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“Man and Beast”: The Meaning of Cooper's The Prairie

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

William L. Vance
William L. Vance*
Affiliation:
Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts
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Abstract

The language, action, setting, and characterization of The Prairie cohere around the idea of man as one species of animal among many. On one level, man is a hunter, dominating the other beasts upon whom he is dependent for food and clothing. On another level, man is a scientist, subjecting the beasts to study, classification, and control. On a third level, the novel observes man as an animal of ambiguous identity. The various groups of characters exemplify differing varieties of humanity. The barbaric Indians and the angelic Inez are opposing extremes in dehumanizing characterization. Ellen and Paul display the conflicting demands of feeling, reason, and conscience on the typical middle ground of human nature. In the most dramatic aspect of the romance, the Bush family is forced by pressure of extraordinary circumstance from a brutal, lawless existence into a troubled consciousness of human guilt, justice, and mortality. Finally, in the aged and dying Leather-Stocking is represented a rare example of a fully human life achieved at the most primitive remove from mere animality.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 2 , March 1974 , pp. 323 - 331
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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References

Note 1 in page 330 The Prairie, in the “Darley” edition of Cooper's Novels (New York: Townsend, 1859–61), pp. 245–52. Subsequent references are to this edition.

Note 2 in page 330 The Prairie is usually discussed as one of the chapters in the “Leather-Stocking Saga” or as illustrating a thesis about American fiction in general. Neither context encourages critical observation of the book's self-sufficient unity and distinguishing characteristics. Two essays that have successfully respected its integrity and individuality are Donald A. Ringe's “Man and Nature in Cooper's The Prairie” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 15(1961), 313–23, and Jesse Bier's “Lapsarians on The Prairie: Cooper's Novel,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 4 (1962), 49–57. My own thesis differs from Ringe's and Bier's without seriously contradicting them: their essential points are comprehended by mine. Cooper's use of animal imagery for purposes of characterization in The Prairie has been noted by Joel Porte, The Romance in America (Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 44–45.

Note 3 in page 330 Susan Fenimore Cooper, in James Fenimore Cooper (grandson), The Legends and Traditions of a Northern County (New York: Putnam, 1921), p. 217 (italics added). Also see her “Introduction” to The Prairie (Boston: Houghton, 1876), p. xii.

Note 4 in page 330 In his Histoire naturelle (Paris, 1749–1804), Buffon avoided a “linear” arrangement conjoining man to the ape. If Cooper read Buffon, it was probably in one of the English versions, either William Wood's New Edition in 20 vols, of William Smellie's standard translation (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1812), or in the 2-vol. abridgment as The System of Natural History, trans. Morison (Edinburgh: Ruthven, 1800). Subsequent references are to Smellie-Wood, but the quotation here is from Morison, i, 73, since it contains a verbal parallel (the use of the word “gifts” in the sense in which Cooper characteristically has Natty use it). Cf. Smellie-Wood, iv, 171–72.

Note 5 in page 330 On breeding, see Susan Fenimore Cooper, “A Glance Backward,” Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1887, p. 199, and The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. James F. Beard (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), i, 23–24, 36–38.

Note 6 in page 330 A compilation of Cooper references evincing his interest in science in general is Harry Hayden Clark's 2-part article, “Fenimore Cooper and Science,” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy, 48 (1959), 170–204, and 49 (1960), 249–82.

Note 7 in page 330 SesLetters, I, 372, and Susan Cooper in Legends, p. 215.

Note 8 in page 330 Cf., e.g., Battius' description of his Vespertilio (pp. 85–86) with the first two items listed in Ch. ix, Sec. i, of the Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains. . . . under the Command of Major Stephen H. Long, comp. Edwin James, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1823). The most complete study of Cooper's sources is that by E. Soteris Muszynska-Wallace, “The Sources of The Prairie,” American Literature, 21 (1941), 191–200.

Note 9 in page 331 John T. Flanagan, “The Authenticity of Cooper's The Prairie,” Modern Language Quarterly, 2 (1941), 104.

Note 10 in page 331 See C. S. Duncan, “The Scientist as a Comic Type,” Modern Philology, 14 (1916), 284–87.

Note 11 in page 331 See Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, 1965), p. 278.

Note 12 in page 331 Systerna Naturae, from Turton's 1806 trans, of the last—1788—edition, i, 3.

Note 13 in page 331 In Battius' defense it may be pointed out that the name is anachronistically based on Ursus horribilis (the grizzly bear), so named by George Ord in 1815 in the security of his study, using descriptions of encounters by Lewis and Clark. See Raymond Darwin Burroughs. The Natural History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1961), pp. vii, 57–58. Cooper would have seen the name in the prominent note in James, ii, 52–57.

Note 14 in page 331 See Buffon, “Of the Degeneration of Animals,” iv, 1–57. See also his remark (vi, 270): “Man is totally a production of heaven: but the animals . . . are creatures of the earth only … the model of their form is not unalterable.” See Charles Singer, History of Biology, rev. ed. (New York: H. Schuman, 1951), pp. 288–95, and Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, The Design of Life: Major Themes in the Development of Biological Thought (New York: Pantheon, 1967), pp. 41, 103–04.

Note 15 in page 331 William Paley, Natural Theology, 8th ed. (London: R. Faulder, 1804), pp. 152–53. Battius cites Paley as an authority (on a different point): see n. 19, below.

Note 16 in page 331 On the authenticity of the figures of speech in Indian orations and their predominant use of animal metaphor for human characteristics, see John T. Frederick, “Cooper's Eloquent Indians,” PMLA, 71 (1956), 1004–17.

Note 17 in page 331 Paley, p. 447. The necessity of angels is discussed by A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950), pp. 189–95.

Note 18 in page 331 William Wasserstrom, “The Origins of Culture: Cooper and Freud,” The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, ed. W. Meunsterberger and Sidney Axelrod, 1 (1960), 277. The internal quotation is from The Prairie, p. 186.

Note 19 in page 331 Basil Willey, Eighteenth-Century Background (London: Chatto & Windus, 1940), pp. 84–94, discusses Joseph Butler, “Three Sermons on Human Nature,” as representative of this position. Paley, whom Battius cites, is mentioned by Willey on p. 85 as a contrasting moralist.

Note 20 in page 331 See Wasserstrom, esp. p. 279.

Note 21 in page 331 See Robert H. Zoellner, “Conceptual Ambivalence in Cooper's Leather-Stocking,” American Literature, 31 (1960), 397–420. In emphasizing Natty's “infantilism,” Zoellner compares him with Hetty Hunter of The Deer-slayer, Billy Budd, and Hawthorne's Donatello. It is pertinent here that these are among the characters cited by Edwin Fussell in discussing the “frontier” between “human beings and animals”: Frontier: American Literature and the American West (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 63–64 and 117–19.

Note 22 in page 331 The traits subsequently noted are those mentioned by René Dubos, So Human an Animal (New York : Scribners, 1968), pp. 35–36 and Urless Lanham, Origins of Modern Biology (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 23–29.'