SOURCE: Magee, Richard M. “Sentimental Ecology: Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours.” In Such News of the Land: U.S. Women Nature Writers, edited by Thomas S. Edwards and Elizabeth A. De Wolfe, pp. 27-36. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2001.

[In the following essay, Magee examines Cooper's role as one of the earliest American nature writers, claiming that she combined elements of domestic fiction and natural history to create a sub-genre that Magee calls “sentimental ecology.”]

Susan Fenimore Cooper, the daughter of the famous novelist, was an early voice in the tradition of American nature writing, publishing her nature journal Rural Hours four years before Thoreau's Walden appeared.¹ This journal of her life in rural Cooperstown is vastly important in the tradition of American nature writing, as it was one of the first American natural histories and the first written by a woman. She acknowledges her thematic debt to male European writers such as Gilbert White and John Leonard Knapp, but claims the genre both for American writers and for women writers.² Before writing Rural Hours, Cooper tried her talents in a more traditional forum for women writers with her domestic-sentimental novel Elinor Wyllys; or, The Young Folk of Longbridge. Many of the concerns, themes, and tropes in this novel prefigure the passionate reverence for nature's beauties that informs much of Rural Hours, a foreshadowing that tells us much about the motivating forces and structure of the environmental genre. For Cooper, rural values and domestic values are congruent, if not always identical. Domestic values are brought into the wilderness by enlightened and concerned men and women and are passed on largely through the educational efforts of mothers who use nature as a lesson or guide for their children. Thus, domestic values are enhanced by the wilderness, which is moderated but not urbanized.

Susan Cooper's interest and participation in the two genres—the domestic/sentimental and the natural history/environmental—suggest that the overlap in her writings may be more than historical coincidence. Certainly, the most popular and economically successful books written during the middle of the nineteenth century were those written by and for women—Hawthorne's “d——d mob”—so Cooper's entry into the market with Elinor Wyllys is not unusual. On the other hand, her subsequent entry into the natural history or environmental genre was without precedent. Ironically, the novel, in spite of its firm grounding in the popular sentimental mode, did very poorly, while Rural Hours was successful enough to warrant numerous editions, including a “fine” gift edition with color illustrations. What makes Cooper's foray into domestic fiction important to students of environmental literature is the dramatic manner in which the language of the sentimental informs so much of her later work, so that any study of Cooper's nature writing that ignores her domestic writing is incomplete. Her domestic-influenced nature writing, in fact, indicates an important sub-genre, which I call sentimental ecology, whereby the demands of community and domestic life are intertwined, much like models of ecosystems, with the demands of the natural environment.

Susan Cooper's voice or author's persona also places Rural Hours firmly within the sentimental narrative of community, to use Sandra Zagarell's term. Throughout the journal, she consistently uses the “we” rather than the “I” to talk about her observations; this marked difference between Cooper and Thoreau, says Lawrence Buell, makes her eye “public, not merely idiosyncratic.”³ By creating this more public persona, Cooper offers an alternative to the narrative of self, an alternative whereby the “self exists … as a part of the interdependent network of the community rather than as an individualistic unit.”⁴ The narrative “we” constructs a linguistic counterpart to the ecological formulation that all life forms a complex web of interrelations dependent upon each other for survival. Arcadian ecology, the scientific notion expounded by Gilbert White at the end of the eighteenth century, states that “each organism, no matter how insignificant to human eyes or in the human economy, [has] a role to play in nature's economy.”⁵ White's view was still current at the time that Cooper was writing, and accurately reflects her attitude toward the natural world that surrounded her at Cooperstown. The connection between the sentimental ethos of human networks and the ecological ethos of bio-networks is reinforced by Cooper's participation in both genres, domestic or sentimental literature and nature writing.

Cooper's narrative also participates in what Buell terms the first major work of American bioregionalism, a subgenre related to local color or regional realism.⁶ The “finely calibrated environmental sense” of Rural Hours is manifested by the variety of environmental goods that are uniquely products of the Otsego County area and include maple sugaring, rural housekeeping, and local farming.⁷ Although Cooper was keenly interested in the regional products of her home, we would be wrong to mistake this interest for provincialism. On the contrary, she believes that Americans should be aware of the wider world but should use this awareness better to appreciate the “variety of the world God had given them.”⁸ Bioregionalism thus operates in a number of ways: It values the natural products of the land and, by extension, the land; it values the American over the foreign; and it values the community as much as the individuals within the community.

