Uzbekistan state university of world languages

1.2. James Fenimore Cooper: Indians and Antiquity in the Leatherstocking Tales of the 1820s
The author of the early decades of the nineteenth century who frequently described Native Americans in his works is, of course, James Fenimore Cooper. The author returned again and again to the subject, and he relatively frequently evokes Antiquity in his descriptions of Indians, notably in his famous series of romances collectively known as the Leatherstocking Tales, which includes “The Pioneers”, or “The Sources of the Susquehanna”; “A Descriptive Tale” (1823), “The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757” (1826), “The Prairie”; “A Tale” (1827), “The Pathfinders” or, “The Inland Sea” (1840) and “The Deerslayer” or, “The First War-Path” (1841). In a similar fashion to the works of Irving considered above, there is a fairly large gap within this grouping. And, to a certain extent, once again, there is a reduction in the romanticizing of Indians over time, also reflected in a diminishing use of comparisons between Native Americans and Antiquity, though this development is not fully linear.
While a detailed analysis of these five relatively long romances is beyond the scope of this study, I will try to characterize Cooper’s use of references to the Ancient World in order to clarify how the author employed them in offering, in most cases, positive images of Indians. Before beginning, however, it would be well to recall that Cooper’s Indians, somewhat like Irving’s in his works of the 1830s, tend to fall into one of two categories: good ones and bad ones. In general, the Delawares (or Mohegans or Mohicans), exemplified by the central Indian hero, Chingachgook, and his son, Uncas, are romanticized and portrayed in an extremely positive light, while, as John T. Frederick somewhat humorously points out, “the Iroquois, or Mingoes, as he called them following Heckewelder, are—as every boy used to know—the bad Indians in Cooper”.
Chingachgook appears for the first time in chapter VII of “The Pioneers”, though he is not a major character in that work. Cooper nonetheless notes, as the Indian is first introduced, that “His forehead, when it could be seen, appeared lofty, broad, and noble. His nose was high, and of the kind called Roman”. Several speeches by Chingachgook are also described in the romance, including a moving oration made as he dies in chapter XXXVI. Cooper makes an effort, both in this work and throughout the series, to put what are clearly intended as noble-sounding words into the mouths of his Indian characters, however successful or unsuccessful these attempts might be. Indeed, at least since 1895, when Mark Twain skewered him in his essay, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” the author’s reputation for dialogue and speech has not exactly been of the highest order. But if Twain declared that one of the “rules governing literary art” violated by Cooper was that “when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances”, Cooper’s portrayal of speech, and specifically his portrayal of the words of Indians, does have its defenders. John T. Frederick, after making a thorough study of the author’s sources, asserts, for example:
Cooper did not, then, indulge his imagination freely and irresponsibly in putting figurative language into the mouths of his Indian characters. Still less did he float passively in the current of European literary tradition or imitate the language of English Romantic writers. Instead he followed diligently and consistently—faithful always to the spirit and usually to the letter—the most trustworthy firsthand accounts of actual Indian speech which the literature of the time afforded.
He concludes: “The recurring charge that Cooper idealized and falsified his red men in this respect—that their eloquence was the product of his own imagination, or the effect of trans-Atlantic literary influence—is contrary to the facts”. Frederick, however, only claims to prove that Cooper was true to his sources on Indian speech, not necessarily to Indian speech as it actually existed either in the first decades of the nineteenth century or in the earlier periods portrayed in the Leatherstocking Tales. And the debate continues, as Lawrence Rosen Wald, for his part, in more or less agreement with Twain, indicts Cooper for impoverishing Indian language in his representations of it. For Rosen Wald, “Cooper makes Native American languages fascinating; but he also makes them something less than European languages and their speakers less than adult members of a complex culture”
In any case, when Cooper wrote the second book in the series, The Last of the Mohicans, no doubt the most famous of the five, he placed Indians, notably Chingachgook and his son, Uncas, at the heart of the action. In this book, Indians, and the entire work as a whole, in fact, are associated with Antiquity in various ways. And the author was also thinking seriously about Indian language again regardless of how accurate his notions of it were as the introduction to the work makes clear. Chingachgook’s language is described as “earnest”; and, early on in the work, the Indian briefly recounts the first meeting between his tribe and white men, “with a solemnity that served to heighten its appearance of truth”. Even a “bad” Indian, like Magua, a Huron, is described as “speaking with the dignity of an Indian chief,” using “those significant gestures with which an Indian always illustrates his eloquence” (591). In the mouth of a hostile Indian, however, this famed eloquence becomes dangerous. At one point, Magua is seen “gliding among his countrymen” like a snake “and speaking with his fatal and artful eloquence”. These various examples already suggest that, unlike Irving, Cooper’s portrayal of Indians was ambiguous from the very start. Later still in “The Last of the Mohicans”, Hawk-eye, who was raised amongst the Delawares, “assumed the manner of an Indian, and adopted all of the arts of native eloquence”. This last example shows how some authors, like Cooper, no doubt influenced consciously or subconsciously by cultural nationalism, not only appropriated the Indian as a worthy subject for the new country’s literature, but also attributed certain supposedly admirable qualities of Native Americans to selected members of the white population, thus helping to create, strengthen and celebrate distinctive national traits that contrasted with those of Europeans.
