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Chapter Six  Body Size and the Body Politic In chapter 1 of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie (1827), a historical romance centered on social and political problems arising from the Louisiana Purchase, the Bush clan—a family of westward-moving squatters portrayed so as to evoke the nomadic families of the Old Testament patriarchs—comes face to face with a “spectacle as sudden as it was unexpected .”1 When it appears, Cooper has already established the prairie as a landscape that plays tricks on the eye: “the eye became fatigued with the sameness and chilling dreariness of the landscape” and “the low stands of the spectators exaggerated distances.” Still, the reader shares the family’s surprise when, as they travel across “long, and seemingly interminable tracts of territory,” a mysterious ‹gure looms out of the West: The sun had fallen below the crest of the nearest wave of the Prairie, leaving the usual rich and glowing train on its track. In the centre of this ›ood of ‹ery light a human form appeared, drawn against the gilded background, as distinctly and seemingly as palpable, as though it would come within the grasp of any extended hand. The ‹gure was colossal; the attitude musing and melancholy, and the situation directly in the route of the travellers. But embedded, as it was, in its setting of garish light, it was impossible to distinguish its just proportions or true character.2 The scene powerfully dramatizes the problems presented by annexation of territory.3 The “rich and glowing train on its track,” though ostensibly referring to the light of the sun as it sets, also suggests locomotives headed West: technology and progress conquering geographical space. Yet this 102 vision of glowing progress is hardly an idyllic scene; the terms “›ood” and “‹ery light” give the episode apocalyptic overtones. That the ‹gure seems “as though it would come within the grasp of any extended hand” is Cooper’s way of representing the distorted sense of distance and depth perception the prairie induces. But the image of the extended grasping hand also symbolizes American imperialism, the larger movement behind the Bushes’ encounter with the mysterious ‹gure on the prairie. The most important aspect of the ‹gure, however, is its “colossal” size. The family’s inability to determine Natty Bumppo’s “just proportions or true character” suggests that, in Cooper’s mind, the Louisiana Purchase presented Americans with a set of formidable problems to be solved. The ‹rst few pages of The Prairie make it clear that by 1827 the risky “purchase of the empty empire” has ended well in Cooper’s opinion: the land has been settled by “a race long trained in adventure and nurtured in dif‹culties” and, though the “more af›uent” residents of French Louisiana resisted amalgamation, the “more humble population . . . was almost immediately swallowed in the vortex which attended the tide of instant emigration.”4 Furthermore, a new state has already emerged from the territory and been “received into the bosom of the national Union, on terms of political equality .”5 In other words, two of the central problems arising from annexation have been solved: how to neutralize the negative effects of supposedly inferior racial stock, and how to incorporate the new territory and its settlers into the United States as a political entity. By 1854, however, when Thoreau published Walden, questions about how to deal with geographical space, what kind of grid to impose on new territory, were once again on the public mind more powerfully than ever before. The Compromise of 1850 merely intensi‹ed fears by attempting to resolve the same questions posed by annexation in a manner that everyone recognized as completely unsatisfactory. In the “Winter Animals” chapter of Walden, Thoreau dramatizes the risks inherent in large-scale annexation of territory in a passage intriguingly similar to Cooper’s description of the Bush family’s ‹rst encounter with Natty Bumppo: When I crossed Flint’s Pond, after it was covered with snow, though I had paddled about and skated over it, it was so unexpectedly wide and so strange that I could think of nothing but Baf‹n’s Bay. . . . and the ‹shermen , at an indeterminable distance over the ice, moving slowly about with their wol‹sh dogs, passed for sealers or Esquimaux or in misty weather loomed like fabulous creatures, and I did not know whether they were giants or pygmies. (180–81) Body Size and the Body Politic 103 [18.218.38.125] Project...

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