Cooper's journal was written over a two-year span but covers only one year, just as Thoreau's Walden did. She begins her entries on March 4 and concludes February 28 of the following year, with the entries further grouped according to the seasons. Cooper's seasonal ordering of her observations does not present any new or unique challenges; such reliance on seasonal change as a literary trope extends back at least as far as Virgil. The cyclical nature of changing seasons is, aside from the day and night cycle, the “most perceptible in everyday life.”⁹Rural Hours, though, uses the seasonal cycle for reasons other than to denote the passage of time or to express an Ecclesiastes-like hymn to the cyclical nature of life. Instead, the book's awareness of the seasons serves to reinforce the environmental as well as nationalistic concerns that occupied a part of Susan Cooper's life. This first becomes evident in the manner in which she divides the seasons and the passages in her book. The book opens with an entry for early March that begins the “Spring” section of Cooper's observations. The “Summer” section begins on June 1 and ends the last day of August, while “Autumn” covers September through November, and “Winter,” December through February. These divisions do not correspond to strict, calendrical definitions of the seasons: March 4 is actually still in winter; spring begins on March 21. Cooper's divisions, then, mark a more natural perception of the changing seasons based on observation and an empathetic feel for and understanding of the yearly cycle in her own region.

The first two entries in the book illustrate this point very well. As with many of her observations, Cooper begins with a brief note about the weather, and the first line of Rural Hours observes that everything “looks thoroughly wintry still, and fresh snow lies on the ground to the depth of a foot.”¹⁰ Her next entry, for Tuesday, March 7, indicates that she is eagerly anticipating spring weather when she begins, “Milder; thawing.” She also points out in this entry that she has seen loons moving northward while walking near the river. The keen observer of birds' migratory patterns soon checks herself, though, saying, “It is early for loons, however, and we may have been deceived.” Whether the birds are loons is not so important as what the migrating birds represent: nature moves at its own, mysterious, non-human pace, and humans may only observe but may not set constraints on the change. Furthermore, any date that we set for the advent of spring is necessarily arbitrary; the birds, who have a much better and more empathetic connection to nature, are better equipped to mark seasonal change than a date on a calendar.¹¹

Another passage, again involving birds, further emphasizes this point. In the 1868 edition of Rural Hours, Susan Cooper added a chapter entitled “Later Hours,” which takes the observations of the Rural Hours year and adds a greater perspective of time. Here she notes that, on June 26, a pair of robins has nested between deer antlers that hang over the door of her verandah. A year later the avian couple returns to build the nest on May 14, and a year after that on June 1. In the “New and Revised” edition of 1887, Cooper notes that the robins are still building in the same spot, having made their 1886 arrival on an unspecified day in May. Although the exact date the robins choose to build their nests never varies by much—except for the anomalous June 26, they are within two weeks—the different calendar dates of the nest-building indicates that nature will not be tied to arbitrary human demarcations.

Arbitrary human demarcations, though, are inevitable, and Cooper recognizes their importance in establishing a link between the natural and the human. According to Buell, “polite culture” and “popular culture” intersect in the almanac tradition through the shared trope of seasonal change: both “polite” poetry such as Thomson's “Seasons” and “popular” culture such as the almanac rely on the trope.¹² Cooper furthers the connective qualities of the almanac by noting its importance to farmers and other country people as a literary piece and as a mediator between humans and nature. On Tuesday, July 3, Cooper describes in detail the visit she takes to a local Farmer B——'s house, where she notes the prominent position of the “well-fingered almanac, witty and wise as usual.”¹³ She goes on to say that the almanac printers had, a year or two previously, decided to leave out the weather prognostications, but the resulting book sold so poorly that the printers had to resume the weather in subsequent editions. For country people, farmers especially, some knowledge of the weather is crucial, and the almanac helps mediate between wild nature and a domestic pastoral. Farmers can use the information about nature contained within the almanac to create a better, more comfortable living situation working within nature.¹⁴ In a sense, then, Cooper's book itself is an almanac, both for its seasonal awareness and for its attempts to bridge natural and domestic concerns.

