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Chapter 2 James Fenimore Cooper, American Canon Formation, and American Literature’s Erasure of Environmental Anxiety During the early 1840s, Horace Greeley was one of Emerson’s most important supporters. He made sure that positive reviews of Emerson’s work appeared regularly in his New Yorker and New York Tribune, effectively keeping Emerson’s name in circulation even before he seemed to deserve the publicity. During the same period, though, Greeley was at odds with James Fenimore Cooper. In 1842, in fact, he lost a libel suit (with a judgment of two hundred dollars) that Cooper had brought against him.1 Emerson’s interactions with Greeley moved him toward national fame and recognition; Cooper’s interactions with the man, though providing a brief and satisfying legal victory, amounted to one episode in an entire decade of controversy that badly damaged his standing with the American public. Cooper had embroiled himself in a host of libel suits beginning in 1837 (one year after Emerson published Nature) after the press attacked him for his role in the Three Mile Point controversy in Cooperstown (in which Cooper forbade public use of a popular tract of land that he owned). The last libel suit was not settled until 1843, just one year before Cooper adopted another unpopular stance by defending the landholders in the 1844 New York anti-rent agitation. From 1837 until the middle of the nineteenth century, then, Emerson’s reputation took flight as Cooper’s crumbled. While Emerson received the consistent support of the press even before he could maintain himself through book sales and lecturing, Cooper and the press were openly hostile to each other. Of course, the points of divergence between Emerson and Cooper extend far beyond their relationships with Greeley and the press. In their own writings, these two authors developed different relationships to the natural world that reflected the differences in their relationships with female intellectuals and female audiences. In literary criticism, Emerson 37 38 Environmental Evasion became a part of American literature’s origin story while Cooper came to live a shadowy half-life as part of what Van Wyck Brooks would describe as the nearly unreadable primordial soup that preceded the beginning of a legitimate national literature in the United States. In his most enduring body of work, the five novels of the Leatherstocking series, published between 1823 and 1841, James Fenimore Cooper articulates a relationship with the natural world that is fundamentally at odds with Emerson’s environmental vision. Rather than treating the natural world as the type of abstract, illimitable, and indestructible space that it becomes in Emerson’s Nature, Cooper insists that nature in North America is a fundamentally political, physical, and limited space. He argues that the United States is expanding into a limited environment, that its dominant capitalist culture is environmentally ruinous and unsustainable, that the continent has always already been a contested space rather than a virgin void, and that language and science are mechanisms of a Euro-American imperialism that was much more complex than the squatters, squires, and outcasts that populate his romances. Cooper damaged himself with his libel suits and with his stance on the rent wars, and it did not help that he continued to hold his family’s federalist sympathies as the nation turned toward Jeffersonian and then Jacksonian democratic politics. For all of this, though, Cooper endured as a commercially successful and completely readable voice who maintained a transnationalist perspective in the face of American nationalism and artistic nativism until he became an example of all that was wrong with American literature for the authors and critics who shaped the twentieth century’s modernist aesthetic—beginning with Mark Twain. Removing Cooper from History and Delegitimizing His Environmental Politics Mark Twain’s 1895 essay, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences,” was a harbinger of the even sharper decline Cooper’s reputation would undergo in the early twentieth century. In the snarky, sometimes vicious, mode that we expect from Twain, the essay mocks Cooper’s style and suggests that his “English [is] a crime against the language,” but it also marks a shift away from the historically and politically focused literature that dominated the literary scene of the nineteenth century.2 The critical assault on Cooper would become a sustained phenomenon several years later, largely at Harvard where George Santayana exerted his influence upon students such as Van Wyck Brooks and T. S. Eliot, and it would continue through the main line of American...

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