruth's rejection of little Martha, a rejection that reaches tragic proportions in the second half as the

Heathcotes fail to accept their half-Indian grandson and attempt to deny 162 the adulthood of their Indianized daughter, while the other whites corrupt the concept of Christian duty in order to betray the noble

Conanchet to his enemies. In both instances families are destroyed because of their failures to live up to Christian ideals.

In The Last of the Mohicans the theme of the perverse conse­ quences of believing in racial purity supplants the theme of the destructive effects of the corruption of Christianity. The two narratives of the novel present two analogous quests for family unity.

In the first Cora and Alice Munro brave the dangers of the wilderness to encourage their father at the nadir of his career. While General

Webb neglects Colonel Munro's critical situation at beleagured Fort

William Henry and refuses to send him sufficient reinforcements, Cora insists upon joining her father because "I would have proved to him, that however others might neglect him in his strait, his children at least were faithful!" (Ch. vi, p. 64). Cora's determination is responsible for the journey that occupies the bulk of the first half of the book. As Munro tells Heyward in sending him to escort the sisters: "It is the spirit of my noble-minded Cora that leads them . . . and I will not balk it. Would to God, that he who holds the honor of our royal master in his guardianship [Webb], would show but half her firmness!" (Ch. vi, p. 64). The loyalty that motivates Cora to under­ take a dangerous journey to join her father is the kind of loyalty that

British officers should accord one another if their country is to protect her territories during the French and Indian War. 163 Cora's determination is rewarded towards the end of the first

narrative when she and Alice escape from Indian captivity and join their

father at the fort. Then follows a two chapter interlude unlike

anything else in the novel. A temporary truce during which both French

and English enjoy such pastoral pleasures as fishing and lounging is

paralleled in the following chapter by scenes of domestic tranquility with Alice sitting on her father's knee and playing with his hair while

Cora looks fondly on:

Not only the dangers through which they had passed, but those which still impended above them appeared to be momentarily forgotten, in the soothing indulgence of such a family meeting. It seemed as if they had profited by the short truce, to devote an instant to the purest and best affections: the daughters forgetting their fears, and the veteran his cares, in the security of the moment. (Oh. xvi, p. 184)

This domestic tranquility is the counterbalance to war, the haven that makes struggle worthwhile. Although in this case the "security" of the family is temporary, it represents the norm that the good characters defend and that the evil Magua threatens. Furthermore, the strength of the family, even at this perilous juncture, is shown by its ability to perpetuate itself as Duncan Heyward formally requests Munro's permission to marry Alice. Munro gives him the history of his own marriages, rebukes his racial prejudice against Cora, and, having forced him to acknowledge the worth of his future sister-in-law, accepts him as

Alice's fiance.

This conversation of Heyward and Munro, resolving as it does domestic difficulties and promising future happiness, is immediately paralleled by Heyward's parley with Montcalm, in which the French 164 general gives the English permission to retreat unmolested in return for their surrender. But like General Webb, who fails to reinforce Colonel

Munro at a critical juncture, General Montcalm makes a tactical mistake by trusting Indian allies over whom he actually has little control.

(Twice Cooper blames Montcalm's weak leadership for the two massacres that marred his career. See Ch. xvii, p. 201 and Ch. xviii, p. 213.)

The perfidy of the failures of both Webb and Montcalm is heightened by the dangers their mistakes create for women. Webb's neglect forces

Cora and Alice to undertake a perilous journey to encourage their father.

Montcalm's failure sparks the massacre that climaxes the first half of the novel. It begins when an Indian, balked of a woman's colorful shawl, murders her baby and then her. The killing becomes general when

Magua, spurred by his desire to revenge himself on Munro by recapturing the sisters, raises the war-whoop.

Magua's capture of the sisters just before the second narrative opens in chapter 18 threatens but does not negate the hope of family security established in the domestic scenes. His desire to revenge himself on Munro by forcing Cora to live as his concubine horribly inverts the possibility of family solidarity and security established at Fort William Henry during the truce. For Cooper's male characters the choice is starkly clear. If they can rescue Cora, domestic happiness may be restored; if they cannot, the family will become a travesty. But the struggle against Magua ends, of course, in a Pyrrhic victory with not only Magua and his confederates dying but Cora and Uncas as well.

Unlike the first narrative with its promise of happiness and security, 165 the second one ends tragically, and the novel closes with Hawkeye and

Chingachgook swearing loyalty to each other over the grave of Uncas, two childless men pathetically attempting the impossible task of re-creating a family.

This contrast between the happiness of one family and the destruction of another culminates a series of careful parallels and detailed contrasts between the two halves of the book. The two narra­ tives are practically mirror images of each other, similar stories with contrasting outcomes. Several critics have commented on this double plotting, although H. Daniel Peck, in detailing some of the correspon­ dences between the two halves, quite rightly notes that the parallels have been insufficiently appreciated.1*1 To stress the similarities between the two journeys Cooper several times repeats almost exactly in the second half of the book incidents that occur in the first half. For example, in both sections the characters take a panoramic view of Fort

William Henry from a nearby mountain. Twice also the sisters are captured by the evil Magua, and twice they are concealed in caves.

Cooper further parallels details in placing the early episode of

Hawkeye's shooting a hostile Indian as he hangs from the branch of a tree over the cataract of Glenn's Falls against the late scene of

Hawkeye's killing Magua while he clings to a shrub that dangles over a

lflPeck, A World By Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper's Fiction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 110, 134-35. Other critics dealing with the structure of the novel include Ringe, Cooper, pp. 43-44; and Pictorial, p. 46; Donald Darnell, "Uncas as Hero: The Ubi Sunt Formula in The Last of the Mohicans," American Literature, 37 (1965), 262; Fiedler, pp. 205, 208; Howard, pp. 42-43, 48-54; Philbrick, "Discord," pp. 31-32; and Butler, pp. 124-29. 166

precipice. The broader actions of the conclusions of the two narratives

are also similar. The massacre of the English ends the first narrative,

while the second closes with the destruction of the Hurons by the

Delawares, who "had fed fat their ancient grudge, and had avenged their recent quarrel with the Mengwe [Hurons], by the destruction of a whole

community" (Ch. xxxiii, p. 410).

Despite these similarities, the two narratives have opposite conclusions, one happy, the other tragic, largely because in the first

Hawkeye is able to work effectively to restore Cora and Alice to their father, while in the second he is unable to commit himself fully to rescuing Cora after Uncas has revealed the attraction "the dark hair" holds for him. Hawkeye's latent misogyny produces the tragedy of the conclusion. Although it may be true, as Harry B. Henderson III has suggested, that Cooper felt that historical progress doomed the Indian to destruction, Henderson's corollary, that Cooper denied free will, does not follow.42 What makes the ending of The Last of the Mohicans tragic rather than merely pathetically inevitable is that an unpreju­ diced Hawkeye might have been able to effect a different outcome. As

Thomas Philbrick has pointed out, crossing of boundaries and blurring of distinctions is beneficial in this novel, as in the disguises and transformations that Hawkeye and his friends use to penetrate the Huron camp* Ultimately, however, Hawkeye denies the validity of such ambiguity. Emphasizing his racial purity, he becomes "a figure in the

^pp. 80, 90. 167 landscape of nightmare, enacting a primitive ethical code that offers no escape from the surrounding horror.nlt3

Hawkeye acts effectively during the first journey because for him restoring Cora and Alice to their father confirms their status as daughters, a status that for Hawkeye mitigates the threat of their sexual potential for racial merging because it restores the non-sexual childhood relationship of parent and child. On the other hand, Hawkeye cannot accept the mutual attraction of Uncas and Cora that largely motivates the second journey because the adult sexuality underlying it denies the righteousness of his own narrow-minded insistence on the value of racial purity, of being "without a cross." Hawkeye can effec­ tively protect Cora and Alice only by regarding them as daughters, not as potential wives.

The major difference between the two narratives is thus the contrast between the types of family each seeks to defend. Whereas in the first narrative Cora and Alice undertake their journey to reunite an old family, what might be called a first generation family, the second narrative involves the quest for new families, second generation families. Heyward, newly affianced to Alice at the middle of the book, has a special motive for wishing to rescue her, while Uncas, whose admiration for Cora has been reciprocated during the first journey, is especially concerned for the safety of the elder sister. The first quest is that of_ the sisters, who are not merely present for the bulk of the action but influence it at crucial moments. For instance, when the

**3"Discord ," pp. 34, 39, AO. 168

party is hopelessly surrounded at the cave at Glenn's Falls and the men

have given up and are preparing to die, Cora convinces them to evade

capture by swimming the river, even though this means temporarily

abandoning herself and Alice to their fates. The second quest, in

contrast, is one for the sisters. Symbolically they dominate the second narrative because they draw the men into the unknown wilderness of the north, but they do not actually appear until close to the end of the narrative and do not personally influence its action.

Because the object of the first journey is the father and the object of the second the sisters, especially Cora, Peck sees the first half of the novel as the quest for the masculine and the second as the quest for the "eternal feminine."1*1* This second quest is not simply, however, a search for the feminine in the mythic sense that Peck stresses. On a more concrete level, it is a quest for America's national unity, like Colonel Middleton's search for Inez in The Prairie. The marriage of Colonel Munro and Cora's mulatto mother has shown that women can, to a certain extent, unite the white and black races. The mutual attraction between Uncas and Cora holds out the further possibility of the union of red and white, a union whose fate depends on the outcome of the second quest. But whereas in the first narrative the sisters succeed in their goal of reuniting their sundered family, in the second narrative the men fail in their attempts to save Cora and the potential for racial merging that she represents.

^p. 110. 169

Although Alice is rescued, her and Heyward's life together will

merely repeat the old, European pattern without initiating a new

American identity. In spite of coming from a southern colony, Heyward

is at least half Scots (Ch. xvi, pp. 185-86); Alice is wholly Scots.

This European background implies that their life together in America

will be more one of exile than of assimilation into a new culture. It

may, perhaps, even be sterile. At least in this novel (but not in the

next one, The Prairie) Cooper does not mention whether they have

children, although a catalog of the descendants of the hero and heroine

is a standard feature of his works. Alice may be saved, but her escape

is not sufficient to mitigate the tragedy of the deaths of Cora and

Uncas.

By contrasting an idyll of domestic tranquility^with a tragedy of

family loss, the double plot of The Last of the Mohicans reinforces the

problematic nature of Hawkeye's character. His unconscious though

primary purpose is to impede the racial merger Cora and Uncas potentially

embody, a result achieved only at the cost of destroying both Munro's

and Chingachgook1s families. Through his unwillingness to accept the

capacity of feminine sexuality for creating new families, he unwittingly

destroys old ones.

Although the author never directly condemns his hero, Hawkeye is

indicted by the contrast between the solidarity of Colonel Munro's family at Fort William Henry and the desolation of Munro and Chingachgook at the end of the novel after their children have been killed. In contrast to the tragedy Hawkeye fails to prevent in the second half of 170 the novel, the first half emphasizes the strength and resilience of the family and its role in the creation of what will be a new nation. While loving both his children, Colonel Munro most prizes Cora, whose mulatto heritage makes her quintessentially American. He also sees both his daughters for what they are, grown women, on the verge of marrying and establishing families of their own, so he is able, despite his initial shock, to accept a new addition to his family when Duncan Heyward asks his permission to marry Alice. Although Munro is not always the ideal father, he never fails in the fundamental duty of recognizing how women can cross cultural barriers and unify diverse people. But because

Hawkeye cannot accept this feminine potential, the domestic ideal of the first half of the double plot is rejected and destroyed in the tragedy of the second half.

Hawkeye typifies the problems that feminine complexity posed for

Cooper between 1825 and 1833. While the scout's inability to accept women fully produces tragedy, Cooper very likely did not consciously intend such a result. Nevertheless the author reveals that his and

Natty Bumppo's positions are not identical, especially when he portrays his protagonist in an ironic light. If Cooper came during this period to view women and the world in general more pessimistically than he had at the beginning of his career, he did not blame women themselves for his mood. Although men might reject what they stood for, women, in his view, were fully capable of comprehending their own complexity and of passing a complete initiation into adulthood, as he was to demonstrate in The Pathfinder. CHAPTER 5

ADULTHOOD AND INITIATION IN THE PATHFINDER

When James Franklin Beard noted in a 1971 survey that criticism

of James Fenimore Cooper has not yet resolved "the long controversy over Cooper's stature as artist" because "it contains all too little suggestion of the tightness of form requisite to classic art," he

described a continuing problem.1 Despite the high quality of such

recent analyses of structure as Constance Ayers Denne's discussion of the organization of The Headsman and H. Daniel Peck's book-length exploration of the effects of Cooper's use of space,2 there remains a

general failure to appreciate the tight structuring of many of Cooper's novels. In the case of The Pathfinder this failure may at least

partially be excused by the fact that the major themes undercut the

effect of the structure. This structure, a classic initiation pattern, suggests that Mabel Dunham's goal should be to achieve the independence of full adulthood. But, even as he depicts Mabel undergoing the rigors of a traditional initiation, Cooper idealizes passivity and

1"James Fenimore Cooper," in Fifteen American Authors before 1900, ed. Robert A. Rees and Earl N. Harbert (Madison: Univ. of Wiscon­ sin Press, 1971), p. 96.

2Denne, "Cooper's Artistry in The Headsman," Nineteenth- Century Fiction, 29 (June 1974), 77-92; Peck, A World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper's Fiction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1977).

171 172 self-sacrifice, working against the pattern he has established to

insist finally that Mabel not take control of her own life, that she

permit others to choose for her the adult role she is to play.

That The Pathfinder has not been analyzed as an initiation story is partly due to the critical tendency to focus on the title

character, often at the expense of Mabel or of love.3 The negative attitude towards the heroine is typified by Kay Seymour House, who declares, "The whole book depends on Mabel and she is weak; she cannot be artful and be a Cooper heroine. Cooper's remedy was to weaken

Natty, also." In House's view, Mabel not only weakens Pathfinder but completely destroys him without being a strong character in her own right: "Mabel is a douce heroine, and so like Alice Munro that Cooper referred to her as 'Alice' part of the time and 'Mabel' the rest in the first edition."4 Unfortunately for House's argument, Cooper

3Critics who idealize Pathfinder follow D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923), p. 87; and include James Grossman, James Fenimore Cooper ([New York]: William Sloane Associates, 1949; rpt. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 143; Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co./Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), p. 55; A. N. Kaul, The American Vision, Yale Publications in American Studies, 7 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), p. 132; Edwin Fussell, Frontier (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 55-59; Kay Seymour House, Cooper's Americans ([Columbus]: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 307-15; Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 73-75; Frank M. Collins, "Cooper and the American Dream," PMLA, 81 (1966), 90-91; George Dekker, James Fenimore Cooper: The American Scott (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), pp. 164- 66; and Joel Porte, The Romance in America (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 24-28.

"pp. 309, 308, 313. 173

originally called his heroine "Agnes," not "Alice." This error in the

names occurs three times only, in chapter 1 of the first English

edition.5 The term "douce heroine" describes the kind of stereotyped

female often associated not only with Cooper but with many nineteenth-

century American writers. House quotes from Precaution a passage in

which Cooper himself exemplifies this kind of woman as pure, true,

innocent, disinterested, and self-sacrificing:

The writer of these pages is a man—one who has seen much of the other sex, and he is happy to have an opportunity of paying tribute to female purity and female truth. That there are hearts so disinterested as to lose the consider­ ations of self, in advancing the happiness of those they love; that there are minds so pure as to recoil with disgust from the admission of deception, indelicacy, or management, he knows; for he has seen it from long and close examination. ... He believes that innocency, singleness of heart, ardency of feeling, and unalloyed, shrinking delicacy, sometimes exist in the female bosom, to an extent that but few men are happy enough to discover, and that most men believe imcompatible with the frailties of human nature.6

This description of an idealized stereotype must stand as a

measure for Cooper's woman characters, but it must not be taken as representative of the qualities of his individual heroines. As fre­ quently happens in Cooper's writing, this authorial comment is

contradicted by the action of the novel itself. The heroine of

Precaution, which yields this quotation as well as some of Cooper's

most idealized women, is not a passive saint but an unsophisticated

5The Pathfinder (London: Richard Bentley, 1840), I, 23, 24, 26.

eHouse, p. 17. 174

girl who must be educated in the ways of the world before she can find

the proper husband. Far less does this description truly represent

the women of the books following Precaution, since Cooper eschewed the

derivative nature of his first novel and worked to develop original

themes and character types.

Another tendency in Pathfinder criticism has been to sidestep

the problem of Pathfinder's love by considering Mabel separately from

her effect on the scout,7 although some critics do regard Mabel in a

positive light or question Pathfinder's social isolation or the quality

of his love.6 Still another factor impeding recognition of the struc­

ture of the novel has been the general critical focus on male—not

female—initiation in literature. Even Elaine Ginsberg, the only critic

to deal in any depth with female initiations in American literature,

after citing Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791) as an early

7Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (1950; reissued Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 64-67; Donald Davie, The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 121; Donald A. Ringe, James Fenimore Cooper (New York: Twayne, 1962), pp. 82-83.

8Peck, pp. 79-80, 170; Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1975), pp. 105-09, 114; Nina Baym, "The Women of Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales," American Quarterly, 23 (1971), 701-03; David W. Noble, The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden (New York: George Braziller, 1968), pp. 14-15; David Howard, "James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales: 'without a cross,'" in Tradition and Tolerance in Nineteenth-century Fiction, ed. David Howard, John Lucas, and John Goode (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), pp. 31-32; Robert H. Zoellner, "Conceptual Ambivalence in Cooper's Leatherstocking," American Literature, 31 (1960), 412-18. 175

prototype and mentioning The Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Romance as later examples, concludes that

it is obvious why the female initiation story is rare in American literature: there has been no adult female world for the young girl to be initiated into. The woman who was to be a redeemer, spiritualizer, and ennobler could never be an initiate because she had to remain pure and innocent, forever a child, even after (and despite) marriage. On the other hand, the woman who gained some knowledge of the world or some self T awareness which caused her to lose her innocence and purity was cast in the role of fallen woman.9

The primary difficulty with the dichotomy Ginsberg sees between the uninitiated household saint and the initiated fallen woman is that it precludes a very real third possibility: an initiated woman's becoming a wife without becoming a saint. Ginsberg rejects this possibility because she assumes that in nineteenth-century American literature the wife "was to be a redeemer, spiritualizer, and ennobler," in other words, was to be Coventry Patmore's Angel in the House.

Cooper, however, did not subscribe to the notion that a wife's primary function was to spiritualize her family. While he did feel that women could be morally superior to men, he felt that the main task of a wife was to provide her husband with intellectual companionship and emotional support, not spiritual elevation. A wife, he felt, should be her husband's equal in many respects. She should be "fit to be his associate, qualified to mingle her tastes with his own, to exchange

9"The Female Initiation Theme in American Fiction," Studies in American Fiction, 3 (Spring 1975), 29. 176 ideas, and otherwise to be his companion in an intellectual sense."

What was important was not her spirituality so much as her "manners, temper, [and] mental improvement."10

Because Cooper does not demand spirituality of a wife, at the end of The Pathfinder when Mabel becomes engaged to Jasper Western, she is not portrayed as the pure innocent. Instead of being a redeemer who will save Jasper from the corruptions of this earth, she is a fallen Eve and he a fallen Adam. Sitting together "like a pair of guilty beings," they resemble "Milton's picture of our first parents, when the consciousness of sin first laid its leaden weight on their souls."11 Rather than guaranteeing her purity, marriage offers Mabel a role in which she will express the full sexuality of adulthood.

Cooper's recognition of female sexuality led to concern with the very practical matter of how young women should be educated so that they could select the proper husbands. Theoretically at least, he believed that American girls should pick their own mates without pressure from family or friends and that they should not be subjected to the planned marriages characteristic of European society. In

Gleanings in Europe; Italy, published in 1838 only two years before

The Pathfinder, he declared that the freedom of choice given girls in

10The Chainbearer, Mohawk Edition (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, [1896]), Ch. xiv, p. 196.

xlMohawk Edition (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, [1895]), Ch. xxix, pp. 484, 489. Subsequent references will be parenthetical in the text. 177 the United States is "the touchstone of domestic manners; for the woman who has freely made her own selection will hesitate long before she consents to destroy the great pledge of connubial affection," that is, before she takes a lover.12 Partly because young women supposedly need time to arrive at mature judgments, Cooper decried early marriages. Although he had been only twenty-one when he married eighteen-year-old Susan DeLancey in 1811, by the 1830s, as he thought about The Pathfinder, he expressed the wish that his daughters not marry until at least their early twenties.13 In objecting to early marriages Cooper was not simply concerned with the possibility that immature young people might choose the wrong spouses. On a more personal level, the maturation of his daughters and the possibility that they might marry and leave him for husbands and homes of their own threatened to destroy the closely knit family life on which he was emotionally deeply dependent, as has been discussed in chapter 2.

This threat became particularly acute by 1840, the year The Pathfinder was published, when his youngest daughter turned twenty-one and his eldest twenty-seven.

The maturation of his daughters did not simply threaten to destroy Cooper's happy family life. It also brought to the fore again

12(Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1838), II, 129.

13Tha Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. James Franklin Beard, 6 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960- 68), I, 23, 430; II, 53, 176, 375; III, 370, n. 3, 393, 394, n. 1. 178 the problem of the complex nature of female sexuality that had haunted him during the 1820s and that reflected the nineteenth-century assumptions discussed in chapter 1. While this age did idealize the pure, innocent, self-sacrificing woman, another widespread assumption was that, while woman combined the carnal and the spiritual, her sexuality was irrepressible. The chastity of a woman before marriage and her fidelity afterwards thus were important in preventing her sexual attractiveness from threatening social stability. Within marriage sexuality could, however, create a powerful social bond. In

Cooper's fiction men and women who cannot accept the opposite sex doom themselves to a sterile, lonely life and may harm other people as well.

The novels of the thirties and forties, including The Deerslayer, stress the problem of young men and women learning to accept adult responsibilities, including responsibility for sex. In these works, as in The Pathfinder, fitness for marriage is the ultimate test of maturity.

To prove her fitness Mabel undergoes the classic form of initiation, as exemplified in fiction and myth and in the rites de passage of many non-literate peoples. The theme of initiation in literature has been discussed in some detail by Mordecai Marcus, who draws the general conclusion that "an initiation story may be said to show its young protagonist experiencing a significant change of knowledge about the world or himself, or a change of character, or of both, and this change must point or lead him towards an adult world. 179

It may or may not contain some form of ritual, but it should give some evidence that the change is at least likely to have permanent effects."11* For Marcus, then, fiction utilizes the theme of initiation when it presents a young person grappling for the first time with the hitherto unsuspected complexities of adult life.

Although Marcus rightly insists that an initiation story in literature need not involve any of the forms or rituals frequently found in anthropological studies of initiation, the type that he terms a "decisive initiation," the type in which the protagonist achieves full integration into the. adult world, nevertheless must encompass the three levels of initiation recognized by social scientists. Arnold van Gennep describes these stages as "separation," "transition," and

"incorporation," divisions analogous to the stages of "separation,"

"initiation," and "return" discussed by Joseph Campbell in his studies of myths. Mircea Eliade's highly detailed catagorization of initiation rites recognizes many different forms, the most complicated of which involve the three stages of "separation," "death," and "ressurection.1,15

1'*"What Is an Initiation Story?,'" Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 19 (1960), 222.

lsArnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (French ed., 1908; English trans. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press/Phoenix Books, 1961), pp. 11, 191-92; Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd ed., Bollingen . Series, 17 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 36-37, 245-46; Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation; The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth, trans. Willard R. Trask (1958, with title Birth and Rebirth; rpt. New York: Harper and Row/Harper Torchbooks, 1965), pp. 130-32, 134-36. 180

According to these anthropologists, the initiate first relinquishes outmoded behavior, then gains new knowledge, and finally returns to normal life with a changed perspective on it. The full initiate thus moves from the flux of the end of childhood through a period of confusion and education to a return to normality, but now in the role of adult. He or she undergoes three stages, which may for convenience be termed separation, initiation proper, and return.

Much of Mabel's development is explored through the traditional motif of a journey into the unknown. She travels from the highly developed civilization of New York City to the crude society of a remote frontier garrison, from thence down Lake Ontario to a secret fort on one of the Thousand Islands—the last bastion of white culture—then back to the garrison and finally back to New York again.

In the first stage of her initiation, Cooper carefully presents Mabel's sexuality in a positive light and contrasts it with Pathfinder's asexuality, which puts him under the control of Sergeant Dunham, a limited man and an inadequate parent. In the second stage, her struggle to achieve a mature independence by resolving conflicts between her duties to her father and to herself is paralleled by and contrasted to the blindness of Pathfinder and her father, who both precipitate disaster as they act on their faulty assumptions about what is best for Mabel. And in the third stage Mabel continues to understand marriage better than the scout does, even though she promises to have him. Ultimately, however, because he never courts her as a lover but 181 with paternalistic detachment tells her to choose whom she wishes, he finds himself rejected.

The Separation

The first stage of Mabel's initiation, her separation from the world of childhood, is divided into two parts, each introducing her to different forms of love and each defined by contrasting settings; the wilderness of the first quarter of the novel is placed against the fort and the ship of the second quarter. To reach the fort where her father is stationed, Mabel traverses a virgin forest. Forests and wilder­ nesses in general are highly significant for the theme of initiation.

Both in American literature and in the separation rituals of some non-literate peoples, the forest is frequently regarded as a no-man's- land, a place of transition between two states of being.16 (Mabel is thrust not only into the wilderness but also into Cooper's other favorite apierons, or areas of possibility, the sea—in this novel, the inland sea of Lake Ontario—and the battlefield.)

Mabel's initial reaction to the wilderness indicates that her personal transition from adolescence to adulthood will ultimately be successful. When she first meets Jasper in the forest, their mutual attraction reveals that he would be an appropriate husband for her.

ieGennep, p. 18; R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (1955; rpt. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press/Phoenix Books, 1958), p. 99: Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1973). 182

They begin to fall in love with the kind of emotion essential, Cooper

believed, to a happy marriage. Their love is mutual and complex,

combining what the author refers to as "sympathy united to passion"

(Ch. xxviii, p. 479). That is, it involves both friendly affection

and sexual attraction. During Mabel and Jasper's first meeting the

"sympathy" between them is evident. Each shows an "interest in the other, which similarity of age, condition, mutual comeliness, and their novel situation, would be likely to inspire in the young and ingenuous"

(Ch. ii, p. 15). This mutual interest has a sexual basis, intially revealed by Mabel's affinity with the wilderness, which in all Cooper's work provides an arena for unrestrained passion. Mabel quickly reveals her own sexuality in incidents in which her sensitivity to the wilder­ ness is linked to her sensitivity to Jasper. Her sexuality sometimes

makes her even more acute than either an Indian or a professional scout in reading wilderness signs. Once she is quicker than the

Tuscarora guide, Arrowhead, to see smoke from Jasper's fire. Later she, not Pathfinder, recognizes Jasper's canoe as it approaches in the dark (Ch. i, p. 5; Ch. vii, p. 102), and. near the end of the book, when she becomes formally engaged to Jasper, Cooper makes the sexual bond between them explicit by describing them as Adam and Eve after

the fall, that is, after discovering their sexuality.

Also in the wilderness Mabel demonstrates that she is brave and competent. Very shortly after he meets her, Pathfinder decides she will not be afraid to watch Jasper take her uncle over a waterfall in a canoe because "she doesn't look like a skeary thing at all" 183

(Ch. ii, p. 29). Mabel's reaction to the feat bears him out. Although she is momentarily frightened, she has the presence of mind to notice

Jasper's skill with the canoe and to be reassured by it (Ch. iii, pp. 40, 42). Shortly thereafter Mabel behaves well in the face of danger. As her party attempts to escape an Indian ambush by descending the Oswego in the dark in frail canoes, Mabel "could hardly be said to be under the influence of fear; yet her heart often beat quicker than common, her fine blue eye lighted with an exhibition of a resolution that was wasted in the darkness, and her quickened feelings came in aid of the real sublimity that belonged to the scene, and to the incidents of the night" (Ch. vii, pp. 90-91). Like the alertness of

Pathfinder and Jasper, Mabel's heightened sensations arise not from fear but from the challenge of danger.

Cooper further describes Mabel's ability to respond positively to danger when Pathfinder lands her and her father at the head of

Lake Ontario by taking them in a canoe through storm-whipped breakers:

Our heroine was no coward, and while she felt the novelty of her situation, she also experienced a fair proportion of its wild delight. At moments, indeed, her heart was in her mouth, as the bubble of a boat floated on the very crest of a foaming breaker, appearing to skim the water like a swallow, and then she flushed and laughed, as, left by the glancing element, they appeared to linger behind, ashamed of having been outdone in the headlong race. (Ch. xviii, p. 278)

In regarding the contest between the canoe and the breakers as a race, that is, as a game, Mabel indicates that she has achieved a new perspective on a previously foreign experience. 184

Cooper emphasizes that it is the wilderness that has brought

out Mabel's latent courage and developed aspects of her personality

that would have continued dormant had she never left civilization. Not long after the canoe trip down the Oswego, she explains how this new environment has affected her courage: "I do feel braver out here in the woods, Pathfinder, than I ever felt before, amid the weaknesses of the towns ..." (Ch. xiii, p. 197). By the phrase "the weaknesses of the towns," Mabel means the conventions that have previously pre­ vented her from needing to confront any dangerous situation bravely.

She is conscious of the extent to which she is now in harmony with the wilderness and is impressed by more than the beauty of Lake Ontario:

"For the first time, Mabel felt the hold that the towns and civiliza­ tion had gained on her habits sensibly weakened, and the warm-hearted girl began to think that a life passed amid objects such as these around her might be happy" (Ch. xii, pp. 180-81). These new feelings she describes to Pathfinder: "I find I'm fast getting to be a frontier girl, and am coming to love all this grand silence of the woods. The towns seem tame to me; and, as my father will probably pass the remainder of his days here, where he has already lived so long, I begin to feel that I should be happy to continue with him, and not return to the seashore" (Ch. xviii, p. 281). The acclimatization to a totally new and fundamentally uncivilized environment that Mabel describes in these quotations shows that she is growing out of the sheltered life of childhood and will be capable of adapting to the complexities of adulthood. 185

After having in the wilderness unconsciously recognized the dual nature of true love, Mabel discovers in the supposedly civilized settings of fort and ship two other types of love. Both these varieties are, however, incomplete and therefore pernicious. (Signi­ ficantly, it is also in these new settings of fort and ship that

Jasper's fortunes decline. He is first suspected of treason and eventually imprisoned aboard his own vessel.) Unlike ideal love, which combines friendship with sexual attraction, the two other types arise either from friendship or from passion and cannot combine these two forces. At one extreme is the unadulterated lust of the villains,

Arrowhead and Muir. Arrowhead treats his wife as a slave and wishes to make Mabel his concubine. The scarcely more restrained Muir has had four or five wives, at least one of whom he abandoned when his passion for her flagged. Clearly, neither of these men could be an appropriate husband for Mabel.

Although Pathfinder's affection for Mabel is the exact reverse of the lust that drives Arrowhead and Muir, it too is an inadequate form of love. Far from expressing a healthy combination of physical and emotional attraction, Pathfinder's feeling for Mabel is both paternalistic and infantile, qualities more similar than they might at first appear since both deny sexuality, either precluding or repressing it. The paternal aspects of his love appear regularly throughout the novel and have been well analyzed by Joel Porte.17

17pp. 24-28. 186

Early on Pathfinder affirms he is as eager to protect Mabel from danger "as her own brave father himself could be" (Ch. vi, p. 80), and,

much later, after the sergeant's death, he emphasizes a promise he has made to Dunham: "I told him that I would be a father to you [Mabel], as well as a husband" (Ch. xxix, p. 486). Like a father, Pathfinder is uniformly protective and self-sacrificing. At the same time he maintains a parental superiority, as when he kills two gulls with one bullet to show Mabel that he could have won the shooting match against

Jasper if he had wished.

The infantile aspects of Pathfinder's love for Mabel are most clearly revealed in his dreams, particularly his dream of having "a cabin in a grove of sugar maples, and at the root of every tree was a Mabel Dunham .... I tried to shoot a fa'an, but Killdeer missed fire, and the creatur' laughed in my face, as pleasantly as a young girl laughs in her merriment, and then it bounded away, looking back as if expecting me to follow" (Ch. xviii, p. 292). Later part of this dream is repeated: "The young does sport before me; and when I raise

Killdeer in order to take a little venison, the animals look back, and it seems as if they all had Mabel's sweet countenance, laughing in my face, and looking as if they said, 'Shoot me if you dare!'"

(Ch. xxviii, p. 476).

