Equality Republican and Liberal

Judith's search for a proper name is not just a search for legitimacy in marriage—a search conducted under the auspices of sexual propriety—but also a search for a proper place in the social hierarchy, a search conducted, surprisingly, under the auspices of marital equality. Equality is the ideal invoked here, invoked as the basis for conjugality. Nor is Cooper alone in this particular, for, as Jan Lewis points out, the ideal of a "symmetrical marriage"—a marriage of equal partners—was an integral feature of classical republicanism, widespread

in the early republic.^[61] More recently, Rosemarie Zagarri has traced this republican ideal to the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment (although, as she also points out, the espousal of such an ideal, with its emphasis on marital equality, also "effectively negated the possibility of political equality").^[62] In any case, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, marital equality was a subject weighty enough to be discussed by the likes of John Witherspoon, president of Princeton. A frequent contributor to Ladies Magazine and Pennsylvania Magazine (edited by Tom Paine), Witherspoon counseled that "a parity of understanding and temper [is] as necessary towards forming a good marriage, as an equality of years, rank, and fortune."^[63] Numerous other magazine articles offered the same advice. It is not surprising, then, that in The Deerslayer inequality should be held up as the principal obstacle to a proposed marriage. In fact, on those grounds Natty is moved to reject not one but two such unacceptable proposals: not just an "onequal match" with Judith but another match, also unequal, with Sumac, widow of the recently killed Le Loup Cervier, who demands marriage even more vehemently. But, as Hetty observes, "Sumac is old and you are young," and, as Natty himself observes, "she's red and I'm white." Such a flagrant violation of equality makes death "more nat'ral like, and welcome, than wedlock with this woman" (473).

Equality, invoked as a marital ideal, foregrounds race as the ground of incommensurability.^[64] It also foregrounds class. The social rankings of the marriage partners are very much at issue here, for paradoxically it is only by settling the question of rank—only by fixing upon one particular class to which both partners belong—that the marriage can be deemed equal. To give the paradox an even sharper edge, we might say that the ideal of marital equality proceeds from the fact of social hierarchy. It does not so much eliminate the concept of social station as accentuate it. Equality is a sorting principle here—it matches like with like—and, as such, it sets the protocol not only for gender relations but also for social distinctions. It is in this context, in the convergence of gender and class under the norm of equality, that proper names would come to figure so largely in the novel: they figure, above all, as signs, signs of something gone awry and of an ensuing sequence of retribution. Judith's lack of a name, her desire for one and her failure to get one, thus compresses into a single detail the punitive weight of two semantic fields, gender and class, joining

both to a common purpose, mapping the lineaments of one onto the countenance of the other. That twofold verdict brings to the novel something like a twofold severity, a passion for justice redoubled in strength, and redoubled in its operative radius.

Nor is this punitive fervor at work only in the name Bumppo. Judith is deemed unequal to, and therefore unworthy of, another name as well. Captain Warley, the owner of that other name, makes it clear why that is so. She is "a lovely creature, this Judith Hutter," he concedes, but, he hastens to add, "I do suppose there are women in the colonies that a captain of light infantry need not disdain, but they are not to be found up here on a mountain lake" (511). The dalliance between Judith and Warley is glaringly, scandalously an "association between superior and inferior" (151), which is why the name "Judith Warley" is also glaringly, scandalously unimaginable in The Deerslayer . Unlike the other two names, "Judith March" and "Judith Bumppo," names tantalizingly held up for our appraisal, this one is not even allowed to materialize on the page.

Still, Judith is by no means an uncouth or ill-favored person vainly aspiring to a social station that is manifestly beyond her. If she is indeed an "inferior," as we are told, that inferiority is not at all self-evident. Quite the contrary. Judith is fastidious, overly fastidious, both in appearance and demeanor. "Her language [is] superior to that used by her male companions, her own father included." It displays no "mean intonation of voice, or a vulgar use of words." Indeed, "the officers of the nearest garrison [had] often flattered [her] with the belief that few ladies of the towns acquitted themselves better than herself in this important particular" (134–135). Judith's refined speech is an enviable asset, a sign, one would have thought, of her social elevation. After all, in The American Democrat (1838), Cooper had suggested that "a just, clear and simple expression of our ideas is a necessary accomplishment for all who aspire to be classed with gentlemen and ladies."^[65] Judith's problem (an unforgivable one for Cooper, it appears) is that she talks like one of the "gentlemen and ladies" when she is in fact not one of them. She is an inferior who commands a superior manner of speech, a sign that deceives the beholder, signifying status and refinement where it ought to have signified ignorance and backwardness.

