Ship of state: American identity and maritime nationalism in the sea fiction of James Fenimore Cooper

In his introduction to Nation and Narration, Homi K. Bhabha writes that, “nations, like narrative, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind's eye.” In other words, in order to grasp what is meant by “the nation,” one must look beyond things like geography, population, language, and race and come to grips with the notion that it is something less tangible, less recognizable, and more ephemeral. It is this concept of a nation as a social construct and ever-changing appropriation of the past that seems to me to be one of the more striking features of the literature of the United States in the early decades of the Republic.; Most often when the development of American sea fiction is discussed, it is Melville who comes to mind or perhaps Richard Henry Dana. The origins of American sea fiction, however, preceded, by many years, the work of these two writers. It was, however, in 1823, with the publication of Cooper's The Pilot that we can identify the American sea novel as we now know it. If Cooper had written nothing but his eleven tales of the sea, he still would have been a major figure in American literature, for with these works he shaped a special genre. Melville and Conrad both credited Cooper with being the father of the genre and acknowledged their indebtedness to him. Cooper viewed the sea as a distinct region with a culture of its own and in the people who made their livelihood from it he placed his hopes for this country's future. In Notions of the Americans, Cooper defines America as a sea-faring nation. Even more strongly than in his land novels, Cooper's sea novels establish a distinctly American identity. In them he creates a range of characters, both real and fictional, that include representatives from all social classes and who are portrayed with a veracity that is unequaled in his other work. This dissertation will examine the relationship between Cooper's maritime characters and his concept of America and discuss how understanding his thoughts on issues of government and culture during the course of his career that may assist us in defining what represents, for Cooper, the American identity.