At least one critic has interpreted these dreams as evidence of Mabel's castrating powers; supposedly it is she who prevents

Pathfinder from being able to use Killdeer, his "manly weapon."18

18House, p. 313. 187

Such an interpretation oversimplifies, however, by neglecting the fact that in the dream of the sugar maples Mabel appears in two manisfesta- tions, discussed by H. Daniel Peck19 and by Annette Kolodny. Kolodny sees the dream as "a revelation of the two competing feminines between which Natty finds himself torn. The Mabel Dunham at the root of each sugar maple is "the maternal feminine, or Earth Mother symbol," while

"quite different from the maternal-feminine aspect of Mabel seated at the root of every tree, the fawn is feminine nature's sexual face."

Pathfinder's inability to kill the fawn does symbolize impotence, but an impotence imposed by himself, not caused by Mabel. He identifies

Mabel with the femininity of the wilderness but cannot equally accept the two aspects of this femininity, the maternal and the sexual. In choosing to try to live in harmony with the wilderness, Pathfinder has had to reject the explotative, sensual role of lover in favor of the passive, pre-sexual role of infant son. He cannot, Kolodny argues, kill the fawn—that is, dominate the wilderness—because he has chosen to remain pre-sexual. So in loving Mabel, Pathfinder accepts her maternal aspects but rejects her sexuality.20

Nowhere is the inadequacy of Pathfinder's separation of sexuality and love made more explicit than in his relationship with

Sergeant Dunham. Pathfinder courts Mabel only at the instigation of the sergeant, but the sergeant is a poor parent who makes no distinction

19pp. 79-80.

20pp. 106-08. 188 between the love of a father and that of a husband and who wrongfully tries to pressure his daughter into marriage. He wishes to control

Mabel rather than guide her and is rigid and unimaginative. He also has no objection to the marriage of the forty-lsh Pathfinder and nineteen-year-old Mabel because he married a woman much younger than himself when he was close to forty and because he is unaware of the extent to which Mabel's education has been superior to Pathfinder's.

He even denies the importance of similarities of age or interest in marriage, but with specious reasoning: '"If like loved like, women would love one another, and men also. No, no, like loves dislike,'— the sergeant was merely a scholar of the camp,—'and you [Pathfinder] have nothing to fear from Mabel on that score. ... my mind is made up that you shall be my son-in-law'" (Ch. xviii, p. 295).

Persuaded by this and other arguments into supressing his own misgivings, Pathfinder acquiesces to Dunham's plan and, before they all leave the relative civilization of the fort, agrees to propose to

Mabel. The proposal itself takes place in the wilderness and marks the end of the separation stage of Mabel's initiation because it forces her to articulate her new understanding of the dual nature of love in the setting in which she unconsciously learned that it should combine

"sympathy united to passion." On an uninhabited cliff at the western end of Lake Ontario she demonstrates the superiority of her under­ standing of love over Pathfinder's naive belief that the fatherly affection he feels for her is a sufficient basis for marriage, a superiority that Cooper stresses by reversing the male and female 189 roles. Whereas in typical proposal scenes the man gently dominates a

timid young woman, Cooper shows Mabel controlling the proposal. She

passes the first test in this stage of her initiation by being concerned

but composed, while Pathfinder is so shy and tongue-tied that she has to ask him if he wants to marry her. She then refuses him because he

cannot offer her a true marriage combining friendship with physical

attraction: "What I wish you to understand is, that it is not likely

that you and I should ever think of each other, as man and wife ought

to think of each other. ... a match like that would be unwise—

unnatural, perhaps" (Ch. xvlii, pp. 286-87). Unlike the scout, who, despite his age, remains as ignorant of sex as any stereotyped female virgin, Mabel understands the importance of physical love.

The Initiation Proper

Mabel's mature, rational rejection of Pathfinder's marriage proposal midway through the novel marks the end of the separation stage and the beginning of the stage of initiation proper, because in rejecting Pathfinder she becomes aware for the first time of the contradictions and complexities of the adult world with which she must

learn to deal. Through this proposal Mabel discovers a deep conflict between her natural duty to her father and her equally natural desire

to marry only a man for whom she can feel "sympathy united to passion."

Simultaneously, Mabel learns that, on the most fundamental level, she is completely isolated: her father is a father in name only because he cannot offer her understanding or emotional support. Rather than 190

seeing that what his daughter needs is a passionate husband, Dunham

has chosen Pathfinder as his son-in-law because he simply wishes to

provide her with a paternal protector. Mable, too, sees the scout as a father figure. The similarity in their assessments creates a deeply

ironic situation since Dunham regards Pathfinder's paternalism as his

primary qualification for marriage, while Mabel regards it as the

main impediment.

This conflict between Mabel and Dunham has developed without

Mabel's suspecting any problem, since she has naively assumed that her father will care as much about her feelings as she cares about his and so will not make any major decisions about her future without consulting her. But because she and he are practically strangers, having been separated at the death of the mother when Mabel was a young

child, Dunham has responded to his daughter not as if she were an

individual whose unique needs should be consulted but as if she

conformed to the stereotype of an adolescent female and was a "good

girl" who would unquestioningly accept her father's decisions.

Again Mabel's differing responses to her dilemma are correlated with different settings. Out-of-doors in the wilderness she finds it easy to express her own desires and otherwise to behave in an

unconventional manner. But inside, whether in cabin or blockhouse, her first response is to act conventionally. Only at the climax of her initiation does she overcome this tendency and assert herself within doors.

Although in the course of the second stage of her initiation

Mabel will eventually learn to choose Pathfinder willingly instead of 191 having him forced on her by her father, her initial reaction is to accept the scout out of duty, not out of free choice. Soon after the proposal, finding herself in another interior setting, a cabin on one of the Thousand Islands, she lets herself be pressured by her father into agreeing to marry Pathfinder if he should ask again because she is not yet able to transcend conventionally feminine behavior:

Trained like a woman, to subdue her most ardent feelings, her thoughts reverted to her father, and to the blessings that awaited the child who yielded to a parent's wishes.

"Father," she said quietly, almost with a holy calm, "God blesses the dutiful daughter! ... I will marry whomsoever you desire." (Ch. xix, p. 331)

Although Mabel's repression of her own will may reinforce some twentieth-century assumptions about how nineteenth-century women were expected to behave, Cooper himself quickly denounces Mabel's renuncia­ tion by describing her face as having "something wild and unnatural in it" as she makes this offer (Gh. xix, p. 332).

In this scene Mabel represses her own desires to obey her father, but in the remainder of the second stage of her initiation she will discover the proper uses of both renunciation and self-serving behavior and learn to make her own decision about whom to marry, a decision that will only coincidentally conform to her father's wishes.

Mabel soon comes to realize the destructiveness of acting in a conventionally feminine manner when her father leaves her and a handful of soldiers at an isolated blockhouse. Here, in a manner reminiscent of the archetypal mythological heroes' initiations discussed by Joseph 192

Campbell, she faces death, becomes a killer, discovers the ambiguous mingling of appearance and reality in this world, and copes with a helper who is by turns both benefactor and adversary.21

Cooper signals the essential changes that Mabel is about to undergo when he describes her response to the mysterious signal of a waving branch on the morning after her father has left the Thousand

Islands garrison, taking with him all but four of its soldiers:

It was one of the peculiarities of the exposure to which those who dwelt on the frontiers of America were liable to bring out the moral qualities of the women to a degree that they must themselves, under other circumstances, have believed they were incapable of manifesting; and Mabel well knew that the borderers loved to dwell, in their legends, on the presence of mind, fortitude, and spirit, that their wives and sisters had displayed, under circumstances the most trying. Her emulation had been awakened by what she had heard on such subjects; and it at once struck her, that now was the moment for her to show that she was truly Sergeant Dunham's child. (Ch. xx, p. 336)

Mabel's new self-reliance does not yet involve distrust of others, but it does immediately lead her to pursue contradictory goals, which she fails to achieve because she will not yet deceive or believe others capable of deceit. The signal comes from the young Tuscarora,

Dew-of-June, who, with her husband Arrowhead, has twice fled the British under suspicious circumstances. Mabel ignores the strong evidence of their treason and accepts June as a friend, believing that her only motive for coming to the island has been to give warning of an imminent

Iroquois attack. When June begs that her presence remain a secret,

21,,Part One: The Adventure of the Hero," pp. 49-251. 193

Mabel agrees, but nevertheless resolves to try to warn the few remain­ ing whites without betraying her friend. Although in this agreement she aligns herself with an Indian against members of her own race,

Mabel is supported in her conduct by conventional nineteenth-century standards of femininity. June has appealed to Mabel as one woman to another, asking her not to reveal the secret of her presence because

"June squaw, and tell squaw; no tell men" (Ch. xx, p. 347). This stress on feminine friendship Mabel can well understand, since deep

intimacies between women characterized nineteenth-century society.22

Mabel reciprocates the Indian woman's love and affirms loyalty to one

of her own sex by pledging fidelity to June. In accepting the Indian's

friendship, then, Mabel displays a certain degree of independence but no rebellion against the mores of her culture.

All too quickly Mabel discovers that she has failed to achieve

her goal of saving her companions while being fair to June because she

has acted purely according to conventional standards of feminine

behavior. Because her skimpy, typically feminine education leads her

inadvertently to insult Corporal McNab, he refuses to believe her warn­

ing and so falls the first victim to the Iroquois attack. In a related

tragedy, Mabel's inability to lie or otherwise violate feminine decorum

indirectly results in the death of Jennie, the wife of one of the soldiers. Moments after the two women take refuge in the blockhouse,

22See Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1 (Autumn 1975), 1-29. 194

Mabel, reconnoitering from the second story, discovers that all the soldiers, including Jennie's husband, have been massacred. But in response to Jennie, who remains by the door frantically demanding news, she prevaricates because "she trembled at what might be the immediate effect of her [Jennie's] sorrow should his death become suddenly known to her" and because "it seemed sacrilegious in her eyes to tell a direct untruth, under the awful circumstances in which she was placed."

Instead of clearly telling the other woman that her husband is dead,

Mabel replies that he may be among "some of our people gathered about the body of McNab, . . . for I see one, two, three, four, and all in the scarlet coats of the regiment" (Ch. xxi, p. 362). Concluding from this account that her husband is safe, Jennie rushes from the block­ house, only to be immediately tomahawked by Arrowhead. Mabel has caused Jennie's death by vacillating in a conventional manner about breaking bad news because at this point in her initiation she still cannot act in an original manner.

The shock of Jennie's death and the sudden realization that someone has entered the blockhouse by taking advantage of the open door mark a turning point in Mabel's initiation and transform her from an immature girl, genteelly concealing the truth while professing to be unable to lie, into an alert, responsive woman. As she braces herself to meet the unknown intruder, probably a murderous Iroquois, she twice attempts to relieve her anxiety with the conventional solace of prayer and twice fails: "the instinct of life, however, was too strong for prayer"; "she made another effort to pray, but the moment was too 195 horrible for that relief" (Ch. xxi, pp. 364, 365). Instead of being absorbed in preparing herself for heaven, Mabel is intensely aware of her present condition: "This was one of those instants into which are compressed the sensations of years of ordinary existence. . . . never had there been a time in her brief career, when Mabel heard more acutely, saw more clearly, or felt more vividly" (Ch. xxi, p. 365). In this scene her old responses slough away, enabling her to perceive more intensely than ever before. This shift in perception will shortly be paralleled by a shift in how she reacts to pressure.

The person who has entered the blockhouse is June, whom Mabel at first greets as someone who will share her own horror at the recent butchery. June, however, rebukes her, reminding her that "Yengeese

[English] too greedy—take away all hunting-grounds—chase Six Nation from morning to night; wicked king—wicked people. Pale-face very bad" (Ch. xxii, p. 368). Despite the fact that she has just seen her own people murdered, Mabel accepts the justice of this rebuke and, by implication, her share of blame for the deaths of the soldiers and

Jennie. Like Elizabeth Temple in The Pioneers and Margery Waring in

The Oak Openings, she is instructed by an Indian about the crimes of whites as part of the process of her maturation.

Admitting the justice of Indian animosity enables Mabel to accept that June is still loyal to her own people. June, in fact, regards the white woman as both her friend and her own particular prisoner: "June no let Lily [Mabel] help enemy—no let Injin hurt

Lily" (Ch. xxii, p. 382). When Mabel accepts June's attitude without 196 relinquishing her resolve to contact the whites absent on the expedi­ tion, she reaches a new comprehension of paradox and a new degree of maturity.

Cooper emphasizes the change that Mabel's new attitude creates in the relationship between the two young women:

It would have been a pleasant sight to witness the eager desire of each of these two sincere females to ascertain all that might be of consequence to their respective friends, and yet the native delicacy with which each refrained from pressing the other to make revelations that would have been improper, as well as the sensitive, almost intuitive feeling, with which each avoided saying aught that might prove injurious to her own nation: as respected each other, there was perfect confidence; as regarded their respective people, entire fidelity. (Ch. xxii, p. 384)

This mutual respect of Mabel and June is the closest that any of

Cooper's woman characters come to the kind of interracial intimacy of

Natty and Chingachgook. The major difference between the friendship of the men and that of the women is that the women cannot detach themselves from their societies as Natty and Chingachgook do and there­ fore cannot sustain their intimacy over any period of time. The contrast between the short-lived friendship of Mabel and June and the extended one of Natty and Chingachgook indicates the strength of

Cooper's assumption that women must remain members of social groups whereas men are free to live outside of society.

The premature death of June further emphasizes that women are defined primarily in reference to others in Cooper's novels. In this author's world, deep intimacies between women are only possible in the absence of men. If men are present, women relate to them first and 197 only then to other women. Cooper also made Indian women completely subservient to men and far less free than white women, because he believed Indians as a group to be more degraded than whites. When

Arrowhead decides to make Mabel his concubine, June acquieses to his choice by conceiving a sincere friendship for her rival. As she tells

Mabel, "If June must have sister-wife, love to have you" (Ch. xxii, p. 372). Though June and Mabel equally accept the authority of men, that of husband and father respectively, Cooper does not equally approve of their attitudes. He presents June's acceptance of her husband's choice as completely admirable, while he describes Mabel's forced acceptance of Pathfinder as unnatural. June has no being apart from her husband. So dependent is she upon him that after he is killed she pines away and dies in a matter of months, even though Mabel tries to save her.

Because this type of feminine weakness and reliance on a man is commonly associated with nineteenth-century fiction, there seems to be an unwritten assumption among critics that Cooper must have accepted it as an ordinary novelistic convention, even as a type of exemplary feminine behavior. However, a close reading of all thirty- one of his novels reveals that, besides June, only one other of his characters (the sister of the hero in Afloat and Ashore) dies in this manner. Far from being a simple lapse into convention, June's death, like that of Grace Wallingford in the later novel, symbolizes the fatality of totally depending on men. 198

At this crucial stage of her initiation as she recognizes her conflict with June, Mabel's dual problem is to realize that she has formerly acted too passively towards both her father and June and to relinquish this passivity and act for herself. Because with the death of Jennie she has seen the disastrous consequences of the kind of decorous truthfulness sanctioned by social convention, she now changes her behavior, using lies and deceit to gain her own ends. So long as their interests are the same, she cooperates with June, but she also proves capable of independent action when her friend opposes her. She initially uses deceit to second June's efforts to enable the two of them to remain in the security of the blockhouse when she deliberately lies to Muir, who has reappeared, apparently as an Iroquois prisoner, and orders Mabel to surrender the fortress. As the hidden June pushes a rifle through a loophole, Mabel boldly claims that her companion is Pathfinder and so puts to flight not only the Iroquois accompanying Muir but also their French leader.

In this minor victory Mabel has acted in accord with June, but the same day she shows she can also act alone to defy the wishes of her friend. Her first defiant act occurs appropriately enough in the open air during one of her solitary lookouts from the top of the blockhouse when she spies a man hiding in a distant canoe. She signals him, correctly reasoning that if he is an enemy his seeing her can do no harm while if he is a friend communication may do great good. The signal is successful. As the man responds, Mabel discovers he is

Chingachgook, who will now guide Jasper to her rescue. 199

This signal is Mabel's first attempt at independent action; to make it she has taken advantage of a brief absence of June, who would have stopped her if she had understood her intentions. Up to this point Mabel has not actually tried to work against this friend who has saved her life, but the success of the signal means that she must decide to deceive June to protect herself from being forced into

Indian captivity. Her deliberate decision to betray her friend proves the decisive turning point in her initiation and indicates that she is now capable of making the difficult choices characteristic of adult life and of acting on these choices. Cooper points up the centrality of this decision by emphasizing how difficult Mabel finds it:

The half hour that succeeded the discovery of the presence of the Great Serpent [Chingachgook], was the most painful of Mabel Dunham's life. She saw the means of effecting all she wished, as it might be within reach of her hand, and yet it eluded her grasp. She knew June's decision and coolness, notwithstanding all her gentleness and womanly feeling, and at last she came reluctantly to the conclusion that there was no other way of attaining her end, than by deceiving her tried companion and protector. (Ch. xxiii, p. 395)

That night, by acting on her resolution, Mabel brings her initiation to a climax. Expecting Chingachgook to come to the block­ house, she deliberately lies to lure June away from the ground floor and then grapples with her when she returns and tries to prevent

Mabel from admitting someone shoving against the partially unbarred

door. The fact that Mabel lies to June shows that she has abandoned

the decorous squeamishness about telling "a direct untruth" that led

to the murder of Jennie. That Mabel has unbarred the door without

being certain whether friend or enemy awaits shows she can now accept 200 the risks of the unknown and can act in the face of uncertainty. And her struggle with June—theirs is the only physical conflict between women in all of Cooper's more than thirty novels—indicates the extent of her new commitment to action.

This struggle between Mabel and June ends abruptly as Path­ finder forces open the door and makes June a prisoner. In reimposing a traditional male dominance, the scout brings to a close the second portion of Mabel's initiation and begins the final stage, that of her return to normal life in the new role of adult. With him present,

Mabel reenters the social relationships of her culture and, relinquish­ ing the independent role she has played for two eventful days, assumes once again the position of a woman subservient to men. However, because Mabel is no longer the same naxve person she was forty-eight hours earlier, she now actively pursues her own goals within the confines of the position her society assigns to her rather than passively accepting her lot.

The Return

In the final stage of her initiation Mabel comes to represent

Cooper's ideal of femininity and simultaneously to reveal the inadequacies of Pathfinder and her father. Hitherto she has proved she can act effectively on her own. Nevertheless, self-sacrifice, not decisive action, is now shown to be Mabel's most important feminine trait. Almost immediately after Pathfinder reappears, she reminds him of his proposal and offers to marry him. This offer is not simply a 201 rote redemption of the promise she made her father the night before his departure because then she attached a condition that has not been fulfilled: Pathfinder himself was to ask again before she would accept him. Now she takes the initiative and, suggesting marriage to spur

Pathfinder's resolve, offers the scout her "worship"—not her love—if he will save the sergeant (Ch. xxiii, p. 401). With this self- renunciatory offer Mabel does everything in her power to help her father.

Despite her efforts, Mabel fails to save her father because his eagerness to see her married to Pathfinder leads him into errors that cause his own death. Not satisfied with ignoring Pathfinder's request not to pressure Mabel (Ch. xviii, pp. 296-97) and with having extorted from his daughter a promise to marry a man she cannot love,

Dunham also ignores her desire that he not let Pathfinder know about her decision but let a new proposal "come of itself—come naturally"

(.Ch, xix, p. 332). Instead, while away on the expedition, Dunham tells Pathfinder that Mabel is agreeable and has him return alone to the Thousand Islands so that he can propose privately. But in sending

Pathfinder on ahead, Dunham dispenses with the services of his best scout and, attempting a rash landing in the dark, is fatally wounded in an ambush. Arising as it does directly from his desire to see the scout and his daughter married, the sergeant's death indicates that the goal of his plan is fundamentally disastrous. Although throughout the novel Dunham ostensibly has only Mabel's welfare at heart, the fact that his attempts to arrange her marriage cause his own death indicates that his efforts should be condemned, not condoned. 202

At this stage only Mabel realizes how false her father's hopes have been. At his deathbed as she "watched by her father's pallet,

[she] began to feel how much our happiness, in this world, depends even on things that are imaginary" (Ch. xxiv, p. 427). Recognizing the hollowness of most ideals and of most contentment, Mabel chooses to accept Pathfinder as a less than perfect husband even though he has not been able to save her father. But despite her resolution, Path­ finder's hopes, like Dunham's, are shattered with a tragic inevitability.

Having promised Dunham that he "would be a father to [Mabel], as well as a husband," Pathfinder finds that this dual role commits him to a course of action that must prevent him from marrying the woman he longs for. Declaring that "no feeling father would deny his child this small privilege" of choosing for herself (Ch. xxix, p. 486),

Pathfinder asks Mabel to pick between him and Jasper. Seeing the scout acting as a disinterested parent and not as a suitor and learning for the first time that Jasper returns her love, how could Mabel not act as she does? In selecting Jasper over Pathfinder she chooses

"sympathy united to passion" over pure "sympathy"; she chooses a true marriage over an unnatural one. Mabel's initiation thus culminates successfully in her assumption of the adult role of true wife, a wife bound to her husband by both sex and friendship.

By structuring his novel around Mabel's growth into adulthood,

Cooper stressed the necessity of passion in marriage and the importance of the education of young women. But sincere as he was about these subjects, he never solved the conflict between them and other deeply 203 held beliefs, particularly his belief in the value of passivity and self-sacrifice. In developing these beliefs, he never simply asserts that a girl must learn to accept self-sacrifice and not have it forced upon her. This is, of course, the implication when Mabel supresses her own desires and offers to marry Pathfinder to save her father's life.

But the theme of self-sacrifice does not end With this scene, nor is Mabel's promise consistent with Cooper's earlier treatments of women's responsibilities. In The Spy and The Headsman, for example, he does not suggest that feminine duty demands extreme self-sacrifice or that young women themselves are incapable of achieving their own goals. Frances Wharton, fighting to save her brother from being executed, marries the man she loves. The heiress Adelheid de Willading convinces her reluctant father that the son of a despised hereditary executioner is worthy of becoming her husband. In The Pathfinder, however, Cooper prevents a woman from controlling her own life when he casts the scout as the deus ex machina who insures the happiness of the young couple. By having Pathfinder relinquish his own dreams of happiness and turn Mabel over to Jasper, Cooper shifts from his initial stress on a woman's education to a generalized idealization of self-sacrifice. Finally for Cooper the primary virtue i£ self-sacrifice, both Mabel's in offering to marry Pathfinder to save her father's life and Pathfinder's in relinquishing her to Jasper.

This glorification of self-sacrifice undercuts the stress on independent action that Cooper develops through the initiation structure. 204

As a result, the conclusion of the novel jars. Up until the end

Pathfinder's humility and passivity have, at best, made him look a fool, and, at worst, made him a collaborator in Sergeant Dunham's cruel scheme. And throughout, Mabel's sensitivity to the dual nature of love and her gradual discoveries of when and how to act decisively have given her a stature and complexity that make her superior to any other character. But all this is reversed when the book closes with a passive Mabel rescued from an unhappy marriage by the altruism of a rejected lover.

Unfortunately for the unity of The Pathfinder, Cooper could not permit the initiation that controls the structure of the novel to control its themes as well. Instead of keeping his focus on the ability to act decisively for oneself that Mabel achieves at the climax of her initiation, Cooper reverts to admiration of passivity and self-sacrifice and asks his readers to accept a conclusion in which a submissive Mabel accepts Pathfinder's renunciation of his own happi­ ness in favor of her and Jasper's.

Whereas Mabel's story teaches the nobility of independence when it shows one how to sacrifice for another, Pathfinder's story emphasizes the pathos of freedom and self-sacrifice when these are based on incomplete understanding. In idealizing the scout's selflessness, the conclusion of The Pathfinder sidesteps the question of whether freedom is more valuable than marriage and social ties. This dilemma was soon to reoccur in Cooper's work as Deerslayer undergoes an Incomplete 205 initiation that teaches him to refuse marriage not out of altruism but out of selfishness. CHAPTER 6

JUDITH, DEERSLAYER, AND CHRISTIAN INITIATION

In discussing the standards exemplified in the five novels of

James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales, critics frequently find the moral center in Natty Bumppo, primarily because during his initia­ tion into adulthood in The Peerslayer he chooses a solitary life in

God's temple, the woods, over marriage to the fallen Judith Hutter.1

Even those critics who focus on the unheroic aspects of Natty's

1This line of criticism follows D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923), p. 72; and includes James Grossman, James Fenimore Cooper ([New York]: William Sloane, 1949; rpt. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 147-49; R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 91, 99-105; Marius Bewley, The Eccentric Design (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 96—99; Donald Davie, The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), pp. 127-28; Donald A. Ringe, James Fenimore Cooper (New York: Twayne, 1962), pp. 85-90; A. N. Kaul, The American Vision (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 129, 132; D. E. S. Maxwell, American Fiction: The Intellectual Background (New York: Columbia Univ. Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 137-38; Kay Seymour House, Cooper's Americans ([Columbus]: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 315-28; Frank M. Collins, "Cooper and the American Dream," PMLA, 81 (1966), 90, 91; Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Dell, 1966), pp. 192-95; Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 71-77; George Dekker, James Fenimore Cooper: The American Scott (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), pp. 184-85; Joel Porte, The, Romance in America (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 10, 39, 52; David C. Stineback, Shifting World (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell Univ. Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1976), pp. 25-26.

206 207 personality generally conclude not that he is destructive but that his ambiguities reflect the conflicting loyalties of his creator or the paradoxical pressures of American society.2 Despite the fact that

Deerslayer is not universally admired, no one has explored his morality in any depth, while only John P. McWilliams, Jr., and Edwin T. Bowden have commented on the relationship between Natty's behavior and

Christianity. McWilliams concludes that the fallen nature of the world and, in particular, corrupt civilization necessarily compromise the saintliness of Deerslayer, who, consequently, must remain solitary and ineffectual.3 This position aligns McWilliams with those critics who see Natty as a moral standard against which other characters may be judged.

2These follow Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (1950; reissued, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 59-70; and include Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1957), pp. 52-65; Robert H. Zoellner, "Concep­ tual Ambivalence in Cooper's Leatherstocking," American Literature, 31 (1960), 397-420; David Howard, "James Fenimore Cooper's Leather- stocking Tales; 'without a cross,"1 in Tradition and Tolerance in Nineteenth-century Fiction, ed. David Howard, John Lucas, and John Goode (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), pp. 24-26, 30-37; Linda Ray Pratt, "The Abuse of Eve by the New World Adam," in Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon, rev. ed. (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Univ. Popular Press, 1973), pp. 158-60; and Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 493-507. Critics who deny Natty's heroic stature include the historian David W. Noble, The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden (New York: George Braziller, 1968), pp. 9-12, 23-24; and Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1975), pp. 89-115.

3Political Justice in a Republic: James Fenimore Cooper's America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972), pp. 276-91. 208

Only Bowden questions the kind of religion Deerslayer practices, saying "it is an odd Christianity at best that does not include the

principle of forgiveness; and Deerslayer offers little forgiveness" when he rejects Judith. Bowden, however, immediately attempts to deny his insight into the complexity of the novel by claiming that Cooper never intended to raise questions about "moral commitment" and instead was merely writing "about the romantic dream of man on the American frontier escaping the need for commitment."4 What Bowden's evasion actually indicates is that he, like other critics, wishes to avoid relinquishing personal idealizations of Deerslayer and the American wilderness. In fact, Deerslayer critics generally accept at face value

D. H. Lawrence's description of the novel as the apex of Cooper's development, the climax of a "decrescendo of reality, and a crescendo of beauty." In their eagerness to cling to R. W. B. Lewis's enticing image of an unfallen New World Adam, they ignore the darker side of

Lawrence's vision and apparently forget that he is explicitly describing

Deerslayer when he says, "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer."5 Finally critics successfully idealize Deer­ slayer only by either misconstruing the characters of the women in the novel or by ignoring Deerslayer's actions, particularly his treatment of Judith.

^The Dungeon of the Heart (New York: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 27, 28.

5pp. 72, 92. 209

In the course of The Deerslayer Cooper reveals the weaknesses of

Deerslayer's shallow morality even as he personally draws back from

condemning his hero. On practically every page he or one of his characters—often Deerslayer himself—insists that the hero is honest, sincere, humble. And Cooper rarely comments on Deerslayer's imperfec­ tions, whereas he stresses the fallibility of the other characters. But these attempts to idealize Deerslayer conflict with Cooper's perception of his hero's frailties. Basically Cooper's problem—and the problem with the novel—is that the author could not completely relinquish a simplistic idealism that his Christian faith and love of realism encouraged him to repudiate. Ke created the novel out of two conflict­ ing longings, his intense desire to believe in the perfection of America, symbolized by young Natty in the virgin wilderness, and his equally intense commitment to the doctrines of orthodox Christianity, especially the belief that all people are imperfect and must repent. In The

Deerslayer, as George Dekker points out, "Cooper's worst prejudices came into collision not only with his better feelings but also with his deeply held Christian belief in the possibility and efficacy of repentance; so that, although the conclusion seems cruel, the treatment of Judith is, as a whole, far from uncompassionate or unintelligent."

In light of this insight, it is surprising that Dekker concludes that

Deerslayer treats Judith in a Christian manner.6 The central problem is, as Dekker does indicate, whether or not Deerslayer can be justified in rejecting the repentant Judith. His refusal to marry her indicates that

6pp. 182, 185. 210 he is unable, for a variety of reasons, to accept the efficacy of her repentance, that he is unable, in fact, to accept the central Christian doctrine that, because mankind is fallen, repentance is essential for salvation.

Although Cooper could never openly admit that his hero was a failure as a Christian, he indirectly indicated this failure in present­ ing inconsistencies between Deerslayer's ideals and his actions and in drawing parallels between Deerslayer and those who lose salvation in

Christ's parables. And in contrast to Deerslayer's weakness, the heroism of Judith and Hetty is reinforced by parallels between their actions and the behavior of the heroines of the Book of Judith and the

Book of Esther. However, the condemnation of Deerslayer and the admiration of the women that these submerged references to scripture indicate are never brought into the open in the novel as a whole, in which Cooper insists that Deerslayer is admirable. The result of this conflict in the author is a book shot through with unresolved inconsistencies and unconscious ironies, a book of great power but finally ambiguous and disunified. What should have been Cooper's greatest novel is ultimately fatally flawed by his inability to come to grips with the conflict between his idealized representation of

Deerslayer and his Christian depiction of the sinful Judith's struggle for repentance. 211

Christianity and a Hero's Denial of Complexity

The fundamental reason Deerslayer rejects Judith and drives her into a life of sin is that he longs for absolute purity and is unable to accept ambiguity and compromise. Some complexities he rejects unconsciously, as when he fails to perceive the ambiguity of the wilderness or good traits of evil men, like Thomas Hutter and Hurry

Harry March. Other complexities he struggles against; for example, he frequently puts on a superior pose and refuses to behave in the flexible manner necessary in social interaction. But one aspect of the complexity of the world he rejects outright: women. According to the standard concepts of Cooper's age discussed in chapter 1, women were defined as paradoxical mixtures of admirable spirituality and threaten­ ing sexuality. Since Cooper himself found it difficult to accept the feminine ambiguity arising from such dualism, he created in Deerslayer, his favorite hero, a man who rejects women completely, a misogynist who constantly fails to understand women and to act effectively in their behalf, because he loathes the confusing combination of the divine and the carnal that women represent.

Deerslayer flees women because of this loathing of complexity, not out of a fear they will "civilize" him by imposing on his masculine freedom the restriction of society and religion, as Leslie Fiedler suggests.7 In The Pathfinder, written only a year before The Deerslayer,

Natty Bumppo asks Mabel Durham to marry him and dreams of establishing

7pp. 179-214. 212 a home of his own. Nor does Natty fear sexuality as sexuality. In

The Deerslayer he implements his belief that love is natural by encouraging the mutual attraction of Hist and Chingachgook and stressing that Chingachgook needs to perpetuate his race.8 But what

Deerslayer cannot accept for himself (though he permits others to embrace it) is the dualism of all women. In Joel Porte's words, he

"runs off to the forest to escape, neither the superego per se nor carnality per se, but rather the awful implications of mixing good and evil (religion and sex, as it were) as they are represented by the confusing single image of woman. She confronts him with a morally equivocal situation, and it is the fruit of this tree--this kind of knowledge—that Natty spurns."9 "The awful implications" of female dualism are that both man himself and his world are ambiguous combina­ tions of good and evil. Deerslayer, who believes that human nature is divine and that the natural world is the uncontaminated work of God, cannot accept such conclusions.

