“‘Its Ghastly Visage’: The Leather-Stocking Tales and the Grotesque.” In Leather-Stocking...

“Its Ghastly Visage”: Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales and the Grotesque

Matthew Wynn SivilsWestminster College

TRAVELING to Fort William Henry through the wilderness of The Last of the Mohicans, Natty Bumppo pauses to remember

a moment of horror. The seasoned warrior points through the gloom of night to a small body of water and tells Duncan Heyward, “here is the ‘bloody pond.’”1 Natty explains how years before he had led a night ambush near the pond, and how he and his fellow infantrymen had pounced upon a group of French soldiers who sat eating, unaware that their doom crept along the dark edge of the forest. Haunted by the aftermath of the attack, Natty recalls, “‘when all was over, the dead, and some say the dying, were cast into that little pond. These eyes have seen its waters coloured with blood, as natural water never yet flowed from the bowels of the ’arth’” (136). The young Heyward, misreading Natty’s meaning, commends the pragmatism of employing what he calls a “convenient . . . [and] peaceful grave” (136). But Natty, revealing emotional scars, replies: “man to lie still, should not be buried while the breath is in the body; and certain it is, that in the hurry of that evening, the doctors had but little time to say who was living, and who was dead” (136).

James Fenimore Cooper’s novels contain a host of such disturbing scenes, and with his portrayal of violence in mind, I argue that not only are his Leather-Stocking Tales powerful, seminal works of American Gothic fiction, but that their Gothic power derives largely from his invention of a uniquely American grotesque. Cooper’s portrayal of violence warps, destroys, and ultimately incorporates the human body into the American landscape, serving as one of the most disturbing

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aspects of his fiction. He does not so much adopt the Gothic motifs of his European models as much as he transforms these motifs into an ever-present, inescapable, and oddly natural grotesque American condition. It was, after all, Cooper’s mission to capture a legitimate American literary experience that led to his transplantation of Sir Walter Scott’s historical romance to American soil. This genre worked well to unify Cooper’s literary imagination with the developing his-tory of the fledgling United States. Nevertheless Cooper, too often discounted as simply an author of historical romances, also wrote some of the most Gothic scenes found in the whole of American litera-ture. Building upon the sparse tradition begun by the likes of Charles Brockden Brown, Isaac Mitchell, and Washington Irving, he took up the concept of the American Gothic, of the dark character of a coun-try built from Enlightenment ideals. Cooper, who did more than any author before him to create an American literary tradition, does not shy away from the horror inherent in the nation’s culture. Before Poe, before Hawthorne, and before Melville (his most worthy successor), Cooper lifted the veil from over a host of cultural anxieties, revealing an American consciousness haunted by doubt and guilt.

Donald Ringe, one of the first to champion the designation of Cooper as a Gothic novelist, counters the idea that all Gothic novels must contain the stereotypical settings found in the works of Horace Walpole or Ann Radcliffe. Ringe argues, “[i]t is not the castle or the abbey that is important to the Gothic, but a sense of enclosed space that can be represented as well through other devices. In a similar fashion, the fear of ghosts and specters, of strange sights and sounds, is after all only the fear of the unknown and the unexpected.”2 Here Ringe argues not only for Cooper’s inclusion in the Gothic pantheon, but for the legitimacy of American Gothic itself as a separate and vi-able literary mode. Ringe champions the idea that the Gothic has less to do with specific set pieces than with the creation of an over-arching atmosphere of terror and anxiety. As with Cooper’s other novels, the Leather-Stocking Tales exhibit this underlying cultivation of psycho-logical discomfort for both the characters of the novels and for the readers who vicariously share in their unease. However, while Ringe explains how Cooper’s tales retain the Gothic while dispensing with the trappings of Walpole, Monk Lewis, and Radcliffe, one element

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crucial to the development of all such works remains unexamined—the grotesque.

Too many literary critics avoid analyzing the works of early Amer-ican fiction writers in favor of beginning their studies with figures drawn from the middle of the nineteenth century such as Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville. By ignoring Cooper and his predecessors, these crit-ics tend to overlook writers who further their critical arguments. For example, in his American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque, Dieter Meindl avoids applying his ideas of the literary grotesque to Cooper, but he does argue that “the grotesque presents an important and largely unexplored aspect of the growth and development of American fiction.”3 Brockden Brown’s and Cooper’s works pointed the way for the vast majority of American novelists who followed, but Meindl never addresses these authors who did the most to invent and foster this tradition. For example, in Brown’s preface to arguably the first American Gothic novel, Edgar Huntly, he asserts that American writers should avoid the “European castles and chimeras” of their pre-decessors and instead favor American locales and themes.4

As the works of Brown, Cooper, and other such innovators dem-onstrate, they understood that regardless of locale or nationality, gothic fiction must retain an element of the grotesque or risk becoming a mere narrative of innocuous suspense, a tale without the disturbing fear of bodily violation. Mutilation, rape, bloody battles, and general instances of deformity touch upon core elements of anxiety, such as those of abhorrence, violation, and otherness. In his influential study of the literary grotesque, Mikhail Bakhtin examines the psychologi-cal foundation of such violence, especially when located within the treatment of the human body. Bakhtin writes, “[w]e find the basis of grotesque imagery a special concept of the body as a whole and of the limits of this whole. The confines between the body and the world and between separate bodies are drawn in the grotesque genre quite differently than in the classic and naturalistic images.”5

Cooper’s mastery of the grotesque resides in his willingness to address issues that cross the boundary between human and nonhu-man existence. As his novels remind us on several occasions, one of Cooper’s major literary strategies is to shatter what Bakhtin terms the “confines between the body and the world” (315). Cooper exploits the


underlying disgust associated with the breakdown of these boundaries, and in doing so unearths the horror—implicit in the literal decay of the corpse—of a human body melding with the larger landscape. In his manipulation of this fear of the body both becoming merged with other bodies and of becoming absorbed within the landscape, Cooper creates an American form of the grotesque.

