Leatherstocking Tales Research Articles

Wister’s “Life Among The Lowly” and Anglocentrism

W lS T E R ’S “L IF E A M O N G T H E L O W L Y ” A N D A N G L O C E N T R IS M K e n n e t h A l a n H o v e y Scholars have long agreed that in The Virginian (1902) Owen Wister transformed elements from Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and the late nineteenth-century dime novels Cooper’s works spawned into a for­ mula that created the modem Western. Although The Virginian has not been blamed for all the excesses of the “kitsch Western,” as Leslie Fiedler dubbed its most formulaic imitations, it has been attacked by him and others since the 1960s for prejudicial Anglocentrism (139). Wister has been declared a “white supremacist” (Tompkins 147), his fictional West viewed as offering “justification for the extermination of the Indian” (Fiedler 139; cf. Kaplan 260) and upholding something “akin to a racist version of Jefferson’s Natural Aristocracy” (Cobbs 108), his chief novel read as supporting ethnic “prejudices, including anti-Semitism” (Payne 204), and its hero charged with “deriding the intelligence of Negroes” and not “consider[ing] Indians humans” (White 143). While all these offenses are ascribed directly or indirectly to Wister’s bestseller, even the most ardent critic of his ethnic views is forced to admit that “Wister’s Anglo-Saxon chauvinism is not spelled out in capital letters in The Virginian” (Tompkins 147). The basis for them is, however, spelled out in capitals in his essay “The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher” (1895). It is in light of this essay that the novel has been constantly read and found wanting, while the major differences between the two works have been overlooked, so much so that the two have simply been read as one (e.g., Nye 289-90). As Ben Vorpahl has explained, “The Evolution” was originally written to serve as a “credo” to Red Men and White (1895), Wister’s first volume of Western fiction, not to The Virginian (97). This credo, which Wister wrote in close collaboration with Frederic Remington, holds that the American cowboy, like the British peer, inherited from his medieval Anglo-Saxon ancestors a spirit of outdoor independence, a love of “his foster-brother,” the horse, and a “contempt for the foreigner” (604, 608). These traits are opposed, the essay maintains, by those of “Poles or Huns or Russian Jews” or, in other words, the “hordes of encroaching alien vermin, that turn our cities to Babels and our citizenship to a hybrid farce” (604, 603-4). While Indians, who are depicted as cruel Ishmaels, and Mexicans, who are viewed as “small deceitful alien[s],” have been 3 9 6 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e W in t e r 2 0 0 5 “supplanted” by the “Saxon” cowboy, the essay laments that “the rider among Indians and cattle, the frontiersman, the American who replaces ... the Pathfinder, is now beneath the notice of polite writers” (608, 614, 606). Wister sought to recover the Saxon Pathfinder for a contemporary audience in Red Men and White. In its interlocking tales Native Americans are hostile primitives, Mexican Americans a “basking Southern breed” (179-80), African Americans in the person of one woman of “incoherent mind and simple heart” comic relief (251), and “Saxons” heroes. One tale repeats the central situation of Cooper’s The Prairie (1824), a young and beautiful Spanish American woman from the Southwest distanced from her Anglo-American lover by an inter­ posing other. Wister’s other is a “swarthy” and “irresponsible” Mexican, while the worthy lover is a blue-eyed, yellow-haired cowboy with a golden mustache and a white horse (159). Nothing like this is to be found, however, in The Virginian. Its epony­ mous hero has an indeterminate eye-color and is distinguished by his “swarthy” complexion and black hair (90, 258, 267).1 He is, in fact, so dark that the heroine first describes him as “that black man” (89). The words “Saxon” and “Anglo-Saxon” do not appear in the...

The return of the Indian guide New formulations of the Indian guide at the end of the 20th century

In the myth of the North American frontier defined as a place where two or more cultures interact, there is a set of characters who represent the capacity to move in both worlds and to build bridges between them. The translator is one and the 'guide' another. The figure of the 'Indian guide' – explored from white people's point of view ever since Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales – staged a large scale return at the end of the 20th century in North American (Canadian and American) novel and film, but now transformed by authors (generally Native American but not exclusively so) who view the history of the North American West from, as it were, the other side of the frontier line. This article will try to describe the new, rebellious, empowering characteristics of the Indian guide as represented in novels and films of the last 30 years.

In Search of the Noble Savage: Some Romantic Cases

The idea of the noble savage is as early as Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688), a novel by Aphra Behn, or Friday, the cannibal in Robinson Crusoe(1719).In Chateaubriand's major novels with New World settings it mirrors European yearning for naivete and purity. In Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales both the “white savage” Natty Bumppo and his friend, the Indian chief, Chingachgook are destined to be outmoded by historical forces. An early novel, Typee: A Peep at Polyneasian Life during a Four Months' Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas, by Herman Melville discloses that the Typee way of life is not very conducive to upholding the European myth of the noble savage. Robert Louis Stevenson's relative success in falling into the embrace of the South Seas when he settled in Samoa is contrasted with Paul Gauguin's contradictory search for Rousseauesque refuge in a primitive culture and his yearning for recognition as an artist by European contemporaries. The idea of the noble savage has been a productive misprision or cultural lie in many respects but today its lingering cliche supports a superannuated hord of lesser Gauguins.