Nor can he accept the fact that as an adult he will necessarily become involved in ambiguity, since love and death, the two primary and apparently mutually exclusive concerns of adult life, are completely interrelated. Throughout the novel Deerslayer attempts to deny the reality of the connection between the two by separating the sphere of death and war from the sphere of love. But the interrelation of war and

8The Deerslayer, Mohawk Edition (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, [1895], p. 239. Subsequent references will be parenthetical in the text.

9p. 10. 213

love confronts him at every turn, beginning with his double reason for

coming to Lake Glimmerglass. Deerslayer and Chingachgook are on their

first war-path, on their way to fight in a conflict between the French

and the English and the Indian allies of both; they also intend to rescue Hist, Chingachgook's betrothed, who is being held captive by the

Iroquois, a tribe allied with the French (Ch. iv, pp. 61-62; Ch. viii, p. 132). Thus in every encounter with the Iroquois they are involved in the mingled demands of war and love.

Chingachgook cannot have Hist until he becomes a warrior and proves himself worthy of love by killing. Since he knows that he must embrace death for the sake of love, he covertly watches the Iroquois

"equally for an opportunity to meet his mistress and to take a scalp; and it may be questioned which he most ardently desired" (Ch. ix, p. J49). In contrast to Chingachgook1s acceptance of the intertwining of death and love, Deerslayer must learn that in becoming a warrior he will become involved with the demands of love. Deerslayer makes this discovery when the death of the first man he kills, an Iroquois attempting to steal his canoe, embroils him in sexual demands, with the widow, Sumach, proposing that he marry her. With Judith, too, he becomes involved in an unforeseen connection between war and love, since he promises to protect her only to discover that the protection she needs most is that of a husband. But Deerslayer refuses both Sumach and

Judith because he cannot accept the insights into his own dual nature that either would inject into his life. 214

Deerslayer clings to his belief in his own and the world's

purity but at the cost of rejecting reality and the orthodox

Christianity in which Cooper believed. While most critics agree with

Howard Mumford Jones that the author's view of life is fundamentally religious, considerable diversity of opinion exists about the specifics of his belief. John T. Frederick thinks that Cooper shifted from an early deism to religious orthodoxy at the end of his life and that

Natty Bumppo infallibly reflects his creator's position. John J.

McAleer likewise assumes that Cooper's views and Natty's are identical and argues that the author rejected puritan religiosity. James Franklin

Beard holds that the young Cooper "conscientiously resisted" the religious orthodoxy he adopted in the last years of his life. Donald A.

Ringe concentrates on the religious motifs in the late fiction, though he rightly stresses the moral vision underlying all of Cooper's work, while Charles A. Brady stresses the mythic stature of Leatherstocking and finds some evidence that Cooper was an orthodox Episcopalian.

William M. Hogue is even more emphatic about the orthodoxy of Cooper's position and his firm commitment to the Episcopal Church. In the most substantial study of Cooper's religious attitudes, John Gerlach argues that Cooper, while constantly preoccupied with the problem, was finally 215

unable to decide whether or not society—especially American society—

could establish God's kingdom on earth.10

Despite this diversity of critical opinion, Cooper's novels, his

letters, and the events of his life indicate that he was an orthodox

Christian who believed that the world is fallen, that human nature is

a confusing combination of the diabolic and the divine, and that the

life work of all people is the struggle for salvation. Although he was

not baptized or confirmed until shortly before his death in 1851, his

religion had always been orthodox. He had been active in Bible

societies beginning in 1813, had preferred that an Episcopalian (William

Jay) rather than a Deist criticize Precaution, had had his children

confirmed, and had represented Christ Church of Cooperstown at conven­

tions of an Episcopal diocese from 1838 on.11

10See Jones, "Prose and Pictures: James Fenimore Cooper, Tulane Studies in English, 3 (1952), 143-47; The Pursuit of Happiness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1953), pp. 105-13; and Belief and Disbelief in American Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 39-47); Frederick, The Darkened Sky (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1969), pp. 1-26; McAleer, "Biblical Analogy in the Leatherstocking Tales," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 17 (1962), 217-35; Beard, ed. The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, I (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), xxxii; Ringe, "Cooper's Last Novels, 1847-1850," PMLA, 75 (1960), 583-90; and James Fenimore Cooper, pp. 145-56; Brady, "James Fenimore Cooper, 1789-1851, Myth-Maker and Christian Romancer," in American Classics Reconsidered, ed. Harold C. Gardiner, S.J. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), pp. 59-97; Hogue, "The Novel as Religious Tract: James Fenimore Cooper—Apologist for the Episcopal Church," Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 40 (1971), 5-26; Gerlach, "James Fenimore Cooper and and the Kingdom of God," Illinois Quarterly, 35 (1973), 32-50.

1JSee James Fenimore Cooper, The Letters and Journals, I, 23, 66; II, 405, n.; Ill, 339-42, 348; IV, 416-17; V, 59-62, 63-68, 73, 75-78, 84-85, 238-39, 247; VI, 232, 233, n.l, 237, 241. For William Jay's religious commitments, see William Wilson Manross, A History of the American Episcopal Church, 3rd ed. (New York: Morehouse-Gorham Co., 1959; rpt. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Xerox University Microfilms, 1975), p. 224. 216

Using an orthodox Christian framework, he created in The

Deerslayer not only a story of the initiation of a boy into manhood but also an analysis of a more profound initiation, the initiation into the fight for salvation. In passing from boyhood to manhood Deerslayer discovers that adult life enmeshes one in situations of dubious morality, such as killing in self-defense. To cope with such situations he has to learn to act in self-defense by shedding the self-sacrificing morality of the Golden Rule and the passivity of childhood, but he never learns how to resolve the moral dilemmas raised by abandoning the Golden

Rule. Such dilemmas can be-solved only first by recognizing that human nature is sinful and then by mitigating sin through repentance. This higher initiation into the mysteries of salvation is left for Judith, who learns that the consequence of sin is not necessarily damnation, that repentance may atone for sin and divine forgiveness absolve it. From a

Christian point of view, both her discovery and Deerslayer's lesson that one must act for self are equally necessary, since a Christian must accept the fact that human nature is corrupt and that he lives in a sinful world in which he can transcend sin only through repentance and

God's forgiveness. Thus the initiation theme in The Deerslayer involves both the complete initiation of Judith into moral ambiguity and the partial initiation of Deerslayer into the necessity of defending oneself in a fallen world.

Although Cooper's intention had been to depict Deerslayer as successful in both worldly and spiritual initiations, he reluctantly came to realize that the traits he had idealized in his hero—especially self-confidence and self-sufficiency—could only be detrimental to a

truly Christian attitude towards life. His hero's failure to commit

himself to the life of a true Christian is intimately related to his

failure to accept life in society, any society. Deerslayer, a white

man in his mid-twenties who has lived with the Delawares since he was

ten years old, is the product of two cultures, the white and the Indian.

In refusing to marry first Judith and then the Iroquois widow Sumach,

he flees from both societies that produced him, a flight that does not

merely doom him to sterility but that also hampers his spiritual development. He is a true isolato, a man who wishes to assert his own

individuality free from any restraints imposed on him by others.

Although Cooper had idealized isolatos almost from the beginning of his writing career, he did not realize until he was writing The Deerslayer the moral ambiguity inherent in such men. From a Christian perspective the isolato is necessarily of dubious virtue, since he trusts to himself alone without acknowledging a dependency on anyone else, perhaps not even on God. The distrust of others that isolates him from society is, in fact, an analogue to the spiritual pride that may lead him to deny

God. For Cooper as a Christian author, the tendency of people to huddle together indicates their awareness of their human frailty and their sense of dependency on something outside themselves, a type of dependence essential to the Christian doctrine of salvation.

While salvation for Christians is a private matter, no individ­ ual being able to save another's soul, it cannot be won without assistance. God alone can save; an individual can only hope to make 218 himself worthy of salvatiofi. And because human nature is imperfect, it is difficult to become worthy alone, without external guides of any kind. Deerslayer's problem is that he has cut himself off from all conventional guides without finding any efficacious substitutes. His solitary life of course isolates him from ministers and congregations, but the Bible, the guide for many isolated Christians, is also unavail­ able to him because he cannot read. He does not even use prayer, which establishes a connection between a person and a superior power.

Instead, he communes wordlessly with the forest. Because he is completely isolated from Christians and even from their doctrine, he never realizes that isolation, by fostering spiritual pride, can destroy the soul. Above all, he never realizes how far he himself has strayed from true Christianity. Rather than being an orthodox Christian, he has fallen into the heresies of perfectionism, which defines human nature as good, and Manicheanism, which believes in the absolute separation and antagonism of good and evil.

Although Deerslayer believes that he is perfect, the events of the novel indicate that his nature is as fallen as that of any person and his unenlightened actions as destructive. His failure to marry not only insures his sterile isolation but also causes the damnation of the woman who, had he been mature enough to recognize the fact, would have made him an ideal wife: Judith, who regrets a love affair with Captain

Warley, a British officer, and, as the novel develops, comes to see in

Deerslayer the pure man who might lead a repentant wife to virtue. The primary reason for Deerslayer's rejection of Judith and her consequent ( sinful life is his prideful belief that salvation can be better insured by avoiding sin altogether than by counting on personal repentance and

God's forgiveness. After Hetty's death when Judith asks him if Hetty's innocence might atone for the sinfulness of their mother, who bore them out of wedlock, his answer reveals that his values are basically unchristian:

"I don't understand it so, Judith; though I'm no missionary, and am but poorly taught. Each spirit answers for its own backslidings, though a hearty repentance will satisfy God's laws."

"Then must my poor, poor mother be in heaven! Bitterly—bitterly has she repented of her sins; and surely her sufferings in this life ought to count as something, against her sufferings in the next!"

"All this goes beyond me, Judith. I strive to do right, here, as the surest means of keeping all right, hereafter." (Ch. xxxii, p. 563)

The first part of Deerslayer's reply to Judith, his statement that "a hearty repentance will satisfy God's laws," is perfectly orthodox. In fact, the sinful mother did gain salvation through repentance, as is indicated when the dying Hetty, passing from life in earth to life in heaven, sees her mother surrounded by "bright beings"

(Ch. xxxi, p. 559). But Deerslayer's next reply undercuts this orthodoxy by indicating that he personally does not place his faith in repentance: "I strive to do right, here, as the surest means of keeping all right, hereafter." This faith in the efficacy of winning salvation by avoiding sin is based on the assumption that human nature is fundamentally good, a heresy, since orthodox Christianity believes in 220 the corrupting influence of the Fall and the consequent necessity for repentance and forgiveness.

In believing that he is basically pure and has no need of repentance, Deerslayer denies the consequences of the Fall. For him the world is uncorrupted, Edenic. He perceives only the positive aspects of the wilderness and contrasts the supposedly good forest with the evil of the settlements. He even tells Judith that churches

are not altogether necessary. They call 'em the temples of the Lord; but, Judith, the whole 'arth is a temple of the Lord to such as have the right mind. Neither forts nor churches make people happier of themselves. Moreover, all is contradiction in the settlements, while all is concord in the woods. Forts and churches almost always go together, and yet they're downright contradictions; churches being for peace, and forts for war. No, no—give me the strong places of the wilderness, which is the trees, and the churches, too, which are arbors raised by the hand of natur'. (Ch. xv, p. 269)

What this speech indicates is Deerslayer's inability to accept ambiguity, the fundamental characteristic of the fallen world, which is a confusing blend of good and evil. Because of his longing for simplicity and moral clarity, he turns from the obvious complexities of civilization with its

"contradictions" of churches and forts to the supposedly Eden-like purity of nature.

But Deerslayer's Edenic world is not the world of Cooper's novel, in which the wilderness is as ambiguous and contradictory as society, because both nature and man have been corrupted by the Fall.

But Deerslayer cannot perceive the reality of the world around him, despite his continual insistence on his love of honesty and truth.

Early in the novel when he exalts in the beauty of the lake, he believes 221 it is undisturbed by man and fails to recognize Thomas Hutter's "castle" as a man-made construction (Ch. ii, pp. 22, 33), a strange error, since he knows that his traveling companion, Hurry Harry, intends to visit a family living on the lake. He also continually insists that the wilder­ ness is peaceful, beautiful, and good, despite the fact that in The

Deerslayer the moods of nature continually shift, betraying..at,best..an inherent amorality, simultaneously embracing both positive and negative elements. For example, the beautiful calm of an evening contrasts with its "gathering gloom" (Ch. xv, p. 256), a contrast that recalls the startling transformation of another lake in The Last of the Mohicans the day after a massacre when the lake changes from summer beauty to winter desolation. This lake too can change appearance drastically, as it does when Deerslayer prepares to keep his furlough and give himself back up to the Iroquois to be tortured: "This was the spot where he [Deerslayer] had first laid his eyes on the beautiful sheet of water on which he floated. If it was then glorious in the bright light of summer's noon­ tide, it was now sad and melancholy, under the shadows of night"

(Ch. xxiii, p. 419).

Although these shifts in the appearance of nature may coincide with shifts in the changing fortunes of the characters, the moods of the wilderness may oppose the moods of men as frequently as they coincide.

A striking example occurs the day after the bloody rescue of Deerslayer from the Iroquois. As Hetty lies dying and the soldiers mournfully bury their dead, "light returned upon the earth, as sunny and as smiling as as if nothing extraordinary had occured" (Ch. xxxi, p. 546). 222

Cooper is not utilizing the pathetic fallacy in which nature reflects the moods of people. Instead, his wilderness exhibits the same confusing shifts between good and evil that his people embody because both nature and man have been perverted by the Fall.

Just as he cannot accept the confusing combinations of good and evil in the wilderness, so too Deerslayer cannot accept that human nature is an ambiguous mingling of good and evil. Cooper, however, stresses human dualism over and over again, even with the former pirate and would-be bounty scalper Thomas Hutter, whom he describes as typical:

"His nature was of that fearful mixture of good and evil that so generally enters into the moral composition of man" (Ch. v, p. 81).

Judith and Hetty are also mixtures of good and evil, although many critics regard them as polar opposites, the damned and the divine.

This interpretation is frequently defended by citing a passage from

Cooper's 1850 preface to the novel:

The intention has been to put the sisters in strong contrast; one, admirable in person, clever, filled with the pride of beauty, erring and fallen; the other, barely provided with sufficient capacity to know good from evil, instinct, notwithstanding, with the virtues of woman, reverencing and loving God, and yielding only to the weakness of her sex, in admiring personal attractions in one too coarse and unobservant to distinguish or to understand her quiet, gentle feeling in his favor, (p. ix)

Though this description was written nine years after the publication of the novel at a time when Cooper was struggling to repudiate the dark insights into the complexity and ambiguity of human existence that he had gained in writing The Deerslayer, he still could 223 not fully believe in his own assertion that the sisters are "in strong contrast." While he describes Judith as "erring, and fallen," he talks about Hetty's succumbing "to the weakness of her sex, in admiring" coarse, unobservant Hurry Harry. Just as her sister admires Harry's physical beauty, so too has Judith admired the well-groomed person and elaborate uniform of Captain Warley (Ch. xxiv, p. 439). And he has been able to seduce her not because she is inherently wicked—according to contemporary theories of woman's passive sexuality, seduced women were the innocent victims of evil men—but because he has flattered her van­ ity and played on her love of fine clothing (Ch. i, pp. 11-12). As the events of the novel make clear, Judith's loss of virginity differs only in degree, not in kind, from Hetty's naive infatuation with Harry.

Despite Hetty's infatuation with an unworthy man, critics often assume that the simple-minded girl is completely pure. After all, her most striking action is an attempt to persuade the Iroquois to act according to the Golden Rule and release Hutter and Hurry, and Cooper frequently describes her as an innocent, "one of those mysterious links between the material and immaterial world, which, while they appear to be deprived of so much that is esteemed and necessary for this state of being, draw so near to, and offer so beautiful an illustration of the truth, purity, and simplicity of another" (Ch. xxxi, p. 559). Cooper, however, indicates in several ways that Hetty is a sexual as well as a spiritual being. "The Drooping Lily>" the epithet for her that he puts into the mouths of the Indians, hints that her nature is not completely innocent. 224

The connotations of purity and spirituality associated with the

lily are rendered ambiguous by the theme of salvation in the novel and

by its American setting. The lily of art and literature, the white

Easter lily, is associated with the two most paradoxical events in

Christianity, those in which the divine is most mingled with the carnal,

the virgin birth—the lily is the symbol of the Annunciation—and the

Resurrection, the mystery of the triumph of spiritual life over bodily

death. These two events express the paradoxical essence of the Chris­

tian faith, the divine Christ's incarnation and the triumph over

mortality. In an American setting these paradoxical connotations of

the lily are also rendered ambiguous by the unavoidable association the

author and his contemporaries would have made between the lily of liter­

ature and the wild lilies of the eastern United States, which are

brilliant orange or red,12 flaming colors associated with physical

passion and sin. In calling Hetty "the Drooping Lily," Cooper did not

give her a name signifying absolute spiritual purity.

In one of her conversations with Deerslayer, he also indicates

how completely she is capable of adult love when she attempts to deny

her inclination in a very sophisticated way. Deerslayer has tried to warn her against Harry:

"What harm can it be to think well of a fellow- creature?" returned Hetty, simply, though the conscious blood was stealing to her cheeks in spite of a spirit so pure that it scarce knew why it prompted the blush; "the Bible tells us to love them who despitefully use us, and why shouldn't we like them that do not?"

12Homer D. House, Wild Flowers (New York: Macmillan, 1935), pp. 45-51, Plates 12-14. This book concentrates on New York state. 225

"Ah! Hetty, the love of missionaries isn't the sort of likin' I mean. Answer me one thing, child; do you believe yourself to have mind enough to became a wife and a mother?"

"That's not a proper question to ask a young woman, Deerslayer, and I'll not answer it," returned the girl, in a reproving manner—much as a parent rebukes a child for an act of indiscretion. (Ch. xxvi, p. 480)

Hetty obviously understands the distinction between the spiritual love of missionaries and the love of ordinary men and women, since she is careful to preserve propriety by faulting the eligible young Deerslayer for asking her about the latter type. She also manipulates him, chang­ ing him from a parental guide into a rebuked child, thereby reversing I their roles and diverting his attention from her feelings about Harry.

Hetty's weakness for Harry is a sign that she is not angelic but human. In feeling for him an "incipient tenderness" that might have ripened into love, she is simply following "a law of nature"

(Ch. xxiii, pp. 414-15). Still, she is as pure as any person can be.

She is a virgin and believes absolutely—though naively—in the Bible, but her purity has been threatened by both the "law of nature" that governs all humans and by her feeblemindedness. Although it is often assumed that Hetty is more pure than other people because she is simple- minded, Cooper indicates throughout the novel that Hetty's inability to reason competently is an equivocal trait, having as many negative as positive effects. It may deepen her spiritual insight, but it is also responsible for her almost unconscious infatuation with; a man whom she knows to be corrupt. She has even remonstrated with Hutter about his and Harry's plan to scalp defenseless Iroquois women and children for 226 bounties (Ch. v, pp. 81-82). But because her flawed mind cannot fully appreciate the extent of his corruption, she remains entranced by his physical beauty.

Her purity is protected only by her using what reason she has to live up to the morality her mother instilled in her, not by her irrationality, which undercuts the moral instruction. Describing her death, Cooper explicitly says that Hetty's lack of reason threatened her purity and was not its source: "The mysterious feeling that bound her to the young man [Hurry Harry], a sentiment so gentle, as to be almost imperceptible to herself, and which could never have existed at all, had her reason possessed more command over her senses, was forever lost in thoughts of a more elevated, though scarcely a purer character"

(Ch. xxxi, pp. 558-59). Her lack of reason has prevented her from understanding the extent of Harry's deficiencies at the same time it has led her to be overly impressed by his physical beauty. Uncorrupted as she is, she mistakenly judges by outward appearances, which in Cooper's works are never trustworthy guides to reality.

Judith is also a dual being, different only in degree from her sister. Although they are frequently assumed to be opposites, she and

Hetty are similar, both in appearance and in personality. Whereas in

The Last of the Mohicans Cooper stressed the dissimilar beauties of his sister opposites Cora and Alice Munro, in The Deerslayer he downplays the appearance of the sisters, scarcely describing them at all. But the careful reader will note that they are much alike. Both have soft blue eyes (Ch. v, p. 73; Ch. vii, p. 122), and while Judith's beauty is frequently mentioned, Hetty is often called "comely" and is described

as being similar to Judith: "Her person, too, was agreeable, having a

strong resemblance to that of her sister" (Ch. iv, p. 54). Instead of

deriving from the contrasting heroines of The Last of the Mohicans,

Judith and Hetty are related to the twinned heroines of Mercedes of

Castile, published only a year before The Deerslayer. In Mercedes

Cooper makes Ozema, a pagan Haitian Indian princess who falls in love

with the hero, Luis, almost the exact image of Mercedes, a young

Christian noblewoman whom Luis loves.13 The part of the plot that does

not deal with the problems of Christopher Columbus involves Ozema's

mistaken belief that Luis loves her, her supposed conversion to

Christianity, her pagan belief that she can become Luis's second wife

after he has married Mercedes, and her death, caused by her discovery

that such a marriage is not possible.

In many respects both Hetty and Judith are similar to Ozema.

Hetty's affinities with the Indian are obvious. Both are children of nature, unable to comprehend either the machinations of others or the abstrusities of Christianity, and the death of each is caused by events

beyond her comprehension. Hetty is, in fact, a Christianized version of the naive, innocent Ozema, although her understanding of her religion is scarcely deeper than the Indian's. What is not so obvious is that

Judith shares an important characteristic with Ozema: both are beauties and accustomed to the admiration of men. Ozema is so used to homage

13Mohawk Edition (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, [1896], pp. 371-72. 228

from men that she assumes that in giving her his crucifix during a

storm Luis is giving her a love token, perhaps even marrying her.

Judith takes the admiration of British officers and Hurry Harry for

granted. That both Hetty and Judith share Ozema's salient traits and

that Ozema is in appearance practically the twin of Mercedes, a

completely idealized character, suggest that the personalities of the

sisters in The Deerslayer are neither dissimilar nor uncomplicated.

Instead of being polar opposites, Judith and Hetty represent extremes

on a sliding scale. As Hetty increasingly reveals her infatuation with Hurry Harry, she moves towards Judith's position, while as

Judith repents and strives to redeem herself, she moves towards Hetty's.

Though the sisters never reach the same spiritual level, the conditions

of their souls are far more similar at Hetty's death than they are at the beginning of the novel.

Adulthood, Sin, and Repentance

Both Hetty and Judith are developing characters whose shifts indicate the connections between different moral standards and different types of action. In this novel the most immoral men are the most destructive: Hutter plans to scalp defenseless women and children, while Hurry Harry acquiesces in this plan and later fires blindly into the woods and kills an innocent Iroquois girl. The problem for moral people is how to avoid this type of destructiveness. One possibility is to remain passive, as Hetty does through much of the novel. Her passive mode of existence is buttressed by the self-sacrificing morality 229

of the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto

you." But although sublime, passivity and self-abnegation are only

possible in childhood. Initiation into adulthood involves new moral

standards and new ways of confronting problems. The first step in

achieving full adulthood is to accept the necessity for self-defense.

The next is to move to an acceptance of one's responsibility to work

for others, which both Judith and Hetty undertake in trying to save

Deerslayer from torture late in the novel. At these levels of action

the Golden Rule is not a helpful guide, but as long as one is merely acting in self-defense moral issues are not overly complex, since one can usually easily decide whether one's actions have been motivated by selfishness or pure necessity. However, when a person moves to the level of acting not merely for self but also for others, he or she necessarily enters a realm of moral ambiguity because of the difficulty of knowing what is best for everyone. At this level people can only preserve their morality if they acknowledge the possibility that their actions may be in error but realize that repentance and forgiveness can atone for sin. Because the possibility of repentence enables one to act for others rather than merely for self, true initiation into the responsibilities and moral ambiguities of adult life necessarily rests on acceptance of the orthodox Christian emphasis on repentance, not on Deerslayer's heterodox hope of avoiding sin, which at best condemns him to act only in self-defense.

In contrast to all the other major characters of the novel, who learn not only repentance but also how to act offensively to protect 230 themselves and others, Deerslayer moves only from passivity to a recognition of the need for self-defense. Initially he strictly adheres to the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" (Ch. v, p. 79), which for him essentially means leaving others alone. But in the course of the novel he moves from this belief to faith in natural law, "To do, lest you should be done by," which he uses to justify killing an Indian who attacks him in the Iroquois camp

(Ch. xxviii, p. 515). At the beginning of the book only the evil

Thomas Hutter adheres to natural law, using it to justify a scalping expedition against the Iroquois (Ch. v, p. 81). Deerslayer's applica­ tion of natural law essentially differs from Hutter's, since he uses it to justify self-defense, whereas Hutter uses it as an excuse for the attempted murder of helpless women and children. Nevertheless, the ease with which natural law can be used to defend crime and the exceedingly narrow grounds on which it can be justified suggest that it provides only a limited guide for moral conduct and indicate the extent to which Deerslayer, by the end of the novel, has become enmeshed in the ambiguous complexities of the fallen world. In his unrealistic desire to live sinlessly in an evil world, he has abandoned the moral sublimity of the Golden Rule and substituted the precarious morality of vindictive natural law rather than relying on repentance and God's forgiveness.

The natural law, "To do, lest you should be done by," is morally justifiable only in situations clearly calling for self-defense.

When he is ambushed by the Iroquois who will soon become his first 231 victim, Deerslayer obviously needs to act to defend himself although he begins by trying to reason with his enemy: "I know it's war atween

your people and mine, but that's no reason why human mortals should slay each other, like savage creatur's that meet in the woods" (Ch. vii, p. 110). The logic of this statement is patently unsound since it denies the true nature of war as it is presented here and in the rest of Cooper's novels—war is^ human beings killing each other "like savage creatur's." But Deerslayer never learns this lesson completely, since he wishes to believe he himself is more than a beast. Even after he has fatally wounded the Iroquois and thereby formally assumed the adult role of warrior, he attempts to mitigate the horror of killing by forgiwing his foe for attacking him. This act of forgiveness is, however, misplaced, because it implies that the Iroquois was wrong to attack, while actually he was only acting as a true warrior should.

Though Deerslayer is proud of having dispatched an enemy and of having become a warrior, he concludes that "when it's onsartain whether good or evil has been done, the wisest way is not to be boastful" (Ch. vii, p. 118), indicating that he is still uncertain about the morality of killing in self-defense. He wishes to remain pure despite assuming an adult role that thrusts him into the complexities of the world.

His belief in his own purity leads him to rely completely upon his own standards, which are based not upon absolute moral truths but upon his relativistic doctrine of "gifts," a doctrine that essentially rejects the laws of God as-the ultimate moral standard and guide for action. Simply put, Deerslayer's theory of gifts expresses his belief 232 that as long as either white or Indian acts according to the conven­ tional morality of his society, he will not do wrong. Usually

Deerslayer uses the term "gifts" to refer to cultural traits, saying, for example, that it is the white man's gift to use a rifle skillfully whereas the gift of Indians is for tracking and understanding the wilderness. But he also confounds cultural traits with moral precepts.

When he refuses to take scalps for bounties, he justifies his stand by equating morality with custom: whereas Indians may lawfully take scalps, whites may not. Although for Christians the law of God is supposed to take precedence over the laws of one's nation, for Deer- slayer personal definitions of the standards of one's race take precedence over the law of society. To his way of thinking, then, the trouble with the colonial law offering a bounty on Indian scalps is not that it encourages murder but that it violates white gifts. He explains his opposition to the law: "Not a farthing of such [bounty] money shall cross my hand. White I was born, and white will I die; clinging to color to the last, even though the King's majesty, his governers, and all his councils, both at home and in the colonies, forget from where they come, and where they hope to go, and all for a little advantage in warfare" (Ch. vii, p. 117). Here he places his hope and the hope of other whites for heaven ("where they hope to go") on "clinging to color to the last."

The difficulty with his concept of gifts is, of course, that it is relativistic and denies that there is any standard of conduct, any higher morality, that transcends race. Deerslayer himself admits 233 that "this [concept of gifts] isn't ra'al missionary doctrine," but

completes his sentence by denying that transcendent morality is

necessary: "This isn't ra'al missionary doctrine, but it's as near

it as a man of white color need be" (Ch. xxv, p. 455). Actually

Deerslayer's standards are certainly not "ra'al missionary doctrine," because they finally declare that race is more important than morality. On a related subject Joel Porte discuses how "Natty's pro­ found need to believe that 'whiteness' is an eternal principle forces him into the odd position of implicitly denying the possibility of

Christian conversion, whereby we see that 'whiteness' for him is a category that transcends Christianity."14 Natty's inability to believe that Indians can be truly converted to Christianity is similar to his inability to believe that repentance can win salvation. For him, being true to white gifts means preserving intact the purity and goodness that he feels are inherent in the white race.

Believing absolutely in his own goodness, Deerslayer comes to realize only temporarily how humanly weak he actually is. In contrast to all the other major characters in the book, who all possess or arrive at the sense of dependency on forces outside one's personal control that is the first step in Christian salvation, Deerslayer alone emerges with his self-confidence unshaken. But in preserving a belief in his own rectitude, he denies the necessity or the efficacy of repentance. The most stoic person in the novel, Chingachgook implicitly

:

His partner in the scalping expedition, Hurry Harry, goes far beyond his repentance with a change of attitude that strongly contrasts to Deerslayer's complacency. He loses his pride in his own abilities and softens his attitudes towards others after being captured and bound by the Iroquois and ignominiously dragged through the lake to safety by Hist:

The events of the morning had sensibly changed the manner of Hurry. Notwithstanding his skill as a swimmer, and the readiness with which he had adopted the only expedient that could possibly save him, the helplessness of being in the water bound hand and foot, had produced some such an effect on him as the near approach of punishment is known to produce on most criminals, leaving a vivid impression of the horrors of death upon his mind, and this, too, in connection with a picture of bodily helplessness. . . . Though Hurry was now unfettered, and as vigorous as ever, events were too recent to permit the recollection of his late deplorable condition to be at all weakened. Had he lived a century, the occurrences of the few momentous minutes during which he was in the lake, would have produced a chastening effect on his character, if not always on his manner. (Ch. xxi, p. 371)

Coupled with his guilt feelings for having wantonly killed an

Iroquois girl (Ch. xix, pp. 329-30), the "chastening effect" of having been saved from death by Hist, the person who most strongly condemned 235

his murder, leads him to change his conduct towards Judith. Whereas

he has previously not proposed because of his suspicions about her,

he forgives her for any past sins and formally proposes marriage

shortly after his rescue: "If you'll accept of me, all that's past

shall be forgotten, and there's an end on 't" (Ch. xxi, p. 381).

Though she refuses him, he does not resent her rejection and says that

since he wishes to see her safe, he will himself guide a rescue party

from the British garrison. Such concern for her is what Judith has

missed in his previous advances:

"Ah, Harry March, had you always spoken thus, felt thus, my feelings toward you might have been different!"

"Is it too late, now, Judith? I'm rough, and a woodsman; but we all change under different treatment from what we have been used to."

"It is too late, March. I can never feel towards you, or any other man but one, as you would wish to have me." (Ch. xxi, p. 383)

Hurry's change has come too late to attract Judith since she now loves

Deerslayer. Nevertheless, he not only changes but reverses his previous

position.

In contrast to Hurry Harry and Judith, Deerslayer comes only

temporarily to a recognition of his own weakness and does not modify

his old assumptions about others at all, except for a brief period of

despair after he returns from his furlough and finds himself once again

a closely guarded prisoner of the Iroquois: "A feeling of loneliness

and desertion came over him to increase the gloom of the moment," and

he abandons himself to the will of God (Ch. xxviii, p. 506). Being 236 bound to a tree and used as a living target for tomahawks and bullets increases his resignation. However, when the Indians untie him and permit him to restore his circulation, his mood shifts dramatically:

It is seldom men think of death in the pride of their health and strength. So it was with Deerslayer. Having been helplessly bound, and, as he had every reason to suppose, so lately on the very verge of the other world, to find himself so unexpectedly liberated, in possession of his strength, and with a full command of limb, acted on him like a sudden restoration to life, re-animating hopes that he had once absolutely abandoned. From that instant all his plans changed. In this he simply obeyed a law of nature. (Ch. xxix, p. 527)

Whereas Harry's "bodily helplessness" and anticipation of imminent death

"produced a chastening effect on his character," the "sudden restoration to life" of Deerslayer's old attitudes is the only effect of his near brush with death. Deerslayer still believes—unrealistically—that he can escape from the Iroquois by his own devices, although finally only the intervention of four of his friends and a troop of soldiers guided by Harry will save him. In contrast to Harry, who learns through being rescued by a woman that people must depend upon one another, Deerslayer continues to assume that he can live independently of others.

