"The Ordering of God's Providence": Law and Landscape in The Pioneers

"THE ORDERING OF GOD'S PROVIDENCE": LAW AND LANDSCAPE IN THE PIONEERS Peter Valenti* While concern with natural landscape characterizes much American literature written before 1830, little attention has been devoted to the examination of landscape as a structural concept or as contributory to aesthetic order. American writers adopted many of the aesthetic categories first popularized by the eighteenth-century British taste for natural scenery, although critical consideration has not shown very clearly how the landscape, and the imaginative response to beholding that landscape, can determine linguistic structure, novelistic theme, and narrative progression. That landscape can furnish a structural or thematic principle is apparent in such documents as Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer and Bartram's Travels in North and South Carolina; perhaps less obvious upon first consideration , though not less crucial, is the importance of landscape as structural device in James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking saga, and particularly in The Pioneers. As Cooper introduced Nathaniel Bumppo to the public in 1823, he also introduced the tragic despoiling of the beautifully promising American landscape as a necessary concomitant to the progress of national civilization. The deep problems which arise from the encroachment of civilization upon the wilderness are embodied in the conflicts between the unwritten codes of woodsmanship and hunting ritual on the one hand and the man-made laws drafted for a frontier society on the other. With the beautiful Hudson River Valley as a backdrop, Cooper presents the violent clash of Leatherstocking's tenets of natural order with Judge Temple's belief in strictly enforced rules. In so doing the novelist shows how the actual physical movement across the North American interior away from the eastern seaboard affects tremendous physical change upon the landscape sacred to Leatherstocking and his blood brother Chingachgook. In Britain and on the continent, the term "picturesque" had been firmly established by 1780 as a method for viewing and evaluating natural scenery against aesthetic norms derived from Burke's categories of sublime and beautiful as well as from *Peter Valenti is an Assistant Professor of English at Fayetteville State University. He has published in the CLA Journal and The Journal of Popular Film and is working on a book on the picturesque. 192Peter Valenti actual experience with affecting examples of natural scenery.1 The Pioneers develops response to affective natural scenes as a frame upon which the key situations in the novel are constructed, as an indicator of moral character, and as demarcation of conflicting lifestyles.2 Picturesque elements characterize this response and demonstrate graphically the tension between the two orders of law. The term "picturesque" has surely been used with as wide lexical variation as any word.3 Beyond its most rudimentary definition as "that which pleases in a picture," picturesque suggests a definite category of aesthetic description.4 While American enthusiasm for this aesthetic category lasted at least until William Cullen Bryant's Picturesque America in 1874, the picturesque had been codified in England almost a hundred years earlier. Both William Gilpin and Uvedale Price defined the picturesque in aesthetic essays, though one must seriously question to what extent these conscious critical dicta defined a term already in wide use. Gilpin distinguishes picturesque from beautiful by stressing variety and roughness as characteristic of the former; this art seeks atmospheric qualities which would meld rough multiplicity into a pleasing verbal or visual artifact.5 Price builds upon Gilpin's theories to characterize roughness as the quality which "conveys . . . irritation, but at the same time . . . animation, spirit, and variety."8 Roughness offers an alternative to the smooth and pleasing symmetry of the beautiful, but these aesthetic treatises of Gilpin and Price do not tell the entire picturesque story: for the real popularity of the picturesque school lay not in codified dicta but rather in the tours made to spots of great natural beauty. Versified and more routine prose accounts of travelers' experiences in the British Lake District, Scotland, Canada, or upstate New York obviously satisfied a deep craving which transcended mere curiosity about distant places.7 Perhaps the most prominent feature of such tours is the sense of excitement at beholding an aesthetically pleasing scene in nature; the traveler hopes that the...