“the grassy sepulchre”

D. H. Lawrence, perhaps the first critic to examine Cooper’s use of the grotesque, finds in the rough progression of the Leather-Stocking Tales a key to much of American culture in general. Lawrence writes that America “starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing of the old skin, towards a new youth. It is the myth of America.”6 Lawrence’s figurative association of American cultural development with a snake shedding its skin is apt because so much of America’s cultural shedding concerns the problem of skin, specifically the problem of race. And no character in the Leather-Stocking Tales better personifies America’s genocidal “sloughing” of a racial group as Chingachgook. For it is in Cooper’s portrayal of this American Indian hero that he invokes the shedding of skin, the removal of an older order, to achieve a vision of a new America made poorer by the tragic yet romanticized loss of an entire race.

Cooper begins his Leather-Stocking series with The Pioneers, a novel positioned almost at the end of the epic. In this book, Coo-per gives us an elderly, though still formidable, Natty and an east-ern American landscape that, while in the process of succumbing to Euro-American settlement, still retains enough wilderness to keep the characters busy fending off the occasional panther attack. In The Pioneers, the once powerful Chingachgook—now bearing the Chris-tianized name of John Mohegan—has become a shell of his former self. Mohegan inhabits the book as a largely harmless curiosity, a relic of a man who stands as a reminder of the frontier’s early days. Lacking any real family of his own, plagued by alcoholism, and ravaged by age, Mohegan fully embodies the concept of the tragic American Indian. As Wayne Franklin argues, in The Pioneers Chingachgook is more a “symbol of dispossession” than a character of any depth.7 In the later


novels Cooper presents a Chingachgook who with his rough visage, tribal ornaments, and vigor for scalping enemies make him a threaten-ing presence to Euro-American eyes, but in The Pioneers he becomes a figure remarkable instead for his ruin and his decision to commit a horrid form of suicide that Lawrence might have termed a grotesque “sloughing of the old skin” (58).

Cooper’s image of a burning, chanting Mohegan becomes a gro-tesque literary gesture invoking the harsh life and injustices imposed by Euro-Americans upon Native Americans. Near the end of the novel Oliver Edwards, Elizabeth Temple, and John Mohegan find themselves surrounded by flames and trapped in a forest fire. Oliver and Elizabeth scramble to save their lives, but Mohegan, stripped to the waist and bearing his Washington Medal as an emblem of how European and Euro-American colonialism mark his heroic past, insists he be left to perish in the fire. As Elizabeth and Oliver search for an escape route through the flames, Mohegan instead sits down on a log and awaits his gruesome death. Coupled with his already wild appearance, his voice contributes to Cooper’s horrid spectacle as the old warrior begins “chanting a low dirge, in the Delaware tongue, using the deep and remarkably guttural tones of his people.”8 Cooper writes that as the flames advance, “the log on which Mohegan was seated lighted at its farther end, and the Indian appeared to be surrounded by fire. Still he was unmoved. As his body was unprotected, his suffering must have been great, but his fortitude was superior to all. His voice could yet be heard, even in the midst of these horrors” (411). Mohegan, encircled in fire becomes a portrait representing the whole of a race wronged by Euro-American assimilation.

Just as the situation seems hopeless, Natty emerges from the flames to save those trapped by the wildfire, and his contact with the intense heat forces upon his body a form of racialized grotesque. Natty appears on the scene with singed clothes and hair and with “his red features of a deeper colour than ever, by the heat he had encountered” (413). The reddening of Natty’s skin in the flames becomes associated with the color of Mohegan’s skin, and represents a grotesque violation of Natty’s body as it is linked with both Mohegan’s race and plight. With Mohegan refusing to accompany them, Natty straps the dying man to his back before fleeing to safety. Once clear of the flames, Natty


realizes that Mohegan’s death is eminent, but explains to the onlookers that the fire itself has done much less to destroy Mohegan as have age and racial injustice: “it’s no burning that ails him, though his Indian feelings made him scorn to move, unless it be the burning of man’s wicked thoughts for near fourscore years; but it’s nater giving out in a chase that’s run too long. . . . Flesh isn’t iron, that a man can live for ever, and see his kith and kin driven to a far country, and he left to mourn, with none to keep him company” (419). With this statement Natty voices Cooper’s condemnation of the removals forced upon the American Indians, and, as Natty argues, Mohegan’s exposure to flames has proven far less damaging than his years of immersion in the hor-rors of colonialism.

Soon the clergyman, Mr. Grant, arrives on the scene and asks Mo-hegan if he wants Christian prayers said over his dying body. Parson Grant represents the colonial efforts of missionaries to assimilate the American Indians by forcing them away from their spiritual beliefs and tribal customs, by transforming them from great warriors such as Chingachgook into innocuous alter egos named John Mohegan. Nevertheless, in death Mohegan becomes triumphant when he angles “his ghastly face” toward Grant and begins to sing his death song (419). Natty, his “red features” enhanced by the forest fire, also bears the grotesque scars of colonialism. In fact, Natty recognizes that his friend’s death—a passing welcomed by Mohegan who looks forward to an afterlife of “good hunting [and meeting] all his tribe together ag’in” (420)—carries dire personal implications. Grant who misreads the ending of Mohegan’s death song says, “Ah! he has abandoned that vain relic of paganism, his songs . . . what says he now? is he sensible of his lost state” (420). Natty, losing patience with Grant, proclaims, “Loss! if there be any loss, ‘twill be to me. I’m sure, after he’s gone, there will be but little left for me but to follow” (420).

