SOURCE: Faherty, Duncan. “The Borderers of Civilization: Susan Fenimore Cooper's View of American Development.” In Susan Fenimore Cooper: New Essays on Rural Hours and Other Works, edited by Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson, pp. 109-26. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Faherty illustrates Cooper's advocacy of landscape and emerging New World culture as primary influences upon American architectural development through a discussion of Rural Hours and “A Dissolving View.”]

Within her best-known work, Rural Hours (1850), and in an important but long-neglected essay “A Dissolving View” (1852), Susan Cooper calls for the development of uniquely American cultural forms reflective of the nation's democratic doctrines. Intimately linked to this appeal was her description of nature as essential nourishment for the national imagination. Implicit in her argument was a second call: for the necessity of preserving this resource. By becoming familiar with their native environment, Americans would locate foundations for institutions in harmony with the landscape around them. As part of a broad-based cultural movement away from the commodification of nature that was a hallmark of the Jacksonian era, Susan Cooper charged Americans to stop imitating European cultural models, urging her generation to form a new national identity grounded in American nature.¹ Within these two texts, which need to be considered in tandem to appreciate fully her conception of American development, she argued that the absence of inherited architectural forms liberated Americans from the obstacles that faced their contemporaries in the Old World. European social development was subject to the constraints imposed by previous architectural productions. While Americans had not yet devised cultural forms to embody their democratic values, they had also not irrevocably altered their environment in ways that would prohibit them from so doing.

Susan Cooper firmly believed that cultural values were products of the combination of material culture (the entire shaped human environment) and the landscapes in and upon which it was fashioned. Petitioning Americans to pause before making further mistakes, she contemplates the delusory effects on American social development if the nation fails to rectify its current architectural practices.² She proposes the scrutiny of new building plans prior to construction, for “[t]here is a certain fitness in some styles of architecture which adapts them to different climates” (Rural Hours, 297). By obscuring the natural negotiation between man and his specific environment, architectural failures threaten the stability of the culture. She teases out meaning on a local level, confining her examination to Cooperstown to illustrate her vision of national amelioration. Susan Cooper transforms Cooperstown into a “city upon a hill” to construct a jeremiad that decries current cultural practice, arguing that it mirrors much of the nation in economic and social progress at midcentury: “The growth of the inland region, to which our valley belongs, will prove, in most respects, a good example of the state of the country generally. The advance of this county has always been steady and healthful; things have never been pushed forward with the unnatural and exhausting impetus of speculation.” Being spared the “unnatural” consequences of rampant speculation because of its geographical position, the environment of Cooperstown was shaped by the “industry of [its] population” and thus had grown “steadily and gradually” (Rural Hours, 318).³

As a post-Revolutionary War settlement largely unaltered by the rampant upheaval of Jacksonian commodification, Cooperstown reflected the social conditions of many rural American settlements. By recording its natural history, Susan Cooper hoped to teach others to respect the demands of the environment so that they might optimally arrange the human presence. Fashioned as a seasonal journal of observations of nature, Rural Hours catalogs the attempts of individuals in Cooperstown to shape and utilize their environment. The wealth of data collected in Rural Hours functions as source material for her more pointed arguments in “A Dissolving View.”

In the “Autumn” section of Rural Hours, Susan Cooper considers the impact of the American wilderness on the writing of natural history. She describes a process of cross-pollination through which Europeans reconceived their environment in light of a new respect for American scenery, asserting that “all descriptive writing, on natural objects, is now much less vague and general than it was formerly; it has become very much more definite and accurate within the last half-century.” Cooper notes the popularity of landscape painting and the propensity for a “natural style in gardening” as possible causes of this transition. But, she contends, social patterns are rarely altered by discrete factors: “It is seldom, however, that a great change in public taste or opinion is produced by a single direct cause only; there are generally many lesser collateral causes working together, aiding and strengthening each other meanwhile, ere decided results are produced” (Rural Hours, 208). Cooper's caveat forestalls reading cultural trends reductively, revealing her deep concern with tracing the complexity of alterations in social attitudes. Furthermore, it underscores her concern with how “causes” combine to produce change.

Susan Cooper employed the languages of both natural history and social refinement to interrogate the current state of her society. The question of American social maturation was intrinsically tied to natural history for Susan Cooper: she perceived that the Republic's social structures had grown out of the management of its natural resources. Cooper's nuanced understanding of the “collateral causes” that collectively shape “public taste” exhibits her attempt to refine various disparate narratives in circulation. In Rural Hours and “A Dissolving View,” she promulgated the notion that American cultural behavior, both in practice and planning, ought to take into account and somehow represent America's environmental uniqueness. Familiar as she was with nineteenth-century natural histories, her own work deploys these source texts, and ideas derived from them, to deliberate about America's social, architectural, and cultural practices.

