Susan Fenimore Cooper's American Ruins

It was a commonplace, among many early American writers, extending as far into the 19th Century as Henry James, to lament the lack of ancient history in America, something that was considered a necessary subject or atmosphere for the creation of literary art. Hawthorne's preface to The Marble Faun (1859) is representative: "No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust, before romance writers may find congenial and easily handled themes, either in the annals of our stalwart republic, or in any characteristic and probable events of our individual lives. Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wallflowers, need ruin to make them grow."

Susan Fenimore Cooper, though, is filled with none of this anxiety. "The forest lands of America," she writes, "[...] abound in ruins of their own" (128). True, Cooper does not find in these "forest lands" any "annals" of human civilization, and she doesn't appear to be as interested as Hawthorne in the specific formal requirements of "romance and poetry." Nevertheless, she has no problem finding material to write about. There may not be evidence of human history in the "ruins" she sees in the forest, but the trees have a history of their own. Cooper writes of "broken limbs and dead bodies of great trees" that are found throughout the forest, some "still clad in [their] armor." The forest is the site for a kind of natural drama, where young trees are ever growing amongst the old, and where chance storms and unpredictable winds always threaten to upset the current order. Cooper explores the natural landscape around her and finds just the right kind of environment to spark the imagination.

At the end of her reflection on the forest ruins, she notes that, "amid this wild confusion," there are traces of human life: "the track of wheels, a rude road [...], or the mark of the axe" (129). Within the ancient history of the forest, Cooper also finds the more recent history of human life, which has a story of its own. She unites the two histories (i.e., natural and human) by observing that the trees "freely and richly [...] contribut[e] to the wants of our race." In this case, it seems Nature is subordinate and subservient to human endeavor. But it is worth pointing out that the human story is dependant on the natural. The two are not in opposition, as they so often are in American writing and imagination. Moreover, while Cooper anthropomorphizes nature to some extent (trees as bodies, bark as armor, etc.), the long history of the forest is, for her, an interesting story worth telling -- more interesting in her reflections, at least, than the story of the "rude road" or the "mark of the axe." If the American imagination is stifled by an environment that has a relative lack of history, Cooper has no trouble finding a rich past in the forest to meditate on. If good writing requires ruins, she seems to be saying, these natural ruins can be easily found.