Although finally in The Deerslayer all people are dependent upon one another, mutual dependency is most obvious in the cases of the women. At the beginning of the book Hist is a helpless prisoner of the

Iroquois, waiting to be rescued by Chingachgook. Hetty, because of her feeblemindedness, has always been aware of personal weakness and her dependence on others. And Judith, too, in a development central to the theme of the book, becomes aware of her inability to.save herself. The 237 inability of women to protect themselves is partly a paradigm of the dependence of all sinners on God's forgiveness but is also a reflection of the theories of feminine passivity current in the first half of the nineteenth century that have been discussed in chapter 1. Although unmarried females were supposed to guard their virginity, seduced women sinned only by omission, not by commission, since they were passive victims whose error lay in not sufficiently resisting evil men. Once seduced, a woman would almost certainly eventually be abandoned, becoming completely declasse, her sexuality free for all comers. In such a situation a woman's best hope of avoiding an evil life lay in her re-establishing herself in respectable society through marriage to any man who would overlook her past sins. Once married, with her sexuality solely the property of her husband, the seduced woman could lead a penitent life and hope for God's forgiveness.

Judith and Hetty's mother, who bore both her dauthers out of wedlock, was abandoned by their father, and then lived virtuously as

Thomas Hutter's wife, ultimately won salvation in this manner. Since she has been dead for two years at the time the novel opens, she remains a shadowy figure, but Cooper implies that she was basically a good woman by explaining that she, "with a connection that will probably strike the reader, had been fond of the book of Job" (Ch. xxi, p. 368). Though he is never explicit about what "connection" he had in mind, the most obvious parallel between Job and the mother is that they both suffered terribly. Job, of course, is a just man whom

God torments in order to prove that he leads a pure life because he is 238

truly good, not because he happens to be happy and prosperous. The

fondness of the mother for this story suggests that she, too, was a

good person who suffered undeservedly.

Like her mother, Judith hopes to atone for her seduction by

marrying, but for marriage to be efficacious, she must not enter into

it hypocritically; she must truly love her husband. Since what she wants from wedlock is the virtue that leads to salvation, a loveless

marriage would be of no more benefit to her than her ultimate fate as a kept woman. Not being able to love Hurry Harry, first because of his suspicions of her and later because she is in love with Deerslayer,

Judith must and does refuse to marry him.

Judith falls in love with Deerslayer and hopes to be saved by marrying him because she believes that he is an honest, good man.

But she has been misled by her first impression of him, created when she overheard him defending her to Harry as "no such admirer of herself, and no such scorner of our own sex as you seem to think" (Ch, iii, p. 50). Since this evaluation does justice to her true attitude and since Deerslayer, unlike all the other men she has known, is obviously not interested in taking advantage of her, she quickly becomes interested in him: "So completely had she been won by his guileless truth of character and of feeling—pure novelties in our [male] sex, as respected her own experience—that his peculiarities excited her curiosity, and created a confidence that had never been awakened by any other man" (Ch. ix, p. 155). She treats him with "the quick instinct 239 of a female's affection, and the sympathizing kindness of a woman's heart" (Ch. viii, p. 127) and discovers in her feelings for him "much of the sincerity and nature that accompany the purest emotions of woman" (Ch. viii, p. 140). More and more she regrets her affair with

Warley and the "deadness of heart" that has followed it. Finally she

« shows her new love for Deerslayer so openly that Chingachgook, whose love for Hist has taught him about the emotion, slips away to leave

Judith alone with his friend (Ch. xiii, p. 227).

Falling truly in love for the first time and believing the object of her affection to be honest and sincere, Judith remembers her sinful mother's penitent life as the wife of Thomas Hutter and concludes that she herself could perhaps be saved in the same manner by marriage.

Resolving to propose to Deerslayer after Hutter's death has forced her and Hetty to find a new mode of life, she tells her sister, "No one knows what changes affection for a good husband can make in a woman's heart. I don't think, child, that I have even now the same love of finery I once had. ... We must live, in future, as becomes respectable young women" (Ch. xxii, p. 390). Hence she twice proposes to Deerslayer, but, unfortunately for her plan, is twice refused. With her hopes for marriage and a virtuous life shattered, she disappears and falls into an evil life, most probably as the mistress of her seducer.

Deerslayer is unable to respond positively to Judith, because before he even meets her, he has been prejudiced against her by Hurry

Harry's suspicions that she has been seduced. Neither Harry nor

Deerslayer ever gets absolute proof of the truth of these suspicions, 240 but Deerslayer, despite a lack of corroborating evidence and despite his disdain for Harry's character, accepts the woodsman's point of view.

Though in many respects Deerslayer is a good man, he is still a man, imperfect by definition and unable to conquer prejudice, one of the most tenacious of all human faults. And Cooper is explicit about his prejudice. Early in the novel he deliberately undercuts the impact of a summary of his hero's virtues, including

an ingenuousness that was singularly indisposed to have recourse to sophisms to maintain an argument, or to defend a prejudice. Still, he was not altogether free from the influence of the latter feeling. This tyrant of the human mind, which rushes on its prey through a thousand avenues, almost as soon as men begin to think and feel, and which seldom relinquishes its iron sway until they cease to do either, had made some impression on even the just propensities of this individual. (Ch. iii, p. 35).

In fact, Deerslayer has "imbibed a prejudice against the girl [Judith] in consequence of Hurry's suspicions of her levity" (Ch. v, p. 86).

Deerslayer is not able to recognize this prejudice much less combat it because nothing in his scheme of values, his faith in gifts and his ultimate reliance on natural law, leads him to question his own assumptions. Since he fails to recognize any transcendent morality,

Deerslayer unwittingly condemns Judith to an evil life and, by implicaiton, to damnation.

In relying on natural law, Deerslayer does not intend to harm other people. In fact, he even says that "natur' orders us to defend our lives, and the lives of others too" (Ch. vi, p. 91). He conceives of himself as the protector of the weak, and his role in all five of the Leather-stocking novels is that of the defender of women. But his 241 problem Is that by choosing to reject a transcendent morality and by relying on himself alone he cannot live up to any of his highest ideals.

He cannot carry through with his promise to defend women, nor is he able to keep from abusing his white gifts. In the long run he is finally not even able to live up to his own definition of the just man.

In The Deerslayer the hero's primary mission is to assist

Chingachgook in rescuing Hist, while his secondary duty is to protect

Judith and Hetty. Twice in the novel he solemnly promises to care for them. He makes his first pledge when Hutter is captured by the Iroquois and enjoins Deerslayer to stand by the girls: "God prosper you, as you aid my children!" At this appeal Deerslayer forgets his repugnance for

Hutter: "He saw only the father in his sufferings, and resolved at once to give a pledge of fidelity to its interests, and to be faithful to his word. 'Put your heart at ease, Master Hutter,' he called out; 'the gals shall be looked to"' (Ch. vi, p. 101). He reaffirms this pledge after Hutter's death in telling Judith and Hetty, "If you've lost a staunch fri'nd, as I make no doubt you have, Providence will raise up new ones in his stead; and since our acquaintance has begun in this oncommon manner, I shall take it as a hint that it will be part of my duty in futur', should the occasion offer, to see you don't suffer for want of food in the wigwam" (Ch. xxii, p. 395). But despite these promises Deerslayer is unable to truly commit himself to aiding the sisters because he lacks faith in the efficacy of repentance and there­ fore cannot become involved in the morally ambiguous task of defending

Judith, a fallen woman, a task that might sully what he believes is his 242 innate purity. Because he does not truly believe that repentance can atone for Judith's lost virtue, he declines to become involved with her quest for salvation and instead merely offers to provide for her material wants by promising "to see you don't suffer for want of food in the wigwam."

Far from insuring that he will adequately protect Judith and

Hetty, the very sense of personal honor that leads Deerslayer to appoint himself their provider actually imperils the girls. Shortly after he has promised Hutter that "the gals shall be looked to," Deerslayer finds himself alone with an Iroquois, who ambushes him for his canoe.

Deerslayer gives up two easy chances to kill his foe, behaving as if he were a free agent whose death would have no negative consequences. In actuality, however, Judith and Hetty depend on him utterly. Aside from him, they are completely without a protector, since Hurry Harry and

Hutter are captives, while Chingachgook has not yet arrived at the lake.

Later, after Hutter's death, Deerslayer imperils Judith and Hetty again when he persuades his Iroquois captors to release him on a temporary

"furlough" so that he can say goodby to his friends and then rigorously adheres to his promise to return to torture. Despite Hurry Harry's and

Judith's protests and much to the astonishment of the Iroquois,

Deerslayer returns to captivity exactly at the time he promised. But in presenting Deerslayer's return to his enemies as an honorable act of keeping his word, Cooper unconsciously raised more questions about his hero's moral character than he solved. The fact is that if Deerslayer's promises are sacred, he has made two earlier promises to protect Judith 243 and Hetty, promises that should have precluded a rigid adherence to the furlough, as well as his foolhardy chivalry in the fight over the canoe.

Just as Deerslayer is unable to effectively protect women, so too is he unable to remain true to the white gifts that are most important to him, his humility and his skill with a rifle. Believing that he is properly humble, Deerslayer repeatedly claims to abhor boasting as an Indian and not a white gift. But during his captivity when Rivenoak describes him as a boaster, he reveals how humility can become a source of overweening pride: "'No man has heard me boast, and no man shall, though ye flay me alive, and then roast the quivering flesh, with your own infarnal devices and cruelties! I may be humble, and misfortunate, and your prisoner; but I'm no boaster, by my very gifts.' 'My young pale-face boasts he is no boaster,' returned the crafty chief; "he must be right'" (Ch. xxx, p. 535). Rivenoak's irony underscores the falsity of Deerslayer's position. In relying on gifts rather than on a transcendent morality, he has necessarily lapsed into pride and betrayed the humility that supposedly defines his personal morality.

Pride similarly overwhelms him in regards to another of his white gifts, his marksmanship. After Judith gives him Killdeer, the rifle whose almost magical accuracy will make its owner "King of the

Woods" (Ch. xxiii, p. 402), Deerslayer tells her, "I'll not deny my gifts, and therefore allow that the rifle couldn't well be in better hands that it is at present" (Ch. xxv, p. 456). But then he moves immediately from realistic assessment of his own skill to pride in the 244 gun itself. Expecting to die, he bequeaths it to Chingachgook with a warning:

"So look well to it, Delaware, and remember that you've now to watch over a thing that has all the valie of a creatur', without its failin's. Hist may be, and should be precious to you, but Killdeer will have the love and veneration of your whole people."

"One rifle like another, Deerslayer," returned the Indian, ... a little hurt at his friend's lowering his betrothed to the level of a gun. "All kill; all wood and iron. Wife dear to heart; rifle good to shoot." (Ch. xxv, p. 458)

This brief conversation illustrates how Deerslayer's pride and passivity have warped his sense of values. Unable to truly feel for anyone other than himself, he falls into idolatry, valuing a weapon of destruction over human beings.

So infatuated with the rifle does Deerslayer become that he violates his own rule against killing game one does not need. Excited as a boy with a new toy, he challenges Chingachgook to a shooting match he knows the Indian cannot win and kills an eagle hunting food for its young. Early in the book, rebuking Hurry Harry for firing on a buck,

Deerslayer claims that "they can't accuse me of killing an animal when there's no occasion for the meat or the skin" (Ch. iii, p. 50), yet the eagle dies merely for him to prove his skill with Killdeer. Immediately he regrets his action and concludes that people do not see their faults until it is too late to correct them (Ch. xxvi, pp. 464-65). This is certainly the case with killing, but here again Deerslayer mistakes a partial truth for the whole truth, since more often than not errors can be at least partially rectified. Here, as in his desire to remain 245 sinless, Deerslayer is an absolutist, unable to cope with moral

ambiguity.

The Problem of Justice

Rejecting the idea of correcting his own mistakes and believing

that he can preserve a supposedly inborn purity, Deerslayer has to strive to act justly. In fact, the central moral problem of the book is whether or not he treats Judith justly. In a pivotal scene involving the search for a ransom for Hutter and Hurry Harry, Judith first challenges Deerslayer to live up to his own definition of justice in regard to her and then unwittingly proves that he cannot accept what she truly is and hence will be unable to treat her justly. The first sign that Judith is changing and striving to be worthy of the respect of decent people is her willingness to give the fanciest of her clothes as ransom. At this point she greatly impresses Deerslayer by challeng­ ing him to judge and condemn her if he finds her going back on her offer:

"But try me; if you find that I regret either ribbon or feather, silk or muslin, then you may think what you please of my heart, and say what you think" (Ch. xii, p. 203).

Deerslayer's instantaneous response defines justice and the interrelationship between it and truth:

That's justice! The rarest thing to find on 'arth is a truly just man. ... I love a just man,— Sarpent; his eyes are never covered with darkness towards his inimies, while they are all sunshine and brightness towards his fri'nds. He uses the reason that God has given him, and he uses it with a feelin' of his being ordered to look at, and to consider things as they are, and not as he wants them to be. It's easy enough to find them who call themselves just; but it's 246

wonderfully oncommon to find them that are the very thing, in fact. How often have I seen Indians, gal, who believed they were lookin' into a matter agreeable to the will of the Great Spirit, when, in truth, they were only striving to act up to their own will and pleasure, and this, half of the time, with a temptation to go wrong, that could no more be seen by themselves, than the stream that runs in the next valley can be seen by us through yonder mountain; though any looker-on might have discovered it as plainly as we can discover the parch that are swimming around this hut. (Ch. xii, p. 203)

In other words, the just man is the objective man, one who can recognize and accept reality and is undeceived by appearances. Judith agrees with this definition of justice and immediately gives Deerslayer another, even more important challenge:

I hope to see you act on this love of justice, in all matters in which I am concerned. Above all, I hope you will judge for yourself, and not believe every evil story that a prating idler, like Hurry Harry, may have to tell, that goes to touch the good name of any young woman who may not happen to have the same opinions of his face and person that the blustering gallant has of himself. (Ch. xii, pp. 203-04)

This challenge is central to the book, since it emphasizes the standard that must be used in judging Deerslayer's treatment of Judith: his own definition of justice as the ability "to consider things as they are."

Unfortunately for Judith, she will discover that Deerslayer is too firmly convinced of the truth of his actually fallible impression to discover what she truly is.

Judith offers her first challenge when Deerslayer doubts the sincerity of her offer to give up her luxuries. The question of her willingness to sacrifice is posed again later in the same scene when, in the search for items to use as ransom, they find a gorgeous brocade 247 gown in the chest. When Judith puts it on, her beauty dazzles both

Chingachgook and Deerslayer, who tells her that if the Iroquois could see her in the gown, they would believe a queen had arrived and immediately release their prisoners:

"I don't know a better way to treat with the Mingos, gal," cried Deerslayer, "than to send you ashore as you be, and to tell 'em that a queen has arrived among 'em! They'll give up old Hutter and Harry, and Hetty too, at such a spectacle!"

"I thought your tongue too honest to flatter, Deerslayer," returned the girl, gratified at this admiration more than she would have cared to own. "One of the chief reasons of my respect for you was your love for truth."

"And 'tis truth and solemn truth, Judith, and nothing else* Never did eyes of mine gaze on as glorious a lookin' creatur' as you be yourself, at this very moment." (Ch. xii, p. 213)

Deerslayer is fully alive to Judith's beauty and admires how rich clothing complements it. However, he almost immediately decides that, despite her beauty in it, he disapproves of her wearing the gown, since it was intended for a lady of high rank (Ch. xii, p. 215). As soon as he explains this objection, Judith doffs the brocade, calling it "rubbish" and happily accepting Deerslayer's praise of her "more pleasing" beauty in a simple dress. Cooper then explains at some length that it is Deerslayer's "truth" that influence Judith to give up the elaborate gown (Ch. xii, pp. 216-17).

It is not out of a love of truth, however, that Deerslayer persuades Judith to relinquish the brocade, since he himself has said that it "is truth and solemn truth" that the gown wonderfully complements her beauty. Judith is not more beautiful in simpler 248

clothes, but nevertheless Deerslayer finds them "more pleasing" than the

gown, because they reflect her actual social station. He retreats from

the complexity of reality that gives a frontier girl the beauty of a

queen by not accepting Judith's beauty as it is, regally splendid, but

as he wants it to be, the attractiveness of a country woman. Though

Cooper would have us believe that Deerslayer rejects the brocade dress

out of his love for truth, his initial admiration of it reveals that his adherence to truth is an equivocal guide, since he has had to admit that in inappropriate garb Judith is truly beautiful.

In the incident with the brocade gown Deerslayer has apparently been superior to Judith, smiling at her almost childlike pleasure in the dress and then forcing her to accept his decision that it is an inappropriate delight. But in actuality he has indicated his fallibil­ ity, which Cooper emphasizes in the next few pages in describing how

Deerslayer mistakes chessmen for idols. In one respect this incident illustrates a backwoods ignorance. As Cooper said in The American

Democrat only three years before The Deerslayer was published, "The ability to discriminate between that which is true and that which is false, is one of the last attainments of the human mifld. It is the result, commonly, of a long and extensive intercourse with mankind.

But one may pass an entire life, in a half-settled and half-civilized portion of the world, and not gain as much acquaintance with general things, as in obtained by boys who dwell in regions more populous."15

15(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), p. 177. 249

Not only does Deerslayer lack an understanding of "general things," but in concluding that the chessmen are idols he also makes another common mistake of provincials, that of automatically assuming that the unfamiliar is bad.

Deerslayer's mistake about the chessmen emphasizes that in many respects Judith truly is his superior. She guesses that the carvings are part of a game and, unlike him, knows that the "animal with two tails" is an elephant. Nor is she as inflexible as Deerslayer, whose religious misgivings almost lead him to abandon any attempt to ransom March and Hutter, since he feels it would be sacrilege to save

Hutter if he is an idolater and since he scruples to give the Indians idols (Ch. xiii, pp. 224-25). Judith tactfully convinces him that he is mistaken, just as he has tactfully convinced her to lay aside the brocade gown. By the end of the incident the gown and the chessmen have brought Deerslayer and Judith almost to a level by showing that the woman has her strengths while the man has his weaknesses. And the most serious of these weaknesses is indicated not by Deerslayer's ignorance about chessmen but by his puritanical attitude about Judith's beauty in the gown, an attitude that reveals his refusal to accept the equivocal nature of reality, his failure "to consider things as they are, and not as he wants them to be."

Although Deerslayer firmly believes he is an honest man, he continually interprets things "as he wants them to be." Throughout the novel he pridefully believes that, because he has not commited any sin of commission, he is better than Judith. He therefore constantly takes 250

a superior tone with her, even when she has done nothing to merit his

condemnation. The first sign that he mistrusts her occurs simultan­

eously with her first sacrifice to win his respect when she offers her

clothes for ransom and he doubts her willingness to part with them

(Ch. xii, p. 202). Shortly thereafter he questions whether her parents

have taught her religion even as he makes the ignorant assumption that

the chessmen are idols (Ch. xiii, p. 224). A short while later he

condemns her desire to live near a fort, which to her represents

civilized life (Ch. xv, pp. 268-69). Then, too, he lectures her on how

her beauty and quick-wittedness are her worst enemies (Ch. xxvi, p. 467)

almost immediately after having defined them as advantages (Ch. xxiv,

p. 441).

Unsympathetic and inconsistent as Deerslayer's attitude is in

these instances, it becomes blatantly hypocritical in an act that reveals both his absolute dismissal of Judith and the falsity of his

pose as a defender of women, his rejection of her first marriage

proposal on the grounds that she comes from "people altogether above

mine" (Ch. xxiv, p. 439). Deerslayer does not make this excuse out of ignorance that Judith is illegitimate. Although he has not been able

to read the letters describing her family history that Judith offers him because he is illiterate, her emotions as she reads them and her brief explanations fully enlighted him (Ch. xxiv, pp. 425, 431), letting him know that Hutter is not her or Hetty's father. The advice he gives her immediately after refusing to take her proposal seriously clearly indicates that he understands the situation: "If your parents 251

have been faulty., let the darter be less so" (Ch. xxiv, p. 441). What

makes his refusal of her with the excuse that her family was of high rank hypocritical is that Deerslayer knows his evasion expresses at best only partial truth. Although their father did come from a higher social class than did Deerslayer's father, Judith and Hetty are bastards, not legitimate members of a family much less of a social class.

Judith has, as she tells Deerslayer, "no reason to boast of parentage"

(Ch. xxiv, p. 440), and his rejecting her for being the daughter of a gentleman is ridiculous.

Despite his encouraging advice to Judith to be less faulty than her parents, Deerslayer is unable to give her the aid she needs most, to become her husband so that she can redeem her sins through a virtuous, penitent life. And when he refuses her second proposal, he makes it clear that he cannot love her because he has been prejudiced against her by Hurry Harry. He first attempts to refuse Judith in a polite, evasive manner, but she demands complete honesty of both of them:

"And I require of you as you fear God, and reverence the truth, not to deceive me in your answer. I know you do not love another; and I can see but one reason why you cannot, will not love me. Tell me, then, Deerslayer—" The girl paused, the words she was about to utter, seeming to choke her. Then rallying all her resolution, with a face that flushed and paled at every breath she drew, she continued: "Tell me, then, Deerslayer, if anything light of me, that Henry March has said, may not have influenced your feelings?"

Truth was the Deerslayer"s polar star. He ever kept it in view; and it was nearly impossible for him to avoid uttering it, even when prudence demanded silence. Judith read his answer in his countenance; and with a heart nearly broken by the consciousness 252

of undeserving, she signed to him an adieu, and buried herself in the woods. For some time Deerslayer was irresolute as to his course; but in the end, he retraced his steps and joined the Delaware. (Ch. xxxii, pp. 569-70)

Notice that Judith is wounded not by Deerslayer's rejection but "by the consciousness of undeserving." Since she has repented of having lost her virtue, she does not deserve this abandonment, which will force her into an evil life. Deerslayer's unjust prejudice against her has denied her a marriage and a penitent life and thereby cut her off from the way to salvation that her mother took. And like the mother} who was fond of a story of undeserved suffering that reflected her own situation, the daughter is worthy of better treatment than she has received.

Deerslayer's rejection of Judith is the most obvious example in the novel of his inability to act effectively on behalf of others.

Basically passive and committed only to self-defense, he is not only unwilling to sacrifice himself for others but is also reluctant to accept the help of others, even when he is undergoing Iroquois torture.

Althdugh he prefers to act on his own, his one attempt to escape without aid is unsuccessful, and his final rescue is not effected by any one individual but by all his friends acting in concert. His best chance for escape comes shortly after he is unbound after serving as a living target and regains his old hopes. At this point Judith unexpectedly appears in the Iroquois camp, gorgeous as a queen in the brocade gown and ready to convince the Indians that she is a noble lady come to ransom Deerslayer. She is temporarily successful in impressing 253 all the Iroquois except Rivenoak, who discovers her identity and thwarts her rescue plan by turning to Hetty for an explanation of who she is. Hetty tells him, "That's my sister Judith, Thomas Hutter's daughter" (Ch. xxx, p. 536). This answer indicates how difficult it is for even an honest person to know the truth, and the effects of the answer indicate that guile is necessary to effectively protect oneself and others. Judith's deceit has not been undone by truth but by a half-truth: she is Hetty's sister, but, as Hetty knows, neither is the daughter of Thomas Hutter. Truth, in the fallen world of The

Deerslayer, is an elusive quality that cannot be grasped merely by loving it or by possessing innate honestly, while guile, used for the sake of right, is the only effective defense of right.

In using the brocade gown to attempt to overawe the Iroquois,

Judith is following Deerslayer's own earlier suggestion that she could have ransomed Hutter and Hurry Harry by passing herself off as a queen. Despite the fact that she is merely acting on his suggestion and that his hopes for escape have recently revived, Deerslayer belittles Judith's rescue attempt. He implies that guile is not a practical tactic to employ against the Iroquois by telling her that

Rivenoak "is an oncommon man, and not to be deceived by any unnat'ral sarcumventions. Things must come afore him in their right order to draw a cloud afore his eyes!" (Ch. xxx, p. 537). However, he himself earlier admitted that even though "desait and a false tongue are evil things, . . . it is a pleasure and a satisfaction to 254 outdo the contrivances of a redskin" (Ch. xxvi, p. 476). But Deerslayer cannot accept Judith's deceit on his behalf, since he wants to escape unaided.

The Author and His Hero

Actually, the reader should not accept Deerslayer's denigation of Judith at face value, since there are strong indications that

Cooper's most fundamental, though perhaps unconscious, evaluation was not the same as his hero's. In the first place, the rescue attempt is not as unsuccessful as Deerslayer would make it out to be. Judith has gained valuable time for him, time that will eventually save his life. Then, too, Judith has acted heroically, in fact acted almost exactly like another Judith, the heroine of Israel whose story is told in the Apocrypha, which Cooper as an Episcopalian, would have read.16

The Book of Judith is the story of how the Israelites were saved from the army of the Assyrian general Holophernes by the gorgeous disguise and deliberate deceit of Judith, a beautiful widow. When the elders of her town prepare to capitulate to the beseiging Assyrians,

Judith protests, telling them that they have no right to abandon faith in the Lord and to take matters into their own hands by surrendering.

Ignored, she prays to the Lord to help her save Israel, asking him to

16Note lessons prescribed from various Apocryphal books, "A Table of Lessons for Holy-Days," in The Book of Common Prayer (New-York: Pendleton and Hill, 1831). 255

"smite by the deceit of my lips the servant with the prince, and the

prince with the servant; break down their stateliness by the hand of a woman" and "make my speech and deceit to be their wound and stripe."17

She then removes the sackcloth and ashes she has worn for three years

in mourning for her husband, makes herself beautiful with her most

splendid garments, and seeks out Holophernes in the Assyrian camp. The

Assyrians are dazzled by her beauty and accept at face value her tale of how she has deserted the Israelites in order to tell the invaders when to successfully attack them. A few days later she plays on

Holophrenes1s lust and entices him into dismissing all his attendants and falling into a drunken stupor, whereupon she cuts off his head and carries it in triumph to her own people, who honor her until she dies many years later, never having remarried.

Obviously Cooper's Judith and her prototype differ in that the unassisted efforts of the former fail to save Deerslayer and her later life is filled with disgrace, while the latter is honored for complete success. But leaving aside the differing conclusions, the women and their exploits are remarkably similar. Neither is a virgin, but both are, when their stories occur, chaste, though remaining sexually attractive. Cooper's Judith is a repentant sexual initiate, while the Judith of the Apocrypha is a widow. Each endangers herself to

17The Authorized Version of the Apocrypha, ed. Manuel Komroff (New York: Tudor Pub. Co., 1936), pp. 107-08, Book of Judith 9. 10, 12. To facilitate reference to other editions of the Apocrypha, I have added verse numbers from The Apocrypha of the Old Testament, Revised Standard Version, ed. Bruce M. Metzger (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965). 256 act against enemies when others have given up. Deerslayer has concluded that the Iroquois will never accept a ransom for him and that he must die, while the elders of Israel plan to surrender. Each changes unattractive garments for gorgeous ones that almost miraculously alter her appearance so that she can overwhelm her enemies with her beauty.

And, in addition to beauty, the most striking characteristic of each is clever speech. Deerslayer tells Judith that her "speech and looks go hand in hand, like; and what one can't do, the other is pretty sartain to perform!" (Ch. xxxii, p. 564). This description echoes that of the

Assyrian servants, who tell the Hebrew Judith that "there is not such a woman from one end of the earth to the other, both for beauty of face, and wisdom of words," and Holophernes, who says, "thou art both beautiful in thy countenance, and witty in thy words" (Judith 11. 21, 23).

Most important, each uses deceit to try to gain good ends. The

Apocryphal Judith's deceit is blessed by the Lord, which ensures her success. In contrast, Cooper's Judith is hampered from the very start in attempting to deceive. Since Deerslayer is her translator, she has to convince the Indians that she is a great lady without telling any outright lies that would offend his "known aversion to falsehood"

(Ch. xxx, p. 535). In this she succeeds, using her own name and telling the Iroquois that she is not the queen of England but a lesser personage.

Despite this initial success, she is defeated when her sister's inability to lie reveals her identity. This disastrous result indicates that a naively rigorous honesty cannot aid an active defense of oneself or others. After all, the Judith of the Apocrypha could not 257 have saved her people by being truthful but was successful when the

Lord blessed her deceit. And the fact that the Hebrew Judith succeeds whereas Cooper's Judith fails does not make the latter a mere ironic inversion of the former, as George Dekker has suggested.18 Cooper's

Judith fails to rescue Deerslayer and to marry and live virtuously not because her own attempts are inadequate but because other people fail her. Hetty cannot willingly tell a lie even for a good purpose, while

"honest" Deerslayer accepts without proof Hurry Harry's insinuations about her loose morals.

Though Judith is abandoned by others at critical moments and is thereby destroyed, the point of Deerslayer's rescue from Iroquois torture is that no one can save himself without the help of others.

Judith's ransom attempt is merely the first of a series. She is followed by Hetty, whose defense is particularly significant since it indicates first that a willingness to replace passivity with action is directly related to shifting one's faith from the Golden Rule to natural law and then that a willingness to go beyond Deerslayer's maxim of self-defense is necessary to effectively aid others. And in shifting from a belief in natural law to faith in direct action, Hetty saves someone from death like a second heroine of Israel, Esther, for whom she is named (Ch. xxx, p. 536). In the beginning of the novel

Hetty uses Deerslayer's explanation of the Golden Rule in attempting to disuade Hutter from taking scalps. When Hutter argues that "we are

18pp. 186-87. 258 at war, and must do to our enemies as our enemies would do to us," she replies, "That's not it, father! I heard Deerslayer say how it was. You must do to your enemies as you wish your enemies would do to you. No man wishes his enemies to kill him" (Ch. v, p. 81). She acts on this belief in the efficacy of the Golden Rule early in the novel when she slips into the Iroquois camp to try unsuccessfully to persuade the tribe to return goo3 for evil in releasing Hutter and

Hurry Harry, captured while attempting to scalp women and children.

Despite her faith, she utterly fails in her mission, because the

Iroquois believe that her feeblemindedness has created the paradoxes actually inherent in the Christian doctrine of forgiveness of enemies.

Under the influence of Deerslayer's shift to natural law, Hetty eventually drops her naive faith in the Golden Rule and during

Deerslayer's captivity defends his killing a second victim, an Iroquois who attacked him, on the grounds that the killing was self-defense.

She tells Rivenoak, "Your warrior sought his life, and he defended himself. I don't know whether the good book says that it was right, but all men will do that" (Ch. xxix, p. 524). In this speech she clearly accepts Deerslayer's shift from passivity to self-defense.

But feebleminded as she is, she also realizes that people must help one another and use offensive action that goes beyond self-defense. When

Rivenoak, unimpressed by her self-defense argument, permits the torture by fire to begin, she saves Deerslayer from immediate death by scattering the brands just as he is on the verge of having to breathe in flame (Ch. xxx, p. 539). Thus she moves from passive reliance on 259 the ability of the Bible miraculously to convert the Iroquois to direct action to achieve her goals.

In this shift from passivity to action, Hetty, like her sister, re-enacts the role of a heroine of Israel. Only John P. McWilliams,

Jr., has briefly noted a parallel between the scriptural Esther and

Hetty but concludes that Hetty is "pathetically ineffectual."19 Hetty is, however, very similar to Esther, who in the Book of Esther conceals her race and is married to the Persian king Ahaserus after he has divorced his first wife for not being properly subservient. Like Hetty, whose consciousness of her weak intellect leads her to look to others for advice and guidance, Esther defers completely to other people, especially her guardian, Mordecai. She acts according to his orders both when she initially conceals her race and when she ultimately reveals it. But in revealing that she is a Hebrew and asking the king to save the lives of her people, threatened by a massacre, she, like

Hetty scattering the fire around Deerslayer, willingly endangers her­ self, since she has to enter the king's presence uninvited, for which the penalty may be death.

Although in the Old Testament Esther is always submissive, in an Apocryphal section of the Book of Esther, she tells the king she is an Israelite on her own initiative, not Mordecai's, just as Hetty acts independently in scattering the fire. While Hetty's scattering the fire saves Deerslayer directly, she also helps him indirectly by winning

19p. 282, n. 29. 260 time until his rescue; Esther's plea also saves her people indirectly.

Learning from Esther that his chief minister, Haman, plans:to massacre the Hebrews, the king permits Mordecai to handle the threat as he pleases. Mordecai orders his people to resist, they slaughter the attacking Persians, and he is made chief minister in place of Haman.

