Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Ecology of Reading

I would like to begin with a footnote, one that occurs close to the end of Susan Fenimore Cooper’s amazing, unclassifiable book Rural Hours (1850). “We are none of us very knowing about the birds in this country,” writes Cooper, “unless it be those scientific gentlemen who have devoted their attention especially to such subjects” (330). The same is true, she claims, when it comes to “our native trees and plants” and “to our butterflies and insects.” Hence the need for her book: a painstaking, detailed, attentive account of the changes wrought by the passage of the seasons on the author’s own immediate environment in Cooperstown, NY, a place named, but no longer owned, by her family.

In her footnote, Cooper claims that Americans, as a rule, do not pay much attention to the natural world around them. The situation is markedly different in Europe, where a basic interest in such “simple matters,” to use Cooper’s phrase, can be taken for granted. But American ignorance, deplorable as it is, also has its advantages, at least when you are a writer. “Had works of this kind been as common in America as they are in England,” Cooper admits, “the volume now in the reader’s hands” would never have been published. Rural Hours, as she sees it, is her “rustic primer,” a book intended to awaken the reader’s interest in nature, in hopes of sending her on to other, more advanced works. Sweeping generalizations (“none of us” really knows anything about American nature) give way to self-disparagement, as happens so often in writings by nineteenth-century women gripped by the anxiety of authorship (see Wolosky). Her book is, claims Cooper, nothing but “chit-chat” and “common-place.” She ends deferentially by praising the two male authors who have guided her as she was working on Rural Hours, James Ellsworth De Kay, author of Zoology of New York (1843–1844), and the garden designer and horticulturalist Andrew Jackson Downing.

But Cooper is being intentionally disingenuous here. There are several obvious problems with her self-characterization. To name just one: why pack all this information away into a footnote? Cooper is giving us the raison d’être of her book here, a statement that seems pertinent enough to appear right in her preface, next to the sentence in which she makes “no claim whatever to scientific knowledge” (3). It seems richly ironical that Cooper should assert her own lack of academic knowledge in a footnote, the epitome of the very kind of discourse she pretends to be unequal to. But maybe that is exactly what she intended: to indicate to her audience that this is a book in which things are not what they seem. Rural Hours is, in a word, a complex primer. American literary history began in the instructional mode, with the famous Massachusetts Bay Primer, which began, chillingly, with the following rhyme, supposed to help young Puritan children memorize the letter A: “In Adams Fall / We sinned all.”

Cooper’s Rural Hours offers lighter fare, and its target audience was not unsuspecting children but American adults. And the world around them is no longer the “howling wilderness” shudderingly perceived by William Bradford but the hills of New York State, becoming “more bare every day” (132), offering no refuge for wild animals, such as the bear, the beaver, and the otter. Worried about what she calls her fellow citizens’ “careless indifference” to such developments (134), Cooper conceives of Rural Hours as her antidote, an attempt to make American readers appreciate what is left of the wilderness, as if teaching them how to read carefully (or ecologically, within the terms I am proposing here) would then lead to a renewed sense of care for ourselves and the environment. For Cooper, this also means questioning familiar narratives — such as the seasonal cycle — so that we regain our appreciation of the strangeness of the world that we share with other beings.

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Cooper’s “rustic primer” does not look much like your average textbook, even by nineteenth-century standards. The four chapters, “Spring, “Summer,” “Autumn,” and “Winter...