Cooper’s creation of a strong relationship between Natty and Chingachgook (Mohegan) forces the shattering of traditional bound-aries of human identity. Lawrence perceives the significance of the grotesque undercurrent found in both Cooper’s specific works and in his larger gesture toward a new American mythology, a mythology based upon a grotesque disintegration and eventual re-formation of human identity across boundaries of both earth and skin. Lawrence


argues that

in his immortal friendship of Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo he [Cooper] dreamed the nucleus of a new society. That is, he dreamed a new human relationship. . . . The stark, loveless, wordless unison of two men who have come to the bottom of themselves. This is the new nucleus of a new society, the clue to a new world-epoch. It asks for a great and cruel sloughing first of all. Then it finds a great release into a new world, a new moral, a new landscape. (58)

For Lawrence conventional identity boundaries fail to apply to Cooper’s portrayal of Chingachgook’s and Natty’s friendship. Leslie Fiedler attempts to localize this phenomenon as an “austere, almost in-articulate, but unquestioned love which binds them to each other and to the world of nature,”9 but Lawrence expressly states that Cooper’s “unison” of these characters remains “deeper than the deeps [sic] of sex . . . deeper than love” (58).

Lawrence argues that Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales do much more than present male bonding; they “create the myth of [a] new relation. And they go backwards, from old age to golden youth” (58). As Cooper’s novels chronicle this process and the youthful origins of their strange relationship, he begins to present Natty’s and Chingach-gook’s relationship as a form of symbiosis, as a pair of men who so fully complement what Natty himself would term each other’s “gifts” that they become hybridized by their mutual self-interests. Lawrence, continuing his examination of their relationship, writes that “Natty and the Great Serpent are neither equals nor un-equals. Each obeys the other when the moment arrives. And each is stark and dumb in the other’s presence, starkly himself without illusion” (58). Natty and Chingachgook thus form a monstrous pairing, a racially mixed hy-brid invoking Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque body as an entity no longer adhering to the traditional “confines between the body and the world and between separate bodies” (315). The uniquely American nature of this grotesque hybrid resides in the pairing itself. Cooper’s “new human relationship,” as Lawrence terms it, is one half American Indian and one half American Adam, combining two distinct forms of American identity into a powerful, but doomed, union.


With his publication of The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper built upon the concepts and characters he created in The Pioneers, and with his return to the American frontier myth he examines the human misery and violence that arise when these conditions become almost naturally linked to the landscape of colonial New York. Natty’s haunted memory of the “bloody pond,” a natural landform filled with and colored by human corpses, represents only one example of this linkage. As The Last of the Mohicans proves, Cooper often wrote of remarkable acts of violence, and, as Wayne Franklin argues, for Cooper this violence serves both as a form of initiation for his characters and as a release of the novelist’s personal demons. “Cooper used violence,” Franklin writes, “but he also seems to have relished it. . . . One feels a certain chill in each case, as if an unattributable evil has released itself in the world” (71). These moments, which emerge again and again in The Last of the Mohicans, often point to a complicated melding of human bodies with the American landscape.

In much the same way that the blood and gore of the dead French soldiers turned the pond’s water red, other moments of the human grotesque alter the natural environment. Perhaps the most pronounced instance of this influence of the grotesque upon the landscape arises in the massacre at Fort William Henry. While Cooper writes that he spares his reader most of the “revolting horrors” (177) and “disgusting aspects” (177) of this “sickening sight” (179), he still presents a remark-ably violent portrait of the massacre. His treatment of the aftermath invokes the idea that the “bloody and inhuman scene” (180) has stained both the history books and the environment itself. He writes that the massacre “deepened the stain which a previous and very similar event had left upon the reputation of the French commander” (180), and in general describes the French army as, “. . . blood-stained conquerors” (180). He then crafts a procession of descriptions portraying how the massacre marred the landscape and even the climate:

A frightful change had also occurred in the season. The sun had hid its warmth behind an impenetrable mass of vapour, and hundreds of human forms, which had blackened beneath the fierce heats of August were now stiffening in their deformity, before the blasts of a premature November . . . The crowded mirror of the Horican was gone; and, in its


place, the green and angry waters lashed the shores, as if indignantly casting back its impurities to the polluted strand. (181)

Following the massacre, the landscape becomes “polluted” and dis-turbed. In Cooper’s portrayal, the aftermath of the massacre also influ-ences the weather, making the landscape experience a dramatic change in tandem with the horrid event and associated with the grotesque corpses left decaying on the forest floor. The horror of the massacre seems to force a sudden change in the climate from one of warmth to frigidity when the corpses, initially baked by the late summer sun, become further deformed by the onset of a “premature” winter.

