"Clothes upon sticks": James Fenimore Cooper and the Flat Frontier

Abstract

The many satires of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking novels that circulated in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century are unified by their insistence on Cooper's problems with depth. From James Russell Lowell, who decided that Cooper's characters are as flat as a prairie, and Francis Bret Harte, who shows Cooper heroes getting mor- tally confused by false hair pieces, to Mark Twain, who demonstrates that Cooper was the king of wonky landscape perspectives, Cooper's satirists attacked him for his seeming refusal of proper dimensionality. Tempting as it may be to conclude that Cooper's satirists had a good point, I wish to suggest that this later-nineteenth-century preoccupation with Cooper's depth offers an important clue about the way in which certain concepts of racial and continental destiny, popularized by Cooper in the 1820s, were being experimentally remodeled by a number of U.S. constituencies in the decades surrounding the Civil War. Indeed, Cooper himself participated in this remodeling project by taking issue, late in his career, with his own notion of racial identity as something deeply and immutably fixed in the depths of the body and soul. As many critics note, Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales of the 1820s had sought to authenticate the white frontiersman for the naturist myths of con- tinental expansion by freely (if sometimes contradictorily) drawing on the two prevailing racial theories of his era, both of which understood racial differences as embedded in human bodies and destinies. On the one hand, as Jared Gardner has shown, Cooper embraced the newer polygenist theory of racial origins, according to which the races had all been created by God as distinct and already hierarchized entities. Each race had what Cooper called its own gifts and its own destiny on the North American continent. By depicting the Native Americans as a group whose coherence was inci- dental to geographical location, this theory vacated the continent for use by Anglo-European settlers by insisting on the alienability of Native American land and on the natural priority of those given to the land's cultivation