Magawisca's Body of Knowledge: Nation-Building in Hope Leslie

Magawisca’s Body of Knowledge: Nation-Building in Hope Leslie Gustavus Stadler (bio) It has now become something of a critical commonplace in American cultural and literary studies to argue that the conceptual division between public and private spheres—a paradigm which has been particularly influential in work on the antebellum era—is artificial, ideological, and largely designed to enforce a social hierarchy between the genders. It has even been persuasively argued that the repeated critique of this binarism by feminist and other critics has unintentionally helped to maintain its authority. 1 But before doing away with this dualism as a frame of analysis, we might be wise to attend to our writers’ and critics’ continuing preoccupation with it (and with its deconstruction), one which I believe dates back to the earliest decades of the nation. By “preoccupation” I mean to emphasize the service these categories have provided for a rhetoric of fantasy, of imaginations of the self and its ability (or lack of ability) to act and to speak as a citizen, as an American self, in an American nation and culture. A particular branch of this genealogy of fantasy, usually found in work by liberal Euro-American writers, constructs people of color as mediating, critical figures in the always already problematic schema of public and private life. 2 For a liberal, white writer, such a figure is embedded with deconstructive force, because he or she appears to wear the social on his or her skin—his or her very body is infused with a degree of cultural conflict which threatens the distinction between politics and the personal before s/he has uttered a word. Within this tradition, these characters of color, by means of the sensations and particularities that make up their selfhood, become the means of the author’s general critique of the national configuration of public and private. This usually means, more nearly, framing an issue as confined to the private sphere of individual deliberation—a sphere which masks the fact that certain individuals’ deliberations are taken more seriously than others—and demanding the interposition of a public debate, a public conscience. Thus, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the horrific spectacle of whipped black bodies, especially Uncle Tom’s, is meant to dramatize the inappropriateness of leaving the slavery question up to individuals, individual families, or individual regions of the nation. Catherine Sedgwick’s 1827 novel Hope Leslie is a still earlier instance of a slightly different take on the private/public dualism. By investing remarkable narrative authority in an Indian woman, Magawisca, this historical novel of early New England dramatizes public issues, primarily the colony’s relations with native people, as foundational for the actualization of a model of private subjectivity suited to the proto-United States. The novel tells a revisionary history of the nation to its antebellum readership, one in [End Page 41] which the privacy of Americans was secured through fascination with, and attacks on, the bodies of Indians. It thus attempts to ensure a place for corporeality, for embodied struggle, in the history of the nation. Sedgwick, the daughter of one-time Speaker of the House of Representatives Theodore Sedgwick, was intimate with the public life of the young nation, and grew up in a house which offered her many more opportunities for cultural growth than most families and schools of the time. 3 Influenced like many of her contemporaries by the writings of Maria Edgeworth, her first two novels followed the parameters of “literary domesticity,” a phrase coined by Mary Kelley to describe the interest of many antebellum female writers in fiction set in the home, often telling the story of a young girl’s rise into virtuous womanhood. 4 In 1826, perhaps buoyed by readings of Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok (1824) and the early volumes of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, Sedgwick set out to write a novel of early America turning on the presence of native characters. While the novel is set in the colonial era that many writers of the antebellum era found so appealing, it also alludes implicitly to the debates taking place in her time over forced Indian removal, especially of the Cherokees...

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

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-

Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film by Lee Clark Mitchell, and Ernest Haycox by Stephen L. Tanner

