O'Brien Cooper-Irving Blog

The readings this week all follow a pattern, a rouge guideline of expository set-up that remains consistent throughout both author’s pieces. Each story begins with a detailed illustration of the setting the story will unfold in. While the stories obviously involve human characters, the focus on the natural world is something that both Cooper and Irving are intent on not just glazing over. Wilderness has a power in their writing. Instead of the wilderness-as-Satan’s domain that crops up in Puritan literature, the otherworldliness of the wilderness becomes something positive, a way to transcend the self through leaving civilization and communing with the natural world, such as is the case with Natty in The Pioneer.

James Fenimore Cooper espouses something like awe when writing about nature. Everything is alive and has a grandness that transcends the everyday world. Whereas the Puritan mindset chose to elevate the dangers and mysteries of wilderness, Cooper’s writing elevates the beauty of it. Take, for example, the opening to The Pioneer where Cooper starts with describing the lay of the land, charting out rivers and mountains before ever arriving at a place where the reader is shown the human characters in the story. The land itself is given a life of its own.

As Judge Temple and his daughter are travelling through the forest, Cooper writes, “To the travellers there seemed to be no wind; but these pines waved majestically at their topmost boughs, sending forth a dull, plaintive sound that was quite in consonance with the rest of the melancholy scene.” Cooper writes the natural world as a place that meditative, a place where even the trees have a sense of quiet thought about them. Those who live in this natural world are shown to be transcendent as well. Natty is at one described as, “leaning upon his long rifle, with his head turned a little to one side, as if engaged in sagacious musing.” Comparing the hunter to a sage is a logical connection, as both are hermetic figures, turning the forest into an area where it is possible to attain higher understanding of the universe.

Washington Irving similarly starts off “Rip Van Winkle” writing about the Catskill Mountains, using terminology like “noble height” and “lording it over” to illustrate a locale as something majestic, a place that is noble for its separation from civilization, even going so far as to be “magical.” The mountains are personified as a place of importance, a natural world ranked higher over civilization, like nobility applied to a region instead of an individual.

“Sleepy Hollow” also has an entry point in the form of natural landmarks. As Irving describes, “there is a little valley among high hills which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook murmurs through it and, with the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker, is almost the only sound that ever breaks the uniform tranquility.” Once again, notice the specific language: “uniform tranquility.” Nature, as any given show on Animal Planet can show, is often far from tranquil. This vision of the wilderness that Cooper and Irving write about is a myth. But being a myth bequeaths great power in the same breadth that it creates a fiction. By creating this grand, mythic stage, Cooper and Irving do as they set out to and create the landscape for the great American literary tradition that had yet to come into its own.