Both stories thus end by emphasizing the men whom the two Esthers serve rather than the women.

While the scriptural Judith saves her people directly, the

Esther of the Old Testament and Judith and Hetty in The Deerslayer save people indirectly, with Judith and Hetty postponing Deerslayer's torture.

Hist and Chingachgook also interrupt Deerslayer's torture after Judith and Hetty have failed to rescue him, and together these four delays do save Deerslayer by gaining the time Hurry Harry needs to arrive with the British troops. The implicit point is that individual heroism is not efficacious; Deerslayer cannot be saved merely by his own action or the action of any other individual. His rescue is a communal effort, reflecting the interdependency of all human beings. Alone, Deerslayer cannot prevent his death any more than the solitary Judith can prevent herself from sliding back into a life of sin with Captain Warley. But he can be saved with the aid of friends and acquaintances—even Hurry

Harry, who dislikes him and is acting more in Judith's behalf than in his. The implication is that Judith, too, could have been saved, if

Deerslayer would have taken the kind of action on her behalf that she and others took on his. Although he is not committed to taking offensive action for others, such mutual assistance is the individual's only hope of safety. 261

While the submerged parallels to the books of Judith and Esther

and the success of the group effort to save Deerslayer imply that

Deerslayer's solitary exploits are not the only possible—or even the

most effective—heroism, on the surface Cooper insists even through the

last chapter of the novel that his other characters fall short when

measured against Deerslayer's morality. However, the context of a

quote he attempts to apply to Deerslayer and the ambiguous wording of

some of his authorial comments, particularly the last sentence of the

novel, indicate yet again that the author could not wholeheartedly

commit himself to the position that hero finally occupied.

Cooper introduces the final chapter with a stanza from a

popular old ballad, "The Nut-Brown Maid." Apparently the quotation

is used to illustrate the virtue of Deerslayer's rejection of Judith

by depicting a parallel situation, but in the context of the entire

ballad the stanza describes a situation opposite to that of Deerslayer and Judith. In the quoted stanza a man refuses to accept the offer of woman of high rank to join him in a life in the woods and thereby sacrifices his own happiness to benefit her, since if she does accompany him, she will regret it:

A baron's chylde to be begylde! it was a cursed dede; To be felawe with an outlawe! Almighty God forbede! Yea, better were, the poor squyere, alone to forest yede, Than ye sholde say, another day, that by my cursed dede Ye were betrayed: wherefore, good mayde, the best rede that I can Is, that I to the grene wode go, alone, a banyshed man. (Ch. xxxii, p. 560) 262

Though apparently the speaker of this stanza is being virtuous and self-sacrificing in rejecting the rash proposal of the baron's daughter, the ballad as a whole reveals that the case is entirely different. The poem is a dialogue in which stanzas of the man's argument against the woman's accompanying him to his forest banishment alternate with her answers to his objections. After each of the woman's replies, the man raises a harsher objection than the one before, but instead of rejecting her, he is actually testing her love to see if she is worthy of being his wife. When, by her submissivenss and willing­ ness to sacrifice all for love of him, she passes his tests, he reveals that he is not a poor, banished squire but an earl's son, ready to marry her.20 In the stanza Cooper quotes, then, the presumed squire is only pretending to reject the woman.

In many respects Judith is very similar to the woman in the poem. Each is willing to sacrifice everything for the man she loves.

The nut-brown maid promises to destroy her beauty by cutting her hair and her gown off short, while Judith tells Deerslayer in the final chapter that, "as a proof of how wholly I am and wish to be yours—how completely I desire to be nothing but your wife, the very first fire that we kindle, after our return, shall be lighted with the brocade dress, and fed by every article I have that you may think unfit for the woman you wish to live with" (Ch. xxxii, p. 567). Also, both women

20Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, ed. Henry B. Wheatley (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1927), II, 31-47. Numerous other editions of Percy's 1765 work also include the poem. 263

love only one man. The nut-brown maid's stanzalc refrain is "I love

but you alone," and Judith tells Hurry Harry that she cannot love him

because "I can never feel towards you, or any other man but one, as

you would wish to have me" (Ch. xxi, p. 383).

While the women in the ballad and the novel are similar, the

attitudes of the men are quite different, although out of context the

stanza Cooper quotes gives a false impression about what the speaker's

attitude really is. If the quoted stanza is read alone, a squire is

apparently virtuously refusing to take advantage of a baron's daughter,

a woman vastly his superior in rank. In a similar vein Deerslayer has

rejected Judith's first marriage proposal because "you come from

people altogether above mine" (Ch. xxiv, p. 439) and rejects the

second proposal because, as he tells her, "I am not one to take advan­

tage of a weak moment, when you're forgetful of your own great

advantages" (Ch. xxxii, p. 567).

But the tone of the speaker of the stanza and Deerslayer is

only superficially similar, since the man in the ballad has not made

up his mind about whether or not the woman actually loves him and is

testing her to discover the truth, while Deerslayer, in contrast, has

been prejudiced against Judith from the start and rejects her proposals

by repeating his old, unbelievable argument that she is too much his social superior to sincerely want to marry him. Also, the ballad explicitly praises woman's faithfulness and presents the woman's

unwavering love for the man as more admirable than his suspicious

testing of her, whereas the novel attempts to condemn Judith. Rather 264 than illustrating Deerslayer's virtue as he had intended, Cooper emphasized the worth of a woman's love by choosing a poem praising it.

That the ballad in its entirity emphasizes the goodness and strength of a woman while the individual stanza Cooper quotes lauds a man indicates that the author was not quite as certain of Deerslayer's virtue as he appears to be.

A similar confusion in Cooper's loyalties surfaces in the concluding sentences of the novel in which he attempts to praise

Deerslayer's purity but instead merely reemphasizes the complex moral ambiguity of the fallen world. Deerslayer has returned to the lake fifteen years after the events described in the bulk of the novel and has been unsuccessful in discovering Judith's fate, though an old sergeant

was enabled to tell our hero that Sir Robert Warley lived on his paternal estates, and that there was a lady of rare beauty in the lodge, who had great influence over him, though she did not bear his name. Whether this was Judith, relapsed into her early failing, or some other victim of the soldier's, Hawkeye never knew, nor would it be pleasant or profitable to inquire. We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no picture that represents us other­ wise can be true; though happily for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned, are to be seen, relieving its deformities, and mitigating, if not excusing its crimes. (Ch. xxxii, p. 573)

Cooper implies that Judith's fate is an evil one when he says that it would not be "pleasant or profitable to inquire" what became of her. He immediately links her wickedness to the nature of our

"world of transgressions and selfishness," but then his tone begins to 265 shift. First he defends depicting evil on the grounds that he is merely being realistic, but then he claims that realism also demands a recognition of the divine goodness also present in the world, the

"gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned." To be a realist, Cooper is saying, is to recognize ambiguity, the very ambiguity that Deerslayer rejects. But Cooper is still unwilling to openly relinquish the idea that complete purity is possible in the fallen world and attempts to leave the impression that

Judith is evil while Deerslayer is one of the gleamings of "pure spirit." But as more than five hundred pages of the novel have made plain, neither is such a simple character. If Judith has contributed to the "transgressions" of the world, Deerslayer has exemplified its

"selfishness."

Despite Cooper's loving final emphasis on "our hero," what the tone of the final sentence evokes most clearly is not Deerslayer's heroism but Cooper's inadvertent description of him in his general preface to the Leatherstocking tales as one who has lost his chance for salvation. As frequently happens in the novel itself, an unconscious allusion in the preface betrays the positive content of Cooper's surface description. After calling Deerslayer's morality a combination of the "highest principles" of civilization and all savage values not incompatible with them, Cooper alludes to one of Christ's parables:

"In a moral point of view it was the intention to illustrate [in Natty

Bumppo] the effect of seed scattered by the wayside" (p. v). Though 266

Cooper is attempting to defend Natty, he is indirectly condemned by

this reference to the parable of the sower, found in Matthew 13. 3-9,

Mark 4, 3-20, and Luke 8. 5-15. One of Christ's many allegories

illustrating the ease with which the chance for salvation may be lost,

the parable of the sower describes how the potentially fruitful seed

that happens to fall by the wayside rather than on fertile ;grourid is

destroyed, devoured by birds. Like the hard ground of the wayside,

Deerslayer's soul ddes not prove fertile; in him the seed of the

possibility of salvation cannot flourish and is destroyed.

This same point is reinforced by parallels Cooper unconsciously

drew in the text of the novel between Deerslayer and a figure in

another parable. Throughout the book his hero's actions are reminiscent

of those of the "wicked and slothful servant" who is "cast into ever­

lasting darkness" in the parable of the talents in Matthew 25. 14-30.

In wishing to husband his resources and to act independently of others,

Deerslayer is like this servant, the one who buries his master's money

instead of putting it out at interest and so fails to increase the

value of what he has. The point of this parable is the same as that

of the parable of the sower: potential goodness is no goodness;

salvation can only be won by nurturing one's potential virtue to live a truly good life. Since Deerslayer is not an active but a passive

person, his goodness remains only potential; it never bears the fruit

of the virtuous actions in behalf of others that Christ demands several

times in other parts of Matthew. Instead of befriending those who have

errred, Deerslayer rejects Judith, a repentant fallen woman, and retreats into his own pride, his social isolation and sterility finally a pale reflection of his spiritual barrenness. Far from being an

exemplar of Christian virtue, he represents those who fail to lead a

Christian life.

In indicating that Deerslayer's life is spiritually barren,

Cooper of course implicitly rejected the possibility of an isolato's leading a life beneficial to others as well as himself. However, he could not draw such a conclusion openly or easily, because, since the beginning of his writing career, he had idealized the solitary individual benefiting society by fighting for his ideals. Thirteen of the eighteen novels written before The Deerslayer include isolatos, usually in prominent and positive roles, like that of Harvey Birch in

The Spy. However, after 1841 only three novels use isolatos positively.

These three—The Two Admirals, The Wing and Wing, and Wyandotte—were all written in 1842 and 1843, indicating that soon after he completed

The Deerslayer in 1841 Cooper grappled for the last time with the problem of the moral ambiguity of the isolato. He was apparently unable to solve the problem to his satisfaction and instead attempted to avoid it by not using a heroic isolato in any of the nine novels written after 1843. In fact, in 1844 in Afloat and Ashore he sentimentalized the isolato, reuniting the solitary seaman Moses Marble with his lost family, while in the serialization of Jack Tier from 1846 to 1848 the isolato, in the character of the vicious gunrunner Captain Spike, becomes a totally negative figure. 268

Cooper abandoned the heroic isolato soon after completing The

Deerslayer because he was unable to resolve his ambiguous attitude towards solitary heroism. On the one hand he admired Deerslayer*s self-sufficiency. On the other, as an orthodox and devout Christian, he realized that the type of self-sufficiency he had portrayed in

Deerslayer arose from overweening pride and that Deerslayer embodied a morality denying the fundamental Christian tenets of repentance and forgiveness. Idealizing Deerslayer but at the same time realizing he was a failure as a Christian, Cooper was unable to resolve the contra­ dictions inherent in his novel and therefore unable to unify it. While on the surface he insists that Deerslayer is heroic and wholly admirable,

Deerslayer's inability to live up to his ideals, the submerged parallels between Judith and Hetty and heroines of Israel, and between Deerslayer and the parables all indicate that Cooper could not fully believe that right was completely on Deerslayer's side. His novel depicts Deer- slayer's initiation into manhood in the wilderness, but a full initiation into the complexities of a Christian life finally eludes his hero. CHAPTER 7

AMBIGUITY DENIED: CONVENTIONAL WOMEN IN THE NOVELS OF THE 1830s AND 1840s

The completion and publication of The Deerslayer in 1841 created a crisis in Cooper's development as a novelist. He remained highly productive until shortly before his death on September 14, 1851, publishing in the last decade of his life a satire (Autobiography of a

Pocket-Handerchief), a ghost-written biography (Ned Meyers), two works of non-fiction (The Battle of Lake Erie and Lives of Distinguished

American Naval Officers), and twelve of his thirty-one novels. Much of this fiction, however, differs substantially from the earlier work because of Cooper's unconscious response to the woman characters of The

Deerslayer. Without his actually intending such a result as he was writing the novel, Judith grew as the book grew, developing a stature and complexity that challenge the very bases of the Deerslayer's morality and ultimately reveal that hero's failure to live up to the

Christian values he initially professes. I have discussed in chapter 6 how unresolved discrepancies between Cooper's intention to idealize

Deerslayer and the development of the hero's character in the course of the novel finally reveal Deerslayer to be a narrow Manichean who refuses to marry Judith because he cannot accept an orthodox Christian belief in the efficacy of repentance.

269 270

In response to this unwilled revelation of the moral flaws of

his favorite character, Cooper immediately, albeit unconsciously,

drastically modified his depiction of women in an attempt to deny the

feminine ambiguity that had set Deerslayer a spiritual challenge he

could not meet. While Cooper preserved in the woman characters of his

late novels much of the competence and poise that make Judith so

memorable, the books following The Deerslayer avoid the type of moral

struggle that gives Judith her complexity so that most of the women

from 1842 through 1850 are far simpler than those in earlier works.

These late woman characters owe much to Judith's complexity,

although half of her influence is positive and half negative. On the

positive side many retain the earlier heroine's competence and indepen­

dence. But these are the only legacies Judith bequeaths directly to

her fictional descendants. Because her self-assertion posed moral

dilemmas that Cooper preferred to ignore, he simplified the personalities

of his later heroines in an attempt to deny the ambiguity of femininity and defined femininity with a constellation of sentimental traits, all of which he had previously associated with women, especially in the

1830s, without insisting that together these traits constitute an ideal.

In this manner Judith's complexity had the negative, though indirect, effect of spurring Cooper to create women who would not put men into awkward situations or force them to make embarrassing choices.

Cooper primarily uses three techniques to hold his heroines in check. Even as he insists on their capability, he demands decorum and severely limits the spheres in which they can act, permitting most 271 of them to behave decisively only in carefully controlled situations in which their behavior will not challenge the status quo. He further limits women's activity by insisting that they deny their own selfhood and depend on men, that they passively wait for their fates to be determined by the worthiness or unworthiness of those they love, and that they not disrupt the lives of their lovers, husbands, or fathers.

In addition, he insists on women's spiritual purity and, under the guise of preserving it, removes them from active involvement in the affairs of the world.

Although such conventional values have been associated with some of Cooper's women from the beginning of his career, they begin to dominate his characterization of females only in 1838 with Homeward

Bound and Home As Found. After The Peerslayer they appear regularly in

The Two Admirals (1842), The Wing-and-Wing (1842), Autobiography of a

Pocket-Handkerchief (1843), Wyandotte (1843), Afloat and Ashore and

Miles Wallingford (1844), Satanstoe (1845), The Chainbearer (1845), The

Redskins (1846), The Crater (1847), The Oak Openings (1848), and The

Sea Lions (1849). Late in Cooper's life, however, this attempt to defuse the ambiguity of women by associating them with conventional values failed. In Jack Tier and The Ways of the Hour, discussed in the next chapter, Cooper's old concept of potentially dangerous female 272

dualism surfaced again, all the more vigorous for his efforts to suppress it.1

"The proper sphere of a woman": The Ideal of Decorum

In bequeathing to some of his late heroines much of Judith's competence and poise, Cooper quickly encountered the problem of defining the proper sphere of women and just as quickly solved it by permitting them great freedom of action so long as they did not violate decorum or challenge the status quo. This is not to say that he defined proper feminine behavior narrowly. In his late frontier novels, in fact, he makes some of his women more competent and gives them more active roles than ever before. The test for whether or not a woman violates decorum is not, then, so much what she does as her motives for doing it. In

The Chainbearer, when the upper-class hero Mordaunt Littlepage objects that Dus Malbone should not have carried chain on her poverty-stricken uncle's survey crew because it is "man's work, and man's work only" and because she was "born a lady," Dus defines the limits Cooper puts on woman's role:

It is not so easy to say what is the proper sphere of a woman. I admit it ought to be, in general, in the domestic circle, and under the domestic roof; but cir­ cumstances must control that. We hear of wives who

1 Subsequent references will be to Autobiography of a Pocket- Handkerchief (Chapel Hill: [George F. Horner and Raymond Adams], 1949) and to the Mohawk Edition of the Works of James Fenimore Cooper (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, [1895-96]). Reference will be parenthetical in the text and will include abbreviations for the following titles: Homeward Bound (HB), Home as Found (HF), The Wing-and-Wing (W & W), Wyandotte (Wy), Afloat and Ashore (A & A), Miles Wallingford (MW), Satanstoe (S), The Oak Openings (00), and The Sea Lions (SL). 273

follow their husbands to the camp, and we hear of nuns who come out of their convents to attend the sick and wounded in hospitals. It does not strike me, then, as so bad in a girl who offers to aid her parent as I have aided mine, when the alternative was to suffer by want. (Ch. xii, p. 172).

Dus's most obvious point is that it is the duty of women to assist their families, even by taking unconventional work, but she also implies that it is their duty to behave genteelly. They should only undertake man's work when their families will "suffer by want."

This double insistence on unconventional behavior and on gentility underscores the dilemma that Cooper faced with his late women when, by permitting a broad sphere of action that even included "man'v work," he opened the way for the loss of feminine decorum. This threat was especially acute on the frontier, with its leveling of social dis­ tinctions. In The Redskins, for example, pretentious Opportunity

Newsome, the lower-class sister of the villainous Jason, can perceive no distinctions between herself and the hero that would preclude her becoming his wife, while in The Chainbearer Miss Tinkum, who keeps a poor inn, is likewise blind to social niceties and condemns Dus as prideful for behaving differently from her own daughters, a free- spirited lot who are described as "scouring about the lots, riding bare­ backed, and scampering through the neighborhood" (Ch. vii, p. 98).

Social conditions on the frontier seem to Cooper to encourage forvardness in women.

They may also encourage violence. In the frontier novel

Wyandotte the slave woman nicknamed "Great Smash" kills an Indian before being slain herself. The only white women Cooper shows actively engaged 274 in violence appear in another frontier novel, The Prairie, in the scene in which Middleton's party attacks the Bush's camp. In its defense

Nelly Wade threatens the trapper and her lover with a rifle, while the younger Bush girls hurl rocks at the men and the eldest, Phoebe, fires at Inez.

In order to mitigate the threat of violence and loss of status that Cooper saw as inherent in women's adoption of unconventional roles, the author advocated gentility and a self-reliance that would uphold it. While the frontier might sometimes incite women to violence, it could also nurture maturity and a valuable independence. As Cooper says in The Oak Openings in describing the backgrounds of two of his most competent and self-possessed heroines,

It is surprising with how little of those comforts which civilization induces us to regard as necessaries we can get along when cast into the midst of the western wilds. The female whose foot has trodden, from infancy upward, on nothing harder than a good carpet,—who has been reared amid all the appliances of abundance and art, —seems at once to change her nature along with her habits, and often proves a heroine and an active assistant, when there was so much reason to apprehend she might turn out to be merely an incumbrance. (Ch. xiv, p. 205)

In Wyandotte the genteel heroine Maud Meredith shows how she has been tempered by the frontier as she keeps her head when caught outside the stockade during an Indian attack:

Although Maud had been educated as a lady, and possessed the delicacy and refinement of her class, she had unavoidably caught some of the fire and resolution of a frontier life. To her, the forest, for instance, possessed no fancied dangers; but when there was real ground for alarm, she estimated its causes intelligently, and with calmness. So it was, also, in the present crisis. (Ch. xi, p. 183) 275

Sensibly, Maud remains where she can see the progress of the attack

without being seen until she can safely join a party searching for her,

and in several other instances she again demonstrates her coolness and

bravery, especially when she helps her lover escape Indian captivity

and when she, alone of all the women, remains unshaken by her foster

father's murder.

If transplantation to a wild frontier is one means of inculcating

independence in young women, it is not the most common one in Cooper's

late novels. More frequently his heroines develop a mature self-reliance

because they are motherless; without constant instruction and super­

vision to guide them, they have to learn to care for themselves. Cooper

does, however, usually insist that girls need some sort of female guide—

perhaps an aunt or other relative—and he does occasionally pay lip ser­

vice to the importance of mothers, as in The Two Admirals (Ch. iv, p. 52;

Ch. xxx, p. 482). In this novel he asks us to believe that the heroine,

Mildred, has become a paragon of virtue because her mother "seldom lets

her . . . stray far from her apron-strings" (Ch. iv, p. 52).

This assessment, far from being typical of Cooper, is merely

sentimental, for in other novels the author explicitly condemns such

dependence. Even in the same year as the publication of The Two

Admirals, the virtue of the heroine of The Wing-and-Wing refutes the

theory that a good woman must have had a good mother: "Ghita Caraccioli

. . . had been an orphan from infancy. She had imbibed a strength of

character and a self-reliance, from her condition, that might otherwise

have been wanting in one so young, and of a native disposition so truly 276 gentle" (Ch. vii, p. 102). By 1849 in The Sea Lions Cooper could conclude, apropos of Mary Pratt, that while "a prudent, feminine, well- principled mother" is usually "of the last importance to the character and well-being" of a girl,

it sometimes happens, however, that a female who has no parent of her own sex, and who is early made to be dependent on herself, if the bias of her mind is good, becomes as careful and prudent of herself and her conduct as the advice and solicitude of the most tender mother could make her. ... A young woman who has no mother, if she escape the ills attendant on the priva­ tion while her character is forming, is very apt to acquire qualities that are of great use in her future life. She learns to rely on herself, gets accustomed to think and act like an accountable being, and is far more likely to become a reasoning and useful head of a family, than if brought up in dependence, and under the control of even the best maternal government. In a word, the bias of the mind is sooner obtained in such circumstances than when others do so much of the thinking; whether that bias be in a right or in a wrong direction. (Ch. xx, pp. 300-01)

Believing as he did that strength of character is nurtured by indepen­ dence, Cooper did not accidentally make many of his heroines orphans.

In wishing to display their innate perfection by permitting them as much freedom as possible, he frees many of them from maternal guidance.

For Cooper, a girl displays perfection insofar as she conforms to the standards of feminine gentility imposed by his age. Lower-class women, like Ghita in The Wing-and-Wing or Dolly Waring in The Oak

Openings, may possess this gentility by nature; many women of all ranks are simply born with it. Yet education is a powerful ally of natural gentility. Because natural delicacy may often be destroyed by a crude upbringing, gentility in Cooper's works often seems to be a function of class. In particular, the extent to which women will use violence 277 depends entirely on their social status. The slave in Wyandotte, a member of the lowest possible class, is the only woman in Cooper's works to kill anyone. In the scene in The Prairie in which the men attack the women on the rock, the squatter's daughters are the most violent, the lower-class Nelly threatens to shoot, and upper-class Inez plays the part of peacemaker. In the late novels, too, lower-class frontier women are more prone to violence than are transplanted ladies. In Wyandotte and Satanstoe the only women capable of helping defend their settlements against Indian attack are all the wives of common settlers (W., Ch. iii, p. 44; Ch. xi, p. 181; S_., Ch. xxviii, p. 445).

Such women are not innately violent. They have simply been trained to respond to coercion in that way. For Cooper, education is everything. As the father of four daughters, he had long been concerned with the education of women and in the last decade of his life, particu­ larly, he condemned the worthlessness of the instruction girls ordinarily received. His targets ranged from the practical to the moral. In

Jack Tier, he castigates "the vicious education which civilized society inflicts on her sex" for the heroine's inability to swim, which makes her

"totally helpless in an element in which it was the design of Divine

Providence she should possess the common means of sustaining herself, like every other being endued with animal life" (Ch. viii, pp. 222-23).

In Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief, Adrienne's lack of practical instruction is also dangerous. A young noblewoman deposed by the

French Revolution, she must become the sole breadwinner for herself and her grandmother, even though she is totally unfit. She cannot earn more 278

than a pittance as a common seamstress, the only job for which she is qualified, and to supplement her income must create an elaborately embroidered handkerchief, which she is forced to sell at not even a tenth of its true value.

In a less practical, but to Cooper equally important sphere, another young woman in this same work also demonstrates the faultiness of her education when she pays the exorbitant sum of a hundred dollars for the handkerchief because she has been improperly instructed about the value: "she had only received a bad education. Her parents had given her a smattering of the usual accomplishments, but here her superior instruction ended." The frivolous expenditures she and her mother make are "the result of vicious educations or of no educations at all" (pp. 75, 89).

The girl who mistakenly thinks to impress her acquaintances with a handkerchief worth more than the rest of her wardrobe combined is the daughter of a nouveau riche speculator in New York, where little in the local tradition works to elevate women. Such is not the case in New

England, which Cooper admired for its attention to the education of women and its high moral standards. Early in his career in Notions of the Americans (1828), he had lauded New Englanders for their civility, honesty, and intelligence and had singled out their young women for 2 for special praise. Although in The Chainbearer, as in other late novels, he condemns the grasping shrewdness of Yankees like Jason Newsome,

2Intro. Robert E. Spiller ([Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1828]; rpt. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1963), I, 97. 279 he continues to admire the stress their region places on education

(Ch. viii, pp. 116-17) and the remnants of Puritan discipline that give New Englanders a poise and dignity one would ordinarily not expect among the lower classes (Ch. xvii, p. 244). The squatter

Thousandacre's oldest girl, Lowiny, especially, has been saved from complete degradation by the "native instincts" of her New England mother, who has imparted "many of the decencies of woman to her daughter" (Ch. xx, p. 288).

In The Oak Openings, too, New Englanders are more careful than others to protect their women from the possible degradations of fron­ tier life. Margery Waring, the heroine, may be living in the wilderness at the whim of a drunkard brother who sells liquor to the Indians, but

"she had reaped many of the advantages of having been born in that woman's paradise, New England. ... we greatly question if any other portion of the world can furnish a parallel to the manly, considerate, rational, and wisely discriminating care that the New England husband, as a rule, bestows on his wife; the father on his daughter; or the brother on his sister" (Ch. x, p. 153). By giving her this background,

Cooper raises Margery above the primitiveness of her present life and creates in her a late version of the new kind of lower-class but genteel heroine whose earlier exemplars are analyzed by Henry Nash Smith.3

3Virgin Land (1950; reissued Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 65-69. 280

As the example of New Englanders proves, education can do much

to improve women. Yet regardless of education, no woman, Cooper

believes, can be considered genteel unless she supports the status quo.

in The Redskins Opportunity Newsome has received the usual feminine

education with its smattering of fine arts and French, but she cannot be

considered a lady, partly because she wishes to cross class lines and marry the hero. In The Chainbearer, on the other hand, Dus Malbone clearly epitomizes the combination of qualities Cooper expected in a lady. Though not particularly high, her birth has been good, which for

Cooper means she comes from an old, well respected family. She has also been educated among ladies. Most important of all, she remains loyal to her family, even though its present poverty forces her into working on a survey crew. Significantly, she works less for money than to help her uncle, who cannot afford to hire any other chainbearer and who charges his employer only half-price for her work because it is only "woman's work." The low wages are an indication of the purely voluntary nature of Dus's employment. Since half-pay is practically no pay, it supposedly indicates that Dus has not sacrificed femininity by undertaking a man's job at the same time that it assures that she will not consider manual labor on a survey crew her permanent job.

Dus's job thus does not challenge conventional standards in any fundamental sense. Whenever she acts, in fact, she supports some social bulwark. The survey crew, for instance, establishes the legal boundaries essential to property rights. And when the hero, Mordaunt, offers to make her brother his manager in order to provide her family with 281 financial security, insuring that she will never have to carry chain again, Dus expresses her gratitude by planning a school from which

Mordaunt "will reap the benefit in the end" because in it she will teach his "tenants' daughters some of the ideas of their sex and station"

(Ch. xii, pp. 174-75). Even the symbolism of Dus's most dramatic act indicates her support (in a very literal manner) of conventional values.

It is she who heroically endangers herself to secure a prop preventing the massive frame of a new building from crushing the men attempting to raise it; significantly, the frame she secures is that of a church.

Whether aiding her family, establishing property boundaries, educating girls to accept their lot, or raising a church, all Dus does, even when she acts unconventionally, supports the status quo.

Dus exhibits the qualities Cooper deemed genteel more clearly than do most of his other heroines because her rather humble background renders her social status somewhat unclear, forcing Cooper to define it carefully. With ladies whose status is never in question, Cooper finds it somewhat more difficult to define where gentility ends and vulgarity begins. Sometimes, apparently unable to justify actions he felt were indecorous, he unconsciously went so far as to shape his plots and the behavior of his woman characters to preserve decorum. In Wyandotte he crudely manipulated the action to rescue Maud from the frontier, making her an heiress and concluding the novel by giving her husband a British title and whisking them both off to England. This is an obvious bit of plot manipulation, supposedly proving that the frontier has had no evil effect on the heroine. 282

A more common device in this and other late novels is convention­ alization, a subtle shifting of the characterization of competent, intelligent women to make them weak or imbecilic at moments of crisis.

Cooper had begun to use this device as early as Home As Found (1838) in which the intelligence of the idealized Eve Effingham is stressed until her love scene with Paul Powis. Initially she is described as having a

"sweet simplicity, and [a] highly cultivated mind"; she is "simple and unaffected as a child, with the intelligence of a scholar; with all the graces of a woman she has the learning and mind of a man" (Ch. xx, pp. 293, 297). But when Paul and Eve declare their mutual love, her intelligence is downplayed, its "masculine" quality denied. Now Paul admires "her meek purity of mind" and "the justness of thought, the beautiful candor, the perfectly feminine delicacy of [her] mind"

(Ch. xxiii, p. 342).

In the case of Eve Effingham this shift in emphasis from the

"masculine" acuteness of her intelligence to its "feminine" purity and delicacy is subtle and not wholly contradictory because her femininity is stressed by her lover. But in several of the novels following Home

As Found such conventionalization cannot be explained away as simply the result of a shift in point of view. For instance in Satanstoe in the scene of the breakup of the ice on the Hudson, Cooper separates Anneke

Mordaunt and Corny Littlepage from their companions and gives Corny an opportunity to rescue his beloved by making Anneke succumb to a "tempo­ rary imbecility" (Ch. xvi, p. 258), forcing her to remain in the endangered sleigh while the other couple flees to safety. But once Corny 283 has shown his heroism in returning to the sleigh to save her, she becomes cool and rational: "Reasonable, resolute, compliant, and totally without any ill-timed exhibition of womanly apprehension, she had done all she was desired to do unhesitatingly, and with intelligence" (Ch. xvii, p. 263). The behavior of Anneke as she courageously clambers over floating ice floes to reach the safety of the shore is completely at odds with her terrified paralysis in the sleigh, which originally endan­ gered herself and Corny. In reducing her to abject terror at the first sign of danger, Cooper imposes on her a behavior inconsistent with the firmness of character she displays in the rest of the novel.

In Wyandotte Cooper carries such inconsistent characterization to an extreme when Maud is in the presence of her lover, Robert

Willoughby. He undercuts his descriptions of her intelligence and vigor by presenting her as passive, timid, and high-strung whenever she is placed in romantic situations. For instance, during an Indian attack she first calmly decides to stay in safety on the mountain. When her lover joins her and wishes to flee, she rationally explains how they are sheltered from observation and still able to spy on their enemies. How­ ever, only three pages later she makes the uncharacteristically stupid suggestion that they use their position to signal their friends in the house, an act that would betray them (Ch. xi, p. 186; Ch. xii, pp. 189-90).

Descriptions of Maud's physical strength also vary considerably, depending upon whom she is with. She is at her best alone with the

Indian Wyandotte, intent upon helping him save Robert from other, enemy

Indians. Following Wyandotte, "she glided after him with a rapidity 284

that equalled his own loping movement" (Ch. xxvi, p. 403). But when

Wyandotte leads her and Robert back, he "passed out of the forest on a swift walk—but for the female, it would have been his customary loping trot" (Ch. xxvii, p. 421). On this return journey Maud is apparently unable to support herself: "Willoughby had an arm round the waist of

Maud, and bore her forward with a rapidity to which her own strength was altogether unequal" (Ch. xxvii, p. 416).

In his review of the novel in Graham's Magazine in 1843, Edgar

Allan Poe objected to this inconsistency. In general he defended

Cooper's skill in creating Maud, concluding that "we know no female portraiture, even in Scott, which surpasses her; and yet the world has been given to understand, by the enemies of the novelist, that he is incapable of depicting a woman." Nevertheless, Poe objected to the shifts in how Maud is portrayed after freeing Robert: "We may be permitted to doubt whether a young lady of sound health and limbs, exists, within the limits of Christendom, who could not run faster, on her own proper feet, for any considerable distance, than she could be carried upon one arm of either the Cretan Milo or of the Hercules

Farnese.In having Maud rely on the strong arm of her lover when with­ out him she has been perfectly capable of running as fast as an Indian,

Cooper shifts her characterization in order to preserve the romantic convention that the woman must be physically weaker then the man. In more general terms, he goes so far in insisting on decorum in his

**24 (1843), 261-64; rpt. in Fenimore Cooper: The Critical Heritage, ed. George Dekker and John P. McWilliams (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 2.J2,..211-12. 285 heroine that he destroys the consistency of her characterization and with it the artistry of his novel.