190 Western American Literature wind gusting the tent in on the cookstove. Just as I was fascinated by the winter incur­ sions ofRawlins’s earlier book, Sky’s Witness, so I was intrigued by the down-to-earth realismoffurtherWyomingexperiences. But these forays take thereader beyond therugged back-country ofthe Salt River Range. Rawlins’s words lead into the “broken country”ofone’s own memories ofthat distant war and of one’s youthful plights and passions. Sometimes witty, sometimes wise, often poignant, and usually provocative, Broken Country effectively herds the readeralong.WhileI’mnotterriblyfondofsheep(neitherisRawlins), Idefinitelyfound thesepages tobe goodgrazing. ANNRONALD University ofNevada, Reno Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film. By Lee Clark Mitchell. (Chicago: UniversityofChicagoPress, 1996. 348 pages, $29.95.) Ernest Haycox. ByStephenL.Tanner. (NewYork:TwaynePublishers, 1996. 150pages, $26.95.) Novels ofthe West deservedly are subject to much scholarly interest, but popular Westernsareonlyrecentlybeginningtoreceiveacademicrespect.Tworecentbooksadd muchtoourknowledgeoftheseformulastories. LeeClarkMitchell’sWesterns provides abroad overviewofthe popularWesterngenre itself; Stephen Tanner’sErnest Haycox provides a specialized studyofone ofthe genre’sbest authors. Interestingly, Mitchell’s basic thesis inhis broad studyis borne out byTanner inhis specialized study. Thebasic themeofpopularWesternshasalwaysbeen,Mitchell’sthesisasserts, the “construction of masculinity.” Thus, Mitchell traces the development of the Western beginning with Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales through the panoramic paintings of Albert Bierstadt. Then Mitchell analyzes in detail major novels of Wister, Grey, Schaeffer, L’Amour, andmajor filmWesterns fromthefifties to the present. Westerns provides an excellent overview of the basic scholarship and the agreedupon lines of development within the genre. It is a substantial book, beautifully illus­ trated with black and white photographs of paintings and movie stills. Here, Westerns come alive because this is not so much a book about other books as a book about the Western myth itself, written by an author who has great respect for an often maligned subject.Therareclosetextual analyses ofRiders ofthe Purple Sage andHondo arepar­ ticularly useful. Also the book is documented with extensive bibliographical notes and commentary. If there is aweakness to this study, it might be that while Mitchell treats the great representative works ofthe genre to extensive analysis, he fails adequately to showthe relationshiptothelargenumbers ofotherpopular works inthefield. Forexample, Grey and L’Amour admittedly are major popular writers of Westerns, but Mitchell barely mentions Max Brand, Clarence Mulford, Luke Short, or Ernest Haycox, lesser writers but extremely popular writers intheir day. Dothe observations pertaining to the repre­ sentative novels applytothe otherformulanovels?Mitchell mightmaketheconnection clearer. Certainly, however, Mitchell’s study opens a large field ofinquiry for others to pursue. Reviews 191 Although Stephen Tanner gives no indication of familiarity with Mitchell’s concur­ rent study, Tanner’s analysis of Ernest Haycox’s short stories and novels bears out the thesis that Westerns are essentially concerned with developing an adequate conception of masculinity for their own time. Also, Tanner shows Haycox’s debt to Cooper and even to Bierstadt’s paintings for his interpretation of the West. As usual within the Twayne format, Tanner’s study gives an overview of the author’s life and all the works, notjust the most famous works. But Tanner gives us much more. He provides an excellent discussion of the popular fiction versus quality fiction controversy. In fact, his stated aim is to examine how “to evaluate a first-rate author in an allegedly second-rate genre.” Tanner also provides the most extensive biography of Haycox to date, concentrating, of course, on his development of the literary career. The book is excellently researched with extensive use of letters and other primary docu­ ments. Unfortunately, those seeking detailed studies of any particular Haycox story or novel may be disappointed in this book. No single novel receives much more than two pages of analysis. In his treatment of The Wild Bunch, Tanner even lists elements of the novel that could be analyzed. That’s fine if we were to expect some great rush on Haycox studies, but this Twayne volume may be the only study of these novels for many years. Also, unlike Lee Clark Mitchell, Tanner does not seem to respect Westerns as literature. Mitchell’s book exudes the West. We feel the movement and atmosphere of Westerns themselves. But most of Tanner’s study is devoted to showing how Haycox attempted to transcend...

If Prairies Had Trees: East, West, Environmentalist Fiction, and the Great Plains