Susan Cooper's refusal to admit a “single direct cause” as responsible for cultural transformations reminds us that for most of her contemporaries the embrace of nature as model for culture was not intended to transcend their material lives but to complement them. Cooper's conception of nature and the patterns nature offered represents a paradigm shift in the way natural history writing was understood in the early nineteenth century. This shift emancipated treatments of American nature from the confines of eighteenth-century European descriptions of New World nature. Liberated from the restraints of such residual practice, Susan Cooper demanded that Americans, in order to define themselves, turn toward nature rather than continue to reject its primacy.

Susan Cooper's connections with her locale were deeply rooted; she understood that the natural environment and social development of Cooperstown were tied directly to her familial history. Susan Cooper was the third Cooper to describe the natural environment of central New York State, following both her grandfather Judge William Cooper and her father, the novelist James Fenimore Cooper.⁴ The views expressed by these three authors, writing of the same region over a forty-year period (1810-50), document significant shifts in the history of American attitudes toward nature. William Cooper held a primarily utilitarian vision of wilderness: writing to attract Europeans contemplating immigration, he described the economic possibilities of New York State. James modified his father's vision by questioning his predecessor's interaction with nature, while simultaneously claiming the American wilderness as a setting for the historical romance. Susan Cooper infused her writing with a scientific consciousness absent in her forefathers' writings. Thus the movement from William to Susan Cooper mirrors developments in American natural history writing while also suggesting the great depth of her intellectual rootedness in her region.

By the mid-nineteenth century, when Susan launched her career as a writer, Americans—at least those who lived in New York—were no longer burdened either with fashioning a civilization out of wilderness or with validating their enterprise to a skeptical European audience. For the first post-Revolutionary generation of American writers, including Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, and Washington Irving, the wilderness offered a fictive realm where they might rehearse the tensions that the formation of a national identity evoked. Empowered by developments in natural history and by the successful literary foundations of their predecessors, midcentury American authors employed nature toward very different ends. For this later generation of writers, nature was not an uncultured realm but an arena unfettered by the constraints of dogma. Freed from the need to defend American art, Susan Cooper figured nature not as a symbolic trope but as an element that evinced social life.

Born in 1813, Susan Cooper came of age in an America very different from that of her father. A mythic reinterpretation of the War of 1812 created a heretofore unknown sense of national cohesion that rapidly supplanted, in the popular imagination, the fact that the conflict had come perilously close to dissolving the union.⁵ After weathering several challenging collapses and panics, the American economy had, by the 1840s, largely stabilized, transforming the nation from an economically stratified society to one with capital held predominantly by an emergent middle class.⁶ Popular iconography figured America as the nation of the future, and youth and possibility became central themes of the new American narrative. Moving beyond an earlier tendency to measure American achievement against European models, Susan Cooper grounds her consideration of national identity in the determining role of the natural environment.

Throughout the 1830s and 1840s efforts to locate the sources of national identity were manifested in a broad-based interrogation of the institutions of the Republic and their effects in forming post-Revolutionary subjectivities.⁷ Beginning in the 1830s, America witnessed a massive increase in the publication of advice manuals and conduct guides.⁸ Coupled with this trend was an increased attention to domestic economy, registered in the novels of Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Maria Susanna Cummins, in handbooks by Lydia Maria Child and Catharine Beecher, and in popular journals such as Godey's Lady's Book (1836) and the Home Journal (1846).⁹ The abundance and success of these publications speak retrospectively to a cultural desire for instruction on matters of identity formation. These texts responded to a Jacksonian cultural anxiety concerning the effects social migration and the commodification of nature—caused by the shift away from an agriculturally based economy—might have on the construction of a national culture. If Americans secured their identity through a primary connection to nature, what would be the cost of urban expansion and industrialization? Linked to this attention to the domestic was an increasing interest in forming scientific and educational associations dedicated to the study of natural history. The creation of these institutions responded to the emerging belief in a correlation between the natural environment and character development.

