San Jose State University SJSU ScholarWorks Faculty Publications, English and Comparative Literature English and Comparative Literature January 1987 Pictorial Space as Identity in The Deerslayer Susan Shillinglaw San Jose State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/eng_complit_pub Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Susan Shillinglaw. "Pictorial Space as Identity in The Deerslayer" Faculty Publications, English and Comparative Literature (1987): 14-21. This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the English and Comparative Literature at SJSU ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications, English and Comparative Literature by an authorized administrator of SJSU ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 4/15/2014 Pictorial Space as Identity in The Deerslayer James Fenimore Cooper Society Website This page is: http://www.oneonta.edu/~cooper/articles/suny/1986suny-shillinglaw2.html Pictorial Space as Identity in The Deerslayer Susan Shillinglaw (San Jose State University) Presented at the 6th Cooper Seminar, James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art at the State University of New York College at Oneonta, July, 1986 ©1987 by State University of New York College at Oneonta [may be downloaded and reproduced for personal or instructional use, or by libraries] Originally published in James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art, Papers from the 1986 Conference at State University College of New York -- Oneonta and Cooperstown. George A. Test, editor. (pp. 54-66) Return to SUNY Seminars | Articles & Papers WHEN Deerslayer first meets Hetty Hutter, they exchange information about their identities: "Yes, I'm Hetty Hutter...Judith Hutter's sister; and Thomas Hutter's youngest daughter." "I know your history, then, for Hurry Harry talks considerable..." (544-45). If Deerslayer quickly understands the simple Hetty, the young woman has a more difficult time comprehending who he is: "Tell me your names and maybe I'll tell you your character," she says tentatively. But his Christian name, Natty Bumppo, and his several Indian names, Straight- tongue, The Pigeon, Lap-ear, and Deerslayer, give neither Hetty nor the reader full insight into his identity. In this, the last-written Leatherstocking tale, James Fenimore Cooper faced an especially difficult problem defining his hero. Here, as in the earlier tales, that hero has no social identity. Outside the Indian culture where he was raised and the white culture where he was born, Deerslayer is without an identifiable history or past. Nor in an initiation novel can the hero be introduced with a mature identity. This novel is a "study," Cooper writes in his Preface, for the later "pictures, of his [Leather-stocking's] life" (485). The Indian names he has earned bespeak his potential, not his prowess as a warrior. Yet in another sense this uninitiated hero enters the text with a mature identity, one that is literary, already familiar to Cooper's readers. The author's challenge was to create a suspenseful narrative about the development of a familiar character, to place new wine in old bottles. That he recognized the problem is clear in his Preface to the series, when he regrets the scant attention paid his last-written Leatherstocking novel: "There was no longer novelty to attract attention, and the interest was materially impaired by the manner in which events were necessarily anticipated, in laying the last of the series first before the world" (490). If the early audience slighted these two texts, however, later readers have not, for in The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer Cooper fully solves problems of artistic http://external.oneonta.edu/cooper/articles/suny/1986suny-shillinglaw2.html 1/11 4/15/2014 Pictorial Space as Identity in The Deerslayer interest -- no matter in what order the novels are read. In The Deerslayer Cooper generates interest by examining the problem itself, the formation of an heroic identity: first, he focuses sharply on the internal as well as the external conflicts; second, he carefully sketches the initiatory process in a setting that corresponds to the hero's expanding self- awareness, so that the reader understands Deerslayer's ethics and expertise within the terrible beauty of this setting. Previous studies have noted the loveliness and complexity of this pristine landscape.1 I will show that in The Deerslayer, where we find Cooper's most precisely rendered series of pictures, the hero fully defines himself within a landscape of pictorial and spatial contrast. Hetty Hutter, as well as the reader, must see him there to comprehend his character. To achieve manhood, Deerslayer, like the Green Knight, must overcome the enemy in two guises. Hostile Indians challenge his physical prowess while Judith Hutter tests his moral rectitude. Deerslayer's is a two-faceted initiation that Cooper envisions as counterpoised patterns of spatial