Recurring amidst all of this Indian eloquence are several references to Antiquity, lending legitimacy and sublimity to this very American story. Indeed, when Chingachgook’s son, Uncas, first appears, he is seen by Alice, who is being escorted to Fort William Henry, where her father is commander, as “some precious relic of the Grecian chisel” (529), thus offering another comparison to statuary—once again an image that is dignified, but not suggestive of life. Also, like in Irving’s “Traits of Indian Character,” Cooper makes reference to the great respect that Indians have for the “manes” of their friends and relatives, using that term which recalls Antiquity four times in the book. And even the Huron Magua, portrayed as an incarnation of evil, seems, for a while, to be able to escape every attempt on his life, “with that sort of fabled protection, that was made to overlook the fortunes of favoured heroes in the legends of ancient poetry”. Linking the story to ancient statuary, literature and history, however, as should be clear by now, also has the ironic effect of both “elevating” the Indians and, at the same time, emphasizing the imaginary, and indeed “vanishing”, “vanished” aspect of these same subjects. Finally, another method Cooper employs to suggest a tie with Antiquity in “The Last of the Mohicans”, thus giving his entire work the prestigious aura of the great stories of the Ancient World, is through some of the epigraphs he places at the head of each chapter. These quotations include excerpts from Thomas Gray’s “Agrippina”, “A Tragedy”, Alexander Pope’s translation of “The Iliad” and William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”. From the point of view of cultural nationalism, these examples also include a significant ironic dimension, since in order to legitimize an American story, they make an implicit appeal not only to the classical world and its literature, but, since only British authors, in fact, are directly cited, also to the prestige of the literature of the very country the United States had only recently broken away from and whose culture it was the most urgently trying to distance itself from.
Cooper’s third romance in the Leatherstocking series, “The Prairie”, is actually the last from the point of view of the chronological progression of the central character and is set in the early nineteenth century. Chingachgook is already dead before the romance begins, but there are a host of Indians who nonetheless make their appearance in the work. Paralleling Cooper’s division in the earlier novels between the Delaware Indians, on the one hand, and the Iroquois (and Huron), on the other, in this work the Pawnee are generally portrayed in a positive light, while the Sioux are described as “demons,” “miscreants” and “reptiles”. The Pawnee leader Hard-Heart is described as furnishing “some idea of the personal appearance of a whole race,” and Cooper asserts that, “Would the truant eyes of Alston or Greenough turn, but for a time, from their gaze at the models of antiquity to contemplate this wronged and humbled people, little would be left for such inferior artists as ourselves to delineate”. Of Hard-Heart himself, Cooper writes: “The outlines of his lineaments were strikingly noble, and nearly approaching to Roman, though the secondary features of his face were slightly marked with the well-known traces of his Asiatic origin”. Here, in fact, Cooper seems to want to have his Indian both ways: “elevated” through an association with Antiquity and “savage” through a reminder of his “Asiatic origin.” As previously remarked, this dual nature can be seen as embracing a Romantic view that values the “uncivilized” appeal of “primitive” peoples. In “The Prairie”, too, there are frequent examples of Indian oratory, and though most of them are placed in the mouths of the hostile Sioux, oratory’s sacred place in Indian culture is nonetheless recognized. One example of a speech given by Hard-Heart, however, offers a subtle, and indeed complex, link with the Ancient World. The young chief’s address is not only delivered “in the usual, metaphorical language of an Indian,” but it is noted that he began “by alluding to the antiquity and renown of his own nation”. It thus has the eloquence of a classical oration; it’s very subject matter touches on the concept of “antiquity,” with the polysemous nature of the word continuing the link between Indians and the Ancient World; and the mention of the word “nation,” with its own ambiguity, creates a parallel between the Indian and American peoples—both of whom were concerned with the futures of their nations—completing the circle, so to speak, and thus “raising” not only the Indians, but the United States as well, to the level of Ancient Greece and Rome, a fundamental aspiration, in fact, of the cultural nationalists.