Along with these changes in the weather follow associated changes in the land that reveal Cooper’s linking of the American landscape with the grotesque. Cooper presents the Horican, a lake he describes as formerly a “crowded mirror” (181), as perturbed by the physical and moral impurity of the attack. The Horican becomes, in the bloody af-termath, characterized by “angry waters” that appear to reject the “im-purities” of the carnage (181). It takes on the form of a sentient entity perturbed by the butchery at its shore and riled not by natural changes, but by the unnatural disturbance of the attack. Cooper’s natural world itself appears indignant at the injustice and “polluted” character of the scene, and he emphasizes this pollution as a condition associated with the smaller elements of the landscape. During such moments Cooper highlights the awful character of the scene through hellish descrip-tions of decomposition. The dehumanizing aspect of decay comes to the fore when he writes that

here and there a dark green tuft rose in the midst of the desolation; the earliest fruits of a soil that had been fattened with human blood. The whole landscape, which, seen by a favouring light, and in a genial temperature, had been found so lovely, appeared now like some pictured allegory of life, in which objects were arrayed in their harshest but truest colors, and without the relief of any shadowing. (181)

The soil drinks up the blood of the unfortunate victims, and the gore fertilizes the ground upon which the massacre occurred. As Wayne Franklin argues, it is in the aftermath of this massacre that “we see the


American border as a devastatingly mortal terrain which serves less as a historic setting than a spiritual metaphor” (230).

In a description scanning the carnage, Cooper emphasizes the hopelessly grotesque character of the scene. “The eye,” he writes, “even sought relief, in vain, by attempting to pierce the illimitable void of heaven, which was shut to its gaze, by the dusky sheet of ragged and driving vapour” (181). Cooper then personifies the wind that goes “sweeping heavily along the ground, seeming to whisper its moanings in the cold ears of the dead, then rising in a shrill and mournful whis-tling” (181), and, as he did with his description of the “angry” Horican, he portrays a nature composed of sentient elements that seem to com-ment on, and at times speak to, the dead. In his description of the haze encompassing the scene, Cooper creates a natural world that largely conceals the shameful evidence of the massacre, wrapping the wound in a gauze of fog and gloom.

While the landscape hides the corpses it also makes use of them in a manner akin to Bakhtin’s concepts by incorporating the dead into itself. As Cooper ends his description of the massacre’s aftermath, he writes that “a few hungry ravens . . . gladly stooped, at random, to their hideous banquet” (181). This recognition of the absorption of the dead by the natural world occurs several times throughout The Last of the Mohicans. For example, in resting upon a “little hillock” in the wilderness Alice, Cora, and Heyward are horrified to find that their seat is actually a “grassy sepulchre,” a mass grave created by Natty himself years earlier and in whose humorous opinion serves as “no bad seat . . . though it be raised by the bones of mortal men” (126). In Cooper’s hands the American landscape becomes a mass grave in which pleasant hills hide corpses beneath a thin romantic veil—a terrain composed of, and pregnant with, the dead. Its surfaces bulge with bones, and its creatures feast upon corpses in a “hideous banquet” made even more abhorrent by the amorality of nature’s transformation of loved ones into carrion.

David Mogen argues that Cooper’s wilderness landscape is a “paradisiacal” one, and that “[b]efore Cooper created the paradisiacal wilderness, the frontier functioned primarily as a setting for night-marish encounters with powers of darkness in nature and in the self, posing the dual threat of demonic Indians and, more insidiously, of


psychological and cultural regression.”10 While his explanation of the powerful psychological implications of the American wilderness rings true, in mapping Cooper’s wilderness as a “paradisiacal” place Mogen deals with only its surface, and in doing so fails to recognize that Cooper’s landscape remains a scene of “nightmarish encounters.” His wilderness is neither a paradise nor a Hell, but a cemetery, and like all cemeteries much of Cooper’s American landscape appears pastoral—deceptively soothing to those who walk its grounds. But for those who dig a little, or who like Natty can read the land’s grave markers, a disturbing history of violence emerges, revealing blood in the waters and bones in the soil.

“their obscene appetites”

Cooper continued his development of an American environmental grotesque in 1827 with his publication of The Prairie, a book that stands as one of his most unsettling novels. In this tale Cooper presents Natty as a man in his eighties who, now called “The Trapper,” has moved west to stay ahead of the rushing wave of settlement. Aside from his aged hound Hector, Natty walks alone into the arid, flat plains, a setting Cooper himself had never visited and renders as more of an allegorical wilderness than a real place. Blake Nevius argues that Cooper’s choice of location represented one of his boldest literary challenges because the landscape presented “no natural or artificial accessory to intercept the eye, and, for the fictional landscapist, no landmark which he could utilize as a base of operations, so to speak.”11 Cooper compensates for his lack of first-person experience with the plains by associating the landscape with that of the sea, using the spare setting to enhance the novel’s atmosphere of desolate solitude. With Chingachgook dead, and no other human companion to keep him company, Natty enters the book as a solitary figure weakened by years of toil and burdened by the loss of his vitality, his friends, and his beloved forests.

In The Prairie, Cooper pays close attention to the ways that the breakdown of sensory perception, in part modeled by Natty’s decline, speaks to a profound anxiety about the erasure of boundaries between humans and the environment. H. Daniel Peck writes that “Cooper’s heroes are characterized by their ability to read carefully, sometimes


painstakingly, what is open for all to see but can in fact be isolated by the ‘practised eye.’ That is, they are distinguished by the power of observation rather than by the power of interpretation.”12 Indeed, many of the characters who populate The Prairie share a diminished sensory acuity; they either lose or lack the skill of interpreting their environ-ment. This loss of recognition occurs most commonly when characters attempt to identify human bodies, living or dead, within the larger landscape. Failure to recognize the human in nature becomes a com-mon motif in the novel and appears to mirror Bakhtin’s idea that “the basis of grotesque imagery [is] a special concept of the body as a whole and of the limits of this whole” (315). On the numerous occasions when characters seem incapable of recognizing human bodies within Cooper’s abstract plains landscape, the human forms become partially absorbed into that landscape in a sort of grotesque camouflage. For example, Cooper’s baffled naturalist, Doctor Battius—the same man who at one point mistakes his own jackass for a horrific new creature—confuses the Pawnee warrior Hard-Heart concealed in some leaves for “a basilisk . . . a monster that nature delighted to form.”13

