3 - Negotiating a Place in the Patriarchy: Literary Style and the Transfer of Power

Summary

For writers, stylistic experimentation leading to a distinct and authentic voice is in some way the professional equivalent of an earlier passage into adulthood. In Cooper's case that equivalence becomes particularly clear in The Pioneers; not only are Cooper's shifting stylistic strategies unusually distinct and the line of development more boldly charted, but the experiments in tone and point of view focus on the fictional portrayal of his own father. In A World Elsewhere, Richard Poirier defines a distinctive American style more intent on displacing existing environments than on negotiating with them or criticizing them. Although The Pioneers is threaded with defiance, its style achieves the power to release Cooper and his readers into a world of his own making, not so much by turning its back on his father's frontier world as by a strategy for subsuming the father's power into the son's art (Poirier 3–16). In the course of The Pioneers, Cooper's style negotiates a series of different relationships between the narrator, the reader, and Judge Temple. In Cooper's shift from the descriptive impulse, motivated by his longing for the Cooperstown of his youth, to the masterful symbolic drama of the central scenes, we can trace a two-step progression as his interest in establishing a point of view independent of his father unfolds into a full-scale assumption of authority in his own right.

Cooper's reliance on writing as a way of negotiating his relationship to authority antedates his sudden decision to become a novelist.