[In the following essay, Maddox examines Cooper's relationship with her famous father and the way it informed her writings, particularly her novel, Elinor Wyllys, and her nature journal, Rural Hours.]

The story of the way James Fenimore Cooper began his career as a novelist has by now entered the folklore of American literature. Readers who first encounter Cooper in an anthology are likely to learn from the introduction that his first novel was written in response to his wife's challenge: to write something better and more interesting than the imported novel of English manners he was in the process of reading aloud to his family. The eventual result of that challenge was the Leatherstocking novels, a series that was to earn him his reputation as the originator of an American hero-myth and the author of an American tradition in fiction. The source of the famous anecdote was Cooper's oldest daughter, Susan Fenimore Cooper, the only one of his five children to follow him in becoming a writer, and the person he chose to be his literary executor. While her own career as a writer was briefer and much more modest than that of her father, it illustrates in an especially personal and focused way the complex constraints on the woman writer in mid-nineteenth century America, writing within a space that has already been defined for her by the literary fathers. In all of her published writing, Susan Cooper revealed a self-conscious sense of her identity as the inheritor and guardian of her father's vision of America, in which the role of the daughter is defined as crucially important to the future of the nation.

Fenimore Cooper had set out that vision most effusively in Notions of the Americans,¹ in which he argued explicitly for the superiority of American culture to the exhausted European culture that the new country was, in his view, designed by nature to replace. The book consists of a series of responses to the American scene by a fictitious travelling bachelor, identified only as European, who is visiting the new republic for the first time. In the opening scenes of the book, the bachelor and his American companion, Cadwallader, make the acquaintance of a young American girl named Isabel. The girl presents “a simple picture, in which delicacy, feminine beauty, and the most commendable ingenuousness, were admirably mingled” (1:25). The two gentlemen escort the young lady to her home, where she is greeted with happy tears all around; once her “foot was on the threshold of her father's house … nature was awakened in all its best and sweetest sympathies” (1:31). Observing this scene leads Cadwallader to remark that “Notwithstanding all that the old world has said of itself on this subject, … you are now in the true Paradise of women” (1:49). The bachelor soon begins to understand the full import of what he has seen and heard:

After all, what nobler or more convincing proof of high civilization can be given than this habitual respect of the strong for the weak? The condition of women in this country is solely owing to the elevation of its moral feeling. … To me, woman appears to fill in America the very station for which she was designed by nature. In the lowest conditions of life she is treated with the tenderness and respect that is due to beings whom we believe to be the repositories of the better principles of our nature. Retired within the sacred precincts of her own abode, she is preserved from the destroying taint of excessive intercourse with the world. …

(1:104-05)

The sophisticated European is thus ushered into the moral heart of America by the young female, the daughter whose natural place is the home of her father. Cooper offers her as a kind of official greeter for the new country, toward which the eyes of the rest of the civilized world are turned with skeptical curiosity. Her “condition” is both an advertisement for the moral and cultural health of the country and, not incidentally, an implicit protection against the “manly interest” of the foreign bachelor.

Cooper's sunny image of the daughter who freely chooses to inhabit exactly that domestic, patriarchal place “for which she was designed by nature” is indeed a “simple picture” and a familiar one, largely indistinguishable from the many other sentimentalized portraits of woman as “the moral guardian for all society”² that were produced by both male and female writers in nineteenth-century America. Behind Cooper's flattened image of the young Isabel, however, lie his rather complex theories about the origin and evolution of American culture, theories which are dramatized over and over in his novels—especially in the Leatherstocking series—in terms of the relationships between fathers and daughters. In those novels, Cooper attempted the inscription of an American daughter-myth to complement the masculine hero-myth embodied in the figure of the childless man of the woods, Natty Bumppo.

The centrality of the father-daughter relationship to Cooper's interpretation of the American past is suggested by the opening scenes of The Pioneers, the first of the Leatherstocking novels.³ The book begins as the widowered father, Judge Temple, is escorting his daughter and only heir, Elizabeth, to the home he has built in the frontier settlement of Otsego, New York. Elizabeth, who has been living in the city while she completed the “juvenile labors” (Leatherstocking, 1:17) of getting an education, returns to the frontier prepared both to inherit the extensive estate of her father and to understand the nature of the sacrifices, physical and moral, that were required of the father in his work of establishing a settlement. The appearance in the opening scene of the two old men of the woods, the white Natty Bumppo and the Indian Chingachgook, reminds Elizabeth and the reader that the land was inhabited by others before settlers like the Temples arrived and that, no matter how legal the process of acquisition has been, the land that Elizabeth will inherit has, undeniably, “been wrested by violence from others” (34). It is also clear from the beginning that the work of settlement has worn the Judge physically; as he will explain to Elizabeth later, “pain, famine, and disease” were all part of the price he and others paid, a price that newcomers are likely to overlook: “No, Bess, … he who hears of the settlement of a country, knows but little of the toil and suffering by which it is accomplished. Unimproved and wild as this district now seems to your eyes, what was it when I first entered the hills!” (233, 236). The daughter listens with sympathy and responds with gratitude; she understands that the father has had to sacrifice both his body and his moral integrity to a battle with the wilderness in order to prepare a place that the daughter can inherit, a place in which moral and physical violence are no longer necessary.

