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How did James Fenimore Cooper portray the American wilderness in the Leatherstocking Tales?
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American literature
Map of Virginia from John Smith's The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles, 1624.
In the Leatherstocking Tales, James Fenimore Cooper portrays the American wilderness as a central, evolving symbol of moral and cultural conflict. His depiction shifts between two primary perspectives:12
- God’s Wilderness: Through the protagonist Natty Bumppo, the wilderness is presented as an untainted, sacred space. Bumppo views the land with reverence, standing in opposition to the "march of progress" and the desire to tame or cultivate the frontier.12
- Romanticized Ideal: While The Pioneers offers a detailed, realistic portrait of frontier life, Cooper’s later novels in the series retreat from this realism. He increasingly portrays the wilderness in an idyllic, romanticized fashion, often using imagery and rhetoric reminiscent of James Macpherson’s Ossian to elevate the setting and its inhabitants.2
Ultimately, Cooper frames the wilderness as a "vanishing" entity. By identifying Natty Bumppo with this fading landscape, he creates an elegiac tone, depicting the scout as a figure hauntingly loyal to a doomed way of life. This tension between the wild and the encroaching "cultivated garden" of civilization serves as the foundational moral drama of the series.123