Cooper's visit to Farmer B——creates an extended narrative of community and rural values that is sustained longer than any other single episode in the book. For Cooper, the small details of daily rural life constitute a microcosm and ideal form of her national heritage. Her opening exclamation about the farmhouse sets the tone: “How pleasant things look about a farm-house! There is always much that is interesting and respectable connected with every better labor, every useful or harmless occupation of man.”¹⁵ She continues to list all of the products of human labor and nature's bounty that occupy the farm house and make it a prime model of domestic satisfaction, and she is particularly impressed by the dairy the wife keeps.¹⁶ While on the visit at Farmer B——'s, Susan and her unnamed companion (her sister) admire the domestic accoutrements and comestibles, all of which are “almost wholly the produce of their own farm.”¹⁷ The farm wife is the model of self-sufficiency and the model of proper domestic roles; she is one who can take the goods of nature and produce comfort, food, and clothing. Interestingly, although Susan Cooper resisted feminism, she did feel that the domestic was a corrective and “recall[ed] her readers to their republican roots in the unassuming country life.”¹⁸

Later, in an entry dated Friday, September 29, Cooper describes going to town for the local fair and market day. She again lists the various items crafted by the men and (mostly) women of Otsego County. The goods available range from woven and rag rugs, flannels, leather goods, woolen stockings, and table linens to “very neat shoes and boots, on Paris patterns.”¹⁹ Cooper is not content to list these items and let her readers draw their own conclusions, but must add her editorial, saying “Every one must feel an interest in these fairs; and it is to be hoped they will become more and more a source of improvement and advantage in everything connected with farming, gardening, dairy-work, manufacturing, mechanical, and household labors.”²⁰ Here and elsewhere Cooper's agenda is clear: she wishes to perpetuate a rural lifestyle that values industry as it is practiced by the agrarian community. Such a lifestyle, performed in such a community, reflects her ideal of nationalism. A large part of this community is, of course, the industry of the farmer's wife, and such highly valued household industries as weaving, sewing, butter and cheese making, as well as other domestic duties.

One of the most important domestic duties is that of providing a moral education for the children in the family, and this task generally falls to the mother or other women in the household. In this case, the natural environment plays a crucial role, as the study of natural history provides a forum and excellent examples for teaching morality to children. Susan Cooper found herself writing in the natural history tradition, “conjoining women's roles as domesticator and the American landscape's new image as home.”²¹ Cooper was operating within a system of natural history writing that had been domesticated and sentimentalized already, most notably by Charlotte de la Tour's La Langage des Fleurs, published in France in 1819. This book purported to teach women botany, but mostly consisted of images of personified flowers and a set of symbols to communicate feelings.²² The close scrutiny that Cooper gives to her natural surroundings had thus been mediated already by this and other quasi-scientific works that potentially undermined any serious study of botany or nature.

Cooper, however, resists being neatly pigeonholed as simply a woman writer participating in the sentimental floral tradition, as the preceding argument has already established.²³ Her own language further refutes any easy dismissal of her writings. Some of her most sustained and passionate passages in Rural Hours deal with complex botanical subjects, most importantly the naming of plants. She begins her June 23 diatribe with a complaint that too many country people cannot identify the plants, trees, and flowers that grow on their land, going on to say that the women sometimes know the names of herbs or simples but they often make strange mistakes. This sad state of education is troubling for two primary reasons. First, if women are to use botanical knowledge to inculcate moral knowledge in their children, they must have some understanding of what they are teaching, and the ignorant women who do not know the names of the plants are not rising to the challenge demanded and are not teaching well. Second, for a nation to grow and prosper, its citizens must understand their own landscape. The domestic pastoral ideal cannot exist when the rural inhabitants cannot identify the elements that contribute to the health and vitality of the ideal. As a corollary to this, those who do not understand the natural world are not as likely to value it, and, consequently, the stability of nature is jeopardized.

