英雄的医療時代の不機嫌なロマンス作家――ジェイムズ・フェニモア・クーパーとアンテベラム期の医療言説

抄録

The consensus among literary historians is that the eruption of yellow fever in 1789 Philadelphia significantly influenced the authorship formation of Charles Brockden Brown, “the father of the American novel.” In contrast, no critical attempt has been made to assess the role such epidemics played in the career of James Fenimore Cooper, who presumably might have contracted the fever during the 1822 outbreak in New York. The epidemic, both as setting and plot-device, is virtually absent on the surface texture of Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales. This article is an attempt to reclaim the traces of the epidemic embedded beneath the texts by reading the romances as Cooper’s own medical chart and to intertwine Natty Bumpoo’s heroic feats with the medical discourses of the antebellum period.

Letter VIII of Notions of the Americans, Cooper’s fictional collection of letters, contains an extensive report on the yellow fever outbreaks in 1819 and 1822, in which the fictive letter-writer delineates the ongoing controversy over the etiology of the communicative disease. Contagionists asserted that the disease was spread by close contact with infected people and objects, and that quarantine would be the most effective preventive measure; anticontagionists suggested that there were multiple factors leading to the epidemic, including an unhealthy environment and predisposing personal factors, and that efforts to prevent the causes of disease, both environmental and individual, were called for. This fictional letter aptly summarizes Cooper’s tactic for self-care. Cooper, who was chronically suffering from a “bilious attack,” maintained two-pronged self-therapeutic measures for overcoming the aftereffects of yellow fever: self-isolation from infectious sources on the one hand, and maintenance of the physiological system on the other. Each of these preventive measures will be incorporated into the geographical imaginary of Cooper’s adventure romances as Natty’s modes of positioning in relation to the threatening outer world.

The postures of isolation dominate in The Pioneers, the first of the tales written during the outbreak. The narrative structure of the romance is multi-layered in the sense that the main plot of the Effingham-Temple feud over the property right is entangled with the corporeal subplot of how an injured and diseased body should be cared for. Natty as the “locum tenence,” both a legal procurator and a proxy doctor, cares for and isolates the Effingham inheritance from the contagious greed of the Templeton people. In The Deerslayer, the last of the tales written eighteen years later, the image of the body secluded from without is taken over by the one of the body opened toward the outer environment. By the mid-century the focus of medical discourse had shifted to the gaze into the nervous system, which was supposed to be open and vulnerable to the outer environment. This shift in the medical discourse is dramatized in the scene of Natty’s trial by the Iroquois, in which Natty’s “steadiness of nerve” is tried under the Iroquois leader’s clinical gaze to examine “what his own body is really made of.” Thus the transition of the antebellum medical discourses from contagionism to anticontagionism is inscribed in the first and the last of the Leatherstocking tales.