James Fenimore Cooper

by HEINZ ICKSTADT

In American nineteenth-century literature there is partially submerged tradition of bourgeois fiction which is linked, in theory and practice, to an idea of democracy, an idea of the People. It derives from the Enlightenment, and those figures in American literary history who most fully, almost tragically represent it, though central to their time and culture, were inevitably left behind when continuities broke down and history entered a new phase of accelerated changes. William Dean Howells, who recorded the symptoms of his growing obsolescence long before he died, was such a figure—as was James Fenimore Cooper, Howells’s senior by half a century.1 Their careers and, with certain qualifications, also their literary theories resemble one another to the point of duplication. Both shared the universalist assumptions of eighteenth-century Humanism and the Enlightenment, both were deeply committed to an idea of the ‘Old Republic’ and struggled to recognize its image in the turmoil of new or still evolving socio-economic orders; both conceived of their literary profession as a business and as a quasi-public office and defined the novel in terms not only of its aesthetic but also of its social and political functions, i.e. as a specifically democratic and thus popular art.

I shall enquire into some of Cooper’s ideological assumptions; analyse the thematic and structural tensions and ambiguities in several of his novels within a context of intense national debate on the meaning and direction of American democracy; compare Cooper’s concept of the People with that of his fellow-Jacksonian George Lippard; and finally discuss the changes that were going on within the system of the novel by the time of Cooper’s death.

Literature—still understood in the broader sense of ‘Letters’ —for Cooper was a means of social influence and power, an occupation worthy of a gentleman whose father had once hoped to see him in high office—the highest, in fact. ‘Books’—Cooper wrote in his very first novel—‘are the instruments of controlling the opinion of a nation like ours. They are engines alike powerful to save or to destroy.’2 Accordingly, he believed that there was ‘perhaps no class of men’ more effective in the general interest of humanity than ‘popular writers of high character’.3 One should note that Cooper explicitly links the importance of literature to its popularity and that he sees the manipulatory misuse of that power as being checked by the author’s moral sense and his awareness of his public function.4 If the writer followed moral principles he was above party and self-interest, on ‘neutral ground’5; if he voiced what everybody was able, yet perhaps not always willing, to recognize as true and just, he could not help but act and write in the name and interest of the general public.