The advent of gentility in America during the mid-nineteenth century was, as Richard Bushman notes, yoked to a “beautification campaign,” which insisted that “everything from houses to barns to village streets was to be made beautiful; every scene was to be turned into a picture.”¹⁰ In Rural Hours Susan Cooper argues for the congruence of interiors and exteriors by unearthing “how large a portion of our ideas of grace and beauty are derived from the plants, how constantly we turn to them for models” (316). Look at “all the trifling knick-knacks in the room,” Cooper directs, “and on all these you may see, in bolder or fainter lines, a thousand proofs of the debt we owe to the vegetable world” (Rural Hours, 316). Cooper urges the incorporation of interior decorations that match America's exterior environments, rather than relying on foreign models. While Cooper's remarks recall the tenets of European Naturphilosophie, they are more properly read as a careful adaptation of that doctrine. Susan Cooper shuns the idealization of nature, insisting instead that Americans adopt realistic forms from their immediate environment.¹¹

As Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson note in their introduction to Rural Hours, Susan Fenimore Cooper avidly read natural history. Cataloging the volumes she is believed to have consulted, they document Cooper's repeated requests that her father purchase for her specific scientific and protoscientific texts. Familiar with the works of Louis Agassiz, Andrew Jackson Downing, and Charles Lyell, Susan Cooper also immersed herself in the writings of John James Audubon, François Chateaubriand, Georges Cuvier, Alexander von Humboldt, DeWitt Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Wilson, and other natural historians.

Chief among these new natural historians was Charles Lyell, whose scientific discoveries had considerable impact on natural history writing in the United States after the publication of his Principles of Geology (1830-33). Lyell toured the Republic in 1841, lecturing to overcrowded halls in most of the nation's major cities.¹² In his speeches and writings, Lyell observed that the age of the earth far exceeded previous understandings, implying that European pride in its “ancient” civilization was misplaced. If the heritage of the West was dwarfed by the reality of the earth's age, then the relative youth of the Republic was inconsequential. By lengthening the frame of history, introducing what Foucault calls “the irruptive violence of time,” Lyell indirectly helped assuage American anxiety about national identity.¹³

Lyell contended that the entirety of the past could be successfully interpreted by examining forces still operant in nature.¹⁴ Such a reconceptualization reversed the prevalent Whig notion of progress, liberating the present from a deterministic past by inverting the figures in the equation. If, to understand the past, one must scrutinize the present, then America's failure to attain some prescribed plateau was irrelevant. These developments in natural history, spearheaded by the work of Lyell, enabled midcentury American writers to imagine nature not simply in a unidirectional relationship with cultivated European landscapes but as a fragment of a much older, more intricate picture. As a result of this recalibration of the earth's age, Susan Cooper could investigate the correlation between the society of the Republic and New World nature without privileging European social structures as the primal scene.

Lyell's American tour sparked a turn during the 1840s toward science as a vehicle for explaining the state of American culture. The first publication of Scientific American (1845) was followed in short order by the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution (1846). Harvard sought to rival European centers of learning by hiring Louis Agassiz and promoting his work through the foundation of the Lawrence Scientific School (1847). While such highbrow activities might seem divorced from the popular success of texts concerned with domestic economy, these trends were intrinsically connected with the creation of a uniquely American style of interior design, with landscape composition, and with stylistic developments in architecture. Intriguingly, Susan Cooper registers this phenomenon by speculating on the linkages between terra-forming strategies and social structures.

A major influence on Susan Cooper's conception of landscape aesthetics was Andrew Jackson Downing, whose widely celebrated Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America (1841) was the first American work devoted to landscape design.¹⁵ In Downing's work Susan Cooper found a voice that counseled patience and the cultivation of nature as the optimal means of advancing American cultural development. In a nation searching for domestic instruction, Downing quickly rose to prominence. Promulgating the cultivation of gentility, Downing argued that as nature could be shaped and husbanded, so too could social practices, and that alterations in the landscape would provoke shifts in cultural habit.

In an editorial in the Horticulturist, a journal Downing edited from 1846 until his death in 1852, he cautioned that “to live in the new world” meant leaving foreign preconceptions behind.¹⁶ Downing called for moderation in the cultivation of the landscape rather than the typical American “goaheadism,” urging his readers to have reasonable expectations and to appreciate the impossibility of forming a picturesque garden overnight. If America was to develop a refined native culture (autonomous, yet comparable to European society); then its citizens must proceed with caution. For Downing, landscape and social structure were directly linked. The cultural institutions Americans created must be grounded in an interior and exterior architecture that represented the democratic tenets of the Republic, for as Downing advanced in The Architecture of Country Houses, “different styles of Domestic Architecture” were “nothing more than expressions of national character.”¹⁷