In her study of the diaries and journals of women who moved to the American frontier, Annette Kolodny concludes that “women avoided male anguish at lost Edens and male guilt in the face of the raping of the continent” by imagining the frontier primarily as a potential garden and themselves as its potential cultivators.⁴ In Cooper's novels, the woman who comes to cultivate the cleared space is not only avoiding the male experience but providing its moral justification as well. When Elizabeth Temple marries at the end of The Pioneers, she and her husband establish themselves in the father's house and say a tearful farewell to the now displaced woodsman, Natty Bumppo. In the moral scheme of the book, Elizabeth is Natty's heir as well as the Judge's; by replacing Natty, Elizabeth moves the moral center of the book (and the settlement) indoors, relocating it in the heart of the patriarchal family. Her continuing presence in the father's home will, Cooper implies, eventually redeem the father's crimes against the woods and the woodsmen.

The pattern of inheritance that Cooper dramatized in detail in The Pioneers is reflected repeatedly in the other novels. The fathers enter the wilderness as soldiers, hunters, or even (like Old Hutter of The Deerslayer) as fugitive criminals, to begin the violent process of settlement. The daughters follow, and it is their vulnerability that both necessitates and justifies the violence of the fathers. The space that the daughters are to occupy must first be cleared if the daughters are not to be destroyed—morally or physically—by contact with the wilderness and its savage inhabitants. The crucial importance of the father's success in clearing a space is indicated by the fate of the two Ruths, mother and daughter, of The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish.⁵ The first Ruth lives happily in a stockaded frontier farm built by her father-in-law, a retired soldier and fierce Puritan (the setting of the novel is “less than half a century” after the Plymouth landing [1]). Ruth thrives in the protected space provided by the stern patriarch: “Her situation was one eminently fitted to foster the best affections of woman, since it admitted of few temptations to yield to other than the most natural feelings” (100). The fate of the second Ruth, her daughter, is much less happy. When the responsibility for the family passes from the fierce old man to his weaker son, the Indians also return across the cleared space to invade the stockade and carry off the female child. This Ruth is restored to the family years later, but when she returns she brings with her the half-breed infant son that is, for Cooper, the tangible symbol of her irrevocable alienation from her natural place within the white family: “She stood … in the centre of the grave, self-restrained group of her nearest kin, like an alien to their blood, resembling some timid and but half-tamed tenant of the air” (349). Because of the father's failure, the daughter becomes a victim of the wilderness, dispossessed of family and of selfhood. The Indians and white hunters, like Natty Bumppo, find their natural home in the moral freedom of the wilderness; but the wilderness must eventually give way to the cleared, enclosed space, since it is only there that the inheritors of the American place, the white daughters, can survive.

Given this evidence of Cooper's efforts to create a myth of the inheriting daughter that would be as compelling as the accompanying myth of the childless man of the woods, it is entirely appropriate that the writer who took over the daughter myth most directly and developed it most explicitly was his own daughter, Susan. The extent to which both Coopers saw the daughter as the right successor to the father is suggested by his appointment of her as his literary executor, at a time when his reputation as a writer had become thoroughly embattled. Susan Cooper was more than dutiful in publicly defending her father's work after his death, not only providing prefaces to editions of his novels, a reverential memoir to accompany her anthology of extracts from his novels, and a biography of his lifelong friend, Commodore William Branford Shubrick, but also frequently paraphrasing her father's words in her own writing:

In no country is the protection given to woman's helplessness more full and free—in no country is the assistance she receives from the stronger arm so general—and nowhere does her weakness meet with more forebearance and consideration. … The position accorded to her is favorable; it remains for her to fill it in a manner worthy her own sex, gratefully, kindly, and simply. …⁶

Susan Cooper's gratitude to her father is most visibly documented in the work she produced as his literary executor, but the more complex aspects of her relationship to him are reflected in the writing she produced in an effort to become the first of his successors—specifically in her novel, Elinor Wyllys (1846); her journal of a year in Cooperstown, published as Rural Hours (1850); her edition of John Leonard Knapp's Country Rambles in England (1853); and her anthology of nature writing, The Rhyme and Reason of Country Life (1854).