P A U L W I T K O W S K Y Radford University IfPrairiesHadTrees: East,West,Environmentalist Fiction, and the GreatPlains A couple ofyears ago, when my son was three years old, we watched a cartoon segment on “Sesame Street” that was obviously intended to raise children’s ecological consciousness: a boywith an axe went around cutting down all the trees he saw, until there were none left. The environmentalism was predictable and unexceptionable—until the nar­ rator remarked that the barren, stump-filled landscape that remained was “empty land like the old prairie,”and, an Easterner myself, I realized that the cartoon had to have been the work of other Easterners. Only the eastern mind could make so facile an equation between such vastly different landscapes. Only the eastern mind could, in the interest of environmentalism, so easily reduce the complex ecosystem of the Great Plains to negative space: in simple terms, a forest with the trees missing. To the Easterner, of course, the prairie is alien terrain precisely because it lacks the single defining feature of the “natural” eastern landscape. Jane Tompkins, who devotes an entire chapter to landscape in West of Everything, identifies the “empty” landscape, especially the desert, as characteristicallywestern—but also notes that this emptiness is only apparent, that the significance of the landscape is in the eye of the beholder: For the desert is no more bleak or empty than the northeastern forests were when the Europeans came. It is full of living things, of birds and animals, and inhabited by people. . . .The emptiness we see in the desert, the sense ofa hostile environment, isan effectofa certainwayoflife and certain desires. Western “nature”exists not in itselfbut through and for Eastern men’seyes. (77) 196 Western American Literature A. Carl Bredahl,Jr., argues further that the essential difference between the eastern and the western imagination—at least as they are reflected in literature—is in their conceptions of space. The eastern mind is concerned with enclosure, “fundamentally distrustful of space” (2), while the western mind has accommodated itself to an environment in which such distrust is suicidal: “Confronting an environment of extrava­ gant size, weather, and configuration, the western imagination had finally to discard assumptions of imposing selfand enclosing landscape, efforts that in the West met inevitably with disaster” (4-5). On the simplest level, Bredahl’sargument can be illustrated by the difference between eastern and western attitudes toward landscape in general, and, as Tompkins suggests, toward characteristically western landscapes in particular. In its reading of the relationship between forest and prairie, the “Sesame Street” cartoon that I watched with my son is a product of the eastern imagination; in a somewhat more sophis­ ticated way, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers and The Prairie are products of the same imagination. The western imagination, accus­ tomed to openness and resigned to the impossibility of (en)closure, reads that relationship from a different perspective, as is demonstrated in Dan O ’Brien’s 1988 novel Spirit oftheHills. In theory many of the two novelists’environmental concerns are the same; in practice the (literal) fields of their concerns are radically different. As an Easterner and a Westerner, they do not see forests and prairies, or the relationships between them, in the same way. Dan O’Brien, a contemporary South Dakota novelist, is an ideal candidate for a comparison with Cooper. In manyways Spirit oftheHills is a late twentieth-century “Leatherstocking Tale”whose hero, Bill Egan, is a latter-day Natty Bumppo: not the Pathfinder or Deerslayer or Hawkeye of the later, more mythopoeic tales, but the old hunter and trapper of The Pioneers and The Prairiewho mourns the fall from the state of nature to the state of civilization and waxes nostalgic for the land in a remem­ bered prelapsarian state. In its emphasis on humans’right relationship to nature and to the land, O’Brien’s novel belongs to a tradition of environmentalist Westerns that extends backward and eastward to the “Leatherstocking Tales,” and as an embodiment of the desire for that right relationship, Bill Egan is clearly a modern avatar of Cooper’s hero. In fact, the parallels between O’Brien’s and Cooper...

The Hollywood Indian in Little Big Man : A Revisionist View

70 Kasdan - Tavernetti / Little Big Man The Hollywood Indian in Little Big Man: ? Revisionist View Margo Kasdan and Susan Tavernetti In Little Big Man Arthur Penn directed a film that inverts the mythologies of American frontier history usually presented in the western genre, and, in particular, the story of the westward expansion. The film combines established generic conventions—the post-Civil War period, Great Plains setting, conflict between whites and Indians—with a reconsideration of western history, a revisionist treatment of legendary figures of the time, of the western hero, and of Native Americans in a comic and ironic tone. This combination makes the film distinctive (while at the same time sows the seeds for such contemporary westerns as Dances With Wolves) . The fusion of elements in the film, including its representation of Native Americans—respectful yet satirical, convincing yet not entirely authentic— is the subject of this paper. Through the works of writers, artists, and photographers, Americans have been taught two contradictory myths about Indians. One, deriving from the Puritan fear of the uncontrolled wilderness and its inhabitants, depicts them as bloodthirsty savages. The other, which flourished in the writings of the eighteenth-century European Romantics, presents Native Americans as noble savages. In this conception, the unspoiled wilderness is a spiritual place uncorrupted by civilization; therefore, its original inhabitants are also pure and at one with the spiritual side of nature. The idealistic view was perpetuated in nineteenth-century America in such works as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's celebrated narrative poem, The Song of Hiawatha (1855). Both conceptions found a place in James Fenimore Cooper's popular novels five of which, including The Last of the Mohicans, were gathered in The Leather Stocking Tales, published between 1823 and 1841: Indians were wild, uncivilized, ferocious, but also brave, dignified, proud, and wise teachers. The visual arts of the period transformed these literary stereotypes into powerful images that helped create the basic iconography of the Hollywood western film. Concentrating on dramatic portrayals of buffalo hunts, exotic tribal dances and ceremonies, as well as on heroic portraiture of the natives, George Catlin painted romanticized scenes of Indians within landscapes reminiscent of the garden of Eden, yet in vivid, nearly "Technicolor" hues. Upon his arrival in the new world, Swiss watercolorist Karl Bodmer drafted striking panoramic views of the Margo Kasdan Ts Professor Tn the Department of Cinema it San Francisco State University. Susan Tavernetti is Professor of Film in the Department of Film/TV at" De Anza College, Cupertino, California. They collaborated on the second edition of The Critical Eye: An Introduction to Looking at Movies published by Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company. Film & History, Vol. XXIII, No's. 1-4, 199371 Little Big Man (Dustin Hoffman) and Chief Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George) are here framed together, identically attired, a sign of their kinship. Jack Crabb has become a full-fledged member of the Cheyenne and, as their spokesman, will finally tell the truth about the tribes' s culture, experiences and ordeals. Photo courtesy of the Publicity Department/Ciname Center Films. 72 Kasdan - Tavernetti / Little Big Man frontier and remarkable scenes of wild natives in the fierce Buffalo and Scalp Dances which mirrored his preconceptions of a savage America. These artists' representations of the Plains Indians were widely distributed through lithographs and aquatints. These works established the "facts" of Indians on horseback and wearing primitive costumes in ceremonies and molded that conception of them in the popular imagination. In contrast to this fabrication of an untamed yet noble people, the artists Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell introduced the "cowboy-as-epic-hero," a character-type whose role was to repress the threatening Indians and win the west. It was not until the early twentieth century when Edward Curtis posed Native Americans before his camera—recording a romanticized vision of the "noble" Indian and a vanishing way of life—that their cause was championed once again.1 Shaped by the marketplace, the popular media of the day— from paintings to photographs, from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show to dime novels and illustrated magazines—reinforced this dual conception of Indians, depicting Native Americans both as scantily-dressed men with feathers in...

