Cooper’s Pioneer: Breaking the Chain of Representation

Abstract

In Cooper‟s Pioneers, the transition from “national literature” and a realist epistemology of representation toward a Romantic imaginary and increasingly individualized politics is linked to the decline of liberal political philosophy and to the loss of landed property as the political basis of society. While the dominant narrative reconciles two families, healing the breach between colonial and post-revolutionary society, displacing Indian claims, and re-legitimizing land ownership, a tragic epilogue—the regressive departure of the pioneer toward a new frontier— opens up a Romantic sub-narrative of desire. A complementary psychosexual narrative and discourse relocates the origin, so deliberately theorized in this novel in terms of natural property rights, in oedipal problematics. It is a regressive move which, paradoxically, also constructs the post-Enlightenment subject. The position that the works of James Fenimore Cooper hold in the American literary canon has been considerably weakened during the past few decades. To an earlier generation of Cooper scholars, eminently represented by the American literary historian Robert E. Spiller, Cooper was a writer who shaped a characteristically American view of nature and the frontier—key features in American national mythology. Evidently the interest in this mythology has declined, and, subsequently, the perceived literary merit of Cooper‟s works. Postcolonial perspectives have exposed the oppressive aspects of his nationalism, in effect relegating his historical novels and romances to a secondary status in the canon. 1 Yet Cooper‟s declining reputation can be viewed in terms of a more distant origin since, as Jonathan Arac has shown, the interest in literature as a bearer of national history comes to an end in Cooper‟s time. 2 Against this broader background, the literary offenses that already 1 See, for example, Nadesan Permaul‟s “James Fenimore Cooper and the American National Myth” and Ezra F. Tawil‟s “Romancing History: The Pioneers and the Problem of Slavery.” 2 “The major narrative form that preceded literary narrative in the United States, and also succeeded it, was what I call national narrative” (16). What Arac calls