Susan Cooper's demand for a clear understanding of nature led to her great problem with the Latinate, specifically Linnaean process for naming plants. According to her domestic pastoral ideology, Latin appellations are clumsy and “very little fitted for every-day uses, just like the plants of our gardens, half of which are only known by long-winded Latin polysyllables, which timid people are afraid to pronounce.”²⁴ One possible reason for so many of the native plants having such unfriendly nomenclature is that the American continent was settled after Linnaean taxonomy took root and names were given by botanists before the common people could give common names. More likely, though, is the possibility that Cooper, through her Linnaean critique, is defending her turf as an amateur botanist. Vernacular botanical names were in common usage, but Cooper sees the scientific language as encroachment from without the community by professionals. The danger of this is clear: professional botanists come from outside the community and thus have no stake in it. When the privilege of naming the land's bounty is removed, the inhabitants of the countryside are also removed from a crucial relationship with the land.²⁵ Furthermore, the spread of Latinate terms “actually perverts our common speech, and libels the helpless blossoms, turning them into so many précieuses ridicules.”²⁶

The reluctance and even antipathy that Cooper felt toward Latinate nomenclature is consistent with a sentimental ethos. As Annie Finch points out, many scholars feel that sentimental art is threatening because it becomes too close and intimate with its reader, and, “worse, sentimental art accomplishes this aim by reversing the crucial hierarchy of reason over emotion.”²⁷ This reversal in some ways parallels Susan's balking at an overly scientific system of naming, if we take Latinate nomenclature as representative of reason and a fondness for common names as emotion. More importantly, though, Cooper is seeking, through this more emotional naming process, a closer, more vital connection between nature and the people who inhabit the bounds of nature. This real and vital connection to nature is at the heart of sentimental ecology.

When the native flowers have complicated and difficult Latinate names thrust upon them by botanists with no stake in the region, poets also suffer because of an inability to create an aesthetically pleasing poem incorporating these uncommon names. This problem, in fact, seems to be most troubling to Cooper, and she spends several pages railing against the unpoetic sound of Latinate names. She asks, “Can you picture to yourself such maidens, weaving in their golden tresses Symphoricarpus vulgaris, Tricochloa, Tradescantia, Calopogon?”²⁸ Her answer to this is “No, indeed!” and the reasons for this resounding denial are not as simple as aesthetic distaste. If one of the purposes of landscape and nature poetry is to help create a national American literature and, by extension, a national American identity, both of which help foster the sense of community crucial to the domestic scene, then American poets become ineffectual when their language becomes distanced and foreign.²⁹ Furthermore, a distinctly American literature would need to be written in a distinctly American idiolect or “ecolect” in order to be truly representative of the new country.³⁰ An imposed language, particularly a foreign, distant, and lofty language like Latin, undermines the nationalistic or regionalistic tendencies of poetry.

Cooper's defense of the local extends beyond nomenclature to the uniqueness of American seasons, where it takes on a fiercely patriotic tone as she unfavorably compares European nature or seasonal poetry to American. In a long entry dated Wednesday, October 11, Cooper begins by saying that “[a]utumn would appear to have received generally a dull character from the poets of the Old World.” She goes on to criticize in one of her longer entries the poor presentation of autumn by various European poets, remarking on many specific passages. Shakespeare, she points out, links “chilling autumn” with “angry winter,” while Collins calls the colorful season “sallow” and Wordsworth dismisses it as a “melancholy wight.”³¹ Not content to chastise merely the English poets, Cooper displays her European education to good advantage by quoting several French poets in the original before moving on to her critique of German and Italian poets.³² All of these European poets lack the ability to see the majesty and beauty of autumn that Cooper spends so much time praising. Not only are the poets factually wrong—she attacks Thomson, Spenser, and Keats for wrongly placing the summer wheat harvest in the autumn—but they are also blind to the beauties of the changing colors, seeing impending winter rather than multicolored autumn.³³ Cooper does admit, however, that the European leaf season is not so colorful, saying, “[h]ad the woods of England been as rich as our own, their branches would have been interwoven among the masques of Ben Jonson and Milton; they would have had a place in more than one of Spenser's beautiful pictures. All these are wanting now.”³⁴ The American landscape, then, is not only more “rich” but it can provide an example for American poets to create works that must by association be more rich as well, which, in turn, allows for a superior setting of domestic/didactic possibilities.