Immediately after the Revolution and well into the first quarter of the nineteenth century, American artists were largely ignored when they mourned the landscape's destruction. In an earlier appeal for preserving the American forest, Thomas Cole enumerated the glories of the New York wilderness, pointing out that it had yet to be “destroyed or modified” to “accommodate the tastes and necessities of a dense population.”¹⁸ In the 1830s, the United States was only beginning to confront the consequences of development, and Cole enjoined his audience to moderate the rate of progress, for “the ravages of the axe are daily increasing” and “the most noble scenes are made destitute.” Writing during the height of large-scale terra-forming projects in New York, Cole realized that “such is the road society has to travel,” yet he hoped this would “lead to refinement in the end.”¹⁹ Jacksonian America was not preoccupied with maintaining picturesque views but with improving market access and building a workable infrastructure. Over a decade later, after the American economy had stabilized and capital was more equally distributed, Downing's popular pleas for patience and preservation—which Susan Cooper echoed—found a more receptive audience. Cooper's arguments about American development were more pointed than Downing's, for the consequences she envisioned were not abstract but extremely personal.

In Rural Hours Susan Cooper investigated American social mores as an extension of the Republic's relationship to its natural environment. In a pivotal essay that appeared two years later, she advanced her argument more specifically, mapping the historical terrain of American architecture and its connection to the landscape. In “A Dissolving View,” which appeared in the handsome 1852 gift-book The Home Book of the Picturesque, Cooper entreated readers to emancipate themselves from received practice, to imagine their own location in nature as the central experience of their worldview. In “A Dissolving View,” she recapitulates residual conceptions of American social evolution and considers how emerging interests in natural history and landscape aesthetics departed from that inherited tradition.

Dedicated to Asher Durand, president of the National Academy of Fine Arts, The Home Book of the Picturesque sought to capitalize on cultural preoccupations with natural history and interior design, while also contributing to the cultivation of an American aesthetic.²⁰ The dedication underscores this intention by stating that the volume was “an initiatory suggestion for popularizing some of the characteristics of American Landscape and American Art.”²¹ Aspiring to fulfill consumer demand, Putnam undertook the volume “as an experiment,” asserting that it would provide an American alternative to popular European gift books by illustrating “the picturesque beauties of American landscape.”²² Both nationalist and market-conscious, Putnam's editors canonized the productions of American artists while advancing an argument about the picturesque aesthetic.

On the title page of The Home Book of the Picturesque, the editors at G. P. Putnam list their contributors in ranking order. Susan Cooper's is the fourth name on that page, preceded only by Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, and her father, James Fenimore Cooper. Susan Cooper's prominent listing is not surprising, since Putnam's published Rural Hours as its 1850 presentation volume and profited from its considerable success. Susan Cooper's relation to the writers whose names precede hers on Putnam's title page is not, however, simply a matter of contemporary literary reputation. Her essay, “A Dissolving View,” conveys its readers from the landscape aesthetic of Irving, Bryant, and her father to a more localized and less romantic conception of American scenery.

America's foremost popularizer of “the Picturesque,” Andrew Jackson Downing, defined that aesthetic mode as “an idea of beauty or power strongly and irregularly expressed,” as opposed to “the Beautiful,” which is “calmly and harmoniously expressed.”²³ In creating a picturesque scene, Downing observes, “everything depends on intricacy and irregularity.” He began from an assumption that nature was not inherently picturesque but required arrangement and embellishment to be formed, and that this shaping “springs naturally from a love” for the terrain. To express a wild yet cultivated nature, landscape gardening must be tailored to its region. In America the progress of landscape gardening was not impeded by a lack of resources but by a failure to adapt European ideals to the demands of America's geographical and historical particularities: “Even those who are familiar with foreign works on the subject in question labor under many obstacles in practice, which grow out of the difference in our soil and climate, or our social and political position.”²⁴ Downing's equation of regional differences with sociopolitical factors demonstrates how closely linked are these seemingly divergent agendas. A landscape aesthetic must reflect the demands of a given environment while representing a nation's heritage. It is precisely this new vision of a landscape aesthetic that informs the creation of The Home Book of the Picturesque and, in particular, Susan Cooper's “A Dissolving View.”