As a delinquent sign, one far in excess of its referent, Judith might

be said to have transgressed against the very idea of the commensurate. This crime makes her equal to no one, least of all herself. She is both above and beneath any given identity, both superior and inferior, a predicament which, under a regime of marital equality, must also make her sadly unmatchable. It is tempting here to describe her in the idiom of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner: she is a "liminal" character, caught "betwixt and between all the recognized fixed points . . . of structural classification," someone who is "neither one thing nor another," "neither here nor there," "at once no longer classified and not yet classified."^[66] The vocabulary of liminality almost describes Judith, but in one crucial respect it does not, and it is instructive to see why. The liminal person for van Gennep and Turner is not so much a deviant as a truant, a figure caught in transit, as it were, between normative states, but whose progress is such as to ensure an eventual restitution of the boundaries he or she momentarily ruptures. Judith's truancy has no such terminal limit, and no such teleological guarantee. She will always remain "betwixt and between," always "no longer classified and not yet classified."

Judith is not a liminal person; she cannot be one, because there is no final resting place for her, no stable identity into which she might be inducted, no encompassing "structure that defines status and establishes social distance."^[67] To say this is also to say that there is a world of difference between the society Judith inhabits and the stable tribal society described by van Gennep and Turner. Indeed, we might even say that what van Gennep and Turner take to be a structural aberration is in her world the norm. And so, the problem of equality—the problem of being commensurate, either with oneself or with someone else—turns out to afflict not just Judith but virtually everyone in the book. Pervading The Deerslayer , indeed, is something like a thematization of that problem, a thematization that gathers force as each character subjects everyone else to yet another ranking, putting this person above or beneath that person, trying to ascertain who is equal to whom. And since the verdict changes from moment to moment and indeed from judge to judge, its sentencing power resides not so much in its finality as in its endless reversals.

A brief conversation between Hutter and Hetty, for example, illustrates just how severe the problem of equality is and how intimately it structures every person's sense of self as well as sense of others:

"You're by no means ugly, though not so comely as Jude."

"Is Judith any happier for being so handsome?"

"She may be, child, and she may not be. But talk of other matters, now, for you hardly understand these, poor Hetty. How do you like our new acquaintance, Deerslayer?"

"He isn't handsome, Father. Hurry is far handsomer than Deerslayer." (83)

In the space of a few lines, two different sets of people have been brought forward to be ranked, and two different sets of criteria have been invoked to facilitate that ranking. High marks in the department of beauty by no means translate into high marks in the department of happiness; this much even Hutter concedes. This drawback, however, does not prevent either term from generating an evaluative frenzy of its own. "Not as comely," "happier," "far handsomer"—these distinctions are all the more insistent for being incommensurable. Hutter, for example, offers beauty as the standard of judgment, which puts Judith considerably ahead of Hetty. Hetty, however, counters with a different standard—happiness—and on that count Judith does not fare quite so well. And yet, when Hetty herself proceeds to rank Hurry Harry and Natty, she abandons happiness as a criterion and returns to the earlier term, beauty, in order to pronounce Hurry the better of the two.

Social identities in The Deerslayer are judged by a profusion of terms, which, unfortunately, make ranking not easier but shakier. To return to the vexed question, for example, about the relative standing of Judith and Natty, how is one to decide? Natty, of course, has announced that Judith is "altogether above" him, but things are actually not so clear. Judith herself, for instance, far from agreeing with him, fancies herself quite his inferior. "But we are not altogether unequal, sister—Deerslayer and I?" she asks Hetty. "He is not altogether my superior?" Equality—between herself and Natty—is a burning question for Judith, and, working herself into a mania, she will go on to ask that question three more times in the course of the same conversation. "Why do you think me the equal of Deerslayer?" she asks Hetty again. And then again, "Tell me what raises me to an equality with Deerslayer." And finally, not satisfied with Hetty's answer, she asks yet again, "But I fear you flatter me, Hetty, when you think I can be justly called the equal of a man like Deerslayer. It is true, I have been better taught; in one sense am more comely; and

perhaps might look higher; but then his truth—his truth—makes a fearful difference between us!" (302).