Cooper's motivation for connecting the colorful autumn season and a national literature comes almost as an afterthought following her critique of the Europeans. She notes “the march of Autumn through the land is not a silent one—it is already accompanied by song. Scarce a poet of any fame among us who has not at least some graceful verse.”³⁵ The poets “among us,” the American poets, stand in clear contrast to the Europeans who fail to write anything “graceful” about autumn, and so the Americans have an advantage in their access to more colorful and more poetic subject matter. Cooper's confidence in her fellow American writers is remarkable as she says “year after year the song must become fuller, and sweeter, and clearer.”³⁶ This confident optimism contrasts dramatically with Emerson's vain search for his ideal poet. “We have yet had no genius in America … which knew the value of our incomparable materials,” Emerson says.³⁷ However, Cooper, though she does not cite American examples to support her claim, recognizes both the “incomparable materials” and the poets who know their value. The richness of the American environment seems to make the rise of rich, sweet, and clear poetry inevitable.

The narrative of community, which crucially informs the sentimental ecology of Cooper's work, culminates in an environmental awareness that transcends aesthetic appreciation to become a conservationist ethos. Cooper's construction of her community is marked by an inclusiveness that sets her apart from her father and illustrates her attempts to link community and environment. Susan Cooper first creates a narrative of community in her domestic sentimental novel, Elinor Wyllys; or, The Young Folk of Longbridge.³⁸

The argument for labeling this a work of nature writing can be summed up as a complex form of environmental synecdoche. Rosaly Torna Kurth dismisses the novel in extremely harsh terms, saying that it “possesses as much or, rather, as little of artistic merit as do the novels of the later domestic writers,” noting that the plot is “not plausible nor … unified,” with too much emphasis on “domestic matters.”³⁹ These very points, however, when viewed in another light, make it an important work of environmental writing. Cooper knew from her frequent nature walks that one action or event in a field, meadow, or forest could have larger reverberations elsewhere, just as she knew from her own social contacts that no member of society lives in a vacuum. Thus when she describes in detail the social climbing vulgarity of the seemingly minor character Mr. Clapp early in the novel, she does so because this unpleasant man and his morally suspect ambitions will have implications for Hazlehurst later. At least four subplots reveal themselves throughout the novel, and each one has some significant influence on the others. Her novel, then, is a model of interrelationships, a sort of sentimental ecosystem. The few subplots are representatives or synecdoches of the larger social environment.

While James Fenimore Cooper creates a moderately favorable portrait of Native Americans, his daughter goes further in her claims of sharing communal values with the Indians.⁴⁰ Susan Cooper notes the Indians' degradation as her father does, but differs from him by noting that civilization is responsible for it. The Indian women, Susan argues, are less likely to become corrupted by the influences of civilization and remain “gentle and womanly” while the braves are marked by the “heavy, sensual, spiritless expression, the stamp of vice.”⁴¹ The gender-dependent differences that Susan Cooper notes illustrate the most important manner in which she disagrees with her father's point of view. To Susan, the “domestic qualities,” which her father mentioned, are much more important, and she is better able not only to see this importance but to see the underlying causes for the disruption of these important qualities. As a woman intent on perpetuating a domestic ideal, she is able to diagnose the problem. Her diagnosis is based largely on a feminine sympathy, which her father seems to lack.

Susan Cooper's sympathy for the Indians is an important aspect of her sentimental ecology because she is sharing an emotional bond by sympathizing. The sympathetic bond is crucial in creating the interdependent links of the sentimental ecosystem. In one encounter with the Indians, she says: “The first group [of Indians] that we chance to see strike us strangely, appearing as they do in the midst of a civilized community with the characteristics of their wild race still clinging to them; and when it is remembered that the land over which they now wander as strangers in the midst of an alien race, was so lately their own—the heritage of their fathers—it is impossible to behold them without a feeling of particular interest.”⁴² This passage is remarkable for Susan's ability to imagine the Indian point of view, to place herself and her entire community as “alien,” as other. By so doing, Susan's language is in some ways “at odds” with the dominant discourse, forming a Kristevan “semiotic discourse” which, rather than an “infantile fusion with the mother,” indicates a fusion with the Indians as a mother.⁴³

We can add another dimension to this maternal language after looking at a related passage that occurs some pages later. Still discussing the Indians, Susan Cooper says: “It is easy to wish these poor people well; but surely something more may justly be required of us—of those who have taken their country and their place on the earth. The time seems at last to have come when their own eyes are opening to the real good of civilization, the advantages of knowledge, the blessings of Christianity. Let us acknowledge the strong claim they have upon us, not in word only, but in deed also.”⁴⁴ Here, Cooper is even more emphatic in her critique of white civilization. While still maintaining the supremacy of white civilization—its “blessings” and “advantages”—Cooper nevertheless acknowledges the displacement and alienation the Indians have a right to feel, as well as the debt that white Americans owe them. Significantly, this debt is not described in pecuniary terms, but in moral, specifically Christian, terms. It would not be overemphasizing the point to say that Cooper's idea of a debt is here a sentimental one: The debt may be paid, Cooper implies, by providing the means for the Indians to reap the “real good of civilization.”

