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Sullen Fires Across the
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Notes1
Oliver’s name and heritage is a source of confusion
in the novel, and the revelation of his heritage is key to
Cooper’s reconciliation of the competing Native
American, British and American claims to Templeton. In this
essay, I refer to Edward Oliver Effingham as Oliver, and to
Elizabeth Temple as Bess. 2 In this
essay, I use "secondary" and "forgotten" heroine
interchangeably. 3 I do not
wish to conflate sympathy and sensibility; for the purposes
of this essay, I consider sympathy to be one of the
qualities necessary to possess sensibility. To possess
sensibility, as Margaret Anne Doody has defined it, is "to
possess the capacity of human sympathy, as well as the
capacity for aesthetic responsiveness" ("Introduction,"
xiv). The power of sympathy, according to Adam
Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759), is to bridge this divide between individual minds:
"As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel,
we can form no idea of the manner in which they are
affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel
in the like situation" (10-11). Smith suggested that
observing a fictional sentimental hero or heroine’s
response to an occasion for sympathy, such as suffering or
beauty, and the narrative reward of that appropriate
behavior, or punishment of inappropriate behavior, enabled
the reader to internalize sentimental ideals. In turn, the
reader’s appropriate response to the representation
of a scene of sympathy allows the reader to claim to
possess sensibility. Thus, despite the decline of the "cult
of sensibility," theories of sympathy continued to impact
the novel. 4 Thus,
sympathy is inherently tied to questions of class identity
and nationalism, issues also central to the resolution of
the marriage plot in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
novel. 5 Elizabeth
Barnes’s States of Sympathy is particularly
useful here. In States of Sympathy, Barnes
suggests that early sentimental seduction novels and the
domestic fiction of the 1850s are connected by a common
preoccupation with sympathetic identification: "Whereas
seduction fiction depicts the middle-class family as a
closed system—a nuclear and potentially incestuous
unit based on the affiliation of blood ties—the
domestic story represents the family as a collection of
shared values and emotional experiences" (15). Cooper
rewrites Radcliffe and Austen’s sisters into friends
to ensure that Louisa is, in effect, always already
forgotten—exterior to the family unit of
Templeton. 6 Race is, of
course, also a central issue in The Pioneers.
Cooper locates the threat of miscegenation in his male
characters, especially Oliver. Oliver’s
manifestations of an appropriate sensibility — his
hand resting naturally on the piano, for example —
assure Bess and the reader that the apparent markers of
racial identity (his name and knowledge of their language,
his time with Natty and Indian John) must be misleading.
Cooper’s conclusion not only erases the threat of
miscegenation, but it reveals that Oliver is the rightful
heir of Templeton, reinstating the importance of
primogeniture in legitimating the new nation’s claim
to the American landscape. 7 This is, as
I will illustrate in the next section, complicated by the
location of Radcliffe’s novel in Sicily. 8 See, for
example, George Levine, who suggests in The Realistic
Imagination: "Realism got its second full start in the
English novel (after Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding) in
the work of Jane Austen" (35). 9 Literally,
in Elizabeth Nollen’s essay, which claims that Julia
and Emilia served as a model for the Dashwood sisters of
Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Valdine
Clemens and Brigitta Berglund also claim that Emilia
contrasts Julia’s sensibility. 10 Even Kate
Ellis’s otherwise quite excellent reading of A
Sicilian Romance in The Contested Castle
ignores Emilia’s role in the novel (103-107). 11 This has
become such a critical commonplace it seems almost
unnecessary to offer sources, but, for the sake of
illustration: see, for example: Kate Ellis, "Ann Radcliffe
and the Perils of Catholicism" where she distinguishes
between Catholic superstition opposed to pious sensibility:
E.J. Clery reads this pedagogy in Marxist terms as enabling
the reader to indulge in a consuming "passion that is
economically desirable but morally problematic;
happily...sublimated by the same means, in sympathetic
identification with the virtuous and most immaterial
heroine" ("Ann Radcliffe," 212). More straightforwardly,
see Fred Botting, "Dracula, Romance and
Radcliffean Gothic"; Scott Mackenzie, "Ann
Radcliffe’s Gothic Narrative and the Readers at
Home," John Stoler "Having her Cake and Eating it Too,"
James Watt’s Contesting the Gothic and
Michael Gamer’s Romanticism and the
Gothic. 12 If you can
call the discovery of your presumed-dead, long-imprisoned
mother a "rational" explanation. 13 See also
Elinor in Sense and Sensibility, who must keep
Edward and Lucy’s engagement secret from Marianne;
also Elizabeth and Louisa — Elizabeth’s
jealousy separates her and Louisa. 14 Although
Julia does escape from the church and from her father,
Ferdinand assumes the head of the household. Additionally,
as Toni Weir has argued, Ferdinand’s adoption of
military dress consolidates his virility as the hero.
