James F. Cooper (1789-1851): The Pioneers

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James F. Cooper (1789-1851) The Pioneers

• American Literature I
• 11/01/2004
• Cecilia H.C. Liu

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Facts on James Fenimore Cooper (1)

• Cooper was born James Cooper on September 15,
  1789 in Burlington, New Jersey. (The "Fenimore"
  was legally added only in 1826.)
• In 1790 the family moved to Lake Otsego, in
  upstate New York, and these early experiences in
  a frontier town gave him the background for The
  Pioneers (1823), among other frontier novels.

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Facts on James Fenimore Cooper (2)

• In 1819, his career as a writer began, and the
  first tale he published in 1820 was Precaution, a
  novel of morals and manners which showed the
  influence of Amelia Opie (whose work Cooper very
  much admired).
• Later, since the work and its reception were
  pleasant enough to encourage JFC to continue, he
  continued on writing, publishing The Spy A Tale
  of the Neutral Ground (1821), The Pioneers, The
  Pilot (1824), Lionel Lincoln (1825), The Last of
  the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827),with
  remarkable explosion of creativity.

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Facts on James Fenimore Cooper (3)

• Cooper was also a keen observer of the political
  and cultural life of America, an accomplished
  controversialist and a fine naval historian.
• By the time of his death Cooper had developed a
  reputation as America's "national novelist," and
  D. H. Lawrence portrayed his work as "a
  decrescendo of reality, and a crescendo of
  beauty," but all his novels engaged historical
  themes and helped to form the American history
  and romantic historiography in the 19th century.

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The Pioneers Background Info.

• In 1785, Coopers father, wanted to investigate a
  a piece of land in this wilderness, Otsego, with
  a party of surveyors.
• At the commencement of the following year,
  settlement began and from that time to this the
  country has continued to flourish and increase in
  number.

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Cooper's Natty Bumppo

• Natty Bumppo, as described in The Pioneers as 6
  ft. tall in his moccasins, thin and wiry, with
  grey eyes, sandy hair, a large mouth and rather
  heavy eyebrows."
• He appears physically as a cross between his best
  friend, the Indian Chingachgook, and his nemesis,
  Judge Temple.

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Bumppos various names in Leather-Stocking
Tales

• Deerslayer
• Hawk-eye
• Pathfinder
• Leather-Stocking

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Leather-Stocking Tales (in the order of events
in the life of Natty Bumppo)

• The Deerslayer (1841)young hero
• The Last of the Mohicans (1826)mature hero
• The Pathfinder (1840)come into maturity
• The Pioneers (1823)heros old age
• The Prairie (1827)heros death
• Coopers novels reflect his continuous awareness
  of contrasts in society, behavior, and government
  between the United States and Europe,
  particularly Great Britain.

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Natty Bumppos Views in Ch 3 (I)

• He implores the group to see that men should only
  kill and use the wilderness to sustain
  themselves.
• In essence, man should only take what he truly
  needs. However, the chapter ends with the eyes of
  the dead pigeons staring up at the men, Natty
  becomes the one who understands the virtuous
  relationship between man and the environment.

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Natty Bumppos Views in Ch 3 (II)

• While the settlers see wilderness as being tamed
  by their presence, Natty Bumppo has a vision of
  civilized life coexisting with nature.
• Natty Bumppo, additionally, wants to keep the
  unique role that this vast unexplored wilderness
  contributes to the complexity of America.

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Coopers Intention in Natty Bumppo

• A critic, James Wallace, writes that Cooper
  wanted Natty Bumppo to combine a popular
  tradition of the eloquence of Indian oratory with
  the garrulity of a frontier character.
• Natty Bumppo is Cooper's tool to express his
  views on the mores of 18th and early 19th
  century U.S. Natty Bumppo agrees with the concept
  of a firmly class-structured society, and shows
  disdain for miscegenation.
• Fearless and miraculously resourceful, Natty
  Bumppo survives the rigors of nature and the
  villainy of man by superior strength and skill,
  and by the help of heaven, for he is always
  quaintly moral.

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Coopers Intention in Natty Bumppo (2)

• Nonetheless, Natty Bumppo is filled with
  contradictions, combining "the soul of a poet
  with the nature of a redneck."
• Natty craves companionship, but trusts no one, is
  used by all, but owes nothing to anyone, and
  craves traditional society while fearing and
  despising civilization.
• According to Duncan Heyward, Natty is "a noble
  shoot from the stock of human nature, which never
  could attain its proper elevation and importance,
  for no other reason than because it grew in the
  forest."

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Perspective in The Pioneers

• It could be said that the incidents of this tale
  are purely a fiction, even though the literal
  facts are connected with the natural and
  artificial objects and the customs of the
  inhabitants.
• The academy, and court-house, and jail, and inn,
  and other things, are exact.
• Cooper is aware of the numerous faults in the
  story, but he still decides to overlook this fact
  but wrote the story with the intention to please
  himself.

