Cooper and The American Dream

Abstract

Chroniclers of the American Dream have made progressively clear in recent years that the “dialogue” or “dialectic” it produced was the distinguishing feature of nineteenth-century American letters. An important consequence of the valuable studies carried out in particular by Marius Bewley, A. N. Kaul, R. W. B. Lewis, and Henry Nash Smith has been the rehabilitation of James Fenimore Cooper as an early and exemplary participant in this debate. According to Lewis, he is, as the creator of the “fictional Adamic hero unambiguously treated,” a partisan of the party of Hope in its skirmishes with the parties of Memory and Irony. In the more properly internalized drama presented by the others, he is the theater for a struggle between what Smith sees as his commitment to the “principle of social order” and his attraction to the “anarchic freedom” projected in Leatherstocking; what Bewley sees as Europe and America taken as value clusters similar to those later placed in dramatic opposition by Henry James; and what Kaul sees as “the history and the myth of American civilization,” acceptance and repudiation of ties with the corrupt European past. But this revised conception of Cooper's significance is in the process of passing into stereotype before it is validated. What remains to be done, what I propose to do, is to examine closely the texture of his habitual discourse. By isolating and relating those minute flourishes and recurring expressions which betray a writer's stance in its complexity, I hope to bring more clearly into focus the conflict between Cooper's formal theory, the conscious thesis of universal depravity which was the structuring principle in his religious and political philosophy (his acceptance of Europe as an abiding reminder of the human condition) and the half or barely articulated antithesis of meliorism (his rejection of Europe as the inevitable condition)— a conflict which did not so much end in an outright victory for either view as subside in a faltering synthesis.