Cooper's Leather-Stocking Novels: A Secular Reading.

James Fenimore Cooper's Leather-Stocking tales, published between 1823 and 1841, are generally regarded as America's first major works of fiction. Here, Geoffrey Rans provides not simply a new reading of the five novels that comprise the series but also a new way of reading them.Rans analyzes each of the five novels (The Pioneers, Last of the Mohicans, Prairie, Pathfinder, and Deerslayer) in the order in which they were originally composed, an achronological sequence in terms of the stories they tell. As events in early written novels interact with those in later ones, the reader is compelled to construct political meanings different from Cooper's ideological preferences. This approach effectively precludes reading these works as Natty Bumppo's life story, or as an aspect of Cooper's. Rans presents the series as a text that faithfully reproduces the conflicts Cooper faced, both at the time when he wrote the novels and in the history that the novels contemplate.Cooper emerges as a composer of richly problematical texts for which no aesthetic resolution is possible and in which every idealization, political or poetic, is relentlessly subjected to the gaze of historical reality. The tension between potential and practice, which is apparent in the final two volumes of the tales, is present, Rans contends, from the inception of the series. Because the problems of racism and greed that Cooper addresses remained as unresolved for us as for him, Rans concludes that this reading of the Leather-Stocking tales reinforces both Cooper's central canonical position and his value as an articulator of political conflict.Originally published in 1991.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

HISTORY AS FICTION, FICTION AS HISTORY

Geoffrey Rans. The Leather-Stocking Tales: A Secular Reading. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. xviii + 292 pp. Ian K Steele. Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the "Massacre." New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. ii + 250 pp. Illus. Ian Steele's title for this detailed and elegant history of the fall of Fort William Henry might very well have been a sub-title for Geoffrey Rans's equally detailed and elegant analysis of the Leather-Stocking Tales. The immediate nexus between these two books is the "massacre" of 1757, the focus of Steele's work and the major historical incident underlying The Last of the Mohicans, the most famous of Cooper's five Leather-Stocking Tales, and this would perhaps in itself justify a review of these two books together. Steele's title anticipates an analysis of the notorious failure of Montcalm to protect his English and American prisoners from his Indian allies after the surrender of Fort William Henry and the refusal of General Webb to come to the aid of the besieged garrison during the fighting; but it also, in this well- balanced history, calls to mind the Indians' view that Montcalm reneged on his agreement to reward them after the surrender of the English garrison.

Wish Fulfillment in the Wilderness: D. H. Lawrence and the Leatherstocking Tales

IN D. H. LAWRENCE'S TELLING, THE FIVE LEATHERSTOCKING TALES REVEAL JAMES Fenimore Cooper's escape in wish fulfillment away from his wife and her effete, overcivilized Old World order into a beautiful but violent and, as each successive novel reveals, a progressively more vital New World. spell cast by Lawrence's short, interpretive essay on Cooper has been remarkable. No other criticism of a major American author has rivaled its ongoing possession of American Studies scholarship. Harold Kaplan called it of most enriched endowments of criticism in literary history. Leslie A. Fiedler considered it the only pertinent literary criticism of Cooper in print. Opinion about Cooper, declared Richard Chase, when it has been interesting at all, has had to be in one way or another an elaboration or revision of Lawrence. 1 Such acclaim was not immediate. Lawrence's interpretation of Cooper appeared in Studies in Classic American Literature in 1923, but received scant attention until after World War II. In postwar years Lawrence's literary reputation flouished as never before, followed by newfound interest in his criticism of American classics. Meanwhile, Cooper's literary reputation began to recover from Mark Twain's vilification a half century earlier.2 From 1960 onward Cooper's reputation has been closely linked to Lawrence, with much of most commanding scholarship on Leatherstocking novels invoking Lawrence or manifesting his influence.3 While Lawrence's magnetism affects studies of other American authors, in Michael J. Colacurcio's words, The classic case is, of course, Cooper.4 viability of Lawrence's interpretation in large measure depends on his authority, or rather our willingness to grant him authority, as a literary critic whose reading of literature is reliable. However, close examination of Lawrence's essay and novels themselves reveals a perplexing variety of errors. While some of these errors are separately trivial, taken together they present a consistent pattern of mistaken reporting, raising doubts about credibility of larger enterprise. Most especially, they suggest need to reassess Lawrence's wish fulfillment thesis and his role as a reader of Leatherstocking Tales. This essay will examine Lawrence's reading of Cooper and its legacy to American literary scholarhip.

