Perhaps more than any other American writer of the nineteenth century, James Fenimore Cooper has been associated with the rejection of the domestic fiction of the European bourgeoisie. One particularly obvious symptom of this critical profile is the uneasy position of Cooper's first novel, Precaution (1820), in his oeuvre. A novel of courtship and manners on the order of Jane Austen's fiction, Precaution is treated, when mentioned at all, as a literary failure, “forgiven and forgotten,” as Robert Darnell has put it. In his discussion of Precaution in Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler even tellingly confused the novel's title with that of Austen's Persuasion. But there is an ironic way in which Precaution does establish Cooper's place in literary history as presently understood, for this first novel sometimes stands in as the sign of everything Cooper's mature work would irrevocably displace in establishing the masculine character of the American novel. Indeed, Fiedler describes the first novel as a kind of experiment in literary transvestism: “Cooper began his career imitating an English gentlewoman entertaining and edifying her peers. It is disconcerting to find him impersonating a female.” Against the backdrop of this early authorial persona, Fiedler celebrates Cooper's artistic maturation as part and parcel of the masculinization of the novel. Cooper's turn to the frontier romance with The Pioneers (1823) represents his final refusal of literary drag in a “self-conscious attempt to redeem fiction at once for respectability and masculinity.”

According to the dominant literary critical tradition, the designation “domestic frontier romance” presents a contradiction in terms. Most accounts of American literary history proceed on the assumption that the cultural impulse behind the frontier romance opposes that responsible for domestic fiction. Deliberately shaking off the conventions associated with the homebound novels of European middle-class women, American frontier fiction tells the story of racial warfare set on the line between settlement and wilderness. Gender and genre coalesce here in a familiar manner. The heart of the frontier romance is a masculine hero, neither genteel nor marriageable, who flees the settlement for the freedom of the “virgin land.” Indeed, its story is often told as if the frontier novel itself were one of Mark Twain's late-nineteenth century boy-heroes, turning its back on “sivilization” to “light out for the Territory.” As Leslie Fiedler tells us, the genre veered from “society to nature or nightmare” in order to “avoid the facts of wooing, marriage, and child-bearing” and the entire realm of the “chafing and restrictive” woman-centered home. Where Fiedler seems to celebrate the genre, Richard Slotkin and Philip Fisher, by contrast, have generated powerful critiques of the culture of racialized violence to which this literature contributed.

“LETTERS TO HIS COUNTRYMEN”: SLAVERY IN COOPER'S POLITICAL WRITINGS

This chapter revisits an old question in Cooper criticism: what did his just-so stories of racial conflict in the colonial past have to say about the most pressing political issues of his own time? By reading Cooper's first Leatherstocking novel, The Pioneers (1823), alongside some of his properly political writing from the 1820s and 1830s, I demonstrate how a fictional narrative about the past could offer a narrative solution to the contemporary crisis of slavery during a period when political discourse, including his own political writing, was curiously unable to do so. Viewed against the historical backdrop I laid out at the beginning of the previous chapter, in which the debate over slavery became periodically focused on the propriety of discussing it in national political forums, frontier fiction was aided in this endeavor by its thematic distance from slavery as such. At the same time, however, Cooper is able in The Pioneers to take up complex questions of entitlement and ownership within the confines of narrative fiction. In a manner that recalls the movements between the “Indian” and the “black” in Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, the frontier novel was thus endowed, at the moment of its birth as a genre, with the ability to think the relationship between these two figures of dispossession and the relevance of physical and characterological differences in accounting for both.

In the chapters above, I have been concerned with tracing the formation of a racialist common sense in American culture, and in particular with exploring the role of a particular strand of literary culture in this process. As a result, some readers may find it frustrating how little I have focused on the forms of resistance to, or critique of, this dominant position – a situation perhaps exacerbated by my emphasis on how some of the putatively “progressive” literary works themselves helped to produce a distinct and entrenched form of racialism characterized by the discourse of benevolence and sympathy. If I have thus represented a stifling kind of unanimity on the question of race, it is only because I have been at pains to explain in explicit detail the pervasive power of a dominant ideology. Having said that, there were of course many sites and types of resistance to dominant racial ideology in nineteenth-century America.

The previous chapters have explored the idea that one cannot fully understand the racial ideology that blossomed in the 1850s without thinking about the way the frontier romances of Cooper, Child and Sedgwick helped to reshape contemporary ideas about racial difference. By turning now to Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, I want to suggest the ways in which frontier romance provided a narrative paradigm for her fictional treatment of slavery. While frontier romances focused their explorations of race on the opposition between the Anglo-American and the Indian, I have argued, they spoke eloquently to the subject of slavery. Without ever addressing the subject explicitly, frontier fiction engaged its central issues by means of a spatial and temporal narrative displacement. This foundational genre reflected on the causes of contemporary racial conflict by retrojecting it into the colonial past and locating it, not in the interior of the nation, but on the edges of the settlement.

In arguing that frontier novels supplied Stowe with a narrative paradigm, I do not mean to suggest that Stowe simply eliminated this structure of narrative displacement and wrote a novel of slavery in precisely the same terms. For to do so would have raised the specter of slave insurrection and “race war” – a figure that haunted the discourse about slavery during the first half of the nineteenth century, and a particularly menacing historical prospect after the Nat Turner rebellion of 1831.