While Cooper presents the taxonomist as a figure of comic relief in an often disturbing novel, other more serious characters share Bat-tius’s inability to recognize the human shape within the larger natural context. In a passage detailing the aftermath of a devastating grass fire, Natty and his party of followers puzzle over the body of a strange animal they find on the burnt grass. Natty initially mistakes the ani-mal’s corpse for “the carcass of a roasted horse” (254). This observa-tion demonstrates how Natty’s once acute senses have clouded with age and lessened his status as one worthy of the name Hawkeye. The younger Paul Hover disagrees, pointing out that the carcass lacks the hooves or head of a horse. Embarrassed by his mistake, Natty corrects his error and bemoans the loss of his keen senses by saying, “bless me, the boy is right! That I should mistake the hide of a buffaloe, scorched and crimpled as it is, for the carcass of a horse! Ah’s me! The time has been, my men, when I would tell you the name of a beast as far as the eye could reach” (254-255). Still, Natty’s perception remains only half correct, and as they lift the enigmatic “buffaloe” skin to see if any meat remains, out springs the same Pawnee warrior Battius confused for a lizard. In this instance the warrior Hard-Heart encases himself


in the buffalo skin as a last ditch ploy to survive the prairie fire (256). As before, Natty and his cohorts fail to recognize a living human body and confuse it with, or warp it within, other elements of the landscape. These two scenes in which Hard Heart is confused for an animal be-come rare moments in which the element of the grotesque preserves, rather than destroys, a human body. Hard Heart’s form melds with the land twice in this fashion, and in doing so demonstrates how Cooper combines the idea of the grotesque with the concept of survival in the harsh American landscape.

Aside from those passages dealing with Hard Heart’s uncanny survival skills, most of the unsavory scenes of The Prairie deal with the way human bodies die in, and decay into, the natural environment. One key moment occurs when the Bush family finds Asa Bush dead in a thicket. Much of the passage describes the manner in which Asa’s murdered body loses its identity and physical integrity, even at times seeming to occupy a state of being between that which is still recog-nizable as a former loved one and a carcass soon to be something other than human. In the Bush family’s initial inability to recognize Asa’s decayed body, Cooper combines the overtly grotesque (i.e., the blood soaked ground) with the subtle horror of a loved one’s loss of identity. In searching for Asa, the Bushes come across a “spot where the earth was trampled and beaten, and plainly sprinkled with blood” (134). Asa’s mother, Esther, asks her sons and husband to tell her “what sort of animal, has here met his death?” (134), and in response, the men offer the names of several animals whose blood might soak the ground before them, including a wolf, a panther, or a buffalo. Ishmael answers his wife by reading the ground itself: “Here are the marks of the spot, where he has struck his hoofs into the earth in the death-struggle, and yonder he has plunged and torn the ground with his horns. Ay, a buffaloe bull, of wonderful strength and courage” (135). In Ishmael’s interpretation the signs that mark Asa’s murder at the hands of Abiram become evidence of a buffalo’s struggle, figuratively transforming Asa into a wild animal of the plains, even before they encounter his corpse only yards away at the bottom of the hill.

The group follows the blood trail to a “thousand carrion birds . . . hovering, above the carcass” (135). Seeing that the corpse could not possibly be a buffalo, Ishmael revises his statement, saying “I


reckon it is the white bear from the upper falls” (135). Asa’s corpse be-comes an object of decay that will soon become part of the American plains environment, and the advancing status of Asa’s transformation from beloved family member to inhuman object becomes apparent after the Bushes retrieve the corpse from the thicket and see not a white bear but instead

the stiff and motionless body of the lost Asa, with the marks of a violent death but too plainly stamp’d on every pallid lineament. . . . The flight of birds, wheeled upward into the heavens, filling the air with their complaints at having been robbed of a victim, which, frightful and disgusting as it was, still bore too much of the impression of humanity to become the prey of their obscene appetites. (137)

In a forensic sense, Asa’s body becomes its own best evidence of mur-der because the “marks of a violent death” that mar the corpse speak for the dead young man. Like the gore-laden ground of the previous scene—earth and grass drenched in Asa’s blood—his body becomes a passive, grotesque spectacle, a text to be read by those with the skill to comprehend.

A form of naturalistic morality resides at the core of Cooper’s most grotesque scenes, further contributing to their disturbing char-acter. His description of Asa’s corpse as still bearing “too much of the impression of humanity to become the prey” of the birds’ “obscene appetites” (137) highlights the knowledge that Asa’s body, all bodies, will soon enough lose the status of “humanity,” becoming food for other organisms. The description of Asa’s corpse demonstrates this loss of humanity when an emotionally devastated Esther kneels beside her dead son and attempts to comfort him, as she would a living child. Cooper writes that “[a]t times, her fingers play’d in the matted hair of the dead, and at others, they lightly attempted to smooth the painfully expressive muscles of its ghastly visage, as the hand of the mother, is seen lingering fondly about the features of her sleeping child” (138).

