"Smothered in Bookish Knowledge": Literacy and Epistemology in The Leatherstocking Tales

American Progress. John Gast. Oil on canvas, 1872. Courtesy of Museum of the American West collection, Autry National Center. JOSHUA J. MASTERS "Smothered in Bookish Knowledge": Literacy and Epistemology in The Leatherstocking Tales Books are, in a great measure, the instruments of controlling the opinions of a nation like ours. They are an engine, alike powerful to save or to destroy. James Fenimore Cooper, Precaution (1821) In John Cast's 1872 lithograph American Progress, a loosely robed female figure hovers over the frontier divide, holding a massive book to her not-quite-exposed bosom, with the words "Common School" written on its cover. Wielding a school book rather than a Bible, the mythic figure is simultaneously secularized and sexualized, a phantasmagoric schoolmarm transporting the nation's grammar and vocabulary into soon-to-be-conquered lands. To the east, under a sunlit sky, we see emblematic frontier types—trappers, miners, homesteaders, and cowboys—moving westward, as cultivated fields, train tracks, fences, and telegraph lines spring up in their wake. To the west, and seeming to flee from the female figure who all but ignores their presence, we see various symbols of "wilderness" and "savagery": terrified Indians, bears, wolves, a herd of buffalo, all cast in ominous shadows beneath a darkened sky, falling off the edge of the canvas and into oblivion. In effect, the scene evokes the visual logic of Manifest Destiny, as light conquers dark and culture displaces nature from right to left and East to West. As a patriotic portrait of national expansion, American Progress reveals some of the book's primary allegorical values as a cultural icon, signifying the ordering of nature's chaos, the dawn of history, and the inauguration of a new linguistic order in the West. Tb borrow a phrase from Arizona Quarterly Volume 61 , Number 4, Winter 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-161 o 2 Joshua]. Masters Herman Melville's Mardi, the book symbolizes "the march of Mind" (552) across the continent, and together with the telegraph wires the mythic figure unfurls behind her, Gast's iconography tells the story of the advance ofprint culture and the dissemination ofnew technologies throughout the nation. However, when the symbol of the book appears in written rather than visual representations of the West, it becomes an extraordinarily flexible motif capable of conveying multiple, often incongruous, symbolic values.1 Nowhere in early American fiction is the book a more contested or conflicted symbol than in James Fenimore Cooper's frontier epic, The Leatherstocking Tales ( 1823-41 ).2 With their self-conscious emphasis on the ambiguities of literacy, language, law, and historiography in the expanding nation, the five novels present the book as a densely ironic, ambivalent symbol. In the hands ofCooper's benevolent patriarchs, stalwart military officers, and refined gentlewomen, books do, in fact, signify "the march of mind" across the continent and encapsulate the sovereign will of the people. However, when they are wielded by the array of demagogues, bureaucrats, con artists, and crackpots that inhabit The Tales, books stand for the spread of a corrosive representational order alienating the people from nature's moral law. As Cooper would remind his readers throughout his career, books are singularly powerful social mechanisms, endowed with the potential "to save or to destroy" {Precaution 216) depending on their content, context, and audience. At the heart ofCooper's conflicted vision ofAmerican expansion is his archetypal Western hero, Natty Bumppo, a figure who disdains the "book l'arning" of the lawyer and bureaucrat but still aids an educated class ofgentlefolk with their trials in the wilderness. It is my contention that Natty's emphatic illiteracy reveals Cooper's ambivalence about the nation's emergence as a republic of letters and anticipates the visionary tendencies in American Romanticism, a movement profoundly shaped by Cooper's influence. In the Sentimental tradition, books symbolize the edifying effects of white cultural knowledge and the pacification of both the unruly child and the "wild" Indian. However, within the Romantic tradition, books stand between the self and the natural world, interrupting and mediating the experience of the Sublime. The Romantic imagination aches for the immanent knowledge of nature known only to the "untutored...