Judith is comically obsessed here, but in a way she is simply doing to herself (and to Natty) what everybody else has been doing throughout the book. She is ranking the two of them, and doing so through a profusion of terms—"better taught," "more comely," "look higher"—as intransigent as they are incommensurable. And the effect, once again, is to multiply the instances of inequality, making it more flagrant, more entrenched. As far as Judith is concerned, for example, literacy and good looks carry some weight, but "truth" carries infinitely more, so much more that it tips the balance altogether. Hetty, of course, disagrees. She is flabbergasted, in fact, that her sister would even entertain the thought of not being equal to Deerslayer. "To think of you asking me this, Judith!" she exclaims:

"Superior, Judith!" she repeated with pride. "In what can Deerslayer be your superior? Are you not Mother's child—and does he know how to read—and wasn't Mother before any woman in all this part of the world? I should think, so far from supposing himself your superior, he would hardly believe himself mine . You are handsome, and he is ugly—"

"No, not ugly, Hetty," interrupted Judith. "Only plain. But his honest face has a look in it that is far better than beauty. In my eyes Deerslayer is handsomer than Hurry Harry."

"Judith Hutter, you frighten me! Hurry is the handsomest mortal in the world—even handsomer than you are yourself." (301)

Who is equal to whom? The question obsesses everyone, but Natty, Judith, and Hetty all seem to have different answers. With breakneck speed, the terms for comparison shift and the partners for comparison multiply. It is not just Judith and Deerslayer who are being ranked now, but also Hurry and Deerslayer, and then Judith and Hurry. One thing is clear, though, in this pandemonium: with each fresh ranking, it becomes less and less likely that those ranked will ever be found "equal" to one another. Here then, dramatized and perhaps ironized, is something of a cultural crisis—something like a crisis of equality—in which personal identities, evaluative norms, and social distinctions are all endlessly fluctuating, endlessly in transit. What is liminal, it would seem, is not so much one particular individual as the entire social structure.^[68]

The "liminality" of nineteenth-century America is a commonplace

among historians, of course.^[69] Here, I want to associate it more specifically with a moment of transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, from the highly rationalized political culture of classical republicanism to the increasingly unrationalizable political culture of modern liberalism. Such a transition, I argue, put a new premium on the idea of equality, giving it a strongly individualistic accent, and, in thus wrenching it from the fabric of republican thought, also transformed the concept, bending it out of recognition and perhaps out of its original coherence.

Gordon Wood has described this transition, in a celebrated phrase, as "the end of classical politics." "The eighteenth century had sought to understand politics," Wood writes, by appealing to "a graduated organic chain in the social hierarchy."^[70] Classical republicanism celebrated hierarchy—not as the distinguishing mark among individuals, but as the operative condition for a civic order. For as J. G. A. Pocock points out, a healthy polity could come about only with organic gradations, only with a "naturally differentiated people" "performing complementary roles and practicing complementary virtues."^[71] Complementarity was the operative tenet of a republican order, and, to the extent that complementarity meant the joint workings of un equal subjects, inequality was not at all a problem here. It was not a problem because it could be rationalized by politics, rationalized by republican institutions, so that rather than sowing the seeds of discord, it instead furnished the structural grounds for civic participation. For as Pocock also points out, classical republicanism did not presuppose a general equality among its citizens; it only legislated a specific political equality, "an equal subjection to the res publica ." The political sphere, in other words, was the unifying ground, the ground of commensurability for citizens unequal in every other respect, for even "though by any standard but one, the shares accorded each were commensurate but unequal, there was a criterion of equality (in ruling and being ruled) whereby each remained the other's equal."^[72] To simplify Pocock's complicated argument (and bedeviling prose), we might say that in classical republicanism, equality was defined as an effect of the polity—an effect of its rational order—and in that sense was both independent of and emendatory to the actual existential condition of its citizens. "Commensurate but unequal" was not at all oxymoronic in this world, for commensurability, understood as an

institutional edict, could stand, in its very institutionality, as the rational ground subsuming and absorbing the brute fact of unequal distribution.