Consciousness and Social Order: The Theme of Transcendence In The Leatherstocking Tales

H E N R Y NASH S M I T H University of California, Berkeley Consciousness and Social Order: The Theme of Transcendence In The Leatherstocking Tales i The West in American history has always implied movement, an advance outward from a familiar environment toward an un­ certain destination beyond the frontier. This pattern of images has entered into our national sense of identity. As Frederick Jackson Turner asserted in his famous frontier hypothesis: “. . . American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its con­ tinuous recession, and the advance of American settlement west­ ward, explain American development.” Although the emphasis on free land invokes a kind of economic determinism, the most important outcome of the processes described by Turner is an intellectual and psychological change. To say that the Great West is the area of free land is to present it as a place where a man may hope to cast off burdens and constraints, where he can enter upon a new and happier life. It is a mythical realm. “American social development,” continued Turner, “has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.” The wilderness “masters the colonist,” and the result is “a new product that is American.”1 Later he wrote: “European men, institutions, and ideas were lodged in the American wilderness, and this great American West took them to her bosom, [and] taught them a new way of looking upon the destiny of the common man . . .”2 George R. Taylor, ed., The Turner Thesis Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History, rev. ed., Boston, 1956, pp. 1-2. 2Tumer Thesis, p. 32. This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Western Literature Association at Sun Valley, Idaho, October 9, 1970. 178 Western American Literature When the pioneer undergoes a ritual death and rebirth, and acquires a new mother, he transcends his past circumstances and even his own former identity. Turner’s interpretation makes all American history a constantly renewed process of transcendence, resulting in the continual production of New Men, democrats, Westerners. Two recent works of literary criticism have shown what varied forms this belief has assumed and to what an extent it has permeated American culture. Edwin Fussell, in Frontier: American Literature and the American West (1965), traces frontier imagery in the work of six major nineteenth-century writers. Leslie Fiedler’s The Return of the Vanishing American (1968), in developing the thesis that a “New Western” has appeared as a fictional genre during the past decade, invokes a long historical background for the myth of the West. I wish to draw upon the insights of these critics in discussing the earliest fully developed example of the Western, Cooper’s Leatherstocking series. II Mr. Fussell schematizes Turner’s Americanizing process into a basic metaphor involving three entities: civilization; the frontier of settlement at its outer edge; and the wilderness beyond (some­ times perceived as nature, sometimes as the domain of savagery). The frontier metaphor is dynamic; it presupposes a stream of migration constantly moving westward, so that what was wilderness develops toward civilization and at the same time civilization is modified by contact with the trans-frontier wilderness. Mr. Fussell maintains that the pattern of the metaphor could be disengaged from the historical circumstances of its origin and stripped down to the process of “reconciling opposites through interpenetration and transcendence.”3 In this fashion he identifies Western imagery in a surprising range of literary texts. The archetypal protagonist of the Westward movement is Cooper’s Natty Bumppo. When this character makes his first appearance in The Pioneers (1823) he is a crude and even slightly ridiculous old man living in a cabin on the outskirts of the town of Templeton that Judge Marmaduke Temple has founded on the New York frontier. But the novelist began almost at once to dis­ cover imaginative substance in his venerable woodsman, and he 8Frontier: American Literature and the American...