"A total abnegation of self": The Ideal of Selflessness

Through such insistence on decorum Cooper attempts to deny that the competence of his late women characters in any way threatens men.

He further defuses the threat to male integrity that the independent

Judith had posed in The Deerslayer by insisting in his late novels that women be dependent on men. This dependency takes several forms. It demands on the one hand that the fates of women be determined by the worth of the men they love and, on the other, that the marriages of women not disrupt their fathers' families.

In depicting women who do not control their own lives, Cooper insists that the true woman is a selfless woman, a woman who can be shaped for good or evil by the men around her. As he says in praise of one of the heroines of The Ways of the Hour, she exhibits "a total abnegation of self. This was a quality to lead to good or evil as it might receive a direction ..." (Ch. xv, pp. 229-30). Specifically, such selflessness means that whether or not heroines of the late novels will be happy or miserable depends almost entirely upon the quality of the men they love.

Such dependence is not new in Cooper but does receive new emphasis after 1841. In the early novels women may depend on men for their safety, as do Cora and Alice Munro in The Last of the Mohicans, or wait for marriage until their lovers have been properly educated, as does

Frances Wharton in The Spy. Their lives may even be blighted by marriage 286

to a bad man, as Polly Jarvis's is in Precaution. Nevertheless, these

early heroines are not as totally dependent on men as several of the

late ones are. Unlike some of their descendants, the early heroines do not die when the men they love prove unworthy. Elizabeth Temple in The

Pioneers, Alida de la Barbarie in The Water Witch, and Meta Frey in The

Heidenmauer, to name only a few, are content to remain single if neces­ sary, while Alice Dunscombe in The Pilot continues to lead her own life despite the futility of her love for John Paul Jones.

Related to their independence is the reluctance of women in the early novels to show their love; Cooper often insists that reticence is essential to a woman's self-esteem. In The Pioneers, for example,

Elizabeth Temple long conceals her fondness for Oliver Edwards out of a sense of "what is due herself," while in Precaution Jane Moseley feels that in having proclaimed her love for the unworthy Colonel Egerton she cannot with propriety avow an attachment to any other man. The late novels present an important shift in emphasis away from such reticence and independence. Often the heroines of the 1840s openly proclaim their love, thereby, according to the scheme of things in Cooper, placing them­ selves completely at the mercy of the men. While their men undergo the trials that will reveal their fitness for adulthood, they wait. If their men complete these trials successfully, they marry. But if their men finally prove unworthy, they go into seclusion or die. In The Sea

Lions Mary Pratt's only role is to wait for the hero, Roswell Gardiner, to renounce his unitarianism in favor of an orthodox trinitarianism so that she can marry him. A somewhat similar relationship appears in 287

The Wing-and-Wing, in which the pious Ghita refuses to marry the atheist

French revolutionary, Raoul Yvard. She cannot, however, resist the attraction she feels for him, and, after he is killed, retires "to a convent, not so much to comply with any religious superstitions, as to be able to pass her time, uninterrupted, in repeating prayers for the soul of Raoul" (Ch. xxx, pp. 469-70).

This pattern of a woman's waiting for a man to determine her fate is particularly obvious in the double novel Afloat and Ashore and

Miles Wallingford. One of the two heroines, Lucy Hardinge, in love with the hero, Miles Wallingford, remains true to him throughout his years of travel and supports him with encouragement and offers of money. When he finally completes his initiation by learning to esteem her at her true worth, they marry. Miles's sister Grace has the opposite fate forced on her by Lucy's brother, Rupert, to whom she has been engaged since adoles­ cence. Initially Miles's equal in energy and ambition, Rupert soon demonstrates his lack of firm values by falling in love with a shallow

Englishwoman. Neglected, Grace wastes away and dies from a psychosomatic illness, arising, as Miles tells his beloved, "from the certainty that your sex has so much heart, Lucy; your very existence being bound up in others" (A & A, Ch. xxix, p. 515). Grace has literally died of a broken heart. Miles explains:

Perhaps the keenest of all Grace's sufferings proceeded from the-consciousness of the total want of merit in the man she had so effectually enshrined in her heart, that he could only be ejected by breaking in pieces and utterly destroying the tenement that had so long contained him. With ordinary natures, this change of opinion might have sufficed for the purposes of an effectual cure, bjit my poor sister was differently constituted. She had even been different from 288

most of her sex in intensity of feeling ... a being so sensitive and so pure, ever seemed better fitted for the regions of bliss, than for the collisions and sorrows of the world. (MW, Ch. v, p. 79)

Living for another destroys Grace, yet Cooper refuses to explore the paradoxical aspects of her love and instead idealizes it as one of the highest qualities of femininity. In fact, he defines it as essential to a good wife. Miles's guardian counsels his ward on this very point:

"Marry no woman, Miles, that is not amiable!" "May I ask what you call amiable, sir?" ... "I do not call levity, amiability; nor mere constitutional gayety. . . . There must be an unusual absence of selfishness—a person must live less for herself, than others—or rather, must find her own happiness in the happiness of those she loves, to make a truly amiable woman. Heart and principle are at the bottom of what is truly amiable; though temperament and disposition undoubtedly contribute. . . . your own sister Grace is a truly amiable young woman." (A & A, Ch. xxiii, p. 384)

Although this same "absence of selfishness" not only makes Grace "truly amiable" but also causes her death, Cooper never explores anywhere in the late novels the implications of this definition of the ideal woman as completely passive and selfless. He instead continues to insist on the value of such simple-hearted devotion to others by ascribing it to his surviving heroine, Lucy, whose nature is "to live out of herself, as it might be, and in the existences of those whom she esteemed or loved"

(MW, Ch. vi, p. 96). In refusing to deal with the problem that Grace's death raises about the destructive aspects of passive feminine loyalty,

Cooper sentimentalizes her love by claiming that it simply indicates that she was too good for this world. 289

In other late works Cooper falls into similar sentimentalization in insisting that in happy families the wife must be subordinate to her husband regardless of how he treats her and that women must remain loyal to their families under any circumstances. At the end of The Two

Admirals, the heroine, "like a true woman, „ . . found her happiness with her husband and children." "Few happier families were to be found in the

British Empire, than that of Sir Wycherly Wychecombe; its head retaining his manly and protecting affection for all dependent on him, while his wife . . . clung to him with the tenacity of the vine to its own oak"

(Ch. xxxi, pp. 492, 493-94). The hackneyed metaphor betrays Cooper's capitulation to the conventional, into which he falls again in

Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief, heightening the pathos of genteel

Adrienne's utter poverty by her sacrifices for her dying grandmother.

Almost the entire pittance she earns as a seamstress goes to buy little luxuries for the oblivious old lady, while the money from the sale of the handkerchief she has embroidered with such pain goes to pay for the funeral (pp. 30-53).

In The Oak Openings Gershom Waring receives the unfaltering love and loyalty of his wife and sister despite his having wrenched them away from a comfortable life in New England ("that woman's paradise") and forced them to follow him to the wilds of the Michigan frontier where he destroys his dreams of becoming an Indian trader by regularly debauching himself on the rum he is supposed to be selling. And in Jack Tier feminine self-sacrifice reaches an extreme as the title character, a woman whose unworthy husband abandons her, desexes herself by disguising 290 herself as a common sailor so that she can travel from port to port in

search of the man she still loves. Jack, like Adrienne, Margery, and

Dolly, preserves an immutable devotion to the man she has first loved, a man who finally determines her fate because she can have no life without him.

This definition of women's love as immutable, unaffected by any unworthiness in the beloved, is linked to Cooper's insistence in these late novels on the inviolability of the family. Just as young women pose no awkward dilemmas for young men but instead passively wait for them whether they are worthy or not, so too do daughters avoid grieving their fathers with marriages that will take them from the paternal home. The lengths to which Cooper goes to permit his heroines to marry without leaving their fathers implies that for Cooper the ideal family is not a fluid configuration of individuals but a permanent entity that he felt should change through accretion, not through subtraction or division.

This ideal of family unity, of course, appears in the early work The

Pioneers, when Oliver Edwards becomes doubly the heir of Judge Temple, first in his own right as an Effingham and then through his marriage to the judge's daughter, Elizabeth. In marrying his heroine to a man already her father's heir, Cooper uses the daughter's establishment of her own family as a means of solidifying the father's family, not destroying it.

Perhaps because of the deus ex machina quality of the revelation of Oliver's identity in The Pioneers, Cooper temporarily abandoned the theme of a family unified by marriage and permitted most of the heroines 291 of his other early novels great freedom in choosing husbands. Still the idea that a daughter's marriage might not threaten the integrity of her father's family remained attractive. In The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829) a young man marries an orphan girl who has grown up in his family. The reverse occurs in The Monikins (1835), when an orphaned boy marries a girl whose family he has lived with for most of his life, and again in

Miles Wallingford when the orphaned hero marries the daughter of his guardian. In Wyandotte Cooper finally explores some of the complexities of this type of marriage. In this novel the orphaned Maud Meredith, who has lived since infancy with the Willoughbys, has grown up considering

Robert Willoughby her brother (Ch. viii, p. 135). As Maud discovers that she loves Robert not as a sister but as a woman, she must contend with her own uneasiness and must learn to assert her independence, since her

"mother" and "sister" still continue to regard her as part of the family.

Recognizing the changed nature of her feelings for Robert, Maud begins to detach herself emotionally from the family, reminding herself that she is not their blood relation and adopting her own surname, "Meredith," in place of "Willoughby." Her detachment succeeds, and when she realizes that Robert's feelings for her have undergone a similar shift from the filial to the amatory, she is able to marry him.

The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, The Monikins, Miles Wallingford, and

Wyandotte all flirt with the notion of an almost incestuous union of foster siblings in order to avoid outside marriages that will dissolve the fathers' families. In Homeward Bound and Home As Found in 1838,

Cooper's desire to use the marriage of daughters to solidify rather than 292 to threaten families reaches an extreme. The marriage of the hero and heroine of this novel comes close to being truly incestuous, if not biologically at least legally and emotionally so, as Eric J. Sundquist has noted in discussing how the Effingham family folds back on itself as

Cooper attempts to defend the aristocracy from incursions of the mob.5

Yet the political motive for the incest that Sundquist explores in such convincing detail does not stand alone but is reinforced by an emotional drive, the close bond between Eve and her father that neither wishes to relinquish. In a manner that foreshadows Maggie and Adam

Verver in The Golden Bowl, the father and daughter become all in all to one another. Eve is her father's only child, he her only parent, her mother having died in childbirth. The father "seldom thought of others, or even of himself, while [Eve's] own wants or safety appealed to his unwearying love" (HE, Ch. vii, p. 83). For her part, Eve "had more than the usual confidence in [her father], for she had never known a mother"; she goes so far as to question whether she ought "ever to quit my beloved father" (HF, Ch. xxiv, pp. 352-53, 354).

Despite this strong bond to her father, Cooper demands that Eve, as an ideal woman, marry and to that end provides her with Paul Blunt-

Powis-Assheton-Effingham. Paul will make her the perfect husband because he is an Effingham, a near relative, the legitimate son of Eve's father's supposedly childless first cousin and close friend, John Effingham. As the mystery of Paul's background unfolds, Cooper repeatedly stresses how

5"Incest and Imitation in Cooper's Home As Found," Nineteenth- Century Fiction, 32 (December 1977), 261-84. 293 his and Eve's marriage will draw the Effingham family together rather than opening it up by bringing in new blood. Even before the marriage

Eve's father comes to feel for Powis almost as strongly as for a son, while Eve has always regarded Paul's father as her "second father"

(HF, Ch. xxvi, p. 385; Ch. xxix, p. 434).

Because of these intimate emotional ties, the marriage will strengthen bonds already established, a development all parties desire, as is indicated by the role Edward Effingham plays in his daughter's courtship. When Paul proposes in the garden, Edward Effingham responds before Eve can accept by more than tacit acquiescence. He steps out of a hidden path "to confirm what his daughter has just declared," that all her "faith and affection" belong to Paul (HF, Ch. xxiii, p. 350). It is also the father, not Eve, who formalizes the engagement, telling her,

"I have ventured, in your behalf, to plight your troth to Paul Powis

. . ." (HF, Ch. xxvi, p. 383). The final symbol of family unity is a legal one. Like their fictional ancestors in The Pioneers, Paul and Eve are already, even before they wed, "each other's natural heirs. Of the name and blood of Effingham, neither has a relative nearer than the other, for though but cousins in the third degree, our family is so small as to render the husband, in this case, the natural heir of the wife, and the wife the natural heir of the husband" (Ch. xxix, p. 444). Rather than threatening the integrity of the Effinghams by linking them to another family, Eve's marriage thus further solidifies a family already "small."

While Home As Found comes the closest of any of the novels to using incest to solve the conflict between marriage and family unity, 294

Cooper had vehemently rejected the very notion of incest only two years before. In 1836 in the first Gleanings in Europe volume, he describes his disgust at a French play in which a girl falls in love with her guardian, a man she believes to be her brother, and marries him after discovering that they are not related. Cooper objects to the improb­ ability of a woman's falling in love with a man old enough to be her guardian and exclaims that since she believed him to be her brother, she

"was guilty of a revolting indelicacy and a heinous crime, and no exaggerated representation of love, a passion of great purity in itself, can ever do away with the shocking realities of such a case."6 Appar­ ently what Cooper found particularly "shocking" was the idea that a woman could fall in love with a man she thought was her brother. In his own novels, he carefully avoids this particular situation; however close they may be, his foster brothers and sisters always know they are not related. But despite his avoidance of the outward appearance of incest, the fact remains that Cooper's young lovers, particularly in

Home As Found, frequently come perilously close to the "heinous crime" that he denounced in the French play: emotionally, if not biologically, many of them are brother and sister.

Partly because of this fear of incest, Cooper could not permanently solve the problem of families being threatened by marriage by always providing foster brothers or sisters as spouses or by uniting

6Gleanings in Europe, Volume One: France, ed. Robert E. Spiller (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1928; rpt. New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1970), p. 253.

4 295

cousins. In fact, after Afloat and Ashore and Miles Wallingford in 1844

he dropped both these solutions altogether and instead solved the

problem of marriage threatening the fathers' families by avoiding it; he

made the majority of his late heroes and heroines orphans whose marriages

affect no one but themselves. This solution dominates the works follow­

ing Home As Found. In the sixteen novels Cooper produced between then

and his death, only one heroine, Mildred Dutton in The Two Admirals,

lives with both parents, but the conclusion of the novel reveals that

the drunkard Dutton is not her true father nor is his long-suffering

wife her mother.. Of the heroines of the other late novels, six have lost

their mothers and been reared by their fathers (see The Pathfinder, The

Peerslayer, Afloat and Ashore and Miles Wallingford, Satanstoe, The

Redskins, and The Crater), while nine are orphans (see Mercedes of

Castile, The Wing-and-Wing, Wyandotte, Autobiography of a Pocket-

Handkerchief, The Chainbearer, Jack Tier, The Oak Openings, The Sea

Lions, and The Ways of the Hour).

Cooper had, of course, used motherless girls as heroines from

The Spy on. For him the archetypal family was either girL(s) and.,

father (often incompetent), the situation in twelve novels out of thirty-

one, or girl(s) and guardian, the situation in fourteen others. To a

certain extent these archetypal situations reflect Cooper's closeness to his own daughters and his pride in their accomplishments, discussed in

chapter 2. The shift from motherless girls to orphans, however, likely reflects not only the fear of incest but also another important aspect

of Cooper's personal life discussed in chapter 2: his increasing fears during his last decade that his grown daughters would marry and leave 296

him. Despite the fact that only two of his four girls ever did marry—

Caroline in 1849 and Frances in 1850—from as early as 1830 on, Cooper

worried about the possible breakup of his family and especially about

losing his favorite child, Susan, to a husband. This threat became

particularly acute after 1840 when the youngest girl turned twenty-one.

Thereafter, instead of making his heroines the wards of widowed

fathers, Cooper tended to make them orphans so that he could close his novels with the conventional marriage of hero and heroine without raising

the disturbing problem of what might happen to a solitary father when his daughter took a husband. Only once does any Cooper heroine defy her

father to marry the man she loves. In 1847, a year before Caroline shocked her father by requesting to marry the nephew of a man with whom

Cooper had quarreled, Bridget Yardley in The Crater secretly marries

Mark Woolston. But Cooper quickly defuses this situation. Because they are both under age, she continues to live with her father while Mark goes on a voyage. Before he can return to fetch his bride to the Utopia he has created on an uninhabited island, her father conveniently dies, a development that brushes aside forever the conflict between Cooper's idealizations of young love and marriage and his realistic understanding of the pain marriage might cause the older generation. Because he chose to define his late heroines as selfless creatures who would never sacrifice their fathers' happiness for their own, Cooper found himself unable to deal with the theme of the conflict of generations. 297

"Her thoughts and prayers"; The Ideal of Spirituality

In addition to demanding in the last decade of his life that women be decorous and self-sacrificing, Cooper also insisted that they should be spiritual beings, influencing men not directly but indirectly.

As he put it in The Sea Lions, "her thoughts and prayers . . . are woman's means of exerting influence, and who shall presume to say that they are without results, and useless? On the contrary, we believe them to be most efficacious . . (Gh. ii, p. 21). This definition of the spiritual as the proper realm of woman's influence is part of Cooper's general attempt to idealize women and to define what an ideal world would be like. As he grew older, he grew less and less tolerant of the deficiencies of those around him and of what he regarded as a general decline in morality. Even as early as 1838 in Gleanings in Europe;

Italy, he described a desire to escape the evils of the world when he sketched his response to a panoramic view:

The effect [of putting convents on heights] is poetical and good; for I cannot imagine a finer stimulant for religious meditation, than a broad view of the glories of the earth; and this the more especially, if it be chastened by a knowledge of the things practiced on it. One gets, in this way, an idea of what things might be without sin, to contrast with one's knowledge of what things are. In boyhood, my feeling on such places, was ever to fly, in order to cull the beauties by again approaching them; but, as life glides away, I find the desire to recede increase, as if I would reduce the whole earth to a picture in a camera obscura, in which the outlines and general beauties are embraced, while the disgusting deatils are diminished to atoms.7

7(Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1838), I, 231. 298

This description testifies to Cooper's increasing desire as he grew older to idealize and to evade the repugnant. To these ends he developed a number of fictional strategies capable of explaining away evil, the most common of which was to emphasize that a principle of right governs the universe. As late as 1841 in The Deerslayer, Cooper's world is morally ambivalent; it counterbalances religious views, such as Deerslayer's deistic interpretation of the woods as temples of the.

Lord and Judith's strivings towards Christian ideals, with the violence of the Indians and British soldiers and the immorality of March and

Hutter's natural law of "do, lest you should be done by." The conclu­ sion, in which Deerslayer damns Judith by following his own moral principles, further emphasizes the ambivalent world of the novel. But immediately after 1841 Cooper adopts a new set of assumptions and for the remainder of his career attempts to define the universe as fundamentally good and as ruled by a just providence.

Cooper first emphasizes that the universe reflects the will of

God in The Wing-and-Wing, published only a year after The Deerslayer but displaying a world view completely opposed to that of the earlier novel. Whereas The Deerslayer is shot through with ambiguity, The

Wing-and-Wing is dominated by a just providence. Time and time again

Cooper suggests, with a stridency perhaps occasioned by his uneasiness over Deerslayer's self-reliance, that belief in oneself is illusory because only providence is all-powerful. When Raoul brags about "serving myself" in rescuing the pious woman he is to fall in love with from

Algerian pirates, she rebukes him, calling him only "the instrument" of 299

God's mercy (Ch. vii, p. 113). This position of the heroine is reiterated by Cooper himself, who insists on "truths that are eternal," on "that mysterious principle of right which is implanted in the nature of things," and on "the universal predominance of truth, and the never-failing downfall of falsehood from the beginning" (Ch. xvii, p. 270; Ch. v, p. 70; Ch. iii, p. 38). The action of the novel bears out these proclamations of the inevitable justice of providence. Fail­ ing to acknowledge his dependence on God and attempting to rely on himself alone, the atheist privateer hero is killed in battle.

In this new framework of a universe governed by a transcendent justice, women are to be the agents of providence, passive conduits for the manifestation of the will of God. Men, says Cooper, expect women to accept this role. In The Wing-and-Wing, in The Oak Openings, and again in The Sea Lions he repeats that "few men, however loose or skeptical in their own opinions on such matters, [find] . . . any pleasure in the contemplation of a female infidel"; "most men . . . however indifferent to religion in their own person, are never sorry "to find that their wives profoundly submit to its influence"; "few men relish infidelity in a woman, whose proper sphere would seem to be in believing and in worshipping, and not in cavilling, or in splitting straws on matters of faith" (W & W, Ch. vi, p. 87; 00, Ch. xxix, p. 454;

SL, Ch. xv, p. 222). Unlike Deerslayer, who rejected Judith's belief in repentence, Cooper's late heroes insist that women's piety be completely orthodox. 300

The late heroes also demand that women be spiritual, not sexual beings. Apparently because Judith's confusing combination of carnality and spirituality placed his favorite hero in a morally awkward dilemma,

Cooper proceeded to deny feminine sexuality, making his late heroines pure guides for all men, not only for their lovers but also for Indians.

This almost complete denial of carnality marks a major shift in Cooper's work. In the frontier novels before 1842, Indian men—both villains and heroes—are almost inevitably attracted sexually to white women.

Uncas and Magua battling over Cora in The Last of the Mohicans spring immediately to mind, as does Conanchet's marrying young Ruth in The

Wept of Wish-ton-Wish. In The Pathfinder Arrowhead schemes to make

Mabel his concubine, while in The Deerslayer a great warrior offers to marry Judith (Ch. xxiii, p. 406). After The Deerslayer, however,

Wyandotte and The Oak Openings depict Indians very differently. In both, Indian men develop close relationships with white women, but these relationships are familial, not sexual. In Wyandotte the title character, a deposed chief, regards Mrs. Willoughby as his mother and

Beulah and Maud as his sisters, while in The Oak Openings Scalping Peter initially considers Margery his daughter and ultimately comes to depend on her as on a mother. The shift occurs after she assumes the role of spiritual guide and teaches him the Lord's Prayer:

When Peter arose from his knees after repeating the prayer to Margery's slow leading, it was with the dependence of a child on the teaching of his mother. Physically, he was the man he had ever been. . . . but morally the change was great indeed. Instead of the obstinate confidence in himself and his traditions which had once so much distin­ guished this chief, there was substituted an humble distrust of his own judgment that rendered him singularly indisposed 301

to rely on his personal views in any matter of conscience, and he was truly become a child in all that pertained to his religious belief. (Ch. xxviii, p. 438) Although their roles are reversed, the metaphor remains that of the

family, but Margery is now the parent and Peter the child.

Indian men and white women are able to develop familial rela­

tionships because of a strong, innate sense of justice shared by both

groups but lacking in white men. In Wyandotte Captain Hugh Willoughby

incurs the deadly hatred of the title character, a deposed chief, by

treating him as "Saucy Nick," a simple renegade, and flogging him for drunkenness. In contrast, the women of the family treat him as

"Wyandotte," a warrior worthy of their respect and trust. Mrs.

Willoughby nurses him through a case of the smallpox, while Maud unhesi­ tatingly accompanies him into the enemy-infested forest to rescue

Robert. Wyandotte reciprocates these divergent treatments in a strictly

Old Testament manner: he murders the captain for degrading him, but rescues the women when troops attack their home.

Wyandotte punishes insensitivity and rewards humane treatment out of a sense of justice, not out of any Christian morality. In The

Oak Openings, however, Cooper correlates the Indian sense of justice with the Christian morality he believes to be innate in all people. Initially the old chief, "Scalping" Peter, plans a genocidal war against all whites because, justice tells him, they have victimized Indians and robbed them of their land. Although gradually his feelings warm toward the heroine, Margery, because of "the growth of that divine principle that is implanted in us all" (Ch. xxi, p. 319), he does not plan to 302 save her from the general extermination until he discovers that her sense of justice coincides with his own; she too believes that "the red- man has ... a better right to this country than the whites" (Ch. xx, p. 312). This justice is explicitly linked to Christian precepts;

Margery's "sense of right" is one of the "sudden impulses in the direc­ tion of love for our species, the second of the high lessons left by the Redeemer to his disciples . . .that is, the Golden Rule (Ch. xx, p. 313).

Despite her inborn belief in the Golden Rule, Margery's

Christianity does not preclude racial prejudice; she could never fall in love "with a young Indian ... of a suitable age and character" because of "her American notions on the subject of color" (Ch. xxvii, p. 416).

Her Christianity shares with Cooper's a defense of the status quo. In

1838 in The American Democrat Cooper argued that the Golden Rule is consistent with social differences:

Slavery is no more sinful, by the christian code, than it is sinful to wear a whole coat, while another is in tatters, to eat a better meal than a neighbor, or other­ wise to enjoy ease and plenty, while our fellow creatures are suffering and in want. According to the doctrines of Christ, we are "to do as we would be done by," but this law is not to be applied to slavery more than to any other interest of life. It is quite possible to be an excellent christian and a slave holder. . . .8

In a similar vein in The Chainbearer, as Edgar A. Dryden has pointed out,

Cooper defends a Christianity that varies according to social class so

8Intro. H. L. Mencken (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), p. 165. 303

that the morality of gentlemen is "not the result of the expression of

divine will."9 And in The Ways of the Hour Cooper goes so far as to

declare "that African slavery is an important feature in God's laws,

instead of being disobedience to them" (Ch. xi, p. 173). For Cooper,

then, the status quo is consistent with Christian morality.

In advocating a Christianity that supports the world as it is,

Cooper sentimentalizes his religion. Although he sincerely believes

in the importance of being a Christian, he allots his faith only a

minor role in earthly affairs. While God is supposedly all-powerful

and providence supposedly just, divine power does not reveal itself in

any struggle against worldliness or evil but only in the most banal

manner. At the end of The Sea Lions, for instance, Roswell Gardiner's

acceptance of trinitarianism wins him not a spiritual but a carnal prize.

As Herman Melville says in a review of the book, "the moist, rosy hand

of our Mary is the reward of his orthodoxy. Somewhat in the spirit of

the Mohametan, this; who rewards all the believers with a houri."10

Melville puts his finger on the failure of Cooper's Christianity

to provide any transcendent morality. No wonder, then, that in ideal­ izing women as the bearers of Christianity Cooper insisted that they be

potential martyrs, not prophets, that they never undertake Judith's role

of directly challenging the morality of men. Instead of carrying a powerful religious message, his idealized women become weak reflections

9"History and Progress: Some Implications of Form in Cooper's Littlepage Novels," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 26 (1971), 53.

10Literary World, 5 (1849), 370, rpt. Dekker and McWilliams, ed., p. 243. 304

of the angel-in-the-house, the woman who is spiritually and religiously

powerful in inverse proportion to her weakness and subjection and who

represents an ideal of chastity, humility, and transcendence.11

Instead of having any real power over men, the women of Cooper's late novels become signs, not symbols, of religious attitudes, far less important to either the actions or the themes of the novels than are

Judith and the women preceding her.

1^rancoise Basch, Relative Creatures: Victorian Women in Society and the Novel (New York: Shocken Books, 1974), p. 6; cited in Elaine Showalter, "Review Essay: Literary Criticism," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1 (Winter 1975), 454. CHAPTER 8

AMBIGUITY CONDEMNED: WOMEN IN JACK TIER AND THE WAYS OF THE HOUR

Although after The Deerslayer Cooper attempted to suppress his

old concept of femininity as inherently dual and contradictory, his

depiction of women as decorous, selfless, and spiritual, a depiction

discussed in chapter 7, was only partially successful. Even some of

these idealized heroines display a lurking ambiguity. In The Two

Admirals Mildred is not what she seems, the daughter of a drunken sail­

ing master, but of a lord. In The Wing-and-Wing Ghita's truthfulness

results in the court martial and condemnation of the man she loves.

More fundamentally, Mary Pratt in The Sea Lions represents a spiritual

ideal for the bulk of the novel but ends by rewarding the hero's new

religious orthodoxy with a carnal prize, marriage. With the late novels

Jack Tier (published serially, 1846-1848) and The Ways of the Hour

(1850), Cooper's old concept of the dualism of women breaks out again

in full force, only now fueled not by fascination but by hatred.1 In

both these novels the female protagonists are more complex than ever

and more vehemently condemned.

1Subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text and will refer to the Mohawk Edition of the Works of James Fenimore Cooper (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, [1896]).

305 306 Jack Tier

The title character of Jack Tier represents not only an extreme in the portrayal of ambiguous women, but also two unconscious develop­ ments in Cooper's art, his rejection, first, of the glorification of women's love and, finally, of Deerslayer and the ideals he embodies.

As the novel opens, Jack Tier, a small, dumpy steward's mate, ships for the first time on the villain Spike's tawdry smuggling craft.

Jack attaches himself to the heroine, assists her and the hero at critical moments, and in the concluding pages reveals that he is not a

"he" at all, but a "she," Molly Swash, the wife whom Spike had abandoned twenty years before. James Grossman has dealt with this late revelation by arguing that Cooper turned Jack into a woman at the end of the book because he "was himself limited by the conventions of his age" and wished to avoid dealing with the homosexual implications of the intimacy between Jack and Spike.2 One difficulty with this interpretation is that little intimacy exists between Spike and Jack; more appears between

Spike and his boatswain. Apparently what Grossman is talking about is not intimacy as such but devotion like Jack's, which, as he points out, certainly does characterize male couples in Cooper's work. But because the author shows no embarrassment about the intimacy of Mordaunt

Littlepage and Susquesus, Submission and Conanchet, or Natty and

Chingachgook, the argument that he feared the implications of the bond between Jack and Spike is not convincing. To suggest that Jack was

2James Fenimore Cooper ([New York]: William Sloane Associates, 1949; rpt. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 228. 307

changed from a man to a woman to avoid controversy over homosexuality

is to slight insights into Cooper's attitudes that may be gained by assuming that the author intended such a reversal from the start.

Seen as a deliberate device, Jack's apparent change in sex functions first to reveal the extent to which Cooper was committed to the concept of feminine ambiguity. Jack is, in everything but the physical, an androgyne, a person whose identity is so fluid that she partakes of the qualities of both sexes. For twenty years, ever since she first disguised herself as a sailor in order to search for her runaway husband, she has lived as a man without her true gender's being suspected. She has not, however, totally changed sexes. At the end of the novel her identity begins to shift again, as she resumes feminine garb and the feminine occupation of nursemaid. But despite this shift away from the masculine and back towards the feminine, Jack has lost forever the ability to achieve any clear cut identification with either sex. At the end of the book Cooper continues to use her male name because her feminine one "seems really out of place, as applied to such a person" (Ch. xvi, p. 458). Jack herself scarcely knows if she is a man or a woman (Ch. xvi, p. 459) and "never can become what she once was" (Ch. xvii, p. 480). Jack indicates that for

Cooper the most fundamental level of woman's nature was not clearly feminine but completely ambiguous.

This final emphasis on Jack's sexlessness betrays the misogyny that permeates the novel. Jack is not treated as an abandoned woman deserving of sympathy but as a freak. Not only has her sexual identity 308

been permanently warped by her pursuit of her husband, but her sacrifices have been in vain. Spike does finally ask her forgiveness, but he also refuses to accept her as his wife, saying that she belongs "quite as much to one sex as to the other" (Ch. xvi, p. 458). Even the heroine,

Rose, who gives Jack a home, finds it hard to believe that "she had ever possessed . . . the attractions so common to her sex" (Ch. xvi, p. 455). In short, Jack remains an oddity, even to those who should be closest to her.