Cooper's next comment about the plight of the Indians points even more forcefully to the domestic or sentimental social awareness that the author brings to the observations of her community. She notes that “perhaps the days may not be distant when men of Indian blood may be numbered among the wise and the good, laboring in behalf of our common country.⁴⁵ The most striking idea expressed here is Susan Cooper's emphasis on the “common country” and her willingness—one might even say eagerness—to give a voice to the Indian. Though we might discern a note of condescension in her tone by her dismissal of any possibility that the Indians might already be wise, as well as the notion that Indians can only achieve social mobility through the generous and charitable efforts of whites, it is still notable that she stresses the importance of commonality and community. Her emphasis on community contrasts with her father's “more favorable picture of the redman than he deserves” and his understanding of the Indian as other and therefore not capable of being part of the same society that the Coopers inhabit. Susan, though, seeks to bring the Indians into her home, as she does literally in Rural Hours, figuratively in the national sense, and symbolically as a part of her domestic community in nature.

Perhaps the best-known entry in Rural Hours is a long description of a stand of old-growth pines, untouched by the threat of the axe, situated on the edge of town, which Cooper uses to illustrate the passage of natural epochs and the very short time white settlers have been on the land.⁴⁶ In this short time, the white settlers have radically altered the natural landscape in a manner that had never happened before. She concludes the passage by meditating on the fate of the forests, speculating that “[a]nother half century may find the country bleak and bare.”⁴⁷ Her tone, however, is hopeful, because “as yet the woods have not all been felled” and we are left with the impression that such a calamity may be avoided. Cooper goes on to urge conservation and systematically refutes arguments in favor of clear-cutting the forests. The final value of a tree, she vehemently tells us, lies not merely in the “market price of dollars and cents,” but in the “intellectual and … moral sense.”⁴⁸ Here Cooper brings her notions of conservation back to the moral value of the landscape and nature.

Her tone as she discusses the unsparing logging in her community is very critical, even angry. She derides early colonists for looking on trees as enemies, and chastises their descendants for maintaining the same reckless spirit. “One would think,” she notes wryly, “that by this time, when the forest has fallen in all the valleys … some forethought and care in this respect would be natural in people laying claim to common sense.”⁴⁹ The brutal but understated sarcasm of her tone is consistent with other times she sees people not acting in the best interests of nature and the community. This is the same sarcasm that creeps into her voice as she chastises country women for not knowing the names of plants, and stands as a stark contrast to her warm approval of people such as Farmer B——'s wife, who recognizes the role of nature in her domestic life.

Cooper's overall tone throughout Rural Hours, though, is generally more positive, and she cannot sustain her anger long before she provides examples of her neighbors' care for the environment. She begins with a story of horrible degradation in the “wilds of Oregon,” where a government scouting party comes across a huge tree that had been felled and left to rot. The man who cut the tree, she speculates, claimed, “no doubt, to be a civilized being.”⁵⁰ Cooper compares this act to one committed by one of “the horde of Attila,” and goes on to offer a counter-example that happened, “happily,” near her own neighborhood. On the banks of the Susquehannah [sic], a large elm tree was left standing in spite of the fact that it stood in the way of the highway. Although the tree stands where a “thorough-going utilitarian would doubtless quarrel with it,” its beauty rendered it safe from the axe.⁵¹ Cooper applauds the decision of her neighbors to keep the tree and their ability to recognize that its moral and aesthetic value far outweighed any merely practical or utilitarian concerns. Environmentalism, Cooper's modern readers are led to see, is a community value that transcends mundane concerns and elevates the moral strength.