George Henry Lewes declared in 1852 that “to write as men write is the aim and besetting sin of women; to write as women is the real task they have to perform.”⁷ Susan Cooper's writing illustrates the special situation that arises when the woman defines herself primarily as daughter, and particularly when she defines herself as the daughter of a writing father whose own successful work enshrines the virtuous daughter and projects her role as the one most crucial to the healthy growth of a young nation. The situation for Susan Cooper was complicated by her awareness that Fenimore Cooper had successfully taken on himself the role of one of the principal “fathers” of an emerging tradition in American literature. For her, that role entitled him to special deference and respect, especially from his female heirs—both literal and figurative. In a small book she wrote about Mount Vernon, the home of another important national “father,” Susan Cooper noted that “the solemn guardianship of the home, and of the grave, of George Washington is now offered to us, the women of the country.”⁸ That emphasis on the American woman's duty as inheritor and guardian of the legacy left by the pioneering males constitutes the strongest theme in all of Susan Cooper's writing.

Susan Cooper's situation was further complicated, in a more personal way, by the nature of her father's attitude toward the oldest of his four daughters. Fenimore Cooper's correspondence suggests that he was well pleased with his daughters, finding them “all that I could desire—natural, simple, sincere, obedient and intelligent.”⁹ Susan, however, he singled out for special praise, in part because she was the daughter with the strongest inclination to remain under the paternal roof. When she was nineteen, he noted approvingly that “[Susan] has the good sense to know that this is the time to work, and I do not know that I ever heard her express a desire to go into the world.”¹⁰ The father's implied fear that the daughter might marry and leave home became more explicit as they both grew older:

I had proposals for Susan last week, coming from a Frenchman of good fortune, noble family, and very fair hopes, but the thing would not do. We mean to continue Americans.

I am horribly afraid for [Susan]. She is so pretty and good, and engaging, and all that, I fear some fellow will be after her.¹¹

This last and most anxious remark was written in 1851, the year of Fenimore Cooper's death, when Susan was thirty-eight.

The most curious aspect of Fenimore Cooper's paternal possessiveness appears in his attempt to find in Susan an adequate replacement for his sister Hannah, who was killed in a riding accident when Cooper was eleven. The strength of his attachment to Hannah, or at least to her memory, is indicated by his heated reaction to a reader's suggestion that Hannah was the model for Elizabeth Temple, the heroine of The Pioneers. Cooper declared himself wounded by the implication “that one whom he regarded with a reverence that surpassed the love of a brother, was converted by him into the heroine of a work of fiction.”¹² He repeated the disclaimer in a footnote in the revised edition of The Pioneers, and concluded the note by asserting that “few of her sex and years were … more universally beloved, than the admirable woman who thus fell a victim to the chances of the wilderness” (Leatherstocking, 1:234n). The phrasing of the note is suggestive of what may have been a powerful psychological motivation behind his repeated fictional portraits of vulnerable young women whose susceptibilities to the “chances of the wilderness” require the constant protection of strong males. It may also suggest a reason for Cooper's possessive attitude toward his own favorite daughter. His private correspondence indicates clearly that if he was loath to use his perfect sister as the model for a fictional heroine, he was not at all reluctant to reincarnate her in his real daughter:

How I love that child! Her countenance is that of a sister I lost, by a fall from a horse, half a century since, and her character is very much the same. They were, and are, as perfect as it falls to the lot of humanity to be. I am in love with Sue, and have told her so, fifty times. She refuses me, but promises to live on in gentle friendship, and, my passion not being at all turbulent, I do not see but this may do.¹³

The tone of this remarkable protestation is difficult to decipher, especially since it was written by the sixty-year-old Cooper to a young girl (Sarah Heyward Cruger), the daughter of a family friend. No matter how whimsical or avuncular the tone was meant to be, however, certain implications are clear; the father was willing to offer his daughter as a model of the perfect generic female—sister, child, lover, and friend—whose weakness entitles her to protection and whose stainless moral character entitles her to be beloved.