This heart-wrenching description of Esther fretting over her dead son as if he were asleep becomes even more disturbing as she works to smooth away his horrific expression, to wipe the grotesque defor-mity of death from her son’s face. Coupled with this scene of futile


motherly affection is the realization that ultimately Asa’s corpse will lose its humanity and become an object. As Bakhtin points out, such realizations of how violence dehumanizes the body emphasize the naturalistic element of the grotesque. In discussing the manifestation of the grotesque as a blurring of the boundaries between human and non-human, between the body and the outside environment, Bakhtin argues, “[t]he grotesque body . . . is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body” (317). Cooper’s description of Asa’s grotesque corpse stands as an example of a body in the act of “becoming,” a human becoming something inhuman. Cooper even highlights Asa’s transformation or Bakhtinian “becoming” by referring to the young man’s grotesque face as “its ghastly visage” (138), a direct sign that Asa’s status is rapidly changing from that of a human “he” to that of an inhuman “it.”

Cooper’s grotesque, as Bakhtin suggests, takes its power from the knowledge that the human body both “swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world” (317). In an attempt to resist Asa’s inevitable decay and consumption by animals, the Bushes quickly dig a grave and take steps to dissuade scavengers. Wrapping Asa’s corpse “in such spare vestments as could be collected” (141), the family places his body in the grave and covers him with dirt. Following this conven-tional burial practice, his brothers then stomp the ground over Asa’s body, turning the area “into a solid mass, by the weight of their huge frames” (141). Cooper writes that “[t]his well-known precaution was adopted to prevent the speedy exhumation of the body by some of the carnivorous beasts of the Prairie” (141). Nevertheless, the futility of these actions becomes apparent when the Bushes look back at the grave from a distance to see that “[t]he little mound itself, was not visible, but it was frightfully indicated by the flock of screaming birds, which hovered above” (143). Here Cooper demonstrates the horrid inevitability of human decomposition coupled with the equally horrid ecology of the process.

Another, more hopeful, element accompanies the dreary reality of death and decay that characterizes Cooper’s incorporation of the grotesque—the physical human connection with history. Through his example of Asa’s corpse as an entity occupying the transitional zone


between human and carrion, Cooper emphasizes the interconnected-ness people share with the land. Bakhtin writes that “in the grotesque concept of the body a new, concrete, and realistic historic awareness was born and took form: not abstract thought about the future but the living sense that each man belongs to the immortal people who create history” (367). Cooper, who understood the importance of historical awareness better than most writers of his time, demonstrates this con-cept in his grotesque but historically focused Leather-Stocking Tales. Just as in The Last of the Mohicans where Natty’s old mass burial mound becomes “no bad seat . . . though it be raised by the bones of mortal men” (126), Cooper again links the dead with the historical in Asa’s internment in the soil above “carnivorous beasts of the Prairie” (141). Asa, through his decomposition, not only becomes a meal for beasts but becomes in a literal sense part of the prairie—part of the history and composition of the landscape.

“the revelries of demons”

While Cooper’s description of Asa’s corpse stands as a disturb-ing example of the way the human body grotesquely merges with the land, another, far worse condition occurs when these natural processes become subverted for human purposes. In 1840, fifteen years after burying an aged Natty Bumppo in a Pawnee village on the desolate plains of The Prairie, Cooper unearthed his most popular character and published The Pathfinder, a book that is technically a sequel to The Last of the Mohicans. Third in terms of plot, but fourth in composition, The Pathfinder occupies a unique position in the Leather-Stocking series. Set in 1759, just two years after the events of The Last of the Mohicans, the book portrays Natty—now called the Pathfinder—and Chingach-gook, as scouts stationed at a fort on Lake Ontario and serving on the English side of the French and Indian War. Despite Cooper’s gesture of returning to his previously successful frontier series, The Pathfinder is no simple rehash of the three preceding novels. Ever the experimenter, Cooper melds the familiar genres of the wilderness, the sea, and the marriage novel into something new and hard to categorize.

In The Pathfinder Cooper reinvents Natty as he resurrects him, casting him adrift into a complicated landscape of forest, lake, and


love, where he struggles to find his way across a variety of challenging physical and emotional terrains. This reinvention of Natty originates from what George Dekker argues is Cooper’s return to his European influence: Sir Walter Scott. Dekker writes that The Pathfinder “is the only Leatherstocking tale in which Natty Bumppo at all resembles the wavering hero of a Scott novel.”14 However, as Dekker argues, Natty’s status as the novel’s hero is weak because “[a]lmost all of the action in The Pathfinder takes place in Mabel Dunham’s presence,” a fact that makes Mabel, not Natty, “like one of Scott’s wavering heroes” (168). Much of the book portrays a Natty unseen in the earlier tales, as he becomes bound by the constraints of social class and military duty. In joining forces with the English, he loses the independence he enjoyed in The Last of the Mohicans, and Cooper removes Chingachgook from much of the book, leaving Natty without his most trusted friend, and essentially, his other half. Throughout the novel Natty seems lost and alone, and it is probably no accident that from its title onward, The Pathfinder takes as its controlling metaphor the idea of naviga-tion. The book repeatedly addresses the problem of pathfinding in a world of overlapping wildernesses and human deceit, and it is in this tale so concerned with the concept of finding the right path that the grotesque becomes associated with the threat of misdirection—of becoming irretrievably lost.

