It seems as though Cooper's attitudes towards history and natural history may be indirectly related to colonial attitudes towards Indians....
While, as Andrew has pointed out, Cooper doesn't get too bent out of shape about the lack of picturesque "mouldering" artifacts, when she does find them, they are not meant to give pause or evoke sublime wonder on the past (as they might in Romantic poetry, say) but to illustrate the birth of history in the New World. After discussing the only tradition the Indians have left in the "neighborhood" leaving no other "mark her, on hill or dale, lake or stream," she moves to
"something more positive; from the dark ages we come to the dawn of history. On the bank of the river are found the ruins of a bridge, the first made at this point by the white man. Among the mountain streams of the Old World are many high, narrow, arches of stone, built more than a thousand years since, still standing to-day in different stages of picturesque decay. Our ruins are more rude than those" (114).
Even if a bit self-conscious about America's lack of picturesque ruins comparable to the Old World's, Cooper doesn't hesitate to suggest that Indians are without history--the bridge, though rude, is remarkable in the sense that it is the first sign of "real" history.
In the section in which Cooper reflects on the "ruins" of the forest [125-35] it seems as though she is not endowing them with history, as she conceives of it above (though her reflections on the "slow" deep-time sort of growth of trees is probably indebted both to the discourses of natural history and Romanticism). Rather her emphases on "unnumbered seasons" and "unrecorded time" (127) produce a sublime that works dialectically with her own prosaic method of recording her neighborhoods history down to the daily temp, and, more importantly, with her collapsing of the distance between the natural and the cultural "other". Here's an example:
"These hills, and the valleys at their feet, lay for untold centuries one vast forest; unumbered seasons, ages of unrecorded time passed away while they made part of the boundless wilderness of woods....The whole land lay slumbering in the twilight of the forest. Wild dreams made up its half-conscious existence. The hungry cry of the beast of prey, or the fierce deed of savage man, whoop and dance, triumph and torture, broke in fitful bursts upon the deep silence, and then died away, leaving the breath of life to rise and fall with the passing winds" (127).
Cooper's forest, frequently (seemingly) anthropomorphized as a "tribe" is not the sort that, in itself, has the consciousness necessary for history proper. And while the forest in its "strangely slow" growth and decay is imagined as existing in a slumber, it surpasses the growth of the "savage man" whose actions become a "dream" reduced to a "deep silence," in a passage that seems to mystify the disappearance of Native American tribes as part of a speechless, sublime, natural process. While the reverence Cooper has towards the unconscious but boundless forest informs her attitudes towards a more responsible land stewardship, the same reverence seems bound up in an unconscious cultural violence.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
You make a good point, Chris, and one that would be worth making of talk about "American ruins" in the 19th C. generally. European emigrants were greatly ignorant, whether consciously or not, of the Native American ruins around them.
ReplyDeleteBut Cooper is not wholly unaware of the "cultural violence" that occurred before and during her own time. Just before the passages you've singled out, she discusses the Native American presence near Cooperstown in some detail. Strangely, she tends to relate the Native Americans she describes to the "Old World" -- the women speak with a "soft Italian sound," and one "full-blooded Indian" (109) has a face that is "decidedly Roman" (110) Why is Cooper connecting Native Americans to idealized, Roman types?
She goes on to deal explicitly with the effect that the arrival of "civilization" (i.e. modern emigrants) has had on the Native population. It has not been all positive, despite her later claim of the "more positive [...] dawn of history" she sees in the ruins of the "white man." The advent of white civilization in North America has upset the old (also idealized) order, and left many Native Americans struggling to adjust to new ways of living. While Cooper lays most of the blame for this struggle on the Native Americans, who seem to her to lack the will or effort to conform to white civilization's expectations, she makes an interesting statement at the end of her discussion: "such is only the common course of things; a savage race is almost invariably corrupted rather than improved by its earliest contact with a civilized people; they suffer from the vices of civilization before they learn justly to comprehend its merits" (112).
This statement is strange for a number of reasons -- one might wonder, for example, what precedents she is drawing on to claim this as the "common course of things" -- but it also seems to call up her earlier discussion of weeds. Many of the widespread, unwanted plants Cooper calls weeds "have come unbidden to us, with the grains and grasses of the Old World, the evil with the good, as usual in this world of probation."
These weeds "are known to attach themselves especially to the path of man" and "patient care and toil can alone keep the evil within bounds" (66). "Briers and brambles seem to acquire double strength in the neighborhood of man," she observes; "we meet them in the primitive ["uncivilized"?] forest, here and there, but they line our roads and fences, and the woods are no sooner felled to make ready for cultivation ["civilization"?], than they spring up in profusion, the first natural produce of the soil" (67). Admittedly, Cooper sees the end of this "cultivation" (and "civilization") as a greater good than the original state of things (see her praise of the "sweet-briar," the "husbandman's blossom," immediately following). Nevertheless, she is not blind to the wounds and weeds incurred in the breach of civilization onto the "natural" landscape. She may not value the idealized past of the forest or the bygone Native American way of life as much as the "blessing" of "cultivated" and "civilized" life brought to New York by her emigrant ancestors, but she does recognize some amount of "violence" and loss in the exchange.
A fascinating discussion. The parallel Cooper insinuates between Native Americans and ancient tribes--and also between the exotic Chinese with their interest and craftsmanship and the Oneida--is a colonialist stereotype. Some colonists imagined Indians as living in a primitive state similar to their own ancestors, for example the Picts, Gauls, and Britons; others who wanted to elevate them--like Jefferson--felt that comparisons with the Romans (another vanished civilization) were mor adequate. There was even a Cheyenne chief--in the 1860s, I think--who was called "Roman nose." William Bartram, in his travels in 1791, insisted that the indigenous civilizations of America were as ancient as those of Europe.
ReplyDeleteSo where does this leave us with regard to Rural Hours? I think especially her portrayal of the unredeemably savage Native American men again serves to highlight something that Rural Hours--as a journal--is really about: the importance of the present moment. Human history and natural history both fade away in the moment of contemplation, which Cooper rehearses again and again. The "long" history of the forests really becomes history only when viewed through a human lens. If it weren't for human intervention, nature would go on renewing itself, in seasonal cycles that--as I argue in my now-discredited essay on Cooper--are only superficially sequences of different periods of time and in reality just assert that the more things change the more they remain the same.