There is no evidence that Susan Cooper openly resisted the formidable psychological burden imposed on her by her father. As Stephen Railton has observed, “Devoted is probably not too strong a word” to describe her behavior toward him.¹⁴ As a writer, however, she necessarily put herself in the difficult position of threatening to compete with her father. Her efforts to find an accommodating position are suggested by the names she used to sign her writing: when she wrote as her father's literary executor, supplying prefaces to his novels or an account of his life, she signed that writing with the name of the daughter—Susan Fenimore Cooper. When she wrote her own books, however, and thus implied competition with her father, she did not use the identifiable name. The novel Elinor Wyllys was published under the protectively self-deprecating pseudonym “Amabel Penfeather”; Rural Hours, an account of Cooperstown that could invite comparison with her father's fictional account of the village in The Pioneers, was identified only as the work of “a lady”; and her introduction to The Rhyme and Reason of Country Life is signed “the author of Rural Hours, etc.” By omitting the father's name, Susan Cooper could put herself on an equal footing with other “ladies” writing, pseudonymously or not, in the middle of the nineteenth century; furthermore, by concealing the presence of the demanding father, she could give additional force to her public choice of the role of the good American daughter.

The father was pleased with the daughter's work: in writing to Susan about the manuscript of Rural Hours, he praised it for its “purity of mind” and “simplicity”¹⁵; in writing to his wife he was more candid:

I have written to Sue to say how much I am pleased with her book—it is not strong, perhaps, but is so pure, and so elegant, so very feminine and charming that I do not doubt, now, of its eventual success—I say eventual, for, at first, the world will not know what to make of it. … She has struggled nobly, and deserves success. At any rate, she has pleased us, and that is a great deal for so dear a child.¹⁶

While Cooper does not explain the reasons for his concern about the reception of the book, it makes sense that he would consider “the world” still puzzled by the kind of daughter's book for which his own work had so carefully prepared the way. In another letter, Fenimore Cooper predicted to his friend William Branford Shubrick that Rural Hours “will make [Susan] the Cooper, at once.”¹⁷ The comment suggests that the father had in his own mind designated as his natural successor the daughter whose “purity of mind” and “simplicity” fit her to occupy the space provided by the father, and whose feminine lack of strength would prevent her from ever overshadowing the father.

Susan Cooper not only accepted her father's idea that simplicity is a requirement for the good daughter, she urged it. The implications of this idea for her are suggested by her uses of the Old Testament story of Ruth—a model of the life of the exemplary woman that Fenimore Cooper had also alluded to in his portrait of Ruth Heathcote, the faithful daughter-in-law of The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish. In Rural Hours, Cooper describes the account of Ruth as a “wholly beautiful” story that is “all pure simplicity, nature and truth, in every line” (258). Significantly, Cooper is insistent that a full appreciation of the story requires our assumption that Ruth was herself a physically plain woman. Since “it is nowhere said that Ruth was beautiful,” then should we not “please ourselves with believing that Ruth was not beautiful; that she had merely one of those faces which come and go without being followed, except by those that know and love them?” (260-61) The beauty of Ruth's story is in her faithfulness and constancy as a daughter-in-law to Naomi. In this case the dutifulness of Ruth is rewarded in a striking way: she is noticed by her elder kinsman Boaz, who praises her publicly and approves so much of her virtue that he marries her. In the King James version, which was surely Susan Cooper's source, Boaz addresses Ruth twice as “my daughter” and specifically praises her because she “followedst not young men.” The narrative that Cooper offers as an illustration of both moral and aesthetic beauty thus becomes, in addition, a story of the plain daughter's rewards for simplicity and restraint: she earns her entry into the home of the elder kinsman, the surrogate father, who demonstrates his approval not only by marrying her but also by establishing her public reputation.

Elinor Wyllys,¹⁸ Susan Cooper's only published novel, is in some ways a recasting of the Ruth story, with the additions and adjustments required by the American setting. The action of the novel moves in and out of a place called Longbridge, which is, like Cooperstown, a small community in upstate New York. The configuration of characters at the beginning of the novel is a variation of the ideal Ruth-Naomi-Boaz grouping: living together at Wyllys-Roof, the paternal home, are the amiable father, Mr. Wyllys; his unmarried, middle-aged daughter Agnes; and the eponymous Elinor, an orphan granddaughter of Mr. Wyllys who has been taken in by her grandfather and aunt. Like Ruth, Elinor is far from beautiful; her family acknowledges that she is “plain,” while strangers more bluntly call her ugly. In this opening arrangement, the role of the daughter is split into two of its most predictable psychological components: Elinor is the good child who is willingly received into the father's household, while the older Agnes assumes the position of the father's wife in caring for the child. This arrangement is threatened only by the potentially disruptive presence of the eligible young male cousin, Harry Hazlehurst, who is presented immediately as an appropriate future husband for Elinor. The agenda of the novel is to accomplish the assimilation of the young male into the patriarchal household without either displacing the father or estranging the daughters from him.