Ethnocentric Manifestations in Cooper's Pioneers and the Last of the Mohicans

So much on the subject of race in Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales has been stated by scholars that to discuss the matter again probably becomes another recapitulation of an effete theme. I would maintain, however, that the question of whether Cooper considers and treats all his characters equitably in the Tales has not been looked at in depth. If, on the other hand, someone has considered Cooper's treatment of race in the Leatherstocking Tales, it can then be argued that the scholarship has been written by group of people insensitive to the intrinsic feeling of another group of people who might now be offended by Cooper's works. I do not mean to suggest from the start that criticism is subordinate to racism, nor should the statement be taken as an indictment of all critics. Certainly we can agree with W. H. Auden that a scholar is not merely someone whose knowledge is extensive; the knowledge must be of value to others. It is from this premise that one may submit the argument that criticism addresses itself to universal audience. If this be the case, then much of the writing about Cooper neglects or sidesteps the specific feelings and emotions

Research in Western American Literature: 1982

R I C H A R D H. C R A C R O F T Brigham Young University Research in Western American Literature: 1982 Most of this year’soffering of masters’theses and doctoral dissertations in western Americana are in non-literary, primarily historical fields. But though the offerings in literature are sparse, they seem intriguing — par­ ticularly Arthur Ray Broten’s dissertation on the novels of the fur trade. And the range is interesting, as well as revelatory of current interests: Willa Cather leads the list by being featured in at least five dissertations, with Cooper being treated in four, Guthrie in three, and with Thoreau, Norris and Kerouac in at least two studies each. The one solitary offering on Mark Twain — and that one not about the West — troubles us Twain aficionados, though we are heartened to read of studies of Steinbeck, Garland, London, Horgan, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Wright Morris, and Nathanael West — and intrigued by the dissertation comparing Gide and Cather. Interest in women’s studies continues; and this year we have apparent first-time consideration of such relatively unknown writers as Rudy Wiebe, Kermit Hunter, and Edwin Way Teale. Still, the field con­ tinues relatively unharvested. Kindly send notices of completed or in-progress masters’ theses or doctoral dissertations on western Americana and literature to Dr. Richard H. Cracroft, Dean, College of Humanities, 2054 Jesse Knight Humanities Building, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 84602. 336 Western American Literature MASTER’S THESES COMPLETED: Murphy, John T. “In A Perfect Oregon Fever” : Myth and Symbol in the Oregon Trail Novel (M.A.) Northern Arizona University, 1981. (Studies Guthrie’sThe Way West, Binns’s The Land isBright and Hough’s The Covered Wagon.) Murphy, Patrick D. “Quest for Place”;The Poetry of Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry (M.A.) University of California, Davis, 1983. DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS COMPLETED: Abbe, Donald Ray Austin and the Reese River Mining District: Nevada’s Forgotten Frontier (Ph.D.) Texas Tech University, 1982. Bird, Roy Kennedy Wright Morris: Imaginative Transformations of Commonplace, the Past, and Language (Ph.D.) Rice University, 1982. Broten, Arthur Ray Twentieth-Century Novels of the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade: Toward a Definition of the Form (Ph.D.) University of California, Santa Barbara, 1980. (Includes a brief history of the fur trade and a discussion of some 17 novels central to the form.) Brundage, David Thomas The Making of Working-Class Radicalism in the Mountain West: Denver, Colorado, 1880-1903 (Ph.D.) University of California, Los Angeles, 1982. Carpenter, David Allen William Everson: Poet of Extremity (Ph.D.) University of Oregon, 1982. (Everson’searly poetry was written in the San Joaquin Valley.) Chase, Thomas Christopher Christian Frederick Post, 1715-1785: Missionary and Diplomat to the Indians of America (D.Ed.) Pennsylvania State University, 1982. Research 337 Cornell, George Leslie Native American Contributions to the Formation of the Modern Conservative Ethic (Ph.D.) Michigan State University, 1982. Crouther, Lou-Ann Returning Home: Heroines as Rebuilders and Victims in American Fiction Written by Women (Ph.D.) Indiana University, 1982. (Treats, among others, Cather’sMy Antonia.) Dunlop, Mary Helen Midwestern Landscapes: Nineteenth-Century Literature of the American Prairie (Ph.D.) George Washington University, 1982. Engell, John Frederick Brackenridge, Brown, Cooper, and the Roots of the American Novel (Ph.D.) University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1982. Evans, Constantine “The Origin of the Nation” : Time and History in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (Ph.D.) Syracuse University, 1981. Foreman, Ruth Jeane The Fiction of Bess Streeter Aldrich (D.A.) Drake University, 1982. Gallagher, Mary Cathleen From Natty to Bigger: The Innocent Criminal in American Fiction (Ph.D.) University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1981. (Treats, among others, The Pioneers.) Gjerde, Jon Alan Peasants to Bourgeoisie: The Migration from Balestrand, Norway to the Upper Middle West (Ph.D.) University of Minnesota, 1982. Graves, William Hilton The Evolution of American Indian Policy: From Colonial Times to the Florida Treaty (1819) (Ph.D.) Florida State University, 1982. Habic, Robert David The History and Achievement of the Western Messenger, 1835-1841 (Ph.D.) Pennsylvania State University, 1982. Hansen, Terry Lee Paul Horgan’sSouthwestern Fiction: A Reader-ResponseApproach to The Peachstone, Far From Cibola, A Distant Trumpet, and White Water (Ph...