The final value of Susan Fenimore Cooper's work may be found in something other than the “market value” of her collection of natural observations, just as she insists that the final value of environmental health transcends the market. She uses her domestic voice to convince us of the intellectual and moral value of the landscape and the responsibility we have to perpetuate this value. By continuing her sentimental ethos from her novel and elaborating upon the themes of the domestic pastoral in the natural landscape, Cooper creates a sentimental ecology that illustrates the interconnectedness of all creatures on earth.

Notes

1. Susan Fenimore Cooper, Rural Hours, eds. Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson (1850; reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). First published in the summer of 1850, the book was so much a success that her father negotiated with Putnam, the publisher, at the end of November 1850 to obtain a better bargain and higher percentage per copy. See Rural Hours, ed. David Jones (1887; reprint, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1968), xxiv. The book eventually went through five more American and one more English edition, including a “fine” volume complete with color plates of local birds. Susan Cooper produced a new edition in 1868 with a new preface, and a “new and revised” edition in 1887, which condensed a great deal of the original.

2. Susan Fenimore Cooper edited the 1853 American edition of John Leonard Knapp's Country Rambles in England; or Journal of a Naturalist (Buffalo, N.Y.: Phinney And Co., 1853).

3. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 266.

4. Sandra Zagarell, “Narrative of Community: The Identification of Genre,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13, no. 3 (1988): 499. My emphasis.

5. Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness (New Haven: Yale University Press), 104.

6. Buell, Environmental Imagination, 406.

7. Alan Taylor, William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Vintage, 1995), 119. William Cooper, Susan's grandfather and the founder of Cooperstown, began heavily promoting Otsego County as a major source of maple sugar in June of 1789. In The Pioneers (1823; reprint New York: Signet, 1964, 1980), James Cooper's most environmentally informed novel, Judge Marmaduke Temple forbids the burning of maple wood in his estate's fireplaces both because maple trees are “precious gifts of nature,” and because they are “mines of comfort and wealth” (101). Thus we can see maple sugar in terms of an important economic commodity, as a product of the Otsego region, and as an ecological treasure.

8. Buell, Environmental Imaginations, 407.

9. Ibid., 220.

10. Rural Hours, 4. Most references to Rural Hours are from the 1850 edition, reprinted in 1998 and edited by Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). References to Cooper's later additions such as “Later Hours” are from the 1887 edition, reprinted in 1968 and edited by David Jones (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1968). References are cited parenthetically in the text.

11. Thoreau also “questions seasonal categorization rigorously” by seeking to “free himself ‘from the tyranny of chronological time,’ to redefine November for example from a ‘calendrical unit’ to a ‘phenomenological category of thought.’” Buell, Environmental Imagination, 228.

12. Buell, Environmental Imagination, 223.

13. Rural Hours, 98.

14. The importance of the almanac in creating the domestic pastoral also appears in Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story “Roger Malvin's Burial,” in Mosses From an Old Manse: The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. X [n.p.] (Ohio State University Press, 1974), 337-60. When the family leaves the settlement to travel into the unknown wilderness, they carry with them “the current year's Massachusetts Almanac, which, with the exception of an old black-letter Bible, comprised all the literary wealth of the family” (354). These two literary works help the family in attempting to bring domestic comfort into the wilds, and thus also mediate between civilization and wild nature.

15. Rural Hours, 96.

16. The spotless dairy the mistress keeps rivals that of Aunt Fortune in Susan Warner's domestic sentimental novel, The Wide Wide World, and the industry in the dairy is mirrored by the other household duties.

17. Rural Hours, 100.

18. Vera Norwood, Made from This Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 29-30.

19. Rural Hours, 194.

20. Ibid.

21. Norwood, Made from This Earth, 28.

22. Ibid., 12.

23. Many of the pseudo-scientific works for women were condescending at best. One French author (L. F. Raban) avoids scientific terms because of their difficulty. Norwood, Made from This Earth, 13. Other books reduced their scientific goals even more, completely giving up any pretense of being scientific and provided “simplified codes for love, flattery, jealousy, motherhood, and nationalism.” Norwood, Made from This Earth, 18.

24. Rural Hours, 83.

25. The relationship between stewardship and naming is clear in Genesis, when Adam is given the task of naming. By naming the plants and animals, Adam not only gains sovereignty but also undertakes a strong measure of responsibility at the same.

