Gendered Justice: The Deerslayer

Within this punitive tradition, James Fenimore Cooper's The Deer-slayer (1841) must stand as an exceptionally salient example. "We live in a world of transgressions," the novel concludes, "and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true," even though we do sometimes catch "gleamings of that pure spirit" among corrupt humanity, "mitigating if not excusing its crimes."^[47] "Crimes" are definitely a key issue in the novel, and if the fate of its chief criminal, Judith Hutter, is any indication, so too is punishment. For Judith is emphatically punished, emphatically rejected by Natty Bumppo, the man she shamelessly hankers for and shamefully fails to get. As Cooper's many authorial comments make clear, that punishment is not at all an after-thought, a mechanical contrivance, or a random occurrence, but the central burden of the novel. In the preface, he characterizes his heroine as one "filled with the pride of beauty, erring, and fallen." His hero, Natty Bumppo, on the other hand, is known "principally for his sincerity, his modesty, and his unerring truth and probity." Between the "erring" woman and the "unerring" man, one manifestly "fallen" and the other manifestly not, the outcome seems predictable enough. Here, "beauty, delirious passion, and sin" will all come to nought, and the retribution visited upon them, the author assures us, will "be sufficiently distinct to convey its moral" (v).

The unabashed presence of the word "sin" (and its conspicuous placement in the preface) gives a hint of the novel's punitive flavor. That hint is more than confirmed by the end of the book, as Cooper issues a clear verdict, a clear indictment of the Hutters and their "history of crime":

Time and circumstances have drawn an impenetrable mystery around all else connected with the Hutters. They lived, erred, died, and are forgotten. . . . The history of crime is ever revolting, and it is fortunate that few love to dwell on its incidents. The sins of the family have long since been arraigned at the judgment seat of God, or are registered for the terrible settlement of the last great day. (533)

With a semantic latitude strikingly reminiscent of colonial usage, Cooper puts on trial not only "crimes" but also "sins," as if the two were synonymous (throwing in, for good measure, the word "err," clearly a favorite of his and apparently to be equated with the others as well). The imprecision here is telling, and tellingly evocative of a punitive universe in which the boundaries between the moral and the legal, between "sin" and "crime," remain as yet undemarcated, as yet elastic and commingling. Crime is a hospitable category here. Within its precincts we find not a single individual (as Cooper's account of his "fallen" heroine might have led us to believe) but the Hutters as a unit, the whole family apparently qualifying for that label. Not just Thomas Hutter, a former pirate, but also his wife, a fallen woman like her daughter Judith, and not just Judith herself, but also her half-witted sister, Hetty—these four figures, otherwise quite different, nonetheless seem united in their joint culpability, in what Cooper generically calls "the sins of the family."

In what sense might the Hutters be understood as a culpable unit, as a family of sinners? Since it is their common guilt that the novel emphasizes, we might do well to ponder their crimes in generic terms. To be sure, Thomas Hutter was once a pirate, and his sins might have been crimes even in a legal sense; and Judith, a fallen woman, has of course sinned in the most time-honored fashion. Still, beyond these discrete categories of offense, something more encompassing and perhaps more deep-seated remains. Indeed, given the Hutters' kinship in crime (not to say kinship in punishment), we should perhaps be alert to a curious coincidence here between the kinds of "sins" the Hutters are said to have committed and the kind of family they represent: a coincidence between their profile as sinners and their profile as a familial unit.

What kind of family are the Hutters? Once we put the question that way, it becomes immediately clear that something is wrong not just with the Hutter family but with them as a family . This is a family that turns out not to be a family after all, as Thomas Hutter is revealed

to be quite a stranger to his putative daughters. Judith, one of those daughters, is overjoyed at this turn of events. "I scarce know by what name to call myself now!" she exclaims with some delight. "I am Judith, and Judith only, until the law gives me a right to another name. Never will I use that of Thomas Hutter again" (403). Judith's name and, by extension, her family are now matters of her own choosing. As she explains to Hetty: "You and you only are my sister . . . and Mother was my mother—of that, too, am I glad and proud, for she was a mother to be proud of—but Father was not father!" (361)

For Judith, the unfathering of Thomas Hutter brings only elation. Hetty, in contrast, is quite distressed. If fathers can stop being fathers—if one familial identity can dissolve so completely into thin air—what is there to prevent other identities from following suit? What is there to prevent sisters, for example, from being turned into total strangers?

