The Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics) - James Fenimore Cooper [13]
The requirements of Nature and of Civilization are evidently at odds, but Cooper has no way of resolving their respective claims. He seems simultaneously to affirm and to condemn the conquest of the American wilderness by transplanted Europeans. It is wrong for civilization to encroach too palpably upon the beauty and tranquility of nature, but white settlers must be free to build towns and to clear the forests. Natty, in The Deerslayer, has a feeling that there is a natural fitness of things, an order both in nature and in the social world that can be grasped and can help guide our actions. The idea is summed up well in a remark to Judith Hutter when they are in a canoe and she hears a fish jump or something stir in the water:
“Sartainly something did move the water, oncommon like; it must have been a fish. Them creatur’s prey upon each other like men and animals on the land; one has leaped into the air, and fallen back hard into his own element. ‘Tis of little use, Judith, for any to strive to get out of their elements, since it’s natur’ to stay in ’em; and natur’ will have its way” (p. 149).
Natty’s sense of the fitness of things rubs off on Judith and helps to shape her evolution from a vain young woman enamored with glitz and show to a serious and appealing figure. Indeed, Judith is perhaps Cooper’s most appealing female character; only Cora, in The Last of the Mohicans, has comparable vitality. We like Judith better as the novel progresses, and this capacity for growth makes her ultimate fate the more poignant. Tom Hutter’s other daughter, Hetty, is strikingly different from Judith. Judith is beautiful, dark-haired, and intelligent, while Hetty is a feeble-minded blond with plain good looks. But Hetty is a saintly figure; her belongings on a peg in the castle in chapter II evoke in Deerslayer a warm, repressed memory of his long dead mother. While Deerslayer appears in some ways as guileless and saintly as Hetty, there is a crucial difference: He can function in the world, in the woods if not in society, while she is as a child, helpless and dependent on others. Natty, furthermore, will prove himself as a warrior, a man who thrives on fighting. Hetty knows the Bible well, quotes from it freely and often, and weaves her way through the narrative delivering uncomfortable truths at awkward moments until she falls victim to a stray bullet in the climactic battle at the novel’s end.
Could Natty Bumppo have turned out to be something different, if only events had gone differently? No, neither history nor fiction allows for “might-have-beens.” Natty’s fate has been predetermined in the other Leatherstocking novels. However, in The Deerslayer the larger events seem more hazy, the personalities more in the foreground, the outcomes more contingent, and the play of circumstance and human will more the decisive factors. Cooper has achieved his greatest literary effects in this last of the series, and we can now with profit revisit the other stories in light of what we know of Deerslayer’s youth.
Natty’s notions of “elements” and the fitness of things do not, unfortunately, resolve fundamental issues for himself or for Judith. Natty was born of white parents but was raised by missionaries and spent much of his youth with the Delaware Indians. He may speak Indian dialects better than he does English (at least we can wonder whether he mangles the syntax and mispronounces words as frequently as he does in English). He works as a kind of contractor for the military Where, then, does he fit in the social pecking order? Judith, who has suffered from being considered the daughter of the reclusive ex-pirate Tom Hutter, but who turns out to be the illegitimate child of a senior British officer and an educated