26. Rural Hours, 83.

27. Annie Finch, “The Sentimental Poetess in the World: Metaphor and Subjectivity in Lydia Sigourney's Nature Poetry,” Legacy 5, no. 2 (1988): 5.

28. Rural Hours, 86. Cooper's italics.

29. Ann Bermingham, in Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), proposes that “there is an ideology of landscape” that “embodied a set of socially and, finally, economically determined values” (3). The ideology of landscape as represented by both painters and poets reflects national concerns because the landscape is the face of the country. In developing a set of expressions and techniques to understand and manipulate landscape representations, artists and writers participate in the creation of a national identity.

30. James McKusick, “‘A language that is ever green’: The Ecological Vision of John Clare,” The University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 2 (1991 Winter): 242. McKusick's term is perhaps more apt in this instance. His neologism, “ecolect,” is used to describe the poetry of the British rustic poet John Clare, and refers to an idiolect that is specifically rooted in the local landscape. Because of the intimate connection between nature or landscape poetry and the natural environment, this term has more resonance.

31. Rural Hours, 202. (Cooper's italics.)

32. The Coopers lived in Paris from 1826 until 1833 (Jones xiv).

33. Rural Hours, 222-23.

34. Ibid., 209.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid., 210.

37. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton, 1957), 238.

38. The novel centers around a young woman, Elinor, who lives with her doting grandfather and aunt in a rural village, probably a fictionalized Cooperstown, about “fifteen years since,” or in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Elinor, who is often described as “plain,” or, worse yet, ugly, is pleasant, kind, and popular among the upper classes in Longbridge. As the action begins, Elinor accepts a proposal of marriage from her long-time friend, Harry Hazlehurst, and seems to be on the path toward domestic happiness. Harry, though, soon falls in love with another family friend, a beautiful but shallow woman whose morals, sense, and intelligence pale beside Elinor's. This shallow woman, Jane, is not interested in Hazlehurst but marries a young rake who leads her to the brink of financial ruin before he dies. In the meantime, a presumably long-lost heir arrives in Longbridge to challenge Harry's right to his fortune. Harry eventually triumphs over the impostor, regains his inheritance, and finally marries Elinor by the end of the novel. While these events are transpiring, myriad subplots are unraveling. Another young friend of the Wyllys family, Charlie Hubbard, determinedly pursues his passion for landscape painting, becoming an important practitioner and advocate of American art before his untimely death in a boating accident. Other minor characters marry, make fortunes, lose fortunes, or fall into scandal and disrepute. Although the number of characters and plot developments can be a distraction, each event and person has a distinct effect on Elinor, and Elinor's family often influences other characters in important ways.

39. Rosaly Torna Kurth, “Susan Fenimore Cooper: A Study of Her Life and Works” (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1974), 124, 112.

40. In the “Preface to the Leatherstocking Tales,” which opens The Deerslayer, James Cooper addresses critics who claim that he has presented a “more favorable picture of the redman than he deserves.” He goes on to say, “The critic is understood to have been a very distinguished agent of the government, one very familiar with Indians, as they are seen at the councils to treat for the sale of their lands, where little or none of their domestic qualities come in play, and where indeed, their evil passions are known to have fullest scope” (x). Here Cooper seems to understand the Indians, and is able to make excuses for their “evil passions,” but he fails to see that the Indians have been wronged in any way. Instead, they are at a disadvantage in the councils, so their lesser nature comes in play.

41. Rural Hours, 209.

42. Ibid., 108.

43. Susan M. Levin, “Romantic Prose and Feminine Romanticism” Prose Studies 10, no. 2 (Sept. 1987): 178-95. Levin points out that “romantic women writers find the forms of conventional language at odds in some way with the realities their writing presents,” which in turn creates this Kristevan discourse (185). As Levin notes, this discourse contradicts standard language by its infantile search for a maternal figure and appears “without discernible contours” (186). I propose taking this further by saying that Susan Cooper does not want to fuse with the mother in this example, but wants to become the nurturing figure.

44. Rural Hours, 112.

45. Ibid.

46. Walter Levy and Christopher Hallowell, the editors of the eco-conscious textbook reader, Green Perspectives, have chosen this passage as the first excerpt.

47. Rural Hours, 128.

48. Ibid., 133.

49. Ibid., 132.

50. Ibid., 135.

51. Ibid.