The Pioneers

THE TEMPTATIONS OF THE TRIGGER: DEMYTHOLOGIZING VIOLENCE IN COOPER’S THE PIONEERS MICHAEL TAYLOR University of Heidelberg, Center for American Studies Abstract: Many scholars mark Cooper as the master myth-maker of American imperialism, arguing that he portrays frontier violence as progress. This paper questions the critical consensus. By retracing the violence depicted in The Pioneers, this paper unravels an ecological argument coupled with a psychoanalytical motif that Cooper employs to warn against unharnessed American aggression, not to celebrate it. Keywords: violence, native Americans, American imperialism, ecology, psychology 1. Introduction A pale finger flushes with adrenaline as it strokes the steel trigger of a rifle. The buck bounds; the pigeon flushes; the Native chief charges; the adrenaline explodes. And with this explosion, James Fenimore Cooper ensconces himself in the American literary canon. Since his canonical induction, foundational literary critics, as early as D.H. Lawrence and on through Richard Slotkin, interpret Cooper’s literary explosions as blatant attempts to mythologize the American frontier as a catalyst to divinely-destined American imperialism. When criticizing The Pioneers, such critics concentrate on Chingachgook’s death and the creation of Natty Bumppo—Leatherstocking—as the quintessential American hero as two sure manifestations of Cooper’s pro-imperialist myth. Other less consensual critics, however, suggest that rather than advancing the already pervasive imperial myth, Cooper problematizes nineteenth-century America and its imperialist ideologies (Fanuzzi 1993:38). Despite such interpretive anomalies, the majority of critics continue to argue that The Pioneers glosses over, masks, and even celebrates the violence of American empire-building (Permaul 2006:9-17). Yet, by aligning with the critical anomaly, an analysis of the violence portrayed in The Pioneers exposes a more critical portrait of American imperialism than most critics conclude. Rather than celebrating violence, Cooper employs ecological metaphors and explores the psychological effects of committing violence in order to combat the literal violence waged against nature and the Native Americans. By doing so, Cooper does not advance the already prominent myth of divine deracination; he violently demythologizes it. Critics cringe at the fact that Cooper inundates hundreds of pages with violence, exterminates the last of the Mohican tribe, only to conclude his novel as a Shakespearean comedy. Adopting Slotkin’s (2000:564) assessment of nineteenth- century American literary violence, Nadesan Permaul (2006:12) insists that the motto of The Pioneers reiterates Tacitus’ tirade on ancient Rome after conquering Britain: “They make desolation and call it peace.” Permaul and Slotkin both argue that The Pioneers depicts the desolation of nature and the Native Americans only to call the desolation peace. Deriving the motto, however, solely from a novel’s dénouement, trivializes the novel’s exposition, rising and falling action, and climax. Instead of interpreting The Pioneers through such an Aesopian lens,— searching for a single, conclusive moral—dissecting the novel’s introduction and body as equally determinant, reopens an intriguing critical discourse on Cooper. Though Cooper concludes The Pioneers by entrusting the future of the American frontier to certain white settlers, he does not conceal nor mythologize the desolating violence of American imperialism; he exposes and problematizes it. Slotkin (2000:4) initially describes what he interprets as Cooper’s Roman tactic as a “failure to recognize and deal with the real mythological heritage of [his] time and people.” Permaul (2006:15) again extends Slotkin’s assessment and contends that beyond simply failing to recognize the reality of the frontier conflict, Cooper strategically conceals it, concluding, “Those who must be excluded from the romance to make its charming mythology work for the audience are effectively removed from the shape and rise of the new American people and national identity.” As Permaul asserts, Cooper’s novel progresses through a series of effective removals. Early on in the novel, Squire Jones describes the forthcoming removals as he presents the frontier project to the inquiring Elizabeth Temple. “We must run our streets by the compass,” Jones exclaims, “and disregard trees, hills, ponds, stumps, or, in fact, anything but posterity” (Cooper 1853:199). Jones’ definition of Templeton’s frontier project sounds familiarly Roman, but nowhere throughout the novel does Jones embody Cooper’s views on the frontier and the proper process of American expansion. Instead, Cooper repeatedly condemns Jones’ blind use of his imperial compass. 