The killer shepherds: hunters as pastoral figures in the Early National period
This dissertation explores the role of the backwoods hunter in American literature and culture during the Early National period, especially as it was embodied by Daniel Boone and by James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo. I use these figures to examine how popular perceptions of the sustenance hunter underwent significant transformation after the Revolutionary period, and how Boone and Bumppo came to exemplify American attitudes about nature, individualism, and western expansion. In exploring the evolution of perceptions about the hunter, I argue that this f igure came to function as the shepherd in a new conception of the pastoral mode. My argument involves an original framework of the pastoral that I construct by integrating theories presented by William Empson and Paul Alpers in their landmark works Some Versions of Pastoral and What Is Pastoral?, respectively. This framework asserts that works in the pastoral mode are characterized not by the presence of an idyllic setting, but instead by the centrality of a shepherd or shepherd-equivalent who is of a lesser social status than the pastoral author and the intended audience, but who possesses an innate dignity and moral sensibility that allows him to serve as a representative of a culture’s aspirations. My framework is further influenced by the work of Leo Marx, in arguing that the pastoral in North America invokes a literal rather than metaphorical understanding of the “middle landscape,” i.e. the physical location that allows a pastoral shepherd to fulfill his representative function. Incorporating Marx’s analyses in his seminal book Machine in the Garden, I also propose that the North American pastoral differs from the European version in identifying a more specific representative function for its protagonists; whereas the Empsonian pastoral operation involves a shepherd whom its author uses to portray model behavior in a general sense, the American hunter-shepherd of this period depicts the ideal way of interacting with the natural world in particular. As such, I also explore how Daniel Boone and Natty Bumppo laid a foundation for future considerations and behaviors related to western expansion, environmental degradation, and interaction with Indigenous people.
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