In its general contours, Elinor Wyllys fits a familiar pattern, taking its place quietly among the other “books from the pens of women” that Lydia Maria Child noted were being “poured forth by hundreds” in the America of 1848.¹⁹ In her survey of this body of mid-century fiction by American women, Nina Baym concludes that the many novels finally tell one basic story over and over: “In essence, it is the story of a young girl who is deprived of the supports she had rightly or wrongly depended on to sustain her throughout life and is faced with the necessity of winning her own way in the world.”²⁰ The young female protagonist, Baym points out, is usually an orphan who has to struggle within a highly socialized environment, and whose problems can only be satisfactorily resolved through marriage. The happy marriage is then a frequent ending to the woman novelist's story, “which is in most primitive terms the story of the formation and assertion of a feminine ego.”²¹ Susan Cooper's Elinor, the orphan who achieves a happy marriage at the end of the novel, seems thus to have been drawn to fit and even reinforce a popular sentimental formula. Where Cooper's novel departs from the formula, however, is in imaging the defining role of the American female as daughter rather than as potential wife; as daughter, her identity, or “feminine ego,” is already formed and needs only an appropriate space in which to flourish. Like her father, Susan Cooper is much less concerned with examining the psychology of her female characters than with delineating their fixed place within a changing social environment. There is, therefore, no sign in her novel of the “deep discontent” that Mary Kelley finds underlying the patterns of mid-century women's fiction and that leads her to conclude that “the fiction of the sentimentalists is, finally, expressive of a dark vision of nineteenth-century America, and not, as they wished, of the redemptive, idyllic, holy land.”²² Susan Cooper's heroine, like her father's, plays a redemptive role simply by her presence; what is required of her is only the patience to wait until the rest of the world—including her potential husband—comes around to valuing the quiet plainness that, for both Coopers, makes the good daughter the most appropriate symbol of the new state of the American place.

Cooper makes it clear from the beginning that Elinor is so completely and perfectly at home as a daughter at Wyllys-Roof as to seem almost an organic extension of the place. The house itself is a “comfortable, sensible-looking place, … such as were planned some eighty or a hundred years since, by men who had fortune enough to do as they pleased, and education enough to be superior to all pretension” (1:7). Surrounding this patriarchal structure is an appropriately feminine adjunct, a simple border of native flowers: “There was not a hybrid among them, not a single blossom but what bore a plain, honest name; … they were the commonest varieties only” (1:8-9). In this rather fiercely American place, the orphan Elinor, the plain daughter whose “appearance exposed her to be entirely overlooked and neglected by strangers” (1:41), can grow like a native plant or a native house, combining the natural simplicity of the former with the sensible sturdiness of the latter: “Her whole manner, indeed, was always natural; its simplicity was its great charm, for one felt confident that her grace and sweetness, her ease and quiet dignity, flowed readily from her character itself” (2:109).

Elinor's moral education is essentially complete at the opening of the novel, since her physical plainness has prevented any interference with the natural development of her authentic nature: her “pleasing manner, … so frank, yet so feminine, so simple, yet so graceful, was only the natural result of her character, and her very want of beauty” (1:148). The course of Harry Hazlehurst's moral education, however, is slower and rockier—in part because as a young male with no settled home he is free (unlike Elinor) to wander away from the steadying American environment. His first excursion is to France, in the company of another young man from Longbridge, Charlie Hubbard. Both young Americans are dazzled by their sudden confrontation with the aesthetic richness of French culture, which presents a striking contrast to the simple prettiness of Longbridge. Charlie Hubbard's introduction to European art has a salutary effect, in that it confirms his decision to become a painter. He returns home with a more sophisticated ability to recognize the peculiar beauty in the simplicity of the American landscape. He now “looks with a painter's eye at the country; the scenery is of the simplest kind, yet beautiful” (2:7-8). Harry also has his eyes opened by his stay in France, but because he is not an artist himself, his excitement at discovering beauty in so many new forms is quickly misdirected into a passion for his beautiful other cousin, Jane Graham: “This course of aesthetics gradually carried Harry so far, that after a profound study of the subject in general, and of Jane's features in particular, he became a convert to the opinion of the German philosopher, who affirms that ‘the Beautiful is greater than the Good’” (1:73). Fortunately, the lovely Jane refuses Harry and thus initiates another “course of aesthetics,” this time a long one that will eventually bring him back to Longbridge with a mature appreciation of the simple dignity to be found in the American landscape, in American art (particularly landscape art), and especially in his plain American cousin, Elinor.

One of the more curious signs of Harry's healthy conversion on his return to America is that he begins collecting books, especially botanical works. The significance of this odd detail becomes clear when one contrasts Harry's attraction to nature writing with the literary inclinations of some of the other characters. Among the silliest and most pretentious of the young married ladies of Longbridge, for example, is a Mrs. Hilson, whose credulous reading of foreign novels is the immediate cause of her scandalous flirtation with a visiting French dandy. Mrs. Hilson has never been to Europe, but has gotten her “silly ambition of playing the fine lady” from reading “certain European novels” (2:192). The seductive novels convince Mrs. Hilson that the true paradise of women is to be found not in democratic America but in aristocratic Europe:

What is it that makes the patrician orders so delightful in Europe?—all those who know anything about it, will tell you that it is because the married women are not slaves; they have full liberty, and do just as they fancy, and have as many admirers as they please; this very book that I am reading says so. That is the way things are managed in high life in Europe.

(2:195)

Under the influence of her European novels, Mrs. Hilson adopts a Parisian coiffure and a vaguely British accent and proceeds to assert her liberty by publicly parading her genuine French admirer. As a result, she not only destroys her marriage, but—more importantly for Susan Cooper—she “filled with the bitterest grief, the heart of an indulgent father” (2:195).

The unhappy fate of Mrs. Hilson, who disgraces herself with both husband and father through her impressionable reading of foreign books, casts an interesting light on Susan Cooper's sense of her own function as a writer. The discussion of the social and moral implications of what women read suggests that Cooper accepted her responsibility, as a writing daughter, to produce the kind of books that could keep the Mrs. Hilsons of America within the patriarchal home rather than enticing them out of it. Considered abstractly, the ideal texts might be the botanical works that Harry comes to value (at the same time he comes to value Elinor and America), since in these the subject is unadorned nature itself, but the Mrs. Hilsons require more than botanical description and Latin nomenclature. Women readers, the implication is, look for models—just as Susan Cooper seems to have found her model in the story of Ruth and in the heroines of her father's fiction. As we have seen, Elinor Wyllys clearly offers such a model, with its reinforcing rewards, in the natural simplicity of Elinor; in Rural Hours, Cooper moves from the fictional model to a non-fictional demonstration of her own comfortable assimilation into the American patriarchal place, miniaturized in the father's home at Cooperstown.

Rural Hours was actually the third book about Cooperstown published by a member of the Cooper family. Susan's grandfather, William Cooper, had compiled an account of his participation in founding the village, which he published in 1810 as A Guide to the Wilderness. Fenimore Cooper then incorporated his father's experiences into his fictional account of the settlement in The Pioneers—the novel that ends with the daughter's inheritance of the estate her male progenitors have carved out of the wilderness. Rural Hours thus completes a pattern, providing final documentation of the moral and cultural significance of the great undertaking that begins with the grandfather's confrontation of the wilderness and ends with the daughter's inheritance of a place that is no longer wild but comfortably rural. In her introduction to The Rhyme and Reason of Country Life, published four years after Rural Hours, Cooper concluded that “the moment has come when in American society many of the higher influences of civilization may rather be sought in the fields, when we may learn there many valuable lessons of life, and particularly all the happy lessons of simplicity.”²³ The lessons of simplicity in Rural Hours are themselves rather complex lessons which constantly return, implicitly, to the central issues of the daughter's location in the domesticated landscape of America and the voice that she can use to speak from, and about, that place.

One object of the daughter's voice in Rural Hours is to continue the process of domesticating the American language, making it as simple and functional as the American objects it describes. The failure to achieve an indigenous language is, for Susan Cooper, the equivalent of displacement from one's psychological home. In the introduction to her edition of John Leonard Knapp's Country Rambles, Cooper describes the problem this way:

We are still, in some sense, half aliens to the country Providence has given us; there is much ignorance among us regarding the creatures which held the land as their own long before our forefathers trod the soil, and many of which are still moving about us, living accessories of our existence, at the present hour. On the other hand, again, English reading has made us very familiar with the names, at least, of those races which people the old world. … Thus it is that knowing so little of the creatures in whose midst we live, and mentally familiar by our daily reading with the tribes of another hemisphere, the forms of one continent and the names and characters of another, are strangely blended in most American minds. And in this dream-like phantasmagoria, where fancy and reality are often so widely at variance, in which the objects we see, and those we read of are wholly different, and where bird and beast undergo metamorphoses so strange, most of us are content to pass through life.²⁴

The language that Americans acquire from their “English reading” is therefore as artificial and disorienting as is the image of woman's happiness that Mrs. Hilson absorbs from her reading of European novels—and in both cases, the result is separation from the patriarchal place. Since the problem is best addressed by replacing English books with American books written in an American idiom—especially books for women readers—Susan Cooper's contribution in Rural Hours can be seen as the daughter's continuation, on a modest scale, of the more revolutionary efforts to liberate Americans from their dependence on England that were initiated by the fathers—through the settlement of a continent, the waging of a war, or the authoring of a native literary tradition.

