Imagining the U.S. as a Pacific Island: A Reading of James Fenimore Cooper's The Crater

     This paper takes the national allegory in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Crater literally. Rather than focusing on how the novel relates to Cooper’s abstract political commentary on democracy in antebellum America or... [ view full abstract ]

     This paper takes the national allegory in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Crater literally. Rather than focusing on how the novel relates to Cooper’s abstract political commentary on democracy in antebellum America or how Cooper refashions the popular “Robinson Crusoe” tale, I consider how this novel is a re-imagining of the origins and trajectory of the U.S. in a Pacific climate. Such a hermeneutic gambit inverts many national assumptions: the island (or the archipelago) takes precedent over the continent; the sea rather than land becomes the principle arena for commerce; a maritime frontier replaces a continental one; and China and Pacific island communities replace European nations as primary trade partners. The Crater creates the imaginative space for readers to consider how such oppositions create alternative ways of understanding national and global history in the first half of the nineteenth-century.

     My reading, part of a larger project on antebellum authors and popular representations of the Pacific, will continue to draw insights by intersecting American Studies with Pacific Studies and Archipelagic Studies. Such a lens particularly illuminates Cooper’s paradoxical ideas on “the spirit of trade” in The Crater. Although Mark Woolston supposedly disparages fashionable notions of trade’s ability to enlighten “savages” and bring progress, he founds his colony on schemes of incorporating emigrants from the continent and islanders in his Pacific colony and binding them together by fostering recognition of their “natural” economic and political roles. The Pacific setting confronts the hypocrisy of national logic, as Woolston paves a global path for capitalism.