movement. In confronting his Indian enemies, the hero moves outward from enclosed areas into the space of action, the forest. In the pictorial and symbolic interplay between circumscribed spaces -- most notably the lake -- and the forest-lined shore, Cooper stages Deerslayer's rite of passage from the novice who is initially identified with enclosures to the mature Hawkeye who stalks confidently into the wilderness. Counterpoised with this visual movement outward onto the shore is an equally significant movement inward, as Deerslayer enters Hutter's cabin and is repeatedly "exposed to these dangerous assailants," Judith's "manner, voice, accents, thoughts and acts" (7~2). More fully than in any other Leatherstocking novel, the hero must acknowledge the claims of interior space when Judith focuses his attention on her love and her own search for maturity. Movement inward tests Deerslayer's moral commitments. I will first discuss the complex visual patterns associated with Deerslayer's movement into the space of action, and then examine his corresponding movement inward, to the space of intimacy that is Judith's. The richly suggestive opening chapter introduces the principle of contrast that is so important in the novel, a principle that informs its social and moral dimensions and, as I shall discuss, its natural and psychological ones as well.2 Cooper first envisions these tensions visually. The opening description of the natural scene is contrapuntal: Whatever may be the changes produced by man, the eternal round of the seasons is unbroken. Summer and winter, seed time and harvest, return in their stated order, with a sublime precision, affording to man one of the noblest of all the occasions he enjoys of proving the high powers of his far reaching mind, in compassing the laws that control their exact uniformity, and in calculating their never ending revolutions. Centuries of summer suns had warmed the tops of the same noble oaks and pines, sending their heats even to the tenacious roots, when voices were heard calling to each other, in the depths of a forest, of which the leafy surface lay bathed in the brilliant light of a cloudless day in June, while the trunks of the trees rose in gloomy grandeur in the shades beneath. The calls were in different tones.... (496-97) These sentences suggest that contrast is inherent in nature and in man. Cooper pairs opposing seasons, summer and winter, spring and fall, as he contrasts the brightly-lit tree tops with the dark forest beneath. Such natural oppositions inform this text, where lake and forest, light and dark, are repeatedly contrasted and yet repeatedly described together, in a single vision, as Donald Ringe observes (110). Concordia discors emerges from an appreciation of contrasting values. Furthermore, the passage also juxtaposes nature's permanence and man's transience. In each sentence the main clause expresses the idea of natural succession and order, while the dependent clauses and phrases appropriately articulate man's subordinate concerns. http://external.oneonta.edu/cooper/articles/suny/1986suny-shillinglaw2.html 2/11 4/15/2014 Pictorial Space as Identity in The Deerslayer Cooper lends authority to the eternal as opposed to the temporal, a contrast that explains the "different tones" of Hurry and Deerslayer. The handsome Hurry seeks only the surface of experience: he gazes at his own face mirrored in streams; thinks "more of the beauties of Judith Hutter, than of those of the Glimmerglass, and its accompanying scenery" (526); and argues that the different complexions of Indians and whites signify a difference in species. Hurry, like Tom Hutter, is defined by his single-minded and superficial vision, while Deerslayer, who comprehends the eternal in nature, embraces the harmony inherent in contrast. Fascinated by the sight of his first lake, Deerslayer later tells Hurry that "The lake seems make to let us get an insight into the noble forests; and land and water, alike, stand in the beauty of God's Providence!"(515). A character ennobled by a spirit that recognizes God in nature, Deerslayer is a man nevertheless; he is a moral paragon who enters the book encumbered by Hurry Harry's presence. Deerslayer must learn to act in the "subordinate" sphere of human concerns, as first defined by Hurry Harry. Repeatedly, he must confront the dangers lurking in the dark forests. The spatial patterns than inform Deerslayer's outward movement are set in the first chapter, as he and Hurry Harry emerge from the forest into the clearing. Lost in forest "depths" and "gloomy grandeur," indeed, stumbling through the "tangled labyrinth of a small swamp" (497), the two call to one another. Whereas Natty Bumppo steps nobly into the other Leatherstocking tales, he here walks in confusion, a peculiar state for the character who always misses the offending twig. This opening chapter introduces a hero who has literally not yet found his hearings, who is self-consciously a novice.