Picturesque and Pastoral: Two Views of Cooper's Landscapes

Abstract

Blake Nevius. Cooper's Landscapes: An Essay on the Picturesque Vision. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976. 127 + xii pp. H. Daniel Peck. A World by Itself: The Pastoral Movement in Cooper's Fiction. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977. 213 + xivpp. In her introduction to The Deerslayer, Susan Fenimore Cooper gives us some insights into her father's perception of, and attitudes toward, lands- cape. A mile and a half from Cooperstown, along the eastern shore of Lake Otsego, Cooper had a farm, "a poet's farm" as his daughter calls it, "more romantic than profitable." It covered the side of a hill, at the top of which he found a cabin from which one could see almost the entire lake, including "the heights of Springfield to the northward, and southward the village, picturesque in position, with the valley of the winding Susque- hanna beyond."1 Cooper's actions here imitate in small the experience of his father in the last decade of the eighteenth century and of his father's artistic reincarnation, Marmaduke Temple of The Pioneers', they also reveal some of the imaginative origins for the transformations of wilderness by Captain Willoughby in Wyandotte, by the three generations of Littlepages, and by Mark Woolston in The Crater. Several decades of frontier experience are compressed into the few years Cooper spent on his "improvements." His daughter describes the process: