SOURCE: Baym, Nina. “Susan Fenimore Cooper and Ladies' Science.” In American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences, pp. 73-90. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Baym depicts Cooper's nature writing as a means to present to women readers a rural life that reflects an educated, class-conscious, progressive society.]

Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours (1850) showed how scientific knowledge contributed to an ideal of gracious country living for women.¹ The book's anonymous publication “by a Lady”—at a time when anonymous authorship had gone out of style—quaintly made the point that the author's name mattered less than her class affiliation.² The book is shaped as a journal kept almost daily throughout a year, beginning and ending in spring. It merges accounts of excursions in the Cooperstown environs with associated material pieced together from a huge array of print sources, most of them scientific.

Modern editors of Rural Hours describe the book as “a dynamic interplay of science and literary nature writing” (xi). Lawrence Buell calls Cooper a “literary bioregionalist” with an “encyclopedic passion for bringing bibliographical resources to bear” on her “native township” (406). Both descriptions point to Cooper's interweaving of the literary, the scientific, and the sheerly descriptive; but in confining the focus to Cooperstown (“literary bioregionalism”) they overlook the way in which Cooper's use of scientific texts remakes the township as an item in a global survey, with the result that excursions in Cooperstown become a gateway to the world. Bibliographic allusions place the native township on a map that, in turn, is clearly shown to be the product of reading in the library. Rural Hours signals its intertextual intentions as early as the second entry (March 7), when the sighting of a loon introduces observations by Charles Lucien Bonaparte (probably from his 1838 Comparative List of the Birds of Europe and North America) about loons in the Alps and Apennines (4-5).

The reason for elevating nature into textuality involves, one might surmise, Susan Cooper's practical awareness that country life was rather dreaded than welcomed by genteel women. As an acute natural observer and inveterate reader, Cooper presents a way of being in the rural world that shows other elite women how to make rural life—in Sarah Ripley's phrase cited in chapter 1—“supportable,” and quite specifically supportable to “fine ladies” (Goodwin, “Botanic Mania,” 20). As Cooper says in a late footnote, the book, written “by a learner only,” is offered “to those whose interest in rural subjects has been awakened” as “a sort of rustic primer, which may lead them, if they choose, to something higher” (330).

Behind Ripley's comment, and behind Cooper's book as well, one senses the writers' awareness that “ladies” usually hated rural life because it was boring and boorish. Cooper wants to change that perception, in part by changing the character of rural life itself. She writes in her introduction to The Rhyme and Reason of Country Life that she wants to contribute, and help other women contribute, to the “national progress” toward “country life in its better form” (31, 30). By “better form” she means a country life suitable for, and reflective of, genteel cultivation. Where Sarah Hale or Almira Phelps urged science on women as a means to attain and demonstrate their rationality, Cooper urges it on them as a way to attain and demonstrate that they had class.

This work on behalf of rational rural gentility had particular relevance to the decades when the appurtenances of leisured country life increasingly became signifiers of class status. Thanks to such emerging social markers as summer homes, weekend retreats, landscaped grounds, gentlemen's farming, recreational hunting, and scenic tourism, a group of urbanites with newly disposable income were being enticed back to a countryside whose poverty perhaps they or their parents had fled.³ There had of course been from classical times a tradition of literary pastoral countering urban corruption with ideals of rural simplicity; but practically speaking, the harsh conditions of early national rural life did not support facile associations between the country and cultivated leisure.

There are many ways to account for the increasing reconstitution, in antebellum America, of vacant country real estate as adult playgrounds; the point is that people who well knew the harshness and sordidness of country life needed to be coaxed back to nature by learning to see it differently. It was no accident that the vogue for natural history in England and the United States arose just as access to country life became a status marker in both nations.⁴ This coincidence may also help account for the success of Rural Hours, which was both fully aware of changing times and specifically directed toward women readers. The purpose of Cooper's work is to model country life as a constant intellectual, civilized, rational pleasure and therefore to show ladies a rational, civilized way of being ladylike. Country ladies demonstrate their class by reconstituting their rustic surroundings through a combination of literary and scientific knowledge.

In earlier chapters I have alluded to the function of school geography as a protoscience. The geographical approach to terrain in Rural Hours would not seem unfamiliar to readers, nor would its journal-like structure, which they would have encountered in the many biography-memoir hybrids published in the nineteenth century. The book obviously synthesizes these forms, along with models drawn from English writing about rural life.⁵ Yet, the immediate inspiration for Rural Hours was probably the example of the well-known traveler and inventor of the science of physical geography (arguably, the construer of geography itself as a science), Alexander von Humboldt.⁶ The first two volumes of Humboldt's magisterial and immensely popular multivolume Cosmos appeared in English in 1848, just when Cooper began her own project. Their publication led to the reissue of some of his earlier travel writings; the 1840s had also been the great decade of U.S. scientific exploration, including the Fremont land expedition and the Wilkes naval expedition.

Although Rural Hours does not resemble Cosmos in form, Humboldt's excitement about the huge world out there waiting to be catalogued, every individual item of which had some (perhaps as yet unknown) relation to the whole, could easily motivate a project whose aim is less to catalogue the locale accurately than to perceive its relation to the global. To be sure, Humboldt really traveled to all the places he wrote about, while in Rural Hours Cooper does her voyaging beyond Cooperstown through print resources. But this is exactly the point of Rural Hours; it shows how the judicious use of print resources allows country ladies to experience their surroundings as a cosmopolitan adventure.⁷Rural Hours may thus be thought of as a book of travels in which the use of scientific texts turns the local into the global while making travel a textual affair. Cooper shows repeatedly that even local terrain is unintelligible without the text-based interpretation. There is simply no recognizing the plant or bird one has sighted without consulting a guidebook; among diverse printed sources, none serve her purposes better than scientific works of natural history.

Because Cooper thinks that knowing where one is in the world requires textual knowledge rather than intuition, she collapses the distinction between reality and textuality just as she blurs the boundary between real and armchair travel. This is not to say that Rural Hours has no grounding in the real world. According to David Jones, the modern editor of the 1887 revision, her botanical identifications are of a caliber that “perhaps only a trained botanist can fully appreciate” (xxx). Yet, to the extent that the book is an instructed record of observations, it necessarily calls on texts. Anything but the artless, spontaneous record of walks and drives it sometimes pretends to be, Rural Hours thoughtfully refracts the notes on which it is based, which may have been recorded initially to be the basis for a book.⁸

Entries in Cooper's virtual journal vary from brief descriptions of the day's weather to extended set pieces, essays sometimes running to six thousand words or more. The connection between these essays and the day's outing is sometimes quite tenuous, suggesting that they might have been written independently of their position in the book. When bad weather precludes excursions, especially in winter, Cooper chooses sometimes to describe what she sees outside the window, sometimes to concentrate entirely on summarizing and commenting on books. Some of her many topics are botanical and ornithological identifications, the habitats of undomesticated flora and fauna, agriculture, horticulture, sylvaculture, milling, mining, political economy, rural technologies, local architecture, hunting, fishing, folkways, holidays, and biblical exegesis. Among her print sources are books of natural history, including the official surveys of New York State and some of the New England states; journal, pamphlet, and newspaper items; statistical reports; geographies; scientific travels; histories; and the Bible.

As she connects the terrain with the library, Cooper emerges as an exemplar of female rationality and decorous piety whose combination of scientific amateurism with Christian orthodoxy would not have been out of place twenty-five years earlier than the actual publication year of Rural Hours. No Transcendental intuitionist, she believes in the biblical God of Christian Revelation, who has authored nature but is not resident in it. As a devout Episcopalian, she derived orthodox homilies from natural observation; these, scattered here and there in Rural Hours, are arguably the book's weakest segments. She writes for example on May 16: “At hours like these, the immeasurable goodness, the infinite wisdom of our Heavenly Father, are displayed in so great a degree of condescending tenderness to unworthy, sinful man, as must appear quite incomprehensible—entirely incredible to reason alone—were it not for the recollection of the mercies of past years, the positive proofs of experience” (45).

If the whole book read like this, there would be little reason to open it now. But the persona also represents a contemporary revision of the English amateur scientist and gentleman perambulator, a sort of nationalized, feminized, and updated Gilbert White. Cooper writes in The Rhyme and Reason of Country Life that it is the union of Christianity with a “general diffusion of a high degree of civilization which has led us to a more deeply felt appreciation of the works of the creation,” such that “the verse of the fields—the rural hymn,—becomes the last form of song, instead of being the first” (27, 29).⁹

As she construes country living as an opportunity for women readers to develop themselves as genteel ladies, she hopes to disrupt the traditional association of women with physical nature by showing them how to think about physical nature, so as to perform themselves as intellectual beings. This is a common motif among all advocates of a scientific education for women. But Cooper nuances the work of the previous generation of scientific affiliates, who argued that women should be proficient in science to demonstrate their possession of reason, by proposing that possession of scientific knowledge also testifies to their possession of class.¹⁰

There is much in Rural Hours about the shortcomings of uneducated folk; that Cooper is no rustic boor is something she is at pains to clarify, less perhaps because of any insecurity she might feel than because of the likely insecurities of her readers. She approaches country people themselves less as conservators of useful local knowledge than as a population in need of instruction. She often asks for the whereabouts of a plant she is seeking, or for the name of a plant she has found, only to encounter entrenched ignorance:

It is really surprising how little the country people know on such subjects. Farmers and their wives, who have lived a long life in the fields, can tell you nothing on these matters. The men are even at fault among the trees on their own farms, if these are at all out of the common way; and as for the smaller native plants, they know less about them than Buck or Brindle, their own oxen. … The women have some little acquaintance with herbs and simples, but even in such cases they frequently make strange mistakes; they also are attracted by the wild flowers; they gather them, perhaps, but they cannot name them.

(83)

In the context of pervasive rustic ignorance, Cooper's emphasis on right naming has obvious class implications. Her chief strategy in every botanical excursion in Rural Hours—to see what is there at a particular point in the calendrical year, to identify and interpret it according to the best authorities—is something other than the desire to know nature as it really is. It is rather to know nature as the educated, enlightened, and well-bred know it. Whether she goes in quest of a particular natural object or takes what she finds, her proceedings always require names. The knowledge of the natural world she desires already translates the natural world into taxonomy. The concept of the “same” plant implies a standard. One cannot assert, or know, that the “same” plant is being differently named in different places or that “different” plants are getting the same name in different places without a stable point of reference. This stable point can only be imposed, top down, by scientific botany. The marsh marigold, for example, is a “handsome” flower called cowslip by the “country people”—“though different entirely from the true plant of that name” (30). She wants the name to be “true” to the “true” plant because she wants to integrate the particular with the general, the local with the global, under the sign of an Enlightenment universal science that is chiefly concerned to identify discrete species correctly so as to compile a comprehensive planetary inventory of the creation.¹¹

But if, on the one hand, Cooper installs a distinction between herself and the rural population, or more generally between herself and those who needed to earn their own livings, she also installs one between herself and the sciences on which she relies to elevate herself above country and working people. She says her book, written “by a learner only,” makes “no claim whatever to scientific knowledge” (3). In calling herself a learner only, she may be distancing herself from the financially needy women textbook writers whom she might otherwise seem to resemble. At any rate, she portrays herself as sitting gratefully at the feet of such notable natural historians as James Ellsworth De Kay (330), or “Professor S. F. Baird, Major Le Conte, and Mr. M. A. Curtis,” who are thanked for personal help in her edition of Knapp (20). De Kay compiled the zoology and ichthyology volumes of the New York State natural history survey; the zoologist Spencer Baird helped amass the Smithsonian's natural history collections; John Eatton Le Conte, an army topographical engineer, produced an elegant North American lepidoptera; Moses Curtis was a botanist and ornithologist. All these men were family friends.

Yet her admiration for these experts is carefully balanced by a recognition that their professional work needs translation to suit the needs of amateurs in the country. Except for a few self-conscious Linnaean footnotes, she uses vernacular names, because they are attractive and accessible, and therefore (for an audience that must be persuaded to her project rather than commanded) useful. Although in many ways as eager as Almira Phelps to conscript women for science and use science for disciplinary purposes, for her audience the pedagogical stance of a Phelps or Catharine Beecher would be counterproductive. She chooses to present herself as a student for whom continuing with her science is a refined intellectual entertainment. Science merges with esthetics; Cooper suggests even that Linnaean taxonomy as such is merely the arbitrary nomenclature of scientists rather than anything inherent in the species or genus. She has, of course, no smidgen of a constructionist attitude toward scientific professionalism; it is simply that her old-style Natural Theology maintained that in relation to the mind of God, all systems of human naming are necessarily artificial.

Because names are artifices, even though they are necessary, Cooper feels free to use those best suited to her purposes, which are to make nature scientific and make science attractive to an esthetically sensitive group of genteel women. The best choice for this group is the English vernacular. She rejects Native American names with considerable vehemence as unpronounceable and, of course, ungenteel. The combined plainness and picturesqueness of English vernacular names are esthetically pleasing; using them at once makes clear that the user has no professional scientific pretensions and is of English descent. The focus on the esthetic comports with the Natural Theology idea that God's goodness and wisdom are evident in his making nature beautiful, which gives people pleasure and prepares them to admire it as evidence of the divine government of the cosmos. All this is at stake in one of the book's set pieces (June 23), which complains specifically about Latinate botanical nomenclature:

What has a dead language to do on every-day occasions with the living blossoms of the hour? Why should a strange tongue sputter its uncouth, compound syllables upon the simple weeds by the wayside? If these hard words were confined to science and big books, one would not quarrel with the roughest and most pompous of them all; but this is so far from being the case, that the evil is spreading over all the woods and meadows, until it actually perverts our common speech.

(83)

The rationale for common names asserts itself soon after this passage: “If we wish those who come after us to take a natural, unaffected pleasure in flowers, we should have names for the blossoms that mothers and nurses can teach children before they are ‘in Botany’” (87).

Because she wants to make her subject attractive, Cooper is interested in esthetics. But because attractiveness has its use, esthetics is more than a luxury. Taking pleasure in rural scenery, and pointing to the beauties that have caused that pleasure, become elements of a rationalized, systematized approach to surroundings. Cooper may well have thought of esthetics itself as a nascent science. Several discourses already recognized as scientific—notably optics and acoustics, divisions of natural philosophy, or physics—involved reciprocal interactions between human perceptual apparatus (eye and ear) and environment. Drawing and painting were both increasingly defined as professional, teachable skills requiring systematic knowledge of geometry (for drawing), chemistry (for pigments and solvents in painting), and physics (for understanding color and light and the optics of perception). Cooper's Elinor Wyllys, which features a character who wants to be an artist, contains several discussions about the optics and chemistry of painting light.

“Taste,” too, had been a major target of Enlightenment efforts to systematize esthetic response. Cooper's language of “pleasing effect” throughout Rural Hours assumes the existence of universally accepted standards that can be transmitted, as for example through Andrew Jackson Downing's best-selling treatise on landscape architecture. Working from Edmund Burke and other theorizers of the sublime and picturesque, along with the work of English landscapers like John Loudon, Downing—a close associate of the Cooper family whom Cooper cites—describes taste as an inalienable, objective attribute of natural objects, from which position his prescriptions for constructing and appreciating country surroundings were made to seem entirely objective.¹²

In between the beginning and end of scientific perception, for both of which Cooper require a stabilized name, she connects named objects in a scientific web of other names. Even the most apparently unmediated entry turns out on closer examination to be thoroughly, adroitly comparative. Take trees, for example. Before the end of May (the journal begins on March 4) she has identified local varieties of alder, ash, aspen, bass-wood, beech, birch, butternut, chestnut, elm, hemlock (“Some of the hemlocks have a much closer and more compressed upright growth than those commonly met with; so that one is almost tempted to believe there are two distinct varieties” [51]), hickory, locust (“always the last to open its leaves” [50]), maple, oak, pine (we have “but one pine,” she will write later on, “though that one is the chief of its family; the noble white pine” [129]), poplar (but not “the great northern or balsam poplar,” which “is found at Niagara and on Lake Champlain, but the farmers about here seem to know nothing of it” [43]), spruce, sumac, tamarack (an easy find, since “there are many planted in the village, and in summer they are a very pleasant tree, though inferior to the European larch” [30]), walnut, and golden willow (“the weeping willow is not seen here, our winters are too severe for it” [31]).

Cooper's method of authenticating her identifications follows guidebook convention; it notes the distinctive features of the species, that is, the features that differentiate it. Accordingly she must inform readers about a great deal that she does not see: not the great northern or balsam poplar, not the European larch, not the weeping willow. She also explains why she knows some things to be what they are rather than something else—for example, because local winters are too severe for weeping willows, the willow one sees is another kind. Sighting meadowlarks on July 30, she writes that “climate seems to affect them but little, for they reach from the tropics to 53° north latitude, and they are resident birds in the lower countries of our own State” (136)—information with no basis in anything that Cooper could actually have seen. In the course of observing and identifying a total of approximately fifty species of local birds, Cooper describes a much larger number of species. One bird leads to another—the sight of a white-bellied swallow (the tree swallow) invites discussion of other kinds of swallows: the bank swallow, “entirely a stranger here, though found on the banks of lakes and rivers at no great distance; we have seen them, indeed, in large flocks among the sandhills near the Susquehannah, just beyond the southern borders of the county” (36); the cliff swallow, “also a stranger here,” the first pair of which only appeared in New York State in 1824 (37). Blue jays lead to “another kind of jay—the Canada jay—sometimes seen in this State” (193); a pair of golden-winged woodpeckers to other woodpeckers—“we frequently see the downy woodpecker, and the hairy woodpecker, in the village” as well as the “handsome red-head, one of the migratory woodpeckers” now “much more rare in our neighborhood than it used to be” and the pileated woodpecker, “said to have been occasionally seen here of late years; but we have never observed it ourselves” (187).

Two paragraphs about naturalized weeds name sixty-six of the “most common,” which are “now choking up all our way-sides” (64-65)—a remark suggesting to a rapid reader that she saw and recognized this astonishing number of species during just a few walks. Closer attention suggests however that she is simply summarizing material from a systematic botany: “others still might be added to the list” (65). When she says that “the shepherd's-purse, with others, is common in China, on the most eastern coast of Asia” and “the gimson weed, or Datura, is an Abyssinian plant, and the Nicandra came from Peru” (65), she is not really describing the weed in her own locale. She has abstracted it from the immediate place and reconstructed it as a datum in the global picture. Although she calls “foreign” weeds “troublesome,” “noxious,” an “evil” requiring “patient care and toil” to keep within bounds, making it “the chief labor of the month to wage war upon their tribe,” there is no sign that she recognizes why foreign weeds might easily overcome the indigenous. Her interpretation of the fact is strictly theological: “These noxious plants have come unbidden to us, with the grains and grasses of the Old World, the evil with the good, as usual in this world of probation. … The useful plants produce a tenfold blessing upon the labor of man, but the weed is also there, ever accompanying his steps, to teach him a lesson of humility” (66).¹³

The passage makes conventional use of natural phenomenon to construct a Christian homily (what Buell calls “homiletic naturism” [402]). If, however, Cooper sermonizes from natural history, so too does she attempt to understand the Bible itself as a scientific document. Just as she wants to get the name right for local plants, she wants to get the names right for biblical references to flora and fauna. The entry for May 1 contains a long discussion of the likely species of willow referred to in Psalm 137: “When we read of those willows of Babylon, in whose shade the children of Israel sat down and wept, thousands of years ago, we naturally think of the weeping willow which we all know to be an Asiatic tree. But the other day, while reading an observation of a celebrated Eastern traveller, the idea suggested itself, that this common impression might possibly be erroneous” (31). (Readers who “naturally” think of the weeping willow when they read Psalm 137 because they “all know” it to be an Asiatic tree comprise an ideally educated audience.) Now, having been provoked by Sir Robert Ker Porter's reference to the gray ozier willows of Palestine, she consults “several” travel books and finds no reference in any of them to the weeping willow. “The assertion, that it is the tree of the Psalmist is universally made, but we have never yet seen a full and complete account of the grounds for this opinion; and, so far as we can discover, no such statement has yet been published” (32).

This passage makes it once again abundantly clear how much Rural Hours is about translating nature into information through which it can be intellectually and instrumentally known. In winter, when bad weather keeps her housebound and few species are to be observed through the window, Cooper often works up descriptive lists of birds and animals that she has never seen but that have been spotted in the region (the parakeet! the ibis!). Winter is also the time to write at length about the great mammals who have disappeared from the region. The social value of all these facts for Cooper is their transformation of rural life into an intellectual text, which makes the provincial into a cosmopolitan and translates bleak days into mental festivals.

The seasonal approach in Rural Hours is itself another sign of Cooper's belief that nature requires translation and abstraction to be comprehensible. She recognizes that, while the seasons are facts of nature independent of the human, they are apprehended in human, that is, instrumental terms by human beings. Being able to predict and prepare for seasonal change in whatever climate one resides is the basic fact of human survival and hence of human history. The sciences of natural history recognized this fact; all official surveys were inventories of resources for present or future exploitation. Natural historians frequently referred to Linnaeus's recommendation that farmers should chart natural growth for agricultural purposes. In Howitt's Book of the Seasons, Linnaeus is quoted as saying that every farmer should “diligently mark the time of budding, leafing, and flowering of different plants” and “also put down the days on which his respective grains were sown” so that, “by comparing these two tables for a number of years, he will be enabled to form an exact calendar for his spring corn” (101-102).

Samuel Deane's well-known and often reissued New England Farmer, which from its first appearance in 1797 was calling for an Enlightened—experimental—rather than traditional approach to farming, urged “naturalists” to chart blossoming along with leafing on a local level. Because vegetation “is not equally forward, in each degree of latitude,” they should list

a considerable number of trees and shrubs, which are common, and near at hand; carefully watch their appearances, and minute the times of the first opening of their leaves, and also of their blossoming. … When these accounts are obtained, let trials be made by sowing a certain kind of seed before, at, and after the foliation, or the flowering, of some particular plant, and the produce compared. Let accurate experiments of this kind be yearly repeated, with all the most useful spring plants; by this, in a few years, complete kalendars may be obtained for every degree of latitude in this country. The consequence will be, that the farmer will be able infallibly to read the true times of sowing, by casting his eye upon the trees and shrubs that are about him.

(236-237)

Deane wants similar “kalendars” of weather, winds, and “state of the atmosphere” made for “every climate in this country” (486).

The purpose here is not to know nature in the Thoreauvian sense (although Thoreau also prided himself in Walden for making the earth say beans instead of grass and in his late journals aspired to compile just such calendars, which he even spelled with a k), but to enable humans to use the earth for their own sustenance. Susan Cooper believed that this connection of people to the earth was divinely ordained, and therefore, as Johnson and Patterson observe, that it “is consistent with God's will” that “humans convert the wilderness into a land that is shaped and cultivated” (xix).

The hand of man generally improves a landscape. The earth has been given to him, and his presence in Eden is natural; he gives life and spirit to the garden. Where there is something amiss in the scene, it is when there is some evident want of judgment, or good sense, or perhaps some proof of selfish avarice, or wastefulness, as when a country is stripped of its wood to fill the pockets or fill the fires of one generation.

(“Dissolving View,” 82)

Because Cooper thought the earth had been given to humankind, she also thought the human presence could always be discerned on it. She likes to make the landscape reveal its human history.¹⁴ For example, in Rural Hours for June 27: “While observing, this afternoon, the smooth fields about us, it was easy, within the few miles of country in sight at the moment, to pick out parcels of land in widely different conditions, and we amused ourselves by following upon the hill-sides the steps of the husbandman, from the first rude clearing, through every successive stage of tillage, all within range of the eye at the same instant” (89).

A habit of superimposing landscapes for purposes of topographical history is especially visible in Cooper's essay “A Dissolving View,” published in an 1852 anthology about American scenery, The Home Book of the Picturesque. The essay culminates with an overlaying of “merrie England” on a prospect of Cooperstown as she observes it from a nearby height. Wooden bridge, courthouse, seven taverns, a dozen stores, churches, and a hundred houses disappear; the town “dwindles to a mere hamlet” with “low, picturesque thatched cottages,” an old church, a tavern, “two or three small, quiet-looking shops,” and a stone bridge. Surrounding hills are “shorn of wood,” hedges divide the fields and line the roads, there are country houses, a castle, a former convent, and no fewer than nine similar hamlets in view (91-92). The “same” topography cannot be the “same” when it has a different human history; scenery always represents and reflects national character, national history, and the national economy.¹⁵

The significance of human history for the landscape is so compelling to Cooper that in “Dissolving View” she even takes issue with Louis Agassiz's claim that America is, geologically speaking, an old land compared to Europe (thereby disclosing, of course, that she was up to date on her Agassiz). “He tells us that in many particulars our vegetation, our animal life, belong to an older period than those of the eastern hemisphere”; but “without doubting this theory”—of course one does not openly challenge an expert!—“still there are many peculiarities which give to this country an air of youth beyond what is observed in the East. There are many parts of Europe, of Asia, of Africa, which have an old, worn-out, exhausted appearance; sterile mountains, unwooded moors, barren deserts and plains” (90).

Here Cooper is not talking about the cultural superiority of the United States, or even its political promise; she is talking about deforestation and depletion of resources. Her concerns are land use and overuse—concerns that have led Johnson and Patterson among others to identify her as protoenvironmentalist. Far more important than the picturesqueness of the stone bridge in this English picture is the fact that it, like the other structures described, is made of stone. The hills shorn of wood mark a historical point in the economic development of a society when wood is no longer available, a point exactly and dangerously coincident with increased population. In Cooperstown, by contrast, all the structures are wooden, and there are plenty of trees around. That England is an “old” country and the United States a “new” one, in human terms, is written in the amount of forested land.

But Cooperstown is in process, just like any other place on the globe. The English story is destined to become the American story as well. Today, Cooper writes in Rural Hours (July 28), a person fond of the forest, “by picking his way, and following a winding course, may yet travel a long mile over a shady path, such as the red man loved.” Already it takes work and imagination to fantasize the locale as wholly forested; “another half century may find the country bleak and bare.” This phrasing suggests regret, and there is some of that; but she also describes deforestation as a “wonderful change” (128), having awakened a land that “lay slumbering in the twilight of the forest. Wild dreams made up its half-conscious existence” (127). In the context of Cooper's drive to intellectualize, phrases like “slumbering” and “half-conscious” are negatives. Understanding the productive capacity of the earth and exploiting it are positive goods; misuse of the earth, always possible, is understood not in terms of nature itself as an absolute good, but in terms of exhausting a resource that the human population depends on.

Insofar as human consumption of the earth's products marks the end point of Cooper's rationale for understanding nature in scientific terms, the market enters her account. For example, in Rural Hours a long section on maple sugar (April 1) begins with two socioeconomic facts: “Fresh maple sugar offered for sale to-day; it is seldom brought to market early as this” (13). From this starting point Cooper moves to a full description of rural sugar-making technology: “A hole is first bored into the trunk, from one to three feet from the ground”; a small trough is inserted, “usually made of a branch of alder or sumach, which is sharpened at one end and the pith taken out for two or three inches”; the sap drips into buckets, “a regular article of manufacture in the country,” made of pine “or at times of bass-wood,” and selling “at twenty cents a piece” (14). That local maple sugar is mainly produced for farm use—not for village sale—is explained as the market outcome of cane sugar's being “produced so easily, and so cheap, from the West Indies and the southern part of our own country, that there is little motive for making that of the maple an article of commerce. Maple sugar sells in the village this year for nine cents a pound, and good Havana for six cents” (15-16). At the end of her discussion, Cooper abandons the village food mart for the global intellectual mart, via the natural history and geography that always returns her to print; “Many other trees are tapped for their juices in different parts of the world. … They prepare from the sap of the Palm of Chili, a syrup of the consistency of honey, using it as an article of food. In Northern Europe, the birch sap is made into a drink which they call birch-wine. … In the Crimea, the Tartars regularly make sugar from the fine walnut-trees on the shores of the Black Sea. So says Dr. Clarke in his Travels.” The entry ends with statistics offered for no apparent reason other than that statistics are good to know: “According to the last general Census, the whole amount of maple sugar made during one year in this county, with a population of 49,658, was 351,748 pounds, or nearly eight pounds to each individual. The whole amount of sugar made in the State, was 10,048,109 pounds” (16).

In the longest set piece in the book, about disappearing forests (July 28, 125-135), Cooper channels trees through pietistic, esthetic, and moral discourses before settling into the blended statistical, scientific, and commercial approaches that fundamentally characterize Rural Hours. “What a noble gift to man are the forests!” she begins, romantically enough; but practicality enters immediately: “What a debt of gratitude and admiration we owe for their utility and their beauty!” (125). She thanks the Creator; expatiates Bryant-like on the mingled signs of life and death in the forest; invokes a formulaic prehistory of vanished Indians. Then her inventory begins: “Perhaps two-fifths of the woods in our neighborhood are evergreens, chiefly pine and hemlock. … Neither the yellow, the pitch, nor the red pine is known here. … The oak of several varieties, white, black, the scarlet, and the red; the beech, the chestnut; black and white ashes; the lime or bass-wood; the white and the slippery elms; the common aspen, the large-leaved aspen; the downy-leaved poplar, and the balm of Gilead poplar; the white, the yellow, and the black birches, are all very common” (129).

After several paragraphs like this she starts to lament—not however over lost trees as an environmentalist might expect, but over rustic ignorance:

One would think that by this time, when the forest has fallen in all the valleys—when the hills are becoming more bare every day—when timber and fuel are rising in prices, and new uses are found for even indifferent woods—some forethought and care in this respect would be natural in people laying claim to common sense. … Our people seldom remember that the forests, while they provide food and shelter to the wildest savage tribes, make up a large amount of the wealth of the most civilized nations. … Our fields are divided by wooden fences; wooden bridges cross our rivers; our village streets and highways are being paved with wood; the engines that carry us on our way by land and by water are fed with wood; the rural dwellings without and within, their walls, their floors, stairways, and roofs are almost wholly of wood; and in this neighborhood the fires that burn on our household hearths are entirely the gift of the living forest.

(132-133)

True to her class, Cooper blames this waste on “the people” and suggests that those with long-term investments in land—owners as opposed to tenants—are more apt to conceive of trees as a renewable market crop as well as in “an intellectual and in a moral sense” (133). These things go together. “There is also something in the care of trees which rises above the common labors of husbandry, and speaks of a generous mind” (134). Only when the entire population becomes highly civilized—and “time is a very essential element, absolutely indispensable, indeed, in true civilization”—will ordinary farmers recognize that “a large shady tree in a door-yard is much more desirable than the most expensive mahogany and velvet sofa in the parlor” (133). Interchanging the tree with furniture, equating the esthetic with the civilized, attaching a literal cash value to the esthetic (and hence to the civilized), Cooper fuses esthetics and cash: “How easy it would be to improve most of the farms in the country by a little attention to the woods and trees, improving their appearance, and adding to their market value at the same time!” (134).

Many passages in Rural Hours show appreciation of country ways, but at best these are graciously patronizing or amusedly nostalgic. Cooper's distinction between herself and the country folk allows her to consider them as though they too are part of nature, are objects for her imperial gaze. One of the most extended set pieces in the book (July 3) describes a visit to a farm where the interconnections between old-fashioned virtues and agricultural practices are exhibited. Cooper assures her perhaps skeptical readers that one “who goes to enjoy and not to criticise, will find enough to please him about any common farm, provided the goodman be sober and industrious, the housewife be neat and thrifty” (96). “We went into her little buttery; here the bright tin pans were standing full of rich milk; everything was thoroughly scoured, beautifully fresh, and neat” (97). An encounter with local schoolchildren whose clothes are neatly patched (October 31) produces a celebration of the patch as evidence of old-fashioned prudence, simplicity, good sense, class awareness, and industry; it shows that the wearer is “not ashamed of honest poverty, and does not seek to parade under false colors,” and it is “honorable to that man or woman to whom Providence has appointed the trial of poverty” (226).

As she thinks about how these patched children are being educated, she produces a deeply conservative critique of contemporary U.S. pedagogy for encouraging self-expression (“impulse”) rather than “restraint,” which ought to be “more especially the moral point in education.” Where instruction in restraint is absent, she writes, “discipline and self-denial are wanting, with all the strength they give to integrity, and honor, and true self-respect, with all the decencies of good manners which they infuse into our daily habits” (228). Cooper need not say directly, indeed must not say directly since that would be indecorous, what is nevertheless redundantly clear in her self-presentation: that she herself exemplifies the outcome of an education in restraint, and that the scientific languages through which she mediates her encounters with nature exemplify the constant disciplining of her intellect.

To sum up: For Cooper the highest form of human relation to the created world is devotional, but Rural Hours is only occasionally a devotional book. It is a secular work privileging natural science above other forms of knowledge as a way to connect with one's surroundings and connect one's surroundings to the information web that is reconstituting human understanding. The book elaborates and updates a republican ideal of a lady's life that detaches her from idleness, frivolity, and extravagance and turns her into an industrious worker on behalf of developing her own intellectuality through acquisition of information, thereby raising the civilized tone of rural society. Cooper's special work for the sciences is to show that they are the epitome of socially desirable knowledge, and thereby to translate them into items for genteel consumption. As I have been showing, the Enlightenment goal of construing women as mental beings took on special force when connected to science. Cooper clarifies what might always have been the class implications of this argument by making the lady who does science in amateur fashion into the highest development of the human female. Raising the social tone by assimilating science into the lady's repertoire becomes Cooper's special mission and gives the lady herself a mission as she comes to occupy the amateur position vacated by male professionals.

As she successively revised Rural Hours to keep it cogent in a changing world, Cooper interestingly shifts the balance between nature and science. In her preface to the lightly revised 1868 version of Rural Hours, Cooper alludes to changes in rural life brought about by the telegraph, gaslight, and railroad. These have made some of the work she had done to connect Cooperstown to the wider world superfluous. The country, if distant from the city, was no longer isolated from it. Concurrently, primitive rurality begins to assume a nostalgic charm. Despite the inroads of modernity, she assures readers, we still “may be as rustic as we please. The hills, and the woods, and the lake, may still afford us true delight” (xxvii). In 1850, in contrast, she had aimed to move the rustic world into the modern age.

The revision of 1887 is far more drastic. Removing her preface of 1868, Cooper also deletes about a quarter of the 1850 text. Deletions include entries that merely mention the weather, all biblical exegesis, dated criticism of local practices, obsolete statistics, global natural history, and, in fact, most of the scientific materials. The residual book contains little more than accounts of the excursions, so that the descriptions of natural phenomena appear much less mediated and contextualized than they had in 1850. Now, too, the book is published as Cooper's, not as an anonymous lady's.

It would appear that the lady herself, and her mission as well, have become obsolete in the late nineteenth century. With no lady in the title, and no criticism of the locals for their ignorance, Rural Hours is far more egalitarian in 1887 than it had been in 1850. The disappearance of the science is related, of course, to the vanished lady, because its role had been predicated on representing a specific kind of gentility.

By this point, too, the wilderness ethos had become far more powerful in American thinking about nature after the Civil War, as the West was “opened” and the idea of national parks as preserves of pristine nature took hold. The wilderness myth produced a corresponding form of imaginative nature writing, the one we know today—a form idealizing unmediated communion with an imagined untouched nature, a nature lacking human history and detached from the scientific understanding that humans had imposed on it.¹⁶

Without its panoply of scientific references, Rural Hours in 1887 looks much more like this newer sort of nature writing than did Cooper's book of 1850. From this angle one might call the 1887 Rural Hours a gesture of disaffiliation from science. Although Cooper would never go so far as to construct her natural world as a form of anti-science, or claim that Cooperstown was wilderness, or blame science and technology for the distresses of modernity, the late version of the book clearly intimates that one ought to approach local flora and fauna not for their value as natural history or global inventory, but as items useful for imagining a wilderness that exists, perhaps, somewhere else. Because she is no longer writing as a midcentury lady, Cooper has abandoned her science.

Notes

1. Rural Hours went through seven editions in five years; it was revised and reissued in 1868, and again in 1887. There is no biography of Susan Cooper; Beard's summary in NAW [Notable American Women,] is useful. The Cooper family, including three younger sisters and a brother, was close-knit. Susan and her father, James Fenimore Cooper, were especially close. He accompanied her on the excursions described in Rural Hours and helped get the book published. Susan Cooper never married; she continued to live in Cooperstown from the time the family moved there in 1836, when she was twenty-three, until her death in 1894. Following the publication of Rural Hours (an earlier novel, Elinor Wyllys [1846], had not been successful) she wrote essays, edited an English nature journal in 1853 (John Knapp's Country Rambles in England), and compiled and annotated a belletristic anthology, The Rhyme and Reason of Country Life (1855). From the late 1850s onward she put most of her literary energies into preserving and enhancing her father's reputation. Pages and Pictures from the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper (1861) was a lavishly produced, beautifully illustrated anthology of extracts from Cooper's novels interspersed with her astute biographical and critical commentary. She also wrote the introductions to volumes in the Household Edition of his novels (1876-1884). For analysis of Elinor Wyllys see Maddox.

2. Although one might suppose that Cooper published anonymously so as not to presume on her famous father, the dedication—“to the author of ‘The Deerslayer’ very respectfully, gratefully, and most affectionately”—obviously implied a close kinship between author and dedicatee. All the Cooper acquaintances knew the authorship from the start. James Fenimore Cooper wrote home excitedly from New York soon after publication, “Right and left, I hear of Rural Hours. I am stopped in the street, a dozen times a day to congratulate me” (quoted in the Johnson-Patterson edition of Rural Hours, xiii). Throughout my discussion of Cooper's Rural Hours, I cite this edition of the 1850 text.

3. For the gentrification of country life after 1840, see Huth; Marx; Stilgoe, Borderlands; Thornton. Among important New York writers publicizing an upscale rural style of life were Nathaniel P. Willis (Rural Letters, 1849), J. T. Headley (The Adirondack, or Life in the Woods, 1849), and the Hudson River Valley horticulturalist and landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing. For the class aspirations of the Cooper family—and their interest in the value of real estate—see Taylor.

4. See chapter 2 and Keeney for the vogue of natural history, especially botany, in the United States; for Great Britain, see Allen, Barber.

5. Likely English models for Cooper's work include Leigh Hunt's perambulatory almanac The Months (London, 1821); William Howitt's calendrical Book of the Seasons, published in London in 1831 and in Philadelphia soon thereafter; Howitt's sociological Rural Life of England (London, 1838); John Knapp's Country Rambles, or Diary of a Naturalist, published in London in 1829 and edited for Americans in an 1853 edition by Cooper herself, brought out by a publisher in Buffalo; Gilbert White's Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, first published in London in 1789 and many times reprinted; and Mary Russell Mitford's five volumes of popular sketches, Our Village, published between 1824 and 1832 in London and New York.

6. Humboldt's history of attitudes toward nature in the first volume of Cosmos is heavily mined by Cooper for her introduction to The Rhyme and Reason of Country Life. For an excellent popular biography of Humboldt, see Botting. For Humboldt's impact on scientific practice in England and the United States, see Bowen, Bruce, Cannon, Livingstone, Slotten.

7. Of course Thoreau's Walden comes to mind here, with its challenging insistence that traveling a great deal in Concord is equivalent to world voyaging and its truculent finale about the superficiality of actual travel as opposed to inward exploration. Thoreau cites Cooper's work in his journals, and many discussions of Rural Hours deviate at some point into discussions of Thoreau. Some scholars propose that Thoreau got Walden's seasonal form from Cooper. But, if she was his model, she was also his challenge; his masculine farmer's persona neatly counters her genteel femininity as a model of how to live in the country. For a development of this point, see Baym, “English Nature”; for the influence of Humboldt on Thoreau's own scientific writing, see Walls.

8. Neither the original journals nor the book manuscript seem to have survived; using local weather records, Hugh MacDougall has shown that she combined materials from at least 1848 and 1849, and perhaps 1850 as well, incongruously—and perhaps fatally for any project demanding scientific environmental accuracy—interweaving a very wet summer (1848) with a very dry one (1849). If the book is meant as an example, not a reliable scientific document, this compression does not matter. There is no evidence that Cooper kept a comparable journal at any other time in her life, for which reason—along with the evidence of Elinor Wyllys that she aspired to a literary career—I theorize that she kept this journal in the first place to make a book. Her preface, however, makes the ladylike disclaimer that she embarked on the project only for her own amusement (3) and Rural Hours editors Johnson and Patterson take her at her word (x).

