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Old November 28th, 2012 #6
Alex Linder
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Neat as Cooper's solution to the problem of American acquisitiveness might seem, his transcendent Yankee represented no real solution to America's social problem. The first commitment of the gentlemen, Cooper suggests, is to the society of gentlemen; the transcendent Yankee like Harvey remains and must remain outside of society. As Harvey's dying father had told him, he must be "a Pilgrim through life. The bruised reed may endure, but it will never rise." ...

The romance by convention begins and ends in the everyday world of organized society. In a certain kind of romance the central figure sets out from society, has his adventure and returns to the everyday world at the end. The adventure is measured against the values of society, seen in relation to them. No matter how far afield the romancer may take his hero, whether he is made to move from Nantucket to the South Seas or from a nineteenth-century customhouse to the Puritan past, the action of romance begins and terminates in the familiar social world where the gentleman has his place. Cooper's various gentlemen, like Mr. Harper, Mr. Wharton and Judge Temple, stand for a kind of social order the romancer could not dispense with. They stand for the fixed values of an older culture with which Cooper and other romancers wished to remain in touch. They stood for Europe and continuity with the past.

In a sense, only the gentlemen believed in society, and only Harvey believed in America. Yet you could not make up a society of Birches and Bumppos, because their very function in fiction was to interpret wilderness to civilization, novelty to tradition. Once removed from their mediating lookout on the periphery of civilization, they become comic boors, a source of comedy. Besides, they are far too acquisitive and predatory, appearances to the contrary, that they end in having no aggressions at all. They seldom marry or make love. They are incapable of reproducing themselves, because they are sexless and sterile.

This, of course, was the ideal, the ideal that a Yankee nation wanted, in fact needed, to believe in - and to convince others to believe in. This was the transcendent Yankee who chased the White Whale of the sea or the White Stallion of the plains - it hardly mattered which - while his alter ego, alas, turned sperm oil into bullion, and rich Indian lands into prosperous real estate holdings, and shipped ice from Walden to the Ganges.

The real Yankee, whose appearance only is given to Harvey Birch, is an unpleasant type: hypocrite, chiseler, fiend. He rarely shows his undisguised face in good company. He is an outcast of sort, an Ishmael, whose grasping hand is turned against everyone. If the transcendent Yankee is kept in the woods or at sea, the real Yankee is kept in the cellar or locked in the woodshed like an idiot kinsmen. He is always apt to break out.

His footfalls haunt the family household like an ancestral ghost. Occasionally he does break out. When he does, the American family is his target of destruction, as Americans were to learn with shocked surprise when they encountered Simon Legree from Vermont. Meanwhile, all ingenuity is devoted to barring the door against his threatened irruptions. He is to the benign, transcendent Yankee what the fire-eater is to the selfless gentleman, the Lawton to the Dunwoodie, the Randolph to the Washington.

Between the transcendent Yankee and his hellish twin lay a whole spectrum of motivation. The transcendent Yankee only seemed to be self interested and acquisitive. Like Harvey Birch, he had to be acquisitive in order to "pass" in American society. He had to remain above suspicion, and to create an air of vraiseblance. The admirable quality about the transcendent Yankee was his real aloofness from the competitive swirl. He believed neither in success or progress. Rather than go up, he preferred to go out, to go back. Like Thoreau at Walden, he cultivated the primitive. By reducing his material needs to a minimum, he could attain a degree of self sufficiency which provided him a fresh perspective on an acquisitive society. He could be as the gentlemen only pretended to be: disinterested.

Harvey, whose virtues remain undisguised, sets the pattern for a familiar type of American hero, the man whose motives are cloaked by a mask of toughness and practicality, the man who seems so much less selfish, so much more generous, than he seems. The real Yankee, the man who values the dollar above everything else, has provided us with our most legendary villains. These are men who do not bother to conceal their depredations behind a front of virtue and genteel honor. Both were types of the Yankee, because they were both defined by their relation to money. Both types fascinated Americans because the problem of acquisitiveness bulked so large in American consciousness. ...

http://vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=148179&page=80