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University Microfilms International 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 USA St. John's Road, Tyler's Green High Wycombe, Bucks, England HP10 8HR I I 77-21,732 BOYLES, Mary P., 1935- SENSIBILITY IN THE NOVELS OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Ph.D., 1977 Literature, American Name also appears as Mary Frances Boyles. Xerox University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 © 1977 MARY P. BOYLES ALL RIGHTS RESERVED SENSIBILITY IN THE NOVELS OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER Mary P. Boyles A Dissertation Submitted to The Faculty of the Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 1977 Approved by Dissertation Adviser APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of the Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Dissertation Adviser of Committee Members " r v'T/ . THQJVJ\ n-77 Date of Acceptance by Committee ii BOYLES, MARY P. Sensibility in the Novels of James Fenimore Cooper. (1977) Directed by: Dr. Donald Darnell. Pp. 350. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the term "sensibility" denoted "quickness and acuteness of apprehension or feeling; sensitiveness" and the "capacity for refined emotion; delicate sensitiveness of taste; and readiness to feel compassion for suffering, and to be moved by the pathetic in literature or art" (OED). Although sensibility is not historically synonymous with "senti­ mentality," excessive sensibility can and often does degenerate into sentimentality. In American literature such exaggerated sensibility is a pervasive ingredient in the sentimental novel. Although the novels of James Fenimore Cooper contain examples of the kind of extreme feeling which characterizes the sentimental novels, such excess is not typical of the sensibility displayed by Cooper's charac­ ters. By and large, sensibility for Cooper refers to the use of intuition rather than rea-son as the guide to truth and conduct in human relations. Reliance on such intuitive guidance reflects nobility of character. The possessor responds with moral imagination to the major areas of human experience: family relationships, station In society, interrelations with fellow human beings, attitude toward country, response to nature and the arts, and relationship to God. The sensibility exhibited by Cooper's characters serves as an index to the author's moral vision of the world. Considering Cooper's background and his theory of "natural inequality" in mankind, it is not surprising that sensibility emerges frequently in Cooper's "upper class" characters. In his earlier novels, however, Cooper locates the quality in representatives of other classes as well: Natty Bumppo, certain Indians and the Spy, for example. In the European novels, particularly The Bravo and The Headsman, Cooper not only portrays the dangers of oligarchical governments parading as republics. He also underscores the failure of sensibility in the repre­ sentatives of those governments. In his later novels, after his return from Europe and after the beginning of his quarrels with the American public, the tenor of Cooper's presentation of sensibility changes. He becomes increasingly less willing to attribute the quality to mankind in general. It becomes almost exclusively the mark of the Effinghams, the Littlepages, the Woolstons, the Wallingfords. The trait continues to signify noble character, but the class grows smaller as Cooper grows older and more disillusioned. In addition, the author becomes more strident and caviling in his treatment of sensibility and more irritable at the unhappy ramifications of its absence in certain classes of Americans—especially the Yankee and those influenced by him. The sanctity of the family unit, once insured by tradition and hereditary property, becomes threatened from without by trespassers and anti-renters. The patriotism of the Effinghams and the Littlepages is colored by a carping irritability about the country's shortcomings. The natural landscape, though constantly in danger from the white man's "wasty ways," is neverthe­ less always impressive and moving to the sensitive observer on the promontory. In the last novels, that landscape assumes the more urgent function of making that observer humbly cognizant of his own insignificance in the universe and of the absolute necessity of placing his dependence upon Providence. It is no longer enough simply to be a declared, practicing Episcopalian. Cooper felt that in the small class of men and women who comprise the natural repository of manners, tastes, and moral principles lay the hope of America; in the antithetical vulgar majority lay the threat of destruction. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank the members of my committee, espe­ cially Dr. Donald Darnell, whose professional integrity and incisive critical judgments have made the writing of this dissertation both challenging and rewarding. I also wish to express my appreciation to my family—Bob, Kelll, and Scott—who, through their endless patience, and loving support, have exhibited a sensibility rivaling that of Cooper's finest ladies and gentlemen. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page APPROVAL PAGE ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ...... 1 II. IN THE DRAWING ROOM: MANNERS AND MORALS . 42 III. IN THE LARGER WORLD: THE VILLAGEs THE FOREST, AND THE SEA 81 IV. COOPER, EUROPE, AND THE POWER OF SYMPATHY 137 V. COOPER'S RETURN TO AMERICA: THE 'SHOCK OF RECOGNITION' 166 VI. SOCIAL AND MORAL SENSIBILITY IN THE FINAL LEATHERSTOCKING TALES 216 VII. THE DECLINE OF SENSIBILITY 248 VIII. COOPER'S LAST NOVELS: SENSIBILITY AS CHRISTIAN HUMILITY 8 297 CONCLUSION 3^0 BIBLIOGRAPHY • 344 iv 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Called upon to deliver a eulogy at the memorial service for James Fenimore Cooper, Daniel Webster, a member of the ambivalent public which made Cooper's final years miserable, inflicted what Leslie Fiedler calls the "last indignity": "As far as I am acquainted with the writings of Mr. Cooper, they uphold good sentiments, sustain good morals, and maintain just taste."1 As a eulogy, the statement is embarrassing: it begins with an admission of ignorance of the subject and ends with a triple clich£ that might well adorn the tombstones of a dozen sentimental novelists. Yet, for all its weakness as a final tribute to America's first true man of letters, the statement happens to identify three important elements of Cooper's novels. Cooper's novels do "uphold good sentiments, sustain good morals, and maintain just taste"—not merely in imitation of the conventional literary romances of the period, but rather because Cooper believed that "good senti­ ments" and "just taste" reflect "good morals." Indeed, in the novels of Cooper, the sensibility exhibited by his ^Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), p. 190. 2 characters serves not simply as an ingredient in a novel of romance; rather it is an index to the author's moral vision of the world.^ In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the term "sensibility" denoted "quickness and acuteness of 2 Cooper criticism has not been concerned at all with sensibility in relation to Cooper's novels. Some of the best Cooper criticism deals with the moral ramifications of his fiction. Marius Bewley, The Eccentric Design: Form in the Classic American Hovel (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959)» shows the relationship between morality and the narrative mode in Cooper's best work. Charles A. Brady, "Myth-Maker and Christian Romancer," American Classics Reconsidered: A Christian Appraisal, ed. Harold Gardner (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), sees Cooper as the only major nineteenth-century creative writer "to work specifically within a religious dimension," p. 81. Prank M. Collins, "Cooper and the American Dream," PMLA, 8l (1966), is one of the few critics who consider Cooper's fiction as a whole in terms of his moral and religious views. Donald Ringe—probably the best critic writing on Cooper today—also treats Cooper as the author of thirty-two novels, not just author of a few adventure tales here and a few novels of social criticism there.