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Responses to The Pioneers

• Cooper's ingenious wasnt expressed in his
  development of American novel, but the ability to
  find audience for it. With The Pioneers, he
  facilitated an American literary awakening from
  imitations of imported novels to a true
  literature. "Quite simply, Cooper created a
  community of readers whose taste dominate the
  market for fiction in America, .in the 19th
  century (Sydney Smiths The Edinburgh Review)

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What Cooper Says About The Pioneers

• "Our political institutions, the state of
  learning among us, and the influence of religion
  upon the national character, have been often
  discussed and displayed but our domestic
  manners, the social and the moral influences,
  which operate in retirement, and in common
  intercourse, and the multitude of local
  peculiarities, which form our distinctive
  features upon the many peopled earth, have very
  seldom been happily exhibited in our literature"

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The Limitation of Coopers Work

• The weaknesses of Cooper is obvious, which is his
  female characters, since they lack variety, and
  are generally sappy and flat.
• All his fictional works reflect the didactic
  concern to educate about democracy in a
  oppressively schoolmasterish method, but his
  characters are often richly developed, and
  recognized as a remarkable gallery of American
  types, with richness, depth, and complexity
  unsurpassed in American fiction before Hawthorne
  and Melville.

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Photo Gallery

• Top James Fenimore Cooper
• Middle Natty Bumppos Cave
• Bottom Lake Otsego Scenery

• Photo Credits http//www.ub-unibielefield.de/digl
  ib/KarlMay/cooper/

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Discussion Questions (1)

• Several scenes in The Pioneers reflect
  specifically Cooper's portrayal of Natty
  Bumppo as a American frontiersman. Name some of
  them in Chapter 3.
• Natty is portrayed as the literary bridge between
  the "old world" and the dawning of American
  possibility. His interactions in the woods and in
  civilization make him a vestige of the natural
  man that Cooper admires, trapped in the changing
  world that Cooper bemoans. Is there a similar
  situation we face in the present as readers?

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Discussion Questions (2)

• The story of Natty Bumppo is linked to Natty
  Bumppo the Indian, representing him with two
  identities. In Taiwan, could it be possible that
  our indigenous people today also face the same
  conflict?
• Cooper mentioned that "In point of civilization,
  comforts, and character, the Indians, who remain
  near the coasts, are about on a level with the
  lowest classes of European peasantry. Perhaps
  they are somewhat below the English, but I think
  . . . they are much below the condition of the
  mass of the slaves. How does this view
  affect Coopers portrayal of the story?

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Landscape in The Pioneers

• In this novel, Cooper debates the complexity of
  landscape within a new American frontier.
• Nature replaces history within American culture
  and Cooper evaluates his landscape as one that
  will be established by a civilization unable to
  escape its own traits of wastefulness and
  arrogance.

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Landscape in The Pioneers (2)

• Cooper foreshadows the settlers' inability to
  conceive the power, life, and autonomy of nature
  because they feel it cannot truly exist without
  their influence.
• In Chapter III, Natty Bumppo emerges as the
  antithesis of the wastefulness demonstrated by
  the settlers. He struggles to understand how
  abusive the Sheriff and Billy Kirby are when they
  slaughter pigeons just for sport.

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Otsego in The Pioneers

• Otsego was included in a county of Albany, and
  then became a part of Montgomery after the war
  was finally set apart as a county after 1783,
  which lies among Alleghanies, covering the
  midland counties of New York.
• Otsego is said to be a word compounded of Ot, a
  place of meeting, and Sego, or Sago, the term of
  salutation used by the Indians of this region.

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Otsego in The Pioneers (2)

• There is a tradition that says the neighboring
  tribes were accustomed to meet on the banks of
  the lake to make treaties, to strengthen
  alliances, and which refers the name to this
  practice.
• In 1779 an expedition was sent against the
  hostile Indians, who dwelt about a hundred miles
  west of Otsego, with the troops proceeded to the
  other extremity of the lake, where they
  disembarked and encamped.

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References

• James Fenimore Cooper Biography
  http//www2.bc.edu/wallacej/jfc/jfcbio.html
• Fenimore's Natty Bumppo http//xroads.virginia.edu
  /UG02/COOPER/bumppo.html
• Landscape in The Pioneers http//xroads.virginia.e
  du/UG02/COOPER/landscape.html
• The Pioneers--Cooper's Introduction to the Novel
  http//xroads.virginia.edu/UG02/COOPER/chapters.h
  tml
• Critical and Popular Response http//xroads.virgin
  ia.edu/UG02/COOPER/response.html
• Natty as Indian http//xroads.virginia.edu/UG02/
  COOPER/indian.html
• Natty as Frontiersman http//xroads.virginia.edu/
  UG02/COOPER/frontiersman.html