Tellingly, Weir does not read Hippolitus as the hero of
A Sicilian Romance, although Weir does make
arguments concerning feminized heroes at other points in
the book. 15 See, for
example, Judith Wilt’s Ghost of the Gothic:
Austen, Eliot, Lawrence. Wilt focuses on
Northanger and Emma, but barely addresses
Sense and Sensibility. 16 Although
Captain Tilney’s subsequent actions suggest that he
is not much better than a Gothic villain, Henry once again
intervenes by proposing to Catherine anyway, locating the
Gothic in the past. 17 There are
two major critical camps: pro-Elinor and pro-Marianne.
(However, within these critical camps is a strong tendency
to insist that Austen troubles a simple division between
sense and sensibility, or between Elinor and Marianne.) For
pro-Elinor readings, see: James Thompson, Marilyn Butler,
Stuart Tave, and Barbara Seeber. See also Alistair
Duckworth and Mary Poovey. For pro-Marianne readings, see:
Angela Leighton, Julie Shaffer, and Karl Kroeber. Laura
Goodlad explicitly connects Austen to both the French
Revolution and English nationalism: "Austen’s early
novel contrasts Elinor’s ideal Englishness, a
synthesis of "sense" and "sensibility" with
Marianne’s immoderate Frenchness" (60).
Other readings of the novel, including Poovey, Kroeber,
Butler, and Leighton, have argued that Elinor’s
reserve is Augustan, Classical, or in other ways outdated
and is contrasted with Marianne’s more modern
Romantic sensibility. I argue, instead, that
Marianne’s sensibility is depicted as outdated,
whereas Elinor’s "sense" is progressive and tied to
economics, rather than aesthetics. 18 Scholars
of this novel have addressed, rather extensively, the
strange paradox that readers are sympathetic to Marianne,
even though Austen appears to punish her excessive
sensibility in the novel’s conclusion. As Tony Tanner
has noted: "As in behavior, so in language, Marianne gives
an added dimension of warmth and vitality to the world of
the book and Jane Austen was well aware of it" (96). Where
Tanner and others struggle is in reconciling
Marianne’s sympathetic character with Austen’s
treatment of Marianne in the conclusion. I argue that this
struggle comes from a critical forgetting of Elinor, who is
alternately dismissed as an "overpowerful ideology that has
limited value and that therefore deserves deauthorization"
(Shaffer, 143), or as "the bearer of a more or less fully
developed historical and national consciousness" (Goodlad,
65). 19 See Tara
Ghoshal Wallace’s article, "Sense and
Sensibility and the Problem of Feminine Authority,"
for an interesting reading of Fanny, and other monstrous
women in Austen. Wallace suggests that Elinor is actually
aligned with authoritative figures like Fanny and Mrs.
