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 The tensions and ambivalences of The Pioneers (1823) which render that novel in the end wholly incoherent, are never permanently resolved. Indeed the question for the reader of the Leatherstocking Saga is whether Cooper’s sustained ambivalences, or in Tony Tanner’s phrase, cultural schizophrenia, are precisely the source of their power, and of Cooper’s international marketability as America’s first novelist-superstar. Henry Nash Smith saw in The Pioneers ‘a genuine ambivalence’ towards such issues as ‘a rough equality’ as against social stratification, free access to wilderness as against inviolable property rights, Leatherstocking’s ‘intuitive theology’ as against institutionalised religion. George Dekker’s thesis that Cooper converts the wavering hero of Scott into the mythologized hero of the Leatherstocking novels is just, but it might be added that the wavering hero remains, more romantically, in the persona of the author. |