Cooper is scarcely more sympathetic to the other women, carica­ turing them almost as harshly as he does Jack. The only one to achieve any significant degree of dignity is a minor one, Biddy Noon, an Irish servant, "a pock-marked, red-faced, and red-armed single woman" (Ch. i, p. 12) who, as Spike burtally forces people overboard to lighten his boat as he flees a Navy cutter, jumps by herself to save his soul from the sin of murder. The heroine seldom rises to such heights. While in some respects she displays a certain degree of common sense, she more frequently appears as the cloying ideal of beauty and sweetness sug­ gested by her name, Rose Budd. Most damaging to her believability are major inconsistencies in her behavior. Although she sometimes acts competently, persuading the hero, Harry Mulford, to flee the villainous

Spike, stealing a sextant to aid their escape, and saving Harry's life by stepping between him and Spike's pistol, she also turns incompetent at a crucial moment; her failure to waken Harry during their flight in a leaky schooner results in the craft's floundering, putting them again at the mercy of Spike. 309

Despite this lapse Rose is far more capable than the remaining woman character, her aunt, Mrs. Budd, whose "very countenance expressed imbecility and mental dependence, credulity and a love of gossip"

(Ch. i, p. 20). Her hallmark is a gush of incorrect nautical terminology, far surpassing that of her prototype, Mrs. DeLacy in The Red Rover. Mrs.

Budd is always a ridiculous figure. Just as she never understands that her husband deliberately taught her nautical jargon wrong for his private amusement, so too does she constantly misinterpret almost everything that occurs around her, even believing that Spike is falling in love with her when actually he is attracted to Rose and her small fortune. In death, too, Mrs. Budd remains the uncomprehending victim, a pathetic figure who functions primarily to highlight the brutality of Spike. During the flight from the cutter she displays the opposite of Biddy's self-control.

When she is thrown overboard, she seizes a man's hand in terror and clings until Spike orders the boatswain to slash her wrists. Her body is never found; in death she remains as inconsequential as in life.

Mrs. Budd's near-idiocy, Rose's over-emphasized sweetness, and

Jack's grotesqueness indicate Cooper's late uneasiness with women in general. He also grew uneasy with the idealization of love. Although in the majority of his novels, particularly in those of those of his last decade, he made marriage the primary business of his heroines and idealized their devotion to their loved ones, in Jack Tier such devotion turns destructive. In chapter 7 I have discussed how in Afloat and

Ashore two years before Jack Tier Cooper insists that Grace's love for the unworthy Rupert is admirable even though it breaks her heart and 310 kills her. In Jack Tier Cooper is no longer able to idealize such love.

Instead he shows its paradoxical side. In being so devoted to Spike that she is willing to live as a man for twenty years in order to search for him, Jack destroys the only thing that could ever win Spike back, her femininity. Love, rather than enhancing femininity as it does in

Afloat and Ashore, here destroys it.

In Jack's devotion to Spike, Cooper, perhaps unconsciously, demonstrates that the total commitment to love is a false ideal. In another development Jack indicates Cooper's unconscious revulsion against other qualities he had earlier admired. In being a detailed parody of Deerslayer, Jack calls into question heroism, sexlessness, and commitment to unorthodox transcendent values.

Parallels between Jack Tier and The Deerslayer have not gone entirely unnoticed. Geroge Dekker has pointed out the similarities in the vicious personalities of the smuggler Spike and the former pirate

Thomas Hutter.3 Other similarities also exist. For example, the

Indians' name for Judith, the Wild Rose, suggests the name of the later heroine, Rose Budd. A more important issue that has not been discussed is the extent to which the later novel parodies the earlier.

Mrs. Budd is an obvious caricature. Cooper describes her as "one of those inane, uncultivated beings who seem to be protected by a benev­ olent Providence in their pilgrimage on earth, for they do not seem to possess the power to protect themselves" (Ch. i, p. 20). Though she

3James Fenimore Cooper; The American Scott (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), p. 214. 311 shares most of Hetty's simplemindedness, she is redeemed by none of

Hetty's spirituality. But it is in the title figures that the most revealing similarities appear. Basically Jack Tier is a parody of

Deerslayer himself, a parody whose bitterness indicates Cooper's only half-suppressed revulsion at the ambiguities of Natty Bumppo's character.

Through Jack Tier, Cooper indirectly and probably unconsciously rejected his earlier idealization of Deerslayer's defining characteris­ tics. Like Deerslayer, Jack is a self-appointed defender of women.

Both are also outcasts from their own societies, Deerslayer because he has lived among Indians since his teens, Jack because she has been twenty years among sailors. Each, nevertheless, attempts to affirm the highest values of white culture, primarily through defending women, who embody them. Natty boasts that he is of unmixed white blood, "a man without a cross," and devotes himself to serving women in all five of the Leatherstocking novels. Jack becomes Rose's defender when she discovers Spike's evil interest in the young woman. Her motive is as pure as Natty's: "a desire to save one as young and innocent as Rose was at its bottom" (Ch. xvi, p. 457).

In defending women, both Deerslayer and Jack behave with heroism, but Cooper's attitudes toward them vary sharply. While he portrays

Deerslayer as a natural nobleman, he portrays Jack as a grotesque anomaly. In the action of the plot, however, Jack plays as important a role as Natty usually does in assisting the hero and heroine. When

Spike abandons Harry to drown on an islet about to be engulfed by the tide, she comes to his rescue, and twice she saves Rose from Spike, once 312

by threatening him with a pistol as he attempts to seize the girl and once by accompanying Rose as a chaperone so that she will flee with

Harry. But despite the fact that Harry and Rose owe Jack their lives and their happiness, the sailor does not emerge as a hero. On the simplest level her appearance is against her. Like Natty she is no beauty, but unlike Natty, whose height and lean angularity promise prowess and stamina, Jack remains a comic figure. Always unpreposses­ sing, even as a youthful bride, as a man she is a travesty of a hero.

Fit only to be a steward's mate, and a clumsy one at that, Jack is short, dumpy, and splay-footed, hardly a figure to inspire respect, much less confidence.

A second and more important factor undercutting the heroism of Jack's actions is the characteristic that defines Natty's altruism: sexlessness. In neither youth nor age does Natty appoint himself the defender of women out of personal desire. Even his courtship of Mabel

Dunham in The Pathfinder is strangely lacking in passion. Instead of considering women as sexual objects, he tends to regard them as embodi­ ments of the highest values of white civilization. In protecting them he is not protecting individual women so much as the virtues of passivity, self-denial, purity, and spirituality. Because of his sexless devotion to women identified with transcendent values, Natty imbibes something of a monkish chastity. Though his spiritual commitment degenerates in The

Deerslayer, his sexlessness is never explicitly presented as a negative force, but as a positive one. Jack's sexlessness is far different, a parody, not an embodiment, of chastity. Jack neuters herself when she 313 deliberately decides to assume a masculine disguise in order to pursue

Spike. In other words, the source of her sexlessness is not chastity but passion, a commitment not to transcendent values but to a man—and an unworthy man at that.

The contrasting sources of their sexlessness reveal how completely Jack inverts and thus parodies Natty. Though both are sex­ less, self-appointed, heroic defenders of women, they are driven by opposing moral values and develop spiritually in opposite directions.

Natty begins by devoting himself to an ideal of moral purity, Jack to an ideal of love. Natty will go to almost any lengths to preserve his spiritual integrity; Jack sacrifices everything in pursuit of her husband. Western tradition, of course, regards these two ideals as moral opposites, the spiritual opposed to the carnal, the heavenly to the earthly. But for Cooper, both Natty's devotion to purity and Jack's love for Spike are finally ironically ambiguous. Their ideals both produce paradoxical results. Deerslayer's desire to avoid sin leads him to damn Judith, while Jack's desire for her husband leads her to destroy the only thing that could have attracted him, her femininity.

Deerslayer and Jack also both destroy their chances of success by failing to recognize the flawed nature of their goals. Both fail because they attempt to succeed without outside assistance. But

Cooper's final, though unconscious, evaluation is that salvation cannot be won by an individual without the intervention of God; love cannot be preserved by one person without the sympathy of the beloved. 314

Despite these similarities the two novels conclude in opposite

ways. Unlike Deerslayer, who fails to achieve a complete maturity

because he refuses to modify his beliefs, Jack shifts in the course of

the novel so that finally she has the chance to win a different fate

than that of the scout. Whereas Deerslayer dooms himself to both social

and moral sterility by rejecting Judith, Jack discovers the possibility

of re-entering society and regaining her lost innocence. By deciding

that Spike is a villain and by saving Rose from him, Jack renounces her

old ideal of conjugal love. In its place she finds a new social bond

in her love for Rose and Harry's infant son and a new spiritual hope in

Rose's assurance that "innocence can return to all with repentance"

(Ch. x, p. 311). Although it indicates Cooper's personal commitment to

orthodox Christian values, this reversal should not be taken as an

indication that Jack Tier is a more profound book than The Deerslayer.

Partly because it is a parody, it remains a lesser work in which Jack's

potential for salvation is too facilely suggested to be meaningful or

to overshadow the grotesquery of her inversion of Natty Bumppo's finest

qualities.

The Ways of the Hour; The Ambiguity

While in Jack Tier the only ambiguous element is the title

'character, little in Cooper's final novel, The Ways of the Hour (1850),

is as it seems. The plot stresses the difficulty of discovering the

truth by centering on a murder trial in which the accused, Mary Monson,

insists on her innocence in the face of strong evidence of her guilt. 315

This beautiful but enigmatic young lady (Cooper stresses her social

class) has appeared mysteriously in the village of Biberry and, under

a patently assumed name, taken up residence in the house of an

apparently poor but respectable couple, the Godwins. When the house

burns and two charred skeletons are found while a stocking full of

gold is missed, Mary is arrested, accused of arson and murder, brought

to trial, and, despite the efforts of two lawyers, Dunscombe and Timms,

found guilty by a prejudiced jury of killing Peter Godwin. All this

seems an exciting enough murder story, even a mystery novel, predating

by some eight years Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, generally

described as the first full length mystery. But Cooper does not mean to

emphasize the solving of murders or the unraveling of mysteries. These

are merely his vehicles for exploring the almost total duality and

ambiguity of the world.

The theme of the unreliability of appearance permeates the book.

Although Mary is accused of murder, in actuality no murder has occurred.

The "guilty" Mary is innocent, not only of that crime but also of theft

and arson. The bodies are not those of Peter and Dolly Godwin, as almost everyone assumes, but of Dolly and a woman servant; they were not

murdered but died during the fire, which started accidentally. The

money was stolen, but not by Mary. A well thought of, churchgoing neighbor woman, Mrs. Burton, took it on impulse during the confusion of the fire and then tried to frame her. Most amazing of all, Mary has known the truth from the start. In fact, it was she who had Peter

Godwin spirited out of the house a day before the fire in order that 316 he might recover from a drunken binge and escape the nagging of his wife.

Every development of this plot is determined by people's mis­ taking appearance for reality. The Godwins are reputably a virtuous, happily married couple, whereas Dolly is actually a shrew and Peter a drunk. The neighbor, Mrs. Burton, known for her honesty and self-control, turns out to be an impulsive thief. And Mary herself, whose guilt seems so probable, is condemned not by any strong evidence that she committed murder but by overwhelming proof that, as a lady, she is different from the mass of people around her, so different that she alienates almost everyone, including the jury. In finding her guilty, the narrow-minded, small town jurors have been swayed not by the rules of law but by what they perceive as her "aristocracy."

The confusion of appearance with reality is the submerged theme of the novel, probably developed unconsciously but informing all aspects of the book. This confusion is especially important in Cooper's analysis of how popular sovereignity can corrupt law. Initially believing that the legal system should be an objective and impartial arbitrator of the truth, Cooper had been disillusioned by its limitations, especially its inability to educate people about the dangers of a libelous press. From early 1839 until well into 1843 he had been involved in a seemingly endless series of courtroom battles with a group of Whig editors led by Thurlow Weed who had scurrilously attacked Home

As Found and The History of the Navy of the United States of America.

Although he frequently won judgments in his favor, he paid a high 317 price in time and effort because, as James Franklin Beard says, "the editors' strategy, clearly, was to frustrate Cooper by postponing and obstructing trials whenever possible.I,lf

One result of these experiences was the bitter depiction of the law in The Ways of the Hour. Mary's two trials are both laughable.

New-fangled rule by the majority has so perverted the court that it can no longer function as a means of establishing and defending the truth.

The two juries are guided more by popular prejudice and fear of opposing majority opinion than they are by a disinterested concern for the facts.

The judge too is subject to public pressures since under a new state constitution that Cooper excoriates he has been elected, not appointed.

As for the lawyers, only old-fashioned ones like Dunscombe are apparently beyond public influence. More typical of the profession are Timms and the public prosecutor, Williams. Each of these shady characters struggles to win his case covertly by swaying public opinion—and with it the jury—through gossip, scandal, and bribes> and each sees his current position merely as a springboard to a career in politics.

The outcomes of the trials are also travesties. The first trial, that for the murder of Peter Godwin, is conducted with strict legality but nevertheless produces the wrong verdict in finding Mary guilty. The second trial is even worse. It constantly abandons legal forms, as in Mary's highly irregular cross-examination of Mrs. Burton,

**The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, IV (Cambridge, Mass,: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), 66. See also 64-66, 144-47, and 281-84. 318 which leads to that woman's confessing to the theft and revealing how the fire started. Then this guilty woman goes free, in a complete mockery of the law. She is not even reprimanded for stealing, for perjury, or for false witness against Mary. "She is clearly guilty,"

Cooper announces,'tut the law, in these times of progress, disdains to pursue the guilty. Their crimes are known; and of what use can it be to expose those whom everyone can see are offenders! No; it is the innocent who must have most reason to dread the law. They can be put to trouble, cost, vexation, and loss, if they cannot be easily condemned"

(Ch. xxix, p. 432). Far from being a disinterested defender of the truth, the law, Cooper concludes, now works against its original noble purpose.

In keeping with his commitment to an ideal of a legal system that actively defends the truth, Cooper makes one of the major protag­ onists of The Ways of the Hour an upright, respectable old lawyer who becomes very important because he consistently rejects everything that

Mary Monson stands for. Yet even the characterization of this lawyer,

Thomas Dunscombe, is ambiguous. While Cooper uses Dunscombe primarily as a spokesman for his own views, he also subtly—and probably unconsciously—undermines his credibility. When lecturing Mary on his wards, Sarah and John Wilmeter, and his other young friends, Anna

Updyke and Michael Millington, Dunscombe generally appears to be a mouthpiece for Cooper's opinions on the national constitution, the presidential veto, elected judges, and prejudiced juries, among other things. 319

As a somewhat pompous old commentator on the foibles of modernity, Dunscombe is almost identical to Lovel, a major character in the only piece of fiction Cooper produced after The Ways of the Hour, the three-act comedy Upside Down, only one scene of which survives. In that scene Lovel, a prosperous old bachelor like Dunscombe, condemns

"communism" in much the same tome that Dunscombe uses to rail against attacks on the class system and that Cooper adopted in an 1848 letter inveighing against "a growing and most dangerous disposition in the people to take from those who have, and to give to those who have not; and this without any other motive than that basest of all human passions

—envy."5 But despite the similarities of their views on communism,

Lovel does not consistently reflect Cooper. When he preaches "Perpetual

Stillism" in a constantly changing world,6 he in fact sounds suspi­ ciously like a parody of the Leaplowers in The Monikins who advocate constant political change but who carefully execute all sorts of somersaults to preserve their old political positions and prestige intact. Like Lovel, Dunscombe remains so adamently opposed to change that, despite the tenor of his lectures to Mary, he cannot be completely identified with Cooper, who, for all his conservatism, was no reactionary.

5The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. James Franklin Beard, V, 388. Most subsequent references to Cooper's material in this work will be given parenthetically in the text by volume and page number.

6"Socialism: A Scene from a Comedy," in The Cyclopaedia of Wit and Humor . . ., ed. William E. Burton, I (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1859), 298. 320

When he is compared to his two closest associates Dunscombe becomes even more problematic than his similarity to the hidebound

Lovel suggests. Dunscombe unwaveringly upholds, among other things, the advantages of bachelorhood. Yet the example of his good friend Dr.

McBrain calls his position on marriage into question. McBrain, as confirmed a marrying man as Dunscombe is a bachelor, has just taken his third wife, having been twice widowed but so happy in both marriages that he cannot bear to live singly. Cooper treats his marriage and the passion of the middle-aged bride and the almost elderly groom seriously, in a manner that brings to mind his own devotion to his wife, the joy he took in his family, and his mixed feelings about bachelors. Once, when Dunscombe is cited as an authority on how to cure the shortcomings of modern young people, his position is tartly refuted by the proverb

"bachelors' wives, and bachelors' children . . . are always admirably managed" (Ch. ix, p..142). As Margaret Fuller points out, this saying indicates that "those who have a more full experience of the instincts have a distrust as to whether the unmarried can be thoroughly human and humane . . . ."7 Is Cooper indirectly suggesting that Dunscombe is not completely qualified to censure Mary?

If Dunscombe's humanity is called somewhat into question by his commitment to bachelorhood, his reputation for professional integrity is challenged even more explicitly in his relationship with Timms, who

7"Woman in the Nineteenth Century," in The Writings of Margaret Fuller, ed. Mason Wade (New York: Viking, 1941), p. 164. 321 assists him in Mary's defense but is apparently his opposite. While

Dunscombe is a big city lawyer who fights with strict legality in open battles in open court, Timms is a wily country practitioner whose success derives from his skill at "horse shedding" and "pillowing,11 that is, swaying opinion by planting proponents of his case in stables and hotel bedrooms. Ostensibly of course Dunscombe only uses Timms to fight fire with fire by counteracting legal corruption with a little corrup­ tion of his own. Yet the intimacy of the two undercuts Dunscombe's position, tending to taint him and finally revealing that the two are not opposites at all. Intellectually they are compatible. Timms has studied under Dunscombe and regards the older man as a mentor, while

Dunscombe respects the younger man's intelligence. More importantly, they are emotionally similar. Timms dreams of marrying Mary; even

Dunscombe is attracted to her, despite his distaste for her opinions.

But the motives of each are impure. Timms wants the political advantages a well-bred wife would bring him; Dunscombe is reminded of the love of his youth, Mary's grandmother, and so is infatuated more with memory than with Mary herself. In thus unintentionally attracting two super­ ficially very different men, Mary reveals their underlying similarity and the mixed quality of their concern for her.

Ambiguity thus permeates the plot of the novel, the workings of the law, the character of Dunscombe, and the emotion of love. The fullest expression of this ambiguity is, however, Mary Monson herself.

She dominates the plot, plays on the discrepancies of the law to her own advantage, and epitomizes the problem of marriage. On the conscious level Cooper uses her deliberately to illustrate the deceptiveness of 322 appearances, making her a mysterious figure whose true name, past, and guilt or innocence are not determined until near the end of the book; the mysteries of the plot revolve around her. More important is her attitude towards her trial. She goes into it with complete confidence that her innocence will be vindicated, with a faith that the law will actually live up to its proclaimed purpose of defending truth and innocence. Because of this confidence, Mary appears a wronged woman, a lady in distress, inspiring both McBrain and Dunscombe, not to mention impressionable young John Wilmeter, to come to her aid, even to offer their services for free. She seems a beautiful but naive victim, apparently unaware of the danger of village prejudice or of the serious­ ness of the charges against her. In destroying her faith in the law, the verdict that finds her guilty crudely teaches her and the reader that even the most sacrosanct institutions are not what they are supposed to be.

As the innocent victim, Mary serves to pound home Cooper's point about the corruption of the legal system. Long before the guilty ver­ dict, however, she has appeared in another guise, that of a disruptive advocate of women's rights and a wily, thrill-seeking manipulator. She has known all along that the trial is a travesty, that Peter Godwin is not dead and that Mrs. Burton has stolen the money. Yet she persists in going through the full legal procedure, partly from a desire to clear her name by establishing her innocence in a court of law, but more importantly from sheer love of excitement. Although she is held without bail, she delights in being completely in charge of her situation.

Several times she describes the jail not as her prison but as her asylum 323

because, as it turns out, she regards it as the perfect place to hide

from her estranged husband. She transforms her cell into a comfortable

boudoir, complete with lamps, carpets, a harp, and a trusted serving

maid. She even obtains the means to come and go secretly as she pleases and travels out every night, sometimes journeying as far as New York

City in her own carriage with her own coachman.

Mary is also thrilled by the possibilities for intrigue that her trial affords. She tells Timms, "There is a powerful excitement in my situation; and I like excitement to weakness, perhaps" (Ch. xxiv, p. 364). She confides to Dunscombe that "the excitement of the last two months has been a gift of paradise to me, and, for the first time since my marriage, have I known what true happiness was!" (Ch. xxix, p. 443).

She offers both her lawyers valuable advice and takes an active role in her defense. Recognizing with Timms the importance of public opinion, she develops her own theory that people will eventually react against scurrilous rumors by believing well of the maligned. Boldly acting on these precepts, she plants tales about herself in the community, letting out that she works for a notorious gang of city thieves and then, when reaction against this story begins to turn public opinion in her favor, circulating those details of her true history calculated to win sympathy.

That the reaction in her favor occurs too late to save her is little to the point. Instead of illustrating her incompetence, this very tardi­ ness evidences Mary's daring and love of danger; from such hairbreadth timing she finds thrills she cannot experience in ordinary life. 324

Mary Monson is clearly a complex woman who treasures her innocence but who also enjoys the excitement of appearing guilty. The conflict between these two aspects of her personality finds expression in the ambiguity of her name, "Mary," which recalls both the Virgin and the Magdalene, the prostitute whom Christ reformed. Monson's appearance, too, stresses her ambiguity. Early in the novel McBrain tells Dunscombe that it is almost impossible to be precise about her looks because "I really do not remember to have seen another human being who is so difficult to describe." McBrain cannot even tell the colors of her eyes or her hair; he says the latter was not red, "nor yellow, nor golden, nor black, nor brown,—and yet a little of all blended together ..."

(Ch. iii, pp. 37,38). Here a woman's appearance combines the physical attributes of fair and dark heroines and also indicates that she combines their moral states as well. Often Cooper describes Mary's face as "illuminated," using a word that recalls paintings of martyrs and saints, their faces shining with a holy light. On the other hand,

Cooper also emphasizes her occasional cunning expression, an evil look, that, it turns out, indicates insanity.

The opposing connotations of Mary's name and the ambiguities of her appearance are apparently slight but actually important indications that at the most fundamental level Cooper could not with certainty define the true nature of his heroine. A more obvious and telling indication of his divided mind is the conflict between the two roles

Mary plays in the plot. While on the conscious level Cooper deliberate­ ly makes her a figure of mystery, on the unconscious level":she beeomest 325 for him totally ambiguous since she functions both as pathetic victim of a corrupt legal system and as a villainous prevaricator whose inde­ pendent antics threaten the social order. Unfortunately for the unity of the novel, Mary's role as the destructively independent woman conflicts with her role as a pathetic innocent condemned by a prejudiced jury. With her Gooper tries to achieve two incompatible aims, to depict both the vulnerability of women and the danger inherent in them.

That Mary represents extremes of both these positions indicates how at the close of his life Cooper's view of women was almost Manichean; he saw Mary not so much as ambiguously combining good and evil but as embodying both of these traits simultaneously but separately. Such a view of womanhood had been latent in early works, although in early pieces like The Pilot several contrasting women represent the various possibilities of femininity. But the greatest of his woman characters, like Cora Munro and Judith Hutter, merge passivity and independence, good and evil, instead of careening between the two extremes as Mary Monson does. She represents a new development in Cooper's work, the ultimately ambiguous woman who may appear as either heroine or villain but never as both at once.

The Ways of the Hour: The Condemnation

The conflict between Cooper's two interpretations of Mary's moral nature and the related conflict between the two mutually exclusive roles he assigns her in the plot probably developed unconsciously.

Cooper seems not to have anticipated these clashes of meaning, because when they did develop he responded by condemning out of hand the 326 independent, manipulative side of Mary's character. His final conclu­ sion is that the ambiguities of Mary Monson are part of a general collapse of social values.

By March of 1849 when Cooper began to plan The Ways of the Hour, much had happened to shake his belief in the American system and even in western civilization. The Three-Mile Point controversy and the legal quarrels with the Whig press over Home As Found and The History of the

Navy were behind him, but the European revolutions of 1848, which he followed with care, were to him disturbing indicators of the fallacies latent in widespread pressures for social change.8 Closer to home, New

York State had in 1846 adopted a new constitution that represented a radical shift in political philosophy. In direct response to the anti- rent troubles of the early forties (in which Cooper, of course, supported the landlords), the state "framed what has not unjustly been called the 'People's Constitution' because of the great recognition of popular authority which it displays."9 Among other things, this new constitution made judges elective, rather than appointive, and abolished the feudal system of land ownership,10 changes to which Cooper was deeply opposed.

In 1848 his principles were affronted again when the new, broadly democratic legislature, responding to a twelve-year-long campaign,

®Beard, ed., Letters and Journals, V, 363-64.

9Willis Fletcher Johnson, History of the State of New York, Political and Governmental, 1822-1864, ed. Ray B. Smith (Syracuse, N.Y.: The Syracuse Press, Inc., 1922, p. 335.

10Johnson, p. 337. 327 easily passed the Married Women's Property Act, which gave women personal control over whatever property they brought into their marriages. Initially proposed by conservatives to protect the dowries of heiresses, the long term effect of the new law was to strengthen the position of all women by making wives, for the first time in New York state, legal entities in their own right instead of defining them merely as adjuncts to their husbands.11 In the same year, 1848, the Seneca

Falls Convention, the first women's rights gathering ever, demanded the vote for women, and the public struggle for enfranchisement and other forms of social equality was on.12

Such developments were the political manifestations of a wide­ spread women's rebellion against the repressive old order, a rebellion particularly evident among unconventional women in France. Cooper was well aware of this movement and cited one of its most famous partici­ pants in describing to his wife the shocking behavior of two girls in his hotel in May of 1849 when he was in New York City working on The

Ways of the Hour: The "daughters, between the ages of 16 and 9, smoke large strong cigars, and drink brandy and water. ... . quite a la'

Georges Sand." It was not behavior Cooper could countenance. As he said of the family, "they are in no society. I question if their relations visit them" (VI, 36, 37).

11Robert E. Riegel, American Women: A Story of Social Change (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1970), p. 216; Andrew Sinclair, The Better Half (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 87-88.

12Johnson, p. 344. 328 *

That parents would permit such behavior was especially shocking to Cooper because his own family remained closely knit and his own four daughters continued generally amenable to his authority. In chapter 2

I have discussed how important the support of his family was to Cooper, especially during the last decade of his life. Depending as he did on the loyalty of his wife and daughters, he came to feel threatened by independent women who refused to put the happiness of their husbands or fathers before their own.

An example of such a woman was constantly at hand after the

Cooper family's return from Europe in 1833 in the person of Harriet

Douglas Cruger. A flamboyant New York heiress whose father died when she was young and whose overly protective mother prevented her from ever achieving emotional independence, Harriet Douglas began toying with proposals from Cooper's friend Henry Nicholas Cruger in 1823 and finally married him ten years later. In 1839 after an often stormy marriage,

Harriet left Henry in the first of several separations. They became permanently estranged in early 1842, forcing Henry to struggle with his wife for a financial settlement for eight more years, during which time

Cooper was his confidant. This struggle must have been painful for

Henry, a proper, rather stuffy lawyer who, under the terms of his marriage settlement, had reluctantly given up all claims to his wife's fortune, later even more reluctantly abandoned his own career at

Harriet's insistance, and then found himself at her mercy financially when she moved out of their house. For her part Harriet was genuinely torn between desire for a stable marriage and fear of one. In 329 particular she feared having children because of her age; she was forty- three when she married.13

In addition to suffering from these very real emotional conflicts, Harriet appears to have enjoyed her power over Henry. At the time of their marriage she forced him to adopt her name in addition to his own after he refused to give up his own for hers. Then came the financial manipulation that continued through a lawsuit and several settlements, which Harriet obeyed only when she chose.11* All in all the situation was not far from Cooper's assessment in The Ways of the

Hour: "A tyrannical woman is worse than a tyrannical man, because she is apt to be capricious. At one moment she will blow hot, at the next cold; at one time she will give, at the next clutch back her gifts; to-day she is the devoted and obedient wife, to-morrow the domineering partner" (Ch. xxi, p. 312). In addition to keeping Henry guessing about her plans for her money, Harriet indulged her pique by sawing her marriage bed in half, spreading rumors about her husband, posing publicly as the wronged wife (although Henry took care to give her no grounds for legal complaint), and finally discovering a fundamentalist faith and declaring that she would not take Henry back until "he has lain long at the foot of the Cross." A permanent financial agreement

13Angus Davidson, Miss Douglas of New York; A Biography (New York: Viking, 1953), pp. 17-18, 45, 53-54, 75, 130-33, 144-45, 147-49, 194-206; Beard, ed., Letters and Journals, I, 424, n. 3; IV, 252, n. 3; VI, 87; Cooper, Letters and Journals, III, 450; IV, 251.

1''Davidson, pp. 145-46, 207-19, 223-24. 330 was signed and the separation finalized in 1850, at which time Henry took a small house at Saugerties, where Cooper visited him.15

Harriet's quarrel with her husband was not regarded by Cooper or by her social set in general as simply an isolated example of marital incompatibility. In her, others saw private concerns merged with public affairs because they considered a major source of the

Douglas Crugers' problems to be a marriage settlement that left Harriet exclusive control of her fortune. Harriet's desire for complete control over her money was generally regarded as shocking. At one time when she did temporarily settle the whole of her income on Henry, a friend, the writer Maria Edgeworth, wrote, praising her: "I cannot conceive how any woman can think of marrying a person to whom she could not confide her property. It seems to me the most absurd species of Irish bull, to trust the whole of the happiness for life to one to whom we should hesitate to confide the lesser portion—money."16 Cooper was of the same opinion and blamed much of Harriet's love of dominance on her financial independence. He also felt personally threatened by financial independence for women because as a young man.he had been able to avoid bankruptcy and extricate himself from crushing debts only by heavily mortgaging his wife's property, as well as his own.17 Bad feelings over these mortgages probably contributed to his quarrel with the DeLancey

15Bavidson, pp. 219-27; Beard, ed., Letters and Journals, VI, 87; Cooper, Letters and Journals, V, 405; VI, 88, 179-80, 223.

16Quoted in Davidson, p. 195.

17Beard, ed., Letters and Journals, II, 88, n. 1 . 331

family over the trusteeship to the Angevine farm near Scarsdale, which

Susan Augusta's father, rather than deeding outright, put in trust for

her, apparently to prevent its being "encumbered or alienated by the

said James Cooper or subjected to any charge whatever on account of his

debts."18

Although Henry Cruger had no speculative designs on Harriet's

money, she could not long permit him to manage it and soon took back

control of her financial affairs, to the increasing disapproval of her

acquaintances. After the passage of the Married Women's Property Act,

she came to be regarded by some as a shocking example of what was to

come. So incensed at the Act were some well-to-do wives with advanta­

geous marriage settlements that they went to court, invalidated the

settlements, and gave everything to their husbands. In the case of two

of Henry Cruger's acquaintances, this action was also a protest against

Harriet's treatment of him. Early in 1850 Henry wrote to Cooper in a

letter now at Yale:

The course Mrs. Cruger has pursued in this matter has produced some singular and to her most obnoxious consequences—Some time ago her cousin Mrs Dyckman Cruger, availing herself of the new Law, went before one of the Judges and abrogated her Marriage Settlement, and last week Mrs. Monroe did the same thing, so revolted were they at the war carried on by their relative to keep up interests distinct from those of her Husband.19

Harriet must have found these abrogations particularly "obnoxious"

because through them two of her closest relatives publicly rejected her

18Beard, ed., Letters and Journals, I, 24-25; 87, n. 1.

19Henry Nicholas Cruger, ALS to James Fenimore Cooper,- 1850, Jan. 1, Za Cooper, 195, Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 332 position; Mrs. Dyckman Cruger was her beloved cousin Eliza, Mrs. Monroe her own sister, Betsy Mary.20 In The Ways of the Hour Cooper likewise condemns a wife who regards her husband's interest as separate from her own.

Despite his deep disapproval of Harriet's behavior, Cooper, gentleman as he was, never publicly quarreled with her. Through the

1830s the Cooper family and the Douglas Crugers seem to have been quite friendly. Letters in the Beinecke Library show that Harriet corresponded with Susan Augusta Cooper and even as late as 1845 invited her to visit at Henderson House, the lavish country place that Harriet had built not far from Cooperstown.21 After this time, however, relations with

Harriet cooled while Cooper grew increasingly close to Henry. In 1849 as Cooper was writing The Ways of the Hour the two men spent a great deal of time together. Henry visited in Cooperstown, and Cooper saw him frequently during stays in New York City (VI, 26-29, 66, 97-99).

In addition to continuing friends with Henry, the author remained, as Beard says, "endlessly fascinated by Harriet's unpredictable antics."22 He was also scandalized by them. On the first of May, 1849, scarcely a month after he described his plans for Ways to his publisher,

20Davidson, pp. 16, 35.