Part of the daughter's work as a writer is to supply the particular names and details that will anchor the patriarchal tradition in a specific local landscape. Susan Cooper's references to the “creatures” of that landscape in her introduction to Knapp appear to include the Indians, those who once “held the land as their own,” as well as native plants and animals. The signatures of the Indians remain on the land primarily in the names of things; repeatedly in Rural Hours Susan Cooper evokes the Indians as the original namers of the components of the American landscape. Her language at times comes close to equating the Indians with the plants they lived among, presenting them both as the pure, uncorrupted, organic products of a special place:

The wild natives of the woods grow there willingly, while many strangers, brought originally from over the Ocean, steal gradually onward from the tilled fields and gardens, until at last they stand side by side upon the same bank, the European weed and the wild native flower. These foreign intruders are a bold and hardy race, driving away the prettier natives. … It is remarkable that these troublesome plants have come very generally from the Old World; they do not belong here, but following the steps of the white man, they have crossed the ocean with him.

(81)

The specific identity of these native people and plants who once shared the American place Cooper finds to be disappearing from the American consciousness, chiefly through the loss of names. Cooper deplores her neighbors' ignorance of “the common names of plants they must have seen all their lives” (135), just as she deplores the practice of replacing the Indian names with the absurd names supplied by “Yankee nomenclature” (484). The retention of Indian place-names has a moral as well as a practical justification, since the stability of the names is both a reminder and a measure of the Indians' loyalty to their own patriarchs: “Shall we, in a Christian land, claim to have less of justice, less of decency and natural feeling, than the rude heathen whose place on the earth we have taken; a race who carefully watched over the burial-places of their fathers with unwavering fidelity?” (291) The good daughter can therefore use her voice to reaffirm both the linguistic authority of the Indian names and the moral authority of the Indians' fidelity to their fathers: “A name is all we leave them, let us at least preserve that monument to their memory” (485).

There are many indications in Rural Hours that Cooper saw the reaffirmation of both kinds of authority as an appropriate form of woman's work, primarily because, she implies, the woman is instinctively responsive to the world of nature—the ultimate source of both linguistic and moral authority. She is therefore the one best prepared to recognize and translate the moral lessons provided by nature. In the rose, for example, she recognizes a symbol of modesty, “and modesty in every true-hearted woman is, like affection, a growth of her very nature, whose roots are fed with her life's blood” (123). The American house-wren, in addition to being sweet and cheerful, is a model of monogamous fidelity; the arbutus, which blooms predictably in the same place and at the same time each year, is an example of the virtue of constancy, “which has a reward above all that fickle change can bestow, giving strength and purity to every affection of life, and even throwing additional grace about the flowers which bloom in our native fields” (49). Nature therefore offers women simple models that confirm the virtues to which they are instinctively drawn, just as the women of Cooper's village are “attracted by the wildflowers” (135): in return, the woman as writer can restore to the natural objects in the American landscape the simple, plain, unaffected names that are the only accurate ones.

One of the few “dramatic” passages in Rural Hours is an account of the surprise visit made by three Oneida women to the Cooper home. Cooper uses the appearance of these “half-civilized” women to extend her implied argument that the moral virtues of the fully civilized woman are not learned but are hers by nature. She describes the Indian women as speaking to each other in a “wild but musical tone”; the voice of one is as “low and melancholy as the note of the whip-poor-will” (176). Their quiet demeanor is natural and winning: “their manners were so gentle and womanly, so free from anything coarse or rude in the midst of their untutored ignorance, that we were much pleased with the visit” (177). A return visit to the Indians' camping-place reveals that what is true for the women is not at all true for the men: they are lethargic, spiritless, marked by “the stamp of vice” (177). The contrast leads Cooper to conclude that the very naturalness and simplicity of the women make them better equipped to benefit from their contact with civilization:

In the savage state, the women appear very inferior to the men, but in a half-civilized condition, they have much the advantage over the stronger sex. They are rarely beautiful, but often very pleasing; their gentle expression, meek and subdued manner, low, musical voices, and mild, dark eyes, excite an interest in their favor, while one turns with pain and disgust from the brutal, stupid, drunken countenances too often seen among the men.

(180)

The gentleness, mildness, and plainness of the Indian women are taken as signs of their successful, natural evolution from the “savage” state toward the “civilized”—that is, toward the fully evolved state of the white woman in America. The women can move easily “from field labors to household tasks” (180) (just as Cooper's favorite, Ruth, moved gracefully from gleaning in Boaz's fields to being the mistress of his household). Presumably, for Cooper and for those of her readers who are “content to await the natural order of things” (23), these signs predict for the Indian women a full assimilation into the American “Paradise of women” and thus a full participation in the culture represented by the American daughter. The moral irreproachability of that culture could, eventually, justify even the slaughtering of “savages” that marked its beginnings.