Vietnam and the Hollywood Genre Film: Inversions of American Mythology in the Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now

SINCE THEIR RESPECTIVE RELEASES IN 1978 AND 1979, MICHAEL CIMINO'S Deer Hunter and Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now have enjoyed remarkable popular and critical success. But their wide recognition as contemporary cinematic masterpieces has been accompanied by corresponding controversy regarding their thematic significance and coherence. In addition, none of the commentaries on either of these two epic-scale films about the Vietnam War has searched for possible connections between them. My first purpose in this essay is to show that each film draws its design from popular American narrative formula, with the separate formulas providing the basis for the differences between The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now as interpretations of the Vietnam War. I further wish to demonstrate that link between those formulas establishes an underlying relation between the two films, embodying their essential aesthetic strategy. The allusion of The Deer Hunter to The Deerslayer signals the presentation of the Vietnam War through the popular genre for which Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales are the prototype: the western. Similarly, the opening scenes of Apocalypse Now establish the presentation of the symbolic journey of Heart of Darkness, itself an adventure/mystery tale, through the specific conventions of the hard-boiled detective formula. This use of popular genres that are related as central American myths of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries connects the two films. A popular genre, as Stanley Solomon succinctly defines it, is a certain mythic structure, formed on core of narrative meaning found in those works that are readily discernible as related and belonging to group. 1 As

Uncas as Hero: The Ubi Sunt Formula in The Last of the Mohicans

LEATHERSTOCKING S ROLE as the hero of the series that bears his name has never been seriously questioned. Despite Professor Henry Nash Smith's discussion of Natty's failure to qualify as a technical hero of romance,' the frontiersman's position continues to be secure. Arvid Schulenberger's comment five years later is illustrative: major unifying element in The Leather-Stocking Tales is the life of a single character, Nathaniel Bumppo, who is the hero of all five under a succession of names...2 (italics mine). Natty as the hero of The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder and symbol of mutability in The Pioneers and The Prairie poses no problems. But for the reader who comes to The Last of the Mohicans without prior conceptions of Natty as series hero, problems do arise. Although there is no falling off of his powers-he is in his prime, his eye is sharp as ever, and his forest skills are fully developed-his role as hero is usurped by Uncas, whose movement to the position of dominance at the novel's conclusion Cooper skilfully develops. Cooper introduces the novel's theme in Chingachgook's reply to Natty's query about the fate of the Mohicans:

The Pathfinder: Leatherstocking in Love

The Pathfinder (1840) is the only Leatherstocking tale in which Natty Bumppo at all resembles the wavering hero of a Scott novel. Here for the first and only time we see him waver between the life he has always led — untrammelled by property, responsible only to his own strict code and conscience, free to follow his own bent away from white European society — and the life of a border family man with all that that implies in terms of a wife who must be kept content with her lot, children.who must be properly educated, property which must be acquired and protected. Yet The Pathfinder is not in the least like a Waverley novel. It is not even very much like one of the earlier Leatherstocking tales. Why, more than a decade after burying Leatherstocking in The Prairie (1827), did Cooper revive him again? And why revive him in this particular way?