In this novel Cooper’s use of the literary grotesque reaches some-thing of a culmination. In a scene that combines elements of both his description of the massacre of Fort William Henry and of his portrayal of Asa Bush’s murder, Cooper presents us with a horrid view to the grotesque. Mabel and Dew-of-June, having fled to the safety of the blockhouse while the marauding Tuscaroras mercilessly slaughtered the English soldiers and the helpless Jennie, awaken the next morn-ing to a deceptively tranquil scene. Mabel, too cautious to leave the security of the blockhouse, peers from a hole in the wall. At first she sees nothing, then

her eye at length fell on a group of three men, dressed in the scarlet of the 55th, seated on the grass in lounging attitudes, as if they chatted in listless security, and her blood curdled, as on a second look she traced the bloodless faces, and glassy eyes of the dead. . . . there was


a mocking levity in their postures and gestures, for their limbs were stiffening in different attitudes intended to resemble life, at which the soul revolted. Still, horrible as these objects were to those near enough to discover the frightful discrepancy between their assumed and their real characters, the arrangement had been made, with an art that would have deceived a negligent observer, at the distance of a hundred yards. . . . June pointed out to her companion, the fourth soldier seated with his feet hanging over the water, his back fastened to a sapling, and holding a fishing-rod in his hands. The scalpless heads were covered with their caps, and all appearance of blood had been carefully washed from each countenance.15

Here Cooper paints a remarkably grotesque scene, one in which the Tuscaroras turn their freshly killed enemies into decoys meant to lure Natty and his companions into an ambush. The Tuscaroras position the bodies as a child might arrange dolls, by placing them in posi-tions of “mocking levity” that form a repulsive commentary on the English themselves. For the Tuscaroras, the arranging of their enemies’ corpses becomes an opportunity to critique the English as amateurs of forest life, as nothing more than naive interlopers. As he does in his earlier Leather-Stocking Tales, Cooper again invokes the concept that corpses briefly occupy a realm between the living and the dead. Just as Asa’s murder launches his body and his identity upon the process of decay that quickly moves him from the status of a man to that of an “it,” so do the posed corpses of The Pathfinder take on the guise of “horrible . . . objects” (362).

Mabel’s disgust at the scene springs in part from the skill with which the Tuscaroras achieve their desired effect of imbuing these stricken “objects” with the illusion of life. The Tuscaroras know their foes well, and have a talent for rendering them in characteristic poses. Her reaction to this horror is more complicated than simple revulsion; she seems to understand the larger gesture of appropriating and violat-ing the sanctity of the very bodies of the English. “Mabel,” Cooper writes, “sickened at this sight, which not only did so much violence to all her notions of propriety, but which was, in itself, so revolting and so opposed to natural feeling” (363). In reacting to the horrid scene, Mabel mourns the deaths of her companions, experiences the terror of the violation of their bodies, and then combines that same terror


with amazement at the “art” of the Tuscaroras in arranging the bod-ies in realistic poses. At each turn Mabel’s gaze shatters the tranquil morning by exposing her to more horror, a condition made even worse as she begins to understand the Tuscarora’s awful purpose. Cooper ap-plies the grotesque in thick brush strokes, inundating Mabel with layer upon layer of the artfully grim. And just as the gruesome scene appears complete, June points to

the body of Jennie, seemingly standing in the door of a hut, leaning forward, as if to look at the group of men, her cap fluttering in the wind, and her hand grasping a broom. The distance was too great to distinguish the features, very accurately, but Mabel fancied that the jaw had been depressed as if to distort the mouth into a sort of horrible laugh. . . . It was indeed, a solemn thing, to look out upon that deserted spot, peopled by the dead in the panoply of the living, and thrown into the attitudes and acts of careless merriment and rude enjoyment. The effect on our heroine, was much as if she had found herself an observer of the revelries of demons. (363-364)

As Jennie’s body proves, the Tuscaroras do not spare women from their grotesque ruse, and they even manage to manipulate her facial expression into a gruesome mask of “careless merriment.”

The grotesque power of the bodies and the morality of the Tusca-rora’s differ depending upon the cultural background of the observer. For Mabel the actions of the Indians represent a condition so abject that she actually reaches a point at which she cannot imagine further horror. When Mabel tells June that she would “prefer to see the enemy, than to look any longer on this fearful array of the dead” (364), June quiets her, saying she thought she heard a warriors’s yell akin to that made when taking a scalp. Mabel shrieks, “What mean you!—There is no more butchery! There can be no more” (364).

June, the marginally neutral Tuscarora wife of the villainous Arrowhead, occupies a different cultural point of view than Mabel, and her reaction to the posed bodies differs accordingly. At the sight of the corpses, June responds not with revulsion but with tribal pride: “‘Tuscarora very cunning—’ said June, in a way to show that she rather approved of, than condemned the uses to which the dead bodies had


been applied—‘Do soldier no harm now; do Iroquois, good. Got the scalps, first; now make bodies work. By and by, burn ’em’” (363). For June, her fellow Tuscaroras handle the situation with an admirable efficiency; they kill, scalp, pose, and burn their enemies to the tribe’s best advantage. Neither squeamishness nor rituals interfere with the task at hand, but the Tuscaroras do make sure to take the all-important scalps before they pose the dead.

The practice of scalping appears in one form or other in each of the Leather-Stocking Tales and in some ways becomes Cooper’s symbol of his Americanized grotesque. In most instances, especially in The Pio-neers and The Last of the Mohicans scalping becomes a practice closely associated with Chingachgook’s enigmatic savagery. In these cases the act highlights Chingachgook’s apparent duplicity as a character who is both Natty’s closest ally and also true to his own sometimes repulsive customs. For example in The Pioneers, Natty, in speaking about Chin-gachgook’s glory as a younger man, mentions his friend’s integrity and his scalping prowess in the same breath, saying, “I seen him . . . with thirteen scalps on his pole. And I will say this for the ‘Big Snake,’ that he always dealt fair, and never scalped any that he didn’t kill with his own hands” (155). Still, the concept of scalping marks the boundary between these two men because while Natty does not condemn the act when performed by American Indians, he criticizes Euro-Americans who adopt the practice.