Susan Cooper situates “A Dissolving View” during autumn in Cooperstown. Her choice of season grounds her essay within (as she conceives it) the paradigmatic American season. Beginning in Rural Hours, Cooper argues that America's autumnal palate offers unrivaled vistas. “Our native writers, as soon as we had writers of our own, pointed out very early both the sweetness of the Indian summer, and the magnificence of the autumnal changes,” which uncovered, Cooper continues, “the precise extent of the difference between the relative beauty of autumn in Europe and in America: with us it is quite impossible to overlook these peculiar charms of the autumnal months,” whereas in Europe “they remained unnoticed, unobserved, for ages” (Rural Hours, 209). While it is customary to associate nature with vernal scenes, the explosion of color during an American autumn affords a spectacle unfamiliar to Europeans. These diverse tints are the most difficult to reproduce, for “there is no precedent for such coloring as nature requires here among the works of old masters, and the American artist must necessarily become an innovator” (Rural Hours, 215). Autumn is, Cooper argues, an unworked genre, delivering American artists from the constraints of unfavorable comparisons with the artistic conventions of Europe. Representing American autumn required painstaking attention to fleeting scenery. The best vantage point a seeker of picturesque scenes could have is in “the hanging woods of a mountainous country” where the “trees throwing out their branches, one above another, in bright variety of coloring and outline” sufficiently frame the intricacy of the scene (Rural Hours, 211). Susan Cooper's narrator occupies such a position at the opening of her meditation on the development of Cooperstown.

Cooper opens “A Dissolving View” with a familiar account of the beauty of the autumnal American landscape. That rendering is complicated when she describes autumn as protean. During fall an observer is unbalanced, never knowing “beforehand exactly what to expect,” for “there is always some variation, occasionally a strange contrast.” Yet Cooper quickly reveals that the human transformation of the multihued landscape generates the picturesque: “I should not care to pass the season in the wilderness,” for while “a broad extent of forest is no doubt necessary to the magnificent spectacle,” there “should also be broken woods, scattered groves, and isolated trees.” She continues, “it strikes me that the quiet fields of man, and his cheerful dwellings, should also have a place in the gay picture.” Fall contains “a social spirit,” for its “brilliancy” draws attention to the human presence in the landscape (“A Dissolving View,” 80, 82, 81).

Cooper locates her narrator on the trunk of a fallen pine tree that “overlooked the country for some fifteen miles or more,” framing her field of vision and enabling her perception of the picturesque. A nearby “projecting cliff” and “the oaks whose branches overshadowed” the narrator's seat, creating a natural Claude glass, guide her vision, imparting a graduated scale to the objects in the background.²⁵ Situated within the forest, Cooper's narrator overlooks a cultivated landscape that figures the progressive development of American settlement: “the lake, the rural town, and the farms in the valley beyond, lying at our feet like a beautiful map.” From this topological position, the favorite perch of the Hudson River school, Cooper's narrator witnesses—and records—the history of American social evolution while ruminating on the consequences of all human development.²⁶ She concludes that although “the hand of man generally improves a landscape,” there is a danger that terra-forming projects partake of the hubristic. In such work, man “endeavors to rise above his true part of laborer and husbandman,” assuming “the character of creator” (“A Dissolving View,” 81, 82).

For Cooper, this hubristic inclination has contaminated architecture since its advent. Europe is replete with architectural projects that compete with nature rather than harmonize with it: “Indeed it would seem as if man had no sooner mastered the art of architecture, than he aimed at rivalling the dignity and durability of the works of nature which served as his models; he resolved that his walls of vast stones should stand in place as long as the rocks from which they were hewn; that his columns and his arches should live with the trees and branches from which they were copied; he determined to scale the heavens with his proud towers of Babel” (“A Dissolving View,” 84). While such “imposing” ancient piles stir up wonder in viewers, they also recall the combative cultures out of which they arose.²⁷ The “very violence” of the past and its “superstitious nature” created monuments to dissolute empires and forged structures to withstand the continual danger of eradication (“A Dissolving View,” 86).

Should Americans mourn the absence of ancient edifices redolent of antagonistic cultural values? If a cultivated landscape should epitomize the specific social and cultural values of its population, as Cooper believes, then is it tragic that the United States lacks monuments to monarchies and feudalism? European cities are burdened by buildings that were formed by the “prevalence” of a “warlike spirit.” These medieval buildings “are likely” to “outlast modern works of the same nature,” for those who built them imagined a future dedicated to the same principles that governed them: “They not only built for the future, in those days, but they expected posterity to work with them; as one generation lay down in their graves, they called another generation to their pious labor.” While Americans are “in some measure influenced by those days of chivalry and superstitious truth,” they are not bound by them (“A Dissolving View,” 86-87).

