Main Character In Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales example essay topic

James Fenimore Cooper: A Setting of His Own. James Fenimore Cooper was born James Cooper on September 15, 1789. His father was William Cooper, a prominent landowner and founder of Cooperstown. His mother was Elizabeth Fenimore, a young heiress.

His young life was relatively comfortable for a new settlement such as Cooperstown. The only experience they had of the "savage enemies", the Indians was the stories of traveling merchants. Most of the Indians had been thoroughly beaten by the revolution. His father acquired a judgeship as well as a seat in congress as a Federalist. The Coopers were a fairly wealthy family.

They lived in a formidable brick mansion named Oswego Hall. James went to school under an Episcopal clergyman with two van Rensselers, a Livingston, and a Jay, all of whom were from incredibly wealthy families from before and after the revolution. In 1803, James began to attend Yale College at the age of thirteen. In his junior year he was expelled for general misconduct including both an apparent gunpowder explosion as well as a joke involving a donkey and a teacher's office.

James left his collegiate life for one on the sea. After two years of traveling between America, Britain, and Portugal, he returned to America. Upon arriving Cooper was commissioned for three years by the American Navy as a midshipman. His years on the sea like those of his youth were relatively peaceful. A year into his job as midshipman, William Cooper died. He was killed while leaving a meeting in Albany by a blow to the head from behind him.

Cooper gained a large inheritance of fifty thousand dollars as well as a considerable amount of property which he shared with his brothers. That same year Cooper became engaged to Susan De Lance. They married on January 1, 1811 and moved onto Susan's wealthy parents land in Scarsdale. During 1813 to 1819 all of Cooper's brothers died, leaving him to support their families. His wife had fallen ill around 1819, and to console her he read many British novels. While reading her one of the latest of the novels, he said, "I could write you a better book myself".

Susan, who was a supporting and intelligent woman, challenged her husband to do so. With these words Cooper began his career as a professional writer. His career was marked with success and downfall, but in the end he is one of the founders of our country's fiction. Through Cooper's innovation, unique style, and social critique he is one of the most influential and important writers of fiction, and his stories are archetypes of of countless other books. Cooper was a writer of innovation and of invention.

He was a Romantic writer in words and actions. Cooper did not invent romanticism; it began over in England with authors such as Sir Walter Scott. Cooper was not a standard romantic author when it came to terms of character development or plot. It is safe to say he lacked these, or used others' literary devices in many of his books. Cooper's abilities lay in his narrative style and his description. Cooper's themes are conveyed through his characters' interaction with their surroundings, as well as his narrative style.

Cooper did innovate upon this new style of fiction, but he was also an inventor of new forms of literature. Cooper's fourth book was titled The Pilot. The Pilot was the original fictional sea adventure novel. Cooper drew from his years as a sailor to accurately depict life on the ocean. Issues of leadership and obedience that arise through the rank of the characters in a sea novel and the ship can symbolize the world. Through the years Cooper would return to his sea tales and try to improve upon them.

Cooper also created another kind of fiction: the Western / Frontier adventure. These stories are comprised of man and his interaction with untouched nature. He tries to convey the effects that men have on nature as well as the other way around. This type of story was made famous through Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. These stories are about Natty Bumppo, the wilderness, and the spread of the "civilized" people. It is a moral as well as physical battleground throughout these books; from the right of people to destroy the virgin forestry to the conflicting Indian and European armies.

Many of his stories are also groundbreaking not because it had never been done before but because of Cooper's decision to write in an American setting. America was a new country as well as a whole new continent, and this type of place had not been seen or heard of for a long time to the conquered and civilized Europe. America wasn't a place of vast history such as Britain, France, or Italy. An American novel, by extension, was completely different to that of Europe.

Many of the British authors could look back upon their predecessors and their rich tradition of writing to inspire their work, whereas Cooper had to create his own American literature devoid of influences and based solely on his Romantic ideals and America's qualities. This mix of originality, completely new settings, and new real world dilemmas created American fiction. In Cooper's writing there are two dominant threads that connect all his works and form his style: Romanticism and setting. Cooper's characters and plots were of the ideal nature.

The characters were either virtuous in all respects or the epitome of loathing. These base characters were surrounded by essentially flat characters. Minor characters played their role in the story and nothing else. This is essentially the main fault of Cooper; his underdeveloped characters. He was notorious for the portrayal of women in his books Basically they were objects or part of the setting, and nothing else. Through these slight faults of an amateur author we can see the incredible characters that he does portray, in stark relief.

Harvey Birch is the main character of The Spy. Harvey is a character with a sense of duty and morality so strong that his self-sacrifice makes him seem unreal. He is a double spy for the Americans, and the most astounding part about his position is that he is thought to be a spy for the British. Harvey allows everyone to think that he is a spy, and in the end he never reveals what he did for the so called "patriots" in the story. He is a man content with doing the right thing and being persecuted for it. This character is basically the testing grounds or prelude to most ideal and romantic character, Natty Bumppo.

