[200 years ago Wednesday, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans was published. That’s one of many Cooper novels with a lot to tell us about his and our America, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Cooper novels. Leading up to a special weekend post on my favorite CooperStudying book!]
On two very different literary homecomings for an iconoclastic itinerant.
As I discussed in Monday’s post, in 1826—just six years after launching his literary career and (probably not coincidentally) at the height of his Last of the Mohicans fame—Cooper moved his young family abroad, first to England and then to multiple Continental spots (but with Paris as a consistent homebase). They would stay across the pond for about seven years, and Cooper made the most of the time, not only continuing to publish at least one new novel a year, but also gathering material for the six-volume Gleanings in Europe series of nonfiction books (combinations of travel writing and memoir) that he would go on to publish in the 1830s. But as perhaps foreshadowed by how many of those novels written while he was in Europe remained focused on American historical subjects, Cooper eventually couldn’t stay away from the land of his birth, and he and his family returned to New York City (and then eventually settled in his hometown of Cooperstown, New York) beginning in November 1833.
As you would expect of a creative writer as prolific as Cooper, he eventually depicted the experience of returning home from abroad in fictional form, and more exactly in a pair of novels published in the same year: Homeward Bound; or, The Chase: A Tale of the Sea (1838) and Home as Found: Sequel to Homeward Bound (also 1838). But despite that proximate publication, and despite focusing on the same main characters (the Effingham family, whom Cooper had introduced in The Pioneers as fictional stand-ins for his own Cooperstown family), the two novels represent two strikingly different sides of Cooper’s work and career. Homeward Bound, as its subtitle suggests, is one of his nautical novels, an adventure story about escapes from pirates, battles with North African raiders, dangerous storms, and so on as the Effinghams make their roundabout way home to the U.S. from Europe. While Home as Found is much more of a social satire in the vein of Cooper’s debut novel Precaution, focusing on romantic relationships, mistaken identities, the pitfalls of class and status, and so on as the Effinghams try to reestablish their home and community in America.
These distinct homecoming novels also reflect, to my mind, the different degrees to which Cooper could remain successful as a creative writer in his chosen genres as both his life and the world changed with time. Nautical adventure stories never really go out of style, nor do they have to particularly reflect those changes in the world—or if they do, as with the rise of North African states that became complex parts of the U.S.’s international relations, they can make those elements just another layer of their thrilling plots, as Homeward Bound does successfully. But social satires of course are and must be far more closely attuned to their societies—and as Cooper’s own iconoclastic perspective became increasingly critical of his homeland and fellow countrymen (on both of which more tomorrow), that criticism found its way into works like Home as Found. And at least to this reader, there’s a mean-spiritedness to elements of Home as Found which, while certainly not out of place in a satire, makes for a rather unpleasant read. The perils of going home again, I suppose.
Last CooperStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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