Susan Cooper recognized just how much materiality matters in shaping a coherent social philosophy. By affirming agency, Cooper extends her contention that European architecture is ill suited for America; like the effect of a canopy formed by towering trees, the shadows of the past prohibit new growth from taking root. “Thus it is that there is not in those old countries,” she observes, “a single natural feature of the earth upon which man has not set his seal.” Cooper finds a triumphant strength in “how different from all this” the “fresh civilization of America” is. Within the United States, “there is no blending of the old and the new,” for “there is nothing old among us” (“A Dissolving View,” 88-89). Much of the Republic's nature remains wild, and thus for Cooper, Americans fashioning a modern nation are not burdened by the detrimental decisions of their ancestors.

Critical of the current state of national life, Cooper complains that Americans are “the reverse of conservators,” failing to preserve markers of their own history. Here Cooper's position reproduces contemporary, class-based arguments against the depredations of laissez-faire capitalism. Yet for Cooper there is freedom in Americans being “the borderers of civilization,” for that position enables them to “act as pioneers.” She extends her examination of American society by freighting the landscape with predictive power; Cooper observes that “the peculiar tendencies of the age are seen more clearly among us than in Europe” (“A Dissolving View,” 89). The unfolding of the American scene—measured by its architecture, its landscape design, and its consequent social refinements—is a matter of more than local interest. It is a barometer of the age, a register of the future.

Inheritors of Western social tradition, yet free from the constraints of modern Europe's determining environment (for “many parts” of the Old World “have an old, worn-out, exhausted appearance”), the United States should fashion an architecture suited to the more “subtle” nineteenth century. America's historic monuments are not to be found in man-made ruins but within nature itself. Paraphrasing Louis Agassiz, Cooper notes that “as the surface of the planet now exists, North America is, in reality, the oldest part of the earth,” simultaneously more ancient and more vigorous than the natural environment of Europe (“A Dissolving View,” 89, 90). While Americans failed as historic conservationists, they have not yet irrevocably denuded their landscape and so can still alter their interaction with it.

Cooper continues by returning to Agassiz, who “tells us that in many particulars our vegetation, and our animal life, belong to an older period than those” of Europe (“A Dissolving View,” 90). Agassiz believed that vegetation that existed only in a fossil state in Europe continued to flourish in North America. By the 1850s, Agassiz was the most prominent natural historian in the United States, and Cooper's citation of his work testifies to her familiarity with contemporary natural history.²⁸ Agassiz wanted to understand nature through, as Edward Lurie suggests, “the perceptions provided by direct experience.” While Agassiz straddled “the two worlds of empiricism and idealism,” he also knew “that nature, if it meant anything at all, was to be understood as a whole, a historical and contemporary unit of experience.”²⁹ Agassiz's conception of nature, which dominated natural history prior to Darwin's 1859 publication of his Origin of Species, rested on the assumption that local environments were shaped by divine power for particular ends. Advancing this notion of separate creations, he argued in Lake Superior (1850) that “the geographical distribution of organized beings displays more fully the direct intervention of a Supreme Intelligence in the plan of Creation, than any other adaption in the physical world.”³⁰ Agassiz's sense of the uniqueness of each territory's natural history undergirds Cooper's promotion of a specific American architecture or interaction with the landscape. If, as Agassiz maintains, nature is separately created for a particular, divine purpose, then Americans, who have not completely disrupted their environment, are positioned to interpret properly their physical world. And by accurately reading their landscape, they can build dwellings in harmony with their surroundings.

Cooper ends her essay with an enigmatic turn. Seizing a “sprig of wych-hazel,” Cooper's narrator plays a “game of architectural consequences” in which she imagines the landscape as it might have appeared if the culture that had formed it had been driven by different forces. The inroads of civilization disappear, and with a wave of the wand the landscape is restored to wilderness. But “merely razing a village” and restoring the valley to its virginal state “did not satisfy the whim of the moment,” and so the spell is cast again until she “beheld a spectacle which wholly engrossed” her attention (“A Dissolving View,” 91-92).

The conjuring wand produces the valley as it would have appeared “had it lain in the track of European civilization during past ages; how, in such a case, would it have been fashioned by the hand of man?” In the midst of this reverie, in which everything is “so strangely altered,” the narrator requires “a second close scrutiny to convince [herself] that this was indeed the site of the village which had disappeared a moment earlier.” Only through an intense examination of “all the natural features of the landscape” is she assured that it is the valley, and not herself, that has been recast. Noting the geographically appropriate vegetation and recognizing the familiar contours of the lake shore, she understands that it is the history of cultural production that has mutated the landscape. Quickly, “all resemblance ceased,” for the “hills had been wholly shorn of wood,” and the “position of the different farms and that of the buildings was entirely changed.” The little town “dwindled to a mere hamlet” (“A Dissolving View,” 92-93).

