The Mingling of Races: A Mediating Gift?

Cooper's "novel displays the American dream turning into the nightmare to which we still awaken" (Weidman, 18).

James Fenimore Cooper might have become a writer, or novelist, on a whim, but he was a “stranger” and therefore quite the paradox inherently and emotionally. Born into the ideal “American Dream” that his father, William Cooper, symbolized and implicitly created, James was constantly conflicted politically and morally by his naturalistic beliefs and a late desire to fill his father’s large American shoes.

William Cooper recalled in his Guide in the Wilderness: “I found fault with their fences… I had nothing better to do than to conform; and am every day more convinced, that wherever men’s minds are uncontrolled they will in a short time discover what is for their interest better than strangers can instruct them.” W. Cooper founded Cooperstown, New York, he was elected first Judge of the Court of the Common Pleas, he served two terms in Congress, and he developed an extremely wealthy estate. J. F. Cooper found himself in a dark shadow to which he proclaimed that “one fact is beyond dispute, I am not with my own country – the void between us is immense,” perhaps alluding to the difference between him and his father as well as that between him and his nation.

The gaping oppositional forces around him are, for J.F. Cooper, morally unanchored and through his words he is able to piece together an irreparable history while both standing for the pre-colonial past intertwined with the natural law of the wilderness and the inevitability of civilized men’s egotistically driven conquest. In his novels, his desire to resolve his conflicting situation manifests in the union of Cora and Uncas, symbolizing the melting of cultures and the “mingling of races.”

J.F Cooper struggled in public attention becoming much disliked because of his texts and every attempt to follow in his father’s path was defeated. He tried to repair his reputation, but it was too little too late. He says in the last years of his life in reflection of public abuse, “Bodies of men are proverbially heartless. They commit injustice without reflection, and vindicate their abuses without remorse. He who is crushed by the masses themselves must look beyond the limits of his early being for consolation and support. The wrongs committed by democracies are of the most cruel character.”

Regardless of this scrutiny, he considered himself a historian with an obligation to record truth. His novels reflect a deeper personal truth in which “Natty is portrayed [-] as a man whose choices have aligned him with those who are to be exterminated. The mediating position of one who cherishes ‘white man’s gifts’ and the red men’s style of life is futureless”



Works Cited

Weidman, Bette S., “White Men’s Red Man: A Penitential Reading of Four American Novels” Modern Language Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn, 1974) pp. 14-26.
Zoellner, Robert H., “Fenimore Cooper: Alienated American” American Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring, 1961) pp. 55-66.