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Top Left-Hand Corner Department of English Idealism and Guilt in the Forest: Cooper, Emerson and the American Wilderness Myth Tommy Feldt Bachelor degree project Literature Fall term, 2011 Supervisor: Paul Schreiber Abstract James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans has had a remarkable impact on American culture and modern critics have often viewed it as a myth of America itself. Cooper’s highly romanticized narrative has partly been seen as the less-than-historical “wish-fulfillment” (D.H. Lawrence) of an author who socialized in the salons of New York and Paris but dreamt of noble savages in the untamed American landscape but also as an expression of America’s difficulties in coming to terms with its conquest of the Indians. As a complement to these views, this essay attempts to show that the character Natty Bumppo, or Hawkeye, represents the new nation’s ambivalent relationship with the surrounding wilderness and therefore helplessly torn between vastly different ideals. On one hand, Hawkeye appears to show us a less confrontational way of relating to the wilderness: one that implies the possibility for man to transform himself and live in spiritual unity with nature—a notion that would make Hawkeye the forerunner of the ideals put forth in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay “Nature”. But Hawkeye’s relationship with the woods and the Indians is complex, self-contradictory and filled with deep inner struggles, and he is at other times a merciless figure who divides Indians into good and bad. As such, his very character seems to be the embodiment of an American identity that is highly conflicted. In addition to examining the novel’s depiction of Hawkeye, the Indians and the forest, the essay offers a wide historical perspective of the ideas of nature that were present or just emerging in Cooper’s time, including those expressed by Emerson, as well as their Romantic and Christian influences. By understanding how Americans struggled to deal with feelings of guilt and sorrow in the face of the perceived decline of the wilderness in the 19th century, we might better understand the persisting importance of Cooper’s work. Keywords: The Last of The Mohicans; nature; wilderness; Emerson; myth; America Feldt 1 In few other periods in time has man been more obsessed with the notion of nature, wilderness and civilization than in the early era of expansion in North America in the 18th and 19th centuries. George Stankey maintains that the sheer scope of the scenery that met the pioneers was utterly overwhelming and vastly different from anything experienced in the Old World. In the settler’s mind, the American wilderness “fit to perfection the mental construct fabricated over generations in Europe of a place harboring anti-Christian forces“(17). For the emerging nation, gathered under the banner of Progress and in the midst of the toilful Westward Movement, the dangers of the wild were part of everyday life and nature itself was a formidable obstacle to overcome. But to most, Ralph Bogardus notes, it seemed like “a struggle that man ought to win” (356). This is the context in which James Fenimore Cooper’s iconic 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 has often been placed— namely as an account of the fateful conflict between man and nature that nature is bound to lose in order for civilization to progress. This, however, was not the only view of nature present in America in the 19th century. There were a number of individuals contemporary to Cooper who, a decade after the publication of Mohicans, proposed another way of relating to nature and whose ideas may also be relevant in relation to the novel. They were the Transcendentalists, adherents of the philosophical, literary and moral movement that sprung up after the 1836 publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature”, which posited a new way of living in spiritual unity with the landscape; for, as Emerson put it, men at the present did not really “see nature” (1112). Ladd and Feldt 2 Philips describe the Transcendentalist ideal imagined by Emerson as a new man, entirely self-reliant and unrestricted by the bonds of conformity but like a child in his appreciation of the spirituality of Nature (35-37). It was a vision that very successfully appealed to the rising American spirit of optimism and tied it closely to the American landscape (30). In effect, this meant that there were two contrasting ideas of Nature in America: one dominated by conflict, apprehension and the fear that it should “lead man to succumb to the wildness of his surroundings” and tear down his “thin veneer of civilization” (Stankey 17); and the other by an optimistic, sentimental and spiritual longing for the unity of Man and Nature. The idea of duality has not gone unexplored in interpretations of Cooper’s work, and perhaps most notable of the critics addressing it is the author D. H. Lawrence. His focus was fixed firmly on the novel’s main character Natty Bumppo— or Hawkeye—the able white man living among Indians and the self-described “man without a cross”. In Lawrence’s eyes, Hawkeye is an ambivalent figure whose every fiber is dominated by conflicts between opposing values: Innocence and lust; mercy and cruelty; white culture and red; and, perhaps most of all, civilization and nature. It is an argument that certainly has its merits, but I will argue that Hawkeye also gives voice to the same emerging idealistic view of nature that Emerson was the primary champion of. Neither Lawrence nor most other critics normally associate the two with each other, but I will attempt to show that parts of Hawkeye’s character are actually strikingly similar to the ideals that Emerson and the Transcendentalists would explore a few years later—while other parts of his persona are not. At one point in the novel, Hawkeye explains his philosophy to the singer David Gamut: I have heard it said that there are men who read in books to convince themselves there is a God. I know not but man may so deform his works in the settlement, as to leave that which is so clear in the wilderness a matter of doubt among traders and priests.(138) With no need for traditional dogmatic religion or the conveniences of civilization, Hawkeye—like the ideal man of Transcendentalism—lives in near harmony with nature, relying on his own wits and mind and the training he has received from his Indian companions. He, more than any other figure in American literature, seems ready to acknowledge Emerson’s idea of an “occult relationship between man and vegetable” (1113). But Hawkeye is at the same time, as Thomas Philbrick points out, “a killer, a slayer” and “a figure in the landscape of a nightmare” who “abides a Feldt 3 primitive moral code” to survive in an unforgiving wilderness (17). At times, Hawkeye is no more in tune with the Emersonian beauty and spirit of Nature than the men and women of civilization with whom he travels. The purpose of this essay will therefore be to look at the contradictory character of Hawkeye and how he is torn between very different sets of ideals and morals in his dealings with Nature and its “children”, the Indians. I will propose that it is possible to interpret Hawkeye as a mythical representation of the ambivalence that existed in the American national psyche regarding the new nation’s place in the wilderness, and that the novel therefore should be put into the wider context of how nature and civilization were viewed in America in the early 19th century. To that end, I will relate Cooper’s book to the writings of Emerson in “Nature”, for the two writers, both in their own way, would come to have a major impact on the way the American wilderness is regarded. Cooper’s five Leatherstocking Tales, and The Last of the Mohicans in particular, have historically been given very mixed receptions by critics, but it is hard to deny their popularity with the average reader. When Mohicans was first published in 1826, its success propelled James Fenimore Cooper to national and international prominence. It was particularly well-received in Europe where it was celebrated as one of the greatest examples yet of American literature, with Cooper himself often seen as the Walter Scott of the New World, and it attracted such prominent outspoken admirers as Honoré de Balzac. Even though Cooper himself stated clearly in the preface to the 1832 edition that his ambitions had been purely historical and that the reader who picked up his novel expecting an “imaginary and romantic picture of things … will probably lay [it] aside, disappointed” (quoted by Clarke, 118), the lasting legacy of Mohicans has not been one of history but one of myth, legend and symbolism. The novel itself, being one of the most-read pieces of American literature ever published, has come to be embedded in the very core of American culture and has spawned scores of different adaptations. In Leslie Fiedler’s words, its main characters Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook have turned into “mythic figures” who have “detached themselves from the texts of Cooper’s books and ... entered the free domain of our dreams” (Fiedler 187), remembered as symbols of a conflict between nature and civilization deemed to be relevant far beyond the forests of 1750s New England. Feldt 4 Yet, Cooper also received a substantial amount of negative critique of his frontier narratives. The criticism, focusing on the perceived literary, historical and social flaws of his work, often came from fellow Americans rather than Europeans and it led to his work eventually falling out of favor among scholars.
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