The valley is now dominated by two structures, the church and an “old country house” that give the surrounding habitations their meaning, or at least arrange them in “various grades of importance.” The church and manor house define the social structure of this European village: all its citizens share one religion, and just as clearly, they are cast into a delineated social hierarchy based upon architectural style. Cooperstown's bustling industry becomes, in the “European” hamlet, “two or three small, quiet-looking shops”; its wooden bridge is replaced by a “massive stone” one guarded by “the ruins of a tower” (“A Dissolving View,” 93).

By recomposing the scene in the form of a European village, Cooper underscores the difference between American and European society. While the denuded European landscape contains buried “ancient coins” and the ruins of “feudal castles,” the relationship of its current occupants to their environment is entirely predetermined (“A Dissolving View,” 93). Unlike the less-ordered American scene, the social roles of Europeans are always already fixed. In sharp contrast, the current state of architecture and civic planning in the United States permits the natural proliferation and change of the social relations of Americans.

The narrator's reverie is disrupted by “a roving bee, bent apparently on improving these last warm days, and harvesting the last drops of honey” (“A Dissolving View,” 94). As Washington Irving reminds us, bees were widely perceived as “the heralds of civilization, steadfastly preceding it as it advanced from the Atlantic borders.”³¹ The bee, cast here as a symbol of an intrusive market economy, quite literally stings the narrator out of her Hudson River fancy and reminds her that the rural location from which she views the American scene might soon fall victim to the energies of regnant capitalism. Or, perhaps, having imagined the appearance of the valley as if it had been shaped by European cultural advancement, readers of her essay would have understood the danger of choosing foreign models as social guides.

Prior to her wych-hazel fancy, Cooper contemplates the current state of American architecture, suggesting that “it is yet too unformed, too undecided to claim a character of its own, but the general air of comfort and thrift which shows itself in most of our dwellings, whether on a large or a small scale, gives satisfaction in its own way” (“A Dissolving View,” 91). This critique is not melancholic; rather, it is framed as a recognition that America is a nation whose identity will be decided in the present, a borderland between a determining past and an unknown future. While American architecture may lack a character of its own, that absence will not obstruct the progress of future generations. She encourages a movement toward preservation that would enable the development of an American aesthetic cognizant of the particular character of the nation's environment. By registering the vulnerability of older aesthetic perspectives that proceed from a reliance on European cultural models, she argues for their rejection. Anything built on such foreign foundations was doomed to collapse; alien to New World soil, they could never take root without damaging the natural environment. At the same time, she maintains that Americans need not pursue heedlessly forms of architectural and landscape design capable of reflecting a democratic cultural order.

Only by considering her two texts in tandem can a reader fully appreciate Susan Cooper's conception of the linkage between cultural forms and nature as dependent upon the imagination. Instead of further damaging their environment by constructing badly designed buildings, Americans, she argues, should imagine the consequences of their choices before plunging ahead, working with—rather than in opposition to—their natural environments. Since assembled aesthetic failures encumber the formation of a national culture by articulating inappropriate social codes, she promotes the imagination (and not the landscape) as the arena for testing the consequences of any new construction. Moving beyond residual aesthetics, requiems for an America that failed to import European cultural models, Susan Cooper makes a case for preserving the wild as the locus of the imagination.

Notes

1. Susan Cooper's distaste for the importation of European cultural forms registers in her critique of the unfortunate practice of naming American settlements after European cities. See Susan Fenimore Cooper, Rural Hours, ed. Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 298-309. Hereafter cited in the text. References to “A Dissolving View” are to The Home Book of the Picturesque; or, American Scenery, Art, and Literature (New York: Putnam, 1852; reprint, Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1967), 79-94. Hereafter cited in text.

2. Cooper's interest in architecture as a record of American social practice reflects its status during the first half of the nineteenth century. Prior to its professionalization in the last quarter of the century, considering architecture one of the fine arts was a common practice, as even the Library of Congress (following Jefferson's cataloging schema) shelved architectural treatises along with works of poetry, fiction, and other artistic texts. Susan Cooper was also most likely familiar with Andrew Jackson Downing's The Architecture of Country Houses (1850), in which he argued that the aim of architecture, like that of “every fine art is the art of so treating objects as to give them a moral significance” ([New York: Dover, 1969], 38). Additionally, Cooper would have been familiar with her father's own speculations on this question, figured most prominently in Home as Found (1838) and The American Democrat (1838).

