The Historical Paradoxes of Manhood in Cooper's "The Deerslayer"

Abstract

is the man, Judith Hutter asks her sister Hetty in Cooper's The Deerslayer (1841), turn this beautiful place into ... a garden of Eden, for us? (376). In addition the mythic terms for that this question implies and Cooper's critics have elaborated, Judith's question finds deep roots in nineteenthcentury discourse about male identity and roles. From the first debate between Harry March and Natty Bumppo about the of deer-slaying and the manful[ness] of the Delawares, Cooper highlights questions about masculine identities and roles (21-22). Despite its setting in a seemingly asocial wilderness of 1740, The Deerslayer is a self-conscious, culturally embedded investigation of nineteenth-century manhood-a thick description, as it were, of manliness, a word that Cooper uses repeatedly. Although the novel features Natty's first warpath and his emergence into the male identity he has already displayed in the previous four Leatherstocking novels, Cooper initially positions him in the shadow of Harry March's more primitive masculinity-as sapling (25) Harry's tall pine (155). A noble specimen of vigorous manhood (20), a handsome barbarian (322) of gigantic strength (339) and sledge-hammer fists (258), Harry epitomizes masculine primitivism, and he registers the midcentury shift toward a physical ideal of masculinity (Rotundo Body 23). Combining virulent hypermasculinity with vengeful, punitive political maneuvers in the manner of Andrew Jackson (Kimmel, Manhood 33), Harry even anticipates a later male character type-the soldier male that Klaus Theweleit has anatomized in Male Fantasies, his two-volume tour de force about the rise of German fascism. Although initially Harry has the power command the junior Deerslayer fall to and prove his with his teeth on the doe he has killed (21), The Deerslayer ultimately poses more complicated questions: What kind of will Natty become? What can Cooper mean by observing in his 1850 preface the Leather-Stocking Tales that in The Deerslayer Natty Bumppo is just emerging into manhood (5)? What models of are available Cooper in 1840? Where is the man in the Deerslayer? Most critics have answered these questions in mythic terms, sharply distinguishing The Deerslayer, as well as The Pathfinder (1840), from the explicitly historical novels-Homeward Bound (1838) and Home as Found (1838)-that Cooper wrote a few years before.1 For R.W.B. Lewis the Deerslayer himself is a self-