21Harriet Douglas Cruger, ALS to James Fenimore Cooper, 1838, Oct. 20; ALS to Anne Charlotte Cooper, 1839, Aug. 29; ALS to Susan Augusta Cooper (Mrs. James Fenimore), 1845, Sept. 12; Za Cooper, 194, 660, Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

22Letters and Journals, VI, 87. 333

Cooper commented after visiting Harriet, "Altogether, she is the queerest woman I have ever met with" (VI, 20, 32). Later he was more explicit: Henry's "wife behaved like a crazy woman—broke into the house—cut all sorts of capers „ . ." (VI, 190). And in 1850 he likened

Harriet to the arch shrew of classical Greece in a letter to Mrs.

Hamilton Fish: "My friend Cruger has got a new place at Saugerties.

Some of his friend[s] have made an innocent mistake, and written it

'Socrates,' fancying he has a Xantippe full blown. . . . The woman ought to be proscribed" (VI, 210).

In The Ways of the Hour Cooper is even more vehement about women like Harriet than in his letters, in which he was habitually discreet. "Daily experience," he says, "proves" that women exist who

"are erring, and selfish, and domineering, and capricious, vain, heart­ less, and self-willed females, whom nature never intended for married life; and who are guilty of a species of profanation when they stand up and vow to love, honor, and obey their husbands" (Ch. xvi, p. 241).

Furthermore, they are dangerous. Women "of independent spirit . . . are usually so many devils incarnate. If they happen to unite moneyed independence with moral independence, I am not quite certain that their tyranny is not worse than that of Nero" (Ch. xxi, pp. 311-12). Clearly

Cooper felt threatened by independent women.

He indirectly revealed his uneasiness about independent women in his characterization of the female protagonist of the lost scenes of his drama, Upside Down, or Philosophy in Petticoats, originally entitled

The Law of Nature, or The Female Philosopher (VI, 166). According to a 334 contemporary reviewer cited by Beard, Cooper's main intention in this play was to ridicule "Fourierism, Socialism, and the lax notions existing among us on the subject of the marriage tie." His major vehicle for this satire was Sophy McSocial, the "petticoats" and the

"female philosopher" of the titles. An opportunist masquerading as a free thinker and a socialist, Sophy, supposedly the sister of the lecturer Dr. McSocial, wrangles the old bachelor Lovel into proposing marriage, in jest, as he believes. Producing a witness to his proposal and declaring that it is as good as a contract, Sophy proceeds to move herself, her brother, and his classes into Lovel's home, where she takes over as mistress. Trapped, Lovel can find no redress in the laws of

New York and is only rescued when a servant reveals that Sophy is not

McSocial's sister after all but his wife.23

The comic treatment of Sophy is part of a general satiric attack on new notions about women. In The Ways of the Hour Cooper further satirizes these notions by lumping feminism in with a whole series of popular contemporary causes that he regarded as both ridiculous and dangerous. As Timms tells Dunscombe, "Pro-nigger, anti-gallows, eternal peace, woman's rights, the people's power, and anything of that sort, sweeps like a tornado through the land" (Ch. xiii, p. 192). Of course to Cooper's way of thinking anything was rightly suspect that, like woman's rights, could be placed in the same category as "people's power."

23Letters and Journals, VI, 164-65. 335

The main tactic Cooper uses in The Ways of the Hour to attack women's rights is the old, fallacious device of begging the question.

Without examining the issues, he jumps to the conclusion that indepen­ dence for women will destroy the institution of marriage and makes Mary

Monson both an advocate of women's rights and a vocal opponent of marriage. Her opinions derive from her own unhappy history. Towards the end of the novel we learn that she lost her mother early, was educated in Europe, married a much older French vicomte for his title, quickly discovered this marriage to be a mistake, fled her husband, assumed an alias, and took refuge in obscure Biberry. These experiences have led her to preach that women should be single and independent. She tells Anna Updyke that she has felt that "matrimony is unsuited to ladies" ever since "I have been made to feel how it crushes a woman's independence, and how completely it gives her a master, and how very, very humiliating and depressing is the bondage it inflicts." For these reasons she declares that women should be free from any domination by men: "It is their business to submit to us; not we to them!" (Ch. xxix, pp. 436, 438). To Dunscombe she is even more explicit:

...I can feel my own longings. They are all for independence. Men have not dealt fairly by women. Possessing the power, they have made all the laws, fashioned all the opinions of the world, in their own favor. Let a woman err, and she can never rise from her fall; while men live with impunity in the midst of their guilt. If a woman think differently from those around her, she is expected to conceal her opinions, in order to receive those of her masters. Even in the worship of God, the highest and most precious of all her duties, she is expected to play a secondary part, and act as if the Christian faith favored the sentiment of another, which teaches that women have no souls. (Ch. xviii, p. 274) 336

In emphasizing the unfairness of the conflict between the sexes and in denouncing women's enforced passivity and subordination, Mary articulates feminist views, but Cooper rejects these views by under­ cutting her credibility when he presents her as deserting her husband for an utterly trivial reason: M. de Larocheforte takes snuff; according to Mary, he "snuffs abominably" (Ch. xxix, p. 440). In her unwillingness to adjust to even this inconsequential habit, Mary loses all stature. She represents not a realistic example of a wronged wife but a complete abstraction of a corruption of femininity, a corruption that Cooper emphasizes by contrasting Mary with a conventional heroine,

Anna Updyke, to whom "the thought of independence would have been painful" (Ch. xviii, p. 274) because, as that young lady declares, "it is for the woman to be dependent on the man, and not the man on the woman" (Ch. xii, p. 180).

Cooper uses Mary not only to denounce women's personal desires for independence but also to attack social institutions that support these desires. In discussing the link between Cooper's late misogyny and contemporary developments, Kay Seymour House speculates that the

"vicious characterization" of Jack Tier "may have some connection with a much-publicized convention of women who met in Seneca Falls . . . ."2lt

Such could not have been exactly the case. Under the title Rose Budd,

Jack Tier appeared serially in Graham's Magazine from November of 1846 through March of 1848;2 5 the Seneca Falls Convention was held in July

2''Cooper's Americans ([Columbus]: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1965), p. 32.

25Beard, ed., Letters and Journals, V, 128, n. 2. 337 of 1848. Nevertheless, Cooper was responding to contemporary develop­ ments, not the Seneca Falls Convention but a locally important cause, the lengthy struggle for the Married Women's Property Act, which became law in 1848.

Two years later in The Ways of the Hour Cooper blasted this new law by blaming it for giving Mary Monson the financial means to abandon her husband. Never using the proper title of the Act, Cooper snipes at it indirectly, calling it "the 'Woman-hold-the-Purse Law,"' "this

'tea-cup law,"1 "giving to married women the control of their property, and drawing a line of covetousness across the bolster of every marriage bed in the State!" (Ch. ii, p. 19; Ch. xii, p. 179; Ch. xviii, p. 275).

Cooper presents the new laws of the act as contributing directly to a dangerous independence. They "are gradually placing the women above the men, making her instead of him the head of the family," and in the case of Mary they "came in aid of her whims and caprices. There is no mode by which an errant wife can be made to perform her duties in boldly experimenting New York, though she can claim a support and protection from her husband. The 'cup-and-saucer' law comes in aid of this power . . ." (Ch. x, p. 142; Ch. xxviii, p. 431). The law, in fact, is largely responsible for the destruction of Mary's marriage:

This estate [Mary's] the recently enacted laws gave solely and absolutely to herself; and it soon became a source of dissension between man and wife. The husband quite naturally considered himself entitled to advise and direct, and, in some measure, to control, while the affluent, youthful, and pretty wife was indisposed to yield any of the independence she so much prized, but which, in sooth, was asserted in the very teeth of one of the most salutary laws of nature. In consequence of this very different 338

maimer of viewing the marriage relation, a coolness ensued, which was shortly followed by the disappearance of the wife. (Ch. xix, pp. 282-83)

While Cooper condemns Mary for being a runaway wife and a headstrong, independent woman, he never denies her gentility and, in fact, curiously insists on it. Despite her desire for independence, she never loses caste and often appears as the epitome of a lady, an idealized representative of the gentry, with which Cooper identified.

In being brought to trial and found guilty by a jury representing "the people," she symbolizes for him the victimization of the few by the many. But at the same time, she represents a warning that the upper classes may be destroyed from within as well as from without; a misguided desire to abandon the old values and to experiment with new social roles may prove as destructive as the leveling forces at work in a democratic country.

Mary Monson thus becomes for Cooper a dangerous figure for many reasons. By itself her drive for independence disturbed him since it challenged the type of female support upon which he depended emotionally.

Yet the threat to society that he perceived in her longings for independence was even more disturbing, undermining as it did the very existence of his class. If ladies like Mary could not be trusted to behave genteelly, who could? In being both a feminist and a lady Mary

Monson brings the ambiguity of woman's nature into Cooper's own social, group. With the majority of his late heroines he had tried to deny this ambiguity. With Jack Tier it had appeared among the lower classes.

But now with Mary it seemed to Cooper to threaten the very values on which he had built his life. 339

Faced for the first time with such a threat, Cooper responded with a deep bitterness. He rejected Mary Monson as a model for

femininity and in her place enshrined Sarah Wilmeter and Anna Updyke,

idealized women of the kind discussed in chapter 7. But even this

substitution was to little avail since the contrast between Anna and

Mary was a constant reminder of the dualism inherent in femininity.

Unable to deny this dualism and yet unable to accept it, Cooper uncon­

sciously ejcpressed his loathing by comparing Mary to one of the most sinister of all fictional women.

As an epigraph for Chapter xv (p. 218), he quotes from a poem

he calls "The Phantom Ship." The stanza is actually from that section

of Part III of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient

Mariner" that describes the appearance of "the specter bark":

Are those her ribs through which the sun Did peer, as through a grate; And is that woman all her crew? Is that a Death, and are there two? Is Death that woman's mate?

The woman is, of course, Life-in-Death, who wins control of the Ancient

Mariner. She is described in the stanza immediately following the one quoted by Cooper:

Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was white as leprosy, The nightmare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold.

Like Mary herself, Life-in-Death is an ambiguous and dangerous

figure. Both are beautiful except for one disturbing quality, in the case of Life-in-Death, her chalk-white skin; in the case of Mary, an 340 occasional cunning expression that hints at her insanity. Both are also associated with grates. Life-in-Death sails a skeleton ship through whose ribs "the sun/Did peer as through a grate." Mary appears several times at the "grating" of the window of her cell to speak with John

Wilmeter but constantly refuses the appeals of the villagers that she show herself to them "at the grating." Most important, both Life-in-

Death and Mary are enchantresses. Life-in-Death controls the Ancient

Mariner, forcing him to wander, telling his tale, for the remainder of his earthly existence. Mary, Dunscombe discovers in the chapter which the stanza introduces, can mysteriously pass in and out of her prison at will. And, like Life-in-Death, she controls men, at least temporarily infatuating Wilmeter, Timms, and even Dunscombe himself. Her power over the latter arises from her similarity to her grandmother, whom Dunscombe loved, only to have her jilt him and abandon him to the "life-in-death" of bachelorhood.

In identifying Mary Monson, however unconsciously, with Life-in-

Death, Cooper ascribes great power to her. But because he conceives of her as extremely dangerous, he has to defuse that power. To this end he declares her the victim of a hereditary insanity that also slightly afflicted her grandmother. This insanity explains Mary's unconventional behavior and at the same time denies the legitimacy of her desire for independence. In deciding that hers should not be a subordinate role,

Mary has trusted only to the strength of her own powers of reason and has thereby given herself over to madness. For Cooper reason alone is an inadequate guide to virtue and must be supplemented by spiritual instruction. For him "all sacred history, and no small portion of the profane," asserts "that agencies exist that are not visible to our ordinary senses; and that our boasted reason, when abandoned to its own support, becomes the victim of those that are malign. We care not by what names these agents are called, imps, demons, evil spirits, or evil passions; but this we do know, let him beware who submits to their control" (Ch. xxix, p. 444). For Cooper, then, there can be no such thing as a rationality that declares itself independent of divine guidance. People who, like Mary, rely solely on reason behave irratio­ nally and, since Cooper equates "evil passions" with "demons," put themselves in danger of damnation.

Reliance on rationality is not the only thing that has made

Mary vulnerable. Her sex itself also endangers her. For the first time in his writing career, Cooper now articulates the old belief that the moral natures of men and women are not the same, that women are, by nature, more corrupt than men. Dunscombe explains to Mary that after

"the liberty of woman" comes "her licentiousness. No woman can throw off the most sacred of all her earthly duties in this reckless manner and hope to escape from the doom of her sex" (Ch. xxix, p. 442). In other words, women, unlike men, will fall into sin if they rebel against a "sacred" submission to others, particularly to their husbands.

This belief provides the theological basis for the double standard: whereas men as individuals are responsible for their souls and can choose to live for either good or evil, independent women are not capable of leading moral lives; only those women who submit to the 342 direction of others can avoid "licentiousness" and "the doom of [their] sex." In this paradoxical view, women who are not angels must be devils.

For them there exists none of the middle ground of moral struggle and individual responsibility that Cooper saw as so important for men. Mary

Monson must be either a passive victim or a conniving villain. Her character, Cooper believes, cannot be gray; it must be either black or white.

Guided solely by the dictates of her own reason, Mary has fallen into sin. She can, however, be saved through proper submission to others and to the will of God. In all his work Cooper says that the proper place for women is within the family. Mary even benefits from close friends and from the examples of three happy marriages. Once she is

"surrounded by those who really took an interest in her, and this not for the sake of her money, but for her own sake, . . . her feelings had become softened" and her insanity begins to abate (Ch. xxx, pp. 453-54).

Seclusion within the family is, however, only the first step in protecting Mary and other women from the evil side of their natures.

More important, according to Cooper, is their submission to the

Christian virtues of humility and submission. Humility is essential to both men and women. It is, Anna tells Mary, "the best mode of subduing error"; without it "we are nothing—cannot be Christians— cannot love our neighbors as ourselves—cannot even love God" (Ch. xxx, pp. 460., 458). It is primarily taught in the New Testament, and, by directing her reading in that work, Dunscombe gradually subdues Mary's insane love of power and her desire to revenge rather than to forgive

(Ch. xxx, p. 461). 343

While humility is enjoined on everyone, demanding that all submit to God, Christianity traditionally has set women.an additional, special obligation. They are to "obey" their husbands, submit to them, while men have no exactly comparable duty. Because this enforced submission to others makes women dependent on men, it constantly encourages them to humility, that most fundamental of all Christian virtues. Women, therefore, though innately more prone to sin than men, also have a better chance of winning salvation than do men, because men lack women's habit of submission.

After she is released from jail, Mary is often lectured on the religious basis of the need for submission. Anna says that the Bible demands "a woman's submission to her husband," while Dunscombe bluntly tells Mary that "it is the right of the husband to be the head of his family; and the wife who resists his authority is neither prudent nor a Christian" (Ch. xxix, pp. 436, 440). Dunscombe's basis for asserting that husbands have this "right" is his traditional belief that marriage unites a couple into one person, making, as he puts it in a paraphrase of Genesis 2.23, "bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh"

(Ch. xviii, p. 276).

When she rebels against her husband's authority, Mary denies the existence of this union, as does the Married Women's Property Act, which gives her legal support. Because both Mary and the law reject the religious aspects of marriage, Cooper attacks them with an ire directed not simply at runaway wives or newfangled tamperings with the legal code but at what he regarded as a threat to the spiritual foundations of society itself. 344

The dualism of the traditional view of Christianity of women as spiritually both higher and lower than men informs the fundamental ambiguity of Jack Tier's character and the very structure of The Ways of the Hour, producing a striking contrast between Mary Monson and Anna

Updyke and between Mary's conflicting roles. Jack's androgyny, the doubling of female protagonists in both novels, and the doubling of

Mary's significance all illustrate Cooper's definition of women as dual beings, capable of paradoxically combining apparent opposites. But the fact that Mary's roles of victim and villain utterly conflict indicates that Cooper eventually lost control of his material. No longer was he able, as in The Deerslayer, to use the paradoxes of femininity to raise fundamental questions of morality. Now woman's dual nature seemed to him not a potential source for the reconciliation of opposites but a dangerously divisive power that, in threatening marriage, threatened the heirarchial social structure to which he had committed himself.

Out of fear, he used the bulk of the novels of his last decade to attempt to deny femininity its power by idealizing those women who never disturb the equilibrium of the heroes and who exemplify the

Christian virtues. Especially in his last three full length works,

The Oak Openings, The Sea Lions, and The Ways of the Hour, he turned to a Christian framework to keep women within acceptable bounds. But even this device failed him as the dark side of Mary Monson came to dominate his final novel. Small wonder then that Cooper could only avoid the implication of her power by declaring that she does not in any way represent normal femininity; she is not a typical woman but a maniac. CHAPTER 9

FROM ACHIEVEMENT TO INSANITY: THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE COOPER HEROINE

In depicting women throughout his writing career, Cooper made the conventions of his time serve his personal vision. From an age that stereotyped women as contradictory beings, describing them on the one hand as physically bestial and irrationally emotional and on the other as pure and intuitively wise, he derived the concepts of the dualism of femininity and the consequent ambiguity of women. Although some critics cite him for failing to create fully rounded, believable female charac­ ters and for substituting stereotyped fair and dark ladies, such objections overlook the complexities Cooper expresses through conven­ tional symbols. As in his plots, where he frequently employs the stock devices of melodrama to present his own original preoccupations, so too in his characterization does he sometimes use the superficially simple, even the apparently simplistic, to express a complexity that can structure entire novels.

Feminine dualism and its ambiguity appear in Cooper's works in many forms. In its positive aspect, dualism may make women more open than men to new experiences, more flexible and innovative, because an understanding of the contradictions of their own feminine nature can enable women to grasp the complexities of the outside world despite limited experience. In its negative aspect, however, dualism may make

345 346

women more absolutist and more destructive than man. If women fail to

achieve a balance between the earthly and the transcendent aspects of

their nature, one may come to dominate the other, producing narrow views

and inflexible behavior. Since Cooper explores these potentials and

dangers both through the range of his woman characters and through indi­

vidual women, within any one novel the reader should not consider the

woman singly but as a group that exemplifies a diversity of feminine

possibility. Cooper's dark and fair heroines are not diametrical

opposites but two halves of the same thing: dual femininity, fluctuating

between the rational and the irrational, the passive and the active, the

angelic and the diabolic. Feminine complexity may therefore be repre­ sented by several women whose varying personalities or beliefs form a spectrum, as is the case with Katherine Plowden, Cecilia Howard, and

Alice Dunscombe in The Pilot or Cora and Alice Munro in The Last of the

Mohicans. Or, in another permutation, feminine ambiguity may be represented by an individual woman, as it is in Elizabeth Temple, whose sense of natural justice wins her the loyalty of Natty Bumppo even as she embodies the civilization that will displace the old hunter.

Because of their inherent ambiguity, few of Cooper's women are

completely good or evil; most are not the static moral signposts—

examplars of pure virtue or object lessons against error—that some critics suppose. Rather, they are developing characters whose educa­

tion, like that of the men, is usually blundering and contradictory

because in Cooper's world shifting temporal standards obscure transcen­

dent morality, especially in the vicissitudes of his favorite settings, 347

the neutral ground, the forest, and the sea. In these and other envir­

onments where standards conflict, each individual, whether man or woman,

must define his or her own place, explore the consequences of action,

and learn to judge the worth of others accurately. The responses of

Cooper's characters to these challenges delineate four major periods of

his writing career, an early stage in which women appear at their most

positive, a stage that further explores the early assumptions but that

frequently shows femininity rejected or thwarted, a stage of full devel­ opment that includes The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer, and a final stage

in which Cooper initially attempts to deny feminine ambiguity but con­

cludes by vehemently denouncing it.

In the early novels from 1820 through 1824 Cooper focuses on the

education of young people, men and women alike, stressing parallels between accepting the complexities of femininity and coming to a mature understanding of the world. The sphere in which feminine ambiguity is discovered, explored, and accepted varies. It may be moral and ethical, as in Precaution (1820), the two didactic Tales for Fifteen (written in

1821), and The Pioneers (1823), or it may be political, as in The Spy

(1821) and The Pilot (1824). But whether the emphasis falls on morality

or on politics, the general pattern of these novels remains the same.

The woman characters function in three main ways. At the most basic level their ambiguity reflects the ambiguity of the world at large. Its second function grows out of this primary one: by grasping the ambiguity inherent in her own femininity, a woman can learn about life as a whole.

Thus a woman's ambiguity can test the intelligence, sensitivity, and 348

flexibility of herself and of others. First the young woman herself

becomes aware of the complexities of her nature and the need for basing

action only upon a full understanding of the truth. Once she has

achieved this enlightenment, she then instructs others about how to

behave in accord with true reality.

This process typically begins with a young woman's attempting to

impose transcendent standards on a situation she does not fully compre­

hend. Like Frances Wharton, who thinks to save her brother by testifying

at his court martial but condemns him instead, the woman may fail at

this stage if she does not appreciate the degree to which ignorance and

evil, both within herself and without, may corrupt the truth in this

fallen world. Following her failure, she reexamines herself and the

situation and modifies her behavior, usually taking some unconventional

step, as Frances does in secretly ascending the mountain to warn her

fugitive brother that he is closely pursued. This unconventional

behavior challenges some fundamental social tenent, in this case Peyton

Dunwoodie's faith in the power of courts to defend justice. This

.challenge by the woman then serves to educate the man; following

Frances's example, Peyton abandons his belief in the law and accepts

Frances's marriage proposal as a means of winning the woman he loves and

of permitting Henry to escape the gallows. In The Pioneers, similarly,

Oliver Edwards and Judge Temple both come to accept the position of

Elizabeth. By the end of the book she "has tamed the lion" within

Oliver, bringing him to an acceptance of her father and restoring his

entire patrimony by marrying him. Furthermore she educates her father, 349 drawing him from a strict reliance upon the law to an understanding that absolute justice may only be achieved by compromise and mercy. In the end Leatherstocking's fate is determined not by law, which sentences him to jail, but by mercy, which grants him a pardon.

In these early novels, then, men usually come to accept woman's understanding of the world and her definitions of morality and, through such acceptance, win happiness for themselves and their loved ones.

Between 1825 and 1833, when he temporarily abandoned writing fiction,

Cooper continued to use feminine ambiguity to test the ability of men and women alike to reject narrow standards in favor of absolute forms of justice. Women often fail to influence men for the good, however, in the nine novels of this second period, Lionel Lincoln (1825), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Red Rover (1827), The

Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829), The Water Witch (L830), The Bravo (1831),

The Heidenmauer (1832), and The Headsman (1833).

Even more so than in his early works, Cooper heavily stresses feminine ambiguity, disguising women as men, placing them in highly contrasting pairs, describing them in racial language, and presenting them as links between hostile groups. But while his women are more ambiguous than ever, they are also more passive. Whereas in the early novels women could educate men to an acceptance of ambiguity, women in this second group tend to be ineffectual. The central problem is still whether or not men can modify their old views and recognize and accept the complexity of reality, but now women scarcely influence the educa­ tion of the opposite sex. Men must learn by themselves to accept 350 women and the transcendent justice that they embody, but too often they fail, with tragic results. All the unhappy events in The Prairie, for instance, result from crimes against women, either Abiram's original kidnapping of Inez or Ishmael's shooting at Ellen, an act of violence that eventually leads to the murder of Asa, the persecution of the old trapper, and the destruction of the Bush family.

Such tragedy is not inevitable, as the double plot structure of some of the novels of this period emphasizes. By fully accepting women, men can win the happiness of a secure position in society, as in the conclusions of The Red Rover and The Heidenmauer. But if, like Jacques

Colis in The Headsman, the elder Ruth in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, and

Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans, they cannot accept the ambiguities of femininity, especially the ability of women to cross the boundaries of class and race, they will become the instruments of their own misery.

In an ironic inversion of the Book of Ruth, the matron of The Wept of

Wish-ton-Wish rejects the shared humanity of all peoples when she sees in her half-Indian grandson only the scion of an alien race; this failure destroys her own family by alienating her daughter. In The Last of the Mohicans Hawkeye similarly precipitates tragedy by rejecting woman's capacity for racial merging when he fails to commit himself wholeheartedly to the rescue of Cora and so fails to avert the murder of Uncas and the extinction of the Mohican tribe. Though these two novels end unhappily, their tragic narratives are balanced against earlier, parallel narratives that conclude happily when ambiguity is accepted so that outsiders unify or strengthen families. Despite 351

Cooper's frequent pessimism during this period, tragedy is not the

inevitable result of human action, only the inevitable result of rejecting women and the ambiguity they represent.

With The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841) Cooper

linked the theme of the destructive effects of rejecting femininity

with the theme of initiation. The two novels are parallel Bildungsromane, the earlier exploring the maturation of a young woman, the later that of a young man. In The Pathfinder Mabel Dunham undergoes a classic three- stage initiation in which she is first separated from the world of childhood, then tested until she proves herself capable of sloughing off conventional behavior inappropriate to her new situation, and finally restored to her old social setting but in a new, adult role, that of wife. Throughout the novel her understanding of the complexities of mature love and her increasing ability to adapt to unfamiliar situa­ tions contrast her to Pathfinder. While despite his age the scout remains as ignorant of love as any child and assumes that in marriage a husband may play a fatherly role, Mabel understands, with Cooper, that conjugal love should be based on sexual passion as well as on emotional attraction and that she and Pathfinder do not feel for each other as a husband and wife ought to feel.

The crisis of Mabel's initiation comes when she discovers that her desire for a true marriage conflicts with the duty she owes her father, who, naiive as the scout, has set his heart on her accepting

Pathfinder. That she chooses to renounce her own desires says less about Cooper's view of women's sexuality than about his concept of 352

women's duty. And that Pathfinder ultimately realizes his mistake and

turns Mabel over to Jasper Western, who will be an appropriate husband,

does not vindicate the nobility of the scout's nature but instead

emphasizes his pathos. His final realization that he does not feel for

Mabel as Jasper does forces on Pathfinder the pain of loss, but his

abiding ignorance about his own role in the unhappy affair prevents him

from reaching tragic proportions.

In The Deerslayer Cooper again explores the problem of what

constitutes full maturity, this time concentrating not on love but on ethics. As young Deerslayer successfully passes the physical challenges

of his initiation into adulthood, including killing another man for the

first time, he also confronts a series of moral challenges that he ultimately fails as he moves from his initial adherence to the Golden

Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," to a final affirmation of the immoral natural law, "To do, lest you should be done by," originally propounded by the corrupt Thomas Hutter and Hurry Harry

March. Although Cooper uses Hetty Hutter to present the Golden Rule as a moral guide suitable only for children, adult morality need not be based on natural law. Judith Hutter provides the Christian alternative: faith in the efficacy of repentance. But because Deerslayer cannot accept the complexities of Judith's nature—the paradox of her sin and repentance—he cannot live up to his own definition of justice or accept a moral code appropriate to full adulthood. As a result, he regresses to natural law. 353 While Cooper was apparently uncomfortable with this moral lapse and continually attempted to idealize his favorite hero, the author's uneasiness with Deerslayer's failure to accept Judith and behave as a

Christian surfaces again and again, often in submerged parallels to scripture that favor Judith and Hetty and condemn Deerslayer. Whereas the behavior of the two young women follows the behavior of the heroines of the Books of Judith and Esther(Esther is, of course, Hetty's real name), the behavior of Deerslayer is compared to those portions of

Christ's parables that represent moral failure. Like the seed that falls by the wayside and like the wicked and slothful servant who buries his master's talents, Deerslayer misses his chance for salvation.

Although on the level of simple skills he successfully completes his initiation, on the more important level of morality Deerslayer fails and even backslides, a development that was to haunt Cooper for the remainder of his writing career.

Judith is Cooper's fullest statement of the contradictions and complexities of femininity, complexities that finally reveal Deerslayer a spiritual failure who cannot accept the doctrine of repentance. In apparent revulsion at this unwilled development, Cooper immediately simplified his heroines, attempting to deny the most paradoxical aspects of femininity. With two telling exceptions, the women of the late novels from 1842 through 1850 are morally simplistic, never confronting men with the kind of dilemma that revealed Deerslayer's shallowness.

Without the challenge to the hero implicit in her behavior, these late women often retain Judith's competence and poise, as in Wyandotte (1843), 354

The Chainbearer (1845), and The Oak Openings (1848), in which women play active roles in the plots.

More often, however, the function of the late heroines is simply to represent ideals that the hero should accept. Sometimes these are social values, as in the comparatively early satires The

Monikins (1835), Homeward Bound (1838), and Home As Found (1838) and in late works such as The Two Admirals (1842), Autobiography of a

Pocket-Handkerchief (1843), Afloat and Ashore (1844), Satanstoe (1845),

The Redskins (1846), and The Crater (1847). But more striking than the heroines who exemplify social norms are those who embody religious values, as in The Wing-and-Wing (1842), The Oak Openings (1848), and

The Sea Lions (1849). Although these heroines, like Judith, represent a spiritual state that the hero should strive for, they differ from the earlier woman in passively representing an ideal instead of directly challenging a man's position. Whereas Judith demands that Deerslayer live up to his own definition of justice and to the Christian concept of forgiveness, Mary Pratt in The Sea Lions, for example, simply refuses to marry her lover so long as he clings to what she, like

Cooper, regards as the heresy of unitarianism and rewards him with her hand after he, thousands of miles away from her in the isolation of an

Antarctic winter, undergoes a crisis of faith.:that leads him to trinitarianism. Mary herself is not instrumental in this conversion; she exists simply to indicate what the hero should strive for and to reward him for success. 355

By relegating women like Mary Pratt to passive roles or by

permitting active women like .Maud Willoughby in Wyandotte only to assist the hero without confronting him, Cooper attempted to sidestep the problem of the woman whose contradictory nature challenges social and moral norms. His concept of the fundamental dualism of women was, however, too deeply ingrained to be supressed completely. Because he still could not accept the awkward truth that Judith's nature had revealed a fundamental flaw in his favorite hero, he chose to punish dualistic women, treating his two final examples with extreme harshness.

Both the title character of Jack Tier (serialized 1846-48) and Mary

Monson of The Ways of the Hour (1850) are vicious satires on the ambiguity of femininity. Jack Tier is not only a woman so fundamentally ambiguous that she passes for a man but a woman whose loyalty to a man makes her ludicrous, not ideal, as is usually the case with loyal heroines. In pursuing a worthless husband, the gunrunner Spike who had abandoned her twenty years previously, Jack desexes herself by assuming a masculine name and the occupation of sailor. She becomes, in fact, a grotesque parody, not only of a woman but of Cooper's most important hero, Natty Bumpo himself. While Jack obviously differs from the scout in being short, dumpy, and barely competent at her profession, she serves exactly the same role as he, the outsider who acts as a dis­ interested, asexual protector of vulnerable young women. But in her pathetic inversion of heroism, Jack indicates Cooper's rejection of both

Natty Bumpo and the feminine complexities that revealed his weakness. 356

This rejection appears again in its most vehement form in the final novel, The Ways of the Hour, in which Cooper loses control of the concept of feminine dualism. Rather than using Mary Monson to make any coherent statement about the position of women in contemporary society, the purpose the setting and themes suggest, Cooper presents her from contradictory points of view. On the level of plot she is, on the one hand, a despicable New Woman who, abetted by New York's pernicious 1848 Married Women's Property Act, frivolously abandons her husband because he takes snuff, while on the other, she is the pitiful victim of the prejudices of a small town that cannot accept her sophis­ tication, European education, or intelligence. The contradictions continue on the thematic level in which Mary is simultaneously the sinister master of legal machination and the innocent victim of a corrupt jury system. Finally Cooper cannot decide how to handle her disturbing combination of naivete and brains, activity and passivity, evil and good, and gives up by defining her as insane. Rather than presenting her as either innocuous, like most of his other late women, or firmly in control of her contradictions, like most his early heroines, Cooper avenges himself on Mary, the ultimate in his ambiguous women, by making her self-destructive.

Mary Monson is the final indication that, despite the persistence of his belief in feminine ambiguity, Cooper never fully accepted woman's dualism. Although in the bulk of his work Cooper uses women to reflect both the fallen world and the transcendent morality that makes escape from corruption possible, he was finally unable to see women as 357 redemptive. Like Elizabeth Temple and Judith Hutter, among others,

Mary Monson challenges society's concept of justice, but unlike them she fails to provide a valid alternative to corrupt pragmatism.

Ultimately Cooper betrayed his finest vision of escape from evil by accepting the world as it is. Instead of permitting Mary any positive role, he chose to idealize her two foils, Sarah Wilmeter and Anna

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