Empathy and _Rural Hours_

During our discussions about Rural Hours, we have often wondered who Susan Fenimore Cooper is… a teacher?  An eccentric, á la a wandering voyeur?  Is she conservative?  A lover?  We can at least say for certain she is a gifted nature writer, interested in collapsing the distance between Americans and the natural environment.  As Christoph asserts, she attempts to teach us how to read ecologically, obsessing over boundaries so she can authoritatively dismantle them (as in when, for instance, she creates boundaries between her, her fellow townspeople, and Native Americans, only then to include a tableau of the Native Americans in her house, admiring of all things a Chinese basket).  She also incorporates quotations in many languages spanning years of human existence, all of which offer differing approaches to nature as art, as surrounding, as inspiration, as spiritual, etc.  Her text thus provides a heteroglot, hybrid lens for viewing and appreciating nature.  Her ecological design features a web of relationships between nature, humans, texts, and readership, with the participants connected to one anther through the discourse that this text prizes: a discourse of empathy that she has threaded throughout her writing.  Arguably, that discourse of empathy is multidirectional, working both to encourage the reader to adopt a fresh way of interacting with nature and to incorporate Cooper herself, textually self-effaced as she is, into this ecological fabric.

I began considering the role of empathy in Rural Hours while reading “Winter.”  In “Winter,” specifically in an entry written on a “dull, cheerless winter day” (259), Cooper watches the sparrows search for food, which reminds her of how sparrows are curiously specified in a couple Biblical passages.  Upon reading about the sparrows, I was suddenly and intensely reminded of a letter Keats wrote, in which he says:

I scarcely remember counting upon any happiness - I look for it if it be not in the present hour, - nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.

Keats argues for a happiness based on a de-centering of the self, through empathizing on a purely existential level with the seemingly lowly sparrow.  Similarly, Cooper derives happiness “in the present hour,” viewing these sparrows and any other creature that happens upon her path as capable of “teach[ing] us a most important lesson” (259).  Here, that specific lesson is that the Creator values all beings (well, all Christian beings) equally highly.  The sparrow, and indeed I think we are subtly encouraged to insert Cooper into this lesson, are “employed as a means” and are of “grave importance” no matter how humble (260).  With this passage, and with this entire ode to nature, Cooper is immortalizing the symbiosis that can, with boundaries empathetically crossed, define the relationship between humans and nature, ensuring “that they and we are ever under the care of our merciful Father in heaven, never forgotten before God” (262).  With the supposed boundaries between both humans and other humans and humans and nature bridged via an empathetic and grateful understanding, nature can no longer be considered an object for humans to act upon, nor can Susan Fenimore Cooper be considered anything but what she presents as herself: an eloquent and fastidious nature writer.  I would argue that just as the sparrow enriches our lives, so, too, are we “all familiar with” Cooper’s “pleasing note” (262).

Cooper, Susan Fenimore.  Rural Hours.  1850.  Ed. Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson.  Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1998.

Keats, John.  “To Benjamin Bailey.”  Briefe.  10 Feb. 2013 http://www.john-keats.com/briefe/221117.htm.