The Silence of the Soulless Corporation: Corporate Agency in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo

Abstract

Early nineteenth-century Americans, particularly during the Jacksonian Era, viewed corporations with caution since they were often associated with a dangerous centralization of power, feudal privilege, and even the threat of conspiracy. In The Bravo (1831), James Fenimore Cooper makes the protagonist of his tale such a “soulless corporation”. Set in the eighteenth century, it tells the story of the government of Venice, which has turned from a model republic into a corrupted oligarchy. This article maintains that Cooper’s novel thereby draws attention to the cultural anxieties surrounding the emergence of the private corporation aggregate in the United States and, by analyzing Cooper’s narrative strategy, points out the special challenges of narrating corporations: how their collective nature requires Cooper to find ways of representing corporate agency beyond embodiment in individual characters.