The Romance of America: Trauma, National Identity, and the Leather-Stocking Tales

Abstract

As part of the continuous dialogue surrounding native and American history in the nineteenth century, we should read Cooper's Leather-Stocking tales not as a simple assertion of a progressive history, nor as a mythical retreat from the concerns and responsibilities of history, but rather as a searching after a literary form, in this case romance, that might be able to encompass a trauma that places all narratives of American progress in doubt. Ultimately, it is in the failure of the Leather-Stocking series, its inability to explain this national trauma and its inability to simply consign it to a place of national forgetting, that we can locate its greatest success. The five books that make up the Leather-stocking Tales represent a repeated invoking of a traumatic past, a continuous attempt to mitigate this trauma, and Cooper's awareness that such attempts must always fail because no explanation or justification can ever be fully adequate.