Ferrars and is emblematic of Austen’s own authorial
anxieties. 20 Lauren
Goodlad argues: "Nevertheless, the greatest irony, as we
shall see, is that Austen’s resort to the logic of
Spivak’s ‘soul making’ project is less a
defense against Marianne’s emancipatory politics,
than against the increasing sway of Lucy’s bourgeois
epistemology" (76). Although Lucy’s desire to know
how much everything costs is clearly a dark echo of
Elinor’s attempts to economize, it is Lucy’s
corresponding over-management of her own sentimental
economy that the novel condemns. 21 Marilyn
Butler has argued that Austen’s use of "free indirect
speech" gives readers access to Elinor’s point of
view, rather than Marianne’s (190). Similarly, Stuart
Tave has claimed: "Sense and Sensibility is the
story of Elinor Dashwood. The action of the novel is hers;
it is not Marianne’s and it is not equally divided
between the sister’s; it is Elinor’s. The whole
of Marianne’s story is included within
Elinor’s: Marianne’s begins later and it ends
earlier"(96). However, both of these readings overlook the
ways in which Elinor’s narrative is packaged (so to
speak) for Marianne’s consumption. 22 Strangely,
despite consistent critical attention to and praise of
Austen’s use of language, critics have ignored this
exchange between Elinor and Marianne. For discussions of
Austen’s use of language, see Thompson, Tanner and
Kroeber. 23 Laura
Goodlad has interpreted Marianne’s status as
"mistress" as revealing "the potential complicities between
domestic and imperial dominions"(76). But in 1811, the year
of Sense and Sensibility’s publication, the
British Empire had just lost a colony (America), had
mistakenly supported the French Revolution, and was about
to enter the War of 1812. Rather than reading Marianne as
emblematic of an ascendent imperialism, therefore, I argue
that she is allied with an outdated feudal agrarian
culture. 24 See also
Janet Dean’s excellent article, "The Marriage Plot
and National Myth in The Pioneers," for a reading
of Elizabeth as contested property. 25
Additionally, Natty has trained Oliver to be both a good
shot and a conservationist. Elizabeth’s affection for
and debt to Natty ensures that they both will abandon the
"wasty ways" that had threatened the natural resources of
Templeton. 26 See, for
example, Joy Kasson: "Elizabeth Temple’s education
shines more brightly when she is contrasted with simple
Louisa Grant" (57); John Sheckter: "In The
Pioneers, references to ‘the delicacy of her
sex’ and ‘natural feminine timidity’
almost always occur in connection with the thoroughly
conventional Louisa Grant, to contrast her lack of
imagination and her cowardice with the energy and courage
of Elizabeth" (41); or Abby Werlock, for a similar
reading. 27 Critics
have been too quick to dismiss Louisa’s potential as
Bess’s rival, as I will argue later. 28 I use this
term advisedly. I do not mean to suggest that Louisa is
"better" than Bess — Louisa’s racism and
timidity are very unappealing qualities. Rather, I argue
that Bess’s class status is what enables her lack of
fear (for Louisa’s racism is really a sort of fear,
rather than a belief in the inferiority of the other). By
writing Louisa out of the novel, Cooper affirms class
hierarchies at the expense of any alternative system of
order, including both the religious hierarchy suggested at
times by Bess herself, Richard Jones, and Reverend Grant,
but also a similar secular hierarchy that would privilege
Louisa’s suffering as a mark of merit, rather than
Bess’s wealth. 29 That
Richard Jones is the chief advocate for the Episcopalian
faith illustrates that the church itself has little power
on its own. 30 Although
popular with the ladies, Monsieur Le Quoi is, admittedly,
no prize. However, Louisa is here presented with the choice
to be married; with Oliver she had no choice or
opportunity. 31
Natty’s journey westward may be thought of as
"progress," in opposition to Louisa’s return east,
which suggests a sort of regress towards England. However,
Natty’s age, his departure from the gravesite of
Mohegan John and Effingham, and the narrator’s claim
that "He had gone far towards the setting sun" all point to
a strange contradiction in Natty’s journey westward:
is he really "opening the way for the march of the nation
across the continent" (456)? Or do all of these images of
age and death gesture instead to a conclusion? Cooper seems
to suggest both simultaneously; as Natty himself remarks,
"Tis like the dead there, who thought, when the breath was
in them, that one went east and one went west, to find
their heavens; but they’ll meet at last; and so shall
we, children. --- Yes, end as you’ve begun, and we
shall meet in the land of the just, at last" (454). But it
is impossible for Bess and Oliver to "end" as they have
"begun," just as it is impossible for Natty to remain ahead
of the "march of the nation" in his journey west. Instead,
Natty and Louisa are each subsumed by the culture from
which they attempt to differentiate themselves. 32 We see
this same pattern rehearsed in Catharine Maria
Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, in which Esther
declines any future offers of marriage once her engagement
to Everell is broken off. |
