the divine. In this equation, the wilderness was a place where man would feel closest to
God. Instead, in the wilderness Tocqueville felt as if “the Creator had turned his face
away.”
Second, Tocqueville had long harbored romantic and manly notions about what it
means to be a Man alone in Nature. As a young man, he attached romanticized notions
of the American wilderness in the works like James Fenimore Cooper’s. And, more
personally, Tocqueville had spent years listening to his uncle, the famous Chateaubriand,
recount scenes of his tromp through the American wilds. In those tales, filled with
“magnificent specimens of savage manhood,” dancing flute-playing braves who valiantly
cared for their civilized European friends, “harkee-harkee” deerslayers, and so on, the
forests and wilds of America were a seductive and noble and grand place, extending their
mystery and magnificence to the brave aristocratic traveler.
“I was full of memories of M. de Chateaubriand and of Cooper,” Tocqueville
“I was imagining something quite different.”
For what Tocqueville felt
himself, alone in the wilderness, was not a jolt of masculine power but rather a sense of
human impotence. The moment in the wilderness when he was separated from
Beaumont, shortly before Tocqueville articulated a feeling of “religious terror,” is one of
the most tortured passages in the Frenchman’s corpus. For Tocqueville, being alone and
at one with nature did not ennoble; it enervated.
Moreover, in this time and place where some of Tocqueville’s basic convictions
19
Pierson 195.
20
Most scholars, such as J.P. Mayer, have taken that to mean that Tocqueville read James Fenimore Cooper
(Tocqueville, “A Fortnight in the Wilds” 351 n.2). Pierson argues that it was more likely that Tocqueville
meant Thomas Cooper’s Reneseignments sur l’Amérique, translated into French from his well-known Some
Information Respecting Americans (37). Since Pierson is an authority on all things Tocqueville, it is worth
mentioning that this dispute exists. However, Beaumont’s letters home specifically mention The Last of
the Mohicans. “Here I am now, penetrating into the west. You will probably not find Utica on the map,”
he wrote. “It’s on the banks of the Mohawks [sic] that Cooper places The Last of the Mohicans.”
Puzzlingly, this comment of Beaumont’s appears in Pierson’s own book (191). I am firmly of the belief,
then, that despite Pierson’s assertion, the Cooper that Tocqueville read was James Fenimore.
21
Tocqueville, “A Fortnight in the Wilds,” 351; 356.
9
Convention