2. Removals 2.1. First Removal: The Trees The novel’s series of removals commences with the trees as Billy Kirby, the town’s leading lumberjack, enters the neighboring forest. Cooper (1853:208) writes, “[S]electing one of the most noble for the first trial of his power . , the heavy and brisk blows that he struck were soon succeeded by the thundering report of the tree.” Here Cooper employs two key terms that invite a metaphoric interpretation of the trees’ removal: “noble” and “power.” The term “noble” intimates a victim more human than arboreal, while the term “power” reveals Kirby’s reason for removal. After ennobling Kirby’s first victim and connecting Kirby to an imperial power struggle, Cooper (1853:208) then further personifies the falling tree: “[I]t came, first cracking and threatening, with the separation of its own last ligaments, then threshing and tearing with its branches the tops of its surrounding brethren, and finally [met] the ground.” Through his personification, Cooper transforms the otherwise routine felling of trees into the battleground between two races, one noble, and the other powerful. Kirby then, like the Romans of old, “march[es] away under the blaze of the prostrate forest, like the conqueror of some city, who, having first prevailed over his adversary, applies the torch as the finishing blow to his conquest” (Cooper 1853:208). Cooper’s depiction of Kirby, this Romanesque conqueror, mirrors critics’ claims of making desolation and calling it peace. Like Jones, however, Kirby never embodies Cooper’s concept of American expansion. Cooper describes the fallen trees as “noble,” a term ubiquitous in nineteenth-century rhetoric to describe the Native Americans. Along with the more obvious epithet, trees themselves were also a common literary symbol for the Native Americans. Similarly personifying the symbolic arboreal victims of American imperialism, nineteenth-century poet, Lydia Howard Sigourney (1854:83-84), writes: Man’s warfare on the trees is terrible. / He lifts his rude hut in the wilderness, / And, lo! The loftiest trunks, that age on age / were nurtured to nobility . / fall with a thunder sound to rise no more. / He lifts his puny arm, / and every echo of the axe doth hew / the iron heart of centuries away. / And uptorn [sic] roots and prostrate columns mark / the invader’s footsteps. Like Cooper, Sigourney depicts the felling of the frontier forest as the violent removal of a noble race. Whether this particular, ecological poem lends interpretation as a metaphor for the removal of the Native Americans is uncertain, although Sigourney grants voice to Native Americans elsewhere in her works (Zagarell 2005). It is no coincidence, however, that Cooper employs the trees as the literal and symbolic victims of his novel’s first removal, for the trees share the ennobling epithets of their “ancient inhabitants” (Cooper 1853:144) 2.2. Second Removal: The Pigeons The second removal comes about much less as a proof of power than out of the thrill of the kill, introducing a psychological aspect to Cooper’s already ecological argument. Waking early to organize their attack, the Templeton settlers gather their ammunition and hurry to the hills. Anxiously, they waylay, anticipating their enemies’ advance. The pigeons— the settlers’ enemies—soon crest the hill and the settlers immediately fusillade: Arrows, and missiles of every kind, were in the midst of the flocks; and so numerous were the birds, and so low did they take their flight, that even long poles, in the hands of those, on the sides of the mountain, were used to strike them to the earth. (Cooper 1853:268) Here, Cooper transforms the frontier sport of shooting into a brutal bloodbath, revealing the American settlers’ unrestrained killer instinct. As the arrows, missiles, and poles prove insatiate to the settlers’ excited aggression, Jones, the holder of the imperialist compass, arrives at the frontlines wielding a cannon. The arrival of the new artillery “collect[s] all the idle spectators to the spot, who being mostly boys, [fill] the air with cries of exultation and delight” (Cooper 1853: 269). While the settlers shout with excitement, Natty approaches and surveys the battlefield, from which “none pretended to collect the game, which lay scattered over the fields in such profusion as to cover the very ground with the fluttering victims” (Cooper 1853: 269). Disgusted with the settlers’ unharnessed excitement, and absolute prodigality, Natty declaims, “This comes of settling a country! . The Lord won't see the waste of his creatures for nothing, and right will be done to the pigeons, as well as others, by and by” (Cooper 1853: 270). Through Natty’s castigation, Cooper transforms the frontier sport into a sermon against the prodigal, passion-filled violence

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