"How do I know, Judith, that you wouldn't be as glad to find that I am not your sister as you are in finding that Thomas Hutter, as you call him, was not your father? I am only half-witted, and few people like to have half-witted relations; and then I'm not handsome—at least, not as handsome as you—and you may wish a handsomer sister." (361)

Hetty's worries here are local and personal, but they give voice as well to a more general anxiety, general to the modern form of life, with its emphasis on elective identities and voluntary attachments. Based not on inherited lineage but on individual choice, not on blood but on "wishes," this modern form of life challenges the very taxonomy of the traditional order, its grounds for classification as well as for association. In the Hutter family that ceases to be a family, we see, dramatized in caricature, the historical shift from parental control to filial autonomy, from a classical world of organic kinship to a liberal society of self-making.^[48] What Cooper collectively condemns in the Hutters—what he denounces as the "sins of the family"—might also be understood, then, as their sin against the sanctity of hereditary estates, which is also to say, their sin against an ascriptive social order.

Sins of this sort do not go unpunished, and, in this case, the wages of sin suitably mirror the sins themselves. Having disowned one parent, however undesirable, and repudiated one identity, however in authentic, Judith is now in danger of being left with no father at

all and no identity to speak of. Nor is she unforewarned. Her lack of filial regard has shocked even Hurry Harry, the most mindless of characters, into a kind of blind prophecy: "Not Thomas Hutter's darter! Don't disown the old fellow in his last moments, Judith, for that's a sin the Lord will never overlook. If you're not Thomas Hutter's darter, whose darter be you?" (349).

The question is ominously put. And lest we miss the point, Cooper hastens to tell us, even more ominously, that "in getting rid of a parent whom she felt it was a relief to find she might own she had never loved, [Judith] overlooked the important circumstance that no substitute was ready to supply his place" (349–350). One might point out, of course, that it is not really Judith's fault not to have found a substitute for Thomas Hutter; she certainly tries hard enough. Her mother has made it impossible for her, having made sure that "all the dates, signatures, and addresses had been cut from the letters. . . . Thus Judith found all her hopes of ascertaining who her parents were defeated" (400).

But the mother has "defeated" the daughter in a less tangible way as well. Judith's problem, after all, is not so much that she has failed to find a father as that she has never had one she can claim . Her problem is not unverifiable genealogy but all too verifiable bastardy. Still, this handicap notwithstanding, it is not inconceivable that Judith could have found a substitute for Hutter, not by discovering a true father but by acquiring a true husband, who, in giving her his name, would have bestowed upon her what her own father had withheld. But, as we know, this "substitute" too is not Judith's to have. In the last paragraph of the book, we are treated to a curious bit of rumor about Sir Robert Warley, Judith's paramour: that he now "lived on his paternal estates and that there was a lady of rare beauty in the lodge who had great influence over him, though she did not bear his name" (534).

Judith's crime is the crime of anonymity, we might say. She is the leading offender, but she is not alone. Indeed, her crime is such that we can safely assume a host of accomplices and a host of precursors. The illegitimate daughter of one man, Judith will in time become the illegitimate consort of another man. She is the daughter of a sinning mother, and she will grow up to sin in exactly the same fashion. Sin here is generic and periodic, a family romance, a phenomenon hereditary and repeatable. Such a criminal sequence rests on a kind of gener-

ational fungibility, equating father and husband, givers of names who withhold what they have to give, and mother and daughter, bearers of names who fail to receive what they are obligated to bear. It is surely appropriate (if not downright heavy-handed) that Judith should be named after her mother: she is a second Judith, a replication of the first.

Judith's sin, then, is neither local nor unique. It is exemplary and synecdochic, it beckons backward and outward, compounding and compressing into its orbit the sins of others. Nor is the transgression here purely sexual, however convenient a label that might afford. Indeed, just as Judith might be said to stand in for a family of sinners, so her misdeed would also seem to encompass a spectrum of the reprehensible. No longer a maiden but not yet a wife, she has forfeited not just a proper sexual identity but any identity at all. And as the novel administers to her a suitable dose of punishment, it also chastises, through her example, a cluster of offenses having generally to do with the problem of identity: not just the misadventures of the sexual persona but also the vicissitudes of the social persona, not just deviation from sexual purity but also ambition in social mobility.