9. Cooper follows Humboldt only up to a certain point in her history of human attitudes toward nature. In Cosmos, Humboldt declares that attitudes toward nature show increasing enlightenment, and Cooper agrees; but he also says that science has superseded poetry as the educated approach to nature, and here Cooper disagrees. She maintains the Natural Theology position that one eventually works up through nature to nature's God, who is outside nature. Her introduction to the Rhyme and Reason of Country Life draws on the orthodox Anglican John Keble for the phrase “last form of song.” Rural Hours, however, is less focused than Rhyme and Reason on the theological implications of nature study.

10. Because much recent interest in Rural Hours has centered on its contribution to, even initiation of, a distinct women's form of nature writing in the United States, I emphasize that I see the book as an example neither of nature writing that rejects intellection for unmediated communion with nature (see, e.g., Finch and Elder, 19-30; Murray, passim) nor of nature writing that assumes the inherent sacredness of the earth and accepts, even celebrates, the traditional earthiness of women. For this contrasting approach to Cooper, see Norwood, 25-53; for more general issues in ecofeminism and ecocriticism, see Gaard and Murphy; Glotfelty and Fromm; Mellor.

11. Cooper's annotations to John Knapp's journal mainly instruct American readers who might picture the wrong natural object when reading an English book—for example the American, not the English, robin.

12. A huge bibliography, far exceeding my scope in this study, exists of works on English esthetics, the role of discourses about the sublime and the beautiful in creating scenic tourism, and in the political bearings of ideologies of the picturesque.

13. Buell interestingly reads Cooper's hostility to naturalized weeds as a sign of ecological nationalism (407). Possibly the sentence about waging war against weeds inspired Thoreau to depict weeding in Walden as epic combat.

14. Ecologists and environmentalists, as well as adherents of the so-called New Geography, increasingly feature the constructedness of the wilderness ideal in U.S. culture. For the idea of all landscape as shaped by the human, and for the idea of landscape itself as a human construction, see especially Cronon, Changes, Uncommon Ground; Glacken; Oelschlager; Rackham; Stilgoe, Common Landscape; Michael Williams; Worster.

15. Stilgoe says that in this essay Cooper “worried that the rural scenery surrounding her home in Cooperstown, New York, stood a poor second to that of England” (Borderlands, 23).

16. For the emergence of, and rationale for, the national parks, see Runte, Sellars. Among denunciations of scientific taxonomy as an attempt to impose Western thinking on an indigenous nature that encompasses traditional cultures, Pratt's Imperial Eyes has become a classic.

Works Cited

Allen, David Elliston. The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Barber, Lynn. The Heyday of Natural History. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980.

Baym, Nina. “English Nature, New York Nature, and Walden's New England Nature.” In Charles Capper and Conrad Wright, eds., Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts, 168-189. Boston: Massachussetts Historical Society, 1999.

Beard, James Franklin. “Cooper, Susan Augusta Fenimore.” In James, Notable American Women, 1:382-383.

Botting, Douglas. Humboldt and the Cosmos. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

Bowen, Margarita. Empiricism and Geographical Thought: From Francis Bacon to Alexander von Humboldt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Bruce, Robert V. The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846-1876. New York: Knopf, 1987.

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Cannon, Susan Faye. Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period. New York: Dawson and Science History Publications, 1978.

Cooper, James Fenimore. Pages and Pictures, from the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper, with Notes by Susan Fenimore Cooper. New York: W. A. Townsend, 1861.

Cooper, Susan Fenimore. “A Dissolving View.” In The Home Book of the Picturesque: or, American Scenery, Art, and Literature, 79-94. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1852.

———. Rural Hours. Edited by Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998.

———. Rural Hours. Rev. ed., 1887. Reprint, edited by David Jones, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1968.

———, ed. Country Rambles in England; or, Journal of a Naturalist, by John Knapp. Buffalo: Phinney, 1853.

———. The Rhyme and Reason of Country Life. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1855.

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.

———, ed. Uncommon Ground: Towards Reinventing Nature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.

Deane, Samuel. The New-England Farmer; or Georgical Dictionary. 3d ed. Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1822.

Finch, Robert, and John Elder, eds. The Norton Book of Nature Writing. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.

Gaard, Greta, and Patrick D. Murphy, eds. Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998.

Glacken, Clarence J. Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Goodwin, Joan W. “A Kind of Botanic Mania.” Arnoldia 56 (1996-97): 17-24.

———. The Remarkable Mrs. Ripley: The Life of Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998.

Howitt, William. The Book of the Seasons; or, The Calendar of Nature. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831.

Humboldt, Alexander von. Cosmos. Translated by E. C. Otte. 2 vols. New York: Harpers, 1850.

Huth, Hans. Nature and the Americans: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.

Keeney, Elizabeth B. The Botanizers: Amateur Scientists in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Livingstone, David N. The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Maddox, Lucy B. “Susan Fenimore Cooper and the Plain Daughters of America.” American Quarterly 40 (1988): 131-146.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Mellor, Mary. Feminism and Ecology. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

Murray, John A. The Sierra Club Nature Writing Handbook. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995.

Norwood, Vera. Made from This Earth: American Women and Nature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Oelschlaeger, Max. The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.

Rackham, Oliver. The History of the Countryside. London: J. M. Dent, 1986.

Runte, Alfred. National Parks: The American Experience. 2d ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987.

Sellars, Richard West. Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

Slotten, Hugh Richard. Patronage, Practice, and the Culture of American Science: Alexander Dallas Bache and the U.S. Coast Survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Stilgoe, John R. Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820-1939. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

———. The Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.

Taylor, Alan. William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

Thornton, Tamara Plakins. Cultivating Gentlemen: The Meaning of Country Life among the Boston Elite, 1785-1860. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Walls, Laura Dassow. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.

Williams, Michael. Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Worster, Donald. Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.