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James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), like Irving, evoked a sense of the past and gave it a local habitation and a name. In Cooper, though, one finds the powerful myth of a golden age and the poignancy of its loss. While Irving and other American writers before and after him, toured Europe in search of its legends, castles, and great themes, Cooper grasped the essential myth of America: that it was timeless, like the wilderness. American history was a trespass on the eternal. European history in America was a reenactment of the fall in the Garden of Eden. The cyclical realm of nature was glimpsed only in the act of destroying it. The wilderness disappeared in front of American eyes, vanishing like a mirage before the oncoming pioneers. This is Cooper’s basic tragic vision of the ironic destruction of the vast stretches wilderness. The new Eden that had attracted the colonists in the first place.
Personal experience enabled Cooper to write vividly of the transformation of the wilderness and of other subjects such as the sea and the clash of peoples from different cultures. Being the son of a Quaker family, he grew up on his father’s remote estate at Ostego Lake (now Cooperstown) in central New York State. Although this area was relatively peaceful during Cooper’s boyhood, it had once been the scene of an Indian massacre. Young Fenimore Cooper grew up in an almost feudal environment. His father, Judge Cooper, was a landowner and spent his life with Indians at Otsego Lake as a boy. In later life, bold white settlers intruded on his land. Natty Bumppo, Cooper’s renowned literary character, embodies his vision of the frontiersman as a gentleman, a Jeffersonian “natural aristocrat.” Early in 1823, in The Pioneers, Cooper had begun to discover Bumppo. Natty is the first famous frontiersman in American literature and the literary forerunner of countless cowboy and backwoods heroes. He is the idealized, upright individualist who is better than the society he protects. Poor and isolated, yet pure, he is a touchstone for ethical values and foresees Herman Melville’s Billy Budd and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
Based in part on the real life of American pioneer Daniel Boone who was a Quaker like Cooper Natty Bumppo, an outstanding woodsman like Boone, was a peaceful man adopted by an Indian tribe. Both Boone and the fictional Bumppo loved nature and freedom. Bumppo loved nature and freedom. They constantly kept moving towards west to escape the oncoming settlers they had guided into the wilderness. In their own lifetimes, they became legends. Natty is also chaste, high-minded, and deeply spiritual: he is the Christian knight of medieval romances transposed to the virgin forest and rocky soil of America. The unifying thread of the five novels collectively known as the “Leather-Stocking Tales” is the life of Natty Bumppo, author’s finest achievement. They constitute a vast prose epic with the North American continent as setting, Indian tribes as characters, and eastward and westward migration as social background. The novels bring to life the frontier America from 1740 to 1804.
Cooper’s novels portray the successive waves of the frontier settlement: the original wilderness inhabited by Indians, the arrival of the first whites as scouts, soldiers, traders, and frontiersmen; the coming of the poor, rough settler families; and the final arrival of the middle class, bringing the first professionals - the judge, the physician, and the banker. Each incoming wave displaced the earlier: Whites displaced the Indians, who retreated to westward; the “civilized” middle classes who built schools, churches, and jails, and displaced the lower-class individualistic frontier folk, who moved further west, in turn displacing the Indians who act preceded them. Cooper evokes the endless, inevitable wave of settlers, seeing not only the gains but also the losses.
Cooper’s novels reveal a deep tension between the lone individual and society, nature and culture, spirituality and organized religion. In his writing, the natural world and the Indian is fundamentally good as it is the highly civilized realm associated with his most cultured characters. The intermediate characters are often suspect, especially greedy, poor white settlers who are too uneducated or unrefined to appreciate nature or culture. Like Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster, Herman Melville, and other sensitive observers of widely varied cultures interacting with each other, Cooper was a cultural relativist. He understood that no culture had a monopoly on virtue or refinement. By whole heart, he accepted the American condition while Irving did not. Irving addressed the American setting as a European might have - by importing and adapting European legends, culture, and history. Cooper took the process a step further. He created American settings and new, distinctively American characters and themes. He was the first to sound the recurring tragic note in American fiction.
The development of the self became a major theme. Self-awareness, a primary method. According to Romantic theory, self and nature were one, self-awareness was not a selfish dead end but a mode of knowledge opening up the universe. If one’s self were one with all humanity, then the individual had a moral duty to reform social inequalities and relieve human suffering. The idea of self - which suggested selfishness to earlier generations was once again clearly redefined. New compound words with positive meanings emerged: “self-realization”, “self-expression,” “self reliance”. As the unique, subjective self became important, so did the realm of psychology. Exceptional artistic effects and techniques were gradually developed to evoke heightened psychological states. The “sublime” - an effect of beauty in grandeur (for example, a view from a mountaintop) - produced feelings of awe, reverence, vastness, and a power beyond human comprehension. Romanticism as a movement was affirmative and appropriate for most American poets and creative essayists. America’s vast mountains, deserts, and tropics embodied the sublime.
The Romantic spirit seemed particularly suited to the American democracy: It stressed individualism, affirmed the value of the common person, and looked to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values. Certainly the New England Transcendentalists - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and their associates -were inspired to a new optimistic affirmation by the Romantic movement. In New England, the Romanticism fell upon the fertile soil.