This discussion of Rural Hours has focused on the book's definition of the territory inherited by the American daughter and its illustration of the possible uses of her voice. To present the book in this way is necessarily limiting, since much of it is actually taken up with a descriptive record of life in and around Cooperstown, arranged as journal entries for a calendar year. The entry for July 18, to take one example, consists entirely of brief descriptions of the plants that might be found blooming in the Cooperstown woods on that day of the year. When Cooper gives her full attention to descriptions of plant and animal life, she is as accurate and interesting an observer as any American naturalist writing before or since. Her writing in these descriptive passages contrasts sharply with the forced and almost formulaic quality of the more didactic passages; it is frequently reminiscent of the writing of Gilbert White, the English naturalist whose Natural History of Selborne Cooper described (along with Knapp's Country Rambles) as belonging to the “choice class” of books “which have opened spontaneously, one might almost say unconsciously, from the author's mind.”²⁵ One interesting question for a contemporary reader is why Cooper did not limit her book to description, especially since her descriptive passages have exactly the quality of comfortable spontaneity that she admired in the male naturalists White and Knapp.

The answer to that question has everything to do with Cooper's consciousness of her position as a writing woman and especially as a writing daughter. Her books announce their special status as a daughter's books, thereby removing them from competition with the father's books and fitting them up to meet the expectations imposed on them from without, especially from the father. One of the most crucial of those expectations is that the daughter's book will be artless, giving at least the appearance of the spontaneity that she admired in White and Knapp, but with this difference: since as a woman she is one of the “repositories of the better principles of our nature,” then her writing must be not only “natural” but principled as well. She must, that is, dispense moral precepts and display a set of principles as if they were hers by nature. For the daughter to write a book that did not assume an overt moral stance would be, in short, unnatural. Susan Cooper's father had written that the eyes of all Europe, as well as the eyes of the American fathers, were on the daughters of America; in Elinor Wyllys, Susan Cooper had demonstrated her acceptance of the writing daughter's obligation to produce plain American books to replace the foreign novels that can turn the daughters away from their fathers. By using her writing to confirm the daughter's place as the natural heir and guardian of the American patriarchy, Cooper could not only demonstrate her gratitude and secure the father's approval; if she were modest and unassuming enough, she could, ironically, perhaps help to accomplish the final justification of the fathers.

Notes

1. James Fenimore Cooper, The Travelling Bachelor: or, Notions of the Americans, 2 vols. (New York, 1852). Hereafter page numbers cited in text.

2. Mary Kelley, “The Sentimentalists: Promise and Betrayal in the Home,” Signs 4 (Spring 1979): 441.

3. James Fenimore Cooper, The Leatherstocking Tales, 2 vols. (New York, 1985). Hereafter page numbers cited in text.

4. Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontier, 1630-1860 (Chapel Hill, 1984), 7.

5. James Fenimore Cooper, The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish, Leatherstocking ed. (New York: Putnam's, n.d.). Hereafter page numbers cited in text.

6. Susan Fenimore Cooper, Rural Hours (New York, 1850), 484. Hereafter page numbers cited in text.

7. George Henry Lewes, “The Lady Novelists,” Westminster Review 58 (July 1852): 72.

8. Susan Fenimore Cooper, Mount Vernon: A Letter to the Children of America (New York, 1859), 70.

9. James Fenimore Cooper, The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. James Franklin Beard, 6 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 2: 176.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., 2:375 and 6: 258-59.

12. Quoted in Susan Fenimore Cooper, Pages and Pictures from the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper (New York, 1861), 62-63.

13. Cooper, Letters, 6: 99.

14. Stephen Railton, Fenimore Cooper: A Study of His Life and Imagination (Princeton, 1978), 56.

15. Cooper, Letters, 6: 149.

16. Ibid., 6: 151.

17. Ibid., 6: 195.

18. Amabel Penfeather [Susan Fenimore Cooper], Elinor Wyllys, or, The Young Folks of Longbridge, ed. James Fenimore Cooper, 2 vols. (New York, 1846). Hereafter page numbers cited in text.

19. Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New York, 2nd ser. (New York, 1848), 106.

20. Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America 1820-1870 (Ithaca, 1978), 11.

21. Ibid., 12.

22. Kelley, “The Sentimentalists,” 436, 446.

23. Susan Fenimore Cooper, The Rhyme and Reason of Country Life (New York, 1854), 33-34.

24. John Leonard Knapp, Country Rambles in England: or Journal of a Naturalist (Buffalo, 1853), 16-17.

25. Ibid., 11.