3. Cooperstown's distance from both the Erie Canal and existing railroads in the 1850s meant that it was relatively unaffected by the boom-and-bust economy of the Jacksonian period.

4. William Cooper published his study of Cooperstown, A Guide in the Wilderness; or, The History of the First Settlements in the Western Counties of New York with Useful Instructions to Future Settlers (Dublin: Gilbert and Hodges, 1810), at the close of the century's first decade, while James Fenimore Cooper repeatedly explored the terrain of New York State in his fiction starting in the 1820s.

5. The best critical accounts of the nationalist myths born from Jackson's victory at New Orleans remain Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957) and John William Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955).

6. For a discussion of this economic phenomenon nationally, see Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). For more specifically regional examinations, see Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York 1815-1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978) and Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

7. For an extended discussion of the shifting representation of America's Revolutionary heritage, see Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1978).

8. For examinations of the effects of this increase in the publication of manuals and guides, see Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982).

9. Among the key critical studies of the emergence of the cult of domesticity are Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Doubleday, 1977); and Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

10. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage, 1993), xiv.

11. Consistently in Rural Hours, Cooper suggests that Americans manufacture interior decorations based upon the superior variety of colors and shades found in nature around them rather than continue to follow foreign trends.

12. For a detailed discussion of Lyell's importance in the United States, see Leonard G. Wilson, Lyell in America: Transatlantic Geology, 1841-1853 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

13. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 132.

14. See Stephen Jay Gould, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).

15. Downing's influence reached into other aspects of rural life: see, as examples, his Fruits and Fruit Trees of America (1845), Cottage Residences (1842), and The Architecture of Country Houses (1850). For in-depth treatments of Downing's influence, see Judith K. Major, To Live in the New World: A. J. Downing and American Landscape Gardening (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997); David Schuyler, Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing 1815-1852 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and Adam Sweeting, Reading Houses and Building Books: Andrew Jackson Downing and the Architecture of Popular Antebellum Literature, 1835-1855 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1996).

16. As quoted by Major, To Live in the New World, 2.

17. Downing, The Architecture of Country Houses, 26.

18. Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” in Thomas Cole: The Collected Essays and Prose Sketches, ed. Marshall Tym (St. Paul: John Colet Press, 1980), 8.

19. Ibid., 17.

20. The dedication to Durand is testimony to his prominence, but possibly the editors were also trying to invoke the spirit of one of his most famous paintings, Kindred Spirits (1849). Commissioned to paint a portrait of Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant, Durand depicted them in Kindred Spirits in complete harmony with the American wilderness. For a sense of the reception of Durand's painting, see Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting 1825-1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) and James T. Callow, Kindred Spirits: Knickerbocker Writers and American Artists, 1807-1855 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967).

21. From the title page of The Home Book of the Picturesque.

22. Ibid., 7.

23. Andrew Jackson Downing, Landscape Gardening and Rural Architecture (1852; New York: Dover, 1991), 54. This volume is a reprint of the seventh edition of A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1852).

24. Ibid., 82, 19, 7.

25. A familiar tool for those searching for the picturesque, the Claude glass (named for the French landscape artist Claude Lorraine) was a convex mirror used to concentrate the features of a landscape. Here Cooper suggests that the cliff and trees create a natural frame for her vision.

26. Employing a tactic familiar to Hudson River school painters, Cooper locates her narrator within wild nature but casts her field of vision into a settled landscape. See Angela Miller's reading of Cole's The Oxbow (1836) in The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 39-48.

27. Cooper in particular singles out the architectural styles of Babylon, Greece, and Rome for their fortitude in surviving numerous attacks at the hands of “savages” and “barbarians.”

28. The best account of Agassiz's importance is Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), see esp. chaps. 4 and 5.

29. Ibid., 82, 52, 50.

30. Louis Agassiz, Lake Superior: Its Physical Character, Vegetation, and Animals, Compared with Those of Other and Similar Regions (1850; New York: Arno Press, 1970), 144.

31. Washington Irving, A Tour of the Prairies (1832; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956), 50. Cooper would have also been familiar with her father's treatment of this myth in his novel The Oak Openings; or, The Bee-Hunter (1848).