Bumppo is the main character in Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. He is a man completely devoted to God and to virtue and in that sense he is more than just a man. He is also more than a man in terms of his physical abilities. Embodying the romantic denial of the ordinary he is able to, for instance, run 40 miles in an hour. Bumppo is the essence of Romanticism incarnate on paper. He is able to do the insurmountable as well as serve as a bridge between two worlds.

He is a man of both the Indians and the settlers. Able to learn from both cultures and respecting both people and the virtues either retain, Bumppo becomes more than what he is. Through his relationship he embodies both existentialism and transcendentalism. He is able to transcend the limits of both white men and the Indians, but all the while he retains the qualities of existentialism his relationship with both God and nature. The second aspect of Cooper's style is his use of setting. Cooper's settings are some of the most beautifully rendered scenes in literature.

He encompasses the whole landscape with his words from the richly layered forest to the moonlight's shadows across a lonely hillock. Cooper uses an imagination and creativity that is so vast that these vivid pictures can almost be realized in front of our eyes. These settings evoke feelings in the reader from the style in which they are drawn. Whether it be a mist covered battlefield or a desolate burial ground these scenes can strike a cord in our mind or heart.

The virgin forest or the immense sea depict a great feeling of peace, tranquility, and isolation. These settings do not just serve as a place for the plot to unfurl but they play a role in it as well. As seen in The Pioneers the main conflict is between Bumppo and the pioneers over their mistreatment of nature. In all of the Leatherstocking Tales setting is one of the main parts of the plot.

Whether it be armies fighting over it, colonists misusing it, or Indians being forced off of it, setting is an essential piece of the tales. Cooper does not exploit the physical setting for conflict exclusively in the Leatherstocking Tales. Take for instance, The Pilot. In this sea adventure setting forms new dilemmas.

On the sea there is nowhere to go except on the boat, and this makes the boat basically a microcosm. The boat is meant to be the world represented in miniature form. This smaller "world" contains all of its characters in one place. This leads to a mass of conflicts. The other question that Cooper's sea fiction poses is one of worthiness.

Is the leader worthy of his position and is he able perform? In these areas of wilderness and the sea, not only does the setting propel the plot, it defines it. Cooper was also able to construct a social setting. In his European tales, Cooper tells of foreign social structures. From oligarchies to aristocracies, Cooper was able to paint a portrait of intricate social structures. These structures were corrupt and self-perpetuating and Cooper used them as the basis for his stories.

Within these governments and social classes is the setting where the characters live. He was able to use the social structures as parts of the plot and parts of the setting for his characters. Coopers final defining quality was his theory of fiction. He believed that a good story is required to give a message or have some sort of meaning beyond itself.

He believed that a writer had a duty to his readers to teach them. This is made most apparent in his criticism of Washington Irving. He said that Irving had a duty to write more than just for entertainment because he was one of the most popular writers at the time and had great influence. The main focus of his messages was to show the world itself. If readers could see indirectly through his stories the faults in their actions he was able to accomplish his goal. He wrote about the European nations and even upon his return to America when Cooper wrote The Manikins, Cooper was trying to show the people their world and its faults through a story.

Cooper put the lesson in the hands of the reader. He may have knocked the door in and forced the reader to see his message but Cooper let the reader have the decision in the end. In his books there were always the obligatory antagonists, but there were also characters in his books that he disagreed with without condemning their opinion. A prime example of this is Judge Temple. He is one of the colonists in The Pioneers, but unlike his associates the Judge sees the immoral actions of his fellow pioneers. He doesn't waste nature and its resources and yet he still decides to tear it down in place of civilization.

It is a dilemma of nature versus colonization and both sides have their support. Cooper however puts his protagonist on the side of nature gently trying to guide the reader to his conclusion. Cooper did not just write stories for entertainment. He was also a social critic of the time. Throughout his stories of sea, and of the past, he supported patriotism. He believed that American principles were the best in the world.

When he traveled to Europe he wanted to educate the nations about America and defend its way of life. He did so in his book Notions of the Americans. Cooper also believed that America should know that their way was the best for the people, as opposed to the corrupt forms of government in Europe. In The Bravo, The Headsman, and The Heiden mauer Cooper portrays the evil governments of Venice, Berne, and Germany. In each of these stories Cooper tries to show Americans that their views are the best in the world. Cooper's innovations, remarkable style, and didactic teachings make him count as one of the most important writers of fiction, and his books are the beginnings of whole new ideas and kinds of fiction.

Cooper developed many of the modern day stories: from sea adventures, to western adventures, as well as moral tales encompassing the waste of nature. Cooper's unique style gives his stories a plot, characters, and setting. He is a Romantic and for him his characters are ideal as well as is the settings. The difference of Cooper's Romanticism to others of his day is that he utilizes the setting.

The setting of Cooper's books range from aristocracies in Venice to the plains of the Western Frontier. Finally Cooper believed that a story should mean something. A story should be didactic and try to give a moral or a viewpoint to the reader. These are the ways in which Cooper is a great author and should be read even today.