This issue of Euro-Americans scalping their enemies becomes a key part of Cooper’s final Leather-Stocking Tale, The Deerslayer. This book serves as a prequel to the entire series, and is more of a pictur-esque fairy-tale than its predecessors—a trait that seems at times to magnify the incorporation of the grotesque. In one particularly affect-ing scene, Cooper presents the act of scalping as a uniquely American form of the grotesque that mirrors Bakhtin’s ideas about the violation of the human body. In this scene following a Huron attack, the Hutter sisters realize that their father, Tom, is not drunk—as they initially thought—but instead has been scalped alive:

the girls ventured near a parent, whom it was no unusual thing for them to find in a condition that lowers a man to the level of brutes. . . . Judith moved forward, with a sudden impulse, and removed


a canvass cap that was forced so low on his head as to conceal his face, and indeed all but his shoulders. The instant this obstacle was taken away, the quivering and raw flesh, the bared veins and muscles, and all the other disgusting signs of mortality, as they are revealed by tearing away the skin, showed he had been scalped, though still living.16

As with the posed corpses of The Pathfinder, Tom Hutter’s true condi-tion is momentarily hidden behind both a head covering and a veil of false levity or inebriation. Cooper creates a skillfully rendered descrip-tion of the gore that accompanies the scalping; and, as in the earlier novels, he ensures that the revelation of the grotesque is made by the victim’s loved ones. In his continuation of the scene, he enhances the horror of the situation by refusing to describe it in more detail:

The reader must imagine the horror that daughters would experience, at unexpectedly beholding the shocking spectacle that was placed before the eyes of Judith and Esther. . . .We shall pass over the first emotions, the first acts of filial piety, and proceed with the narrative, by imagining rather than relating most of the revolting features of the scene. Hutter was simply scalped, to secure the usual trophy, and was left to die by inches, as had been done in a thousand similar instances, by the ruthless warriors of this part of the American continent. (355-356)

In a clever act of non-description, Cooper addresses his unwillingness to recount the details of the scalping to highlight the grotesque nature of the scene, making its horror beyond words. He also reminds his readers that such a gruesome event was a common one, akin to “a thousand similar instances,” in the early American forest. Still, Tom’s scalping has a unique angle. Much of the violence of the narrative begins when he and Harry March go out in hopes of ambushing the Hurons and scalping them—an errand the young Natty abhors. Hetty, aware of this irony, exclaims, “Father went for scalps, himself, and now where is his own?” (356). Cooper’s example of the American grotesque serves then as a lesson in the dangers of crossing cultural boundaries. By melding Euro-American conventions and fears with the strange American Indian character of the new continent, scalping comes to represent much of what is both grotesque and unique about the early


American frontier.In Notions of the Americans, Cooper wrote of his predecessor,

Charles Brockden Brown, that “I remember to have read one of his books (Wieland) when a boy, and I take it to be a never failing evidence of genius, that amid a thousand similar pictures which have succeeded, the images it has left still stand distinct and prominent in my recollection.”17 The same might now be said of Cooper’s work. Like Brown, Cooper set as his task the creation of an American literature, and like Brown he filled his works with “pictures” that remain, even today, “distinct and prominent.” As his Leather-Stocking Tales dem-onstrate, Cooper believed that addressing the grotesque of a nation also invokes its beauty. These passages, often violent in nature, present an important part of the larger project of pioneering an American literary tradition. These scenes reveal a unique form of the grotesque through which Cooper associates his characters with the landscape upon which they live and die. His grotesque passages reveal a complex and often disturbing human interrelatedness with the land, a powerful connection with a rich soil made ever richer by its fertilization with American blood.

NOTES

1. I presented portions of this essay at the James Fenimore Cooper Society Con-ference at the State University of New York College at Oneonta on 12 July 2007. That less developed version appeared in the conference’s proceedings: James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art, vol. 16. Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, 135. Subse-quent citations to the novel are to the Cooper Edition text, and page references appear parenthetically following the citation.

2. Ringe, “The Last of the Mohicans as a Gothic Novel,” 43.3. Meindl, American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque, 2.4. Brown, Edgar Huntly, 3.5. Bakhtin, “The Grotesque Image of the Body,” 315. Hereafter cited parentheti-

cally in the text.6. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 58. Hereafter cited parentheti-

cally in the text.7. Franklin, The New World of James Fenimore Cooper, 122. Hereafter cited paren-

thetically in the text.8. Cooper, The Pioneers, 410. Subsequent citations to the novel are to the Cooper

Edition text, and page references appear parenthetically following the citation.9. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, 192.10. Mogen, “Wilderness, Metamorphosis, and Millennium: Gothic Apocalypse


From the Puritans to the Cyberpunks,” 99.11. Nevius, Cooper’s Landscapes, 14.12. Peck, A World By Itself, 21.13. Cooper, The Prairie, 69-72, 182. Subsequent citations to the novel are to

the Cooper Edition text, and page references appear parenthetically following the citation.

14. Dekker, James Fenimore Cooper: The Novelist, 161. Hereafter cited parentheti-cally in the text.

15. Cooper, The Pathfinder, 362-63. Subsequent citations to the novel are to the Cooper Edition text, and page references appear parenthetically following the citation.

16. Cooper, The Deerslayer, 354. Subsequent citations to the novel are to the Coo-per Edition text, and page references appear parenthetically following the citation.

17. Cooper, Notions of the Americans, 350.

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