Cooper’s Problematic Pilot: “Unrighteous Ambition” in a Patriotic Cause
- Cooper’s Problematic Pilot: “Unrighteous Ambition” in a Patriotic Cause
Donald Darnell is professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has published a book on William Hickling Prescott and articles on Prescott, Cooper and Hawthorne in American Literature, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, American Transcendental Quarterly, South Atlantic Bulletin and Studies in American Fiction. He ıs currently completing a book on Cooper as a novelist of manners.
Notes
1. James Fenimore Cooper, The Redskins, Mohawk Edition (New York, 1896), 86–87. Hereafter, all citations from The Redskins will be to this edition.
2. James Fenimore Cooper, The Pilot (Albany, SUNY, 1986), 415. Hereafter, all citations from The Pilot will be to this edition.
3. Several critics have commented on Jones’s motivation: John P. McWilliams, Jr. writes “Whether Cooper’s treatment of John Paul Jones is an act of deliberate debunking or uneasy praise is difficult to assess” (67). He concludes that Cooper is “unwittingly expressing his own divided feelings concerning the integrity of the revolutionary hero” (71). H. Daniel Peck notes “The Pilot’s deep and ineradicable flaw is willful pride; he is motivated not by selfless idealism but by ‘wild ambition’” (25). Kay Seymour House sees Jones as the “most purely Byronic of Cooper’s naval commanders,” a man obsessed with securing fame. “His motivation is that of the mercenary except that Jones asks to be paid in glory” (190–191).
4. Cooper introduces a further complication in the manners theme when Alice condemns Jones’s using his knowledge of the local waters to pilot the American warships. Although her disapproval stems from her unthinking loyalty to the king, she appears also to reflect Cooper’s uneasiness about Jones’s role, an uneasiness clearly evident in his subsequent commentary on the incident fifteen years later. In his History of the Navy of the United States (1837), Cooper examines the historical Jones’s conduct in the raid on St. Mary’s, the incident upon which the raid in The Pilot is based. He notes that the raid itself was justified by British attacks on the American coast and that personal vilification of Jones by the British press “weakened any remains of national attachment that he may formerly have entertained.” It is the ambiguous clause introducing the justification, however, that tips Cooper’s hand: “Whatever may be thought of the conduct of Captain Jones, in turning a local knowledge acquired in his youth, in the manner mentioned, to such an account …” (172).
Cooper apparently thought that under certain conditions, piloting like spying, is not the act of a gentleman.
5. James Fenimore Cooper, The Spy, Mohawk Edition (New York, 1896), 423–424. Hereafter, all citations from The Spy will be to this edition..
6. Samuel Eliot Morison notes that “Only when Congress made it clear that it had no use for him did Jones seek service under the French and Russian flag” (411).
Works cited
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