There is a thirteen-year gap between the publication of “The Prairie” and the next work in the Leatherstocking series, “The Pathfinder”, which takes the reader to a period of time between the events described in “The Last of the Mohicans” and “The Prairie”. There are very few references to Antiquity in this work. Arrowhead, however, a Tuscarora who serves as a guide for Charles Cap and Mabel Dunham, is described as “one of those noble-looking warriors that were often met with among the aborigines of this continent a century since”, though he turns out to be a traitor. And when Davy Muir, a quartermaster who himself betrays the British, tries to convince Mabel to surrender to Arrowhead, he makes the claim that the Indian reminds him of “a Roman, or a Spartan, by his virtues and moderation,” but that he could also prove dangerous since he may feel the need “to appease the manes of fallen foes”. These references, of course, create a certain tension in their association with a hostile Indian and a traitorous British soldier, but they do continue the link between Indians and Antiquity. In fact, they may be seen as highlighting once again just how ambiguous the strategy of associating Indians with the Ancient World can be. As already noted, if such links can “elevate” the Indian, they can also highlight his “savageness” as a member of a “primitive” people.
The last work in the series is “The Deerslayer”, which is also the first one chronologically in the lives of Leather-stocking and Chingachgook. It describes events that take place just before those presented in “The Last of the Mohicans”, as the tensions leading up to King George’s War (the third of the French and Indian wars, known in Europe as the War of Austrian Succession) are beginning. The hostile Indians in this story are the Hurons, who have not only sided with the French, but have also kidnapped Chingachgook’s betrothed. Indeed, as the Delaware works out his plan to recover his wife-to-be, there is a reference to Antiquity in his description as “an Apollo of the wilderness”. While on the surface this association is no doubt another effort to “elevate” the Indian, it may also be viewed as a further example of the ambiguity of many of the characterizations of Native Americans as figures of Antiquity since, as Marcel Detienne has shown, Apollo displayed traits of excessive and vengeful violence in addition, for example, to being recognized as a god of music and poetry and an embodiment of order, knowledge and harmony. Furthermore, the deliberate melding of the American and the Indian through the use of comparisons with Antiquity can also be seen in this romance when Deerslayer makes a desperate effort to escape from the Hurons “that would have rendered a Roman illustrious throughout time”. Here, as seen in previous examples, a reference to Antiquity serves to link Indians and white Americans, creating a web of associations whose primary goal is to culturally “elevate” them both. Later in the romance, one of the Hurons is said to be “the model of a naked and beautiful statue of agility and strength”, and even the fading light of day, over the lake, casts “a glow that bore some faint resemblance to the warm tints of an Italian or Grecian sunset” —but it is Chingachgook, once again, who is cast into the role of a hero of Antiquity when, as Leather-stocking leaves to keep his pledge of honor to surrender himself to the Hurons, the Delaware draws “the light blanket he wore over his head, as a Roman would conceal his grief in his robes”. Finally, when Chingachgook makes his dramatic attempt to save Leather-stocking, he is clothed in “his war dress, which scarcely left him more drapery than an antique statue”. The final work also includes several references to Native American oratory. And if none of these examples are explicitly linked to Antiquity, it should be clear by now that the connection between the two is implicit throughout Cooper’s works—and American writings of the early nineteenth century more generally. As was the case with Irving, Cooper had more of a propensity to romanticize Indians, notably through comparisons with various aspects of the Ancient World, in his earlier works than in his later ones. But he nonetheless made use of that association, in varying degrees, throughout the entire Leatherstocking series.