In American Incarnation, Myra Jehlen gives an instructive account of the significance of the land for the American national consciousness. American ideology, she points out, is informed by a belief in natural law, which was reinforced in America because the very presence of (presumably) empty land, a vast continent stretching from ocean to ocean, made “Americans [see] themselves as building their civilization out of nature itself, as neither the analogue nor the translation of Natural Law but its direct expression.”1As a consequence, since God created Nature and Nature was embodied in America, Americans came to regard their country as the perfection of human society, a belief which in turn affected the American attitude towards other societies. Jehlen writes, “By comparison . . . , the histories of most other nations seem to have just grown, first prehistorically over indistinct and indefinite lapses of time before time, then through multiple incomplete versions whose coherence and meaning are produced afterward, by retrospective interpretations.”2This perspective is precisely what we find in James Fenimore Cooper’s European novels—The Heidenmauer (1832), The Bravo (1831), and The Headsman (1833)—which are “retrospective interpretations” of events occurring in three “incomplete” Old World societies. The three romances are grounded in Lockean concepts of natural law and natural right, and reflect their author’s attempt at participating through his narratives in the shaping of an emerging national consciousness.
Like the Leatherstocking tales and the Littlepage trilogy, Cooper’s European novels constitute a chronological sequence, giving us snapshots of crucial moments in the historical development of three Old World societies. The defects of these societies, i.e., their unnatural features, lead to various kinds of societal ills, or abuses of nature. The Heidenmauer depicts Reformation-torn Germany in the early sixteenth century; a Bavarian count seizes the moment of a power vacuum and, supported by a mayor, uses military force to get rid of a Benedictine abbey. The Bravo concerns the ordeal of several characters of different social provenance in early eighteenth-century Venice, which is threatened by external and internal foes and protected by a totalitarian political apparatus. The Headsman describes an episode in the (relatively) enlightened, tolerant, and peaceful Switzerland of the early eighteenth century; the happiness of a motley group of people is endangered by the tradition of hereditary law.
Implying in all three romances that America is in tune with nature, Cooper presents Europe as a place of religious, political, and juridical conflicts that violate natural law and the natural rights of human beings. Further, the abuse of nature—rendered in the fictions as the abuse of God, family, and individual—does not happen without consequence. The immoral behavior of the Benedictine monks leads to their violent removal; the Venetian policy results in the destruction of families, a fact that, in the long run, will destroy the republic itself; and Swiss hereditary law endangers the happiness of the individual and ipso facto that of society in general. As Leo Strauss puts it, “There is . . . a kind of sanction for the law of nature in this world: the disregard of the law of nature leads to public misery and penury.”3Hence the disorder and suffering in the societies which Cooper describes; hence, too, the novels’ virtuous characters, who resist the harm inflicted upon nature: Father Arnolph, Ulricke, and Odo von Ritterstein; the Bravo, Antonio, Gelsomina, and Father Anselmo; and, finally, Sigismund. Inevitably, nature holds court over the abuse it suffers (as God holds court over evil), which means in historical terms that the abusive systems of Europe are eventually supplanted by the positive model of America. In short, Cooper’s European novels are allegories of nature’s workings in the historical world, closed ideological spaces conveying what American readers either unconsciously already know or (through early national literature like Cooper’s) ought to be made aware of: that America is the telos of the historical process.
Yet, though he draws on his own knowledge of and experiences with the countries of the Old World, Cooper does not fully succeed in presenting to his readers the injustices of the undemocratic political systems of Europe and the superiority of America as the model nation. He tries to have America emerge from the fictions, through indirect contrast and comparison, as what a nation can and should be, but he merely accomplishes an ideologically distorted, propagandistic depiction of European societies. This weakness arises from one of the major problems frequently haunting Cooper: his difficulty in reconciling writing historical romances with writing political tracts, being a historian with being an expert in politics. This problem is manifest in the European romances in their machinery of ideological persuasion.
Apart from Cooper’s direct authorial intrusions, which are only the most visible of his strategies of manipulation, his crafting of character and plot in the three romances also contributes in a subtle manner to his goal of influencing the ideology of his readers. Here, however, Cooper trips and falls in the web of historical text and ideological subtext; he can depict European history at three of its crossroads only by employing European characters who surprise the reader with their typically American attitudes and ideas. Cooper wants to show that human society naturally tends toward the American model, whose cultural DNA must therefore already be present in the Old World societies he describes. Making the Old World appear as the seedbed of the New, Europe as America in statu nascendi, Cooper creates characters who, fulfilling their function as purveyors of an American ideology, compromise his obligations vis-à-vis history; in other words, bolstering the national consciousness of America’s role as the natural destiny of the world comes only at the price of tampering with Europe’s past.
The Heidenmauer depicts the power struggle between castle, town, and abbey, the three dominant factions in a province of early-Reformation Bavaria, which are represented by their respective leaders: Emich of Leiningen, the Count of Hartenburg; Heinrich Frey, the burgomaster of Duerckheim; and Father Bonifacius, the Abbot of Limburg. By turning Protestant and by ridding itself of an illegitimate elite, the Bavarian community follows an essentially American path of individualization and democratization—a parallel development of America and Europe also emphasized when Cooper likens the southern German locale to American environments.4The German Reformation is, in Cooper’s view, a variation on the American Revolution, another instance of “an entire people awakening, as it were, by magic, to the virtues of a new set of maxims.” At the climactic moment of the romance, Emich and Heinrich, with four hundred soldiers, destroy the abbey and drive away the monks, whose levying of taxes and worldly, immoral behavior have been a burden on the region. Thus aristocracy and bourgeoisie defeat the clergy; and thus the Reformation weakens the Catholic Church and paves the way for secularized society. Cooper justifies the raid on the abbey by pointing out that, “Happily, this is an age in which no sophistry can long escape unscathed, nor any injury to natural justice go long unrequited.” The burning and leveling of the building and particularly the destruction of the confessionals, described in the narrative as “attacking the enemy in his citadel,” are presented as the natural, inevitable course of history.
The American nature of the events taking place in Germany is nowhere more obvious than in Cooper’s choice of characters. The members of the higher classes are either, like Emich, already converted Protestants or, like Father Arnolph and Ulricke, Catholics surprisingly tolerant of the heretic Luther. Odo von Ritterstein is a special case; though now a repentant Catholic, he was in his youth a small version of Luther, trying to achieve some sort of church reform. More important, however, are the members of the lower class, Berchthold and Gottlob, with whom the romance begins and ends, for both are veritable Yankees in disguise. Rejecting Catholicism, Berchthold’s ideology goes beyond purely religious convictions and embraces a secular faith worthy of a Ralph Waldo Emerson or a Henry David Thoreau: “‘I am myself a miracle, that tells me every moment of the existence of a superior power; and in that much I bend to its control. But it hath never been my fortune to hear an image speak, or see it do aught else that belongs to the will.’” Gottlob, though less prone to entertain notions of the “infinitude of the private man,” also betrays an American frame of mind, not only because of his irreverent attitude toward the monks, but because of his egalitarianism: “‘There is a moon for a monk as well as for a cow-herd, it would seem, . . . we vassals are little more than so much clear water in which our master may see his own countenance, and at need his own humors.’” Yet to Berchthold and Gottlob belongs the future. The former will inherit Odo von Ritterstein’s riches and marry Meta, the mayor’s daughter; and the latter will wed Gisela, Count Emich’s servant. In short, the common men—Protestant in religion, republican in politics, and revolutionary in spirit—rise to eminence and, together with their wives, will be fruitful and multiply; Bavaria will emulate the thirteen founding states of America.