Politics & Power Quote by Leslie Fiedler

Fiedler’s compliment lands like a backhand, and that’s the point. Calling Cooper’s novel “absolutely indistinguishable from Austen” isn’t just praise for technical mimicry; it’s an accusation that the great American novelist is at his most convincing when he disappears into someone else’s tradition. The phrasing keeps tightening the screws: “completely from a female point of view, completely English” reads less like admiration than a catalog of implausibilities, as if authenticity is being measured by how thoroughly Cooper can efface his own nationality and gender.

The subtext is Fiedler’s larger obsession: American literature’s anxious relationship to Europe, and the way “Americanness” is often policed as a set of expected subjects (frontiers, democracy, roughness) rather than a mode of perception. If Cooper can pass as Austen, the cultural border guard has a problem. Fiedler is testing a national myth: that American writing is inevitably loud with identity. Here, the “no sense that he was an American” line doubles as a jab at the reader’s expectation that an American author must perform Americanness on the page.

Context matters: Fiedler’s criticism regularly interrogated who gets to speak for a culture and how literary reputations are built around genre and identity scripts. He’s also nudging the gendered gatekeeping of viewpoint. “Female point of view” functions as both a technical challenge and a cultural taboo: the feat is framed as ventriloquism, and the ease of it makes the categories feel theatrical. The sting is that passing is the achievement. The question left hanging is whether that’s liberation, betrayal, or the real American tradition: reinvention by impersonation.