Pursuing “the Unhappiest Idea Possible” in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales

It is the unhappiest idea possible, to suppose that politics can be associated, in any effective way, with romance or fiction.

—The Knickerbocker, August 1835

When James Fenimore Cooper published The Pathfinder in 1840, the New York Review was jubilant: “We hail the reappearance of Mr. Cooper in his old and true sphere, with deeper regret than ever that he should so long have been unfaithful to his proper vocation” (Rev. of The Pathfinder 479). It wasn’t that Cooper had been unproductive in the 1830s but that he had abandoned “his proper vocation” of writing historical fiction, so often set on the sea and on the frontier, to hazard his reputation on a variety of genres imbued with social and political commentary. In this regard, what marked the “true work of genius” in the author’s “reappearance” in The Pathfinder was actually his disappearance. In the new book, continued the reviewer, “our pleasure is marred by scarcely a false feeling and disgusting self-obtrusion of his two or three last productions; on the contrary, the person of the author is lost in his works,” which is to say that as long as Cooper is not detected in his fiction he stands a chance of winning approval (480). Rather than tolerating the “disgusting self-obtrusion” of the author’s more overtly critical publications, the reviewer prefers his virtual self-negation.

The sentiment so forcefully expressed in the New York Review was not new to Cooper in 1840, for he had faced similar charges in the 1830s when he published his European novels, travel books, and other nonfiction. In 1835, for instance, the Knickerbocker deemed his political satire, The Monikins, clear evidence that “an evil genius [had] prompted him to shoot from his sphere” (Rev. of The Monikins 152). Defiling “the sturdy American feelings” and the “love of country” he had so masterfully engendered in his old “sphere” of historical fiction, Cooper was turning against his countrymen to rouse “social and political strife” with the vile “pugnacious spirit” he had acquired during his extended travel in Europe (152–53).

To the New York Review Cooper’s “reappearance” in The Pathfinder hinged not only on authorial self-removal but also on the “inimitable” presence of Natty Bumppo, who after thirteen years in the grave was resuscitated in the “absolute identity of person” that “nobody but he could be” (480). To the delight of the Review, The Pathfinder demonstrated the author’s ability to remove his polemical self from his writings for the purpose of recreating “a personage more vividly and truly real … than nineteen twentieths of the living men of flesh and blood” (480). Presenting Bumppo so “clearly and freshly” in the pages of The Pathfinder signified that the ruckus swirling around Cooper’s writings in the 1830s had had no effect on him when he finally decided to exhume Natty Bumppo for his readers in 1840. His pen no longer obstructed by intrusive politics, Cooper had reset himself in his proper sphere, ostensibly conceding the advice the Knickerbocker had offered five years earlier: “It is the unhappiest idea possible, to suppose that politics can be associated, in any effective way, with romance or fiction” (152).

To what degree Cooper pursued “the unhappiest idea possible” by infusing politics, explicitly or implicitly, into his thirty-two novels remains a lively issue in Cooper studies. Relevant to this review are recent critical inquiries into the political dimensions of Cooper’s five Leather-Stocking Tales and the animated discussion they have generated about the author’s presence, and absence, in the viewpoints expressed by his famous frontiersman and the...