The Wilderness and the Negro in Faulkner's “The Bear”

The heart of Go Down, Moses (1942) is “The Bear.” The most widely acclaimed story of the seven in the volume, “The Bear” has received a variety of interpretations. One critic has emphasized its New Testament spirit, others its romantic and transcendental character, and still others its primitivism and myth. The variety of critical response testifies to the story's density of meaning. It is a rich, original story treating of a universal issue; nevertheless, it is distinctly American. Lionel Trilling has placed it in the romantic, transcendental tradition of Cooper, Thoreau, and Melville, while Malcolm Cowley has associated it with the work of Mark Twain. In its pastoral spirit “The Bear” does seem related to Huck Finn; and, in its development of the wilderness theme, to Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. Yet because of the story's tendency to split into two parts—one part concerned with the wilderness, the other with the Negro—the structure of the story has seemed faulty and its meaning ambiguous. If “The Bear” is examined within the context of the other related stories of the Go Down, Moses volume, its meaning may be clarified.

R. M. Bird's Plans for Novels of the Frontier

DR. ROBERT MONTGOMERY BIRD'S Nick of the Woods, his historical romance of early Kentucky,' was published in I837. Although Dr. Bird was but thirty-one years old at the time and had displayed great ambition as a novelist after turning from dramaL to fiction, he wrote only one novel afterward, and it was a slight performance.2 James Fenimore Cooper had published but three of his five Leather-stocking Tales; The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer were yet to come. William Gilmore Simms, born the same years as Bird, was near the beginning of his extensive series of border romances. Since Nick of the Woods has been one of the most popular of all the border tales, warranting a second edition and several dramatic versions in its author's lifetime, and since reaching a total of some thirty editions, including British, Polish, Dutch, and German, it is a matter of some speculation that Dr. Bird did not follow up his apparent success in its field. His preface to the I853 Redfield edition, which he prepared shortly before his death in 1854, states more clearly than had his first preface his intention in the book and attempts to answer certain criticisms that had greeted its appearance, but here Bird says nothing to indicate that he had originally planned the work as merely the first in an extended series of frontier novels. An examination of manuscript materials, however, shows that Nick of the Woods was but a fragment of its author's whole intention, the only finished novel of four or more projected. Dr. Bird left copious manuscript notations not only for his finished works but also for his intended ones. His grandson and namesake has placed a trunkful of his literary grandfather's manuscripts in the Library of the University of Pennsylvania. These manuscripts include extensive and interesting jottings for novels of the West. As preliminary work, Dr. Bird had written digests of such histori-

The Sources of The Prairie

Fred Lewis Pattee asserts that when Cooper was a lad was a hamlet . civilized and easily accessible from Albany and Hudson. Furthermore, Cooper was from age of nine to age of thirteen in Albany, studying with Reverend Thomas Ellison. During this time Cooper's visits home were short and few (James Fenimore American Mercury, IV, 290, March, 1925). See also S. T. Livermore, A Condensed History of Cooperstown, with a Biographical Sketch of J. Fenimore Cooper (Albany, I862), p. I96; Constance Fenimore Woolson, Haunted Lake, Harper's Magazine, XLIV, 22 f. (Dec., I87I). Evidently area had been abandoned . . by red race when Cooper was a boy. In autumn of 1778, eleven years before Cooper's birth, Cherry Valley Massacre took place. With success of Clinton's and Sullivan's expedition against Six Nations, one reads in A Centennial Ofering. Being a Brief History of Cooperstown with a Biographical Sketch of James Fenimore Cooper, . . . with Other Interesting Local Facts and Data, edited by S. M. Shaw (Cooperstown, N. Y., i886), p. 8, Otsego had suffered its last Indian incursion; and from that time forward only occasionally a few straggling Indians were seen in cabins of its white settlers. According to Ralph Birdsall, The Story of Cooperstown (Cooperstown, N. Y. [1917]), p. 24, as early as I684 Susquehanna lands were first conveyed to white men by Indians although Indians retained right to live and hunt on river. One learns further from Susan Fenimore Cooper that only infrequently some . . . representatives of Five Nations, had crossed his [Cooper's] path in valley of Susquehanna, or on shores of Lake Ontario, where he served when a midshipman in navy. See Susan Fenimore Cooper, ed., Pages and Pictures from Writings of James Fenimore Cooper, with Notes by Susan Fenimore Cooper (New York, I86i), p. I29. See also Albert Keiser, The Indian in American Literature (New York, 1933), p. 131; Gregory Lansing Paine, Indians of Leather-Stocking Tales, Studies in Philology, XXIII, i6-i8 (Jan., I926). As a young man, therefore, Cooper's opportunities to study Indian at firsthand had not improved. Cooper himself states in his Introduction to The Last of Mohicans. Revised . . . with a New Introducgon, Notes, etc. by Author (New York, 1850), pp. viii-ix, . . . wilderness, in which incidents of legend occurred, is nearly a wilderness still, though red man has entirely deserted this part of state. . . There exist only a few half-civilized beings of Oneidas, on reservations of their people in New York. In his Notions of Americans: Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor, 2 vols. (London, 1828), I, 328, he affirms, the Indian must now be chiefly sought west of Mississippi, to be found in any of his savage grandeur.